Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  With that epiphany rumbling through his head, Dylan wrote a slew of new songs while on vacation in Greece that May. More personal and inward-looking than his previous material, the songs that formed the crux of his next LP, Another Side of Bob Dylan, poured out of him in a week. Released in early August 1964, the album contained no generational anthems like “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “The Times They Are a-Changin’”; instead, songs like “All I Really Want to Do,” “My Back Pages,” and “It Ain’t Me Babe” had little, if anything, to do with the topical songs his fans wanted. But the songwriter had grown disillusioned with the political orthodoxy of the folk scene. Dylan had complained to a friend that all anyone wanted from him were political-minded protest songs—“finger-pointing songs,” he called them. He didn’t want to speak for anybody other than himself. “There aren’t any finger-pointing songs in here,” he warned The New Yorker’s Nat Hentoff about his new LP. “Me, I don’t want to write for people any more—you know, be a spokesman. From now on, I want to write from inside me. . . . I have to make a new song out of what I know and out of what I’m feeling.”

  The disillusionment flowed both ways. The album, along with Dylan’s headlining performance at that year’s Newport Jazz Festival, where he debuted some of the material, inspired Irwin Silber, the editor of Sing Out! magazine, to reprimand the singer in an “open letter” published a few months later. “Your new songs seem to be inner-directed now, inner probing, self-conscious. . . . Now, that’s all okay—if that’s the way you want it, Bob. But then you’re a different Bob Dylan from the one we knew. The old one never wasted our precious time.”

  But Dylan had lost interest in what the editor of Sing Out! or any other publication thought about him or his work. He was interested in a different scene now. On August 28—exactly one year to the day after standing with King at the March on Washington, where he sang “With God on Our Side”—Dylan met up with the Beatles at their hotel suite at the Delmonico on Park Avenue and 59th Street, hours after they played the first of two sold-out shows at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens. After studying each other’s records for months, the British pop stars and the Greenwich Village hipster now stared nervously at each other from across a table. The Beatles tried to break the ice by offering their guest their drug of choice: pills. But Dylan, wearing his now omnipresent black shades, turned them down. “How about something a little more organic?” he asked and began to roll a joint. “A skinny American joint,” McCartney later complained.

  The Beatles, no stranger to chemical substances, hadn’t had much experience with marijuana by then. Dylan was confused. “But what about your song—the one about getting high?” he asked before singing in his nasally rasp, “and when I touch you, I get high, I get high . . .” It was Lennon who set the record straight. “Those aren’t the words,” he informed Dylan. “It’s ‘I can’t hide, I can’t hide.’ ”

  Undeterred, Dylan finished rolling the joint and handed it to Lennon, who passed it to Ringo, calling him “my official taster.” The drummer repaired to the bathroom only to emerge minutes later with an absurd, goofy grin on his face. Intrigued, all the Beatles took a hit and the mood in the room shifted dramatically as the pop stars and their entourages grew more relaxed under the pacifying influence of marijuana. “We were smoking dope, drinking wine and generally being rock ’n’ rollers, and having a laugh,” recalled Lennon. “It was party time.” Dylan got into the joking spirit, too, and repeatedly answered the suite’s phone by saying “This is Beatlemania here.”

  The night was the rock ’n’ roll equivalent of a US–USSR summit. In August 1964 the Beatles and Dylan were at opposing ends of the musical spectrum. The Beatles were world-famous British pop stars, outsiders who had arrived on American shores preaching the gospel of rock ’n’ roll, which was all but dead in the United States; and unlike racially segregated Americans, the Beatles didn’t see—or hear—the difference between Elvis and Chuck Berry, between the Everly Brothers and the Marvelettes. (During their American tours in the 1960s, the band refused to play to segregated audiences.) Beloved by teenyboppers, the band got panned by music critics—Beatles Stump Music Experts Looking for Key to Beatlemania read one New York Times headline. Despite their unprecedented success, the Beatles and the mania they elicited were expected to fade.

  Dylan, on the other hand, had all the credibility the Beatles lacked. He was the acclaimed avatar of the folk music revival—a “Homer in denim”—revered by his young college-educated audience (many of whom disdained pop bands like the Beatles) as their generational spokesman. He didn’t have any hit singles, though others—like Peter, Paul and Mary—turned his songs into hits. He was heralded by living folk legend Pete Seeger, a genuine hero to the Old Left, and through his association—both musically and romantically—with Baez, became a hero to the New Left. While many in the mainstream media deemed the Beatles’ music lacking of any redeeming qualities, many journalists—most notably the New York Times’ Robert Shelton—championed Dylan as a uniquely talented songwriter, whose art stood at the crossroads of American music: a blend of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly mixed with healthy doses of Hank Williams and lyrics that drew inspiration from the life-affirming and beatific poetry of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti.

  But Dylan and the Beatles had more in common than most realized: They were rebels with plenty of causes. Each hailed from the provinces (from Northern England and Northern Minnesota, respectively); they were outsiders in the moneyed capitals of London and New York, which they dreamed of winning over. They were talented songwriters, first inspired by rock ’n’ roll but drawing upon a wealth of musical influences. They were wildly ambitious. And like countless bohemians, jazzmen, artists, and free sprits before them, both would embrace pot, not only as a creative tool, but as a rebellious way of life. From this point on, both the Beatles and Dylan, inspired by one another, would blur the lines between folk and rock and reinvent pop music, elevating its importance and forever changing American—and global—pop culture.

  While Dylan was turning the Beatles on to pot, American bohemians and intelligentsia were already consuming other, more potent forms of drugs. One in particular would, over the next few years, become a source of life-altering inspiration to many, including the Beatles: LSD. That same summer, the harbingers of America’s Great Stoned Age, as it would later be remembered, would make a pit stop at the World’s Fair, giving Fairgoers a glimpse of the nation’s psychedelic future.

  25.

  These are the stakes: To make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love one another, or we must die.

  —Voiceover narration read by President Lyndon B. Johnson for his 1964 “Daisy” campaign ad

  Setting off from his La Honda, Northern California, ranch in June 1964, novelist Ken Kesey and his friends had no idea what would happen during their cross-country trip to New York City. But one thing was for certain: Their destination was the World’s Fair.

  The exhibition had fascinated Kesey since the November 1963 day when, after seeing the Broadway production of his best-selling novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he and a friend had traveled out to Queens to see the World’s Fair taking shape. “We vowed next year we’d come back to New York to see the World’s Fair,” Kesey promised. A book party planned by his publisher for his new novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, in the summer of 1964 gave him the excuse he needed to travel to New York and check out the Fair.

  But before leaving La Honda, things had changed. The number of people heading to New York grew too numerous for the Volkswagen he and his friend Ken Babbs intended to use. So, they acquired and outfitted a 1939 Harvester school bus with five hundred pounds of equipment: an elaborate stereo and PA system (with indoor and outdoor speakers); sleeping quarters for roughly a dozen people; a platform on the roof (with a mounted drum kit, just in case anyone should be moved to bang out some grooves as the they made the
ir way down some lonely highway); and film cameras, lights, and microphones. Kesey and company had decided to document their road trip, to create a cinematic diary of their journey. They even came up with a working title: The Merry Pranksters Search for the Kool Place.

  There was just one last thing to do: paint the bus every color under the sun with Day-Glo paint—blues, oranges, reds, yellows, pinks, and greens—a phantasmagoric array of hues. They dubbed their four-wheel chariot “Further.” As a gag—it was the middle of a presidential election cycle—Kesey painted on the side A Vote for Barry (as in Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate) Is a Vote for Fun on the side of the bus.

  And then Neal Cassady, the real-life muse of Jack Kerouac and the inspiration for Kerouac’s On the Road hero Dean Moriarty, turned up at Kesey’s door unexpectedly. Cassady had read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and saw himself in the novel’s hero, McMurphy, the rebel without a cause who fatally clashes with the authoritarian Nurse Ratched. Kesey took Cassady’s arrival as a sign of the gods, a blessing for the psychedelic odyssey. When asked by a reporter in New York what had inspired his trip, Kesey replied, “For a lot of us it started when we first read On the Road.” Now here was Cassady, sprung from the pages of the novel that had changed everything, driving their bus. He would be their amphetamine-induced Virgil and nonstop narrator, giving his endless “rap”—which Kesey called a “careening, corner-squealing commentary on the cosmos”—as they visited the four corners of the nation.

  It was all very romantic, and in its rebellious rejection of authority and the status quo, very American. Kerouac’s vision of America was romantic, too—all open roads and endless horizons. “Everyone I knew had read On the Road,” Kesey recalled. Both literati and songwriters alike were affected by the Beat author’s work. Reading Kerouac had changed everything for a young Robert Zimmerman. “Someone had handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul in 1959,” Dylan told Kerouac’s brother-in-arms, the poet Allen Ginsberg, after the pair met in early 1964 at an East Village bookstore. “It blew my mind.” Now both Kesey and Dylan were exploring the road—and where it led to—just as Kerouac had years before.

  But Dylan and Kesey weren’t the only ones. The success of On the Road in 1957 gave a voice to the angst of the younger generation and their nonconformist ideas, which had been roiling beneath the staid surface of the 1950s. Cassady, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and their fellow Beats, like blacklisted filmmakers and political radicals, had never fit into the black-and-white movie that was Eisenhower’s America. That America had segued seamlessly into John F. Kennedy’s Camelot, where his Ivy League Knights of the Roundtable—the Best and the Brightest—were poised to fix the nation’s ills with technocratic and pragmatic solutions, regardless of the problem at hand: the Cold War, civil rights, or Vietnam. Only when Kennedy, after having dragged his feet for two years, delivered the boldest presidential endorsement yet of civil rights legislation was it apparent that America had begun to change course.

  Then, in rapid succession, the nation underwent a series of traumas: the Kennedy assassination, the murder of the three civil rights workers by racists in Mississippi, followed a month later by the race riots in New York and other Northern cities during what was supposed to be Freedom Summer. The latter events threatened to overshadow the hopeful passage of the Civil Rights Act in June—a historic change that required all the protean powers of President Johnson, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, and Robert F. Kennedy, and the all-important cooperation and support of Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican Minority Leader. Despite this bipartisan cooperation in Washington, DC, the nation as a whole seemed to be digging further into the trenches of their own beliefs.

  And now with a presidential election just months away in November, this ideological rift was epitomized by the stark choice being offered to voters: one the one hand, the Left’s newly minted liberal hero, President Johnson; and on the other, the far-right conservatism of Senator Barry Goldwater, who would brag in his July nomination acceptance speech that “extremism in the pursuit of liberty was no vice and . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice no virtue.” Goldwater frightened people. He refused to rule out using nuclear weapons in Vietnam, where the nation was on its way to another Asian ground war—a fear that President Johnson would soon exploit with his controversial “Daisy” TV ad, which featured a little girl mindlessly picking a flower in a field, as a voiceover begins counting down a missile launch; the whole screen then fades to black as a nuclear mushroom exlodes. The nation’s future seemed up for grabs, between wildly opposing forces.

  Kesey felt the seismic activity, and it affected his writing. In fact, the novelist began to doubt the impact that books could have. “I began to suspect,” Kesey confessed, that his own novels “might not have a lot to do with the world.” It was one of the reasons why he wanted to embark on this psychedelic journey to see the country and the World’s Fair. “We decided to go drive across the country . . . across the United States, go to the World’s Fair and just to experience the American landscape and heartscape.” It was in that spirit that Kesey and his friends, dubbed the Merry Pranksters, began their journey. But the group wasn’t just going to drive cross-country stone cold sober. They had a large supply of lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, the psychedelic drug that was, in the summer of 1964, completely legal.

  Discovered by the Swiss scientist Dr. Albert Hofmann in 1943, LSD, which induced hallucinations, was snatched up the US military for use as a weapon in the fight against Communism. Military brass hoped to use it as a truth serum to aid in interrogations or to embarrass America’s enemies. LSD was also used by psychiatrists to treat patients, including actor Cary Grant, the personification of the dapper Hollywood leading man, who said his acid trip gave him “the peace of mind” that he had been searching for all his life.

  As a student at Stanford University, where he was an English major, Kesey agreed to become a human guinea pig at a veterans hospital where LSD and other mind-altering drugs were being tested. (Ginsberg had undergone a similar government-funded research project in 1959.) Kesey’s experience inspired One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and changed his life. Now it was about to change American history.

  As the Merry Pranksters made their way from the West Coast, with pit stops in Houston, Texas, and Louisiana, up the East Coast to New York, few people knew what to make of them. Hippies and psychedelic trips were still in the future for most Americans, while the Merry Pranksters were all veteran acid-droppers. When their Technicolor dream bus drove down a busy midtown Manhattan side street, music blasting, Pranksters hanging out the windows or sitting on the platform on the roof, it was a shock even to seen-it-all New Yorkers. Children ran after them; pipe-smoking gentlemen snapped photos; Beatles-obsessed teens laughed in excitement; and respectable women gasped in bemused amazement. People weren’t afraid; they were intrigued.

  In New York, in mid-July, the Pranksters picked up two guests: Ginsberg, who had attended the 1939 World’s Fair as a child and who was going to help round up his old friend Kerouac for a party; and the novelist Robert Stone, a pal from Kesey’s Stanford days, who was now living in New York with his family. Together they headed to the World’s Fair to experience its vision of America. “To Ken, to America in 1964, world’s fairs were still a hot number,” Stone wrote decades later. “Fairs and carnivals, exhibitional wonders of all sorts, were his very meat.”

  That much, at least, Kesey and the Fair’s creator, Robert Moses, could agree on. But there was one other important link connecting the two: the road. Moses had devoted his life to creating the open roadways and elevated highways that had transformed the American landscape that Kerouac and now Kesey had committed themselves to exploring; the inescapable reality is that there couldn’t be any On the Roads or Merry Prankster road trips without highways, or men like Moses who built them.

  When Kesey and company finally arrived at the World’s Fair, they were shocked by what they saw. It had nothing—
absolutely nothing—to do with their LSD-fueled dreams. The Merry Pranksters, avatars of what would soon come to be known as the hippie movement, didn’t see their vision of America’s future at the Fair. It wasn’t there among the fountains and rides, the Walt Disney–designed shows, or even the postmodern architecture of Philip Johnson with its trippy pop art murals. And it certainly wasn’t to be found among the multitude of corporate America’s displays—the giant-size tire Ferris wheel, the life-size dinosaurs of Sinclair Oil, or any of the various offerings of GE, GM, Ford, Chrysler, or DuPont—or even the life-size rockets sent by NASA.

  As if hung over from a bad acid trip, Kesey and the Pranksters left Flushing Meadow disappointed. “The Fair was trippy and great when you were high,” noted Paula Sundsten, the stunning beauty who was better known by her Prankster moniker Gretchen Fetchin. She had made the journey for the most practical of reasons: She wanted a summer job at the Fair as a synchronized swimmer (none were available). But one of the Pranksters made a diary entry that summed up the group’s consensus about their trip succinctly: “The World’s Fair is not a kool place.”

  It seemed that they were at the end of the road, but Ginsberg suggested one last stop before heading back West. He wanted Kesey to meet Dr. Timothy Leary, the onetime professor who had been booted from Harvard along with his colleague Robert Alpert for questionable practices during their experiments with LSD. Since the fall of 1963, the academics had set up their experiments in a sixty-four-room, four-story Gothic mansion that sat upon 2,500 acres of lush, green land in Millbrook, New York, lent to them by Peggy Hitchcock, a rich socialite who was part of their inner circle. Although Leary was still years away from becoming the hippie guru who extolled the youth of America to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” he was well on the way. Whatever he and the other hangers-on desired—whether sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll or tai chi or chanting Hare Krishna—everything could be explored at Millbrook, and all of it in the name of mind expansion.