CHAPTER 6

flower power

In the wake of the Be-Ins, there was a period in 1967 when it seemed to many in the hip world that the force of agape was sufficient to overcome society’s obstacles and that a utopian vision could meaningfully change mass culture for the better.

The dramatic growth in the population of acidheads, pot smokers, meditators, activists, and others who wanted a more joyous, caring society than the one they’d grown up in, made it seem like something better was imminent. At the same time, the more thoughtful members of the hip community were well aware that new structures and ideas were necessary to deal with the explosion of interest in their culture. Many meetings focused on the possibility of building a brave new world and the avoidance of perils in attempting to do so. Not surprisingly, among the first of these took place in Northern California.

 

The Houseboat Summit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leary snapped back: “Your teaching at Cal.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Summer of Love

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Indeed, the best-known San Francisco rockers quietly moved from the increasingly chaotic Haight-Ashbury streets to Marin County, including Janis Joplin, the Dead, and the Airplane. Even the Diggers increasingly occupied Morningstar Ranch in Sonoma, which had originally belonged to Lou Gottlieb of the folk group the Limelighters.

 

Lower East Side

Looking over copies of the East Village Other from 1967, it seems as if the Fugs performed weekly in New York at a benefit show or protest rally. The obscenity trial for the Peace Eye Bookstore finally came to court, and the store was acquitted. On February 17, 1967, Life put Ed Sanders on its cover, proclaiming him “a leader of New York’s Other Culture.”

This kind of visibility gave Sanders the clout to negotiate a deal with the mayor’s office to allow a series of free concerts in Tompkins Square Park. Naturally, the Fugs played at one of them. The Lower East Side had been a predominantly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood before the hippies descended to take advantage of the low rents and there were bitter disputes about what kind of music should be played in the park.

However, all the groups were cool with a performance in the park by the Grateful Dead on June 1, 1967, on the band’s first visit to New York. In appreciation of their temporarily unifying influence, NYC Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving arranged for the New York Police Department to escort the Dead to the gig, where the band was met by a welcoming parade of approximately eighty Lower East Side hippies. The band member Pigpen was given a “key to the city” made of white carnations, which he placed on his organ for the concert. The small park was packed with three thousand people. Although it was just a few days after the cops had busted forty-one people in the neighborhood, this time the police looked the other way when joints were thrown from the stage. Maybe it was in deference to the newfound celebrity of the band, or maybe there were just too many people smoking pot to bust them. During one of Garcia’s solos, a framed picture of Jesus was thrown onto the stage, damaging Pigpen’s organ.

The next day, the Dead visited Timothy Leary in Millbrook and he played them the just-released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. The band then returned to the city for a couple more shows. On June 9, just before an appearance at the Café Au Go Go, the Dead had dinner at an Italian restaurant called Emilio’s with Tom Wolfe, who was putting the finishing touches on his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

In the early spring of 1967, Emmett Grogan, Peter Berg, and other Diggers had visited the Lower East Side and were “received in the hippie community like visiting royalty,” according to Don McNeill in the Village Voice. Within days, Berg was a guest on The Alan Burke Show. Burke had a populist tough-guy persona, but he liked to have countercultural people on to argue with. He was no match for the Diggers, though, and he lost control of his show when Berg shoved a pie into the face of an audience member, a woman whom he absurdly claimed was Emma Goldman, the legendary anarchist who had died in 1940. (Some accounts of the exchange say that Berg actually called her Emma Grogan, a riff on the name of his Digger colleague). The audience member was in on the stunt, and the appearance by Berg influenced at least one New Yorker—Abbie Hoffman. While still relatively unknown, Hoffman watched carefully and plotted how to adapt Digger energy to the Lower East Side scene.

For serious old peace-movement types like Cora Weiss, Abbie was too weird. “I liked him a lot personally, but when he’d look at me at rallies to try to get a speaking slot, I wouldn’t let him on,” she says. Weiss’s branch of the movement aimed to convert older adults who were getting disillusioned by the increasingly implausible Cold War rhetoric coming out of Washington.

Sometime in 1967, Hoffman had published a pamphlet called Fuck the System under the pseudonym George Metesky (the real Metesky was known as the “mad bomber” for having planted thirty-three bombs around New York City in the forties and fifties, and had long been held in a mental institution). The pamphlet listed ways of getting things for free in New York City, and advice on how to deal with the cops.

This very irreverence that made Abbie appealing to kids like me made him problematic for the more mainstream peace movement’s agenda. Although he was an old man of thirty in 1967, Abbie had a knowing twinkle in his eye that made it obvious he was one of us, not one of them.

On the other end of the antiwar continuum, Abbie was criticized by Diggers like Coyote, who considered him to be a “media junkie.” Emmett Grogan was even more cutting in his criticism of Hoffman’s penchant for visibility and the two became bitter enemies. Paul Krassner told me that Anita Hoffman had told him that during this period Grogan raped her as a way of humiliating her husband.

These internecine tensions were invisible to me when I was a teenager. Hoffman’s media presence was one of the things about him that I appreciated. Kids like me had no other way of being turned on to the sort of humorous but uncompromising rebellion that he had become famous for.

Hoffman’s first full-length book, Revolution for the Hell of It, was published under the pseudonym “Free,” but everybody knew who the real author was, as the Diggers bitterly pointed out—a Richard Avedon photo of Abbie jumping for joy was featured on the cover. The book reached hundreds of thousands of kids around the country who had never seen one of the mimeographed pamphlets the Diggers handed out.

One attitude Hoffman borrowed from the Diggers was a fierce differentiation from flower children. “Personally I always held my flower in a clenched fist,” he wrote in his autobiography, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture. “A semi-structure-freak among the love children, I was determined to bring the hippie movement into a broader protest.”

In August, during the Newark riots, Abbie trucked in food, clothing, and blankets to the embattled city, but after that, his political and cultural actions were defined by his passion for bringing radical ideas to the mass media. With the exception of Dr. King, Hoffman understood this art better than any other activist in the sixties.

On August 24, Hoffman, Jim Fouratt, and a dozen friends entered the visitors’ entrance to the New York Stock Exchange. Among them was Jerry Rubin, who had just moved to New York to help plan the protest scheduled for later in the year outside of the Pentagon. Rubin, having fully morphed into hip culture, would now say that he and Abbie were Marxists, “in the revolutionary tradition of Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Karl.”

Although Hoffman would later make the dubious claim that he had not alerted the media, several TV camera crews showed up. The cameras made the security people nervous and they asked for the visitors’ names, to which Fouratt replied, “George Metesky,” and said they were with the “East Side Service Organization” (the acronym of which was ESSO, the name of one of the Rockefeller oil companies). A guard confronted them and said, “Hippies are not allowed in.” Abbie snapped back, “Well, look, we’re Jewish. You don’t let Jews in the Stock Exchange?” Perhaps worried about the prospect of a headline reading, “Stock Market Bans Jews,” the guard dutifully wrote, George Metesky and friends, on his notepad and escorted them to seats in the visitors’ gallery just above the trading floor.

Immediately, the group began throwing handfuls of one-dollar bills over the railing, laughing the entire time. (The exact number of bills is a matter of dispute; Hoffman later wrote that it was three hundred, while others said no more than forty were thrown.) A number of the people on the floor scurried and pushed each other out of the way to get the bills. The chaos itself was the conceptual art that Hoffman had envisioned—the greed of people on Wall Street was so ingrained that they would act like desperate kids in a playground even for an extra dollar or two.

The bills barely had time to land on the ground before guards began removing the group from the building. The stunt had a poetry to it that implied contempt for the selfish side of capitalism, and the news coverage of the morning made Abbie Hoffman a celebrity overnight. (A few months later, the stock exchange installed bulletproof glass panels around the visitors’ gallery, as well as a metal grillwork ceiling. A spokesman told the New York Times that this was for “reasons of security.”)

Once outside, Hoffman, Fouratt, and the other activists held hands and chanted, “Free! Free!” Hoffman then lit the edge of a five-dollar bill on fire, but a guy in a suit grabbed it from him, stamped on it, and said: “You’re disgusting.” (A few months earlier, the Diggers had burned money at a demonstration outside of the East Village Other’s offices, but got far less attention than Hoffman and his crew did at the stock exchange.)

Hoffman was now one of the most visible figures in the theoretically leaderless hip community of New York. He was arrested and beaten at many protests, but at the same time developed a relationship with Captain Joseph Fink of the Ninth Precinct that covered the Lower East Side. (Like many of Hoffman’s political adversaries, Fink was Jewish, and Hoffman tried to connect with him on that basis.)

Hoffman showed up as a speaker at New York events as diverse as a seminar at the radical Catholic Worker and a meeting at the Hudson Institute, the think tank run by military-industrial-complex theoretician Herman Kahn.(One of Kahn’s colleagues told Hoffman, sotto voce, “We’re glad you brought your girlfriends. They are a lot prettier than ours.”)

Hoffman strove to synthesize the various aspects of the left and counterculture. Although his own personal dramas would interfere with his legacy, some of the “words of wisdom” he wrote in his first book stand up pretty well as a document of the attitudes of those few who tried to fuse together hippies and “revolutionary” politics.

“The first line of defense is to turn on the enemy.” (I’m pretty sure Abbie meant “turn on” in the sense of offering an adversary a joint, or at least a loving insight.) And later he instructed: “When you meet a brother, never preach to him” (just exchange info), and, “Never forget that ours is the battle against a machine not against people.” He also addressed his and others’ commitment to nonviolence: “Although I admire the revolutionary art of the Black Panthers, I feel guns alone will never change this System. You don’t use a gun on an IBM computer. You pull the plug out.”

* * *

On February 22, 1967, the Off-Broadway satire MacBird! opened at the Village Gate. The Realist’s Paul Krassner invested $3,000 in it, and I found out about the play in his publication. It was written by Barbara Garson, a Berkeley playwright and activist. I was mesmerized by the savage wit with which she adapted the plot of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to modern American politics. It starred the then-unknown Stacy Keach as the Johnson-like title character, Rue McClanahan as Lady MacBird, and William Devane as Robert Ken O’Dunc, obviously based on Robert Kennedy. In tune with the resentment (some of it irrational) that had developed for President Johnson in the counterculture, the harsh satire suggested that the Texan had been responsible for President Kennedy’s murder. In real life, President Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, had made beautifying the highways her personal project. In the play, Lady MacBird had an exaggerated obsession with flowers related to her guilt, riffing on the “out, out damn spot” moment that Lady Macbeth has in Shakespeare’s original work. The New York Times panned its “crackpot consensus,” and the New Yorker reviewer Edith Oliver wrote, “The cruelty and vulgarity are almost beyond description.” Even more remarkably, the magazine refused to run an ad for the play. Although I didn’t believe that Johnson killed Kennedy, I did believe he killed a lot of the spirit that Kennedy had inspired in America. And I knew how to differentiate between docudrama and satire. Once again, the “establishment world” and our “real world” were two very different places.

In the spring of 1967, the Realist reached its peak connection to the American zeitgeist. In what would be both Krassner’s most famous and most infamous piece, he wrote a cover story called “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book.” Historian William Manchester had been asked by Jacqueline Kennedy to write a book about her husband’s assassination, but when he completed the manuscript, The Death of a President, the first lady took legal action, successfully forcing Manchester to remove portions of his account. Krassner’s satirical imagination of those portions was written in a pitch-perfect replica of Manchester’s style and stated that Jackie Kennedy had seen Lyndon Johnson literally fucking the fatal wound in John Kennedy’s head. Krassner, who had a keen interest in JFK assassination conspiracy theories, was on one hand creating a metaphor for the worst fears about the killing, while at the same time testing the credulity of his readers, some of whom initially took the satire literally. This was decades before “fake news” became a phenomenon.

The very same issue had a cartoon by former Mad magazine artist Wally Wood that depicted Disney characters having an orgy. Krassner heard that Disney executives had considered a lawsuit to protect their legendary intellectual property, but decided against it when they realized that the Realist had virtually no financial assets and that any lawsuit would give more publicity to what they considered to be a repulsive image.

Around the same time, Timothy Leary announced the formation of his new religion, the League for Spiritual Discovery, at a press conference at the Village Theatre. Some of the reporters in attendance were scared to drink the coffee on the buffet table because they worried it might be dosed with LSD. Leary told a reporter for Look, “Someday, instead of asking what book you are reading—they’ll ask what level of consciousness you’re at.” Krassner interrupted with, “But the same way they lie about what they are reading, they’ll fake levels of consciousness too.”

Leary was at his most unfiltered, asserting that children as young as seven or eight could safely take LSD. He also announced that three consciousness-raising “plays” were being produced, and would soon tour: The Death of the Mind, The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and The Illumination of the Buddha.

As if Leary didn’t have enough pressure on him from various branches of the government and from attacks on his penchant for publicity from the Diggers, the Progressive Labor Party’s weekly newspaper Challenge asserted that he was actually working for the government. As “evidence,” the magazine wrote that by urging young people to detach from “games,” including antiwar activities, Leary played into the hands of the establishment. They found it sinister that the prowar Henry and Clare Luce had supposedly contributed to Leary’s defense fund and that Life had recently published a pro-LSD story.

Despite the dizzying array of left-wing antiwar factions, there was still a group of Lower East Side freaks who felt that no one represented the precise sensibilities of the neighborhood, so they formed Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers in 1967. Their name was taken from the LeRoi Jones poem, and they were described as “a street gang with an analysis,” claiming to be the Lower East Side chapter of SDS. (Todd Gitlin points out that “no application for an SDS charter was ever refused.”) For their first public action, the Motherfuckers carried garbage from the Lower East Side and dumped it into the fountain in front of the recently opened Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center.

 

Boston and Canada

Notwithstanding my myopic view that focused predominantly on New York City and the Bay Area, there were compatible communities developing in dozens of other places in the Western world by 1967.

Boston had the largest college population in the country. MIT was home to lefty icon Noam Chomsky, and Harvard had a lively SDS chapter, and had been where Leary and Alpert emerged as LSD advocates. Boston University, Brandeis, Radcliffe, Tufts, and Emerson were also among the many colleges based in the Boston area.

WBCN, which would become one of the most political and influential FM stations, did not start the “underground rock” format until March 1968, but in 1967, Boston hippies were able to watch a TV show chronicling hip culture called What’s Happening Mr. Silver? hosted by a twenty-two-year-old British transplant named David Silver, whose day job was teaching English literature at Tufts. Silver regularly covered Boston love-ins and peace protests and was host to a who’s who of the counterculture, including Abbie Hoffman and Julius Lester. He also had a surprisingly civil conversation/debate with conservative William F. Buckley Jr., who was disarmed by Silver’s unpretentious decency.

In Montreal, a lot of countercultural activity was centered around a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller at the USA Pavilion at Montreal’s Expo 67. (In 2017 it is an environmental museum called the Montreal Biosphere.)

Like Marshall McLuhan, Fuller was a visionary intellectual from another time who was embraced by younger kindred spirits in the counterculture of the sixties. He was seventy-two years old in 1967, but was brimming with futuristic visions, which he expressed with machine-gun verbal intensity.

Fuller, a native of Massachusetts who mostly grew up in Maine and would later be considered one of America’s greatest intellectuals, was a Harvard dropout who had an epiphany in his early thirties following the failure of his business, the death of his young daughter, and a descent into alcoholism. While contemplating suicide, he had a vision in which he felt himself suspended several feet from the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”

Not long thereafter, Fuller invented the geodesic dome structure for which he became famous. A passionate environmentalist who coined the phrase “spaceship earth,” Fuller was one of the first public figures to focus attention on the perils of dependence on fossil fuels. As early as the 1960s, he believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power. He hoped for an age of “omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity.”

In February 1967, there was a counterculture conference at the University of Toronto called Perception 67 which featured appearances by the Fugs, Paul Krassner, Richard Alpert, and hip fashion designer Tiger Morse. (Leary had been invited, but the Canadian government would not allow him entry into the country.)

Alpert and Dr. Humphry Osmond, a Candian psychedelic peer of Oscar Janiger, debated with antidrug crusaders including philosopher Charles Hanly, who called LSD “an opiate for the mentally lame, intellectually halt, and morally blind.” Alpert countered, “If I have to wind up psychotic to break the status quo and get to a meaningful future, I’m ready.”

On another panel, Allen Ginsberg said that LSD provided the same high as having sex, solitude, or mountain climbing, but was more reliable than any of these activities.

The last night featured Paul Krassner performing a monologue, poetry by Ginsberg, a musical set by the Fugs, and ended with remarks by Marshall McLuhan, who was wearing a prismatic disc on his forehead.

 

London

In July 1967, at the Roundhouse in London, there was a two-week conference portentously titled the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation. Originally conceived by therapists known as “antipsychiatrists,” such as R.D. Laing, to discuss issues like treatment of schizophrenia, the mission of the congress transformed into “a unique gathering to demystify violence in all its forms,” and became London’s major intellectual countercultural conclave of the decade.

Most of the speakers were the big radical academic brains of the Western world at the time. Among them were my friend Joel’s uncle Paul Goodman, then fifty-five years old, and Herbert Marcuse, almost seventy, who was a German Socialist and political theorist who had emigrated to the US. Marcuse was the ideological idol of many radicals around the world, including Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis. (In Revolution for the Hell of It, Hoffman wrote that Marcuse smoked hash at the conference, but it is possible this was wishful thinking.)

The organizers were old-school intellectual radicals. Paul Goodman had developed a disdainful attitude toward much of the youth culture, and he lamented the hippies’ apparent lack of respect for expertise, criticizing what he perceived as an obsession with “inner” experiences. In his 1970 book New Reformation, Goodman wrote, “I knew that I could not get through to them. I had imagined that the worldwide student protest had to do with changing political and moral institutions, to which I was sympathetic, but I now saw that we had to deal with a religious crisis of the magnitude of the Reformation in the 1500s.”

Other old lefties worried that a stoner departure from rational thought could make the movement susceptible to dark social forces. British playwright Arnold Wesker, one of the founders of the Roundhouse and an antinuclear activist, had referred to hippies as “pretty little fascists.”

To many in the counterculture, these criticisms were akin to those of folk music purists who had freaked out when Bob Dylan went electric. San Francisco Chronicle critic Ralph J. Gleason, who would become one of the founders of Rolling Stone, mocked many in the old left as “prisoners of logic.”

There would be no rock and roll, tabs of acid, or nudity at the convention, but in a nod to the burgeoning youth culture, a panel with Emmett Grogan, Stokely Carmichael, and Allen Ginsberg took place on the last day.

Grogan wore a work shirt, corduroy pants, and a necklace of wooden beads. He gave a fiery oration that ended with the statement, “History will judge the movement not according to the swine we have removed or imprisoned but according to whether the revolution has succeeded in returning the power to the people.” Grogan was rewarded with a standing ovation, after which he revealed that the words had been an English translation of a speech Adolf Hitler had given to the Reichstag in 1937. The point was to sensitize the radical audience to the moral emptiness of much of what passed for revolutionary rhetoric.

Carmichael had stepped down as leader of SNCC but remained affiliated with the organization, and had recently been named honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party. He was dressed in a gold suit and wore dark glasses. Immediately prior to the panel, Ginsberg had introduced Carmichael to Grogan, but the Digger had just shot some heroin, which was perhaps why he refused to shake the civil rights leader’s hand. Carmichael was infuriated at the slight as he walked onto the stage, but he had long before learned how to channel hurt feelings into effective public speaking.

He spoke so powerfully that Ginsberg admiringly called him “a young shaman.” Carmichael referred to urban riots as “rebellions or guerrilla warfare,” and rhetorically aligned America’s racial struggles with movements by people of color in Africa and other parts of the third world. He lamented the recent death of Che Guevara and insisted, “[R]evolutionaries of the world [must] redouble their decision to fight on to the final defeat of imperialism.”

Carmichael ended his remarks by expressing contempt for the “flower power” of young white hippies. This ephemeral “tactic,” he felt, had absolutely no effect on reducing violence against black people nor in stopping the war in Vietnam. The audience of intellectuals gave him a standing ovation. A lot of the old left already believed that hippies were a self-indulgent movement of “haves” who had far too little compassion for the “have-nots.”

Ginsberg had just spent several weeks in Rapallo, Italy, with the eighty-two-year-old Ezra Pound, who at that point in his life was in such a state of melancholia that he often went weeks without uttering a word. Even with such an idol, Ginsberg was an evangelist for youth culture. He played the Sgt. Pepper’s album, Donovan’s Sunshine Superman, and Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, and before Ginsberg left, Pound spoke to and embraced him.

The day before the congress commenced, Ginsberg had done a Hare Krishna chant at a rally to legalize marijuana in London’s Hyde Park attended by five thousand British heads. Early on during the congress, Allen sang a musical melody he had written to an English translation by Shunryu Suzuki of the Prajnaparamita Sutra.

Grogan, who was a withering critic of most hip celebrities, made an exception for Ginsberg, calling him “the kind of good person that is hard to find.” For additional moral support, Ginsberg brought beatnik icon William Burroughs, author of the novel Naked Lunch. The Beatles had included Burroughs in their montage on the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover. He didn’t speak at the conference but stood in the back, rarely removing his black raincoat and hat.

The closing-day panel with Grogan and Carmichael was to be Ginsberg’s last chance to communicate with this particular gathering of intellectuals, and he had promised not to chant. He began by respectfully challenging Carmichael’s depiction of hippies. “The best experience I have had has been with the younger people in America, and some few of my own generation who have had to confront the mass hallucination, or style of consciousness, or mode of consciousness, into which we were born, and had some kind of mental breakthrough, which clarified not only the nature of our own identity, but also the nature of others’ identities, as being the same as our own.”

Younger people! That was the key energy of the moment. Beats like Allen, left-wingers, and black nationalists had stood against both racism and materialism in decades past, but things were different now because of this vast new generation. Unlike older radical intellectuals at the congress, Allen was embracing them. He seemed to be saying that the same dominant culture that oppressed black people had stifled many young whites. The room was silent. Carmichael peered at him through his dark glasses. What possible connection was there between the “inner” worlds supposedly opened up by LSD that Ginsberg was so enraptured by and the moral nightmare of racism and other forms of oppression? Ginsberg continued, “That is not, necessarily, to preclude our taking detached action within the situation.”

Action! But Ginsberg was not referring to confrontations with police. “The most detached action that I have seen taken, within the situation, is the use of LSD by the younger people, for the purpose of demystifying their own consciousness and arriving at some sort of meat-universe where they are sitting with flowers, ourselves.” Earlier in the year, Ginsberg had said, “Flower power is the power of the earth itself.”

The poet acknowledged that attempts by the hippie culture were experimental thus far. “We have very small community groups, in San Francisco and in New York, beginning to leave the money-wheel, and also beginning to leave the hallucination-wheel of the media, beginning to form small cooperatives, tribal units, societies of their own.”

He turned to Carmichael and continued, “The reason the hippies have taken on these beads, appurtenances, music, of shamanistic groups, of ecstatic trance-state types, is because they are beginning to explore, for the first time, the universe of consciousness of other cultures beside their own.” Some clusters of hippies were even “beginning to move in on authority with those weapons which have been called ‘flower power,’ being euphemistic for a simple, calm, tranquil equilibrium, nonviolent, as far as possible, as far as the self can be controlled, so that it can relate to other selves in disguise, including the police.”

Including the police! Carmichael had sarcastically said he would have more respect for flowers if they’d had any effect on the Newark police who had, in recent days, brutally quashed the riots in their city. This was exactly the sort of language that drove him crazy about the hippies.

“Mr. Ginsberg, I don’t know much about the hippie movement, but I would like to beg to differ with you,” said Carmichael. “I think the reason most of them are hippies today is because they are confused little kids who have run away from their home and who will return to their culture within a year or two.”

Ginsberg responded: “There’s no culture to return to.”

To which Carmichael fired back indignantly, “Before I find my individual self, I must find my group culture.”

The poet countered with a rueful smile. “We don’t have a viable group culture either, so we’re in the same boat, in that sense.”

Carmichael nodded respectfully but had another point to make. Nothing the hippies had done had reduced white-on-black violence.

Ginsberg was quick to answer: “Nothing anyone has done, not hippies nor the Black Power movement, has reduced such violence so far.” This quiet point seemed consistent with Grogan’s earlier dramatic put-on. The word “revolution” had an intoxicating sound, and angry tones could temporarily be cathartic, but what did it really mean if people’s day-to-day lives became worse in their wake?

The establishment was not charmed by the earnestness of the exchange. British authorities were terrified that American race riots would spread to black sections of the UK such as Brixton and Notting Hill. As things turned out, black people in Britain did not riot that summer, but when tapes of Carmichael’s remarks were made public the next month, he was banned from reentering the country.

There were a couple of other significant moments that the congress is remembered for. On the last day, six British women jumped onto the stage at the Roundhouse and bitterly complained about the inherent sexism of the meetings. Out of twenty-two speakers, only two were female and even they had been placed in secondary sessions. More effective struggles by women of the left to avoid such absurd disparities were soon to come.

Ginsberg’s favorite speaker was British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who conducted a seminar called “Ecological Destruction by Technology.” Bateson introduced his theory of the effect of pollution on increasing the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere. Shortly thereafter, Ginsberg told an interviewer, “You keep the heat up and the fog gathers up and pretty soon you have a cloud over the sky and you have the greenhouse effect and the earth will heat up and melt the poles and the poles will melt and drown cities.” This was one of the first times the concept of “global warming” was discussed outside of scientific circles.

Despite all of the brainpower assembled at the congress, it did not encompass everything that was going on in the minds of the counterculture. There was another note in the mystic chord of 1967. The very next month, the Beatles made front-page news by meeting with a man who had very different ideas about how enlightened human beings should use their minds.