Acid Dreams: Part II “From Hip to Hippie”

Acid Dreams: Part II

“From Hip to Hippie”

Haight-Ashbury

• 1965: “A small psychedelic city-state was taking shape” (141)

• They had “cast aside the syndrome of alienation and despair that saddled many of their beatnik forebears” (142)

• Folk and jazz was replaced by rock and roll

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy_JXPixTRA

Family Dog“A Tribute to Doctor Strange”

Family Dog

• “Thoroughly stoned on grass and acid and each other, they rediscovered the crushing joy of the dance, pouring it all out in a frenzy that frequently bordered on the religious” (142)

The Free Concert

• “When rock music was performed with all its potential fury, a special kind of delirium took hold. Attending such performances amounted to a total assault on the senses: the electric sound washed in visceral waves over the dancers, unleashing intense psychic energies and driving the audience further toward public trance” (143)

The Trips Festival

“…a wide-open three-day LSD party with just about every sigh and sound imaginable” (143)

Jerry “Captain Trips” Garcia

“It was magic, far-out beautiful magic.” – Jerry Garcia

Scores of Local Bands Were Forming

• “Acid rock, as the San Francisco music was called, was unique not only as a genre but also as praxis…” (144)

• “To patrol the street in full regalia was an act of defiance, an open refusal to buy into the System” (145)

The King of Illicit LSD

• Augustus Owlsey Stanley III– Had visited Millbrook– Went to the Kesey

parties– Became a patron of the

Grateful Dead

• “The unofficial mayor of San Francisco”

Arraigned in 1967

Deifying LSD

• Optimism ruled the early days….

• People saw LSD itself as capable of “ushering in the Kingdom of heaven on earth”

The Ban

• California banned the use of LSD on 10/6/66

• “We were not guilty of using illegal substances…we were celebrating transcendental consciousness” - Allen Cohen of the Psychedelic Shop (149)

Love Pageant Rally, 1966

SCARE HEADLINES• “Girl, 5, eats LSD and goes wild”

• “A monster in our midst – a drug called LSD”

• “Thrill drug warps minds, kills”

• Politicians issued pronouncements against the drug… hoping to ride the coattails of a FULL LSD PANIC that was sweeping the land

Public Enemy Number One

• Lee and Schlain: “…all of a sudden the press conjured up the frightening prospect of couples giving birth to some kind of octopus because LSD had scrambled their chromosomes” (154)

Vice or Dissidence?• Octavio Paz claimed the real reason hallucinogens were

banned was because authorities were trying to stamp out dissidence

• Repressive controls have usually targeted drugs identified with the poor and with racial minorities in times of crisis

• With psychedelics, it was largely well-educated whites of privileged background (153)

Bad Trips?

• How many?

• About 50% reported having had at least one bad trip

• How much was due to the hostile climate – the creation of a negative set and setting

1967

• The First Human Be-In– Herb Caen coins the term

“hippies”– “Flower-children” and “love

generation”– “Hippies became The Other,

the very people ‘our parents warned us against,’ and this negative definition quickly congealed into a national obsession” (163)

– Ronald Reagan on hippies

The Human Be-In

The Choice, according to Watts:To Drop Out or Take Over

• Tim Leary: “The choice is between being rebellious and being religious”

SDS and SNCC

• Trying to create alternative structures within “the loving community”

• Harkening back to IWW: “forming a new society within the shell of the old”

The Summer of Love

• Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco (Be sure to wear flowers in your hair)

• But… “The early days of acid glory had receded into memory” (178)

Summer of Contrasts

• “America’s war against the Vietnamese had swollen into a disaster” (179)

• “The black ghettoes of Detroit and Newark had exploded in the summer heat”

• “Aretha Franklin belted out her anthem for women and oppressed minorities: ‘All I want is a little respect…’” (179)

Summer of Love

Jimi Hendrix

1967: Summer of Violence

Detroit Newark

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Paul McCartney told Life: “[LSD] opened my eyes… It made me a better, moreHonest, more tolerant member of society” (181)

• “It is difficult to overstate the record’s importance in galvanizing the acid subculture. For the love generation, Sgt. Pepper was nothing less than a revelation” (182)

• But… the Beatles eventually jumped off the Magical Mystery Tour for a fling with the Maharishi

• “’Acid is not the answer,’ said George Harrison. ‘It’s enabled people to see a bit more, but when you really get hip, you don’t need it’” (184)

The Spiritualizing of America?• The “Easternization of the

West”

• How much was superficial?

• Nirvana, karma, maya… did most people who used these words know what they were talking about?

Esalen and the Counterculture

“Where spirituality was born?” - The very prospect of being “spiritual butnot religious” was introduced here.

The Dark Side Emerges• Power trippers, hustlers,

ripoff artists proliferate

• “Call it acid fascism or plain old psychological warfare, the hippie community had degenerated to the point where it merely offered a different setting for the same destructive drives omnipresent in straight society” (186)

Exodus from the Haight

• The end of the Summer of Love

• The Diggers staged a funeral: “The death of the hippie” (191)

By October 1967

• “…cops patrolled the area (Haight-Ashbury) in riot gear, roughing up longhairs and busting young people indiscriminately” (192)

The East Village

• The New York Be-In

• “… a combination of runaways, tourism, and Mafia heroin destroyed a creative scene that had been many years in the making” (195)

• “The decimation of the East Village and the Haight might have been the final chapter of a unique phase in cultural history if not for the profound impact these communities had on American society as a whole. Like a cueball scattering the opening shot, the media laser beam broke up the energy cluster…and spread the psychedelic seed throughout the country” (195)

Madison Avenue

• The advertising industry appropriates the psychedelic culture

• “The media would be deeply implicated in everything that happened thereafter” (200)