The Flawed Revolution
Several years ago I had the opportunity to be in a television studio audience where Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz were being interviewed. When asked about the Sixties their reactions were funny and most likely canned answers having been asked so many times.
Micky responded with a sly smile, "I was told I had a very good time."
Davy quipped ,"they say that if you remember the Sixties you weren't really there." Both answered in typical rock star fashion acknowledging that
drugs played a major part in the 60's counterculture philosophy of freedom outside of the establishment.
Of course we all knew that. As impressionable teenagers we were bombarded with it. But I was only 14 at the time living comfortably at home with mom and dad and the worst thing I was struggling with was if girls would like me even if my face broke out with a pimple. Of course that's important too but it never made me want to overthrow the government.
I sought refuge in music in 1967 starting a band with friends that on the surface was about music but in reality it was about girls. Yes it's true.
I think any successful rock star will tell you that their reason for playing rock initially was to impress girls.
Further than that though I watched a lot of TV. One particular show I in the late 50's and until 1963 was The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis. It was based on a popular book of the same name written by Max Shulman. Yours truly took the time to find that book and check it out from the public library and study it for clues on how girls like to be treated.
Surprisingly it didn't help. Females are impossible to understand. It was true then and trust me it's true now.
But Dobie Gillis wasn't just about the pursuit of romance. It was about the complexities of American life and about the young people who were trying to figure out who they were. To review, Dobie was the star of the show but he was not the lesson that I learned. Wisdom about life was garnished from one Maynard G. Krebs. ( the G is silent.) Before Gilligan was Gilligan, he was Maynard. You need to think about that for a minute because I believe Bob Denver may have played two of the most pivotal characters on television at the time and each of his characters represented separate shifts in a cultural revolution.
Maynard was not Wally or Beaver or Ricky or Opie or any other non-threatening kid on 50's TV you can think of. Maynard was a Beatnik who lived at home with his parents and who rejected the established ideas of conformity and the necessity of a solid Puritan work ethic. He was a product of the Baby Boomers who returned from the war with a sexual imperative to "catch up" on lost time. I'm going to get back to this in a minute after I tell you what I know about the aforementioned "Beat Generation" so bear with me.
The drumbeat of discontent started in the 50's manifested in what was named the Beat Generation. Allen Ginsberg , Jack Kerouac and people like them wrote and preached non conformity and social revolution.
They were the poster boys for the Beat Generation and in my mind Maynard G. Krebs was a symbol adapted for television for that movement. He was comical and so not to be taken seriously. Honestly how can you claim adherence to a philosophy of social revolution and live in your parent's house. Regardless of whether Maynard was taken seriously. It doesn't change the fact that life in the 50's wasn't perfect. Maynard was the mascot that represented the early signs of what teachers used to call "creeping socialism."
Civil disobedience appealed to a generation reared on post war fatigue and ,even further back, there was silent resentment for the American Industrial Revolution that required conformity in the classroom to produce a workforce more than to foster individuality. Whew, that was a long sentence. It's just a different way really to express dissatisfaction about life in America. It's centered on paranoia and distrust of the establishment. Even Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex. Wow, even the government distrusts itself. But I digress. My point is that Maynard
represented what the establishment feared. Young people in a state of unrest. The show ran until 1963 which coincided with the airing of the first episode of Gilligan's Island. You can say I'm wrong if you want but I see it's release as a sign of two things. One, Maynard and the Beat Generation were now perceived as a non threat and, Two, that threat was being replaced with a new and improved threat of kids in search of freedom from conformity. Gilligan stranded on an island with the others was not just hilarious , it was also TV's way of showing us a microcosm of what civilization would be like without the constraints of traditional
society. In short Gilligan was marooned on an island paradise. I'll stop short of comparing it to the Garden of Eden. You can do that for me. We are all now familiar with the group dynamic that developed on the island. Money didn't matter and they survived through cooperation and ingenuity and dare I say Love?
To summarize, Bob Denver as Maynard and then Gilligan epitomized the transition of thought developing in young people at the time. Rebellion against authority and conformity and a search for a paradise...heaven on earth. The beatnik died and became what we laughably called the hippie.
Let me tell you what I think doomed the counter-culture revolution. It was a number of things but three things spring to mind right away.
One, Media technology and the rise of consumerism. Two, the development of hallucinogenic mind altering drugs.
Three, the feminist movement and The Pill.
Television is insidious. It pretends to do one thing while doing something else. As a young person I never thought about the power of repetition or the ability of media to shape me as a person, telling me what I wanted and needed at a subliminal level but it did then and continues to do so even now. In addition to that it had the power to mold opinion on a nightly basis with world news recapped with live video, a new technology of portability that reported the rise of counterculture and anti-war sentiment to your living room and as a side note to this subject, if you think about it , without Les Paul and his subsequent idea of a little thing called the electric guitar, there may well never have been a 60's type revolution at all.
Psychedelia requires electricity and technology provided that too. Various amplified rock mantras repeated endlessly on the radio ( again technology) that provided the background music for the restless generation percolating across the nation. I believe what we experienced in the 60's through television advertising and news, and radio programming consisting of youth oriented rock anthems touting the message of peace and love, ultimately produced an irreconcilable state of contradiction in the minds of impressionable youth. Myself included, although again, I was only 14 in 1967.
I believe it created an unresolvable struggle between an intangible ideal and the need for tangible goods engrained in us by both medias. An orchestrated brain teaser with no solution. No wonder we were confused. If there were class songs for the love generation I would pick Scott Mackenzie's San Francisco as the idealistic anthem but The Rolling Stones Satisfaction would be the cynical reality . Freedom, peace and love faced off with materialism implied by consumerism and civic responsibility of American citizens.
The music fed the delusion that heaven on earth was possible. Getting back to the garden ... but TV was advertising all this cool stuff that I needed to buy. Forgive me , I'm confused.
What made it more difficult to support the ideal over the material was the fact that the spokesmen for the movement were making money singing about the rejection of money and responsibility over the message of peace and love. Let me explain it this way. Let's say your parents routinely forbid you to get a tattoo because they're gross. At the same time they encourage you to accept Jesus as your savior. But because you want a tattoo and they want you to know Jesus, you come home with a tattoo of Jesus on your arm. At that point don't be surprised if their heads explode. On the surface it was an attempt to resolve a conflict that satisfies both parties. But your parents heads exploded instead. The mid 60's were like that.
Ask anybody what destroys the romance of a relationship and they will tell you that it's Money with a capital M. Or better I should say the lack of money kills relationships. Would that be a capital L? Not really sure.
The hippie philosophy works the same way. If there are any young romantics out there who think you can live on love against all odds, you need to learn from a generation who rejected work, money, religion and all things resembling conformity in their 20's and then summarily turned around in their later years to embrace materialism like no generation before them. That is the ugly truth... the hypocrisy of the movement itself. We the flower children never did "get back to the garden." Even hippies needed money for stuff. For drugs if nothing else. That fact became more apparent over time.
Bottom line... if you smell bad you won't get laid. So much for free love. Individuals have standards above and beyond the hippie group mind set.
I suppose there are exceptions to that premise like if the two or three of you smell equally bad in which case it would be like two smokers not noticing that the other wreaks of tobacco because tragically you get used to it while everyone else is gagging. But that's not good sex.
No , I would say it's the opposite. I would call it hippie sex where expectations are low. Besides with hippies you can always fall back on the drugs which really isn't fair and clouds the fact that you're not really taking care of your self. Frankly the drugs are doing all the work.
No, the hard fact was that love, peace, brotherhood and enlightenment will not tolerate a person for long if they show no signs of some kind of initiative to accomplish something of substance and to contribute to the collective. You can wear your hair long but you better wash it and have a change of clean underwear. Sorry Jerry Reuben you were just wrong. The truth is that Haight-Ashbury and San Francisco became a Mecca for homeless, uneducated, uninspired, drug addicted moochers. It's safe to say that the more noble aspirations of the movement were discarded in favor of drug addiction. Enlightenment where did you go? Getting back to the garden ... regaining our innocence through a simple life of communing with nature and one another. A mass hallucination of sorts ... a philosophy best lived out in your head gently subduded with drugs. As an old friend might say... what a crock.
I find it ironic that one of the 60's popular anthems urged young people to "feed your head." suggesting that drugs would expand their minds. What some learned and others didn't is that they should have fed their head with an education and ambitions beyond getting high and grooving on that.
Most people define the psychedelic era of the Love generation as beginning with the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and ending with the Woodstock Music Festival in 1969. In between these events the counter-culture had its best chance to make its case but to no avail. Say what you want but Woodstock was its own kind of failure, relying on government help to handle food and medical emergencies. It of course made no money and had to make a movie to try and recoup its losses. See? Money does matter. I recently saw a list of all the Woodstock performers and what they were paid for their part. Some didn't show because their check never arrived. I totally get that too.
The Beatles, of all people, may have provided the loudest declaration of surrender to the ideal of world peace and brotherly love of all. John Lennon, icon and rock martyr wrote Revolution ( 1968) smack dab in the middle of the psychedelic movement. Yeah that same guy who wrote "All you need is Love." In the lyrics of Revolution he declares,"
You say you want a Revolution, well... you know... we'd all love to see the plan." To me that sounds like a statement made by a guy who saw the futility of that hope. It was a heavenly idea to wthat died in a material world and he had resigned himself to that reality.
And while we're on the subject, what about all those drugs? They arrived just in time to infiltrate the revolution. I'm not talking about the marijuana. I'm talking about the LSD.
Timothy Leary called it "the key to enlightenment " but it became the centerpiece of the revolution and brought it to its knees quickly. The enlightenment was random and hazy at best. I love the music of the 60's and some say the drugs should be given credit for a lot of it. Maybe.
Some icons of rock and the revolution made it out alive and as I said before , got rich as a result.
For his appearance at Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix got paid 18, 000 dollars more than anyone else who played.
That iconic performance was viewed by a relatively small percentage of those attending because it was near the end of the festival. His face was the face of Woodstock, and he was dead a year later. Drugs took him.
I guess at this stage in my life I'm too cynical. Some one told me several years ago that liberals eventually become conservatives in their old age and maybe that's true. I did my share of dabbling in my younger days and now I certainly see life differently.
Hind sight is .... what you see while your head is up your ass... no wait, it's 20/20 that's right. Well anyway, I see drugs from the 60's as a kind of ant poison for the flower generation.
Various sinister substances were created and distributed first to key people of the revolution and then to the foot soldiers and scouts who then brought them back to the mound where it killed them from within. Like giving pox infected blankets to the Indians.
And now on to women.
I have a hard time believing that the majority of young women in the 60's
were on board with the free love idea being talked about by all the major figures of the flower children generation. Certainly not if you were a good girl and certainly not if I knew you. Of course I was only 14 at the time. Prudish behavior could always be justified before , because of the possibility of pregnancy but by 1965 just five years after it was introduced The Pill was being taken by 6.5 million women. Not even close to being a mind-altering drug it still changed the way women ( and men) perceived sex. At its core it was another avenue of personal freedom for women and, I assure you, men saw it as a valid argument for casual sex. Seems like solid logic except for the danger of spreading disease indiscriminately. It happens and it happened a lot. The hippies were also happily ignorant in their youthful knowledge of human nature and sexual intimacy. When your high, maybe you don't care that your girlfriend or boyfriend is "making the rounds" with others in the commune but time will tell when the drugs wear off. Love that doesn't care is not love at all, It's indifference, and free love is a misnomer.
The enduring symbol of the 60's for me is the generic flower girl with
"flowers in her hair", a delicate pure figure of beauty that spoke about peace and love with a soft whisper in her voice evoking a "back to the garden" innocence. I suspect that she never really existed back then, sort of like the 60's themselves. There was the dream and then there was the reality.
