In Search of the Lost Chord

CHAPTER 1

being in

The precursor to the brief cycle in which Haight-Ashbury was the biggest counterculture magnet in the Western world is generally thought to have begun in the summer of 1965 at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada—just across the border from Northern California—where a rock band called the Charlatans played for several months. They took a lot of acid and created some of the first light shows and psychedelic concert posters. They wore Edwardian clothing, conveyed a weird nostalgia for idealized prenuclear America, and revered Native Americans. Although the Charlatans never developed the national following of other San Francisco bands, they were integral to many of the big rock events in the Bay Area in the late sixties. (Dan Hicks of the Charlatans would go on to form Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks.)

By the end of 1965, the Charlatans had moved to the racially integrated Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. It was near several university campuses and had become a center for artists, beatniks, and other bohemians, primarily because of its cheap rents. There were many large Victorian houses, which had up to six bedrooms and cost as little as $120 a month. By the end of 1966, the twenty-five square blocks had a distinctive culture. One could see mandalas made of yarn and drawings from Native American and Eastern religious traditions in many windows. A group of merchants with names like God’s Eye Ice Cream and Pizza Parlor had sprung up to service the new residents. Members of the new psychedelic rock bands Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company all moved into the neighborhood.

On January 3, 1966, the Psychedelic Shop opened on 1535 Haight Street, signaling a turning point in the growth of the area as a countercultural center. The store sold books on Eastern religion and the occult, records of Indian music, beads, incense, posters, pipes, and other paraphernalia. It would be the prototype for hundreds of “head shops” that would open up across America in the coming years. A couple of weeks later, the Trips Festival attracted what was at the time a staggeringly high number of people—six thousand over the course of a weekend—to the Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco. Many of the attendees drank fruit punch spiked with LSD while watching performances by popular local bands.

By the end of the summer of 1966, several thousand hippies were living in the Haight, and in the fall a new publication called the San Francisco Oracle appeared. During its brief but glorious eighteen months of existence, the Oracle was as definitive a document as would ever exist of the messianic aspirations of the Haight-Ashbury scene. (Tattered individual copies regularly sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay.) The paper was conceived by editor Allen Cohen and art director Michael Bowen. Cohen said he had a dream of a newspaper with rainbows on it that was read all over the world. Both of the Oracle founders were acidheads. Cohen sold some of famed LSD maker Augustus Owsley Stanley III’s earliest tablets, and Bowen had been arrested with LSD pioneer Timothy Leary in Millbrook, New York.

The initial $500 investment for the Oracle came from Ron Thelin, who ran the Psychedelic Shop with his brother Jay. The Oracle featured brightly colored psychedelic art and essays by and about counterculture luminaries. In its first issue it had a manifesto with a founding-fathers-on-acid declaration: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to cease [obeying] obsolete social patterns which have isolated man from his consciousness . . . we the citizens of the earth declare our love and compassion for all hate-carrying men and women.”

The Oracle regularly printed articles by and interviews with luminaries like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, Richard Alpert, and Timothy Leary. Within a few months the Oracle could be found in nascent hip communities in every region of the United States and many other parts of the world. With typical grandiosity Leary stated, “If the Buddha were alive, he would read the Oracle.”

However, the Oracle did not speak for most political radicals and it certainly did not represent the vibe of the Diggers, an American collective who took their name from a group of seventeenth-century British radicals opposed to the Church of England and the British Crown.

The sixties Diggers delighted in tormenting brothers and sisters in the hippie and radical political communities for being insufficiently pure. The Diggers did not believe in money or any external measure of accomplishment. They berated head shop owners, concert promoters, and others in San Francisco who made money from the culture, and they detested media coverage of the scene.

The Diggers had emerged from the avant-garde San Francisco Mime Troupe and were more about performance art than politics. On the streets of Haight-Ashbury, the Diggers sometimes wore animal masks, held up traffic, passed out joints to people on the street, and gave away fake dollar bills printed with winged penises. They also organized a lot of the free concerts that helped cohere the Haight-Ashbury community. They got ahold of a mimeograph machine and began printing and distributing a newsletter under the name the Communication Company. One of their flyers read: “To show Love is to fail. To love to fail is the Ideology of Failure. Show Love. Do your thing. Do it for FREE. Do it for Love. We can’t fail.”

The Diggers also felt a moral imperative to address the day-to-day realities of poor people. They made “Digger stew” from day-old food gathered from local markets and gave away hundreds of meals a week. They also briefly operated a “free store” in Haight-Ashbury that gave away donated clothing.

Emmett Grogan of the Diggers was an intense twenty-four-year-old from Brooklyn with movie-star good looks and a fierce vision of cultural revolution. In his memoir Ringolevio, Grogan expressed Digger thinking at the time, railing against “the pansyness of the SF Oracle underground newspaper, and the way it catered to the new, hip, moneyed class by refusing to reveal the overall grime of Haight-Ashbury reality.” He detested the “absolute bullshit implicit in the psychedelic transcendentalism promoted by the self-proclaimed, media-fabricated shamans who espoused the turn-on, tune-in, drop-out, jerk-off ideology of Leary and Alpert.” Grogan wrote that he “immediately dismissed as ridiculous the notion that everything would be all right when everyone turned on to acid.”

The other best-known Digger was the twenty-five-year-old Peter Cohon, who would soon change his name to Peter Coyote and in the decades that followed have a successful career as an actor in dozens of Hollywood films including E.T.

One person who was equally at home in the worlds of the beatniks, radicals, acidheads, and rock and roll was Allen Ginsberg. In addition to his explorations of psychedelics, he was an unrelenting critic of militarism. In 1966, he wrote a poem called “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” which mocked Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had described one of his errors in escalating the war in Vietnam as a “bad guess.” The poem included some of the very few public references to the allegedly closeted homosexuality of J. Edgar Hoover and Cardinal Spellman of New York, who was also one of the biggest cheerleaders for the war in Vietnam: “How big is Cardinal Vietnam? / How little the prince of the FBI, unmarried all these years!”

I worked with Ginsberg on his last recordings in the early nineties and asked him if he knew that Hoover was gay. The poet nodded. Why had he not been more outspoken about Hoover’s sexuality at a time when the FBI director was wreaking havoc on the lives of so many decent people? Ginsberg told me he had a friend when he was a college student at Columbia who regularly had sex with Cardinal Spellman and who asked the prelate if he weren’t worried that his career would be ruined if his propensity for having sex with young men was ever made public. Spellman supposedly laughed and said defiantly, “Who would believe it?” Ginsberg explained to me that in the context of the repressive power of the establishment at the time, the words of the poem were as far as he felt he could safely go.

“Wichita Vortex Sutra” also made clear Ginsberg’s antipathy to Soviet-style communism, which, among its many moral shortcomings, was repressive in the arts.

Black Magic language,

formulas for reality—

Communism is a 9 letter word

used by inferior magicians

the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold

With his black horn-rimmed glasses, long black beard, and white Indian shirt, Ginsberg, despite being forty years old at a moment when youth was ascendant, was one of the most recognizable figures of the counterculture. Although he was often profane, was openly gay, and was an unapologetic left-winger, Ginsberg’s literary brilliance and flair for self-promotion had propelled him to a level of celebrity rarely found in bohemian history. Unique among the beat writers, Ginsberg had embraced sixties rock and roll and the hippie culture. He had taken LSD with Tim Leary and Ken Kesey, and had been befriended by the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

Known primarily for poetry, advocacy of free speech in the arts, and mysticism, Ginsberg was also a peace activist and had withheld a percentage of his taxes as a form of protest against the war. The IRS notified him at some point that they would seize $182.71 from his Howl and Other Poems royalties, which, among other things, was a testament to how little compensation there was in being America’s most famous poet.

When the editors of the Oracle wanted to get the counterculture to the next level in early 1967, Allen Ginsberg was the indispensable man to help them do so.

Gathering of the Tribes

Ginsberg would later say that the Be-In in San Francisco in early 1967 was “the last purely idealistic hippie event,” but at the time the notion that the spiral of sixties countercultural growth and euphoria was peaking would have seemed absurd to those involved. There were more “heads” every single day.

Organizing an event with self-proclaimed revolutionaries, radicals, and cosmic explorers had not been easy. The very term “Be-In” was a mocking hippie twist on the civil rights movement’s term “sit-in” and the Vietnam War protest’s “teach-in.” The phrase was also a pun—another way of saying “being,” as in “human being.” (Like much hip language, the device had a short shelf life before going mainstream. An NBC network prime-time comedy show called Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In would debut in September 1968.)

There were intense factions whose conflicts with each other were at the center of day-to-day life at the center of the hippie storm. Hence the subtitle of the 1967 San Francisco Be-In: “A Gathering of the Tribes.” Tribes, plural.

The Be-In sprang from the minds of the Oracle’s Allen Cohen and Michael Bowen. Cohen saw the counterculture in glorious terms. Years later he would write, “The beat and hippie movements brought the values and experiences of an anarchistic, artistic subculture, and a secret and ancient tradition of transcendental and esoteric knowledge and experience, into the mainstream of cultural awareness . . . [It] gave us back a sense of being the originators of our lives and social forms, instead of hapless robot receptors of a dull and determined conformity.”

A few months earlier, a police shooting of a black youth on September 27, 1966, led to riots in the Hunters Point neighborhood and a curfew was imposed in San Francisco. Bowen put up posters telling hippies to stay inside. Emmett Grogan, on the other hand, posted signs saying, Disobey the Fascist Curfew. Each took down the other’s signs. The two men ran into each other at a telephone pole, and they began an argument which would persist throughout 1967.

“The Diggers were . . . passionately critical of the commercialization of the Haight,” wrote Cohen. “Generally, the atmosphere around the Diggers was desperate, dark, and tense, while at the ordinary hippie pad, it was light, meditative, and creative, with a mixture of rock and raga music, Oriental aesthetics, and vegetarian food.” Maybe so, but at their peak the Diggers were providing five hundred free meals a week to people in the community, which brought them a lot of credibility on the street.

If Cohen and Bowen were going to be successful in pulling off the Be-In as a true “gathering,” they needed to avoid a torrent of negativity from the Diggers, who initially saw it as a gimmick created by an organization of head shops and a loose conglomeration of “hip stores” called the Haight Independent Proprietors (HIP). The Diggers were suspicious that HIP was hoping to attract national publicity so that they could sell “hippie products” to chain stores and at the same time attract more tourists to Haight-Ashbury.

While it’s impossible to know the inner motivation of every Haight merchant of the time, the Digger theory does seem to have been an unfair characterization of Ron Thelin, whose shop was part of HIP. Thelin soon thereafter told the Oracle, “The direction I see it taking is getting back to the land and finding out how to take care of ourselves, how to survive, how to live off the land, how to make our own clothes, grow our own food, how to live in a tribal unit.” (In October 1967 the Psychedelic Store would close and Thelin would move to Marin County, where for the rest of his life he worked as a cab driver, a mason, and a carpenter.) At the Oracle, Cohen and his colleagues lived hand-to-mouth and avoided the kinds of tabloid stories that drove up the circulation of typical “underground” newspapers; they rejected sleazy ads as well.

Cohen got HIP to agree that Haight stores would all be closed on the day of the Be-In so at least there wouldn’t be immediate profit from those who came in the name of idealism. The Diggers scored an additional agreement with a different kind of capitalist, Augustus Owsley Stanley III (known mostly as “Owsley” or his nickname “Bear”), who agreed to give three hundred thousand tablets of “White Lightning” LSD to the Diggers to distribute free to attendees of the Be-In. Owsley also provided the seventy-five turkeys from which free sandwiches would be made. Although Grogan would later mock the spiritual aspirations of the Be-In, the Diggers stuck to a commitment not to bad-mouth it beforehand.

Cohen also had to reassure the San Francisco rock musicians who had emerged as key thought leaders in the community. The musicians were a generation younger than the beatniks. Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead was nineteen; Janis Joplin was twenty-three; Jerry Garcia and Marty Balin were twenty-four; Jefferson Airplane’s new singer, Grace Slick, was twenty-seven. The Airplane, the Dead, and Joplin all had houses in the Haight within a few blocks of each other. Their primary concern was maintaining a vibe that fostered creativity.

British folk-rock singer Donovan had followed in Bob Dylan’s footsteps and had gone electric in 1966 with the album Sunshine Superman, which included the song “The Fat Angel,” the chorus of which paid homage to the Haight rockers: “Fly Jefferson Airplane, gets you there on time.” The Airplane was the first local band to get a record deal (with RCA). Grace Slick had not been a member on their first album but joined in late 1966. Two songs on which she sang lead on the band’s second album, “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” (which she also wrote), both became massive hits in 1967, the first emanations of the Haight culture to go mainstream.

Yet another “tribe” in the counterculture who initially resisted participation in the Be-In were the Berkeley radicals who by 1967 were primarily focusing on trying to end the Vietnam War. The weekly underground paper across the Bay, the Berkeley Barb, centered far more on radical politics and far less on spirituality than the Oracle.

Cohen explained, “Bowen and I had become concerned about the philosophical split that was developing in the youth movement. The antiwar and free-speech movement in Berkeley thought the hippies were too disengaged and spaced out, and that their influence might draw the young away from resistance to the war. The hippies thought the movement was doomed to endless confrontations with the establishment that would recoil with violence and fascism . . . In order to have a Human Be-In, we would have to have a powwow.”

The meeting took place at Bowen’s pad at the corner of Haight and Masonic. The Berkeley radical contingent included Max Scherr, who was the publisher of the Berkeley Barb, and antiwar activists Michael Lerner and Jerry Rubin. Rubin was a twenty-eight-year-old native of Cincinnati who had enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, in time to witness the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Later that year he was among a group of American students who traveled illegally to Cuba and met with Che Guevara. In 1965, he was one of the organizers of the Vietnam Day Committee—a small group who tried to block trains filled with GIs who were ultimately headed for Vietnam. Rubin and fellow radicals Mario Savio and Stew Alpert served short jail sentences after being convicted of “public nuisance.”

Rubin and his girlfriend Nancy Kurshan had recently met with then-unknown Eldridge Cleaver, who had been released from prison in late 1966 and would soon join the Black Panther Party, eventually becoming their Minister of Information. In an introduction to Rubin’s book Do It! Cleaver recalled, “Thinking back to that evening in Stew’s pad in Berkeley, I remember the huge poster of W.C. Fields on the ceiling, and the poster of Che on the wall . . . This was our first meeting. We turned on and talked about the future.” Now the question was whether Rubin could relate equally well to the San Francisco hippies.

While Rubin tried to soak up the hippie ethos, his comrade Michael Lerner earnestly asked the group, “What are your demands?” The hippies and musicians were amused. “Man, there are no demands! It’s a fucking Be-In!” Still, it was agreed that Rubin could make a short speech.

Ginsberg said that the Be-In would be “a gathering together of younger people aware of the planetary fate that we are all sitting in the middle of, imbued with a new consciousness, and desiring of a new kind of society involving prayer, music, and spiritual life together rather than competition, acquisition, and war.”

Bowen and Cohen consulted Gavin Arthur, a philosopher and astrologer who was the grandson of US President Chester Arthur. According to Gene Anthony’s The Summer of Love, Arthur said that January 14 was the day “when communication and society would be most favored for a meld of positive communication for the greatest good.” He also claimed it was “a time when the population of the earth would be equivalent in number to the total of all the dead in human history.”

The Oracle cover story about the upcoming Be-In said, “A new nation has grown inside the robot flesh of the old . . . Hang your fear at the door and join the future. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see.” The issue featured a centerfold with an ornate trippy drawing by Rick Griffin in which the faces of ancient mystics emerged from hookahs. In its center was a heart-shaped depiction of a lecture Ginsberg had given to Unitarian ministers in Boston the previous November called “Renaissance or Die,” in which he associated his philosophy with that of Thoreau and Emerson and then urged everyone over the age of fourteen to try LSD at least once. The Barb also ran an announcement on their front page.

A poster designed by psychedelic artist Stanley Mouse was put up in Marin County, Berkeley, and the Peninsula, as well as around Haight-Ashbury. It featured a trippy drawing of an Indian sadhu with a third eye, and the typeface used stylized art nouveau lettering that required a great deal of concentration to read.

Saturday, January 14, 1967, 1–5 p.m.

A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In

Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Michael Mclure
[sic], Jerry Ruben [sic], Dick Gregory,
Gary Snyder, Jack Weinberg, Lenore Kandel

ALL SF ROCK GROUPS

At the Polo Field, Golden Gate Park

FREE

Bring food to share, bring flowers, beads, costumes,

feathers, bells, cymbals, flags

* * *

It was just past dawn on the morning of the Be-In and Allen Ginsberg wasn’t really worried about the rumors, but he wanted to sanctify the gathering anyway. The day before, word had spread through San Francisco that a satanic cult had put some sort of a curse on Polo Field where the Be-In was scheduled to take place. A couple of hippies who lived near the park had found some chopped-up pieces of meat and bones in the field. In a community with a lot of mystics, many of them high on psychedelics, it hadn’t taken long for the paranoid theory to reach the ears of some of the “elders” who had been planning the event. Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, had given a blessing, but many in Haight-Ashbury were still a bit unnerved. Ginsberg, who had spent a lot of time in India the previous year, knew just what to do.

It had been an unusually rainy winter in the Bay Area but the sun was shining with barely a cloud in the sky and the temperature was around fifty degrees. Shortly after sunrise, Ginsberg, along with fellow poet Gary Snyder and a few of their close friends, performed a Hindu ritual called “Pradakshina,” which consisted of a slow, solemn walk around the field (which was 480 feet wide by 900 feet long) while reciting sacred prayers. This, the poets explained, was crucial for ensuring that the Be-In would be a mela—a pilgrimage gathering—and not just a big stoned party.

A dozen years earlier at the Six Gallery, which was just five miles away on Fillmore Street, Ginsberg had read his groundbreaking epic poem “Howl” for the first time. (The famous first line of the poem is, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” but the poet’s own mind, no matter how far out he got, was as sharp as a razor.) Along with his friend Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, Ginsberg’s poem expressed a radically different vision of sexual morality, art, and the very meaning of life than that which characterized the prevailing ethos at the peak of the Eisenhower era, which was still under the dark shadow of McCarthyism. In the succeeding decades, Ginsberg and Kerouac became beacons of light for thousands of marginalized smart kids. One of those was Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, who said in the late sixties, “I can’t separate who I am now from what I got from Kerouac . . . I don’t know if I would ever have had the courage or the vision to do something outside with my life—or even suspected the possibilities existed—if it weren’t for Kerouac opening those doors.” Ironically, Kerouac hated the hippies; he just couldn’t connect with the next generation. But Ginsberg had dived fully into the heart of the hippie movement.

The posters that had been put up around the Bay Area said that the Be-In would start at one in the afternoon, so Ginsberg was pleasantly surprised when dozens of people were already arriving by nine in the morning, just as the Pradakshina was ending. They kept coming and coming and coming. Previously, the biggest hippie gathering had been six thousand at the Trips Festival a year earlier. Before the afternoon was done, at least thirty thousand had shown up “to be.” Where the fuck had they all come from?

Although there were various theories about the best way to take LSD, there was no question that the drug created a powerful inner experience only some aspects of which lent themselves to verbal explanations. Experiences in which small groups of friends discussed the various theories of the meaning of life were not necessarily the same “trips” as those of people doing the same things in different homes, in different neighborhoods. So the idea of a “tribe” did not merely refer to high-profile clusters of hip celebrities like the bands or the Diggers or Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters or the Free Speech Movement veterans of Berkeley. It applied to hundreds of small groups with varying notions of community and inner experiences.

One of the reasons the external manifestation of tens of thousands of freaks felt so extraordinary was because of the notion so vividly held at the Be-In that an integrated matrix of hundreds of tribes could function as the nucleus of a new society. Looking back, it is not at all surprising that this turned out not to be the case. What was remarkable was that it ever felt that way on such a mass scale, even for a moment.

Many at the Be-In brought cameras, and within weeks, photos would be seen in magazines and newspapers around the world of the massive crowd, which included barefoot young women in madras saris, folk singers, self-proclaimed shamans, and motorcyclists. Some of the men dressed in Victorian clothes, Edwardian jackets, and velvet cloaks, with stovepipe or porkpie hats. Others looked more like cowboys, or Native Americans, and a few, like Ginsberg, like well-fed sadhus. There were lots of feathers, drums, esoteric flags, soap bubbles, and balloons.

Hundreds of the men had really long hair, way past their shoulders, longer than that of the Beatles. Many of the women wore long dresses, while others wore miniskirts and see-through tops; there were also quite a few mothers with small children. Some had masks and body paint; there were astrologers, jugglers, and a couple with shining eyes passing out tarot cards. But these were the veterans of earlier hippie gatherings. The bulk of this expanded community was still in jeans and khakis and wouldn’t have looked out of place at a folk festival.

Although Haight-Ashbury was a relatively integrated neighborhood, the hip community in the Bay Area at that moment was mostly white. Dick Gregory was the only scheduled African American speaker and he bailed at the last minute to attend a protest at Puget Sound. Jazz virtuosos Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Lloyd, who sat in on a couple of Airplane and Grateful Dead songs, were the only black musicians to perform.

A group of Krishna devotees with their distinctive shaved heads and single braids danced. On the periphery, a sole Christian evangelist with a bullhorn vainly tried to argue that hell and damnation awaited those who followed the lead of the speakers. The hippies smiled sweetly at him as they sauntered by.

Adding to the surreal feeling in the huge crowd was the fact that its transcendental craziness was happening adjacent to apparent normality. Golden Gate Park is one of the largest parks in an American city and a rugby game was being played on the other end of the vast field. A few local cops on horseback surveyed the crowd, but didn’t make any busts. For the moment, it was live and let live.

The sheer sense of a newly expanded community, collectively tripping out to an inchoate notion of universal love, and the feeling that the ideas, fashions, vibes, and music would spread and spread and spread, was in and of itself the main memory that many in the crowd would have. But there was a “program” that tried to shape and enhance the energy.

It started, as scheduled, at 1 p.m. sharp with the blowing of a conch shell by poet Gary Snyder, who had lived at a Japanese monastery for about ten years before his recent return to Northern California. He had longish brown hair and a beard and was wearing a dark turtleneck and a darker vest with a single string of beads around his neck and an earring in one ear (very far out for a man in those days). Sitting next to Snyder on the stage was Ginsberg, who chanted a Hindu mantra in his earnest off-key voice and then switched to English: “Peace in America, peace in Vietnam, peace in San Francisco, peace in Hanoi, peace in New York, peace in Peking. Hari Om Nama Shivaya.”

Although a few people strolled on the periphery, where the weak sound system didn’t reach, the bulk of the crowd sat attentively, straining to take in every word. Several minutes into Ginsberg’s chant, a beautiful blond woman wearing a short black dress with mirrored circles on it rose and danced sensuously to the rhythm of the poet’s hand cymbals. Ginsberg gently nudged the crowd: “You also need to sing.” He explained that the Hindu deity Shiva was, among other things, the god of hash smokers.

Michael McClure had recently written a play called The Beard about a sexually charged fictitious meeting between Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid. (It had been closed down by the cops in San Francisco at one point because of its depiction of cunnilingus.) McClure played a quirky song while accompanying himself on the autoharp, with a lyric that ended, “It is all perfect, this really is.”

Lenore Kandel was a local poet with long brown braids who had met Jack Kerouac earlier in the decade and was later immortalized by him as Romana Swartz, “a big Rumanian monster beauty,” in his novel Big Sur. She had recently published The Love Book, a collection of erotic poetry, which had also been the subject of a local obscenity prosecution. (She was convicted after a five-week trial in which she was supported by numerous literary figures, but the case would be thrown out on appeal on First Amendment grounds.) Kandel earnestly told the crowd, “The Buddha will reach us all through love—not through doctrine, not through teachings, but through love. And looking at all of you—all of us—I feel more and more that Maitreya is not this time going to be born in one physical body but born out of all of us.” (Theosophists believed Maitreya to be the messiah of the future.)

Then it was Jerry Rubin’s turn. He had a Trotskyite handlebar mustache and tufts of his midlength hair were blowing above his head in the breeze. He too wore a white shirt. “Boy, I’m happy to be here. This is a beautiful day. I wish today that all of America could be here.” Despite his best efforts to keep it mellow, an outraged tone crept into his voice. “The police, like the soldiers in Vietnam, are both victims and agents. I just came from the old world, here to the new world. The old world are places like jails—structures where a person cannot feel like a human being.” He asked members of the crowd to contribute to the bail fund for arrested protesters and awkwardly ended, “Our smiles are our political banners and our nakedness is our picket sign.” Despite his effort to fit in, Rubin retained an unmistakable whiff of self-righteous lefty hysteria. Jerry Garcia would later say, “I remember being at [the] Be-In and Jerry Rubin got up on stage and started haranguing the crowd. All of a sudden it was like everyone who had ever harangued a crowd. It was every asshole who told people what to do. The words didn’t matter. It was that angry tone. It scared me. It made me sick to my stomach.” After the Be-In, the Grateful Dead often avoided associations with radical politics.

The last of the speakers was Timothy Leary, who mirrored Ginsberg’s holy man uniform, wearing a white shirt and pants. For the last several years, Leary had been the highest-profile American advocate of LSD, but he was based on the East Coast. The Be-In was his first public appearance in San Francisco. Leary had a yellow flower behind each of his ears and was barefoot. “We have to get Western man out of the cities and back into tribes and villages. The only way out is in.” He finished by solemnly intoning, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” a phrase he had unveiled in New York a few months earlier. Ginsberg, who was sitting beside publisher/poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the stage, leaned over and whispered, “What if we’re all wrong?”

Then came the rock and roll. After the power line was cut during a Quicksilver Messenger Service song, it was quickly repaired, and thereafter the stage and electric generator were guarded by Chocolate George, a member of the Hells Angels who was so nicknamed because of his fondness for chocolate milk.

Two years later there would be a now-infamous violent incident involving the Angels at the Altamont Festival, but at the Be-In they were in perfect harmony with their surroundings. (Lenore Kandel was married to an Angel named Sweet William.)

At one of Ken Kesey’s events in 1966, Ginsberg had given many of the local Angels LSD, and for that moment they had been on the same page as the hippies. One of the reasons for naive optimism about the effects of LSD in the community was that incongruous bonding of a gay Jewish poet with members of the outlaw motorcycle gang who had not so long before beaten up antiwar protesters. (In August, when Chocolate George was killed in a motorcycle accident on Haight Street, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company played at his wake, and Grogan and Coyote of the Diggers also attended.)

The Angels’ appeal to the Diggers, Coyote explained to me, was that they were fellow anarchists who resisted conventional authority. During my brief time of living in the Bay Area in 1967–68, I shared that romance about the Angels. The fact that I knew people who were close to some of them gave me the same kind of illusion of protection that kids who grew up playing with the offspring of Mafia families had in some urban neighborhoods. In retrospect, I feel that nonviolence means nothing unless it applies to everyone, including people who otherwise seem very cool.

The bands who played at the Be-In had developed a passionate local following with little or no connection to the music business. Only the Airplane had released an album, but most of the others would be signed to major record companies within the year.

The coin of the realm for bands in the San Francisco scene was the ability to play extended semi-improvised solos and jams which sounded especially good when the listener was high. No one did this more effectively than the Grateful Dead, who were the last band to play, ending with a psychedelicized version of the Motown song “Dancing in the Street,” to which Ginsberg danced ecstatically as Jerry Garcia sang, “It doesn’t matter what you wear just as long as you are there,” followed by a long, trippy guitar solo. Jim Morrison and the other members of the Doors (who were in San Francisco for a gig at the Fillmore) did not play at the Be-In, but wandered around Polo Field cheerfully tripping on Owsley’s acid.

At some point during the Dead’s set a parachutist who’d jumped from a small plane floated down into the middle of the celebration and was greeted by many stoned oohs and aahs. Not long afterward, Ginsberg took the microphone again, gently cradling a four-year-old boy, and said, “If the parents are here for this child—please come and take him.”

The music was fun and served as a magnet for the crowd. San Francisco rock was at its innocent peak. But the day was still permeated by an elusive but palpable sense of nondenominational cosmic purpose that made it very different from a regular party or concert. The main point was for members of the crowd to experience each other. There were so many freaks! It was like the straight world had just melted away.

As the afternoon drew to a close, Allen Cohen repeated three times, “You are your own salvation, man!” He continued, “I have had one of the fullest days of my life. In that day, there was much good. There was also bad. But my day was full. I am thankful that each and every person here came to share this day with each and every person here . . . I would ask you to, at this moment, realize that the sun is setting and our day is at an end. I would ask you to turn and face the sun, and Allen Ginsberg, along with Gary Snyder, will chant the night . . . Thank you for sharing the day with all the people here, and please, please take it home and realize the beauty that can come forth . . . I would say this to all the members of the establishment—we are happy and proud to have you in our brave new world.”

Ginsberg chanted, “Om Jai Maitreya, Om Jai Maitreya.” Dozens of people, some holding paisley flags and the rest holding hands, danced in a circle on the periphery of the crowd. Ginsberg ended with a request for civic responsibility: “Now that you have looked up at the sun, look down at your feet and practice a little kitchen yoga after this first American mela. Please pick up any refuse you might see around you. Shanti.”

Present throughout the day was Leary’s protégé Richard Alpert, who was then thirty-five. Alpert had been among the elite in the American psychedelic scene for the last five years and his name had appeared on the Be-In posters. On the surface Alpert seemed optimistic and ecstatic, but in the days that followed he would start to talk and write a lot about “the problem of coming down.”

Robbie Conal was an artist from New York, a “red-diaper baby” whose schoolteacher dad was followed by the FBI during the blacklisting era. He began attending San Francisco State and lived in Haight-Ashbury starting in 1963, so he had watched the whole scene unfold. Conal stayed in college as long as he could without graduating to retain a draft deferment, but says of the time, “I was taking psychedelics and smoking dope. I was as far away from politics as I’d ever been.” He was in Golden Gate Park almost every day, but the Be-In touched him deeply. “What stayed with me was Ginsberg. You don’t get to see a guy like that very often.”

Also among the attendees in San Francisco were James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who shortly thereafter wrote the musical Hair, which premiered in New York the following year, by which time much of the essence of the culture they were exploiting had dispersed. Most early hippies viewed the musical as a dumbed-down version of their evanescent culture, but over the years, millions of people have professed to having picked up shards of light from it. The spirit moved in mysterious ways.

In the early evening following the Be-In, Bowen hosted a party at his place. Around eighteen people squeezed into his meditation room, including Ginsberg, Snyder, Leary, and two local TV cameramen. The New Yorker’s Jane Kramer hung out with the effusive Ginsberg. “I thought it was very Eden-like today, actually,” he told her. “Kind of like Blake’s vision of Eden. Music. Babies. People just sort of floating around having a good time and everybody happy and smiling and touching and turning each other on. A lot of groovy chicks all dressed up in their best clothes.”

One of the TV guys interrupted him to ask, “But will it last?”

Ginsberg shrugged. “How do I know if it will last? And if it doesn’t turn out, who cares?” Once was enough.

Around nine that night, a crowd assembled on Haight Street and cops said they were blocking buses. Twenty-five people were arrested for causing a nuisance. Nonetheless, the scale and colorful nature of the crowd that had gathered during the day created a significant impression. Photos of the Be-In appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world.

McClure would later write, “The Be-In was a blossom. It was a flower. It was out in the weather. It didn’t have all its petals. There were worms in the rose. It was perfect in its imperfections. It was what it was—and there had never been anything like it before.”

Of course, to a huge part of the country, the Be-In was of no particular consequence. Far more Americans paid attention the next day, January 15, when the Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35–10 at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in the first Super Bowl.

Meanwhile, the Diggers were worried that the publicity from the Be-In would change people’s heads in the hip community for the worse, so they held their own event called “The Invisible Circus at the Glide Church.” It took place in San Francisco a month later, on February 24, with no posters or advertising that the media would notice, just word of mouth. It went all night and had more nudity, sex, and intense drug use than the Be-In had (and nary a Hindu chant).

New York: Lower East Side

New York City’s Lower East Side was Haight-Ashbury’s psychic cousin. At times it seemed like they were two pieces of the same puzzle, but there were differences. The Lower East Side was economically poorer and more crime ridden, and in New York the hippies had a lot more competition for possession of the cultural zeitgeist.

Greenwich Village, which was just a few blocks west and north of the Lower East Side, had been a haven for rebel culture at least as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century. Even though Bob Dylan had taken a lot of the air out of the folk world (no one could compete with his brilliance), the folk scene that spawned him was still there, and so, on occasion, was Dylan himself. There was a revolutionary art world that included Andy Warhol, and a fierce literary community that included the likes of Paul Goodman, James Baldwin, George Plimpton, and Norman Mailer.

Harlem had its own vast energy and many of the jazz geniuses of the age—such as Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk—were still in their prime. John Coltrane, whose 1965 masterpiece A Love Supreme was as influential a musical/spiritual opus as any rock record, would die of cancer at the age of forty in July of 1967.

Most record companies at the time were based in New York (although Los Angeles was rapidly expanding and would soon be an equal music business center), which was also the American home of Broadway as well as avant-garde theater, most notably the Living Theatre.

Ed Sanders, a native of Missouri, had moved to the city to attend New York University, from which he graduated with a degree in Greek. An impassioned supporter of the peace movement, he was arrested at a protest near a nuclear submarine when he was twenty-two years old in 1961 and wrote his first poem in jail. Shortly thereafter, Sanders started an avant-garde literary magazine called Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.

In 1964, Sanders and beatnik poet Tuli Kupferberg started a rock band called the Fugs, named after the euphemism Norman Mailer had invented to substitute for the word “fuck” in his classic World War II novel The Naked and the Dead. The Fugs combined literary sophistication with profane, hip rage. They set William Blake poems to music, but would follow them with songs like “Coca Cola Douche” and “My Baby Done Left Me” (the chorus of which had the brokenhearted narrator singing, “I feel like homemade sh—”).

The Fugs also had a political side and participated in numerous anti–Vietnam War rallies. They wrote “Kill for Peace,” which they performed at Carnegie Hall at a “Sing-In for Peace” that also featured Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and civil rights hero Fannie Lou Hamer.

In 1965, Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore at 383 East 10th Street, which became one of the key meeting places in the Lower East Side hip community. At the grand opening the Fugs and the hippie/bluegrass band the Holy Modal Rounders played. (The Rounders wrote a new verse to the jug band standard “Hesitation Blues” in which they said they were wearing “psychedelic shoes.”) Andy Warhol gave Sanders three large silkscreen prints of flowers for the walls. Among the literati who attended were Allen Ginsberg, George Plimpton, William Burroughs, and best-selling novelist James A. Michener, who arrived in a limo.

Sanders had a mimeograph machine at the bookstore to continue publishing Fuck You as well as the prolegalization Marijuana Newsletter. On January 1, 1966, police raided the Peace Eye Bookstore and charged Sanders with obscenity.

Ginsberg was in Los Angeles at the time and held a benefit poetry reading in Hollywood to raise money for initial legal fees. The ACLU quickly stepped in to defend Sanders, which limited future costs.

In Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he quotes Ken Kesey telling him in 1966, “No offense but New York is about two years behind [California].” By 1967 this was no longer the case. It had become easy to get LSD in New York and both Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side had proud bohemian traditions. New York’s counterparts to the Oracle were the late-night shows on WBAI-FM, a radio station that created a similar sense of a psychedelic/revolutionary community.

WBAI was part of the small, feisty, and noncommercial Pacifica Network, which had been created in the late 1940s by a pacifist named Lewis Hill. The first affiliated stations were KPFA in Berkeley and KPFK in Los Angeles. In 1960 Pacifica was given WBAI in New York. (In later years, Pacifica added stations in Houston and Washington, DC.) The idea of “listener-sponsored” radio, without commercials, was a novelty (National Public Radio wasn’t founded until 1970), and the audiences for Pacifica stations were passionate and engaged. The stations offered a combination of classical music and public affairs programming with a pronounced left-wing tilt.

Among WBAI’s virtues was an extremely strong signal that reached up to Westchester where my parents lived. The station published monthly programming folios for donors. A glance at the first week of programming from March 1967 gives an idea of the cultural footprint WBAI had in the New York area.

In keeping with the sensibilities of the FM radio audience of the time, they broadcast a large sampling of classical music, including Clementi piano music, Carl Orff’s adaptation the thirteenth-century poem “Carmina Burana,” Schubert’s “Octet in F Major,” sacred compositions by Benjamin Britten, and Beethoven string quartets. Other highbrow programming included Shakespeare with a Difference, hosted by Alfred Rothschild, the editor of Bantam Classics’ Shakespeare editions, a recording of a full performance of the Bard’s Measure for Measure, a program dedicated to Indian music played by Ravi Shankar, and a jazz show hosted by Downbeat editor Ira Gitler.

Weekly programming included Commentary, a production of the New York chapter of SDS, a review of the Soviet press, satirical shows by Paul Krassner and Hugh Romney, and a panel discussion by the board of the Ethical Culture Society (a religion created by rationalist Jews earlier in the century who had founded Fieldston, the high school I attended). Specials during the first week of March included one on the trials in Newark of African American poet LeRoi Jones, another on the “police harassment” of Timothy Leary in Millbrook, and a conversation between antiwar congressman William Fitts Ryan (whose district included Manhattan’s Upper West Side) and former army general David Shoup, who had turned against the war. WBAI also offered new, original reporting from Vietnam (they had sent reporter Chris Koch there as early as 1965), and later in the year the Pacifica stations broadcast a live interview with Che Guevara a few months before he was killed.

I had a limited appetite for this well-intentioned but often dull programming, yet WBAI’s late-night offerings rocked my world. From Monday through Friday, Bob Fass broadcast from midnight to four a.m. On Saturday and Sunday, it was Steve Post. Together, they created a sense of a secret, hip world, totally remote from the tedium of school and work. Bob Dylan often showed up in the wee hours of the morning to play a new song or exchange cynical cosmic observations with Fass, and regular guests on these shows included such luminaries as Paul Krassner, editor of the Realist and Lenny Bruce’s autobiography.

Fass decided to try to find out how many engaged listeners he actually had and suggested that they all come to JFK Airport on the night of February 11 for a “Fly-In.” Despite the fact that it ended up being the coldest night of the year with temperatures near zero, several thousand bleary-eyed WBAI listeners (whom Fass affectionately referred to as “the cabal”) showed up.

The next month, on Easter Sunday, there was a daytime Be-In in Central Park’s Sheep’s Meadow. Paul Williams and Jim Fouratt were the primary organizers. Williams was a precocious eighteen-year-old who had started Crawdaddy, the first magazine to write about rock and roll with the intellectual gravitas previously reserved for jazz, folk, and classical music. He had written all of the articles in the first ten-page issue, but the mimeographed magazine attracted enough attention in the blossoming rock world that other brilliant writers soon flocked to him, including Jon Landau, who would later become Bruce Springsteen’s manager, and Paul Nelson, who would sign the New York Dolls during a brief stint at Mercury Records. (Williams was a visionary but a terrible businessman. Both Landau and Nelson left Crawdaddy by the end of 1967 to write for a new San Francisco–based rock magazine called Rolling Stone.)

I would meet Fouratt a few years later, by which time he was the “Company Freak” (this was his actual title!) at CBS Records, where, among other tasks, he was the primary liaison with Janis Joplin. He was also a central figure in the gay liberation movement that emerged from the Stonewall Riots in 1969.

But in 1967, Fouratt, having spent time with the Diggers in San Francisco, was calling himself Jimmy Digger. He brought the Diggers’ anti-elite sensibility to the New York Be-In. “We really wanted not to have an audience and a stage and performers in an active/passive situation. We wanted to make people figure out how to relate in real time.” Thus there were no speakers and no music. It was a pure vehicle for the community to come together and “be.”

New York’s biggest alternative weekly, the Village Voice, founded in 1955, had been dominated by grimly grounded New York lefties who were invested in the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and off-Broadway. The Voice had initially been dubious about the hippie scene but that was about to change.

Howard Smith wrote a column called “Scenes” in the Voice, and he saw himself as an activist as well as a journalist. “Howard called me one day and said that the Voice was throwing out a Gestetner machine because they’d gotten a new one,” Jim Fouratt recalls. This was the same kind of mimeograph machine that the Diggers used in San Francisco. It was capable of printing tens of thousands of flyers in a few hours. Fouratt convinced some kids to pick it up on the street outside of the Voice’s office. At the time there were plenty of high school students hanging around the Lower East Side, some of whom went to private schools like Dalton. The students would steal reams of paper from their schools that would eventually become flyers for the upcoming New York Be-In.

Pop artist Peter Max created a psychedelic graphic for free and printed up thousands of handouts, but the flyer had his name on it; Fouratt was incensed. “I told Peter that we didn’t want any individual having visibility and he was very good about it. He destroyed the first printing and gave us thousands more without his name. We tried to remain anonymous. People would ask who was organizing it, and we would give them a Be-In button and tell them, You are!” Another distinguishing fact of the New York Be-In was that the words on the posters and flyers were in both English and Spanish—as a result, thousands of Puerto Ricans showed up.

In the week leading up to the Be-In, Fouratt was on the Bob Fass show, Radio Unnameable, virtually every night “anonymously” exhorting listeners to come to the event. As had been the case in San Francisco, a hip community which had previously never been known to exceed a couple thousand people had increased tenfold, seemingly overnight. The New York Be-In attracted roughly twenty thousand celebrants. Some had Easter Parade hats and others wore psychedelic robes. Many painted their faces in wild designs and colors ranging from chalk white to glowing lavender; they often included a dot, a tiny mirror, or a prism disk pasted on the forehead. One man was dressed in a suit of long, shaggy strips of paper. A tall man, his face painted white, wearing a silk top hat adorned with straw flowers, wandered ethereally through the Be-In holding aloft a tiny sign that simply read, LOVE.

Abbie Hoffman, then thirty years old, would not emerge as a media figure until later in the year, but he and his soon-to-be wife Anita were in attendance. Hoffman was a native of Worcester, Massachusetts, and had a thick New England accent, long dark hair, and a big Jewish nose. (Although Hoffman described himself as an atheist, he was proud of having been born Jewish and frequently mentioned it.) He had graduated from Brandeis and had gotten involved in the civil rights movement.

A few months earlier Hoffman had opened a “Freedom Store” on East 13th Street that sold products made by civil rights workers in the South. Unfortunately, the store did not do well. At the Be-In, Hoffman’s mind raced with ideas about how to synthesize the disparate cultural and political elements that were exploding before his eyes. He had become enamored with Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media, and as much as he enjoyed the Diggers’ intensity and creativity, going forward he would have no interest in anonymity.

Anita Hoffman described the scene in a roman à clef called Trashing, written under the pseudonym Ann Fettamen. “Someone gave us some orange and a chocolate. It was mind-blowing to be offered a poem or a daffodil by someone you’d never seen before. In New York you’d usually never speak to a total stranger.”

Among those mingling with the hippie kids were leaders of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation and Group Image artistic commune. Also flowing with the crowd were a number of New York jazz and rock musicians, including Ornette Coleman, and Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs.

The cops at the Be-In were cool. A police car arrived around six forty-five in the morning, and the few hundred people already gathered rushed the car and pelted it with flowers, yelling, “Daffodil power!” There were no arrests, not even of people who stripped and ran around naked, nor of those few couples who had sex out in the open. “The police were beautiful,” remembers Fouratt. “It was really strange and it freaked them out, but they were beautiful.”

Under Smith’s influence the Voice abandoned its lefty cynicism in their coverage of the Be-In the following week: “Laden with daffodils, ecstatic in vibrant costumes and painted faces, troupes of hippies gathered . . . Rhythms and music and mantras from all corners of the meadow echoed in exquisite harmony, and thousands of lovers vibrated into the night. It was miraculous . . . Layers of inhibitions were peeled away and, for many, love and laughter became suddenly fresh.”

Los Angeles

Hippie energy was spreading in Los Angeles as well. On weekends, teenage longhairs would crowd the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, causing the local merchants to complain. Eventually, the Los Angeles Police Department announced a curfew.

On Saturday, November 12, 1966, a demonstration was held to protest the curfew outside the popular Pandora’s Box nightclub on the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights boulevards. The ten p.m. curfew would effectively shutter Pandora’s Box and other nightclubs frequented by teenagers. A thousand young people demonstrated and the LAPD overreacted and declared it a riot, beating and handcuffing many of the participants.

Stephen Stills, a twenty-one-year-old guitarist and singer for the new rock group Buffalo Springfield, wrote “For What It’s Worth” about the Sunset Strip “riots,” and the band recorded it on December 5, 1966. The song would later be used in countless movie montages of antiwar protests, but had been written to celebrate the simple idea of teenagers expressing themselves.

On the same Easter Sunday in 1967 that the New York Be-In took place, a Love-In occurred in Downtown LA in Elysian Park, near where the Dodgers played. The psychedelic posters urged people to “bring incense, bells, flowers, and joy.” The turnout was around twenty thousand, roughly ten times as big as the hippie dances and events in Los Angeles during the preceding year.

Elliot Mintz, then twenty-one years old, had a talk show on the Los Angeles Pacifica station KPFK. Someone at the station had decided they should reach out to younger audiences and Mintz had sent in his resume at the right time. He was the youngest person on the radio in LA and was making it up as he went along.

Around the same time, Peter Bergman and Philip Proctor, who would soon form the underground comedy group the Firesign Theatre, were creating trippy audio montages for the station. “I was intimidated,” remembers Mintz. “I had no knowledge of how to edit in sound effects or write conceptually the way [Bergman and Proctor] did.” Instead, Mintz initially played an eclectic blend of music until he found his métier as an interviewer of young musicians, actors, writers, and hip philosophers.

“I talked the Love-In up every night and gave driving directions, parking info, and kept reminding people it was free.” Mintz and Peter Bergman played the roles of a very laid-back masters of ceremonies, introducing the bands who played.

The LA Love-In was neither as minimalist as the New York Be-In nor as structured as the one in San Francisco. There was a stage where local LA rock bands played—including the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, and Clear Light—but there were no poems, political speeches, or spiritual ceremonies. (Noting the magnitude of the newly expanded scene, the bigger LA rock bands—the Byrds, the Doors, Love, and Buffalo Springfield—showed up and played for free at subsequent Love-Ins in Griffith Park later in the year.)

Among those in the swarm of mostly teenage hippies were Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork of the TV band the Monkees. The group was dismissed by many “serious” rock fans, but the guys in the band were determined to bond with the hippie community. (Tork had recently “invested” $5,000 in the Oracle.)

Also in attendance was Peter Fonda—the twenty-seven-year-old son of Hollywood icon Henry Fonda—who had started a minor acting career of his own. In August of 1965, the Beatles had rented a house on Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, and Fonda had taken LSD there, along with John Lennon and Ringo Starr. At one point while tripping, Fonda announced, “I know what it’s like to be dead.” Lennon used the phrase in the song “She Said She Said,” which appeared on Revolver, an album the band released in August 1966. Fonda had been among those roughed up by cops at the Sunset Strip “riots.” He had grown his hair long, which prevented him from getting most acting jobs for the moment, but he and his friends Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper were convinced that the same hippie energy that was transforming rock and roll would soon come to Hollywood. Later in the year, Fonda starred in a low-budget film written by Nicholson called The Trip, playing a TV commercial director who takes LSD. Hopper played the dealer. Encouraged by the experience, Fonda and Hopper wrote a more serious movie about the hippie scene called Easy Rider (cowritten with Terry Southern) which would be released in 1969, and would achieve massive commercial success, ushering in the era of what was called “the new Hollywood.”

Another attendee at both the San Francisco Be-In and LA’s Love-In was eighteen-year-old Pamela Miller, who would soon become well-known as “Miss Pamela” of the GTOs, a band signed to Frank Zappa’s label, and eventually became even more famous for the memoirs she wrote as Pamela Des Barres about her experiences with numerous legendary rock musicians. She recalls hitchhiking to the San Francisco Be-In: “I was a hippie turning into a flower child before I turned into a freak.” In San Francisco, she made out with Bobby Beausoleil, then a good-looking nineteen-year-old aspiring rock singer and actor. (Later that year Beausoleil would meet Charles Manson when he was released from prison and moved to Haight-Ashbury; in 1970 Beausoleil would be convicted of a murder said to be made at Manson’s behest.)

Miss Pamela came to the LA Love-In with a friend. They’d made dozens of cupcakes to give away. “They were taken and eaten immediately,” she says with a laugh. Soon after, she met Jimi Hendrix, and appeared in a “short film” (what would now be called a music video) made for “Foxy Lady.” She fell in love with her first serious boyfriend, Noel Redding, the bass player of the Jimi Hendrix Experience; in the 1970s she went on to marry rock singer Michael Des Barres.

As at the other Be-Ins, the crowd brought lots of balloons, flutes, and tambourines. Many wore flowers in their hair and had drawings on their faces. Hippies were dancing, playing conga drums, looking through kaleidoscopes, flying kites, and blowing soap bubbles. Miss Pamela warmly remembers people “tangled up in each other’s daisy chains and making out with strangers.” There was at least one couple actually having public sex. But her primary memory is a “sharing atmosphere with kindred souls. I was so thrilled that I was actually a part of it.” By the following year, Miss Pamela and her friend Sparky (also in the GTOs) were pictured on a poster advertising the next Easter Sunday Love-In. “It was in all the head shops. I was half-naked in a dress I’d made out of a tablecloth and Sparky was holding a gigantic stuffed bunny.”

The main drug at the event was marijuana, and although the LA cops were more confrontational than those in San Francisco or New York, there were only around a dozen arrests. There were several large hand-painted signs with the Egyptian ankh symbol on it and a colorful banner for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and the big acid dealers in Orange County gave out samples of their wares, although not in the quantity that Owsley had distributed in San Francisco.

Sweep-In

Back in New York, Abbie Hoffman felt that the “Fly-In” and “Be-In” had been too self-involved and that the community should do something with a “good purpose like cleaning up junk on the Lower East Side.” So, on the day after Easter on Fass’s WBAI show, they announced a “Sweep-In” where they asked the people who had attended the other events to come clean up the block on the Lower East Side where Paul Krassner lived (7th Street between avenues C and D), which was usually strewn with garbage. (Some accounts of the Sweep-In say that it was Emmett Grogan’s idea.)

It was essentially at this moment that Hoffman emerged as a public figure, and his sense of humor and fearless defiance in the face of all forms of authority made him an instant hip celebrity—exactly the kind of thing the Diggers had sworn they would prevent from emerging. Grogan himself had moved to the Lower East Side and became a bitter critic of Hoffman, accusing him, among other things, of leading a bunch of self-aggrandizing suburban white kids into poor neighborhoods without respecting the needs of the minority communities there.

Hoffman and Fass planned the Sweep-In for April 8, 1967, and word of the upcoming spring-cleaning quickly reached New York’s sanitation department. Apparently embarrassed by the idea of dirty hippies doing their work for them, city trucks were dispatched in the wee hours to clean the block from top to bottom, an unprecedented occurrence.

Fass was undeterred. When a thousand people arrived armed with brooms, mops, sponges, and cleaning solutions—only to discover that the original mission had already been accomplished—he directed them to 3rd Street and they started scrubbing there. The New York Times reported that a sizable group of participants were kids who came in from Westchester County and Long Island. I was one of them.

A new culture was being born, but like all births, it had originated somewhere else.