American Fun
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27. “I just about went wild!”: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, quoted in Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 147.
28. “Many zoot suiters”: Ibid., 134; see also 142, 145.
29. “every couple, almost”: Dizzy Gillespie quoted in Alvarez, Power of the Zoot, 121.
30. “juvenile delinquency,” “revolt of callow youth”: White and White, Stylin’, 259–60.
31. “role in facilitating,” “Mixed Dancing Closed Savoy Ballroom,” “Christian youth center”: The Amsterdam News and the People’s Voice cited in Alvarez, Power of the Zoot, 120–24.
32. Later that same month: Alvarez, Power of the Zoot, 168–82.
10 A CALIFORNIA EDUCATION, REDUX
1. “A Vote for Barry Is a Vote for Fun”: Magic Trip, dir. Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney, A&E Indie Films, 2011, 33:33.
2. “pudding”: Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Picador, 1968), 238.
3. “We don’t propose to have”: David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Random House, 1993), 417–78.
4. Over the next five years: Ibid., 134.
5. “one swimming pool was built”: Ibid., 137.
6. machine-made “freedom”: Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1991), 6.
7. women, now housebound: Halberstam, The Fifties, 587–92.
8. “paranoia, delirium, frenzy, hysteria”: Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 46.
9. the languishing HUAC was energized: Griffin Fariello, Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition; An Oral History by Griffin Fariello (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 255–314; McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare; A Documentary History, ed. Albert Fried (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1–47, 119–56.
10. “This was the great and final”: Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Viking Penguin, 1955), 248.
11. “cross-country truckers,” black store on Beale Street: LeRoy Ashby, With Amusement for All: A History of Popular Culture Since 1830 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 340. See also Halberstam, The Fifties, 457.
12. “literary James Dean”: “The Ganser Syndrome,” Time, September 16, 1957.
13. “kicks,” “fun”: Rebel Without a Cause. Dir. Nicholas Ray, perf. James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, and Dennis Hopper, Warner, 1955.
14. at Gregg’s Drive-In: Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 38–39.
15. “participatory democracy”: “Port Huron Statement,” The Sixties Project, Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia at Charlottesville; http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html. Accessed July 17, 2013.
16. “Wilde West”: Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 56.
17. “Funk Art”: Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History (New York: Wenner Books, 2005), 14.
18. “introduced the idea of pranks”: Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 63.
19. “superprank”: Ibid., 67.
20. “tootled”: Ibid., 112.
21. “go with the flow”: Ibid., 84; emphasis in original.
22. “doing rock dances and the dirty boogie”: Ibid., 91.
23. “the first annual tour”: Ibid., 106.
24. “I feel like we’re a pastoral Indian village”: Ken Babbs and Paul Perry, On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990), 96.
25. “out-front”: Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 329.
26. “We’re Clean, Willie!”: Ibid., 150.
27. “It was fun”: Ibid.
28. “hipster Christ”: Ibid., 153.
29. “THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME”: Ibid., 169.
30. “Oh, but it’s great to be an Angel”: Ibid., 173.
31. “the inordinate boredom of middle-class life”: R. G. Davis, The San Francisco Mime Troupe: The First Ten Years (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1975), 13.
32. “pleased its audience”: Ibid., 31.
33. “guinea pig”: Ibid., 21.
34. “riff[s] of jazz,” “participatory fun,” “riffs or bits”: Ibid., 20.
35. “indecent, obscene, and offensive”: Susan Vaneta Mason, “Introduction,” in The San Francisco Mime Troupe Reader, ed. Susan Vaneta Mason (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 11, 12.
36. “This is an Old Western town”: Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 10.
37. “an outlaw enclave”: The Life and Times of the Red Dog Saloon, dir. Mary Works, 1996, 2:18–2:32.
38. “We knew we were American”: Ibid., 20:00–20:72.
39. “The bottom line”: Ibid., 48:00–50:00.
40. “a fireball”: Ibid., 25:22.
41. But Virginia City was still the Old West: Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 10–11.
42. “improvised lyrics”: Ibid., 32.
43. “liquid”: Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out (New York: Da Capo, 2004), 120.
44. “people who’d never heard”: Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 31.
45. “the artistic community coming together”: Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents, 120.
46. “This is the business of the future!”: Ibid., 123.
47. “slightly hysterical”: Ibid., 125.
48. “a more jubilant occasion”: Trips Festival handbill, reproduced at http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_first_rays/5247960620/. Accessed August 25, 2012.
49. “non-drug recreation of a psychedelic experience”: Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 41.
50. “old home week”: Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents, 140.
51. “a gold lamé space suit”: Ibid., 138.
52. “ ‘Goddamn son of a bitch’ ”: Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 46.
53. “It was one of those balanced-up helmets”: Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents, 139.
54. “that minstrel shows were a part of our cultural heritage”: Davis, San Francisco Mime Troupe, 49.
55. “We were not for the suppression of differences”: Ibid., 63.
56. The show corked up both whites and blacks: Ibid., 50.
57. “wise conniver,” “learned to respect him”: These and the remaining quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., 52. See also R. G. Davis and Saul Landau, A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel, in The San Francisco Mime Troupe Reader, ed. Susan Vaneta Mason (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 26–56.
58. “a courageous and creative act”: Mason, “Introduction,” 27.
59. “an empowering vision”: Claudia Orenstein, Festive Revolutions: The Politics of Popular Theater and the San Francisco Mime Troupe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 118.
60. “People thought we were on their side”: Davis, San Francisco Mime Troupe, 63.
61. “[T]he hippies use black people”: Nicholas von Hoffman, We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against (1968; Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1989), 124, 123.
62. “We don’t want violence or trouble”: Lewis Yablonsky, The Hippie Trip (New York: Pegasus, 1968), 218–19; emphasis in original. The black community wanted the hippies’ “bread,” but they didn’t think much of their freely expressive dancing. Von Hoffman was at the Straight Theatre on Haight when “three hundred dopeheads” followed instructions “to find the moving, rhythmic spot inside [themselves].” As a result they “stamp[ed]” and “flutter[ed] their arms” to the Grateful Dead. A black girl watching them exclaimed, “They can’t dance. They can’t keep time, what are they doing, and they’re so ugly!”(125).
63. On September 27, 1966: Walter C. Rucker and James N. Upton, Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), 584.
64. “Psychedelic Community”
: Emmett Grogan, Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (New York: Little, Brown, 1972), 238–39.
65. “Go back to school”: Ibid., 242.
66. “Places of entertainment”: “Take a Cop to Dinner Cop a Dinner to Take a Cop Dinner Cop a Take,” The Digger Papers (August 1968), 14. The Digger Archives, http://www.diggers.org/digpaps68/takecop.html. Accessed August 11, 2012.
67. “Regarding inquiries concerned with the identity”: Grogan, Ringolevio, 239.
68. Within a week the Diggers: Ibid., 246–50.
69. “Are you a digger?”: George Metevsky [sic], “Delving the Diggers,” Berkeley Barb, October 21, 1966, 3. The Digger Archives, http://www.diggers.org/digger_papers.htm. Accessed August 25, 2012.
70. “charity”: “The Diggers Mystique,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 23, 1967, Digger Archives.
71. “life acting”: Peter Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998), 64–65.
72. “the white kids are more advanced”: Von Hoffman, We Are the People, 123.
73. “tickled the people silly”: Grogan, Ringolevio, 250–51.
74. “Meatfest”: Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 104.
75. “Oooo!,” “A Munibus driver,” “The streets belong to the people!”: Grogan, Ringolevio, 259–60. See also Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall, 96–97.
76. “We want Hairy Henry!”: Grogan, Ringolevio, 260.
77. “The Digger Papers”: Quoted in “Takin’ It to the Streets,” ed. Alexander Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 321.
78. “community switchboards”: John McMillian, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 32. Discussion of undergrounds sourced from McMillian, 140–72. A representative example of the Realist’s take-no-prisoners satire is Krassner’s early 1960s piece on the women’s gun craze in South Africa, titled “I Dreamed I Shot a Nigger in My Maidenform Bra.” Best of the Realist: The 60’s Most Outrageously Irreverent Magazine (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1984).
79. “anarchistic organization,” “Fuck Censorship press”: McMillian, Smoking Typewriters, 73.
80. “Electrical Banana”: The story of the hoax is nicely detailed ibid., 66–71.
81. “aborigines, Tonto, Inquisitor-General Torquemada”: Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall, 95.
82. The first such party: Helen Swick Perry, “The Human Be-In,” in Bloom, “Takin’ It to the Streets,” 313–16.
83. “took drugs, danced, painted their faces”: Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall, 75.
84. “the love shuck”: Grogan, Ringolevio, 276.
85. “San Francisco’s diverse communities”: The Glide website, http://www.glide.org/page.aspx?pid=412#1960s. Accessed August 10, 2012.
86. “improbable and outrageous”: Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall, 78.
87. “love-making salons”: Grogan, Ringolevio, 283.
88. “Several couples”: Ibid., 284.
89. “surreal harmony”: Ibid., 285.
90. “Permission was the rule”: Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall, 79.
91. “it was simply like letting steam out”: Ibid.
92. “disastrous Summer of Love”: Alice Echols, Shake Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 44, 45.
93. “how many times you been raped”: Quotations in this and the following paragraph are from Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 124–27. David Cavallo reads the Diggers’ mid-sixties activities and “life-acts” as a riff on America’s tradition of “self-reliant individualism” and the “malleable” sense of self that it often engenders. While Americans often exercise this individualism in “ ‘Free’ enterprise—the ‘performance’ of buying and selling,” as Cavallo puts it, “Grogan, Coyote, Berg, other Diggers and serious hippies did more than challenge this equation. They reversed it … They substituted a free life for free enterprise. Their versions of self-reliance and of becoming self-made had nothing to do with work, careers, economic competition, possessions or status-seeking.” A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 102, 144.
11 REVOLUTION FOR THE HELL OF IT
1. “holy clown”: Howard Zinn, “Remembering Abbie,” afterword to Abbie Hoffman, The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000), 305.
2. “a born rascal”: Hoffman, Autobiography, 91.
3. “waves of immigrants”: Ibid., 87.
4. “strait jackets”: Ibid., 93.
5. “Flatbush Conservative Club contingent”: Free [Abbie Hoffman], Revolution for the Hell of It (1968; New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), 25.
6. “money should be abolished”: Jason Epstein, The Great Conspiracy Trial (New York: Random House, 1970), 335.
7. “got the point”: Free [Abbie Hoffman], Revolution for the Hell of It, 33.
8. “the Wedge”: For a detailed account, see Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (1968; New York: Penguin, 1994), 272–78.
9. “We would be a party”: Paul Krassner, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 157.
10. “the kind of party you had fun at”: Epstein, Great Conspiracy Trial, 338.
11. “Yippies say if it’s not fun”: Jerry Rubin, Do It! (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 85.
12. “Energy—excitement—fun—fierceness—exclamation point!”: Free [Abbie Hoffman], Revolution for the Hell of It, 81.
13. “eternal bliss”: Hoffman, Autobiography, 165.
14. “naked swim-ins in the gym pool”: Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation (New York: Vintage, 1969), 34.
15. “With Yippism”: Hoffman, Autobiography, 165.
16. “For Fun and Freedom”: Epstein, Great Conspiracy Trial, 340.
17. “If you gave good quote”: Krassner, Confessions, 160–61.
18. “a direct threat to our theater-in-the-streets”: “The Yippies Are Going to Chicago,” reprinted in Free [Abbie Hoffman], Revolution for the Hell of It, 104.
19. “a huge rock-folk festival”: Ibid., 105–7.
20. “slow-motion car chase”: Krassner, Confessions, 162–63.
21. “peace offerings of apple pies”: Hoffman, Autobiography, 152.
22. his “wife,” a sow named Piggy Wiggy: Ibid., 153.
23. “Perfect Mess”: Free [Abbie Hoffman], Revolution for the Hell of It, 122.
24. “ ‘greasers,’ motorcycle toughs”: Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 329.
25. “They charged, clubbed, gassed, and mauled”: Ibid., 327.
26. “right across the table”: Hoffman, Autobiography, 159, 160.
27. “Conspire, hell”: J. Anthony Lukas, The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities: Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 12.
28. “illegitimate father”: Ibid., 16.
29. “the country’s top Yippie”: Epstein, Great Conspiracy Trial, 429.
30. “self-serving”: Lukas, Barnyard Epithet, 73, 74. See also Schultz, Motion Will Be Denied: A New Report on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (New York: William Morrow, 1972), 217.
31. “regarded himself as the embodiment”: Lukas, Barnyard Epithet, 45.
32. “in a silent dare to the court”: Ibid., 27. See also Schultz, Motion Will Be Denied, 128.
33. “allegiances”: Schultz, Motion Will Be Denied, 14.
34. “Why don’t we settle this right here and now”: Lukas, Barnyard Epithet, 72; see also Epstein, Great Conspiracy Trial, 361.
35. When an undercover cop denied: Schultz, Motion Will Be Denied, 143.
36. “seriously Abbie and Jerry’s statement”: Ibid., 128–29.
37. “Fineglass,” “Weintraub,” “Weinrus,” and “Weinrub”: Ibid., 173.
38. “mirth”: Ibid., 164.
39. “
revolutionary discipline”: Epstein, Great Conspiracy Trial, 256.
40. “constitutional rights”: Ibid., 252.
41. “the kind of party you had fun at”: Ibid., 338.
42. “I know those guys on the wall”: Ibid., 428. See also Lukas, Barnyard Epithet, 78.
43. “to show that we were in the tradition”: 445 F.2d 226: Abbie Hoffman, Appellant, v. United States of America, Appellee, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit. 445 F.2d 226. Argued December 18, 1970. Decided March 29, 1971. As Amended April 1, 1971. Paragraph IV.
44. “P. T. Barnum of the Revolution”: Rubin, Do It!, unnumbered front matter.
45. “The recipe for revolution”: Gerard J. DeGroot, The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 264.
12 MUSTANGERS HAVE MORE FUN
1. “14 interlocking companies,” “a leader of men”: “The Entourage,” Wild in the Streets. Dir. Barry Shearer. Perf. Shelly Winters, Christopher Jones. United States: American International Pictures, 1968.
2. “We’re 52%”: “Fourteen or Fight,” Wild in the Streets.
3. “the biggest block party in history”: “Heeding the Call,” Wild in the Streets.
4. “the pursuit of happiness”: “Victory,” Wild in the Streets.
5. “America’s greatest contribution”: “Maiden Speech,” Wild in the Streets.
6. “good old patriotic drunk”: “High Crimes,” Wild in the Streets.
7. “a happy trip, a voting trip,” “They’ve been looking”: “Switching Sides,” Wild in the Streets.
8. “retirement homes”: “Golden Years,” Wild in the Streets.
9. “immense wealth,” “We’re going to put everyone”: “Over 10,” Wild in the Streets.
10. “So will you all do me a favor”: Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 487; italics in original.
11. “things and attitudes”: Quoted in William J. Stanton et al., Fundamentals of Marketing (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 153. Circulation figure also on p. 153.
12. “personal power”: Stewart Brand, “Purpose,” Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, 2.