Wouldn’t you know, the library’s complete set of the San Francisco Oracle had been stolen and the alternative press database only went back to 1969, the year after the Oracle had folded. Ed gnashed his teeth. How could he do justice to the hippie Haight and not read its newspaper?
He Googled San Francisco Oracle and found mostly junk. But several pages in, he stumbled on a quirky site called BADASS.org, the Bay Area Digital Archive of the Sixties and Seventies. Its “About Us” tab said it was a labor of love built by Allen Cohen, founder of the Oracle, and Carol Covington, an editor who’d worked at both the Oracle and the Berkeley Barb. BADASS indexed those two papers, plus a number of other flash-in-the-pan hippie-alternative publications. The site displayed big, colorful facsimile pages of the Oracle. Ed couldn’t decide if they looked inspired or amateurish. He started with issue number one. By number three, he was kicking himself. He’d never written about the Oracle, and with all his scrambling for work, he’d let his column slide. His next deadline loomed.
THE SAN FRANCISCO ORACLE: SEX, DRUGS, AND THE UNDERGROUND PRESS
During World War II, the French Resistance mocked the German occupation with a clandestine publishing operation, the “underground press.” Twenty years later, the term was applied to American tabloids produced by and for restive young Baby Boomers. This new-wave underground press combined a love for rock music with left politics and drug-inspired spirituality. Among the nation’s estimated 200 underground newspapers, one of the most prominent was the San Francisco Oracle, published in the Haight-Ashbury from September 1966 through February 1968.
The Oracle was not the first underground newspaper. The Berkeley Barb, LA Free Press, Detroit’s Fifth Estate, and New York’s Fast Village Other all launched a year earlier. And the Oracle was certainly not the longest-lived—it published only 12 issues.
Nonetheless, the Oracle was the most influential example of the genre. At its height, it printed 120,000 copies that circulated from coast to coast. It also defined the formula that most other papers embraced: support for the civil rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam War, and a cultural outlook that embraced peace, love, marijuana, and rock music. Its spirituality combined the Buddhism of Allen Ginsberg with Timothy Leary’s vision of an LSD-infused Utopia. Its design revolved around strikingly elaborate illustrations produced in bold colors, a first on newsprint.
Rolling Stone founder Ian Wenner called the Oracle “inspiring.” The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia said it was “the heartbeat of the Haight-Ashbury.” Novelist Ken Kesey insisted it was “more trustworthy than the New York Times.” Anti-war activist Abbie Hoffman called it “our version of illuminated manuscripts.” And while playing the Fillmore one night, Beatle George Harrison distributed copies from the stage.
But the mainstream media held a different opinion. In 1967, the newspaper you are now reading sniffed that the Oracle was “a crude hodge-podge of drug-crazed nonsense over which someone spattered a dozen colors of paint.”
The San Francisco Oracle was founded by editor/publisher Allen Cohen and art director Michael Bowen. Cohen (1940-2004) was a New York poet who moved to the Haight in 1964 for its cheap rents and post-Beat bohemian scene. One night he dreamed he was flying around the world. Whenever he looked down—on Paris, Tokyo, San Francisco—he saw people reading a tabloid newspaper decorated with rainbows. He shared his dream with friends, who said, “Let’s do it!” In an interview shortly before his death, Cohen recalled, “The next thing I knew we were tacking flyers to phone polls up and down Haight Street asking for volunteers.”
Bowen (1937-2009) grew up in Beverly Hills, the son of a dentist and a free-spirited mother who openly divided her affections between her husband and a long-term lover, the mobster Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel, whom the young Michael called Uncle Benjie. Bowen became an accomplished painter and sculptor and felt drawn to Eastern religions. In the late 1950s, he moved to San Francisco, fell in with the Beats, and befriended Janis Joplin and Allen Cohen. His studio in the Haight became the Oracle office.
In October 1966, a month after the Oracle’s debut, Bowen and Cohen helped organize a rally in Golden Gate Park to protest the criminalization of LSD. Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company played for free before an unexpectedly large crowd of 3,000.
The organizers were thrilled, and announced a more ambitious rally to celebrate the Haight-Ashbury’s burgeoning counterculture. That event, the Human Be-In, took place on January 14, 1967. Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead performed. Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder read poetry. And coining the phrase that became a hippie rallying cry, Timothy Leary urged the throng to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” The Be-In attracted more than 10,000 people, and because of it, the media discovered hippies.
The Be-In also brought the Oracle dozens of new volunteers, who thought it was their paper. The staff quickly split into two factions. The new arrivals, political radicals, hoped to channel opposition to the Vietnam War into revolution against corporate capitalism. The founding hippies were more interested in getting high, dancing to the bands, creating art, and living on what they could scrounge at the Diggers’ Free Store. The radicals eventually became disgusted and decamped to Berkeley, where the Barb was more their style. That left the hippies, including Cohen and Bowen, in control of the Oracle.
It was not a newspaper in the usual sense. It published little actual news. Instead, it styled itself a manifesto-in-progress, touting higher consciousness through love, drugs, music, meditation, poetry, and hippie tribalism. The paper’s innovative design, wild illustrations, and bold use of color underscored its messianic vision. “The problem,” Cohen recalled, “was that higher consciousness didn’t interest advertisers.”
The Oracle carried a few full-page ads for new releases by the Airplane and other local bands, and some smaller ads for Haight-Ashbury boutiques. But advertising brought in only a fraction of the print bill, and so many copies were given away free that circulation brought in next to nothing.
The problem was hardly unique to the Oracle. Every underground newspaper was based on strong convictions and weak finances. “We thought rock ‘n roll would support us,” Cohen said, “but it didn’t. That left sex and drugs. The Barb chose sex—prostitution ads, hundreds of them. We chose drugs, and fortunately, the local dealers gave generously.”
Why would marijuana and acid dealers bankroll a newspaper? “They were our friends,” Cohen explained. “They had money and there was an ethos of sharing the wealth. They also wanted a sympathetic platform to organize support if they got arrested—and several did.”
But after the Summer of Love came the long, cold winter when the Haight-Ashbury was flooded with heroin and meth-amphetamine. The Diggers’ Free Store closed. Most of the bands moved to Marin. And Michael Bowen left for an extended trip to India. “In the spring of ‘68,” Cohen recalled, “I looked around and everyone was gone.”
Cohen moved to Berkeley and divided his time between preserving the Oracle (folio reprint 1991, CD-ROM 1996, New Human Be-In, London, 2002) and participating in cyber-culture (Digital Be-ins, 1992-2002). Bowen resumed his art career. He died in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2009.
By the mid-1970s, most underground newspapers had folded. They were replaced by today’s alternative weeklies. These tabloids, including the San Francisco Defender, owe less to the underground press than to New York’s Village Voice, founded in 1955 by novelist Norman Mailer and friends. Compared with the underground press, the Voice had a more realistic approach to advertising (though it also has a long history of sex ads). Less graphically flamboyant than the Oracle, the Voice was nevertheless editorially similar: progressive politics, a focus on the arts, and a libertarian streak—support for legalization of marijuana and sex work.
Like the underground press, the alternative weeklies see themselves as journalistic Davids hurling stones at mainstream media Goliaths. Now, with the Internet threatening all print journalism, some alternative weeklies appear to be in better shape than many major dailies, thanks to “hyper-local” content that readers can’t obtain elsewhere. Wherever they are, the founders of the Oracle are probably smiling.
Ed hit the Send button, reshelved some books, and tidied up his files. Not long ago, his editor might have objected to his quoting the Horn’s ancient snootiness about the Oracle, but with the paper reduced to a shadow of its former self, the few surviving editors were so overworked he doubted anyone would notice, let alone care.
Noon was approaching and Ed’s gut grumbled. From the fridge, leftover pasta called, yet he remained glued to his chair. Gene Simons was number 180 on Fortunes list of the 400 richest Americans, but he didn’t know his given name. It was clear that his mother had lived fast, died young, and left no trace. But the clips in her son’s file came only from mainstream papers. Ed returned to BADASS and typed Jackie Zarella.
Five hits. Two in the Oracle, two in the Barb, and a photo. The Oracle called her a pot dealer and noted her arrest for possession. The Barb said she’d become a speed dealer and had burned her supplier.
Ed clicked the thumbnail photo and his screen filled with a grainy black-and-white snapped at the Human Be-In. A wisp of a woman and a stocky long-haired man sat smiling in the foreground in front of a field full of hippies. The caption identified them as Jackie Zarella and Doug Connelly. Jackie was a petite innocent in a Minnie Mouse sweatshirt. Her arm snaked around her companion’s waist and her head rested on his shoulder.
Looking at Doug Connelly, Ed did a double-take. On his neck was a tattoo of a lightning bolt.
Ed recalled the gathering after Dave’s funeral. The skinny cancer sufferer with the shaved head and tattoo of a pine tree looked nothing like this husky long-hair. But he said his tattoo had once been lightning.
The photo was part of a two-page spread. The other Be-In shots included Ginsberg, Leary, the Dead and the Airplane—and that photo he’d seen after Kirsch was killed, of Dave in the magician’s cape and Olivia in the peasant dress. They looked like young versions of their older selves, only she was thinner and he had a full head of long hair.
So Jackie had known Doug, or whatever his name was, and the photo implied they were more than friends. Meanwhile, Doug knew Olivia. Maybe Olivia could put him in touch with Doug. Maybe she also knew Jackie and her son. Maybe she’d remember his name.