“People don’t want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in.”
—KEN KESEY
The beatniks who had settled in San Francisco’s North Beach area began to leave in 1960 because of police harassment and rising rents. They moved to the Haight-Ashbury district and slowly evolved into “hippies” (a contraction of “hipsters”). The hippies slipped through the cracks in the veneer that the Beat generation had widened and became a full-blown youth movement. Allen Ginsberg compared them to “the whole gang around Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald” in 1920s Paris. “Haight-Ashbury was a continuation, another manifestation of things that had happened before in history. It was just gangs of friends getting together.”
Like their literary counterculture elders, the hippies rejected conformity and “dropped out” of America’s success- and status-driven culture. The invention of the birth control pill radically altered cultural sexual dynamics, and “free love” became a rallying cry for the hippie movement. The youthful John F. Kennedy entered the White House in 1961 and brought a new activist approach to the government. Compared to the 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s were a time of dramatic change, not just in the United States but around the world.
Ginsberg was the link between the Beats and the new counterculture. His support for the legalization of marijuana earned him major brownie points with the hippies. Ginsberg had been smoking pot since the 1940s, and he was one of the first people to address marijuana’s legal status on television in a February 12, 1961, appearance on a TV talk show, where he discussed “Hips and Beats” with Norman Mailer. There’s even a famous photograph of Ginsberg from 1965, where he’s standing on a New York City street at a protest with a cardboard sign around his neck that reads: POT IS FUN.
Ginsberg also won notoriety as a pioneer in the field of “consciousness expansion.” He had begun a personal quest to expand his mind after hearing the voice of William Blake during a particularly intense masturbation session in 1948. He was so excited by his experience, in fact, that he crawled onto the fire escape of his East Harlem apartment and screamed at the women in an adjacent apartment, “I’ve seen God!” When he called his psychiatrist and told him the same thing, the psychiatrist hung up.
Afterward, Ginsberg made it a personal mission to find “God” by any means necessary: peyote, psilocybin, mescaline, heroin. He was one of the first people in the United States to try LSD, as part of a trial at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. “Acid is just a chemical illusion, a game you play with your brain. It’s totally meaningless in terms of a genuine expansion of consciousness,” horror author Stephen King once said. Ginsberg came to a similar conclusion in 1963 and turned to meditation and other natural methods of expanding his consciousness. Still, he continued to proselytize for the counterculture, appearing naked (with a hand covering his genitals) on a poster advertising his friend Ken Kesey’s “Trips” festival in 1966.
The Trips festival was part of a series of parties, dubbed “acid tests,” orchestrated by Ken Kesey (1935–2001) and “the Merry Pranksters” in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. Kesey administered LSD to anyone who showed up at these parties, and musical groups such as the Grateful Dead provided live soundtracks.
Kesey was a former psychiatric hospital orderly who, like Ginsberg, had been turned on to LSD when he volunteered for a research study. Kesey wrote portions of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, on hallucinogens such as acid and peyote. Critics hailed the book as an instant classic when it was published in 1962; Jack Kerouac called Kesey “a great new American novelist.” One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was adapted into a successful stage play in 1963, and later into a film starring Jack Nicholson.
Kesey and his Merry Pranksters took their message on the road in 1964, traveling from California to New York City in a bus as part of a “book tour” for the publication of Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac’s friend who had provided the inspiration for the titular character of Dean Moriarty in On the Road, served as the bus driver and resident father figure. When they reached New York City, Cassady introduced Kesey to Ginsberg and Kerouac. Despite the friendships Kesey formed with the Beats, he never believed he was truly a part of their clique. “I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie,” he later said.
In 1965, Kesey was arrested for marijuana possession—his second offense, for which he would surely face jail time. He faked his own death and fled to Mexico. Authorities, however, stayed on his case and nabbed him when he returned to the United States after eight months in exile. He spent five months locked up before being released on bail, and the charges were later dropped. LSD was outlawed in the United States in late 1966.
Kesey lived out the rest of his life on his family farm in Oregon, occasionally appearing as a celebrity guest at rock concerts. “I write all the time. I just don’t publish that much,” he told a film crew. “I’ve got four kids, and there’s a lot of the same energy that goes into raising a family that goes into putting together a book. Either that, or I’ve fried my marbles, just like everybody thinks.”
Ginsberg did not believe that poets should be recluses. He believed in putting himself right in the action, which earned him the designation “the bravest man in America” from Norman Mailer.
“Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior,” Kesey once said. “He’s a warrior first, a poet second.” Ginsberg helped organize Chicago’s “Festival of Life” in 1968, a protest of the Democratic Party’s support of the Vietnam War. Six months before the protest, Ginsberg told Norman Mailer he had a bad feeling about it.
Ginsberg’s nervousness was justified: the protest, coinciding with the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, was a bloodbath. Police indiscriminately clubbed the protesters, who fought back with bricks. Amidst the chaos, Ginsberg seated himself in the lotus position and began chanting. When an officer raised his billy club to beat the bald, bearded radical, Ginsberg looked him in the eyes and said, “Go in peace, brother.” The cop, disgusted and frustrated by Ginsberg’s admonition, lowered his club and said, “Fucking hippie,” before moving along to beat another protester.
The 1960s, however, came and went, and the Merry Pranksters barely registered on the cultural radar when compared to the Beat generation before them. Rock music was the defining medium for the rebellious young messengers of the 1960s and 1970s. Like all other youth movements, the hippies were tied to a generation in a specific time and place, and they grew up.
“I used to think we were going to win in the sixties,” Kesey said. “Nixon went out and I thought we won.” Even with the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and Nixon’s disgraced exit from the White House the previous year, the U.S. government’s drug war continued. Free love did not transform the world.
Ginsberg passed away from complications of liver cancer on April 5, 1997, exactly three years to the day after the death of another generation’s spokesperson, Kurt Cobain. Kesey died in 2001, also the result of liver cancer. “We’re only a small number and never with the popular vote,” Kesey said in 1992, reflecting upon the counterculture. “We have to keep this little flame going and pass it on. All it takes is one person.”