NO COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL

1960s advertisements reflected the empire at the crossroads. Pop and Op Art and Carnaby Street fashions entered the living room, and grabbed the eyes of younger consumers. While oldsters chuckled to Alan King on Sullivan, the kids waited for the new pop groups, and the ads straddled this split. Did you drink Sanka or Tang? Did you wear a polka dot plastic mac? Or maybe a leopard skin pillbox hat?



Tang, we were assured, was the breakfast of astronauts. If we hoped to beat the Russians to the moon we'd better start drinking it by the boatload! Lots of powdered foods could survive the trip to outer space, or an extended stay in a fallout shelter. Tang, and Kool-ade and Pixie Stix and Fizzies were the food of the future! Especially if we were forced to live underground for any period of time.


Volkswagen changed everything. Their advertisements stood apart from the hard sell, old school commercials. They welcomed a new sensibility that included irony, self-deprecation and a "cool" sense of humor. "Think Small," they said, and "Live Below Your Means." One ad caught our attention with a single word, "Lemon." Oldsters were puzzled.



Old fashioned ads still existed, of course. This soul-killing suburban coffee problem begged for satire. What did Harvey want? Would the wife ever satisfy his gray flannel dreams? God forbid, would the wife ever satisfy her own? We heard she later ran off to a commune in New Mexico to eat peyote and seek the perfect orgasm. Maybe Harvey learned to make his own damn coffee.



Alka Seltzer pummeled our solar plexus with a cool ad featuring the T-Bones performing the slinky rock hit "No Matter What Shape Your Stomach's In." This was new and different--and miles from Madge with the dishwater hands. Catchy, it anticipated MTV jump cuts.


Sexy stewardesses in mod gear promised trips to exotic locales with a "coffee, tea, or me?" insouciance and long, long legs. They were assembled in secret factories run by James Bond, or possibly Hugh Hefner, whose seedy mid-western version of sexual freedom meant wearing a bathrobe all day long. At this point, women's liberation was still a distant land with no direct flights. Fasten your seatbelts!


These were the men flying those planes. They were weekend swingers, and they wanted to look cool. Bell bottoms were cool, right? Right? Just look at these squares.


Vietnam was raging, the cities were in flames, and wife-beating was just a punch-line (pun intended) in Alan King's stand-up comedy routine. Battered wives had yet to make it to the movie-of-the-week. Subliminal advertising was a reality that hadn't yet been exposed. People were too busy fighting over cigarettes and keeping up with the Joneses. America was invincible, an empire on a power ride that included the cold war and the space race, Cadillacs and martini lunches served by black guys in white jackets. We'd rather fight than switch!


No comment.



Sexist? So what's wrong with sexy? An unforgettable ad for...who cares? Take it off. Take it all off!

But the empire needed defending, and that meant training the little ones ahead of time. We would have to police the world and keep it safe for democracy and capitalism. Hearts and minds, right? The cornucopia of endless products would keep us fat and happy as long as we all pitched in and defended our borders from the Vietnamese, the Latin Americans, and those nasty and godless superpowers.



The barbarians were at the gate, but we could stave them off with the help of Mattel and Hasbro--toy manufacturers who kept our wits sharp and our senses battle-ready. All we needed was our GI Joe dolls, er, "action figures." That, and a little napalm.

Twiggy had "the Look." She was the quintessential frail bird of the sixties with an anorexic boyish body and eyes that could shame a Keene painting. She was the English waif, the woman-as-child, the fragile super model whose eyes followed you around the room. Or did they? Were they, like television itself, glittering with potential but more often just vacuous portals to nothingness? Did they see the changes on the horizon? Let's end on a mystery.

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.

GO ASK ELLIS

Not long ago, major league baseball player Dock Ellis passed away. His best season was 1971, when he won 19 games for the World Series champion Pirates and was the starting pitcher for the National League in the All-Star Game. Ellis is probably best known for pitching a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD in 1970.

He didn't plan it that way. Ellis had been hanging out with friends in LA and was under the impression he had the day off when he ingested the powerful psychedelic.

"I was in Los Angeles, and the team was playing in San Diego, but I didn't know it. I had taken LSD..... I thought it was an off-day, that's how come I had it in me. I took the LSD at noon." At 1pm, his girlfriend and trip partner looked at the paper and said, "Dock, you're pitching today!"

Ellis boarded a shuttle flight to the ballpark and threw a no-hitter despite not being able to feel the ball or clearly see the batter or catcher.

"I can only remember bits and pieces of the game," Ellis recalled. "I was psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the glove, but I didn't hit the glove too much. I remember hitting a couple of batters and the bases were loaded two or three times. The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. They say I had about three to four fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn't hit hard and never reached me."

autographed ball: Dock Ellis, No Hitter 6-12-70

The dubious achievement inspired several songs, including "Dock Ellis" by Barbara Manning (performed by SF Seals), "Dock Ellis No-No" by Chuck Brodsky, and "America's Favorite Pastime" by folk singer by Todd Snider.

Listen to "America's Favorite Pastime" by Todd Snider, click the button below:

Listen to "Dock Ellis" by SF Seals, by clicking here:


Dock Ellis, American Hero

WILD IN THE STREETS!

This election year, it's worth taking a look at campaigns of the past. In 1968, Max Frost and the Troopers led a revolution of young people who challenged the status quo and eventually took over the country. LSD was put in the water supply, hip kids wore crushed velvet bell-bottoms, and people over thirty (!) were taken off to camps.

Talk about California Uber Alles! (Somebody call Jello).

Yup, it was a cautionary tale, and a "youth-sploitation" movie, but we kids thought it was pretty cool, and the song was great. Years later, The Ramones covered it, but here you have Max Frost himself performing the original, the rallying cry, "The Shape of Things to Come."

SOMETHING SPECIAL

SHEA STADIUM, 1965. The Beatles flew into New York City on August 13th, 1965 to begin a tour of the United States. On August 14th they rehearsed and recorded a live tape at CBS studios to be shown on the Ed Sullivan Show later that evening. Throughout the city, the excitement was palpable. The Beatles were in town! The following day, August 15th, they officially opened the US tour with a concert at Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets.

This was an amazing show. The boys were in top form. The fans screamed and fainted and were carried away by New York's Finest. This was the first time in the history of pop music that a stadium was used for a rock concert! 55,600 adoring fans witnessed rock history. The take at the box office was a record $304,000 -- of which the Beatles took a whopping $160, 000!


Happy Birthday, Bekki!

JIMI HENDRIX PAYS HIS DUES

This is a video from 1965, featuring Buddy and Stacey performing "Shotgun" on Nashville's WLAC-TV. The rendition is pretty generic, but the guitar player is a young Jimi Hendrix.

This is the oldest known film of Hendrix performing -- paying his dues in a back-up band. Check out the young avatar a full two years before his fiery debut at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967!

Jimi in 1965

WORKINGMAN DEAD: ALTON KELLEY

Alton Kelley passed away Sunday

Psychedelic poster artist Alton Kelley died Sunday at the age of 67. Kelley, who teamed up with longtime collaborator Stanley Mouse (pictured below, Kelley on the left) created some of the greatest psychedelic posters of the Summer of Love, Haight-Asbury hippie scene, including iconic work for the Avalon Ballroom, the Family Dog, Winterland, the Fillmore, and various Bay Area bands like the Airplane and the Grateful Dead. They designed the covers of Dead albums "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead."

Kelley and Mouse helped create the acid-infused look of san francisco in the 1960s

"Stanley and I had no idea what we were doing," Kelley told The SF Chronicle last year. "But we went ahead and looked at American Indian stuff, Chinese stuff, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modern, Bauhaus, whatever. We were stunned by what we found and what we were able to do. We had free rein to just go graphically crazy. Where before that, all advertising was pretty much just typeset with a photograph of something."

SOUL SACRIFICE

Just a couple years after "Blowup!" the entire world changed drastically. The glacier cool of mod London is replaced by full-out sex, drugs and ecstatic abandon. The same summer man lands on the moon, another small step for mankind is taken in the muddy fields of Bethel, New York. Here, on Max Yasgur's farm, The Woodstock Music and Art Fair provides three days of fun and music to half a million peaceful people.

Here, Santana performs Soul Sacrifice!

BLOWUP!

This is a cool clip of the swinging London go-go scene of the mid-60s from Antonioni's "Blow-up." Carnaby Street fashions, mod birds in mini-skirts, cool rock music, and Thomas, played by David Hemmings, loosely based on mod photographer David Bailey, racing around London in a sports car convertible trying to solve a murder he thinks he's accidentally photographed in a park.
What more could you ask for? How about The Yardbirds, featuring Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page? They're the uncredited pop group in this scene. Groovy, baby. By the way, I love the chick with the striped pants. Meet you at the discotheque.