cineSOURCE magazine

Summer of Love Shows, Movies & Festivals Beg Question: What Went Wrong with Hippie Intellectuals?
by Doniphan Blair

Dead Heads turn out for Jerry Day during San Francisco's 50th Summer of Love Anniversary. photo: D. Blair

THE FRUITS OF SAN FRANCISCO'S
Summer of Love are still being relished by raja rock guitarists in Pakistan, Brazilian hippies and old Grateful Dead fans, like Minnesota's Senator Al Franken or the overweight longhairs decked out in their finest tie-dye for Jerry Garcia Day. Held on August 6th, Jerry Day has happened annually for 15 years in an amphitheater built for The Dead's lead guitarist in a park near his childhood home in southern San Francisco.

There’s also the Rainbow Family, a loose affiliation of hippies, alternative thinkers and road dogs, who’ve been gathering for a free festival every fourth of July since 1972 in a national park paradise, often over objections from park authorities or Native Americans.

About six thousand Rainbowers did so again this year, I was honored to witness (full disclosure: it was my sixth; I started in 1976, Montana). Held in a gorgeous glade in the mountains east of Bend, Oregon, their shouts of “welcome home” and "love you," ecstatic drum circles and proclivity for hugs, psychedelics and Rainbow folk songs appeared unchanged by the intervening half century, although the sanitation, kitchens and performances had improved markedly, while marijuana was legalized in Oregon in 2015.

In the meantime, however, most of us in San Francisco are the shoemaker’s children—going barefoot, but not by choice this time.

Article author, Doniphan Blair, enjoying and filming a Rainbow Festival in New Mexico, 1977. photo: N. Blair

Although the Bay Area has plenty of musical talent, from avant-rocker K. Flay to the Stu Allen Band, which did a great job of raising The Dead on Jerry Day, there’s a startling absence of vestiges of the musical Mecca that once was.

The San Francisco Sound—a farrago of rock, psychedelia, blues, country AND jazz—went pop in the summer of 1967 with two top-ten hits, Jefferson Airplane’s “All You Need Is Love” and then their “White Rabbit”, both brought to the band by Grace Slick (the first penned by her brother-in-law, Darby Slick). They captured two central concerns of the oddly-named Haight neighborhood, or Haight-Ashbury (from its cross streets), as well as young people world-wide: love and enlightenment or, its more common aspects, sex and drugs.

To be sure, there were other pressing problems, like civil rights and the Vietnam War, and many people dis the hippies as dead and gone or of little value in the first place, starting most vociferously in the late-’70s with the punks.

A half-century later, however, it's pretty easy to see that, after the genocidal 1940s and the film-noir ‘50s, the hippies, musicians and mystics of the '60s delivered on the 19th century's romantic dreams, bringing to the masses methods as well as visions of love, poetry, adventure and inner, spiritual freedom.

Outer or legal freedom, however, was the job of the related—if sometimes with opposing concerns—civil rights movement. Indeed, simultaneous to the Summer of Love, just across the Bay Bridge in Oakland, the Black Panthers were emerging as a political powerhouse with their "police monitoring" and cinematic takeover of the California State Assembly in Sacramento, the first of May—NOT A SHOT FIRED!

Sadly, many shots were fired that summer in over one hundred riots/uprisings nationwide, although not in Oakland, notably. A year later, young people did much the same in Paris and Prague, the latter with severe Soviet consequences.

The Airplane (lf-rt), Paul Kantner, Marty Balin, Grace Slick, Jorma Kaukonen, Spencer Dryden, Jack Casady, '67. photo: courtesy Jefferson Airplane

Even in the middle of another civil rights moment, however, trying to “free yourself from mental slavery,” as singer, artist and marijuana-enthusiast Bob Marley put it, remains valid. The 77-year-old Slick, looking good after battles with alcoholism, signaled as much when she belted out, in perfect pitch, her hits at the 50th Anniversary concert in the City's Golden Gate Park—held on June 21st, the summer solstice.

While best friends The Airplane and The Dead were the pop and psychedelic lodestars, the SF Sound had a ridiculous number and range of acts. In addition to the emotive, often-explosive Janis Joplin and her agile band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, which she NEVER should have left (leader Peter Albin was anti-drug, others had jazz roots and their '68 album, “Cheap Thrills”, went to #1 on the Billboard charts!), there was Quicksilver Messenger Service, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, It’s a Beautiful Day, Moby Grape, The Steve Miller Band, Country Joe and the Fish and The Sons of Champlin, not mention the all-women Ace of Cups or, across the Bay, in sleepy El Cerrito, soon to best them all with 16 chart-topping singles IN A ROW, Creedence Clearwater Revival.

The Sound and the Haight were no surprise if you consider the San Francisco Renaissance, noted many observers including local jazz critic, author and art activist Ralph Gleason.

Emerging in the late '40s around the poet Kenneth Rexroth, the SF Renaissance came to include abstract impressionist painters, Zen practitioners, art filmmakers, dancers, thespians and therapists, although it was beatnik authors like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman who put it on the front page. Along with popularizing modernist writing, the beats pioneered the public expression of queer, dope and world-traveler culture (see Bill Morgan's comprehensive "The Typewriter is Holy", 2007, or his new book of Ginsberg lectures).

With rock and roll the new poetry and San Francisco reigning supreme, the astute Gleason founded Rolling Stone Magazine with Jann Wenner in the fall of ‘67, a few months after he helped produce the first Monterey Pop Festival, ushering some of those musicians into the national spotlight.

The rockumentary “Monterey Pop” ('68), commissioned by ABC but cancelled for being too crazy—notably The Who and Jimi Hendrix destroying their guitars, was finished as an indie by director D.A. Pennebaker and soon considered a masterpiece. Joplin was shot twice, if for good reason: her first performance was inferior AND she was the queen of the summer.

Voted the ugliest girl at her Texas college, Janis Joplin became the queen of the Summer of Love and star of Monterey Pop. photo: Elaine Mayes

The San Francisco Sound continued for years in a various Bay Area venues, Dead descendant bands, after Jerry died in 1995, and Carlos Santana’s hit album “Supernatural” four years later, as well as Acid Punk and neo-Psychedelia world-wide, but not much of that spirit or sound remains here today.

“We’ve definitely experienced a downturn,” I was told by Lynn Schwarz, co-owner of renown SF indie rock club, Bottom of the Hill (see cS article). “Techies don’t go out.”

Ironically, the term "personal computer" started with Stuart Brand, author of "The Whole Earth Catalog" (1968-), the hippie bible which brought new tools and ideas to the people, and empowered the alt-lifestyle and back-to-the-land movements.

People power, dropping acid and traveling to India also inspired Silicon Valley titans like Steve Jobs, a story well told by NY Times reporter John Markoff in “What the Dormouse Said” (2006), which is a quote from Slick's “White Rabbit”. Although the digital revolution certainly changed the world and rates as one of the '60s greatest outcomes, it has been all about machines, while the Dormouse said what? "Feed your head!"

Secondly, even our nostalgia has been parsimonious—kind of kooky considering the super-rich Silicon Valley has migrated north and gentrified San Francisco into one of the nation's priciest cities, hardly a place for hippies, unless you count some of the enormous homeless population camped out under our freeways.

“The Summer of Love show at the Albert Hall [in London] was MUCH bigger and better than this,” complained the sixty-something English hippie I met at the “Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock & Roll”, at the De Young Museum, which sits in the middle of Golden Gate Park.

I had to agree with him, having found some critical issues under- or unrepresented, although it was still a substantial show (and why they kept up only 'til August 20th is beyond me).

Young women 'tripping out' at the De Young Museum's 50th Anniversary Summer of Love show. photo: D. Blair

Fortunately, there’s a smaller, more personal take called “On the Road to the Summer of Love” curated by local historian Dennis McNally at the California Historical Society, on Mission near Third, up until September 24th.

“At the end of the show, [the Albert Hall] had an enormous room full of bean bag chairs,” the English hippie carried on, his voice rising and drawing stares. “With film projected on the walls and the music blasting, you could trip out for hours, MAN!”

The De Young also had a “trip room,” where two young Asian-American women were taking the opportunity to "trip out" when I walked through, but it was medium-sized and mid-show, and the last room was yet more posters and fashion.

Which left me wondering, what '60s story were they trying to tell? Was it consonant with what happened? What does it all actually mean historically, philosophically?

The art part of the show, which might have offered some answers, featured little of note aside from a lovely Lawrence Jordan film, consisting of cut-up old etchings animated surrealistically. There was nothing from Bruce Conner, arguably our greatest alt-filmmaker, and only one sculpture, “Snore” (1960), not his best, although appropriately named, odd for a museum that once owned his seminal and shocking “Child” (1959). Plus his work is THE antidote to “hippie art” (see cS article).

Poster for Grateful Dead and James Cotton show by Wes Wilson, '68. illo: W.Wilson

There were, however, hundreds of fantastic posters, almost all of which rate as fine art, given they're so striking and their visuals so dominate their text. Technically speaking, however, they’re graphic art, highlighting a philosophical fight from back in the day, since the ‘60s were all about breaking barriers between performer and audience and art and craft as well as races, classes, creeds and genders.

I learned this first hand when my brother, Nicholas, and I and other members of The Modern Lovers Commune started Ancient Currents Gallery near Pine and Webster streets in San Francisco in 1976 (see cS story). It was thrilling to open art curation to amateurs, outsiders and avant-gardists but that ethos ultimately cut into the creation of truly high art—as opposed to the stoned variant—which was desperately needed at the time.

The Ancient Currents archive contains a telling portfolio of “acid art.” It consists of paintings of obsessive doodles, peace symbols and the other icons graffitied across the Haight when it imploded in what can be called “The Fall of Love” (1968-71).

In honor of ‘60s egalitarianism, however, the De Young offered a detailed explanation of the offset lithography used to print all those posters. There were so many shows, it required a mass mobilization of strippers—not the naked kind, but the technicians, often women and radicals, able to do press camera-ready as well as the presspeople and artists themselves: Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso, Wes Wilson, Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin and Robert Crumb, among others.

The museum certainly showcased their success, except for Crumb, who became world-famous despite an irascible, over-sexed personality, eventually trading two notebooks of drawings for a small chateau in France before tackling "The Bible" in “Genesis” (2009)—talk about hubris but it’s gorgeous!

Bizarrely, there was not one of Crumb’s iconic Zap Comic characters—Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont, White Man, Angelfood McSpade, Keep on Truckin' Man, almost all of which came to him on a single acid trip in ‘67—and only one modest poster (he was probably too prickly for much “poster prostitution”).

Robert Crumb's first comic book, 'Zap Comix 0' rocked the Haight, then the US in '68. illo: R.Crumb

The San Francisco Poster Look borrowed the big-serifed type of the Old West, ubiquitous around the young gold-rush city, and squeezed and liquefied it to near illegibility. While the female nudes and landscapes could wax archaic or Maxfield Parrish, image and type usually melded into an aggressive, unified aesthetic, a graphic shot heard ‘round the world.

Next to all those posters, however, the museum placed hippie designer fashion on skinny manikins—“oddly repulsive,” according to my friend, graphic artist Jeff Walker. Mark Bode, artist and son of underground cartoonist Vaugh Bode, who grew up amidst it all, “wanted to see more of stuff like Jimi Hendrix wore, Jim Morrison wore—that kind of thing,” (see cS interview). Missing for me was enough average hippie chick chic: the work boots, long floral skirts, beads and colorful Guatemalan “huipils", which can still thrill this elderly hippie today.

The show could have used an oversized Mr. Natural, a life-sized "headshop," where you could peruse the "hippie arts and crafts" (pipes, posters, beads, underground comics), or a wall-sized shot of the Be-In, which triggered the Summer of Love in January, '67. Although those would have been nice, the longueurs in fine art, filmmaking and philosophy were an egregious error, in my opinion, though that did reflect the hippie focus on music, fashion and craft.

Fostering the higher arts was a problem we addressed at Ancient Currents Gallery (1976-87) with recitals by beatnik poets Bob Kaufman and Allen Cohen, concept shows like the Fuck Art, Art War and Anti-Art shows (the latter with a piece by a hand-less Indian artist, done with his feet) and border-breaking art, in general. Overseas connection became our theme: artists or artisans from faraway, local artists who traveled there or embodied the spirit. At our height, we had Huichol yarn paintings from Mexico (our best seller), my brother's India photos and then Linda Conner’s, followed by a well-known Indian painter, Om Prakash Sharma, see cS article.

A meditative piece by neo-Tantric Indian artist, Om Prakash Sharma, shown at Ancient Currents Gallery,1984. illo: OP Sharma

“We are all artists and shamans—we’re breaking the paradigm, MAN!” were noble notions and do-able to degrees. But the lawyer who self-defends has a fool for a client, as the saying goes, and similar holds true for communities or movements vis-a-vis their artists, philosophers and mystics. We needed penetrating, precognitive art and ideas more than ever, we concluded at Ancient Currents, which required visionaries and professionals.

Not to mention, the hippies had already anointed their art saints, whom they called rock stars.

The evolution of local “guitar god” Jerry Garcia, who grew up in San Francisco’s Excelsior District, from bluegrass picker to psychedelic pioneer, who ran off with Mountain Girl, Ken Kesey’s woman (they’d already split but the symbolism remained), and who became the nominal leader of the greatest jam band ever—the riff that launched a thousand trips—is beautifully detailed in the new film, “Long Strange Trip”.

By Amir Bar-Lev, a Berkeley boy with a few docs under his belt (“The Tillman Story", 2010), with production help from Martin Scorsese (a rock-doc king), Justin Kreutzmann (son of a Dead drummer) and more, it had a one-day, nation-wide theatrical release in May before streaming off Amazon.

An artist and rebel since youth, Jerry studied painting as a teen at the San Francisco Art Institute before turning monomaniacally to guitar, in large part because he had endured big losses early: the top of his right middle finger to a wood chopping accident, then his father, a Spanish immigrant and professional musician, to a swimming accident, both before he was six. Indeed, death emerged regularly in his art, starting with his band name.

Jerry schooled the band's first players—guitarist Bobby Weir was 17 when he joined, bassist Phil Lesh was a trumpeter studying composition—and led the songwriting with lyricist Robert Hunter, although Weir and lyricist John Barlow would eventually pen famous Dead songs like "Sugar Magnolia" and "Trucking".

Jerry Garcia works his way into a free concert in Golden Gate Park, 1968. photo: courtesy The Grateful Dead

“Long Strange Trip” features lots of observations from the venerable, voluble Dennis McNally, who became The Dead’s biographer in 1980 and publicist four years later, and wrote the equally-fascinating and long—the film is four hours, the book 684 pages—Dead bio by the same name (2002).

No wonder McNally, who also did a book about Kerouac (earning him his first meeting with Jerry), became the go-to guy for Summer of Love interviews. His rational overview makes for a great romp through the beat and hippie world, as I enjoyed recently at his lovely Mission District Victorian (see cS interview). Criticized for subject proximity, McNally appeared equally at home soaring in the stratosphere of music and ideas as getting down in the nitty-gritty of drugs, sex and group dynamics.

“One night in Munich there was a confrontation," he writes, "between Lesh and [Bill] Kreutzmann on the one hand and the management—[longtime manager Jon] McIntire… and [rock promoter Rock] Scully—on the other, a ‘knock-down-drag-out’... Kreutzmann was part of what John Barlow called the ‘neo-cocaine cowboy aesthetic’ that characterized one chunk of the crew, and this aesthetic had no affinity for an intellectual like McIntire. After plenty of abuse, McIntire had enough and quit.”

Garcia had little interest weighing in on this or most other disputes. Excess interference would contradict the communal living he enjoyed in the early Haight, the band maintained thru out, touring with one of the largest road clans in rock, and first practiced at the “acid tests” organized by Ken Kesey.

Author of the best-selling “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1962), Kesey and his crew, The Merry Pranksters, concocted much of hippiedom by '64, from van-living and -painting to tie-die and America-flag wearing, as well as communal living, street theater and prodigious psychedelics. They became not just the eight-lane bridge to the beats, who lived in San Fran’s North Beach, but super-hippies themselves, as excellently elucidated in Alison Ellwood’s doc “Magic Trip” (2011) with lots of Prankster-shot footage and cool animation, see cS article.

The Prankster bus, Further, which Kesey resurrected and toured the country in shortly before he died at 66 in 2001. photo: courtesy K. Kesey

Neal Cassady, the great vagabond and seducer but also thinker—he wrote the 1947 “Long Letter” from Denver, inspiring the first major poem from Ginsberg ("Howl", '58) and Kerouac's still fantastically-popular, if overrated, "On the Road"('59), AND he became Jack's road spirit guide—literally drove The Prankster bus, Further, on their three-week, drug-addled, America-cleaving jaunt from Oregon to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, Kesey in American-flag drag the duration.

The Acid Tests were religiously open. Everyone, including Kesey, bought a ticket (a buck, acid included) and the audience was most of the show. The Dead didn’t play the whole time or at all, if they weren’t feeling it, understandable in that they didn’t have much trip or even original material back then. When Garcia and Hunter started writing psychedelic hits like “Dark Star” and “St. Stephen”, they really blew minds and staked out an ethereal community.

Dead egalitarianism emerged in their identity as a people-pleasing dance band with a penchant for playing free concerts and paying top wages to their roadies, who often had to get up at 6 am—torture for hippies—to unload up to five tractor-trailers and build what became the biggest and best sound system in rock.

“They work so we can play,” quips Jerry in “Long Strange Trip” (the film), which features a lot from Ramrod, head roadie and virtual band member. “The voice of god,” as Lesh called it, was critical to delivering their art to their audience at the highest possible quality—clearly audible one mile away at outdoor venues.

Alas, attending an Acid Test or Dead concert while tripping balls on lysergic acid diethylamide distilled to 100% purity by Stanley “Bear” Owsley—street acid’s first great chemist and entrepreneur (he financed The Dead and designed and built their “wall of sound")—was not always warm and fuzzy. Indeed, LSD's "bad trip" side was well-known in the '60s, although current remembrances often omit that, another serious memory lapse.

Probably wilder than it looks: '65 acid test with The Grateful Dead. photo: courtesy Grateful Dead

Kesey, who researched acid first hand as a subject in early Stanford University studies, prepared visitors to his bus or house in Menlo Park (later La Honda, in the hills above Silicon Valley) for acid's shamanist or psychosis-inducing effects with the slogan “Never trust a Prankster.” Visitors soon learned, in Dead houses or hotel rooms as well: Never put anything into your mouth—WHATSOEVER—if you don’t want to trip.

Sometimes you had no choice, like during the coke-acid wars predicted by author, futurist and stone-cold junkie William Burroughs. When The Dead community got into cocaine in the ‘70s, individuals opposing that pharmacological turn of events would sit at the stage door with a bottle of acid insisting all who wished entry take a hit—enforced psychedelia, now there’s a contradiction in terms.

Fortunately, most people were accustomed to epic, elephant-slaying amounts in accord with Dr. Timothy Leary’s mantra: “Turn on, tune in and drop out.” As corny as it sounds, it was revolutionary. “If there is going to be a drug war,” he explained, “I want to be on the winning side." While referring to Soviets dosing us from the sky and why he accepted CIA funding, acid's mental gymnastics, when used properly, helps prepare users for a schizophrenic snap, institutionalization or other alternate realities—making "And learn how to handle it" a good addendum to Leary's epigram.

For this reason, LSD proved a poor truth serum or behavior modifier, as the CIA rep to Nixon's “Plumbers” tried to explain to G. Gordon Liddy, who knew Leary from busting him as a New York State district attorney.

Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, later LSD prophet, and his colleague Richard Alpert, later Hindu mystic Baba Ram Dass. photo: courtesy T. Leary

Leary was arrested dozens of times, in fact, compared to zero for his Harvard associate Richard Alpert, who became the Hindu mystic and "kindness" advocate, Baba Ram Dass, see the interesting-if-not-great “Dying to Know: Ram Dass and Timothy Leary” (2015) or Dass's brilliant AND beautifully-designed book, "Be Here Now" ('68), which turned on a generation to anti-materialism, Indian culture and Eastern thought.

Leary got twenty years for two joints in California, until he shimmied 200 feet of cable over a prison wall near San Louis Obispo. He ended up in Algeria, dosing younger members of the Black Panthers legation while arguing with their chief, Eldridge Cleaver. Notably upbeat, even glamorous, throughout, “Leary was never less than a gentleman, even while being arrested," remarked Liddy. They became friends, in fact, doing a “Fed versus Head” debate routine on the college circuit in the ‘90s—history returning as farce.

Leary didn't get on well with Kesey and other West Coasters, however, who opposed what they saw as his Harvard-shrink attitude, his over-organized “set and setting”—the opposite of their “free acid to the people,” and his inflated ego, which LSD was supposed to cure.

Fortunately, Ram Dass overcompensated, going way beyond his identity as a rich kid, professor and closeted gay to build the neo-mysticism movement, Hindu-style, and bring its ideas west, a godsend for those of us who traveled to, or were inspired by, India.

Another powerful metaphysical system was neo-shamanism, notably as outlined by Carlos Castaneda in “The Teachings of Don Juan” (1968) and his three following books. About the "sorcerer's path"—take full responsibility, live life with "death on your left" and psychotropic plant use, Castaneda was read religiously across South as well as North America.

Jerry with Robert Hunter (rt), circa 1964, before he gave up playing to become The Dead's lyricist. photo: courtesy GD archive

Critiques that he made it all up are rebutted by McNally with: "The point is made, whether it is literally true or metaphorically true." Castaneda's veracity is also evinced in his prose styling, which sucks while his Don Juan quotes are pithy brilliance; his shamanist theory, which is in accord with similar practices; and his basic precepts, which are simple enough for a box top or a runaway bestseller, like "The Four Agreements" (M. Ruiz, 2003).

But these philosophies—intellectual, anarchic and mystical psychedelicism—were but three of many vying for ‘60s consciousness. Ultimately, the most influential thinkers were musicians, especially John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with their romantic, sophisticated and visionary songsmithing, and Bob Dylan, with his protests, irony and Old Testament poetics.

While health food hit in the early 1900s and organic farming with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" in '62, more complex hippie philosophies were derrived from Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, the radical Germans who opened psychiatry and civilization to emotions and sex; the human potential movement typified by Big Sur's Esalen Institute; the Zen Buddhists led by Bay Area England-transplant Alan Watts and beat poet Gary Snyder; and social revolutionaries like the Black Panthers' Cleaver and Huey P. Newton, the Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Ruben, and others.

Many Bay Area musicians participated in protests: Country Joe and the Fish were famous for their activism; The Airplane song “Volunteers of America” called for revolution, albeit with dancing; Weir drew raised-fist icons on The Dead's bass drums; and the band played more free concerts than anyone.

And so Garcia became a leading voice, although he said little, avoided politics and floated above controversy, while Hunter withdrew from public view. They even became a “friend of the devil,” as noted in their eponymous song and actual friendships with moderate Hell’s Angels. “The Hell’s Angels happened because of freedom,” Garcia explains in “Long, Strange Trip” (the film). “They are a manifestation of what freedom is, in essence.”

The Altamont concert: Jagger headed in and Jerry out—he declined to play what he saw as a fiasco, November '69. photo: unknown

With Lesh’s pounding harmonic bass, Weir’s jazz-like chords and the thundering herd of two drummers, Kruetzmann and Mickey Hart, plus Garcia’s soaring solos and Hunter's enigmatic lyrics, The Dead combined danceable rhythms with the best of American rock, notably Dylan and The Band, after they moved on from aggressive psychedelia to their most popular albums, “Working Man’s Dead” and “American Beauty” (released only five months apart in '70!), while retaining it in their jams.

Their jams got them in with Miles Davis, who started touring the rock circuit extensively and it was “ridiculous to have open for us," noted Jerry. Miles, in turn, was impressed with Jerry's jazz fluency, which he put to good use during The Dead's hiatus around '75, gigging with his old friend, SF jazz keyboardist Merle Saunders. Indeed, the free-est rock available, except for Captain Beefheart and a few others, was The Dead jamming or Miles fusing cool jazz, Indian and Brazilian music and Hendrix, whom he admired unabashedly.

The Rolling Stones also liked The Dead, if as openers, especially after they hit on the idea of doing a free concert in San Francisco at the end of their '69 tour, to give back to the people as well as the filmmakers they had in tow. Mick Jagger—ever the edge-pushing bad-boy, despite being so often eclipsed by his own guitarist, Keith Richards—enlisted The Dead, the free concert experts, to make arrangements and play, along with The Airplane and Santana, perhaps to prove that, even in the hippie epicenter, The Stones were the world's greatest band.

Held at Altamont race track, 40 miles east of the City, it was a clusterfuck from the get-go, riddled with venue changes, poor prep, a 300,000-strong crowd and 100 Hell’s Angels “hired” as “security” for 100 cases of beer. When apprised of the situation, The Dead simply up and left, leaving The Stones, authors of another devil song, to reap the whirlwind.

Jagger delayed his performance, including the climactic “Sympathy for the Devil”, until sunset, despite the crazies cramming close to the three-foot, jerry-built stage flanked by rows of Angel bikes. Jagger wanted a night look, as did the Maysles brothers, the master documentarians (see cS article), who were making what would be the third in the titanic tryptic of docs on the rise and fall of the hippie empire: “Monterey Pop”, the Oscar-winning “Woodstock” ('70) and their “Gimmie Shelter” ('70), which finally showed the '60s' “naked lunch," as Burroughs would say.

In the film, Jagger and Richards (who fit in fine at Altamont, crashing in the Hog Farm tent the night before, while Jagger retreated to a luxury suite) repeatedly review footage of the stabbing of a well-dressed black man, Meredith Hunter, right in front of the stage, by a Hell's Angel (who got off on self-defense since Hunter was seen waiving a gun). Airplane’s Marty Balin was knocked out by an Angel, twice; Stephen Stills was stabbed with a poker; and The Stones essentially played for their lives, quite well, apparently.

William Burroughs in Tangiers, Morocco ('54), where he wrote the notes assembled into 'Naked Lunch' by Ginsberg, the great beat booster as well as poet. photo: courtesy W. Burroughs

Three others died by accident, the same as Woodstock but, along with the Manson Family's murders of Sharon Tate and friends three months earlier, Altamont came to iconize the end of the ‘60s: The Fall of Love.

“Altamont was the little bit of sadism in your sex life, that The Rolling Stones put out in their music, coming back,” surmised Stephen Gaskin, the Haight’s best-known spiritual teacher, whom McNally quotes before reverting to Robert Hunter: “There has to be education, and the education has to come from the poets and musicians, because it has to touch the heart rather than the intellect.”

Kesey, for his part, had returned to Oregon four years before. Although he never added to his scene-shaking oeuvre, which included “Sometimes a Great Notion” ('64), considered by some superior to "Cuckoo's Nest", he wrote essays and plays and became a family man and farmer, helping his brother Chuck, who started the creamery making Nancy’s Yogurt.

And so, Garcia ended up the face of the psychedelic revolution, the benevolent Buddha grinning out from his beard, renouncing responsibility for everything save his solos, which were monumental, dominating Dead songs and directing the jams from tune to tune—a trademark trick few bands could attempt, let alone accomplish.

When I first saw The Dead (Brooklyn Academy of Music, March 21, 1972, spring equinox), whacked-out on windowpane, flat on my back between front-row seats, I was amazed how Jerry could build the jam into a chugging, fugging monster-machine only to introduce another melody and play one against the other until the band switched over. In Miami one time, McNally recalled, they jammed between three tunes before playing them straight, replete with rich harmonies—which was difficult for The Dead but which they strove for and often achieved, rather sweetly.

It was that musical journey which so intrigued the Dead Heads, who started following the band around the country and then the world in the 1980s. If California-governor Ronald Reagan became president to lead a counterrevolution against the '60s, The Dead were the counter-counterrevolution. Indeed, their second bounce was much bigger than their first and featured their first top-ten hit, "Touch of Grey" ('84). As Jerry repeatedly explained, as the band and their fans came to be widely covered (from “Long, Strange Trip”, the film):

'Short Term Pain Equals Long Term Gain' poster by Doniphan Blair. illo: D. Blair

“I think now, in the 1980s, The Grateful Dead represents something like hopping railroads. Something like being 'on the road,' like Kerouac. You can’t do those things any more but you can be a Dead Head. You can get in your van and go with the other Dead Heads across the United States. ‘Now that looks like fun.’ I think that is what motivates the audience now, the spirit, being able to go out and have an adventure in America."

The Dead Heads included Deaf Heads holding large balloons to feel the sound, Spinners trancing out and visualizing Jerry as an actual deity, and Tapers capturing the audio adventure for later enjoyment, which spawned a huge tape trading scene.

“Once we’re done with it, they can have it,” remarked Jerry. Indeed, the Dead originated performance-based business models, essential after digital decimated the recording industry. To make their nut, they played up to 100 shows a year for almost 30 years, some up to five hours long, especially in the late-'70s, although most about two hours.

The Dead eventually sold some 35 million records, repaying the massive investment into recording them (it takes time to tape improv, particularly while tripping) made by Warner Brothers, where their long-suffering exec ran around the office shouting when they finally delivered “Working Man’s Dead” in 1970, with its radio-friendly “Casey Jones”. Combining an old folk tale with country, rock and drugs, it inched as close as Jerry would go to a cautionary tale:

“Driving that train, high on cocaine, Casey Jones you better watch your speed”—closing with basic Buddhism: "The fireman screams and the engine just gleams."

Eastern philosophy loomed large in the ‘60s but Jerry's "Just have fun," Kesey's trickster credo and Leary's "Turn on" hearken more back to the mystical hedonism of Aleister Crowley, the English writer, ceremonialist, alpinist and druggy, whose thesis was “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” although he did qualify that with, “Love is the law.”

“Short term pleasure equals long term pain; short term pain equals long term pleasure” was an anti-Crowley epigram I cooked up years later, while raising a teenager, but which would have worked wonderfully on the "guru board" at The Modern Lovers, where we too had run-ins with Satanists. Alas, such admonitions were for squares and San Francisco was the Satanist center where Anton Levay set-up his Satanic "church" in '66, despite a professed hatred of hippies.

Ancient Currents Tantric Art Show, 1977, consisted of visitors painting Yantras and hanging them around the gallery. illo: D. Blair

So it came to pass, within three years of the Summer of Love, laissez-faire laxity led to the death of the Haight. By '71, almost every store in its five-block shopping district was boarded up and blasted with graffiti, while phalanxes of dead-eyed or motor-mouthed panhandlers—junkies and speed freaks, engaged in their own drug war—wandered the once-flourishing principality.

Strangely, this catastrophe has been minimized by many, starting with the City's tourist bureau, which put the Haight on the tour bus map by '68. My Craig’s List appeal and internet search unearthed not a single shot of the war zone I witnessed after hitching into town the winter of '71 (see description in my “Bruce Conner’s Cracked Vision”).

“The culprit for the destruction of the Haight was the Be-In, which was a glorious day: January 14th 1967,” according to historian McNally. “What was going on in the Haight was 800, maybe a 1000, people experimenting with freedom, bothering few and being paid little attention to.”

“So they said, ‘Eh, this is great, let’s throw a party,’ and 50,000 people showed up. Suddenly the media jumped on the story and ran with it worldwide and that is what destroyed the Haight. Suddenly tens of thousands—maybe a hundred thousand—of kids descended on the Haight looking for the magic. They were simply overwhelmed.”

A few folks from the Haight, including The Diggers, met with San Francisco Mayor John Shelley and warned him of the tsunami coming of food and housing shortages and disease and drug overages. They were dismissed. Named for 17th century English anarchists, The Diggers were an offshoot of The Mime Troupe, which still performs satirical musical theater in Californian parks every summer—often excellent, no mime involved. They were led by Emmitt Grogan, a wild child, second-story man AND Manhattan private school student who found time during his own wild adventure to author the 500-page “Ringolevio” ('71).

Called “a great book” by Garcia and “the only authentic book written on the ‘60s” by actor-director Dennis Hopper, it is no longer read much, despite colorful coverage of his hippie and Digger days, replete with bon mots like "spreading the cheeks and kissing the little brown asshole of democracy." Conversely, one of the best, still-read books of the '60s, "The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test" ('68), is by the eccentric, Southern "new journalist" Tom Wolfe, who was entranced by Kesey, one of the few people whose game he could not read.

Thankfully, The Diggers did take responsibility, collecting food, arranging crash pads and opening their "free store." Their squad soon included actor Peter Coyote, narrator of almost every hipster doc of the last twenty years and many regular ones. Coyote tells his side of what went down in a somewhat self-aggrandizing and fabricated but still fascinating and well-written autobiography, “Sleeping Where I Fall” (1998). Coyote also became a junkie, in keeping with Grogan, who claimed it was “a revolutionary act," but then died of it at 35.

Digger street theater 'Now Day' on Haight Street, '66. photo: Gene Anthony

Burroughs, however, rejected that thesis, seeing heroin as pure need and domination. "Control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...like junk,” he notes in his masterpiece “Naked Lunch” (1959), which could have easily been titled “I Am a Junkie Faggot”. In point of fact, it's a sophisticated detox manual, "cut up" with anecdotes from Mexico, Morocco, American low and queer life and his fictional junkie doctor, Dr. Benway.

Ignoring his rich upbringing, Harvard education, even beatnik buddies (the younger Kerouac and Ginsberg, who lauded him endlessly), Burroughs emerges as a core thinker, not only of the beats but the hippies and punks, see the fact- and celeb-studded "A Man Within" (2010). While surfacely strange, pessimistic, even sick, Burroughs still conjures the modern, radically-openminded individualist, who keeps cool in a maelstrom of civilizational control by enjoying drugs (he was a walking pharmacology), sex (queer but married women—twice), world travel and the future (unlike Kerouac, who collapsed into nostalgia, self-pity and alcoholism).

Drawing on his voracious reading and his friend Byron Gysin's literary method "cut-ups" (slice pages/rearrange strips), Burroughs deconstructed language, concocted concepts like "The word is a virus" and did for the novel what Jackson Pollack provided painting: full abstraction!

Extremely sensitive as well as rebellious as a youth, he dodged trouble in rough trade bars or on the road by packing a .38 (see his oddly romantic "Queer", '85), although being a crack shot led to the accidental killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer, at a Mexico City party after she insisted he play WIlliam Tell (he fled, paying off the cops). The eventual loss of their son Billy to drugs and depression was another tragedy, undoubtedly weighing heavily, but he lived to 83, not bad "when you're running at the track every day," joked an old friend.

A healthy hipsterism, meanwhile, was fostered by the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. Started in June, '67, by the young Dr. David Smith, it set the standard for free clinics nation-wide, notably a more honest doctor-patient relationship, helping stem the tide of syphilis and scabies as well as overdoses and bad trips. It continues apace today at a second clinic in the Mission, as well as in the Haight.

“One positive effect of all that media,” reflected McNally, “is it spread the substance of what was going on in the Haight”—from new gender notions to environmentalism—“around the country and the world. But one side effect was the destruction of the neighborhood. With the publicizing of the Haight, you have all these lost children wandering around. They were perfect prey for vampires, those selling the methamphetamines and the heroin.”

The result of Jim Jones's manipulation, messianism and eschatology was murder: 928 acolytes, Congressman Ryan and a few others. photo: ABC

And so the Bay Area proceeded to overdose, first on runaways and junkies; then on revolutionaries like the Weatherpeople, who helped Leary escape but also perpetrated hundreds of bombings, or the Symbionese Liberation Army, which murdered Oakland School Superintendent Marcus Foster and kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst; and, finally, the cults.

Known for spiritual interests, communes and lost souls, San Francisco was a cult magnet, culminating with Jim Jones, the charming socialist pastor who brought his thousand-strong community from Ohio. An all-terrain hustler, Jones could find almost anyone’s Achilles’s Heel and seduce them with political support (stuffing envelopes, canvassing districts), sex (regardless of gender, he was bisexual), drugs (he was a speed freak) or salvation (he fancied himself god).

Jones brought low the otherwise-decent Mayor George Moscone, bussing in his flock to vote illegally in the close '75 mayoral race and furnishing Moscone young black women from among his many black parishioners. Moscone appointed him Housing Commissioner and helped quash investigations, see the fascinating and excellent, if horrific and tragic, “Season of the Witch”, by Salon publisher David Talbot (2011).

As if the City wasn’t generous enough, Jones went wack-job paranoid and applied to emigrate with his People's Temple to the Soviet Union. They rejected him but the impoverished Guyana granted him permission to build a town in their jungle: the brochure seemed so Eden-esque!

In the end, Jones murdered over 930 people, many of color, tricking most into drinking the Kool-Aid—laced with poison, this time—while shooting a few, including Bay Area Congressman Leo Ryan, who flew down in a belated attempt to investigate. Nine days later, on November 27th, 1979, when a disgruntled ex-city supervisor murdered Moscone and Harvey Milk, America’s first out gay politician, San Francisco's end of the '70s made the ‘60s Fall of Love seem like kindergarten.

But what could hippie leaders or cool public intellectuals have done to abate this long, sad decline?

At the conclusion of “Long Strange Trip” (the movie), Garcia notes wistfully: “I don’t have a Grateful Dead I can go to”—no hipper band or guiding light, in other words.

The obvious candidate for spiritual counselor would have been Stephen Gaskin. Originally a SF State English teacher, by 1967, he was holding forth to up-to 1500 kids on ecology, drugs, romance and utilitarianism, every Monday night, at the Family Dog Auditorium on Ocean Beach.

The Modern Lovers Commune was six blocks from Jones's People's Temple and three from that of Father Yod (Jim Baker, 2nd fr rt), who led The Source, the famous LA organic cafe and commune, until he renounced playing god, had a hang gliding accident and 'left his body,' see the great 'The Source Family” (2013, Maria Demopoulos, Jodi Wille. photo: courtesy Source Family

After the Haight imploded, that community boarded 60 hippie buses and caravaned to what became The Farm, a few hundred acres in Summertown, Tennessee, arriving in early ‘71. While Nashville was only 70 miles away and its musicians backed Dylan on “Blonde on Blonde” ('66), it was not, nor ever became, a hippie haven.

There were many large communes. Black Bear Ranch in the upper north of California—"Free land for free people"—was where Coyote, The Diggers and other Bay Areans, often Jewish intellectuals, tried to carve a life out of remote nature. They were back at urban careers, if profoundly changed, within a decade. That story is well told in "Commune" (Jonathan Berman, 2005), especially the drama of Shiva Li-li, who advocated free love and dosing kids, splitting the group until the 'mune's stalwarts called in their heavies—mechanics and lumberjacks—to evict him.

The Farm became the Ur-hippie commune, teaching midwifery and selling books on the subject, food stuffs, even Geiger counters. By the '80s, however, their own rebellious teens were fleeing backwoods boredom for the Bay Area, which would have recovered quicker from the ‘60s and ‘70s had Gaskin remained. (He did return periodically, often with his band, which would open for The Dead in free Golden Gate Park concerts.)

The Modern Lovers took in its share of wanderers and walking wounded, attempting to forge a functional community, or at least provide a good meal (once we learned to cook organic). Every night for a decade, we fed eight to 20 people fantastic spreads, including tables full of sushi (Japantown was nearby).

During that time, The Dead, who disbanded in '75, regrouped and were better than ever, often playing Winterland Auditorium a few blocks from the commune, and becoming a cultural bridge to the next generation of psychedeliacs, romantics and travelers. But hitchhiking became hard in the '80s and Dead Heads had their own problems. If a few thousand had tickets to a show, sometimes double that would gather outside, dancing, drugging and setting up camp, while destroying fences and causing sanitation hazards, which Jerry refused to condemn.

Erin (lf) and Luke (rt) catch up on their reading at the library at the 2017 Rainbow Fest in Oregon. photo: D. Blair

Being a non-leader leader took its toll, along with 80 performances a year. Jerry loved scuba diving but didn’t exercise and developed diabetes, which nearly killed him in '86, none of which mixed well with drugs, including heroin, a habit he picked up probably because he could. The humble messiah did his best to maintain a functional balance but eventually was spent by his obsessed flock and his love of music, dying of a heart attack at 53.

Tripping, trance dancing and freedom dreams live on, however, at festivals like Burning Man, which has happened in the Nevada desert every Labor Day since 1988—60,000 "burners" this year, though some disavow their hippie roots and tix were a whopping $425. Then there’s the Rainbow Festival: free and lovely this year, as usual.

And what are its young intellectuals up to?

After hiking through main camp and up the hill, I stumbled on Rough and Ready, one of the event's best kitchens with its fresh-baked bread and delicious dinners, conveniently located next to the Reading Rainbow Library. Set up by Joshua from Chico, the library attracted a cool coterie of kids who liked to riff on a various interests and esoteria. Having read up on the Roman Empire, Rocko from LA was seeing its traces everywhere, while Luke from Mississippi, in attendance with brilliant girlfriend Toby, was channeling Kesey: "In my research, I found that DMT begins where other psychedelics end."

In center camp, I met an old friend, Zen monk Yamato, preparing a sacred pole. An advocate of "active meditation," he walked across the country six times and even showed up at The Modern Lovers a few times, often carrying his 'meditation' chair. "You're born, someday you die—no big deal," Yamato told me before starting his prayer, as his friend, an Apache who was at the first Rainbow (1972, Greeley, Colorado), finished rolling a joint, smiled and said, completely straight, "Happy days!"

Zen monk Yamato erects prayer pole at Rainbow Festival. photo: D. Blair

Although some First People have been at Rainbow since day one, others have protested the up-to 25,000 people (in the '90s) camping for up to a month, in or near sacred sites, or their flagrant cultural appropriation. It happens almost every Rainbow, along with Park Ranger objections, despite the freedom to assemble on federal lands. Not an official organization, the Rainbow Family still has many able negotiators and native connections, who eventually work it out. According to a young woman who chatted with Native Americans at the Oregon gathering, they were pleasantly surprised.

As regards race, rural hippie America is often not that populous with people of color. But black hippies are a well-established sub-tribe, dating back to Sun Ra, Hendrix, Sly and Marley. At the Oregon Rainbow, a 24-hour coffee shop, Montana Mud, was run by two wizen, old Montana longhairs, one black, one white.

Amazingly, many of the kitchens—often little more than massive pots over big fires—achieved notable levels of cuisine. That standard started in '88 when the volunteers, who arrive three weeks early—one week after the site scouts present to the "high council" and location is finalized, began plumbing the sites with PVC pipe, providing running water to up to 100 kitchens, about a third of which become night clubs, often with astounding acts.

There is even a full on theater, Granola Funk, featuring music, skits, comedy, like the parody of "The Dating Game", which I enjoyed, all without lights, mics or electricity of any kind. There are even Rainbow stars, like Fantuzzi, the Neyorican Berkeley-ite and world-traveller, who sings and leads bands.

Of course, in an anarchist gathering some discord will fall. But Rainbow's main problem, the "tweekers" and "dirty kids" (speed freaks and dumpster-diving train hoppers), prefer camping with each other near the parking lot.

A guy in a "Hillary for Prison" T-Shirt appeared once at the Library, complaining he'd been shouted down elsewhere, to which Librarian Josh responded, “You can say whatever you want here.” But when he tried to Trump-bait us, we didn’t bite, returning to our discussion of 5th century Indian Tantra as he wandered off.

And so, post-modern hippiedom is doing well. Apparently undaunted by the onslaught of machines, conservatism, over-communication and money culture, they revel in the ease with which they can live on the road or off the grid while periodically plugging back in for tech, info or income downloads.

One hippie's philosophy, tied to a tree at the Rainbow Festival. photo: D. Blair

Their worldview was well articulated by a hand-drawn poster I saw tied to a tree: “Pray For Peace, Learn From All. Carry “Home” with You. Love Yourself. Help Your Neighbor. We Are Family. We the People Need to Be the People, And Work to Create a Better World, By Making Your Own Life Better First. Find Your Happy. Be Your Self. Move if You Have to But Live Your Live. Fill the Now with Good Things.”

To which I might add: "Protect the tribe but don't tribalize. 'Search out knowledge, even unto China,' as Muhammad said. Civilization is the sum of the tribes' ideas not blood. Keep tools current but bear in mind psychology, sex and other basics are as unchanged through time as through space or race. Know that we are in turbulent times but they can hardly match the '60s, let alone the '40s. Maintain the balance—female/male, nature/tech, play/work—and we'll be fine."

In this way, perhaps, San Francisco might reintegrate its storied history with its unprecedented present to foment a flourishing, front-edge content culture.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Aug 23, 2017 - 10:25 PM