CHAPTER 9

death of hippie

The Summer of Love Curdles

Most of the symbols of hippie life—long hair, bright colors, psychedelic posters, hip language (far out, crib, bummer, uptight, groovy, balling)—would all be drained of meaning over the next couple of years.

On the summer solstice, June 21, there was a free concert on Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park with the Big Brother, Quicksilver, the Charlatans, and the Grateful Dead (using the sound equipment “borrowed” from the Monterey Festival). The idea was to welcome the Summer of Love, but to many in the community it was an elegy.

“The Haight-Ashbury was a gigantic media magnet, and now we would drown in the media flood. It would never be the same,” lamented Allen Cohen. It could take an hour for a car to go the six blocks on Haight Street between Masonic and Stanyan. Rock Scully complained of rising prices: “We’ve been driven out of our community. Starting in July, it became all drug dealers. Coffee shops charging fifty cents for a cup of coffee!”

It was not only the sheer quantity of wide-eyed teenagers that strained the infrastructure of the neighborhood, it was also the juxtaposition of the most naive and vulnerable kids with the lowest types of predators.

The open sexuality in hippie culture was exploited by a predictable number of macho jerks. Some guys crudely expected hippie chicks to immediately have sex with them. Other guys creepily deployed cosmic language as a tool of seduction.

A widely quoted mimeographed circular handed out by the Diggers’ Communications Company described a darker trend:

 

Pretty little sixteen-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about and gets picked up by a seventeen-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again and again, then feeds her 3,000 mikes and raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gangbang since the night before last. The politics of ethics and ecstasy. Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street.

 

George and Pattie Harrison flew to San Francisco in August 1967 to check out Haight-Ashbury. He was dressed in psychedelic pants and moccasins, and wore heart-shaped sunglasses. The neighborhood had changed enormously in the few months since McCartney had visited. Garbage littered the streets. Harrison was depressed by “horrible spotty dropout kids on drugs.” A couple of longhairs came up to him in his car and said, “You’re our leader.” Harrison was appalled: “No, you’re wrong.” He held up a picture of Paramahansa Yogananada as he drove off. Paul McCartney came to the same conclusion on his second visit to Haight-Ashbury, quipping, “I can’t see this lasting because the media are going to get here and pretty soon [Haight Street] will turn into Rip-Off Street.”

On August 3, John Kent “Shob” Carter, a twenty-five-year-old flute player and dope dealer, was found after having been stabbed to death by a twenty-three-year-old client named Eric Frank Dahlstrom, described by a Communications Company flyer as a “longhaired Marin Country daredevil bike freak with symptoms of what an untrained man might call a psychopathic personality.” In his confession, Dahlstrom said it was because Shob had sold him inferior-quality acid.

On August 15, the Recreation and Park Commission banned amplified music from San Francisco parks, which ended one of the primary ways in which the community had gathered over the last few years.

As most of the early idealistic hippies left the neighborhood, the ultimate villain arrived. Charles Manson’s mother was in and out of jail for robbery when he was a child. He was sent to foster homes, and was frequently arrested, eventually serving several years in McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary for forging checks. In jail, Manson read a handbook on Scientology and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. He was released at the age thirty-two, in March 1967.

Manson gravitated to Haight-Ashbury, saw the Dead at the Avalon Ballroom, and took LSD. He established himself as a self-styled guru, mixing a hodgepodge of occult doctrines with his own apocalyptic notions. He soon attracted a handful of followers, most of them female, who called themselves the Manson Family. The next year they would move to Southern California, and in October 1969, Manson and several followers were arrested and later convicted for the murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others.

Near the end of September, an “invitation” was given out in Haight-Ashbury:

 

FUNERAL NOTICE

HIPPIE

In the Haight-Ashbury District of this city, Hippie, devoted
son of Mass Media

Friends are invited to attend services beginning at sunrise,
October 6, 1967 at Buena Vista Park

 

A Communications Company handout elaborated:

 

Once upon a time, a man put on beads and became a
hippie—Today the hippie takes off his beads and becomes
a man—a freeman! Leaving behind the final remains
of “Hippie”—the devoted son of mass media and the
boundaries are down.

San Francisco is free! Now free

The truth is OUT, OUT, OUT!

 

The date of the ceremony was October 6, 1967, exactly one year after LSD had been made illegal in California. Organized by the Diggers, a couple hundred people marched through San Francisco with a mock coffin filled with beads, incense, and flowers. At the end it was burned while the “mourners” did “Indian” dances. The Psychedelic Store stayed open all night, giving everything away while Sgt. Pepper’s played over and over again in the background.

Another Digger communiqué read:

 

Media created the hippie with your hungry consent. Be somebody. Careers are to be had for the enterprising hippie. The media cast nets, create bags for the identity-hungry to climb in. Your face on TV, your style immortalized without soul in the captions of the Chronicle. NBC says you exist, ergo I am. Narcissism, plebian vanity . . . Exorcize Haight-Ashbury . . . You are free, we are free. Believe only your own incarnate spirit . . . Do not be bought by a picture, a phrase. Do not be captured in words.

 

Some of the marchers explained that the idea was to bury the “term” hippie and suggested that those imbued with the vibe would now call themselves “free men,” a suggestion that quickly disappeared without a trace. However, they were right about the word “hippie.” It was toast. If we had to call ourselves something, it was “freaks,” which was a lot harder for Madison Avenue to co-opt.

On October 2, eleven people were busted for smoking pot at the Dead’s house at 710 Ashbury, including Pigpen, Bob Weir, Scully, and Danny Rifkin. They pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and paid fines, but after that the members of the band soon left the city for Marin County. Soon the Psychedelic Shop closed and put a sign in its window saying, Nebraska Needs You More.

The Oracle printed a letter suggesting that the original Haight dwellers move to Louisville: “The scene there began to grow . . . but we need more turned-on real people.” The missive added that Louisville had Victorian houses with low rents.

On December 21, Owsley was arrested for conspiracy to illegally manufacture controlled drugs. Although he was released on bail, he was out of business. The Oracle published its last issue in February 1968.

 

New York and London

The Lower East Side also struggled under the burdens of a greater population of inexperienced kids, an influx of criminals, and an increase in police hostility. In the summer there was a “Community Breast” concert at the Village Theatre featuring Judy Collins, Richie Havens, Tiny Tim, Paul Krassner, and Hugh Romney, intended to raise money to gather content for a Digger-style free store. It soon opened at 264 East 10th Street, and in a brief burst of optimism, Paul Goodman volunteered to stack clothes.

The concept failed almost immediately. Local hippie stores that did charge money plundered free stuff and then sold it. Meth heads started hanging out and there were numerous fights and muggings. When it first opened, the free store had a sign out front that said, Love. By the fall, it had been replaced by one that said, Hate.

Meanwhile, Ed Sanders had asked a charismatic neighborhood hippie named Groovy to live in the back of the Peace Eye Bookstore. Groovy gave advice to young newcomers to the Lower East Side in need of help, and he offered karate lessons in the garden behind the store. At some point over the summer, they halted the lessons when the landlord, alarmed by weird-looking visitors learning martial arts, threatened to call the cops. Groovy and his girlfriend Linda moved out and found a pad a few blocks away. On October 7, both were murdered—someone had smashed their heads with a brick. A neighbor named Donald Ramsey, a self-described Yoruba priest, was arrested.

In his memoir Fug You, Sanders mourned, “In a better world, Groovy Hutchinson, spreader of goodwill, warder off of burns and bad acid, and finder of sleeping space for the partisans of love, might have gotten a Great Society job to help locate housing or temporary communes in the tenements.”

The degradation of hippie symbols happened in Europe at the same time. Music producer Joe Boyd wrote, “The agape spirit of ’67 evaporated in the heat of ugly drugs, violence, commercialism, and police pressure. In Amsterdam, people began stealing and repainting the white bicycles.”

 

Rationalist Backlash

The decline of Haight-Ashbury and respect for hippies could not come quickly enough for those who had been appalled by the whole thing. It was no surprise to many of us that political and cultural conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Billy Graham demonized the hippie idea, but many liberal grown-ups were similarly contemptuous. They were not in the same moral sinkhole as the Blue Meanies, who cynically pursued the war in Vietnam, and for the most part were people of goodwill. Some were brilliant. Some were genuine altruists. They just didn’t get it.

One was Nicholas von Hoffman, a political progressive who wrote for the Washington Post and had worked for radical organizer Saul Alinsky. Von Hoffman visited Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and published the book We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against, which seethed with indignation and contempt for the counterculture as he saw it. In the book, von Hoffman quoted a hippie girl: “I’ve decided that from now on I’m not going to sleep with any boy unless I know his name.” And he referenced a “guy at a commune with a religious smile on his face all the time, but he would never do the dishes.”

Von Hoffman did not merely cherry-pick hippie airheads—he was repelled by the whole idea:

 

At a time when Negroes are fighting to get off dope and forcing their way out of the ghetto to get the good things that hips dismiss as so much plastic, it’s hard for them to empathize with white kids who have all that Negroes want. It’s incomprehensible that these whites should build a new ghetto and lock themselves up in it to take dope. They are an affronting put-down to the blacks, making a virtue of every sin the black man has been accused of—dirt, shiftlessness, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, and irresponsibility.

 

Putting aside the intellectual dishonesty of conflating marijuana and heroin, von Hoffman (who is white) seemed to be suggesting that a critique of materialism was invalid if it came from people born into relative privilege. A determination to escape from poverty and prejudice did not necessarily translate into a value system that prized superficial material success above all else. Von Hoffman also implied that focus on an inner life somehow precluded liberal reform. It did not seem to occur to him that while the liberal policies that he (and many hippies) believed in might be necessary to help transform the darkest aspects of America, they were not sufficient.

Contempt for the Haight scene also permeated “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” an essay by Joan Didion, who was thirty-two years old in 1967 when it was first published in the Saturday Evening Post. (The piece was later included as the title chapter in an anthology of Didion’s brilliant short nonfiction.)

Like von Hoffman, Didion spent some time in Haight-Ashbury and interviewed anguished parents of runaways. “We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum.” She reported on some grotesque extremes, such as young mothers who gave their five-year-olds LSD. There were a few young women who were indeed that irresponsible. My former classmate Susan Solomon says she witnessed such behavior in some of the people who hung around with the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish, whose drummer she married. Sara Davidson, author of the sixties novel Loose Change, saw it at the Wheeler’s Ranch Commune. And yet there is no reason to believe that such irresponsibility was either typical or widely sanctioned in the counterculture. It is not fair to judge any community by a few of its most disgraceful members.

Didion concluded that the hippie movement was “quintessentially romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis . . . [which] lends itself to authoritarianism.” This proved to be as inaccurate a prediction as Timothy Leary’s suggestion that Times Square would be covered over by grass in fifty years.

One of the reasons that a number of older intellectuals were so put off by the hippie idea was that the secular religion for many in the 1950s was old-school Freudian psychoanalysis, the very worldview that Leary, Alpert, Janiger, and Kesey had all rebelled against.

LSD advocates were not the only people who were questioning the Freudian fundamentalism of the time. Gary Greenberg, a historian of psychiatry, says, “What became clear by the sixties was that analysis had become a force for conformity and adaptation.” This orthodoxy was rejected by younger therapists who defined themselves as humanists. Ground zero for the humanist movement was the Esalen Institute, which was started in 1962 in Central California by two Stanford graduates—Dick Price, who had been influenced by an Aldous Huxley lecture on “human potentialities,” and Michael Murphy, who had spent time at an ashram in India. By 1967, Esalen’s most well-known figure was Fritz Perls, who, along with Paul Goodman, created “gestalt therapy,” a post-Freudian approach to psychology that incorporated theories from Eastern traditions and had a much broader concept of what constituted mental health.

In the wake of these non-Freudian newcomers, and the spread of LSD, some conventional analysts became defensively hostile to the counterculture and formed theories that would be used by cultural conservatives in years to come. One such therapist was Dr. Ernest A. Dernberg, who was the psychiatric director of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, in addition to his duties at two San Francisco hospitals.

Free Clinic director David E. Smith published Love Needs Care in 1971. In the chapter “The Hippie Modality,” Smith described Dernberg’s conviction that the hippie lifestyle was a pathology. Appalled that Episcopal bishop James Pike compared hippies to early Christians, Dernberg complained to Smith that “hippies invested ‘love’ with a great many meanings but it signified less an intimacy and mutual respect between two people than an all-embracing feeling for man and nature. The feeling was probably an extension of the oceanic oneness associated with LSD and the toxic afterglow of hallucinogenic experience, a toxicity so strong that the young people sought to dispense with ego and see themselves as part of a psychologically undifferentiated organism, a group mind.”

This disdain for agape could apply to any form of mystical or spiritual experience, not solely the “afterglow” of LSD, and it is really a theological attack cloaked in the language of science. Dernberg may have been influenced by Freud’s book Civilization and Its Discontents, which views “oceanic consciousness” as inherently psychotic.

For some reason Dernberg had a particular animus toward Marshall McLuhan, as if the Canadian professor was personally responsible for the whole thing. Smith wrote, “Instead of thinking sequentially, some of them focused only on lights, color, and sound. This condition may have seemed promising to McLuhan and others who considered it an inner trip, but for most of Dr. Dernberg’s patients the circus never seemed to end.”

According to Smith, Dernberg detested hippie slang and rock concerts, and he also mocked interest in Eastern spirituality. As with many rationalist hippie critiques, it is hard to tell if Dernberg was dismissing all mystical philosophies (as Freud did) or merely those without kosher Western credentials. Even health food was suspect.

Smith and Dernberg did provide desperately needed medical services to people in Haight-Ashbury who had nowhere else to go. However, they had a concept of mental health that was suffocatingly narrow. As Gary Greenberg explained to me: “Like most psychiatrists in 1967, Dernberg would have been trained in the psychoanalytic theory that if you don’t resolve your Oedipal conflicts, your psychosexual life will be a disaster. Homosexuality, promiscuity, fetishes, plus the symbolic versions, rebellion, fecklessness, underachieving, overachieving, all could be traced to this supposed ‘failure.’ The paradigm case is Bruno Bettelheim’s denunciation of Vietnam War protesters as just so many neurotics who still wanted to kill their fathers and fuck their mothers.”

Even if the word “hippie” was dead, there was no way that millions of people who had briefly identified with it were going back to blindly obeying such “authority.”

 

Birth of Yippie

Indifferent to such reactionary currents, Abbie Hoffman, his wife Anita, and Paul Krassner took a vacation in Ramrod Key, Florida, where they rented a small house the week before Christmas. It was the same week that Stokely Carmichael came back to the United States. “We would have been there cheering for him had we been in New York,” Krassner wrote in the Realist. “For Stokely had said in Paris that ‘we don’t want peace in Vietnam. We want a Vietnamese victory over the US.’” (There was not a consensus about this attitude in the antiwar movement. Many of us did want peace.)

One night they planned to see Hoffman’s favorite movie, The Professionals, but it was playing too far away, and a storm was brewing, so instead they watched the Dino De Laurentiis version of the Bible. In a 2007 essay in the Los Angeles Times, Krassner wrote, “Driving home in the rain and wind, we debated the implications of Abraham being prepared to slay his son because God told him to. I dismissed this as blind obedience. Abbie praised it as revolutionary trust.”

After the film they all took LSD and got back to the house just as the storm reached full force and the acid was coming on. According to Krassner, “We watched Lyndon Johnson on a black-and-white TV set, although seen through psychedelicized eyes, Johnson’s face was purple and orange. His huge head was sculpted into Mount Rushmore. Johnson said something like, I am not going to be so pudding-headed as to stop our half of the war, and I told Abbie we had to protest against the war at Johnson’s convention the next summer in Chicago.”

Back in New York a week later, Krassner and the Hoffmans were joined by Jerry Rubin. They stayed up all night smoking Colombian weed on New Year’s Eve, talking about what to do at the convention. Krassner recalls, “I came up with ‘Yippie’ as a label for a phenomenon that already existed, an organic coalition of psychedelic hippies and political activists. In the process of cross-fertilization at antiwar demonstrations, we had come to share an awareness that there was a linear connection between putting kids in prison for smoking pot in this country and burning them to death with napalm on the other side of the planet.”

Jim Fouratt soon joined as a Yippie organizer. In a 2013 AlterNet essay, Krassner wrote:

 

Our fantasy was to counter the convention of death with a festival of life. While the Democrats would present politicians giving speeches at the convention center, we would present rock bands playing in the park. There would be booths with information about drugs and alternatives to the draft. Our mere presence would be our statement.

 

Hoffman and Rubin would continue to switch back and forth between being counterculture types and being radicals. In Black Panther leader Bobby Seale’s book Seize the Time, he quotes Jerry Rubin as saying that he and others had formed the Yippies because hippies had not “necessarily become political yet. ‘They mostly prefer to be stoned.’”

Given what happened the next summer in Chicago, perhaps being too stoned to go would not have been such a bad idea. By then the notes in the culture had changed enough that the chord of 1967 was indeed lost.