MILLBROOK: ACID DREAMS
At Millbrook beautiful people gathered to discover their inner selves, helped by a compound consisting of twenty atoms of carbon, twenty-five of hydrogen, three of nitrogen and one of oxygen. According to Timothy Leary, lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, would make the world a better place. His psychedelic home, on wooded land in southern New York State, was a lovely place to get high—even the name of the township, Millbrook, suggested tranquillity. From his pastoral laboratory sprang a chemically induced revolution of the psyche.
LSD acts by temporarily dismissing the sentries guarding the gates of consciousness. The unprotected brain is invaded by a mob of unprocessed stimuli on which it is unable to impose logic. “My eyes closed, the impressions became more intense,” one tripper wrote. “The colors were brilliant blues, purples, and greens with dashes of red and streaks of yellow-orange. There were no easily identifiable objects, only convolutions, prisms, and continuous movement.” Thoughts, reactions, sensations, and emotions collide, sometimes producing bizarre chain reactions and at other times combining in weird amalgams. Visual blends with spiritual: “The dominant impression was that of entering into the very marrow of existence . . . . It was as if each of the billion atoms of experience which under normal circumstances are summarized and averaged into crude, indiscriminate wholesale impressions was now being seen and savored for itself.” Since the drug’s effect is influenced by emotions and environment, the experience is infinitely varied and unpredictable. LSD provides a trip of unknown destination.1
Leary enthusiastically embraced the beneficial attributes of hallucinogens after he first munched some “sacred mushrooms” in Mexico. “I was whirled through an experience which could be described in many extravagant metaphors but which was above all and without question the deepest religious experience of my life.” At a meeting sponsored by the Lutheran Church of America in August 1963, he revealed that up to 83 percent of subjects given LSD in controlled tests reported something similarly sacred. The day would come, he predicted, when psychedelic substances would be as widely used as Communion wine in churches around the world. God, he claimed, had created LSD to allow spiritual awakening.2
Psychedelics would supposedly unlock the gate to true freedom. Since freedom—be it political, social, or emotional—was the great aspiration of the Sixties, LSD, or “acid,” became a sacrament in the decade’s liberation theology. By facilitating freedom of thought, the drug was supposed to inspire enlightenment. Chris Rowley recalled signing on to “the powerful psychedelic belief in the goodness of people once they’d been turned on to their inner cortex.” It followed that “if. . . everybody could take it together . . . the world would undoubtedly become a much saner and safer place because people would get hold of the problem.” Leary taught that psychedelic drugs not only liberated the individual—they were also an effective way to attack conformity. In his Psychedelic Review, first published in 1963, he foresaw a comprehensive revolution through their universal use. “Make no mistake,” he wrote, “the effect of conscious-expanding drugs will be to transform our concepts of human nature, human potentialities, existence.” He dismissed fears of bad trips, blaming them on the insecurities of the “spiritual voyager.”3
From these ideas came the decree: “Turn on, tune in, drop out”—a directive the Establishment found deeply disturbing and the counterculture consistently misunderstood. Turning on meant activating unused neural processes through drugs. The next step, tuning in, would follow automatically. It involved a harmonious interaction with the world, on levels impossible without drugs. Dropping out was a concept borrowed from Marcuse, who railed against the tyranny of technocratic society. Taking drugs was, in other words, an expression of the Great Refusal. “In a sense, I think, LSD and pot signifies the total end of the Protestant Ethic,” argued Rubin. “Fuck work—we want to know ourselves . . . . The goal is to free one’s self from American society’s sick notions of work, success, reward, and status and to find and establish oneself through one’s own discipline, hard work, and introspection.” LSD, in other words, was a benign form of revolution which did not necessitate shooting people. Liberation could come entirely through the mind. All this tended to give indulgence the aura of noble purpose, encouraging the assumption that the individual tripper was engaged in self-improvement and contributing to social progress.4
The Establishment found the “drop out” bit threatening, fearing a drug-induced general strike, with no young people left to fill classrooms, climb the corporate ladder, or kill the Viet Cong. Those who dropped out, it was thought, might not be able to climb back in. On this point, Leary was characteristically vague. While he often presented drugs as a wholesale revolution, at other times he suggested that even a transitory experiment was beneficial. “Take a voyage! Take the adventure!” he urged. “Before you settle down to the tribal game, try out self-exile. Your coming back will be much enriched.” In other words, worries about a mass exodus were greatly exaggerated. Advocates argued that LSD could provide a brief spiritual holiday for the part-time rebel, since even those who eventually joined the Establishment would find themselves improved by their sojourn on the other side.5
Allen Ginsberg, another drug disciple, saw LSD as a political statement, a spiritual tool, and a “refuge for a person in a plastic world.” He wanted all healthy Americans over the age of fourteen to take at least one trip in order to perceive “the New Wilderness of machine America as it really was.” “If there be necessary revolution in America,” the poet proclaimed, “it will come this way.” Rather like Leary, Ginsberg thought that LSD could promote the attainment of good karma by breaking down barriers to inner understanding. In other words, though the trip itself would be enjoyable, much more important was the spiritual destination. He was entirely serious, but, much to his dismay, those who took his advice inevitably simplified his message, lazily assuming that the drug by itself would bring good karma, without any intellectual effort required. For Ginsberg, acid was never simply recreation, yet for the multitude that is all it ever was.6
Drugs were part of the official uniform of the counterculture, a badge of belonging. The British radical Robin Blackburn admitted that taking drugs did not add up to “a hefty political statement,” but he still felt that they were “among the things that defined a new Left, as against a traditional, rather stuffy old Left.” Because they allowed escape from reality they seemed the perfect elixir for a culture devoted to the abandonment of traditional values. It was easy, therefore, for the user to convince himself that he was engaged in meaningful rebellion. Due to their illegality, drugs were also a delightful way to defy authority—an enjoyable act of insubordination. (Though LSD was not outlawed in the United States until 1966, marijuana had been made illegal in 1937.) Michael Rossman, a Free Speech Movement activist, argued that drugs, by making the user a “youth criminal against the state,” politicized a generation.7
Achieving personal salvation and social revolution, it seemed, was as easy as swallowing a tab. A simple drug could make one beautiful, creative, kind, committed, intelligent, and perceptive. One devotee argued that LSD
was one of the best and healthiest tools available . . . . Acid opens your doors, opens the windows, opens your senses. Opens your beam to the vast possibilities of life, to the glorious indescribable beauty of life . . . . Drop down into your consciousness and see the pillars and the roots of the tree which is your personality . . . . You see what your hang-ups are; you might not overcome them but you cope with them, and that’s an amazing advance.
“Better living through chemistry” proclaimed a popular psychedelic poster. Though no one overtly admitted it, drugs were an expression of the baby boomers’ boundless faith in science—all the ugliness of the world could be made to disappear, thanks to a chemical compound synthesized in a laboratory. Every moment was an epiphany, greeted with wide-eyed stares and surprised exclamations. Druggies convinced themselves that they were improving the world, because their private world of psychedelic fantasy seemed so wonderful. Listening to the Grateful Dead, dropping acid, and staring at a lava lamp for hours could be passed off as both politically vital and personally enriching. LSD transformed utter banalities into pearls of wisdom, making everyone seem clever. “The depths of tedium that can be plumbed by sitting around half stoned, listening to people chatter moonily about reuniting humankind and erasing its aggressive instincts through Love and Dope, are scarcely imaginable to those who have not suffered them,” wrote the art critic Robert Hughes. The folk stalwart Dave van Ronk agreed. “Why did people have to build these enormous, rickety, theoretical, bargain-basement, mystical structures to justify getting stoned?” he wondered. “I think that was a very middle-class rationalization. All those kids who were into drugs as a self-awareness trip always struck [me] as silly, just plain silly. And the mystical stuff that went along with it was boring.”8
Radical politicos had difficulty deciding what to do about the drug culture. Some considered LSD the enemy of revolution—a true opiate of the people. “Flower power can’t stop fascist power,” one activist complained. “The hippies are making it easy for the fascists. Sniffing daffodils is playing it safe. Chanting isn’t going to change anything.” The Port Huron Statement, on the other hand, attacked the “hypocrisy of American ideals” and proclaimed a “commitment to social experimentation.” To some, that seemed an endorsement of psychedelics. Carl Oglesby, onetime president of SDS, certainly thought so: “The acid experience is so concrete. It draws a line across your life—before and after LSD—in the same way that you felt that your step into radical politics drew a sharp division . . . . It’s not necessarily that the actual content of the LSD experience contributed to politically radical or revolutionary consciousness—it was just that the experience shared the structural characteristics of political rebellion.” For some radicals, dropping acid was as important as marching. During the Sproul Hall occupation at Berkeley in 1964, protesters openly took drugs as a bold act of defiance against university authority. The ultimate act of rebellion was to get high while sitting at the chancellor’s desk rifling through his papers. Drugs became a ritual of rebellion.9
For all the hippies’ talk of freedom, theirs was a totalitarian movement, ruled by the despotism of drugs. Their Utopia was accessible only to those who indulged and was intimidating to those who, for whatever reason, abstained. Drugs divided the world into hips and squares, with unbelievers ostracized. Like heathens judged by a peculiarly bigoted religion, those who did not indulge were cast from the kingdom. Drug disciples often took it upon themselves to convert the reticent, by trickery if necessary. “We used to have discussions about the ethics of whether it really was a good idea to put LSD in people’s drinks, people who needed turning on, like politicians and so forth,” John Willcock recalled. Sue Miles lived in constant fear of having her food spiked with a drug she did not welcome. “I never consumed anything in public for years.”10
The Establishment reacted hysterically to what seemed a drug epidemic. Government and the media conspired to fuel fear, in the vain hope that the young might be scared away from their chemical paradise. Newspapers competed with one another to produce lurid stories of LSD-inspired tragedy. One of the favorites concerned Stephen Kessler, a boy from New York who killed his mother but claimed to have no memory of doing so because he was tripping at the time. In January 1968, many papers reported that six undergraduates at a college in Pennsylvania were permanently blinded by staring at the sun while on LSD. The story turned out to be a complete fabrication, dreamed up by a Dr. Yoder of the Pennsylvania Institute for the Blind, who explained that he “invented [it] . . . because of my concern about the illegal use of LSD and other drugs.”11
In 1967 the US Bureau of Narcotics claimed that “the cannabis sativa plant, while having very little medical use, is capable of profoundly disturbing the brain cells and inducing acts of violence, even murder.” Two years later, the American Institute of Mental Health spent $100,000 on a TV advertising campaign warning about the dangers of drugs. The ads were narrated, rather appropriately, by Rod Serling of the Twilight Zone, whose air of gravitas gave credence to the horror stories. Young people were constantly warned that drugs were an escalator which always went down: the first step (marijuana) led inexorably to heroin and the doom of addiction. “Those who experiment with narcotics can become hopelessly addicted for life, become mindless vegetables, may even die,” the wholesome crooner Pat Boone warned in his bestselling book, A New Song. “Some authorities claim that one “trip” on LSD may affect four generations of children born afterwards!! And, of course, we know that some children born to LSD users have had exposed spines, two heads, and other gruesome physical deformities.” Druggies, however, were never likely to listen to an Establishment they were so determined to defy.12
Those who believed in the political power of drugs had a favorite mantra: “They have the atomic bomb and we have the acid . . . and we hope to win.” If in retrospect the connection between drugs and politics seems illogical, it is well to recall that logic was often seen as an obstacle to enlightenment. Yet the weakness of the drug revolution was revealed whenever political engagement was encouraged. At a 1967 antiwar rally in Berkeley, Rubin found to his consternation that most of the audience had taken seriously his advice that dropping acid or smoking pot was revolutionary. Because they were all tripping, they had no tolerance for what he had to say about the war. They instead shouted at him to shut up and play some music. Rubin grew disgusted with the hippie hero Richard Alpert (also known as Ram Dass), who told followers that social and political transformation was as easy as taking a pill. “He was a sad sack, in my view,” Rubin confessed. “Told [everyone] that the truth lies within, that change externally was impossible . . . . I’m getting increasingly bitter as I see the cop-out of youth.”13
Thanks to Ginsberg, Leary, Alpert, and a host of others, the drug culture had become allied to Eastern religions, which in part explains the popularity of pilgrimages to Marrakech and Kathmandu (not to mention the ready availability of potent hashish). Rubin, however, saw how easy spiritual transformation had become—as easy as chanting “Om.” Political commitment had given way to karma and mantra. Some people took these ideas seriously, but most of the time they were bastardized, diluted, and bumperstickered.
The flaw in Leary’s revolution lay in the very personal nature of the LSD experience. “Feed your head,” proclaimed the Dormouse in Jefferson Airplane’s song “White Rabbit.” Tuli Kupferberg, the Beat poet and member of the Fugs, proclaimed: “the first revolution is in yer own head.” For most people who sought rebellion through drugs, the crusade went no further than their own heads. Taking LSD was a selfish act which allowed escape from reality. Politics, in contrast, is a group activity demanding engagement with reality, however discordant that reality might be. Drugs and politics, in other words, do not mix, as the Yippie Paul Krassner found: “The more I laughed, the more I tried to think about depressing things—specifically the atrocities being committed in Vietnam—and the more wild my laughing became.” Devoted druggies, for all they might have fantasized about political change, found it difficult to contribute materially to change. Since a colorful and exciting world could so easily be entered through the escape hatch of psychedelics, there was little incentive to work hard to improve the real world.14
Many who took LSD thought that the mere act of doing so made them bona fide members of Leary’s revolution. They did not understand that changing the world involved something more fundamental than simply turning on, and that dropping out actually required serious thought and effort. In the end, the drug rebellion was defeated by its own excess and by the contradictions inherent in the act of turning on. It is impossible to organize those whose first priority is self-indulgence. In this case, it was doubly difficult because the foot soldiers of this fantasy revolution were usually too high to take directions and the commanders too distracted to give them. Formal organization was exactly the “bad trip” that these revolutionaries were trying to avoid.
During a hippie happening in Central Park in 1969, a rape occurred. That, at least, was what a journalist saw. “A young long-haired girl stripped and danced in the warm rain . . . . Her friends stood by while a dozen young men raped her in an animal frenzy. Of the hundreds who gathered to watch, no one helped her, no one cared. Someone even stole her clothes. As she staggered around dazed and muddy, all she wore was a four letter word painted on her forehead: ‘Love.’” Those who carried out the rape, and most of those who witnessed it, saw something different—an innocent, fun-loving “gang bang.” “Raped?” Richard Neville asked with an air of incredulity. To him, the incident seemed a harmless example of sexual exuberance. Sex had become play, a group activity carried out in public. Some even called it a political act—an open attack upon repressive monogamy.
Interpretations differed because the Sixties had redefined sex, decoupling it from convention, emotion, and, most important, from love. The generation that convinced itself that “all you need is love” somehow managed to trivialize love’s most transcendent expression.15
Missing from recollections of the incident in Central Park are the feelings of the person who mattered most: the woman at its center. In that sense, the incident was emblematic—the Sixties sexual revolution was most perplexing and painful for the women it affected most deeply.
Sixties sexual rebels seldom made love. They fucked. The word—vulgar, aggressive, rebellious, unfeeling—was the preferred term of the soldiers in the sexual revolution. It perfectly conveyed an act from which emotion had been excised and which was deliberately intended to offend the “uptight.” Meaningless sex became a worthy aspiration. “One of my friends,” Neville recalled, “when asked what he remembered most about his days behind the barricades, . . . replied, ‘In one afternoon I fucked fifteen girls.’” Neville admired how his generation had completely transformed the dynamic between love and sex:
When boy meets girl, within minutes of drifting off to a comfortable location, boy can be happily splashing about in girl’s cunt, both of them up each other’s arses, sucking and fucking with compassionate enthusiasm. No more tedious “will she or won’t she by Saturday?” but a total tactile information exchange, and an unambiguous foundation upon which to build a temporary or permanent relationship. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow comes first; later one decides whether the rainbow is worth having for its own sake. If the attraction is only biological, nothing is lost except a few million spermatozoa . . . . If there is a deeper involvement, the relationship becomes richer, and so does the sexual experience. One way to a girl’s mind is through her cunt.
Years later, Neville penned his own mea culpa: “Steeped in the sexism of the time and thrilled at slamming the citadels of repression, I said stupid things. Making love is still better than making war, but orgies are not the key to social justice.”16
With monogamy no longer sacred, it was only natural that these pioneers should explore group sex. While far more orgies took place in the imagination than in reality, the phenomenon is deservedly associated with the Sixties. In some cases, group sex was intentionally institutionalized, performed out of duty more than desire. The Weather Underground, for instance, took politicized sex to the point of absurdity with their Smash Monogamy campaign. One member, Gerry Long, recalled a mandatory orgy: “I took the hand of this girl and exchanged a few pleasantries to give it a slightly personal quality, and then we fucked. And there were people fucking and thrashing around all over. They’d sort of roll over on you, and sometimes you found yourself spread over more than one person. The room was like some weird modern sculpture. There’d be all these humps in a row. You’d see a knee and then buttocks and then three knees and four buttocks. They were all moving up and down, rolling around.” Awkwardness prevailed the next morning when members scanned the room trying to recall with whom they had coupled. One woman broke the silence: “I’m sure they have to do it this way in Vietnam.”17
As with drugs, promiscuity constituted rebellion. Those who worshiped “free love” convinced themselves that they were doing their bit to overturn the repressive morality of their parent’s generation. With no risk of AIDS, irresponsibility carried little cost—or so it seemed. Granted, there were sexually transmitted diseases, but they were treated with a quick dose of penicillin from a free clinic. Venereal disease became a certificate of service to the sexual revolution. “There was clap, but that was rather a badge, in those happy, far-off days,” Nicola Lane recalled. “There was no stigma to having the clap.”18
The mantra that “the personal is political” meant that heretofore personal acts took on deep political meaning. “[Sex] was part of my growth as a human being, as a woman and as a feminist,” Andrea Adam decided. “That’s how I justified it. I didn’t want a revolution . . . but I wanted women to become equal and I wanted permissiveness. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I wanted a license to fuck around and I did fuck around.” A respondent to a sexual survey expressed a similar attitude: “I could pick up a guy and take him home with me for one night, and it was my choice. I was in control and I didn’t feel he would think I was a ‘slut.’ My men friends could accept my right and desire to do the same as them.” Another woman confessed: “I had no guilt or second thoughts about having sex for sex’s sake. If it felt good, I did it, and if someone excited me I’d make sure we ended up in bed.”19
The great problem with Sixties-style sex was that liberation was so much more unequivocal for men than it ever was for women. The iconic films of the decade—like Alfie, Room at the Top, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning—celebrated the sexual adventures of young males at the same time that they sneered at the possessive females who tried to curb their swinging. Women who sought meaning in sexual relationships were often dismissed as frigid. As the feminist Robin Morgan remarked, “A woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if she didn’t want to be raped.”20
In 1967, Gershon Legman railed against the weekend radicals who, he felt, debased themselves, their partners, and the sexual act by pretending that every lascivious fantasy carried deep political meaning. In The Fake Revolt, he argued: “How does the sexual piggery of sharing your girl or your wife with three to six other guys at every end of her pink little anatomy show your rebellion against your parents’ bad old world? How does it expose the backside of your parents’ ludicrous ideal of ‘togetherness’ for you to stand in line to gang-ba ng your own undergraduate wife, with her ass baby-oiled and her teats tattoo-painted like Art Nouveau easter eggs?” Legman’s critique was all the more incisive because it came from a bona fide political radical who promoted sexual openness. A self-proclaimed eroticist, he understood that sex stripped of feeling was a grotesque thing more likely to wound than to please.21
“We put out, either because we wanted to be in love or because it was too much trouble to say no,” Sue O’Sullivan recalled. “I’m amazed now when I think of the sexual acrobatics I performed back then with no pleasurable outcome—I could move my hips for hours, take it on all fours, fuck fast and furious, be on top, be stimulated by hand or mouth, grudgingly suck someone off and never a glimmer of the pleasure I felt in anticipation or in fantasy.” “You had to fill so many roles,” commented Nicola Lane. “You had to be pretty and you had to be ‘a good fuck’—that seemed to be very important. I think it meant mostly that (a) you would do it with a lot of people, and also (b) that you’d give people blow jobs . . . . It was paradise for men in their late twenties: all these willing girls. But the trouble with the willing girls was that a lot of the time they were willing not because they particularly fancied the people concerned but because they felt they ought to.” Lane felt “a huge pressure to conform to non-conformity.” “A good many of us,” the writer Judith Brown remarked, “are desperately screwing some guy because we think we should and wonder what our friends would think if we didn’t.”22
Reflecting on his experiences, one sexual rebel admitted: “If a sexual revolution is fucking a lot, then I did. If it incorporates things like the rights of women, I’m not sure if my involvement meant a damn thing.” Rebels succeeded in transforming attitudes toward intercourse, but could not leave behind its emotional baggage. “We grew up with a fairly stultified, Victorian attitude to sexual relationships,” Marsha Rowe reflected, “and the only way we had to deal with that was to do what we did; which was to lighten sex, to make it erotic play, to say that sometimes you will just want to sleep with each other. What we didn’t see was that this would maybe stretch our emotional or physical resources till they would collapse.” “Free love,” one veteran of the revolution reflected, “is like a free lunch—there is no such thing.” Sex could never be completely separated from love and possession. “There was a lot of misery,” Lane recalled. “Relationship miseries: ghastly, ghastly jealousy, although there was supposed to be no jealousy, no possessiveness. What it meant was that men fucked around. You’d cry a lot, and you would scream sometimes, and the man would say, ‘Don’t bring me down—don’t lay your bummers on me, . . . don’t hassle me, don’t crowd my space.’ There were multiple relationships but usually in a very confused way; usually the man wanted it.” John Lloyd agreed that it was impossible “to leap out of your own habits and upbringing into this blissful state where there were no hang-ups . . . . All the jealousies and tensions just grew exponentially.” What resulted was the worst of all possible worlds: sex still came with a cacophony of guilt and jealousy, but it had lost much of its sublime meaning. Making sex less momentous did not remove its pain. “In spite of all the scientific advances,” the novelist Beryl Bainbridge reflected, “there wasn’t a pill invented, and we women knew it, that could stop one’s heart from being broken.”23
Like the drug craze, the sexual revolution has often been seen by those who participated as something fun at the time, but in retrospect rather embarrassing, bewildering, and sordid. Self-discovery could be distressing. There was, for instance, nothing more painful than being slapped in the face by one’s own double standards. “It is an illusion to suppose that sexual promiscuity helps create personal freedom,” Robert Hughes concluded. “There is a huge difference between the condition of freedom and that of accepting no responsibilities to anyone.” The Beat poet Tuli Kupferberg agreed: “Politically, the movement was never able to affiliate with the vast majority of people who were not nineteen, who had problems with work and family, education. It said this was the life, when maybe it was just youth.”24
Reaching a final verdict on the sexual revolution is impossible and pointless. Because sex remained a personal act (despite the best efforts of rebels to render it otherwise), its effect was far too varied to make sweeping conclusions possible. It also seems certain that the carnal Olympics described by some were by no means typical. “There was an awful lot of sex not happening, then being talked about afterwards as if it did happen,” Steve Sparks felt. “I suspect that the great sexual freedom of the 60s was not as great as it would appear in retrospect.”25
Those who look back often do so with binoculars, with the result that everything looks bigger. The tendency to exaggerate experiences, and even to manufacture them, is human. That tendency is most profound when sex is discussed, and especially when it is discussed by men. Measuring the true level of sexual promiscuity is therefore difficult. Studies by Albert Klassen and by the 1994 National Health and Social Life Survey have, however, shed light on the actual extent of promiscuity, mainly by diligently striving to include those who would not ordinarily respond to sex surveys. Klassen discovered that among women born in the 1940s, 37 percent entered marriage as virgins, while a further 31 percent had had sex, but only with their husband-to-be. In all, around half the cases of premarital sex among this cohort involved sex between the woman and her eventual husband. Only 3 percent of women had ten or more sexual partners.
Males were more likely to have sex before marriage. Klassen found that only 11 percent of those born in the 1940s entered marriage as virgins, which suggests that by the 1960s the ideal of premarital chastity was largely abandoned, among men at least. Another 12 percent, however, had had sex only with those women who eventually became their wives. That still leaves a significant 78 percent who were inclined to experiment, compared to just 33 percent of women.
Klassen found that the typical male born in the 1940s had six sexual partners during his life. That constitutes a doubling of experience compared to the generation born before 1900. In other words, the sexual revolution can be reduced to, in reality, an additional three sexual partners per average male. As an indicator of more permissive times, this statistic hardly seems earth-shattering, especially since the generation of men and women born in the 1940s enjoyed better health standards, increased longevity, and greater social mobility, not to mention a reduction in the threat of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. This cohort also married later and therefore had more time between puberty and marriage to devote to experimentation. Generally speaking, however, experimentation did not usually take the form of rampant orgies and one-night stands—as folklore suggests. While premarital sex and cohabitation did rise during the 1960s, this did not mean the death of monogamy, no matter how hard some tried to smash it. Instead, the most common pattern of behavior was serial monogamy—a sequence of long-term relationships leading eventually to marriage when the right person came along. Sexual restraint remained a respected goal among both sexes, particularly after individuals fell in love.26
Something nevertheless had happened. In 1963, 80 percent of American women thought premarital sex was wrong. By 1975, only 30 percent did. In other words, a change had occurred, even if it was not enough to be called a revolution. The change was undoubtedly greatest for women, who could now admit to sexual desires and could openly pursue their fulfillment. “I find it very odd that women who are otherwise perfectly sensible say that the ‘sexual revolution’ of the sixties only succeeded in putting more women on the sexual market for the pleasure of men,” Angela Carter reflected. “What an odd way of looking at it. This seems to deny the possibility of sexual pleasure to women except in situations where it’s so hedged around with qualifications.” One of the greatest achievements of the decade, she felt, was that “sexual pleasure was suddenly divorced from not only reproduction but also status, security, all the foul traps men lay for women in order to trap them into permanent relationships.” In other words, while terrible abuses did occur, the enjoyment of sex was not onesided. And those abuses were often illuminating, if only in retrospect. When taboos were pulled down, some awful truths were revealed, from which important lessons were learned.27
LIVERPOOL: THE BEATLES
In 1960, there were probably 400 pop groups in Liverpool, all competing for stardom. “Every teenager who could tap his foot in rhythm . . . had gathered three mates together, signed an HP [hire purchase] agreement with Frank Hessy’s music store, and was rocking away with the requisite set of drums, amp, rhythm and bass guitars,” Liverpudlian Maureen Nolan recalled. “I suppose the excitement stemmed from the belief that anything was possible, it was all within reach.”28
For the Beatles everything was possible. They somehow rose above the fray, eventually becoming the most successful rock group in history. Their success can easily be gauged by record sales, but also by creative versatility—their ability to mold musical tastes. Their catalogue of songs recorded from 1963 to 1969 provides a perfect chronicle of the decade, a collective Bildungsroman moving from innocence to excess.
In 1962, however, the Beatles were just a rock-and-roll band singing simple songs. No one would have predicted their enormous success, nor how they would evolve. Granted, their manager, Brian Epstein, claimed they would be “bigger than Elvis,” but managers always talk like that. The only ones supremely confident of the Beatles’ potential were the Beatles themselves, or, more specifically, John Lennon. “We were smart heads,” he explained in March 1966. “We knew from the start we were better.” “I’m a genius,” he boasted a few years later. “I’ve been like this all me life.”29
For quite a long time, genius went unrecognized. John Lennon and Paul McCartney first played together on October 18, 1957, at the Conservative Club in Norris Green. Back then they were the Quarry Men, playing local dances, birthday parties, and church fetes. What distinguished them was that they performed their own material, but this was hardly sufficient to send them shooting to stardom. For more than six years they played in a succession of clingy clubs, desperate for the big break. During a spell in Hamburg, they performed almost every day, sometimes for six hours at a stretch, to audiences of drunks, soldiers, and prostitutes. John survived the pace by swallowing amphetamines like candy. The artist Klaus Voorman, who first stumbled upon the band in Hamburg, recalled a music “so raw and so fresh, . . . the words of the songs were so simple and so direct and . . . they were so happy, having such a good time on stage. And that was what was missing in all these others I’d seen before . . . . The combination was such magic—unbelievable.”30
Their break came when they met Epstein in late 1961. “They were fresh and . . . honest,” he later recalled, “and they had what I thought was a sort of presence and . . . star quality.” He cleaned them up, dressed them in smart clothes, and instilled discipline. “I don’t think John particularly liked wearing a suit—nor did I,” George Harrison recalled, “but we wanted more work, and we realized that’s what we had to do.” Being a hot rock band was not, however, a guarantee of success, since it was not yet clear that rock and roll would be the soundtrack for the new decade. The classic rockers—Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and the like—had faded away. Elvis had retained his popularity by turning smooth and soulful. Rockers, it seemed, had given way to wholesome crooners and bal-ladeers like the Everly Brothers. In Britain, pop music was dominated by Cliff Richard, who proved that millions could be made from bland songs that couldn’t possibly offend one’s granny. Some music-industry insiders predicted that jazz would dominate, since it seemed to harmonize so well with the decade’s taste for existentialism. “Groups are out; four-piece groups with guitars particularly are finished,” Dick Rowe, an executive at Decca, told Epstein when he rejected the Beatles in 1962. Pye, Philips, Columbia, and HMV all decided that the group wasn’t worth an audition.31
In came George Martin, a producer at Parlophone, an EMI subsidiary. Martin, like Epstein, could hear something special within the loud, rather raucous music. He also had the technical ability to refine the music to make it marketable. The Beatles wisely listened to Martin, at least in the early years. His first significant piece of advice was to drop their much-loved drummer, Pete Best, who had been with them for two years. Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison were sufficiently ruthless to cut Best loose. In came Ringo Starr.
Martin’s bosses were not impressed, but he persevered, promising great things. Their first single, “Love Me Do” came out on October 5, 1962, and rose to a respectable seventeenth on the charts. The next song was “Please, Please Me,” originally intended as a soulful ballad, in the manner of Roy Orbison. Martin took the song, added a harmonica at the start, upped the tempo, rearranged the vocal harmonies and ended up with something he guaranteed would top the charts. He was right. Released in mid-February 1963, it hit number one on March 2.
After waiting so long for success, the Beatles now found that it came in a torrent. Their next song, “From Me to You” went straight to the top, as did their first album, Please, Please Me. The British, most of them at least, fell instantly in love, thanks in part to Fleet Street’s conspiracy of adoration. “You had to write it that way,” one correspondent reflected. “You knew that if you didn’t, the Sketch would and the Express would and the Mad and the Standard would. You were writing in self-defence.” The Beatles had the good fortune to emerge at a time when the papers were full of stories about the scandals and mismanagement of Harold Macmillan’s government. Journalists enjoyed contrasting the perfidy of an aristocratic Home Counties Cabinet with the fresh-faced, innocent vitality of the Fab Four from Liverpool. “We were the first working-class heroes in England to ever get anywhere without changing their accents,” Lennon claimed, not altogether accurately. For a country eager to pretend that the class system was in decline, the Beatles were welcome folk heroes. “The Beatles are the first people to make rock ‘n’ roll respectable,” wrote the Evening Standard. “They have won over the class snob, the intellectual snob, the music snob, the grown-ups and the husbands . . . . They appeal to the family and they appeal to the nation.”32
Beatlemania gripped Britain. “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” released at the end of November 1963, became the biggest-selling British pop record ever released, selling more than ten million copies worldwide. People weren’t just buying records—they were also buying a huge variety of merchandise designed to keep the image ubiquitous. Hairdressers were inundated with requests for Beatle haircuts; stores sold out of Beatle wigs. After the group had stormed the citadel of British musical taste, other rock bands—Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Dave Clark Five, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks—swarmed over the ramparts. Those who had predicted the early demise of rock and roll swallowed their words and started moving to the beat. Except, that is, for Cliff Richard, who felt as if a rug had been pulled from under him. “Anyone who can shout can be a Beatle,” he told the Daily Mirror.33
The most conspicuous, and worrying, manifestation of Beatlemania was the horde of screaming girls who went hysterical at the mere mention of the band’s name. After a gig in Cambridge on November 26, 1963, the seats and floor were soaked with urine. Psychologists were quick to offer explanation. Some concluded that it was pent-up energy which the girls, had they been boys, would otherwise have released playing football or rugby. One English doctor surmised that “this sort of activity was important for young women because it made the pains of pregnancy easier . . . when they grew up and got married.” In the New Statesman, Dr. David Holbrook argued that the Beatles were “a masturbation fantasy.” Noel Coward, inclined to agree, compared Beatlemania to a “mass masturbation orgy,” while the Daily Telegraph found disturbing parallels with Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies.34
Most people, however, simply joined in the hysteria, though rather less loudly than the young female fans. One of the most surprising converts was William Mann, music critic for the Times.
The outstanding English composers of 1963 must seem to have been John Lennon and Paul McCartney . . . . The slow sad song about “That Boy” . . . is expressively unusual for its lugubrious music, but harmonically it is one of their most interesting, with its chains of pandiatonic clusters . . . . But harmonic interest is typical of their quicker songs too, . . . so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat sub-mediant key switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of “Not a Second Time.”
The Sunday Times ballet critic, Richard Buckle, joined the chorus, calling the Beatles “the greatest composers since Beethoven.” As Buckle and Mann demonstrate, the Beatles had made rock and roll respectable, something further confirmed at the 1963 Royal Variety Show. Lennon delighted the crowd with his introduction to “Twist and Shout”: “Those in the cheaper seats, clap your hands, and the rest of you . . . just ratde your jewelry.” After the performance, the Queen Mother called it “one of the best shows I’ve seen . . . . The Beatles are most intriguing.” Around this time, the staid Daily Telegraph began to publish a weekly listing of the top ten pop records. Politicians eagerly told everyone how much they loved the Beatles. Some even resorted to incorporating lyrics into their speeches.35
Next stop America, where music industry executives were contemptuous of the possibility of the Beatles making it big, for the simple reason that no British group ever had. The Beatles bringing rock and roll to America seemed like Rover sending cars to Detroit. But then, on January 17,1964, came news that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had reached number one on the US charts, a nice prelude to the American tour, which was to begin on February 7. In no mood to gamble, publicists spent an unprecedented $50,000 on pretour publicity, all to the tune of “The Beatles Are Coming!” This included paying a crowd of teenagers to meet the group on their arrival at Kennedy Airport.
The moneymen needn’t have worried. Everywhere the Beatles went, they encountered crowds of young people (mostly girls) desperately indulging in madness. Stores maintained a brisk trade in Beatle memorabilia and concerts were packed. A journalist described the reaction when the Beatles hit Los Angeles:
For more than twelve hours the crowd has been gathering with quiet anticipation. Now, fifteen minutes before concert time, the Hollywood Bowl is surrounded. People crowding the security guards to get in, while the guards look less than amused and a little apprehensive . . . . Tiny teenage girls, dressed in their finest, wave half-heartedly at each other, not anxious to break the privacy of the mood created by the months of waiting for this day. No matter who they are, each of them feels that SHE is the one who will be seen by the Beatles—SHE is the one who will get backstage and see them, talk to them. Of course they dress up! No—those aren’t early-American night gowns (what kind of nut are you?)—that’s the “London look.” Don’t you even read Seventeen?
An appearance on the Ed Sullivan show attracted 78 million viewers, the largest audience ever for any television show. By the beginning of April 1964, the Beatles had the top five spots on the American charts, twelve singles in the top 100, and the top two albums. Bob Dylan, observing the mania, reflected: “I knew they were pointing the direction music had to go . . . . It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn.” The rock critic Greil Marcus has written that the arrival of the Beatles in New York “was the moment that took Bob Dylan out of his folksinger’s clothes.”36
By the beginning of 1966, a little over three years after their first hit, the Beatles had published around ninety songs which were recorded in nearly 3,000 different versions by artists famous and forgettable. They themselves had sold close to 200 million records, while sales of cover versions reached half a billion. Most pop bands would have reacted by offering more of the same. Had the Beatles done so, they would have quickly faded away, as most groups do. The shelf life of bands is seldom more than a few years. The Beatles, however, were ambitious, not for money and fame, but for immortality. For them, fame brought freedom, the freedom to let creativity bloom. “We are so well established that we can bring the fans along with us and stretch the limits of pop,” McCartney told the Rolling Stone journalist Michael Lydon in March 1966. “We don’t have to follow what everyone else is doing.”37
Lennon felt that the Sixties was “a revolution in a whole new way of thinking . . . . We were all on this ship—a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest.” Their artistic whims became international trends. They did not consciously reinvent themselves, nor did they try to anticipate trends. They instead allowed themselves to develop, safe in the knowledge that whatever they produced would sell. As McCartney explained: “We started off first with songs like ‘Love Me Do,’ with easy, easy, stupid rhymes that didn’t mean very much, then we moved to a middle bunch of songs which meant a little bit more. Not an awful lot more, but they were a little deeper. There was no mystery about our growth; it was only as mysterious as a flower is mysterious . . . . We were just growing up.” The freedom to improvise was strengthened by the group’s conscious decision to retreat into the studio. Playing before a crowd of screaming fans quickly lost its appeal. “We don’t progress,” Harrison complained in July 1965, “because we play the same things every day, every time we play somewhere.” By cutting back on concerts, and eventually stopping them entirely, the group was able to rejuvenate its artistic drive. It also meant that they no longer had to conform to audience expectations. “That’s it,” George Harrison said after their last concert, “I don’t have to pretend to be a Beatle any more.”38
The Beatles’ immense popularity caused many people to endow them with an importance they did not deserve. Their every move was intricately analyzed. Off-the-cuff remarks, like Lennon’s assertion that they were more popular than Jesus (which was true), were given far too much weight. As a result of Lennon’s statement, thirty-five US radio stations banned their music and some communities staged record burnings. The Beatles were made into role models and then attacked for setting a bad example. Revelations about their drug-taking caused widespread condemnation, when in fact their behavior was no different from that of millions of ordinary young people from a similar background. “One thing that modern philosophy—existentialism and things like that—have taught people,” Lennon protested in 1966, “is that you have to live now. You have to feel now. We live in the present, we don’t have time to figure out whether we are right or wrong, whether we are immoral or not. We have to be honest, be straight, and then live, enjoying and taking what we can.” That said, the Beatles occasionally got carried away with their own celebrity; they began to believe that they might indeed be gods worthy of worship. Lennon, for instance, expected the world to accept without question his credentials as a pacifist, despite the fact that he had a long history of violence, as his first wife, Cynthia, could attest.39
The peak was reached in 1967 with the release of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, perennially judged the best rock album ever produced. After that came two years of bitter unraveling. The media circus grew unbearable. “If I could be a fucking fisherman, I would,” Lennon told Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner in 1970. “If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It’s no fun being an artist . . . . These bastards are just sucking us to death; that’s about all that we can do, is do it like circus animals.” Their time at the top lasted about seven years—longer than most bands, shorter than some. But bands that stay together for a long time, like the Rolling Stones, do so in part because they don’t evolve. Stasis brings stability. The great strength of the Beatles was their versatility but that was also their greatest weakness. All that improvisation inevitably created conflict, as individual members tried to pull the band in different directions. The breakup left their fans crushed, but to them it seemed logical. “I wouldn’t mind being a white-haired old man writing songs,” McCartney told Lydon in 1966. “But I’d hate to be a white-haired old Beatle at the Empress Stadium, playing for people.” “Always the Beatles were talked about . . . as being four parts of the same person. What’s happened to those four parts?” Wenner asked shortly after their demise. “They remembered that they were four individuals,” Lennon replied, with perfect simplicity.40
“Changing the life-style and the appearance of youth throughout the world didn’t just happen,” Lennon boasted. “We set out to do it; we knew what we were doing.” The Beatles suited their era perfectly. The music industry back then was young, innocent, and open-minded. Improvisation was possible because success had not yet become an algebraic formula. The reason the Beatles phenomenon has not been repeated is perhaps that the industry today could never accommodate a band so creative, autonomous, and progressive. Pop culture in the Sixties, writes Ian MacDonald, was “intrinsically democratic.” The Beatles “represented an upsurge of working-class expression into a medium till then mostly handed down to the common man by middle-class professionals with little empathy for street culture.” They succeeded in changing so much within the industry but in the end they could not transform the mechanics of power. “The only significant aspect of pop the Beatles failed to change was the business itself.”41
MANCHESTER: THE BATTLE FOR BOB DYLAN
The crowd in the Manchester Free Trade Hall on the night of May 17, 1966, confirmed that the times were indeed a-changin’. Half were folkies with rucksacks and sandals who had come to hear their Bob Dylan. The rest were rockers in jeans and black leather eager to hear their Dylan. A fair proportion, in other words, were destined to be disappointed. For quite a few, that concert was the Great Betrayal—the day Dylan went electric. In fact, he’d gone electric some time before, but the folk faithful were desperate to deny the truth. For them, seeing Dylan plug in his Stratocaster was like watching Pontius Pilate pass judgment on Christ. The amplified wail felt like nails piercing flesh. The rockers were delighted, but the folkies grew increasingly restless as each song underlined Dylan’s treachery. And then came the most famous catcall in the history of rock: “JUDAS!”
Dylan, it seems, was waiting for this moment, this instant of attack in a culture war. He barked to the five members of his band: “Play Fucking Loud!” They responded with a terrifying, ear-splitting fusillade—a seven-minute barrage of “Like a Rolling Stone,” played with intent to wound. “It was great,” Sue Miles felt. “Half the audience pissed off—all the ones that had rucksacks.” Among the angry was Keith Butler, who left in disgust. On the way out, he ran into the filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker. “He’s a traitor,” Butler muttered. “He wants shooting.”42
The words “I was there” echo across the ages. The number who recall that seminal event, who felt personally the stab of betrayal, could fill the Free Trade Hall ten times over. That is the nature of rock legends: those who remember an event far exceed those who actually experienced it. Some attended later concerts on the tour; others heard stories from friends; still others saw film clips of the concert. Some even swear the betrayal occurred at London’s Albert Hall, not in Manchester. Imagining that one had been present was easy, because the emotional challenge Dylan posed was so profound. With a few wailing notes, he had asked: “Where precisely do you stand?”
In truth, the question was first asked at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, the day after “Like a Rolling Stone” had entered the American charts. Dylan came onstage with some members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, looking like an extra out of The Wild Bunch. He carried his Stratocaster like a Kalashnikov. On that occasion, the crowd was mainly folkies, as befits a folk festival. The new song (played badly) brought forth boos, tears, hysterics. A minuscule few cheered, but most sat in stunned silence. The air was thick with reproach: “Play folk music!” “Sell-out!” “Get rid of that band!” And epithets more abusive. Backstage, Pete Seeger, his face a deep purple, was shaking his head and kicking equipment. “I had never seen any trace of violence in Pete, except at that moment,” one witness remarked.43
Dylan left the stage, dripping sweat and disgust. Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary, acting as emcee, promised that Dylan would return by himself, accompanied only by an acoustic guitar. The audience was instantly forgiving, urging him back, as if time could be stopped, as if 1963 could be relived. Dylan obliged with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” then went straight into “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” The message of the latter was inescapable. Nevertheless, that strange encore left many Dylan fans confused. Dedicated folkies saw it as a farewell, the end of the end, but those prepared to accept the fact that times might actually be changing felt the encore strangely hypocritical, an act of submission by a man who supposedly knelt to no one.
The Janus-faced concerts continued for a year, incorporating the entire tour of Britain. Dylan, it seems, wasn’t actually being hypocritical; he was intentionally trying to stir his listeners, in the process asserting ownership of his music. Audiences mirrored the musical schism. They were, according to Greil Marcus, like “people who had come together to fight a cultural war . . . . Again and again fury coursed through the crowd like a snake, the wails of hate . . . beyond belief.” Protests in the United States had been angry and raucous; in Britain, they were all that and political too. British folkies, cultural Stalinists, believed that music was an extension of class and that groups like the Beatles were capitalist—or, worse, fascist—plots. They were Luddites who believed that by shouting loud enough they could smash the machine of pop music. After the Manchester concert, people were recruited from the folk clubs to protest; disgusted departures were carefully choreographed. In Sheffield, someone phoned in a bomb threat. In Scotland, the demonstrations were allegedly organized by the Communist party—allegedly. Whether or not they really were is beside the point, since the allegation demonstrates that some people genuinely believed Dylan had sold out to capitalism. Political oppression, the rules said, could be expressed only in folk harmonies.44
Today, Dylan explains his transformation not as an evolution but rather as a conscious change of direction. “The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden,” he wrote in his memoirs. “It was just too perfect. In a few years’ time a shit storm would be unleashed. Things would begin to burn. Bras, draft cards, American flags, bridges, too—. . . The national psyche would change and in a lot of ways it would resemble Night of the Living Dead. The road out would be treacherous, and I didn’t know where it would lead but I followed it anyway. It was a strange world ahead that would unfold, a thunderhead of a world with jagged lightning edges . . . . I went straight into it.” That explanation was as obscure as the message in many of Dylan’s songs, but understanding Dylan has never been easy. His fans, and indeed his detractors, have perpetually tried to simplify him, assigning him labels that conform to their preconceptions. He, on the other hand, has consciously defied understanding, the message being that to comprehend is to own, and he is not for sale. In this sense, the controversy sparked by his Stratocaster in 1965 is just one skirmish in the battle for Dylan.45
Dylan wrote “The Times They Are a-Changin’” in 1962, before most people quite realized that the times were changing. The world was grooving to Elvis, Chubby Checker, and the Everly Brothers, and here came a skinny Jewish kid from Minnesota, raising painful questions about the world and telling people that the answers were blowing in the wind. The world could handle a troubadour, but it was slightly uneasy about one who doubled as soothsayer. The really unsettling thing about Dylan was that he turned out to be right about so much—war, racism, hypocrisy, greed. He seemed to anticipate so eloquently all the problems of a troubled decade. No wonder, then, that people were quick to label him the voice of a generation.
What seemed a determined, perceptive voice back then was in fact a clarion of confusion. If there is inconsistency in Dylan’s political message (and quite clearly there is), it is because he had not himself come to any decisions: “As for what time it was, it was always just beginning to be daylight and I knew a little about history, too—the history of a few nations and states—and it was always the same pattern. Some early archaic period where society grows and develops and thrives, then some classical period where the society reaches its maturation point and then a slacking off period where decadence makes things fall apart. I had no idea which one of the three stages America was in.” “Dylan is to me the perfect symbol of the anti-artist in our society,” the folksinger Ewan MacColl once remarked, wearing his contempt on his sleeve. “He’s against everything—the last resort of someone who doesn’t really want to change the world.” That is the predictable wail of a man enslaved by his own pieties. MacColl sought purity in politics as much as in music. Dylan answered MacColl perfectly in “My Back Pages,” his stinging rebuke to those who discovered truth before the age of majority. For that matter, MacColl was also beautifully rebutted when Dylan first picked up his Stratocaster, an act that evoked the elusive-ness of certainty, not to mention the certainty of change. Principles, Dylan seemed to be saying, are the last resort of the small-minded. Rules are an obstacle to creativity. We all crave unambiguous truth but are forced to live in a world of nuance.46
“He was telling those who were listening a story they already knew,” Marcus wrote, “but in a manner that made the story new—that made the familiar unstable, and the comforts of familiarity unsure.” Marcus recalled a Joan Baez concert in 1963, when Dylan came onstage to sing a few songs:
I barely noticed the end of the show. I was transfixed. I was confused . . . . This person had stepped onto someone else’s stage, and while in some ways he seemed as ordinary as any of the people under the tent or the dirt around it, something in his demeanor dared you to pin him down, to sum him up and write him off, and you couldn’t do it. From the way he sang and the way he moved, you couldn’t tell where he was from, where he’d been, or where he was going—though the way he moved and sang made you want to know all of those things.
The confusion Dylan sowed made listeners all the more eager to label him. This wild force had to be put in a box—otherwise, he might blow apart the world. It seemed that Dylan was an extension of the chaotic times he sang about and that understanding him might bring order to chaos.47
“Dylan’s talent evoked such an intense degree of personal participation from both his admirers and detractors that he could not be permitted so much as a random action,” his friend Paul Nelson reflected. “Hungry for a sign, the world used to follow him around, just waiting for him to drop a cigarette butt. When he did they’d sift through the remains, looking for significance. The scary part is they’d find it.” Dylan struggled against the labels and the ever-intrusive analysis of random action. He took refuge in lies—partly to construct an image that suited his aspirations, more to build a barrier behind which to hide. During his first interview at Columbia Records, he claimed he’d come to New York on a freight train, because that is what folksingers were supposed to do. Later he lied about his age, his birthday, his hometown, the jobs he’d once had. He claimed he was an orphan, when in fact he had two devoted parents. Sowing confusion was Dylan’s way of retaining tide to himself. He scattered lies as he walked through life, in order to put off the cultural bloodhounds trying to track him down. “Well I try my best / To be just like I am, / But everybody wants you / To be just like them.” Though he sang about the world, he did not feel part of it. Writing meaningful songs was not an act of service, but a personal statement he felt he had to make because of who he was. “I knew that whatever I did had to be something creative, something that was me that did it, something I could do just for me.”48
His intense desire for privacy caused him to object violently to the labels fans lovingly assigned, even when those labels were accurate. He hated, for instance, being labeled a protest singer: “Topical songs weren’t protest songs. The term ‘protest singer’ didn’t exist, any more than the term ‘singer-songwriter.’ You were a performer or you weren’t, that was about it—a folksinger or not one. ‘Songs of dissent’ was a term people used, but even that was rare. I tried to explain later that I didn’t think I was a protest singer, that there’d been a screwup. I didn’t think I was protesting anything . . . . Rebellion spoke to me louder. The rebel was alive and well, romantic and honorable.” Dylan derided the bona fide protest singer Phil Ochs as a “singing journalist.” When asked for his political opinions, he reacted with outrage: “I’ll bet Tony Bennett doesn’t have to go through this kind of thing.” A well-meaning journalist who asked him to name his favorite protest singers got the bitingly sarcastic reply: Eydie Gorme and Robert Goulet. On another occasion, he insisted he was just a “song-and-dance man.” Fans of his topical songs wondered why he avoided singing specifically about Vietnam. Tired of being questioned as to whether that was omission or betrayal, he once snapped: “How do you know that I’m not, as you say, for the war?”49
Dylan deeply resented the fact that fame implied ownership, that fans expected something of him, assumed they were entitled to a piece of him. He recalled a telling incident at the Newport Folk Festival—one that seemed innocent at the time, but foreboding in retrospect:
Ronnie Gilbert, one of the Weavers, had introduced me, . . . saying, “And here he is . . . take him, you know him, he’s yours.” I had failed to sense the ominous forebodings in the introduction. Elvis had never even been introduced like that. “Take him, he’s yours!” What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn’t belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children whom I love more than anything else in the world. I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I’d ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of . . . . I was more a cowpuncher than a pied piper.
Dylan hated the way his songs became badges of faith, as if by revering the artist, by listening to his music, one could demonstrate political credibility. “I really was never any more than what I was—a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me. I wasn’t a preacher performing miracles.”50
In the years 1962 to 1964, Dylan matured faster than most artists do in a decade. The good causes he had so eloquently supported seemed not so simple and clear by 1964; he was, as he announced in “My Back Pages,” so much older then, so much younger now. He had also become disenchanted with liberalism, a disenchantment rudely and incoherently expressed when he accepted the 1963 Tom Paine Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. During his speech, he mentioned that he saw something of Lee Harvey Oswald in himself, a remark which, however profound, was far too ingenuous to be appreciated or understood at that particular moment. “Here were these people,” he later remarked, “who’d been all involved with the left in the Thirties and now they’re supporting civil rights drives. That’s groovy, but they also had minks and jewels, and it was like they were giving their money out of guilt . . . . These people at that dinner were the same as everybody else. They’re doing their time. They’re chained to what they’re doing.” Dylan, like the black nationalists and student protesters, had become disenchanted with white liberal America’s answer to social injustice, the answer that involved changing a few laws but avoided the much more important, and painful, assumption of guilt.51
Dylan had shifted from the political to the personal—or, in a manner the era would eventually appreciate, had made the personal political. He was attacking conformity by showing that the movement associated with change—the liberals—were as conformist as the rest. This was not just an attack upon the political culture, but also an assertion of independence from that culture. He was exhausted at having to act out a role America had assigned him: that of the protest singer and mouthpiece for his generation. His music would henceforth become more introspective and obscure, as if to frustrate those in search of meaning. The songs were carefully constructed labyrinths designed to foil those who sought the artist at their core. Meanwhile, his public utterances took on a tone of absurdity being calculated to confuse.
In a very personal sense, Dylan resented the way being famous meant that fans assumed they had open access to his life. He found himself imprisoned in his home in Woodstock, New York, having to resort to subterfuge and disguise just to be able to do the kinds of things ordinary people do ordinarily. “It would have driven anybody mad,” he reflected years later.
No place was far enough away. I don’t know what everybody else was fantasizing about, but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice. After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can’t buy it back . . . . Demonstrators found our house and paraded up and down in front of it chanting and shouting, demanding for me to come out and lead them somewhere—stop shirking my duties as the conscience of a generation.
In retrospect, looking at the soundtrack that Dylan provided for the Sixties, one is struck by its brevity. The songs that most people associate with the era were produced before 1965. By the time the decade laid claim to Dylan, he had already given up on it. “Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it,” he later reflected. When the news began to conform so vividly to the images he had earlier constructed, he turned away in horror: “The events of the day, all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul—nauseating me—civil rights and political leaders being gunned down, the mounting of the barricades, the government crackdowns, the student radicals and demonstrators versus the cops and the unions—the streets exploding, fire of anger boiling—the contra communes—the lying, noisy voices—the free love, the anti-money system movement—the whole shebang.” Dylan, having entered adulthood, was experiencing the inevitable shrinking of his world that every good parent and husband feels. “I was determined to put myself beyond the reach of it all. I was a family man now, didn’t want to be in that group portrait . . . . Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses.” However common that experience might be, it was not expected of one so holy as Dylan.52
Whether he liked it or not, Dylan was the voice of a generation, though not perhaps in the way people imagined. His admirers wanted him to express an opinion on every political controversy of the day, and treated his utterances as gospel, even when he was only joking. In a wider sense, however, his confusion and alienation, expressed so well in his songs, mirrored that of his generation. He tried to turn the personal into the political, but succeeded only in intertwining the two. Like his generation, he swayed between outrage at the injustices of his age and deep personal hurt at the betrayals felt in love. Like everyone else in the 1960s, and indeed in any age, he could never quite decide which—the personal or the political—was more important. That perhaps explains his longevity: had he kept to politics he would have quickly become a tiresome propagandist stuck in a bygone age.
In the aftermath of that fateful concert at Newport in 1965, Jim Rooney a musician and critic, wrote:
It was disturbing to the Old Guard . . . . Bob is no longer a neo-Woody Guthrie . . . . The highway he travels now is unfamiliar to those who bummed around . . . during the Depression. He travels by plane . . . . The mountains and valleys he knows are those of the mind—a mind extremely aware of the violence of the inner and outer world . . . . They seemed to understand that night for the first time what Dylan had been trying to say for over a year—that he is not theirs or anyone else’s and they didn’t like what they heard and booed . . . . Must a folk song be of mountains, valleys and love between my brother and sister all over this land? . . . The only one who questioned our position was Bob Dylan. Maybe he didn’t put it the best way. Maybe he was rude. But he shook us. And that is why we have poets and artists.
Who was, and is, Bob Dylan? It’s possible that his recent memoirs are just another attempt at obfuscation, more bricks in the wall of lies he has constructed to protect himself. But, then, perhaps it doesn’t really matter who he was, since his importance lies in the effect he had. He unintentionally became what people wanted him to be. Leaving aside his objections, it is the prerogative of any generation to choose its voice. He was a revolutionary, though perhaps a reluctant one. Mouthpiece or not, he was a genius-one who had the good fortune to live in a time when genius could still be recognized, cultivated, and appreciated.53
WOODSTOCK: A FESTIVAL, YES; A NATION, NO
Dylan lived in Woodstock, New York. He tried to keep that secret, but failed miserably. The Woodstock Festival of August 15–18, 1969, started out as a pilgrimage to the home of the prophet, yet that idea proved unrealizable, partly because Dylan despised pilgrims but mainly because the locals didn’t want half a million hippies destroying their Elysium. The name remained, but the concert actually took place in Bethel, New York, specifically on Max Yasgur’s farm.
The idea had originated three years earlier, when investment broker John Roberts met lawyer Joel Rosenman on a golf course. Both were New England preppies; both, bored with their mainstream jobs. While lining up a putt, they started brainstorming about exciting things to do with their trust funds. Over the following year, they considered quite a few hare-brained schemes, but finally settled upon an outdoor rock concert after linking up with Artie Kornfeld, a young, penniless producer at Capitol Records. “It sounds feasible,” Roberts said of the idea. “And not really all that risky. After all, how much trouble can you get into putting on a concert?”54
Naïveté provided a sturdy umbrella against a storm of trouble. Roberts and Rosenman agreed to put up $150,000 of their own money. Costs were estimated at $200,000. Since a crowd of 75,000 was expected, and admission pegged at $6.00 per day, logic suggested that the promoters would be rolling in money by the end. As it turned out, Kornfeld and his sidekick Michael Lang proved remarkably adept spenders, much of the money going for drugs and beautiful women.
Construction had already begun on a site near Wallkill when suddenly the local council refused a permit. Yasgur came to the rescue, offering his farm for $75,000. Then came a stampede of unanticipated complications. What were guests going to eat? Where would they pee? Where would all the sewage go? Who would provide security? Each answer cost money. In the midst of the planning, Abbie Hoffman summoned Rosenman to his office in New York City and threatened that his Yippie army stood ready to invade. “I don’t give a damn about your platform, your agenda,” he spat. “We’re going to bring this whole thing down around your ears, and if you don’t want us to do that you’ll write a check.” The word “extortion” was not mentioned, but it didn’t need to be. Rosenman wrote a check for $10,000.55
Shambolic management was completely camouflaged by sublime music, atmosphere, and drugs. Woodstock was turned into a myth long before a single hippie trampled Yasgur’s alfalfa. That myth was the creation of the organizers, who cleverly constructed a fantasy world in which a generation could indulge its dreams. That the myth eventually grew larger than the marketers ever intended is testimony to the imagination and sentimentality of the Sixties generation, a generation in thrall to the adolescent verities of rock and roll. Those who lived the fantasy, and those who pretended to do so, made Woodstock into the epiphany they wanted it to be. They saw an opportunity to celebrate the spirit of the Sixties, but also to graft that spirit onto the new decade fast approaching. The myth was deep and meaningful precisely because the Sixties dream was under assault.
By the eve of the event, 186,000 tickets had been sold, meaning that nearly $3.35 million dollars had been collected before a single note was played. That sort of money was enough to finance an impressive list of acts: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; the Who; Jimi Hendrix; Jefferson Airplane; Creedence Clearwater Revival; the Band; the Grateful Dead; Janis Joplin; Santana; and others. Their renown, in turn, ensured success for the concert film, where the real money was made.
Artists were attracted not because it promised to be a magical musical event, but rather because the money was good. The Who, for instance, steadfastly refused to take the stage until they were paid, a wise precaution in an era when producers regularly fleeced musicians. Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, et al. took their money, performed their music, and then called it “the worst gig we ever played.” It was made worse by the fact that Hoffman invaded the stage in the middle of “Tommy,” seized Daltrey’s microphone, and started ranting about a friend imprisoned for possession of drugs. Townshend kicked him in the rear and then hit him on the head with his guitar, sending him flying. “[It was] the most political thing I ever did,” he later confessed.56
The promoters realized that Woodstock’s appeal would be enhanced if concertgoers understood beforehand that they would not be prevented from smoking pot or dropping acid. The official attitude to drugs was utterly pragmatic: controlling a crowd of 200,000, some 90 percent of whom probably indulged, was impractical. Harmony, it was decided, would be easier to maintain if drug laws were momentarily ignored. Yet that harmony was quickly incorporated into the Woodstock myth—instead of something engineered by the promoters, it was assumed to have arisen from the assertive will of those who attended.
The organizers had anticipated an audience of 186,000; something closer to half a million showed up. That made it impossible to take entrance fees from everyone, so the managers gave up trying. That, too, was quickly incorporated into myth. The crowd assumed that capitalism had been overturned, that the event had been seized by the people. But the fact remains that the concert was already a financial success long before the capitalist gates were stormed. Gate-crashers pushed at an open door. Ironically, one of the main joists supporting the myth of Woodstock is the eponymous song by Joni Mitchell, who did not actually attend. Her manager feared that, due to the huge crowds on the roads, she would be unable to get out of Bethel in time to make a scheduled TV appearance to promote her latest record.
Mitchell’s song suggests a paradise. The reality was something closer to carnage. Torrential rain turned the field into a fetid swamp, made hellishly worse by inadequate toilet facilities. Due to incompetence or greed, there was not enough food or water for a crowd of half a million. The New York Times reported: “The dreams of marijuana and rock music that drew 300,000 fans and hippies to the Catskills had little more sanity than the impulses that drive the lemmings to march to their deaths in the sea. They ended in a nightmare of mud and stagnation that paralyzed Sullivan County for a whole weekend. What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?” On Sunday morning, the governor of New York State threatened to send in the National Guard. His decision to declare the festival a disaster area has been derided as politically motivated, but was in fact sensible, given the precariousness of the situation at the beginning of the third day. After a hasty meeting with concert organizers, who warned of riot if the site was cleared, the governor decided instead to deploy medical teams, a field hospital, and emergency food supplies, all flown in by US Army helicopters.57
Thanks primarily to their own incompetence, Roberts and Rosenman just barely broke even. The big money was made by the swindlers who fleeced them and particularly by those who produced the film. Newly emergent groups like Ten Years After benefited enormously from the publicity. Political radicals at first sensed that that was the whole point: they saw the festival as a clever scheme by the big record companies to sell their products. “Woodstock was absolutely appalling,” Townshend reflected. “I hated every minute of it. I thought it was a disgusting, despicable, hypocritical event. The most incredible duplicity everywhere. It was a commercial event.”58
Eventually, however, even hard-bitten cynics were anesthetized by myth. Dreamers decided that the concert was a brilliant demonstration of youth power. According to the Chicago underground newspaper The Seed, “Woodstock was . . . a massive pilgrimage to an electrified holy land where high energy communism replaced capitalism . . . because the immediate negative forces of the outside world, cops, rules, and prices had been removed or destroyed.” “With a joyous three-day shriek, the inheritors of the earth came to life in an alfalfa field outside the village of Bethel, New York,” Rolling Stone proclaimed. Before long, the myth was transformed into Woodstock Nation, a model of a harmonious community that would supposedly resonate around the world. One dreamer recalled: “Woodstock was a time of social change in human freedom and expression . . . . We learned not to be ashamed of our bodies in the nude, we smoked grass to expand our horizons with the music, we spent time with our kids and pets . . . . It was very much focused on a new standard for families . . . . That festival set the standard for peace, music, people, and expression and showed the world that all was not just violence and hatred . . . . It was LIFE!” “I realized I was part of something much bigger than myself, and my life changed,” another concertgoer wrote. Woodstock Nation seemed the perfect ending to the Heavenly Decade. It represented the epitome of freedom—free love, free drugs, freedom from repression—even the music seemed free. Belief in a new dawn was reinforced by the guru Swami Satchidananda who arrived by helicopter to bless the crowd. “The future of the whole world is in your hands,” he proclaimed. “You can make it or break it . . . . The entire world is going to know what American youth can do for humanity.” Believing in Woodstock Nation was an act of faith so transcendent that all the hype miraculously vanished, along with the extortionately expensive hot dogs.59
The myth has been sustained by those who want to believe that something special took place in the Sixties, reached its apotheosis at Woodstock, and then was systematically destroyed by the forces of reaction, repression, and greed. Central to the myth is the image of order, politeness, and good humor. In the film Woodstock, a local resident remarks: “I was here when the crowd really came in. We expected 50,000 a day, but there must have been a million. And the kids were wonderful. I had no kid that wasn’t ‘Sir this’ and ‘Sir that’ and ‘thank you this’ and ‘thank you that.’ Nobody can complain about the kids. This thing was too big, too big for the world. Nobody had seen a thing like this, and when they see this picture . . . they’ll really see something.” In fact, that was clever editing. For every local who praised the event there were probably a half dozen who hated it. “Do you want me to explain it in plain English?” one remarked. “A shitty mess—it’s a disgraceful mess.”60
“The older I get,” one concertgoer recalls, “I realize I was part of something with . . . far-reaching significance . . . . The whole time reflected something of great almost biblical importance.” The Woodstock myth is all the more powerful precisely because the spirit that inspired it dissipated so quickly. Suspended over an abyss of reality, believers cling to vines of sentiment, stubbornly chanting manufactured memory and pop doctrine. “Woodstock was not a concert,” one roseate rememberer attested years later. “This was a coming together . . . . The music was just the background music to our lives. We were doing what great men like our High Priest Timothy Leary had led us to do.”61
However bright the Woodstock myth, it was simply a myth. The festival itself was a flash of emotion confined by time and place. What resonated outward was simply hype. The stage had hardly been dismantled before exploiters invaded. “No sooner was there a Woodstock than there were a million natural-yogurt companies cropping up,” John Sebastian, lead singer of the Lovin’ Spoonful complained. “I think we are devourers of our own culture and cannibalized a lot of things that could have happened out of Woodstock. A media culture can absorb and regurgitate stuff so fast that it loses meaning almost before it’s out of the pot. Somehow every mood that was created was suddenly turned into a marketable item.” The dreamers who insisted on seeing the festival as a millennial vision were forced to ignore the fact that a large proportion of the crowd had to leave paradise early on Monday morning, long before Hendrix finished his set, in order to get to work on time. They were nine-to-fivers for whom hippie was hobby, not way of life. Yet their desire to believe was so strong that, many years later, they would be able to recall every note of Hendrix’s soul-shattering rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” even though, at the time, they were actually caught in an ugly traffic jam headed south.62