YOUR HIPPIE HATIN' HIT PARADE!

People think the country is divided now, but that's nothing new. People are pitching a fit over health care and personal freedom, over war and peace, black and white. Back in the day we wore long hair and hitched around the country--blue states and red states, it didn't matter, they all seemed red back then -- redneck, right wing, and dumb as a mud fence. Now even cowboys have long hair, but things were different back then. Listen to some of these hippie-hating anthems from the Heartland and see if you agree. Pretend you just walked into a bar and these were playing on the jukebox. Feel that? Just push the little buttons and it's like going back in time.

Smokey Harless sure hates hippies in this tune, "A Place for Them Called Hell." Sample lyric: "They can carry their signs go marching in the streets, all that's good and well - But to my way of thinking if they don't like our country, there's a place for them called hell." He hates protesters, but I wonder what old Smokey thinks about teabaggers...or President Obama, for that matter!

These two dorks couldn't find their ass with both hands and a roadmap, but they sure as hell don't want no socialism stirring up the Knee-grows or giving Aunt Bea a free pair of dentures. And they sure as hell don't want some goddamn hippies hitching through the bible-thumping county, praise the Lord. And that means you, longhair!


Here's one for the president--no, not THAT president! This is "The Great Richard Nixon" by Gene Marshall. Buy a clue, Gene. Now picture yourself tucking your long hair up under your hat and trying to flag a ride. Yesiree, Bob, that's some fine music! Yeeha! Watch those taillights fade on the Interstate.


The other side: "When Did Jesus Become a Republican?" by Cindy Lee Berryhill


Don Jarells sings about his terrible son in this tune. The boy doesn't agree with old Don about Vietnam, civil rights, music, just about every damn thing! Hell, he's a militant!



"The Love In" by old reactionary Sheb Wooley. This is a laugh riot.



Howard Barnes can't tell the girls from the boys in this ode to latent homosexuality, "Helluva World."




Good Old Boy Rusty Adams wrote this redneck "response" to Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muscogee" called "Hippy from Mississippi."




Don Bowman wrote this sensitive portrayal of "The San Francisco Scene."



Joe Ritchie means business in his song, "How Do You Get Rid of a Hippie (In a Country Western Bar)."



Thanks to the musical archives of WFMU for most of these great tunes.

FORTY SUMMERS

This summer is the fortieth anniversary of two pivotal 1960s events--the moon landing and Woodstock. I was too young to go to either, but I watched the film and video of each in a state of rapture and awe, thrilled we'd made it to another world, and convinced that the music and arts festival was a shining glimpse of our utopian future. Naive? Perhaps. Utopia didn't come to pass, in any case. The war in Vietnam dragged on, and we still had Nixon and the hawks to get rid of, and since that golden season history has repeated itself so many times I can't keep track if this round is tragedy or farce.

That same summer, on July 20th, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and American spacemen ambled onto another world. They planted a stiff flag that would forever wave in a vacuum, and beamed back pictures of Earth, which looked nothing like the dusty brown globes in our social studies classes that were mapped and marked by man-made boundaries. Our home planet was sparkling and blue. There was a global recognition that this was a small boat indeed, and we were all on it. There was hope. If worse came to worse, some reasoned, good old American technology could save us. Mankind could shoot its silver seed into the cosmos and escape our war-torn planet to build a sci-fi fan's dream of an antiseptic orderly future a la Star Trek. That was also naive, I suppose, a utopian fantasy of a different sort.



Woodstock didn't commence the Aquarian Age, but the three day rock festival at Max Yasgur's dairy farm in upstate New York was a gathering of the tribes. This was "youth culture" in full freaky fruition, and a joyous celebration of the hippie message of peace, pot, nudity and music. Fantastic music. Sure, it didn't stop the war machine, but it spit in its eye. This was art and whimsy on a mass scale, and people looked up from every uptight button-down small town to think, maybe I'll grow a mustache. Wear a peace button. Get the hell out of Dodge.



Woodstock inspired countless rock festivals, but this was the milestone. The country was violently divided. It was less than a year to the Kent State shootings, when National Guardsmen opened fire on protesters Nixon referred to as bums. It was less than a year til progressives like Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. The counterculture was driven underground. Soft drugs, once considered a ticket to expanded consciousness, were replaced by hard drugs that left people strung out and hopeless. The anti-war movement and the black power movement were harassed and wiretapped and infiltrated by various secret police forces and red squads. Body bags kept coming home from Nam. Nixon went down, sure, but history provided even more Nixons, more greedy Republican war hawks who invoked Jesus while robbing the treasury and incinerating peasants. Change is impossible, you might think. Stupidity is hard-wired into our DNA. Maybe so.

But for one brief shining moment there was a festival--no more, no less--where a possible future played out in a few rolling hills and cow pastures, a future that was crowded and muddy and crazy and stoned and for a brief moment also stardust and golden before it got sucked back into the devil's bargain.


The last morning of the festival, Jimi Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner and Purple Haze to the tired huddled masses

DIGGING THE DIGGERS

You probably know Peter Coyote as an actor, a writer, and a narrator--his warm grainy voice is instantly recognizable in over a hundred documentaries.

What you probably didn't know is that Coyote was one of the founders of the Diggers, an anarchist collective back in the Haight-Ashbury days. The Diggers may have looked like non-conformist freaks (and they were) but under all that hair and get-up they were brilliant community organizers (look it up, Sarah Palin) who provided meals, shelter, health care, and counseling to the throngs of kids who showed up in San Fransisco with flowers in their hair.

The Diggers took their name from the English Diggers (1649–50), a group that opposed private property, and all forms of buying and selling.

"DIGGER, any of a group of agrarian communists who flourished in England in 1649-50 and were led by Gerrard Winstanley (q.v.) and William Everard. In April 1649 about 20 poor men assembled at St. George's Hill, Surrey, and began to cultivate the common land. These Diggers held that the English Civil Wars had been fought against the king and the great landowners; now that Charles I had been executed, land should be made available for the very poor to cultivate. (Food prices had reached record heights in the late 1640s.)"
-- (c) 1994, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Diggers: Coyote and JP Pickens

The Diggers kept the tradition of those outlaw agrarians alive. Not your typical do-gooder activists, working from the outside in, the Diggers were members of the scene themselves who practiced what they preached. When they set up the Free Store or gave out sandwiches to hungry kids in the park they offered more than just a handout; they were trying to raise consciousness about the possibilities of a society where money didn't matter. Utopian, sure. Dreams were big back then. Mainstreamers may scoff at their naivete or see their work as a failed experiment, but they might point to our rampant materialism and tailspinning economy and say we're closer to a post-capitalist society than we think.

The Diggers were also artists (both "con" and "fine") and they organized free concerts and political art. They created "Happenings," including the Death of Money Parade, Intersection Game, Invisible Circus, and Death of Hippie/Birth of Free. Coyote himself was an early member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a group that performed satirical, political comedy, original music, and street theater.


Coyote tells the whole story in his autobiography, "Sleeping Where I Fall" (Counterpoint Press, 1998; buy a copy here). Read some excerpts here. In the interview above, Coyote talks about Emmet Grogan and the Diggers.

Give him a listen. The man has something to say.

The Diggers Archive Home Page.

Peter Coyote's website.

GREATEST, GRATEFUL & STILL DEAD

What a long strange trip, indeed. The New York Times published an article a couple days ago settling things forever and silencing all debate by announcing, once and for all, that the greatest Grateful Dead concert--according to Ben Ratlif, anyway, and others he claims to have spoken with--took place on May 8th, 1978. End of story. The journal of record has spoken. The story barely made a beep, and the world of news quickly returned to its tales of war and collapsing economies, mothers killing children, fathers killing mothers, pirates kidnapping sea captains, and seemingly normal people killing huge numbers of random strangers or loved ones before turning their guns upon themselves. Stories about the ungrateful dead, you might say.

1966: at the old place on Ashbury, just before the party spilled into the streets

Of course, all musical lists are suspect; the value of music is felt in the heart of every listener and should not be left to New York Times, the trainspotting music geeks, or even the Nicks--Hornby and Harcourt. And don't leave it to the Deadheads. They're a funny bunch, whichever vintage, and they've been trading thousands of recordings for decades and are simply too close to the thing to see it clearly. (Like the old joke: what do Deadheads say when the dope runs out? "This music sucks!" Well, it doesn't suck, not all of it, but you get my point) It would be like asking an Eskimo (Inuit, sorry) about snowflakes. No, you don't want to commit your life to the damn thing. You, with your short attention span, want an overview.

Anyway, here are some unusual Grateful Dead clips. The opening segment comes from Playboy After Dark, and listening to the skeezy pajama king Hugh Hefner "rap" with Jerry Garcia brings to mind the writer from the Times dissecting Dead shows for relative merit. You don't need to ingest psychedelic drugs to catch a glimpse of Hef as a lizard of the lounge variety, but I'm sure the bandmembers popped their pills anyway and the entire affair has a surreal quality that Thorazine and orange juice might not bring you down from. In fact, you might not be able to shake this hallucination until you escape the Playboy rabbit hole entirely and get a breath of fresh air.

Further on down the line, truckin' in the 1970s

My point (and yes, I had one...) is that you can't really say which concert is best because it's a matter of taste, but even beyond that the band itself changed so much over the years it would be like comparing apples to orange sunshine. The Playboy mansion clip is from 1969--and by that time the Dead had already evolved from being the house band at the Acid Tests hosted by Kesey and the Pranksters. The band that played the Trips Festival at the Longshoreman's Hall in 1966 had already grown less experimental, more polished and professional. By 1972, they were an altogether different group, and the recordings from that tour were released on "Europe 72" remain favorites. Some would argue this was the "best" Dead period. By 1978, they'd mutated again--the show rocked harder, etc, and if you liked that sort of thing you might like that. To all the kids who staggered after them in the 1980s and 1990s the experience was altogether different. The band played the old favorites for adoring kids who weren't even alive when they put out their first album. (a far cry from my first Dead concert in '70 or so. When someone yelled out "St. Stephen!" Garcia barked back, "That was three X*&$* years ago, man!")

The last clip is from April 17th, 1972, at the Tivoli Theatre in Copenhagen. Their hi-jinx are in high gear as you can see from the clown masks. 1972 was a good year. What do you think?



Grateful Dead Update: According the the Washington Post (April 14th, 2009): "The surviving (and formerly feuding) members of the Grateful Dead had a secret impromptu meeting Monday evening with the man they credit with reuniting them: President Obama."

"The president welcomed all the members of The Dead, who are performing tonight at the Verizon Center in Washington, to the Oval Office just before dinner last night. They didn't talk music as much as they did history - history about the Oval Office, and the president's desk."

To read the rest of the story in the Washington Post, click here.

Still Dead: Phil Lesh and Bob Weir lead the latest incarnation of the Dead shown performing here in NYC, March 30th, 2009

Read annotated Grateful Dead lyrics here.

BURNING MAN

What's the deal with Burning Man? It's 120 degrees in the shade and you have to pack in water...it's like Road Warrior on the surface of Mercury. What's the deal? Why not have the annual freakout in some mountain meadow with a babbling brook? How about in the dunes on some beautiful coastline? Am I just hopelessly square? What brings out all the freaks, neo-hippies, ravers, artists and strippers to bake in this hellish landscape? Is it the dope? The art? The naked people? Is it the sense of belonging? Are people tripping their brains out? WTF?

The art looks pretty cool...and it looks like people put a lot of work into their projects, so we tip our hat. Maybe this is the last chance for full-out craziness, the last hurrah for non-conformists on our orderly, dying planet. Okay, I can see that. I shouldn't rush to judgment. Who knows? Maybe someday I'll glue some toy dinosaurs on the Mazda and drive down to Death Valley or whatever godforsaken landcape they've chosen for their revels, and have a truly transcendent experience. I could make a hat out of tinfoil. Paint my ass blue. Get some roller skates, you know, and some bottled water, and head out beyond the Thunderdome. And why not?


Burning Man? Check out the official website here.

JORMA KAUKONEN

Jorma and Jack play "Embryonic Journey" at the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, 1996

Jorma Ludwik Kaukonen Jr first came to our attention playing lead guitar with the San Francisco rock band, Jefferson Airplane. Psychedelic acid rock--you know it well. Jorma Kaukonen helped shape the sound. Listen to that weird loping solo on "White Rabbit." Better yet, listen to the electric guitar on the live version of "Plastic Fantastic Lover" from "Bless its Pointed Little Head."

Lead guitar with the Jefferson Airplane, circa 1966

In 1969, Jorma and fellow bandmate Jack Casady formed Hot Tuna. The band began as a side project where they could explore wild heavy blues, both acoustic and electric. Their early repertoire was derived mainly from American country blues artists such as Rev. Gary Davis, and Arthur Blake (Blind Blake).

Before long, Jorma and Jack left the Airplane completely (the rest of the band became Jefferson Starship...) and concentrated on this "new" old sound. When not playing electric, Jorma was playing an intricate fingerstyle on the acoustic guitar. Watch and listen as Jorma accompanies the melodic line with an alternating thumb pattern, then try playing like that on your own guitar. You may want to bash it to bits, but remember that he didn't learn that fancy stuff overnight.

Hot Tuna in 1972, the year they released "Burgers." Jorma (bottom right) with Jack Casady, Papa John Creach, and Sammy Piazza. Rolling down the blues highway...


Jorma plays "Genesis" at D.O.C. Music Club Studio on Italian TV, 1980


"Uncle Sam Blues," Hot Tuna, featuring Papa John Creach. 1971

Jorma was always a hell of a fingerpicker, and continues to play his intricate patterns with Jack in Hot Tuna. He also teaches guitar at Fur Peace Ranch, a guitar camp in the hills of Southeast Ohio. You just grab your guitar and pack in, stay in a cabin, and play guitar all day. Wouldn't that be cool? There's more to it--just click the link below.

Jorma Kaukonen today

Listen to "I Am the Light of This World" (Rev. Gary Davis) performed by Jorma. Click button:


Explore Jorma's Fur Peace Ranch guitar camp here. Hot Tuna's official website here.

TOKING UP WITH LAWRENCE WELK

Technically, Lawrence Welk was never part of the 1960s counter-culture. In fact, culturally-speaking, he was probably as close to a perfect square as was geometrically possible. He loved his polkas and played them tirelessly for his adoring fans in a galaxy of champagne bubbles.

Sometimes the champagne music wasn't enough. Those times Welk went searching the mean streets for something stronger, something wilder. For Kicks. We may never know what was actually going on behind that smile, the friendly demeanor, and the insistence that everything was "Wunnerful, Wunnerful!" All we have are these clues.


In this clip, the Lawrence Welk singers describe the disorienting effects of smoking too much marijuana in a train station. As the singers weave their haunting spell, the music builds in intensity, approximating the drug user's "high." Was Welk a closet hipster sending secret messages to fellow druggies? Or was this a desperate cry for help?

In the clip below, Welk has clearly turned into a hippie. Must have been all that grass. His friends hardly recognize him, and his aggressive behavior seems "out of character." Fortunately, an impromptu intervention sets him on the right path.

DAMN HIPPIES

Crosby, Stills, & Nash

Here are some damn hippies. When you were out running in the rat race, these lucky bastards were playing guitars, smoking weed, growing their hair long, and stealing your girlfriend. Or trying to, anyway. Sure, they were freaks and weirdos, outsiders and losers, even anti-war protesters...but they made some good tunes.

Hippie Costume

They're easy to poke fun at now (What does a deadhead say when he runs out of pot? This music sucks!) and sure they were naive and utopian, but maybe they deserve a little respect for escaping the lock-step conformity of their time and having some joi d'vivre back when you were still wearing white belts and feathering your hair, back when you thought Tricia Nixon was hot. Own your lameness. For just a moment, transcend...kick off your shoes, light a banana, and groove along with these crazy hippies!

For the grand finale, here's the Grateful Dead--yup, I make fun of them myself on occasion--but listen to the interplay of bass and guitar in this lysergic classic, "China Cat Sunflower," and hear how it evolves into "I Know You Rider." It really doesn't get more hippie than this. Come on, you're practically there. You're nearly groovy. Peaceout.


The Dead

HOME WITH THE ARMADILLO

"London Homesick Blues" by Gary P. Nunn and the Lost Gonzo Band. This great song about a homesick cowboy stuck in London is the bittersweet side of outlaw country music, Austin style. Performed here at Willie Nelson's second annual 4th of July Picnic, in Bryan/College Station, Texas, 1974.

The armadillo was the symbol of far-out, longhaired Texas -- as opposed to the longhorned shitkicker variety steer -- and was probably made popular by underground artist Jim Franklin, who had been drawing them since 1968.


Jim Franklin came from Galveston, and opened a psychedelic music hall in Austin, called the Vulcan Gas Company. He lived in the place, and provided a stage, and great posters for Texas hippie bands like Shiva's Headband, and 13th Floor Elevators. The legacy of the gas company was continued in 1970, with the opening of the Armadillo World Headquarters.

Armadillo World Headquarters, Austin, TX, in 1976

SUMMERTIME TRIP

It's summertime! Sorry to be so "boomercentric", but I came across these short clips about the "The Summer of Love," and had to post them. One is a "straight" documentary for TV news about the "hippie temptation." The grim expose style of the piece belies it's objectivity as square news media tries to make sense of the counter-culture.

We'll get to that, but first is a clip from a documentary on the same scene, but from the inside. This is an entirely different planet. Joy and celebration -- and sex and dope -- replaces fear and guilt. Afghan vests and love beads replace the gray flannel straight-jacket. True, it's not objective, and it doesn't claim to be.


Something's happening, and you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?

A famous educator once said: the person who has the hardest time learning something new is the person who has all the answers -- or thinks he does. That fits Mr. Newsman to a tee.


The Hippie Temptation: straight news on the subculture

Finally, you have to play the music. Here is a sweet soulful sixties gal, and a big part of the Haight Ashbury scene, infiltrating plastic mainstream America; Janis Joplin on "Hollywood Palace." In spite of the cheesy setting, she sings her heart out on "Summertime" and "I Need a Man to Love." She represents. Afterward, host Don Adams tries to make fun of her-- typical for this era when you've caught a real live hippie. Don't worry, Janis can handle that little twerp. She zaps him with love.

FATHER OF LSD DIES AT 102

Albert Hoffman, the Swiss scientist who created LSD, died at his home near Basel, Switzerland at the age of 102.

To some, LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) may seem to be an anachronism, a souvenir of the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s like lava lamps and black lights, but the drug was actually created in 1938. It's powerful psychoactive properties weren't discovered for five more years, when Hoffman accidentally ingested the drug and experienced its powerful effects while riding his bicycle home from the lab.


"[Hoffman] then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life."
--the New York Times, 4/30/08

From a BBC documentary on LSD:


A link to the New York Times obituary, click HERE.

UNCLE SAM NEEDS YOUR HELP AGAIN

Show some guts! This is war!!! Country Joe McDonald takes on the politicians, generals, war profiteers, and "patriotic" parents in this anti-war classic. Yes, it was written for another war. Then again, so were most of the pro-war "talking points" being recycled these days.

Back then people weren't so civil. Nowadays, we're much more sophisticated. Most of us are fighting to claim the ideological middle, on the assumption that there are two sides to every question, and a cool rational middle-of-the-road position is the sensible thing. We've been well trained. But are there really two sides to every question? What's the sensible middle position on cannibalism, say, or the Earth being flat? How about slavery, or child abuse? Highly rational people can be extremely agile intellectually. They can tell you straight-faced that there are good reasons to incinerate people, or to "stay the course" and continue incinerating people once the incineration has begun.

They have plenty of good reasons, and they always have.

9 POUND SHOWCASE: THE FUGS

Keeping our promise to offer offbeat, beat, non-conformist, non-commercial, visionary and downright strange acts of creativity to our readers, we bring you this 9 Pound Hammer Showcase highlighting the uncle beat poets from the East Village, The Fugs. Brilliant avant-folk provocateurs, these guys sang truth to power with a wicked sense of humor, satire, irony, high level stuff that could get you arrested (and did) in the Land of the Free.



The Fugs formed back in 1964, when Ed Sanders rented the former Kosher meat store on East 10th, and transformed it into the Peace Eye Bookstore. He met poet Tuli Kupferberg. They named themselves after a Norman Mailer-coined euphemism from "The Naked and the Dead," a wartime novel written when soldiers were free to kill but not say the word "fuck," at least in print. They played in cafes and theaters in the Village, and headlined a cross-country tour opposing the Vietnam war in its early days, playing folk and rock and basically blowing minds in the Heartland.



We drew inspiration for the Fugs from a long and varied tradition, going all the way back to the dances of Dionysus in the ancient Greek plays and the "Theory of the Spectacle" in Aristotle's Poetics, and moving forward to the famous premier performance of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi in 1896, to the poèmes simultanés of the Dadaists in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, to the jazz-poetry of the Beats, to Charlie Parker's seething sax, to the silence of John Cage, to the calm pushiness of the Happening movement, the songs of the Civil Rights movement, and to our concept that there was oddles of freedom guaranteed by the United States Constitution that was not being used.
- Ed Sanders


They first recorded in 1965, and put their show on vinyl to the delight of far flung fans and connoisseurs of beatnik irreverence. This wasn't the frail, anemic poetry of your timid schoolbooks, but some rough beast vexed to nightmare, it's hour come at last, playing electric guitars and invoking the gods. They freaked the squares out. The grey flannel Chamber of Commerce types didn't dig this crazy pagan humor, and the crewcut cops were notified, but the children -- at least, some of them -- thought it was great to spit in Goliath's eye.

The Fugs became a cult favorite, secretly traded among fans like contraband, passed like a joint between outstretched fingers, popping up all over this great land. Yes, soon the Feds would be pounding at the door, and the FBI would try to crush this communist conspiracy of "free thought," but the damage had been done. Songs like "Kill for Peace" had already gotten out to undermine the war effort and corrupt the youth of Athens, er, I mean America.

You will enjoy this, I'm sure. For those who think the 1960s were all Austin Powers and the Monkees, this is a good antidote. Just don't take it and operate heavy machinery, okay kids?


For more information, check out the official History of the Fugs here. An interview with Ed Sanders is here. For more tales of beatnik glory, check out Ed Sanders' Woodstock Journal here.

STRANGE SCENES FROM AMERICA (1969)

Maybe these damn hippies seem naive by today's standards, but these clips of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young should melt your cynicism a little if you're not already too far gone. Hanging out, shooting the breeze, jamming on Stills' "Black Queen", "Find The Cost of Freedom", and Crosby's "Laughing".
The second part is the morning after Woodstock, so a little utopian enthusiasm is forgivable. Literally just off the plane from the festival, the band has arrived blissed-out at Dick Cavett's TV studio, ready to spread the news. Stephen Stills sings "4+20." Friends Joni Mitchell and some of the Jefferson Airplane are there, too. Use your imagination. For one golden moment it seemed the world might change for the better, and pessimism and superstition would be swept aside for peace, love, and understanding. Corny, right? I guess you had to be there.

PSYCHEDELIC EXPLOITATION MOVIE TRAILER

Some guy had a brilliant idea -- film all the crazy hippie runaway kids flooding the Haight and make a ton of money selling it to the curious squares! Why not? There were already tour buses jammed full of gawkers, why not some cheesy weirdo lava lamp psychedelic "trip" for the grindhouse? That's a very young Jack Nicholson, who acted in a lot of similar Roger Corman flicks, and Bruce Dern in a frightwig. This was the tipping point, a subculture on the verge of being packaged and sold by waterbed entrepreneurs with pencil-thin mustaches.

This clip reminds me of the Psychedelic Supermarket, a little rundown shop where I bought a blacklight poster and a teardrop-shaped peace amulet on a cheap leather string. It was lame, but to a sixth grader it seemed pretty cool. Squinting at the brilliant Day-glo posters, I literally stumbled into a dark backroom that looked like a sultan's tent with parachute silk ceilings and oriental rugs, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw faint images of hippies sprawled out on beanbag chairs. A pretty girl in a headband swayed to the music, undulating to trippy psychedelica, maybe the Electric Prunes, and there was a whiff of strawberry incense in the room, and the slightly acrid smell of burning leaves. I probably got a contact high just standing there. I was dumbstruck. The baseball team would never believe this. I felt like Toby Tyler, first discovering the circus. There was no turning back now. PSYCH OUT! PSYCH OUT!!!!

SUMMER'S ALMOST GONE

Summer's almost gone, and thankfully so is the anniversary of the "Summer of Love." Enough with the candy-coated reminiscences of people who weren't even there (the cub reporters normally sent to cover birthdays at the zoo), the uncritical misty-eyed memories of boomers now deep in the corporate rat race, even those rare respectful nods from officialdom (only two more weeks to catch the "Summer of Love" show at the Whitney!). Like the great Jimmy Durante would say, "Everybody wants to get into the act!"

Talk about False Memory Syndrome! I'm sick of all this revisionism, the sanitizing Austin Powers time machine that strips all the grit from the equation and turns history into just another Disneyland theme park, all Dayglo daisies, cutesy flower power, peace-and-love. All style and no content.

They got it all wrong. From the 1966 riots on Sunset Strip to the Kesey acid tests, from Vietnam to Watts to the moon landing to Hendrix burning his Fender Stratocaster at Monterey, a cultural hurricane ripping through the land. It tore through dinner tables and classrooms and draft boards. The music, the hair, the dope -- the attitude -- wasn't created in a vacuum. It wasn't even the best part. There may have been strawberry incense and cannabis on the winds of change, but it came with the unmistakable stench of teargas. Worldwide. Students and auto workers threw paving stones in Paris 1968, and hundreds of students were gunned down in Mexico City, where the Olympics were being held. The Tlatelolco Massacre didn't make the Wide World of Sports broadcast, but you might remember those Olympics for one stunning image; that of two African-American Olympic athletes, medal-winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raising black gloved fists in a Black Power salute. People were shocked, and the International Olympic Committee promptly banned them from the Olympic Games for life!

Summer of Love? Buy the T-shirt. Better yet, love your neighbor, expand your mind, stand up for peace. But don't trust your memory, it's been tampered with.

Here's a great article from the SF Gate.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/21/DDG0MPU2OS1.DTL