In Search of the Lost Chord

by Danny Goldberg

  The Houseboat Summit

  “We’re going to discuss where it’s going. The whole problem of whether to drop out or take over.” So said Alan Watts. It was February 1967, a few weeks after the Be-In, and Watts had invited Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary to discuss the future on his houseboat the Vallejo, in Sausalito, roughly an hour outside of San Francisco.

  Watts was then fifty-two years old. A native of England who had moved to California in the early fifties, he had published The Way of Zen in 1957; the book had introduced Zen Buddhism to thousands of American college students. As a public speaker, Watts had a humorous colloquial approach to Eastern philosophy that allowed him to bond easily with baby boomers. He also had a radio show on KPFA.

  With a couple of dozen locals in attendance as a sounding board, and with Allen Cohen recording the conversation for posterity (the Oracle would devote an entire issue to a transcript of the “summit”), the self-styled hippie elders tried to define various aspects of the movement that they were all simultaneously leading, following, and questioning. Watts framed the conversation by observing that an elite minority (including present company) had been able to drop out in one way or another. The question at hand was whether millions could do it. Gary Snyder expanded on Watts’s proposition: “I see it as the problem about whether or not to throw all your energies to the subculture or try to maintain some communications network within the main culture.”

  But before getting into a discussion of the glorious future, Ginsberg wanted to deal with the here and now: “We’re accused of being leaders. We’re not though, you know. What were we doing up on that platform?”

  Leary immediately bristled: “That’s a charge that doesn’t bother me at all.”

  Watts tried to bridge the difference, siding in substance with Ginsberg, but bowing in tone to Leary, suggesting an organically designed society with no boss—parts of society work together the way cells in the body do. But Ginsberg had not finished expressing his main concern: the reaction of many young people to Leary’s remarks at the Be-In a few weeks earlier: “Everybody in Berkeley, all week long, has been bugging me and Alpert about what you mean by ‘Drop out, tune in, and turn on.’ Finally, one young kid said, ‘Drop out, turn on, and tune IN.’ Meaning: get with an activity—a manifest activity, a worldly activity—that’s harmonious with whatever vision he has. Everybody in Berkeley is all bugged because they think [the] ‘drop out’ thing really doesn’t mean anything, that what you’re gonna cultivate is a lot of freak-out hippies goofing around and throwing bottles through windows when they flip out on LSD.”

  “Berkeley” essentially meant “political radicals.” Leary didn’t support the war in Vietnam, but he didn’t like the antiwar movement all that much either. “I want no part of mass movements,” he said. “I think this is the error that leftist activists are making. I see them as young men with menopausal minds.”

  Like Leary, Ginsberg was a lot older than the cut-off point for the military draft, which was a day-to-day issue that younger men had to deal with. But the poet didn’t see an inherent contradiction between the inner psychedelic path he shared with Leary and the antiwar movement he enthusiastically supported.

  Ginsberg recalled a recent evening he’d spent with Berkeley radical Mario Savio. Though Savio only occasionally smoked pot, the two had gotten very high. “Yesterday, he was weeping. Saying he wanted to go out and live in nature,” Ginsberg said emotionally, as if this indisputably proved the soulfulness of the hero of the Free Speech Movement.

  Leary was unmoved. “I respect his sincerity, but his tactics are part of the game that created the war in Vietnam: power politics. You can’t do good unless you feel good. You can’t do right unless you feel right.”

  Ginsberg responded, “You haven’t dropped out, Tim. You dropped out of your job as a psychology teacher at Harvard . . . But you’re not dropped out of the very highly complicated legal constitutional appeal, which you feel a sentimental regard for, as I do. You haven’t dropped out of being the financial provider for Millbrook, and you haven’t dropped out of planning and conducting community organization and participating in it.” He went on in this vein, citing Leary’s book deals and traveling theatrical tour. Leary had multiple safety nets that were not, and never would be, available to the vast majority of teenagers who were taking acid and trying to figure out how to function in the world while staying true to their new versions of themselves.

  Leary then addressed the small group in a tone better suited for a lecture hall: “The first thing you have to do is completely detach yourself from anything inside the plastic robot establishment . . . Each group that drops out has two billion years of cellular equipment to answer those questions: Hey, how are we going to eat? . . . How are we going to keep warm? . . . I can envision ten MIT scientists, with their families, they’ve taken LSD . . . They drop out . . . They may use their creativity to make new kinds of machines that will turn people on instead of bomb them.”

  Ginsberg asked, “What can I drop out of?”

  Leary snapped back: “Your teaching at Cal.”

  The poet chuckled. “But I need the money.” Then, changing to a more serious tone, he said of hippies, “I don’t think they are all gonna go out on a limb. I think they’ll wind up dropping back in.”

  Leary responded with condescension, “Allen is not ready to drop out. Don’t worry, Allen, you will when the time is right.”

  Ginsberg defensively replied, “I’m not worried. I’m having a good time.”

  The meeting continued, and Leary told of the previous spring solstice when he and others at Millbrook had taken sledgehammers to break through asphalt on part of the highway to get to the real dirt. He suggested that city life would become less and less appealing to the new version of humanity he saw coming. “There will be deer grazing in Times Square in forty years,” Leary predicted grandly, and woefully inaccurately. Pressed for a road map from here to there, Leary made the far more modest suggestion that there should be prayer rooms and meditation centers in every urban neighborhood so that individuals could reconnect inwardly throughout the day.

  Gary Snyder spoke of times when he was able to live in a way that would later be called “off the grid.” He would get rice off the San Francisco docks, day-old vegetables thrown away by supermarkets—the kinds of things the Diggers had been doing to provide free food for children in the Haight. Snyder extolled the virtues of the Plains Indians, the Sioux, and the Comanche, echoing a long-held hippie reverence for Native Americans. “[Y]ou have to be able to specifically say to somebody in Wichita, Kansas, who says, I’m going to drop out. How do you advise me to stay living around here in this area which I like? . . . Find out what was here before. Find out what the mythologies were.”

  Leary enthused: “That is a stroke of cellular revelation and genius, Gary.”

  Snyder had pointed out earlier that “an ecological conscience” needed to emerge. It was one of the first times that the concept of ecology entered public discourse.

  Alan Watts went on to suggest that Western man had lost touch with original intelligence through centuries of relying solely on analytic thinking. Now, with psychedelics and meditation, some were reconnecting with original intelligence, “suggesting an entirely new course for the development of civilization.”

  Someone in the small audience asked about getting rid of the week as a measurement of time and focusing only on the month, the lunar cycle. Watts shot this down because the week system includes Sunday for Sabbath. Without the framework of a week, Watts worried, society would jettison the day off. (He did not mention that the convention of weekends without work was the result of decades of efforts by the labor movement. The lack of mutual respect between unions and the counterculture would be bad for both movements as the subsequent decades unfolded.)

  There was then a long digression about the viability of group marriage. If a new society was being built, everything was up for grabs. Watts was all for it. Leary
wanted nothing to do with this notion; he believed in couples.

  Another attendee raised an issue that was hanging over the fragile hippie culture: “Diggers say since the Be-In, thousands of kids have come to the city and they don’t know where they’re at.” None of the “elders” had a solution. Another audience member asked worriedly, “Don’t tribes learn to mistrust other tribes?” In retrospect, this was an extremely important question. In the moment, on the houseboat, however, the elders seemed stumped.

  Yet Leary was determined to stay positive: “If Pepsi-Cola can be marketed around the world, so can hippie ideas.”

  Ginsberg returned to his earlier argument: “The whole thing is too big, because it doesn’t say drop out of what, precisely. What everybody is dealing with is people, it’s not dealing with institutions. It’s dealing with them but also dealing with people. Working with and including the police.”

  Remarkably, Leary then changed the aggressive tone he’d been using all day. He wasn’t going to ruin the vibe between him and Ginsberg over this slogan and he adroitly retreated. “You know, I always say to take what I say with a grain of salt. Half of what I say is wrong. I make many blunders. Maybe we should change it to, ‘Turn on, tune in, drop in.’” But the media die had been cast at the Be-In, and for better or worse, Leary was stuck with the McLuhanesque slogan for the rest of his life.

  Around the same time, Jerry Rubin ran for mayor of Berkeley with a platform of: peace in Vietnam/end poverty/stop police harassment/eighteen-year-old vote/legalize marijuana/rent control/Black Power/student power/fight racism/tax the rich/plant trees and flowers. During the last month of the campaign, Rubin thought he had a chance to win and often spoke wearing a jacket and tie. But on election day, April 4, he only got around eight thousand votes, which was 22 percent of the electorate. After that, he changed course and morphed into a radical hippie.

  The Summer of Love

  Joel Selvin has written, “The Summer of Love never really happened. Invented by the fevered imaginations of writers for weekly news magazines, the phrase entered the public vocabulary with the impact of a sledgehammer, glibly encompassing a social movement sweeping the youth of the world, hitting the target with the pinpoint accuracy of a shotgun blast.”

  Nevertheless, the media phrase affected reality. In April 1967, in a relatively small box near the back of the Oracle, a notice read:

  Haight-Ashbury has been practicing a warless way of living and loving and creating and exchanging for a new age. New forms, successes, and failures and dreams have drawn great attention to the Haight-Ashbury.

  While American nightmares its military hells of the mind, Americans loving love and hoping peace and seeking wisdom and seeking guidance have turned toward the Haight-Ashbury and are journeying here.

  The notice exhorted all new visitors to bring warm clothing, food, ID, sleeping bags, and camping equipment.

  The Oracle postulated that there were “two sides of the kettle” of Haight-Ashbury, the Oracle itself and the Diggers. The reality was that there were dozens of sides. The Diggers were not the only people in the hip community who felt that the Oracle was too pompous. One sarcastic letter to the editor called it “The Hindu Science Monitor.” J.M. Jamil Brownson, who had edited the first issue of the Oracle, left because he felt that an ethnically diverse “rainbow culture” was being jettisoned by Cohen and Bowen in favor of the insular white psychedelic culture.

  Despite the internal differences, everyone in the hip community knew that both a great opportunity and a great crisis were at hand. The hype about the Summer of Love threatened the stability of Haight-Ashbury. Hundreds of teenagers arrived on an hourly basis in a section of the city without any capacity to contain them. The Council for the Summer of Love was formed to raise money to plan for the onslaught, but San Francisco supervisors were unsympathetic. On a citywide basis, it was not politically popular to further enable the influx of hippies. (One exception among elected officials was Willie Brown, whose state assembly district included Haight-Ashbury. In a letter to the supervisors, he requested more trash cans in the neighborhood, because of the influx of visitors.)

  Some local businesses that had little or no emotional connection to a utopian notion pounced. A coffee shop sold “love burgers.” Tourist buses now included hippies as a highlight of San Francisco for sightseers.

  In addition to teens, a parade of writers, musicians, and artists from around the world made their way to Haight-Ashbury. Seventy-eight-year-old British historian Arnold Toynbee went to a Quicksilver Messenger Service show. The internationally famous ballet dancers Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev were busted at a party in Haight-Ashbury where pot was being smoked. Nureyev performed a jeté into the back of a police van. They were released because there was no proof that they had personally indulged in smoking weed.

  Paul McCartney visited San Francisco and immediately went to the Fillmore, where the Airplane was rehearsing. The band invited him back to their apartment on Oak Street, where Marty Balin, Jack Casady, and manager Bill Thompson were staying. They offered him a new psychedelic drug called DMT, which had LSD’s intensity but only lasted a couple of hours. The Beatle demurred and just smoked pot. He tried to jam, but the left-handed McCartney had a hard time playing Casady’s bass. Before leaving, he played them an advance copy of the soon-to-be-released Sgt. Pepper’s album.

  The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic was founded in June 1967 by Dr. David E. Smith, who immediately became a go-to source for journalists covering the Summer of Love. Smith staffed the clinic with volunteers who contributed samples of penicillin and tranquilizers from local hospitals where they also interned. Aware of police scrutiny, Smith put up a sign on the door that read, No dealing! No holding drugs. No using drugs. No alcohol. No pets. Any of these can close the clinic. We love you. The clinic served more than two hundred and fifty people a day. Among the most common ailments treated at the clinic were bad trips, drug overdoses, and venereal diseases. (As of the writing of this book in 2017, the clinic is still operating.)

  There were ongoing tensions between hippies and local police, who periodically enforced the drug laws and were under constant pressure from local businesses to help minimize disruptions in traffic.

  Censorship of the arts was still a major issue in 1967. Lenny Bruce had died of an overdose the previous year, driven to despair by relentless and unconscionable obscenity prosecutions of his stand-up performances. Statements of support for The Beard (a Michael McClure play that had been shut down by the cops) came in from Norman Mailer, Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg, among others.

  Parallel to the Haight world, the antiwar movement was surging, but combining the cultures remained elusive. On April 15, the same day that Martin Luther King Jr. led the march to the United Nations in New York, there was a march in San Francisco to Kezar Stadium. At the outset, there were 50,000 people there, but the pacifist organizers focused the program on the earnest but unhip peaceniks. Country Joe and the Fish played from the back of a truck as the march went on, yet once inside the stadium they were only given enough time for two songs. Ginsberg complained that they had foolishly ignored the hippies and the crowd dispersed early.

  Nonetheless, the Vietnam War was inescapable even at the Oracle. Early in 1967, they published “A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon,” a Gary Snyder poem which addressed those at the Department of Defense with the lines: “To trample your throat in your dreams / This magic I work, this loving I give / that my children may flourish / And yours won’t thrive.” The decision to publish was controversial within the Oracle, and involved a vote by the entire staff. By a margin of one vote, the paper moved forward with running the poem, a decision that resulted in a photographer, whose father worked at the Pentagon, leaving the magazine. The August issue had the line “Psychedelics, Flowers, and War” on its cover, and it included two full pages dedicated to a Michael McClure poem.

  In representing the sensibilities of the community that had put Haight-A
shbury on the cultural map, the Oracle focused much of its energy on visions of a more positive alternate society. Many of the Oracle writers and artists refused to sign their work, because they felt that their writing came from a higher consciousness. One frequent theme in the paper was getting back to nature. A writer who identified himself by the initials S.B. extolled “those who seek being rather than status and who decide to return to the land often to attain an ethical relationship with nature.” Other articles focused on organic gardening and astrology. There was even a piece on Aquarian tarot cards, and another headlined, “Dialogue between Astronomer and Philosopher.”

  Letters to the editor poured in from newly formed hip communities around the country.

  * * *

  Rock and roll was not the only art form integrating and influencing hippie culture. Poster artists such as Wes Wilson and Rick Griffin created a new and mind-expanding cosmology. R. Crumb helped invent radical comics that provided satire and perspective on the counterculture, unavailable elsewhere. Richard Brautigan brought commune culture into fiction.

  There was an ongoing debate between the majority of hippies who were staunch advocates of psychedelics and those who had adopted antidrug spiritual practices. The Oracle ran a long piece on a Hindu teacher named Chinmayananda, and an article titled, “Yoga and the Psychedelic Mind,” by Bob Simmons.

  The Oracle’s brightly colored graphics enhanced the synthesis of these notes in the hippie chord. One issue featured a gorgeous full-page Rick Griffin silkscreen of a Christlike figure pouring out two cups of energy into heads of unicorns. A writer named Tom Law (later a member of Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farm commune) suggested that readers “guard carefully against feeling that we are a special, new, or unique tribe. We are the ancient tribal consciousness of man in harmonious relationship with nature . . . Let’s make Haight Love together, and then move to the country where love is hanging out waiting.”