The Sixties (2013) s01e10 Episode Script
Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll
1 There are colonies of Hippies springing up in most American cities.
It's all related.
The psychedelics, and the war, the protesting.
I'm planning on having a good time as long as I can.
Smoke pot with your kids and then you'll understand why the kids are happy.
It's a giant love-in.
People should be uninhibited in their sexual expression.
You cannot ignore it.
A change in morality.
They're fascists.
They don't like Hippies, and they don't like the things we do.
We do have to maintain law, order, and decency on the streets.
What we're thinking is about is a peaceful planet.
We're not thinking about anything else.
They are trying to do what no one else has ever done before.
Find a new way for humanity.
America in the early 60s, it was a real good time of prosperity, but it was also kind of stagnant time in terms of spiritual growth.
Things were kind of at a standstill.
The baseline culture was materialism.
And also the feeling that the culture itself didn't honor the human spirit and didn't honor creativity.
In the early 1950s, the nation recognized in its midst a social movement called the Beat Generation.
A novel titled On the Road became a bestseller.
When Kerouac's book comes out, it became a revolution, defined a new generation of what being Beat means.
And it defined it as a spiritual revolution.
But if we're living in an age of conformity, if everybody is trying to work the corporation that you're losing a sense of self.
I was traveling west one time at the junction of the state line of Colorado.
I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fearing golden desert of even fall the Great Image of God with 4 fingers pointed straight at me.
C'mon boy, go thou across the ground.
Go moan for man.
Go moan.
Go groan.
Go groan alone.
Go roll your bones.
Alone.
Jack Kerouac became like a godfather for the counterculture.
The village has a life and language all its own.
If you dig it, you're hip.
If you don't, man, you're square.
Coffee houses, the neighborhood bars of Bohemia.
Where the strongest potion is coffee, and the coffee house poet is the specialty of the house.
To find a place where the eyes can rest.
Beatniks, they had these coffee houses that they would go in and play chess and read poetry.
And those same coffee houses became kind of a proving ground for folk singers.
And all the young kids were running out to buy guitars and banjos.
Folk music, it gives me a lot more than the popular music of our own time does.
My outlooks is that popular songs should be sung because we don't anything about say, the bomb, you know, the whole situation comes to an end.
There's got to be an alternative to whatever ways in life are offered to them.
You know, I mean Democrat, Republican.
And I would like to offer some kind of alternative somehow, you know.
The folk revival scene had a big part on politics.
You can't get left politics out of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger.
And so the Greenwich Village Movement was there to celebrate people's culture.
If you like the music you really were signing on for their ways of looking at the world too.
And then eventually, one guy emerges as being special.
A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers' blood.
During that time in the 60s, as that cultural revolution was slowly bubbling, and kids were starting to question authority, question what was happening in their country.
They were looking for answers.
Bob Dylan thought that folk music was poetry.
He took Beat energy and mixed it with folk culture.
And it's more of lyrical intensity than anybody's put to song before.
And the Negro's name is used, it is plain, for the politician's gain as he rises to fame.
Up until the time of Bob Dylan, there were the songwriters and there were the singers.
Dylan started writing his own music.
He says, "I'm going to comment on the world.
"I'm going to comment on the nature of this human experience.
" Bob Dylan was in this sort of white hot moment of saying more in the popular song than anyone ever had before.
Only a pawn in that game.
After the revolution of Bob Dylan, the music world moves West.
Laurel Canyon becomes the epicenter of the rock revolution.
The music scene was not happening in New York anymore.
It was now L.
A.
Everybody moved to Laurel Canyon.
Actors, musicians, artists.
And so it was kind of a whole community.
Very open.
If you were driving over Laurel Canyon and you saw somebody hitchhiking, you'd just automatically pull over.
"Hey, brother, get in.
I know where you're going.
" Laurel Canyon was an incredibly interesting place to live in those days.
I live on Lookout Mountain with Joni Mitchell.
Crosby was close.
Steven was close.
Now it was all these artists who were singing the truth.
And their truth was this idyllic sort of sense of freedom.
There was a thriving community of kids that were discovering their new life and couldn't wait to play you the new song that they'd written.
It was a lot of freedom.
There was a lot of drugs, there was a lot of beautiful women, there was a lot of good rock 'n' roll being made.
It was a fabulous time.
These are students at a suburban high school in Los Angeles.
They reflect the sun, sensuality, and affluence which dominate life in Southern California.
The latest fad is the Sunset Strip.
During the past year it has become a playground for Southern California's mobile, restless teenagers.
It is the place to go.
People would meet down at clubs on the Sunset Strip and they would go to the Trip or they would go to the Whiskey a Go Go.
It was a real happening.
We changed from a culture of grownups that sort of looked down on kids, to kids leading.
It is the creation of the teenager.
And the revolution begins.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office has begun foot patrol on the Sunset Strip to cope with the growing influx of youngsters.
The notion of teenagers who had a culture of their own, that weren't listening to their parent's music, kind of opens up this giant space for rebellions large and small.
I believe 10% of the students have used and are using marijuana.
And probably a very significant thing is that acceptance is gaining steadily and the usage is really increasing very, very rapidly.
In L.
A.
we were all kind of, you know, smoking God's herb.
Whereas up in San Francisco it seemed like they were experimenting more with mind expansion, you know? Ken Kesey took classes of writing at Stanford University and he writes the great novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
And this makes Kesey a celebrity.
While at Stanford, I was given the opportunity to go to the Stanford Hospital and take part in the L.
S.
D.
experiments.
Kesey had volunteered to do tests for L.
S.
D.
A government-sponsored test.
L.
S.
D.
was isolated by Stoll and Hofmann in the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company of Basel, Switzerland.
- Do you feel happy? - Yes.
Well, you must be, because you have tears in your eyes.
Is it a beautiful experience, would you say? I would say yes.
Some people think it's when Kesey discovers L.
S.
D.
that the counterculture in California is born, because more and more people then want to try experience what Kesey experienced.
And he becomes a promoter of it.
Kesey created a drug commune at La Honda, which is an hour from San Francisco.
Great artists love smashing traditions, and at his best, Kesey was doing that.
Everybody would have this communal L.
S.
D.
trip together.
Tom Wolfe would write The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test about it.
People were constantly slipping drugs into my food.
The number of times that I would get a brownie.
"What the hell is happening to me?" They thought they were doing me a favor.
They were having the World's Fair in New York, so a bunch of us were going to go.
But the bunch of us were too big to fit in his station wagon, so he bought this converted school bus.
Kesey, he was going to put the bus in day-glow bright colors and then go what he called unsettling America, blowing people's minds.
The whole idea of blowing people's minds was that you have to present something to them that is so different, there's a crack comes open where something new can come in.
And the reaction of all these people is wonderful because what it was in 1964, there was no other thing like this happening.
Its part of a kind cultural revolution going on, making the squares pay notice to this underground of America.
When we got New York City, which is the home of the Beats, where Kerouac lived and picked him up Because we were in his presence, we were just acting as goofy as we could.
Playing music, putting on costumes, doing all kinds of acts and stuff like that.
And then Kerouac sat on the couch drinking a big, tall Budweiser.
He was obviously not an enthusiastic guy.
Those Beats, they had done their thing, you know.
I really felt like the torch had been passed from those guys to the psychedelic generation.
Kesey in many ways was very messianic, and he started feeling that acid would allow you to see a larger truth.
And they started saying, "let's get as many people to try L.
S.
D.
as you can.
" And so we started renting halls.
We called the thing the Acid Test.
And the band, of course, was known as The Warlocks.
As time went on, they changed their name to The Grateful Dead.
L.
S.
D.
was not an illegal drug.
When Kesey held these Acid Tests, as they were known, they would have 2 vats.
1 was punch and 1 was punch with L.
S.
D.
The Acid Tests were like a party.
The scene is a lot of lights shows, and music, and people dancing.
And when The Dead were playing it was a way to feel that acid in waves.
And I looked down I saw kids in front of me moving to the music.
They looked up at me and I said, "yeah.
" The drug culture really took hold And that's where artists, whether it was The Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane, to be able to embrace it and put it in their music.
The counterculture in California is born because more and more people then want to try to experience what Kesey experienced.
And he became the kind of Grand Poobah of the carnival of San Francisco in the 60s.
There's nothing grown up or sophisticated in taking an L.
S.
D.
trip at all.
They're just being complete fools.
CBS News, without any flowers in its hair, is in San Francisco because this city has gained the reputation of being the Hippie capital of the world.
I got accepted in San Francisco State and I found an apartment at Haight and Clayton Street.
Right in the center of what would become the Haight-Ashbury.
The psychedelic shop on Haight Street started just over year ago.
Its spreads the gospel of a dreamy new utopia based on brotherhood, and love, and L.
S.
D.
To all of people out there that are confused and hungry for some kind spiritual meaning in life.
That's why all these people are down here.
That's why there is so much interest in Haight-Ashbury, because it offers some kind of hope.
We moved up and lived right down the street from the psychedelic shop.
People were growing their hair long, they were wearing beads, they were playing music on the street.
It was just an incredible environment at that point at the beginning.
That's when it was just like one big, giant family.
Before you knew it, it was a congregating place for artists.
And the dividing line seemed to be the psychedelic experience.
You couldn't understand the posters, you couldn't understand the fashions, you couldn't understand anything, if you hadn't gotten high.
The Diggers Group scrounges food and money to feed free those who arrive in Panhandle Park with a bowl and an appetite.
Diggers are people who share, says their manifesto.
And their aim is a society where everything is shared, everything free.
The Diggers were one of the first groups that were into social consciousness about what was needed to take care of this huge group of people that were coming into the Haight-Ashbury.
Their free shop looks more like a playground at first sight.
Here they make treats and clothes for other Hippies who can come and take what they want without paying anything for it.
Everything in the store was free.
Tools, clothing, televisions.
And so we were inviting people to imagine the way of life that would please them and then to make it real by doing it.
What we're thinking about is a peaceful planet.
We're not thinking about anything else.
We're not thinking about any kind of power.
We're not thinking about any of those kinds of struggles.
We're not thinking about revolution or war or any of that.
That's not what we want.
Nobody wants to get hurt.
Nobody wants to hurt anybody.
We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life.
A simple life, a good life, you know, and like think about moving the whole human race ahead a step, or a few steps.
We wanted to learn more about the real meaning of life.
Why are we here? Certainly, not to kill each other, but here to celebrate life.
To make music, and do art, and love each other.
These people are Hippies.
They represent a new form of social rebellion.
It is hard to figure out what positive things they are in favor of.
The reason we can no longer identify with the kinds of activities that the older generation are engaged in is because those activities are, for us, meaningless.
They have lead to a monstrous war in Vietnam, for example.
We did want change from war.
From rigid ideas of what the sexes ought to be doing.
A change from black people ought to be here and white people ought to be here.
No, why can we try and make that work? The Haight-Ashbury community has created the Counsel for a Summer of Love in San Francisco.
The counsel is calling for creative love happenings for every weekend throughout the summer.
We ask all who come here to come here in love.
And we ask all who live here to greet all men with love.
They at their best are trying for a kind of group sainthood.
And saints running in groups are likely to be ludicrous.
They depend on hallucination for their philosophy.
This is not a new idea, and it has never worked.
There was sort of divide of generations, a lot of mistrust.
Young people didn't trust old people.
Old people didn't understand young people.
What's so offensive about long hair? - It looks sloppy.
- Just It doesn't differentiate the boys from the girls enough.
We didn't ourselves Hippies.
The Hippies are a fabrication.
They were an attempt to diminish young adults and infantilize us.
And it certainly serves to exclude the people that were deeply thoughtful about the world, that were ready to dedicate their lives to making change, and that question the paradigm of materialism.
Look around you.
Nothing works.
The only a kid is presented with is when you grow up, look, you know.
You can join the army.
You can go to war.
You can get a gig working as an engineer and become a vegetable and drive to work in your own car, your own big metal box, you know.
Just, it looks absurd, you know.
People in their metal boxes, like this going all over from job to job, frustrated, uptight.
What joy is there in life? Life is and should be ecstasy.
The counterculture had the arrogance to tell everybody else what they were doing is wrong.
And nobody likes that.
It's estimated that anywhere from 10,000 to 200,000 youngsters may pour in to Haight-Ashbury this summer.
Many people are apprehensive.
They feel that Black Power or other political activist groups may use Haight Street as a stage setting for riots.
Haight-Ashbury cannot handle 100,000 because there isn't room.
The tension between the government and the people began to be evident.
Nobody should let their young children come into San Francisco unsupervised to become a part of a group such as that.
They're fascists as far as I'm concerned.
And they don't like Hippies, and they don't like the things we do.
And they try to harass us and bother us.
In some way, their revolution's a war between generations.
The Hippies' rallying cry is, "never trust anyone over 30.
" The war of youth culture against the establishment is in full swing on every front.
About 4 policemen and a plainclothes man came in and said, "Everybody get out, everybody get out.
This store is closed.
" They wouldn't give a reason.
They wouldn't identify, you know, under what premise they were doing this.
When we asked them, they started pushing people around.
They pushed people physically out of the store.
The mayor is This is really very insidious what he's up to.
He wants to stop human growth.
The Hippie leaders say all will be well.
Flower Power will prevail.
They say it will be a summer of love.
A great pilgrimage.
Hopefully, they'll be right.
If it's necessary to bring in National Guard, I'll bring in National Guard.
I'll use whatever force is necessary.
We now seem to be witnessing in this country and elsewhere an intense preoccupation with the pursuit of pleasure.
Call it hedonism, call it self-gratification, call it what you will.
You cannot avoid noticing it.
You may not like it.
You may not accept it.
But you can not ignore it.
A change in morality.
Turn on.
Tune in.
Drop out.
I spent some time in New York.
I spent some time in London.
And I'm here to tell you it's happening all over.
In any large city, Haight-Ashburies, which people could point to.
See, we're on the map.
We're big, and we're far more interesting than what you all have to offer.
How do you answer the questions of parents who are concerned about the use of L.
S.
D.
and marijuana for their children? These are young people who are hungering for older people, for their parents, to listen to them.
These youngsters want to share with their parents the grandeur and the glory that they are encountering.
And perhaps eventually, when you're spiritually ready, you'll turn on with your children if you think that's the right thing to do.
Monterey Pop, it was the absolute ultimate love-in.
Down by my window, just looking out at the rain.
The best festival that I've played, pretty much ever, is the Monterey Pop Festival.
Just looking out at the rain.
Monterey hit like lightning.
Popular music was changing and had become something different.
And there was a whole new generation of people that wanted to march with it.
It said, "get on board.
We're leaving town.
" Well here you go today, and I want to love you, I want to love you for so long.
Oh, yeah.
You realize, this is Janis Joplin before she was known.
Before she'd ever done her first album.
Before she'd ever done her first single.
Out at the rain.
Sun came along It's just music at its freshest.
It's music that is just being born, and the audience is like Oh honey, this can't be, oh, baby, baby, baby, love in vain.
Why, oh tell me why, oh, baby, tell me why love Honey, why love is like It's like a ball and chain.
Everything was love, and peace, and music.
And the policeman who was in charge brought flowers out to his men, and he said, "don't bust anybody.
" Monterey was that Hippie dream come true.
Culture was changing.
The Hippie movement, it was swaying the mainstream.
This is where the youngsters come to buy their clothes.
And not just the youngsters, it's the young adults, and the men who are 40, 50, and even 60 years old.
In the states, pot is going middle class and spreading like Prohibition liquor.
As more and more citizens get zonked out of their minds, the drug cult enters the bloodstream of American life.
Like it or not, we're living in the stoned age.
At its best, the counterculture came in with hard punches to the mainstream culture.
People have already changed their minds about contraception, abortion, premarital sex.
The 1960s were absolutely a sexual revolution.
Because of the pill, women could take charge of their own bodies.
They could be sexual and they didn't have to get pregnant.
Everything sort of coalesces.
Sort of a perfect storm of societal forces come together.
Here, if you love somebody, and people here love everybody, if you want to make love to somebody, then you should.
There's no reason why you shouldn't.
Free love was all well and good.
And there was a lot of accidental sex, but we didn't look at it as hedonism.
People were just so open to each other, and life was beautiful, you know.
And people weren't judgmental.
The mainstream young people were telling their parents, "you've been prohibiting my sexual freedom, and the Puritan work ethic is bunk.
" It was clear the rules were changing, and the rules were really that there were no rules.
The topic tonight is the Hippies.
We have with us Mr.
Jack Kerouac over here, who was said to have started the whole Beat Generation business.
Jack Kerouac never wanted to be a prophet.
He wanted to be a great American writer, but fame destroys people in America.
To what extent do you believe that the Beat Generation is related to the Hippies? What do they have in common? Was this an evolution from one to the other? Just the older ones.
I'm 46 years old.
These kids are 18.
The Beat Generation was a generation of the attitude, and pleasure in life, and tenderness.
I believe in order and piety.
Here's the progenitor, really, of the counterculture kind of disowning his own babies and try to make sense of a decade, the 60s, that he didn't feel parry to.
Apparently some kind of Dionysian movement and which I did not intend.
This was pure in my heart.
So.
All sorts of people have been writing various articles about the Hippies.
Usually about the Hippies as if they were animals, something to look at.
Thus we've gotten hundreds and literally thousands of people coming up to Haight-Ashbury to watch people.
It makes Haight-Ashbury a terribly unpleasant place to be in.
The news got out about the Haight-Ashbury.
It became overrun.
We're now entering what is known as the largest Hippie colony in the world.
The fountainhead of the Hippie subculture.
The nickname is Hashbury's.
And marijuana, of course, with L.
S.
D.
is being used.
Literally people made the trip to San Francisco to be a part of something.
But by the time they got there, that trip was over.
This is the latest stage in the evolution of the Hippie movement.
The Hippies are trying to get away.
So they go out to a cabin in the countryside and start a commune.
Here they can get away from the tourists and the reporters who badger them in San Francisco.
Communes started, and this was really what the Hippie movement was all about.
An idea of sharing everything.
Clothes and food and everything.
People could just help themselves, you know.
We lived communally because it was the cheapest way to live.
A lot of people began to clarify and simplify their lives.
What will follow this dispersal of the Hippie movement to the countryside is hard to predict.
They may be, as they say, coming here to build the foundations for a new society in this nation, or they may be coming, like the woolly mammoth, to find their own extinction.
I was working for The New York Times in the Catskills.
And there were just a couple of us going up there.
As we went north of the city, we began to run into traffic jams.
I found a state cop, asked, "what the hell is going on?" He says, "I don't know.
There are thousands of people here, "and they're all going to some farm.
" And it was, of course, Woodstock.
I think Woodstock was an opportunity for people to realize they weren't alone.
A lot people that were in their hometown, or in their family, felt isolated, realized they weren't.
The townspeople, quite frankly, were terrified at the prospect of the Hippie arrival.
The word got out.
Everybody and their brother came from all over the country.
First the sudden rain, the, the thirst and hunger from the shortage of water and food, just for the opportunity to spend a few days in the country getting stoned on their drugs and grooving on the music.
We got together had a little pow-wow about what are we going to do to feed these people? We went in to New York to buy 1,500 pounds of bulk wheat, 1,500 pounds of rolled oats, 130,000 paper plates, 130,000 Dixie cups, and I believe we served 200,000 people.
By now, there are tens of millions of people who feel themselves to be an irresistible river of change.
And you get something incandescent.
Freedom, freedom, freedom Freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom Freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom We'd had love-ins in L.
A.
on the weekends where everybody gets dressed up and goes to the park and brings an instrument.
but to see hundreds of thousands of people, like a meeting of all the tribes from all over the country.
Boy, we didn't know there were so many of us that felt the same.
We must be in heaven, man.
A rock music festival that drew hundreds of thousands of young people to a dairy farm in White Lake, New York over the weekend came to an end today.
Admittedly, there was marijuana, as well as music, at the rock festival, but there was also no rioting.
What did not happen at that dairy farm is possibly more significant than what did happen.
These long-haired mostly white kids in their blue jeans and sandals were no wide-eyed anarchists looking for trouble.
They remained polite.
Residents and resorts freely emptied their cupboards for the kids.
Merchants were stunned by their politeness.
And while such spectacle may never happen again, it has recorded the growing proportions of this youthful culture in the mind of adult America.
Whenever you see a phenomenon, especially if you're living in it at the time, you tend to think that's the arrival.
This is the dawning and the start of something new.
Unfortunately, Woodstock just marked the end of it.
Is this going to be Woodstock West? Well, it's going to be San Francisco.
Woodstock was followed by Altamont, you know, only a few months later.
And there couldn't have been 2 more different concerts.
The Jefferson Airplane.
Jefferson Airplane.
We'd had the Hells Angels be security at a number of free-in-the-park concerts that we had done, and they were fine.
They were funny.
They were doing what they were supposed to do.
So we suggested using Hells Angels.
That's the other side of this life I've been leading.
What happened was a lot of speed and alcohol.
That's a deadly combination for bikers.
Marty said the F word to one of the Hell Angels.
While we were on stage, the Hells Angel knocks him down.
That was just the beginning.
I'd like to mention that the Hells Angels just smashed Marty Balin in the face and knocked him out for a bit.
I'd like to thank you for that.
You're talking to me? I'm going to talk to you.
I'm not talking to you, man.
I'm talking to the people hit my lead singer.
- You're talking to my people.
- Right.
Let me tell you what's happening.
You what's happening.
- Oh! - No! Oh, that's what the story is here? - Oh, bummer.
- Really, man.
It's scary.
- Who's doing all the beating? - Hells Angels.
Hells Angels are doing beating on the musicians? Marty got beat up.
It's really weird.
Go ask Alice.
I think she'll know.
When we left, it was dark, and The Rolling Stones were on, and we were on a helicopter.
Paul Kantner looked down, he said, "wow, it looks like some body's getting killed down there.
" Well, he was right.
They were.
In California, 5 members of a so-called religious cult, including Charles Manson, the guru or high priest, have been indicted in the murder of Sharon Tate and 6 others.
All the elements are present for one of the most sensational murder trials in American history.
7 people brutally murdered in a glare of Hollywood publicity.
The involvement of a mystical Hippie clan which despised the straight affluent society.
Young girls supposedly under the spell of a bearded svengali who allegedly masterminded the 7 murders.
- Hi.
- Hi.
- Sun's shining this morning.
- I know.
Charles Manson cleverly masqueraded behind the common image of being a Hippie.
Goes up to the Haight-Ashbury district, surrounds himself with a young bunch of followers.
Their lifestyle was sex orgies and L.
S.
D.
trips.
Eventually, he gets them to commit mass murder for him.
With blood, the killer had scrawled on the refrigerator door the words, "death to pigs.
" You see, prior to these murders, no one associated Hippies with violence and murder.
People would pick up a hitchhiking Hippie.
There was no big deal.
But after the Manson murders, you saw a Hippie with long hair hitchhiking, and the image of Manson would enter the driver's mind and they'd drive right by.
By the time of Charles Manson, and watching and seeing what happened there, it symbolizes the drained idealism of the spiritual quest of the Beats and early Hippies.
Today the magic is gone.
Aimless and disorganized, the Hippies have fallen prey to their own free spirit.
Free love, free drugs, and too much free publicity have gradually corrupted them.
Has something happened to Haight-Ashbury since last year? We hear it's not the same place.
Well no, it isn't.
The love-ins brought more and more people, and then people who were really just bums, they just were trying to get into a good thing.
You know, free food, free everything.
And so they just came in, you know.
And a lot of really rotten people.
And so now you've really got a bad thing.
I mean, it used to be you could set your stuff down beside the road, and nobody would touch it.
And now it got so you couldn't even put your things inside of a building.
Somebody would come along and take everything you had.
Well one day I woke up very hungry.
And, you know, very dirty, and tired, and disgusted.
So I decided to, you know, get a job and settle down.
To get serious.
Joe's job is making jewelry.
He's been taking a 6-month course to learn how.
It's hard to be getting up at 8:00 every morning and doing all these changes.
Joe bought the suit, uncomfortable though it looked.
Will he be equally uncomfortable in his new life? There have been generation gaps before but today is probably the widest yet.
Can the Joes of America bridge the gap and conform, without society making concessions in return? I'd say there was a common element in the counterculture of people trying to invent a new world.
But people mature.
Their point of view gets more nuanced.
The costs start to come due.
Children come into the world.
That idea of sex, drugs and rock and roll, it's a youth dream.
Then youth dies.
Yet our mainstream culture took what it needed from the Hippies.
The actual movement of the 60s was the movement towards something more authentic.
In the 60s we thought of other people as part of our own family.
We were into caring for society as a whole.
This is what the revolution is all about.
Mercy is better than justice.
The carrot is better than the stick.
And the most important lesson is be kind.
Be kind.
To me, every day was a high watermark.
We played music all day long.
We worked.
We did not have jobs.
It was the most carefree period of my life.
Dylan has this great line in an early song.
He says, "I wish, I wish, I wish in vain "that we could sit simply in that room again, "$1000 at the drop of a hat, "I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.
"
It's all related.
The psychedelics, and the war, the protesting.
I'm planning on having a good time as long as I can.
Smoke pot with your kids and then you'll understand why the kids are happy.
It's a giant love-in.
People should be uninhibited in their sexual expression.
You cannot ignore it.
A change in morality.
They're fascists.
They don't like Hippies, and they don't like the things we do.
We do have to maintain law, order, and decency on the streets.
What we're thinking is about is a peaceful planet.
We're not thinking about anything else.
They are trying to do what no one else has ever done before.
Find a new way for humanity.
America in the early 60s, it was a real good time of prosperity, but it was also kind of stagnant time in terms of spiritual growth.
Things were kind of at a standstill.
The baseline culture was materialism.
And also the feeling that the culture itself didn't honor the human spirit and didn't honor creativity.
In the early 1950s, the nation recognized in its midst a social movement called the Beat Generation.
A novel titled On the Road became a bestseller.
When Kerouac's book comes out, it became a revolution, defined a new generation of what being Beat means.
And it defined it as a spiritual revolution.
But if we're living in an age of conformity, if everybody is trying to work the corporation that you're losing a sense of self.
I was traveling west one time at the junction of the state line of Colorado.
I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fearing golden desert of even fall the Great Image of God with 4 fingers pointed straight at me.
C'mon boy, go thou across the ground.
Go moan for man.
Go moan.
Go groan.
Go groan alone.
Go roll your bones.
Alone.
Jack Kerouac became like a godfather for the counterculture.
The village has a life and language all its own.
If you dig it, you're hip.
If you don't, man, you're square.
Coffee houses, the neighborhood bars of Bohemia.
Where the strongest potion is coffee, and the coffee house poet is the specialty of the house.
To find a place where the eyes can rest.
Beatniks, they had these coffee houses that they would go in and play chess and read poetry.
And those same coffee houses became kind of a proving ground for folk singers.
And all the young kids were running out to buy guitars and banjos.
Folk music, it gives me a lot more than the popular music of our own time does.
My outlooks is that popular songs should be sung because we don't anything about say, the bomb, you know, the whole situation comes to an end.
There's got to be an alternative to whatever ways in life are offered to them.
You know, I mean Democrat, Republican.
And I would like to offer some kind of alternative somehow, you know.
The folk revival scene had a big part on politics.
You can't get left politics out of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger.
And so the Greenwich Village Movement was there to celebrate people's culture.
If you like the music you really were signing on for their ways of looking at the world too.
And then eventually, one guy emerges as being special.
A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers' blood.
During that time in the 60s, as that cultural revolution was slowly bubbling, and kids were starting to question authority, question what was happening in their country.
They were looking for answers.
Bob Dylan thought that folk music was poetry.
He took Beat energy and mixed it with folk culture.
And it's more of lyrical intensity than anybody's put to song before.
And the Negro's name is used, it is plain, for the politician's gain as he rises to fame.
Up until the time of Bob Dylan, there were the songwriters and there were the singers.
Dylan started writing his own music.
He says, "I'm going to comment on the world.
"I'm going to comment on the nature of this human experience.
" Bob Dylan was in this sort of white hot moment of saying more in the popular song than anyone ever had before.
Only a pawn in that game.
After the revolution of Bob Dylan, the music world moves West.
Laurel Canyon becomes the epicenter of the rock revolution.
The music scene was not happening in New York anymore.
It was now L.
A.
Everybody moved to Laurel Canyon.
Actors, musicians, artists.
And so it was kind of a whole community.
Very open.
If you were driving over Laurel Canyon and you saw somebody hitchhiking, you'd just automatically pull over.
"Hey, brother, get in.
I know where you're going.
" Laurel Canyon was an incredibly interesting place to live in those days.
I live on Lookout Mountain with Joni Mitchell.
Crosby was close.
Steven was close.
Now it was all these artists who were singing the truth.
And their truth was this idyllic sort of sense of freedom.
There was a thriving community of kids that were discovering their new life and couldn't wait to play you the new song that they'd written.
It was a lot of freedom.
There was a lot of drugs, there was a lot of beautiful women, there was a lot of good rock 'n' roll being made.
It was a fabulous time.
These are students at a suburban high school in Los Angeles.
They reflect the sun, sensuality, and affluence which dominate life in Southern California.
The latest fad is the Sunset Strip.
During the past year it has become a playground for Southern California's mobile, restless teenagers.
It is the place to go.
People would meet down at clubs on the Sunset Strip and they would go to the Trip or they would go to the Whiskey a Go Go.
It was a real happening.
We changed from a culture of grownups that sort of looked down on kids, to kids leading.
It is the creation of the teenager.
And the revolution begins.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office has begun foot patrol on the Sunset Strip to cope with the growing influx of youngsters.
The notion of teenagers who had a culture of their own, that weren't listening to their parent's music, kind of opens up this giant space for rebellions large and small.
I believe 10% of the students have used and are using marijuana.
And probably a very significant thing is that acceptance is gaining steadily and the usage is really increasing very, very rapidly.
In L.
A.
we were all kind of, you know, smoking God's herb.
Whereas up in San Francisco it seemed like they were experimenting more with mind expansion, you know? Ken Kesey took classes of writing at Stanford University and he writes the great novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
And this makes Kesey a celebrity.
While at Stanford, I was given the opportunity to go to the Stanford Hospital and take part in the L.
S.
D.
experiments.
Kesey had volunteered to do tests for L.
S.
D.
A government-sponsored test.
L.
S.
D.
was isolated by Stoll and Hofmann in the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company of Basel, Switzerland.
- Do you feel happy? - Yes.
Well, you must be, because you have tears in your eyes.
Is it a beautiful experience, would you say? I would say yes.
Some people think it's when Kesey discovers L.
S.
D.
that the counterculture in California is born, because more and more people then want to try experience what Kesey experienced.
And he becomes a promoter of it.
Kesey created a drug commune at La Honda, which is an hour from San Francisco.
Great artists love smashing traditions, and at his best, Kesey was doing that.
Everybody would have this communal L.
S.
D.
trip together.
Tom Wolfe would write The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test about it.
People were constantly slipping drugs into my food.
The number of times that I would get a brownie.
"What the hell is happening to me?" They thought they were doing me a favor.
They were having the World's Fair in New York, so a bunch of us were going to go.
But the bunch of us were too big to fit in his station wagon, so he bought this converted school bus.
Kesey, he was going to put the bus in day-glow bright colors and then go what he called unsettling America, blowing people's minds.
The whole idea of blowing people's minds was that you have to present something to them that is so different, there's a crack comes open where something new can come in.
And the reaction of all these people is wonderful because what it was in 1964, there was no other thing like this happening.
Its part of a kind cultural revolution going on, making the squares pay notice to this underground of America.
When we got New York City, which is the home of the Beats, where Kerouac lived and picked him up Because we were in his presence, we were just acting as goofy as we could.
Playing music, putting on costumes, doing all kinds of acts and stuff like that.
And then Kerouac sat on the couch drinking a big, tall Budweiser.
He was obviously not an enthusiastic guy.
Those Beats, they had done their thing, you know.
I really felt like the torch had been passed from those guys to the psychedelic generation.
Kesey in many ways was very messianic, and he started feeling that acid would allow you to see a larger truth.
And they started saying, "let's get as many people to try L.
S.
D.
as you can.
" And so we started renting halls.
We called the thing the Acid Test.
And the band, of course, was known as The Warlocks.
As time went on, they changed their name to The Grateful Dead.
L.
S.
D.
was not an illegal drug.
When Kesey held these Acid Tests, as they were known, they would have 2 vats.
1 was punch and 1 was punch with L.
S.
D.
The Acid Tests were like a party.
The scene is a lot of lights shows, and music, and people dancing.
And when The Dead were playing it was a way to feel that acid in waves.
And I looked down I saw kids in front of me moving to the music.
They looked up at me and I said, "yeah.
" The drug culture really took hold And that's where artists, whether it was The Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane, to be able to embrace it and put it in their music.
The counterculture in California is born because more and more people then want to try to experience what Kesey experienced.
And he became the kind of Grand Poobah of the carnival of San Francisco in the 60s.
There's nothing grown up or sophisticated in taking an L.
S.
D.
trip at all.
They're just being complete fools.
CBS News, without any flowers in its hair, is in San Francisco because this city has gained the reputation of being the Hippie capital of the world.
I got accepted in San Francisco State and I found an apartment at Haight and Clayton Street.
Right in the center of what would become the Haight-Ashbury.
The psychedelic shop on Haight Street started just over year ago.
Its spreads the gospel of a dreamy new utopia based on brotherhood, and love, and L.
S.
D.
To all of people out there that are confused and hungry for some kind spiritual meaning in life.
That's why all these people are down here.
That's why there is so much interest in Haight-Ashbury, because it offers some kind of hope.
We moved up and lived right down the street from the psychedelic shop.
People were growing their hair long, they were wearing beads, they were playing music on the street.
It was just an incredible environment at that point at the beginning.
That's when it was just like one big, giant family.
Before you knew it, it was a congregating place for artists.
And the dividing line seemed to be the psychedelic experience.
You couldn't understand the posters, you couldn't understand the fashions, you couldn't understand anything, if you hadn't gotten high.
The Diggers Group scrounges food and money to feed free those who arrive in Panhandle Park with a bowl and an appetite.
Diggers are people who share, says their manifesto.
And their aim is a society where everything is shared, everything free.
The Diggers were one of the first groups that were into social consciousness about what was needed to take care of this huge group of people that were coming into the Haight-Ashbury.
Their free shop looks more like a playground at first sight.
Here they make treats and clothes for other Hippies who can come and take what they want without paying anything for it.
Everything in the store was free.
Tools, clothing, televisions.
And so we were inviting people to imagine the way of life that would please them and then to make it real by doing it.
What we're thinking about is a peaceful planet.
We're not thinking about anything else.
We're not thinking about any kind of power.
We're not thinking about any of those kinds of struggles.
We're not thinking about revolution or war or any of that.
That's not what we want.
Nobody wants to get hurt.
Nobody wants to hurt anybody.
We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life.
A simple life, a good life, you know, and like think about moving the whole human race ahead a step, or a few steps.
We wanted to learn more about the real meaning of life.
Why are we here? Certainly, not to kill each other, but here to celebrate life.
To make music, and do art, and love each other.
These people are Hippies.
They represent a new form of social rebellion.
It is hard to figure out what positive things they are in favor of.
The reason we can no longer identify with the kinds of activities that the older generation are engaged in is because those activities are, for us, meaningless.
They have lead to a monstrous war in Vietnam, for example.
We did want change from war.
From rigid ideas of what the sexes ought to be doing.
A change from black people ought to be here and white people ought to be here.
No, why can we try and make that work? The Haight-Ashbury community has created the Counsel for a Summer of Love in San Francisco.
The counsel is calling for creative love happenings for every weekend throughout the summer.
We ask all who come here to come here in love.
And we ask all who live here to greet all men with love.
They at their best are trying for a kind of group sainthood.
And saints running in groups are likely to be ludicrous.
They depend on hallucination for their philosophy.
This is not a new idea, and it has never worked.
There was sort of divide of generations, a lot of mistrust.
Young people didn't trust old people.
Old people didn't understand young people.
What's so offensive about long hair? - It looks sloppy.
- Just It doesn't differentiate the boys from the girls enough.
We didn't ourselves Hippies.
The Hippies are a fabrication.
They were an attempt to diminish young adults and infantilize us.
And it certainly serves to exclude the people that were deeply thoughtful about the world, that were ready to dedicate their lives to making change, and that question the paradigm of materialism.
Look around you.
Nothing works.
The only a kid is presented with is when you grow up, look, you know.
You can join the army.
You can go to war.
You can get a gig working as an engineer and become a vegetable and drive to work in your own car, your own big metal box, you know.
Just, it looks absurd, you know.
People in their metal boxes, like this going all over from job to job, frustrated, uptight.
What joy is there in life? Life is and should be ecstasy.
The counterculture had the arrogance to tell everybody else what they were doing is wrong.
And nobody likes that.
It's estimated that anywhere from 10,000 to 200,000 youngsters may pour in to Haight-Ashbury this summer.
Many people are apprehensive.
They feel that Black Power or other political activist groups may use Haight Street as a stage setting for riots.
Haight-Ashbury cannot handle 100,000 because there isn't room.
The tension between the government and the people began to be evident.
Nobody should let their young children come into San Francisco unsupervised to become a part of a group such as that.
They're fascists as far as I'm concerned.
And they don't like Hippies, and they don't like the things we do.
And they try to harass us and bother us.
In some way, their revolution's a war between generations.
The Hippies' rallying cry is, "never trust anyone over 30.
" The war of youth culture against the establishment is in full swing on every front.
About 4 policemen and a plainclothes man came in and said, "Everybody get out, everybody get out.
This store is closed.
" They wouldn't give a reason.
They wouldn't identify, you know, under what premise they were doing this.
When we asked them, they started pushing people around.
They pushed people physically out of the store.
The mayor is This is really very insidious what he's up to.
He wants to stop human growth.
The Hippie leaders say all will be well.
Flower Power will prevail.
They say it will be a summer of love.
A great pilgrimage.
Hopefully, they'll be right.
If it's necessary to bring in National Guard, I'll bring in National Guard.
I'll use whatever force is necessary.
We now seem to be witnessing in this country and elsewhere an intense preoccupation with the pursuit of pleasure.
Call it hedonism, call it self-gratification, call it what you will.
You cannot avoid noticing it.
You may not like it.
You may not accept it.
But you can not ignore it.
A change in morality.
Turn on.
Tune in.
Drop out.
I spent some time in New York.
I spent some time in London.
And I'm here to tell you it's happening all over.
In any large city, Haight-Ashburies, which people could point to.
See, we're on the map.
We're big, and we're far more interesting than what you all have to offer.
How do you answer the questions of parents who are concerned about the use of L.
S.
D.
and marijuana for their children? These are young people who are hungering for older people, for their parents, to listen to them.
These youngsters want to share with their parents the grandeur and the glory that they are encountering.
And perhaps eventually, when you're spiritually ready, you'll turn on with your children if you think that's the right thing to do.
Monterey Pop, it was the absolute ultimate love-in.
Down by my window, just looking out at the rain.
The best festival that I've played, pretty much ever, is the Monterey Pop Festival.
Just looking out at the rain.
Monterey hit like lightning.
Popular music was changing and had become something different.
And there was a whole new generation of people that wanted to march with it.
It said, "get on board.
We're leaving town.
" Well here you go today, and I want to love you, I want to love you for so long.
Oh, yeah.
You realize, this is Janis Joplin before she was known.
Before she'd ever done her first album.
Before she'd ever done her first single.
Out at the rain.
Sun came along It's just music at its freshest.
It's music that is just being born, and the audience is like Oh honey, this can't be, oh, baby, baby, baby, love in vain.
Why, oh tell me why, oh, baby, tell me why love Honey, why love is like It's like a ball and chain.
Everything was love, and peace, and music.
And the policeman who was in charge brought flowers out to his men, and he said, "don't bust anybody.
" Monterey was that Hippie dream come true.
Culture was changing.
The Hippie movement, it was swaying the mainstream.
This is where the youngsters come to buy their clothes.
And not just the youngsters, it's the young adults, and the men who are 40, 50, and even 60 years old.
In the states, pot is going middle class and spreading like Prohibition liquor.
As more and more citizens get zonked out of their minds, the drug cult enters the bloodstream of American life.
Like it or not, we're living in the stoned age.
At its best, the counterculture came in with hard punches to the mainstream culture.
People have already changed their minds about contraception, abortion, premarital sex.
The 1960s were absolutely a sexual revolution.
Because of the pill, women could take charge of their own bodies.
They could be sexual and they didn't have to get pregnant.
Everything sort of coalesces.
Sort of a perfect storm of societal forces come together.
Here, if you love somebody, and people here love everybody, if you want to make love to somebody, then you should.
There's no reason why you shouldn't.
Free love was all well and good.
And there was a lot of accidental sex, but we didn't look at it as hedonism.
People were just so open to each other, and life was beautiful, you know.
And people weren't judgmental.
The mainstream young people were telling their parents, "you've been prohibiting my sexual freedom, and the Puritan work ethic is bunk.
" It was clear the rules were changing, and the rules were really that there were no rules.
The topic tonight is the Hippies.
We have with us Mr.
Jack Kerouac over here, who was said to have started the whole Beat Generation business.
Jack Kerouac never wanted to be a prophet.
He wanted to be a great American writer, but fame destroys people in America.
To what extent do you believe that the Beat Generation is related to the Hippies? What do they have in common? Was this an evolution from one to the other? Just the older ones.
I'm 46 years old.
These kids are 18.
The Beat Generation was a generation of the attitude, and pleasure in life, and tenderness.
I believe in order and piety.
Here's the progenitor, really, of the counterculture kind of disowning his own babies and try to make sense of a decade, the 60s, that he didn't feel parry to.
Apparently some kind of Dionysian movement and which I did not intend.
This was pure in my heart.
So.
All sorts of people have been writing various articles about the Hippies.
Usually about the Hippies as if they were animals, something to look at.
Thus we've gotten hundreds and literally thousands of people coming up to Haight-Ashbury to watch people.
It makes Haight-Ashbury a terribly unpleasant place to be in.
The news got out about the Haight-Ashbury.
It became overrun.
We're now entering what is known as the largest Hippie colony in the world.
The fountainhead of the Hippie subculture.
The nickname is Hashbury's.
And marijuana, of course, with L.
S.
D.
is being used.
Literally people made the trip to San Francisco to be a part of something.
But by the time they got there, that trip was over.
This is the latest stage in the evolution of the Hippie movement.
The Hippies are trying to get away.
So they go out to a cabin in the countryside and start a commune.
Here they can get away from the tourists and the reporters who badger them in San Francisco.
Communes started, and this was really what the Hippie movement was all about.
An idea of sharing everything.
Clothes and food and everything.
People could just help themselves, you know.
We lived communally because it was the cheapest way to live.
A lot of people began to clarify and simplify their lives.
What will follow this dispersal of the Hippie movement to the countryside is hard to predict.
They may be, as they say, coming here to build the foundations for a new society in this nation, or they may be coming, like the woolly mammoth, to find their own extinction.
I was working for The New York Times in the Catskills.
And there were just a couple of us going up there.
As we went north of the city, we began to run into traffic jams.
I found a state cop, asked, "what the hell is going on?" He says, "I don't know.
There are thousands of people here, "and they're all going to some farm.
" And it was, of course, Woodstock.
I think Woodstock was an opportunity for people to realize they weren't alone.
A lot people that were in their hometown, or in their family, felt isolated, realized they weren't.
The townspeople, quite frankly, were terrified at the prospect of the Hippie arrival.
The word got out.
Everybody and their brother came from all over the country.
First the sudden rain, the, the thirst and hunger from the shortage of water and food, just for the opportunity to spend a few days in the country getting stoned on their drugs and grooving on the music.
We got together had a little pow-wow about what are we going to do to feed these people? We went in to New York to buy 1,500 pounds of bulk wheat, 1,500 pounds of rolled oats, 130,000 paper plates, 130,000 Dixie cups, and I believe we served 200,000 people.
By now, there are tens of millions of people who feel themselves to be an irresistible river of change.
And you get something incandescent.
Freedom, freedom, freedom Freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom Freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom We'd had love-ins in L.
A.
on the weekends where everybody gets dressed up and goes to the park and brings an instrument.
but to see hundreds of thousands of people, like a meeting of all the tribes from all over the country.
Boy, we didn't know there were so many of us that felt the same.
We must be in heaven, man.
A rock music festival that drew hundreds of thousands of young people to a dairy farm in White Lake, New York over the weekend came to an end today.
Admittedly, there was marijuana, as well as music, at the rock festival, but there was also no rioting.
What did not happen at that dairy farm is possibly more significant than what did happen.
These long-haired mostly white kids in their blue jeans and sandals were no wide-eyed anarchists looking for trouble.
They remained polite.
Residents and resorts freely emptied their cupboards for the kids.
Merchants were stunned by their politeness.
And while such spectacle may never happen again, it has recorded the growing proportions of this youthful culture in the mind of adult America.
Whenever you see a phenomenon, especially if you're living in it at the time, you tend to think that's the arrival.
This is the dawning and the start of something new.
Unfortunately, Woodstock just marked the end of it.
Is this going to be Woodstock West? Well, it's going to be San Francisco.
Woodstock was followed by Altamont, you know, only a few months later.
And there couldn't have been 2 more different concerts.
The Jefferson Airplane.
Jefferson Airplane.
We'd had the Hells Angels be security at a number of free-in-the-park concerts that we had done, and they were fine.
They were funny.
They were doing what they were supposed to do.
So we suggested using Hells Angels.
That's the other side of this life I've been leading.
What happened was a lot of speed and alcohol.
That's a deadly combination for bikers.
Marty said the F word to one of the Hell Angels.
While we were on stage, the Hells Angel knocks him down.
That was just the beginning.
I'd like to mention that the Hells Angels just smashed Marty Balin in the face and knocked him out for a bit.
I'd like to thank you for that.
You're talking to me? I'm going to talk to you.
I'm not talking to you, man.
I'm talking to the people hit my lead singer.
- You're talking to my people.
- Right.
Let me tell you what's happening.
You what's happening.
- Oh! - No! Oh, that's what the story is here? - Oh, bummer.
- Really, man.
It's scary.
- Who's doing all the beating? - Hells Angels.
Hells Angels are doing beating on the musicians? Marty got beat up.
It's really weird.
Go ask Alice.
I think she'll know.
When we left, it was dark, and The Rolling Stones were on, and we were on a helicopter.
Paul Kantner looked down, he said, "wow, it looks like some body's getting killed down there.
" Well, he was right.
They were.
In California, 5 members of a so-called religious cult, including Charles Manson, the guru or high priest, have been indicted in the murder of Sharon Tate and 6 others.
All the elements are present for one of the most sensational murder trials in American history.
7 people brutally murdered in a glare of Hollywood publicity.
The involvement of a mystical Hippie clan which despised the straight affluent society.
Young girls supposedly under the spell of a bearded svengali who allegedly masterminded the 7 murders.
- Hi.
- Hi.
- Sun's shining this morning.
- I know.
Charles Manson cleverly masqueraded behind the common image of being a Hippie.
Goes up to the Haight-Ashbury district, surrounds himself with a young bunch of followers.
Their lifestyle was sex orgies and L.
S.
D.
trips.
Eventually, he gets them to commit mass murder for him.
With blood, the killer had scrawled on the refrigerator door the words, "death to pigs.
" You see, prior to these murders, no one associated Hippies with violence and murder.
People would pick up a hitchhiking Hippie.
There was no big deal.
But after the Manson murders, you saw a Hippie with long hair hitchhiking, and the image of Manson would enter the driver's mind and they'd drive right by.
By the time of Charles Manson, and watching and seeing what happened there, it symbolizes the drained idealism of the spiritual quest of the Beats and early Hippies.
Today the magic is gone.
Aimless and disorganized, the Hippies have fallen prey to their own free spirit.
Free love, free drugs, and too much free publicity have gradually corrupted them.
Has something happened to Haight-Ashbury since last year? We hear it's not the same place.
Well no, it isn't.
The love-ins brought more and more people, and then people who were really just bums, they just were trying to get into a good thing.
You know, free food, free everything.
And so they just came in, you know.
And a lot of really rotten people.
And so now you've really got a bad thing.
I mean, it used to be you could set your stuff down beside the road, and nobody would touch it.
And now it got so you couldn't even put your things inside of a building.
Somebody would come along and take everything you had.
Well one day I woke up very hungry.
And, you know, very dirty, and tired, and disgusted.
So I decided to, you know, get a job and settle down.
To get serious.
Joe's job is making jewelry.
He's been taking a 6-month course to learn how.
It's hard to be getting up at 8:00 every morning and doing all these changes.
Joe bought the suit, uncomfortable though it looked.
Will he be equally uncomfortable in his new life? There have been generation gaps before but today is probably the widest yet.
Can the Joes of America bridge the gap and conform, without society making concessions in return? I'd say there was a common element in the counterculture of people trying to invent a new world.
But people mature.
Their point of view gets more nuanced.
The costs start to come due.
Children come into the world.
That idea of sex, drugs and rock and roll, it's a youth dream.
Then youth dies.
Yet our mainstream culture took what it needed from the Hippies.
The actual movement of the 60s was the movement towards something more authentic.
In the 60s we thought of other people as part of our own family.
We were into caring for society as a whole.
This is what the revolution is all about.
Mercy is better than justice.
The carrot is better than the stick.
And the most important lesson is be kind.
Be kind.
To me, every day was a high watermark.
We played music all day long.
We worked.
We did not have jobs.
It was the most carefree period of my life.
Dylan has this great line in an early song.
He says, "I wish, I wish, I wish in vain "that we could sit simply in that room again, "$1000 at the drop of a hat, "I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.
"