The caged bird sings with a fearful trill,
of things unknown, but longed for still,
and his tune is heard on the distant hill,
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
Maya Angelou, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”
No one could have predicted the paradoxes, ironies, explosions, and potentials of the last year of the 1960s. For individual young people like Greg Laurie, as well as for many in the nation as a whole, the world felt like a ball of confusion.
At the beginning of the 1960s, the golden young president had looked ahead with great hope. In speeches before a joint session of Congress and at Rice University, President Kennedy called on the United States to commit itself to achieving the goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Kennedy believed that space itself could be a “theater of peace” rather than a force for ill, but only if the US achieved preeminence in the space race with the Soviet Union.1
John Kennedy never got to see his Americans on the moon. By 1969 both he and his brother Robert were gone, shot down by assassins. The decade that had started with high hopes for cosmic peace and exploration was ending in violence, war, and social unrest.
Still, on July 20, 1969, there was one moment that brought the entire nation together, almost like those sunnier days of the 1950s, around the television set. Six hundred million people tuned in to watch, in living color, as Americans landed on the moon.
First, astronaut Neil Armstrong slowly descended the space ladder from his silver rocket ship. He planted his bulky, booted feet on the powdery surface of the moon.
Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind was followed about twenty minutes later by his fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s stroll on the lunar surface. (Buzz also became the first human to urinate while on the moon, but that’s another story.) By now Kennedy’s nemesis, that scowly Richard Nixon, was president. He called from the White House to congratulate the astronauts. Viewers were absolutely boondoggled, not just by the technology of the lunar landing itself but by the fact that the president of the United States could somehow chat on the phone with two guys hanging out 239,000 miles away.
Neil Armstrong’s words in the midst of his historic moment are well-known. Buzz Aldrin’s thoughts about his walk on the moon are both less familiar and more poignant. The first phrase that came to his mind, he said later, was “magnificent desolation.” He thought about the “magnificence of human beings . . . Planet Earth, maturing the technologies, imagination and courage to . . . dream about being on the Moon, and then . . . carrying out that dream—achieving that is a magnificent testimony to humanity.
“But it is also desolate,” Aldrin continued. “There is no place on earth as desolate as what I was viewing in those first moments on the Lunar Surface. . . . I realized what I was looking at, towards the horizon in every direction, had not changed in hundreds, thousands of years . . . no atmosphere, black sky.
“Cold. Colder than anyone could experience on Earth. . . . No sign of life whatsoever. . . . More desolate than any place on Earth.”2
In some ways, Aldrin’s “magnificent desolation” could serve as a tagline for the decade.
Magnificence, ’60s-style, included the best and the brightest scientists achieving the extraordinary goal of President Kennedy’s glorious dream for Americans to arrive on the moon. There was also the magnificence of the persevering courage of the civil rights movement, and the high hopes of the hippies and others who were searching for peace, love, and understanding. Many of the younger generation earnestly rejected the staid material values of their parents’ era, seeking brighter colors of community, meaning, creativity, and new horizons.
But there was desolation as well. At the beginning of the decade, the best and brightest minds in political leadership had pursued a policy that led to tens of thousands of young American men being brutally killed in a faraway war. Those who made it home were spit on in the streets. Many hippies—those “gentle people” with flowers in their hair—who had pursued a brightly colored revolution of freedom, found themselves as confined as their parents, trapped in addictions, destructive relationships, discord, and disappointment. The sweet life of the commune, contentedly nibbling brown rice, had become dumpster diving for half-eaten trash on dirty streets. The “harmony and understanding” and “mystic crystal revelation” of the Age of Aquarius turned out to be a fleeting experience, not an ongoing and dependable reality.
For many, the ’60s were a wild ride. Some might call it magnificent. But most didn’t end up at the destination they had hoped for. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll could only roll so far, and sometimes the ride ended at a pretty desolate place.
In mid-August 1969, half a million young people gathered at a New York dairy farm for what many consider the last great hoorah of the hippie movement: Woodstock. Thirty-two great bands. Rain. Mud. Drugs. Peaceful youth getting “back to the garden.” It would become a cultural touchstone, a time of stardust, golden magic that flickered for four days in the rain and then faded away.
Kurt Vonnegut, author of 1969’s blockbuster novel Slaughterhouse Five and hero of the antiwar movement, later said of Woodstock on a PBS panel discussion, “I think it represents a very primitive need in all of us. . . . At our peril we do without a tribe, without a support system. The nuclear family is not a support system. It’s hideously vulnerable. And so we again and again join gangs.”3
Vonnegut’s interviewer called Woodstock “an extended family,” a community, and a support system.4
Another member of the PBS panel noted the dark side to all this “very thin idea of community.” The legitimate hunger for family had led some to a hideous counterfeit. “Just a few days before Woodstock, it’s worth remembering ‘the family’ that murdered Sharon Tate, and that Charlie Manson was a version of what could come out of this kind of pseudo-tribalism in a drug-addled atmosphere.” 5
He was referring to the gruesome headlines that had splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the whole country the week before Woodstock. Charles Manson, the ex-con drifter who had built his commune of lost young women, the Manson “Family,” commissioned two nights of murder in Los Angeles. A group of his followers had already killed and dismembered several hangers-on unlucky enough to cross their path. And on August 9, 1969, they slaughtered actress Sharon Tate and four of her friends. The next night they butchered a middle-aged couple in their LA home.
Manson saw an apocalyptic war coming between the races. He called it “Helter Skelter,” and his disciples scrawled that phrase on a wall in their victims’ blood. Manson had fused everything bad about the times and the darkness in his own heart into a bloody tide of mayhem. His followers were fresh-faced teenaged girls who’d run away from home to the communal security of Charlie’s family. They slept with Charlie, cooked for Charlie, carved Xs on their foreheads for Charlie, and killed for Charlie. They giggled in the courtroom during their eventual trial.
Unlike Woodstock, the Manson Family represented the darkest extreme of a few in the hippie movement.
Then, though it was billed by some as a West Coast Woodstock, the Altamont Speedway music festival on December 6, 1969, became an icon for the dark side of the countercultural movement. Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and the Grateful Dead were on the lineup; the Rolling Stones were to take the stage for the finale.
But the evening began to deteriorate. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that the Hells Angels, who’d been hired as security for $500 worth of beer, were getting more violent with every beer they downed. Feeling the bad vibe, the Dead declined to play.
The crowd got violent too. Fights broke out. One performer, who was six months pregnant, was hit in the head by a beer bottle that fractured her skull. The Hells Angels were pushing people back from the stage with sawed-off pool cues and motorcycle chains. Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane was punched in the head and knocked unconscious.
By the time Mick Jagger finally took the stage, he’d already been hit in the head by an attendee. During the Stones’ third song, “Sympathy for the Devil,” an eighteen-year-old fan named Meredith Hunter tried to get on stage. He was repelled by security. High on methamphetamines, he left and returned later in the set with a gun, which he pulled from his jacket. One of the Hells Angels pulled a knife from his belt and stabbed Hunter repeatedly. (A jury later ruled that the Angel acted in self-defense.) The teenager died on the ground in front of the stage.
After it was all over, there was only the wreckage. Trash, human waste, dozens of people injured, extensive property damage, and lots of stolen cars and drugs. Three other people besides Meredith Hunter died that night. Two were victims of a hit-and-run accident, and one drowned in an irrigation canal near the venue.
Later—much later—the New Yorker concluded that Altamont ended a utopian dream, “the idea that, left to their own inclinations and stripped of the trappings of the wider social order, the young people of the new generation will somehow spontaneously create a higher, gentler, more loving grassroots order. What died at Altamont is [that] . . . dream itself.”6
That last big concert of the ’60s became a symbol of all that had gone dark in a decade that had promised such bright colors. The flower power, the love beads, the innocence of psychedelic dreams . . . it all ended in shades of gray, with sympathy for the devil, knives and guns and violence. To this day, the unforgettable film footage shot that night—the snuffing of a human being in the Gimme Shelter documentary—looks a lot like people making war, not love.
“They said Altamont was the end of an era,” Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick said later, “which more or less is true. It coincided with the way things rise and fall. Everything does that. Look at the Roman Empire. Sometimes it takes two years, sometimes it takes 500. Everything is born, rises and then dies.”7
To cap off Grace Slick’s perspective, it’s worth quoting the Woodstock Preservation Alliance’s analysis of the end of the era:
The year preceding [Woodstock] had been of one of the most violent in post-World War II history. The long struggle for African-American civil rights had been forestalled following the assassination of its most articulate leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. His murder had provoked rioting and arson in most of the nation’s largest cities. . . . Protests against American involvement in Vietnam had drawn thousands of people into the streets, most notably in Chicago the previous summer at the Democratic National Convention. . . . A growing perception among women of their own lack of social and economic equality prompted the emergence of a new wave of feminism . . . Women’s Liberation. College campuses were convulsed with sit-ins opposing the Vietnam War. . . . During the month before the Festival a routine police raid on a gay bar in Greenwich Village touched off the Stonewall riots, which itself marked the birth of the Gay and Lesbian Liberation movement.
All of these crises and disruptions to the status quo produced a feeling among many Americans, and particularly the youth, that the country was coming unraveled. Among the more radical segment of political and cultural activists on the left there was an increasing sense that the next American revolution might be at hand.8
Interesting: “The next American revolution might be at hand”?
And so it was.