In 1967 the Beatles were in Abbey Road Studios
putting the finishing touches on their album
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. At one
point Paul McCartney wandered down the corridor
and heard what was then a new young band called
Pink Floyd working on their hypnotic debut, The
Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He listened for a
moment, then came rushing back. "Hey guys," he
reputedly said, "There's a new band in there
and they're gonna steal our thunder."
With their mix of blues, music hall influences,
Lewis Carroll references, and dissonant
experimentation, Pink Floyd was one of the key
bands of the 1960s psychedelic revolution, a
pop culture movement that emerged with American
and British rock, before sweeping through film,
literature, and the visual arts. The music was
largely inspired by hallucinogens, or so-called
"mind-expanding" drugs such as marijuana and
LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide; "acid"), and
attempted to recreate drug-induced states
through the use of overdriven guitar, amplified
feedback, and droning guitar motifs influenced
by Eastern music.
This psychedelic consciousness was seeded, in
the United States, by countercultural gurus
such as Dr. Timothy Leary, a Harvard University
professor who began researching LSD as a tool
of self-discovery from 1960, and writer Ken
Kesey who with his Merry Pranksters staged Acid
Tests--multimedia "happenings" set to the music
of the Warlocks (later the Grateful Dead) and
documented by novelist Tom Wolfe in the
literary classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test (1968)--and traversed the country during
the mid-1960s on a kaleidoscope-colored school
bus.
"Everybody felt the '60s were a breakthrough.
There was exploration of sexual freedom and [a
lot of] drugs around that were essential to the
development of consciousness," recalls British
avant-garde filmmaker Peter Whitehead, whose
movies include Tonite Let's All Make Love in
London (1967) and the Rolling Stones
documentary Charlie Is My Darling (1966). "The
zeitgeist of the time was the final collapse of
a certain kind of thinking. The seeds were sown
for feminism, for the whole notion of
cyberspace, ecology, and the whole philosophy
of Gaia."
Suzy Hopkins, formerly Suzy Creamcheese, a
dancer and inspirational figure on the
underground scene in Los Angeles and London,
remembers the visceral way psychedelic culture
affected the senses. "There's a difference
between a drug and a psychedelic. Drugs make
you drugged and psychedelics enhance your
ability to see the truth or reality," she says.
For her, LSD and music created a kind of
alchemy. "When I start to dance, at a certain
point, the dance takes over and the music is
dancing me. Dancing is this electric
enhancement of your spine by sound."
Many psychedelic bands explored this sense of
abandonment in their music, moving away from
standard rock rhythms and instrumentation. The
Grateful Dead of San Francisco, for instance,
created an improvisatory mix of country rock,
blues, and acid R&B on albums like The Grateful
Dead (1967) and Anthem of the Sun (1968), while
another 'Frisco band, Jefferson Airplane
(fronted by the striking vocalist Grace Slick),
sang of the childlike hallucinatory delights of
an acid trip in the 1967 Top Ten hit "White
Rabbit."
In Los Angeles the multiracial band Love played
whimsical, free-flowing rock, fueled by the
unique vision of their troubled frontman Arthur
Lee. A typically eccentric line from their
third album, Forever Changes (1968), satirizes
hippie dinginess: "The snot has caked against
my pants." Also from Los Angeles, the Byrds
plowed a different furrow, creating a jangly
psychedelic folk augmented by rich vocal
harmonies and orchestration. With such hits as
"Eight Miles High" and their cover of Bob
Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," they, along with
the brooding intensity of the Doors, were among
the most commercially successful of the West
Coast bands.
Another important Los
Angeles act
was the United States of America, a band led by
electronic music composer Joe Byrd, whose
eponymous 1968 debut album blends orchestral
pastoral with harsh, atonal experimentation.
Meanwhile the 13th Floor Elevators from Austin,
Texas, epitomized the darker, more psychotic
frenzy of acid rock. Featuring the wayward
talent of Roky Erickson, a gifted musician and
songwriter who was later hospitalized for
mental illness, the band played visionary
jug-blowing blues. The track "Slip Inside This
House," for instance, on Easter Everywhere
(1967), conveys a sense of mysticism and
transcendence, enhanced by acid. Erickson's
occult explorations took him so far that by the
time the band split in 1969 he believed Satan
was following him everywhere.
On the East Coast the Velvet Underground echoed
the sonic techniques of psychedelia with their
use of repetition and electronic improvisation.
Their attitude, though, was more about
nihilistic art-school cool than the more
playful "flower power." This was accentuated in
the drugs they celebrated in song--speed and
heroin, for instance, rather than LSD.
Established rock bands began to introduce
psychedelic elements into their music, notably
the Beatles, with such records as Revolver
(1966), featuring the pounding mantra of
"Tomorrow Never Knows"; Sgt. Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band (1967), with the trippy lyrics
of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"; Magical
Mystery Tour (1967), showcasing the swirling
surrealism of songs like "Strawberry Fields
Forever" and "I Am the Walrus"; and The Beatles
(1968; the "White Album"), containing the
standout track "Revolution 9," an experimental
collage of found sounds.
The Beach Boys, too, branched out with the
expansive, haunting Pet Sounds (1966), an album
masterminded by an introspective Brian Wilson.
The Yardbirds, with Jeff Beck on guitar, scored
a hit with the echo-laden "Shapes of Things"
(1966). Encouraged by Brian Jones, who was
drawn to instruments like the sitar and ancient
Eastern percussion, the Rolling Stones dipped
their feet into the scene with songs like
"Paint It Black" (1966) and the less-successful
album Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967).
In Britain psychedelic pioneers created music
that was steeped in whimsy and surrealism and
was less aggressive and minimalist than their
American counterparts. The scene revolved
around venues such as London's UFO club (a
predecessor to festivals like Glastonbury) and
Middle Earth and such events as the 14-Hour
Technicolour Dream, a happening in April 1967
in the Alexandra Palace that featured an
enormous pile of bananas and bands like Pink
Floyd, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and the
Utterly Incredible Too Long Ago to Remember
Sometimes Shouting at People. A benefit for the
alternative newspaper IT (International Times),
the event also drew counterculture celebrities
such as John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol.
Pink Floyd was the leading light of
the British
underground scene, with vocalist/guitarist Syd
Barrett the main writer behind such hits as
"Arnold Layne" (a quirky, controversial song
about a transvestite), and the spacey, driving
instrumental "Interstellar Overdrive." He was a
strong creative force until his worsening
schizophrenia led to him being edged out of the
band in 1968. Other British acts included the
anarchic Tomorrow, which specialized in droning
raga feedback and wild drumming; the operatic,
flamboyant Arthur Brown; the R&B-flavored
Pretty Things, and the Canterbury band Soft
Machine, which incorporated "harmolodic" jazz
into their psychedelic rock.
"Musically people were experimenting, trying to
convey that transcendant feel. Even the Stones
did it, shooting off at an angle that didn't
suit them," sums up Andy Ellison, lead vocalist
with John's Children, the first band of Marc
Bolan, who later fronted T. Rex. "It was like
soul music came from white boys on acid and
took on a whole different meaning."
Psychedelic rock--which had already
revolutionized fashion, poster art, and live
performance--continued to grow after the 1960s,
influencing a host of subgenres, including
heavy metal, progressive and art rock,
"Kraut-rock" (experimental electronic music by
German bands such as Tangerine Dream), and the
space-age funk of Parliament-Funkadelic (which,
along with Jimi Hendrix, proved to be a key
connection between black funk and psychedelia).
Moreover, psychedelic rock's influence was
evident in later genres, from punk to trip-hop
to acid-house dance.
As Paul McCartney said in 1967, psychedelia
meant musical liberation: "The straights should
welcome the Underground because it stands for
freedom."
IN A
NUTSHELL
The
decade of the 60's
was a time of
revolution. Young people were breaking
out of the molds that were cast by their
parent's era. This revolution of the
Baby Boomer generation found that one
effective outlet for their ideas was
music. The coming together of the
tribes at concerts, 'love-ins',
'sit-ins' and simple 'be-ins' made
everyone that attended realize they were
not alone in their views. And soon, they
realized that there was strength in
numbers. Not all hippies congregated in
urban centers like San Francisco, of
course. The formation of 'the
commune',in rural areas, often on farms,
had a philosophy and way of life quite
different in many ways from the urban
counterculturalist, as we observe in the
following article by Timothy
Miller.
ROOTS OF
COMMUNAL REVIVAL 1962-1966
Courtesy of Timothy Miller
One of the great flowerings of
communitarianism in America came with
the era of the hippies in the 1960s and
early 1970s. The rural hippie communes
were media attention-grabbers, full of
photo opportunities, wild anecdotes, and
the weirdest-looking people most
Americans had ever seen. Press coverage
was massive from about 1969 through
1972, and a string of popular books soon
emerged, most of them travelogues of the
authors' visits to communes. A fair body
of scholarship eventually developed as
well.
One standard theme in all of that
coverage and scholarship, however, was
oddly misguided. In case after case,
observers of the new communalism seeking
to explain the origins of the communes
concluded that they were products of the
decay of urban hippie life in the
Haight-Ashbury, the East Village, and
other enclaves.
The hip urban
centers,
so the thesis ran, might have briefly
been joyous centers of peace and love
and expanded consciousness, but they
soon devolved into cesspools of hard
drugs, street crime, and official
repression of dissident lifestyles. The
hippies at that point fled for the
friendly precincts of the countryside,
where they built communes as new places
for working out the hip vision.
Examples of this explanation of the
origins of hippie communalism abound in
both popular and scholarly writings.
Maren Lockwood Carden, for example,
writing in 197`6, says matter-of-factly
that the hippies' "first communes were
created within the urban areas in which
they already lived," and that beginning
in 1966 "and especially during 1967 and
1968, such community-oriented hippies
left the city." Helen Constas and
Kenneth Westhues purport to trace the
history of the counterculture "from its
charismatic beginnings in the old urban
bohemias to its current locale in rural
communes," concluding that "communes
signify the routinization of hippiedom."
The photograph by Rober
t Altman shows the communitarian
belief in a return to the earth put into
practical use with man plowing the earth
much like his ancestors.
Photo by Robert Altman [not
related to the film
director]
Actually,
however, the new communes
began to appear before there was a
clearly recognizable overall hippie
culture, much less a decaying one; they
represented a new outcropping of the
much larger venerable American tradition
of alternative culture, a part of which
has involved communal living.
Catalyzed by shifts in American culture
in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the
hip communes were not, in the beginning,
products of hippiedom, but crucibles
that played a major role in shaping and
defining hip culture. In other words,
the urban hippies did not create the
first hip communes; it would be closer
to the truth to say that the earliest
communes helped create the hippies.
While communes were indeed founded by
hippies who fled the cities, they were
johnnies- come-lately to the hip
communal scene. When did the hippies
first appear?
An argument that the new wave of rural
communes predates the rise of the urban
hippies depends on the proposition that
hippies were not present as a
recognizable movement in American cities
until the second half of the 1960s. Of
course no one can point to an exact
moment at which the first hippie
appeared at the corner of Haight and
Ashbury Streets. The hippies evolved
from the beats of the 1950s and the
bohemians of the decades before that,
but it would be hard to see them as
coalescing into anything that amounted
to a distinct social movement before
about 1966.
The Diggers of San
Francisco, the altruists who helped
penurious hippies survive and whose
abodes were sometimes more or less
communal themselves, began to take clear
shape in that year. Although LSD, whose
use became a pivot of the hip
experience, had been discovered by a few
cultural pioneers, among them Timothy
Leary and Ken Kesey [see pages 10 and 11
for more on Kesey and the 'beats'], some
years earlier, it did not become a
symbol of and vehicle for rejecting the
dominant culture until mid-decade, when
Kesey staged a year of Acid Tests from
November, 1965, to October, 1966.
The term "hippie," which seems to have
been coined in late 1965, was quite
obscure even into 1967; it does not
appear in such pioneering books on the
new dissident culture as J. L. Simmons
and Barry Winograd's 'It's Happening'
and John Gruen's 'The New Bohemia' (both
published in 1966). By mid-1967,
however, everyone knew who hippies were.
The 1966-67 'Reader's Guide' has no
entry for "hippie"; the 1967-68 volume
has over a column of them. In sum, it
would seem fair to conclude that the
cultural phenomenon of the hippies began
to take on clear, distinguishing
characteristics about 1966 and was
widely familiar to the general public by
the following year.
But communes that were hip already
existed by then. 'Drop City', a
full-blown prototype of hip communalism,
was established in May, 1965; another
community with a notably hip
orientation, 'Tolstoy Farm', was two
years older. Ken Kesey and his Merry
Pranksters took their famous bus trip in
1964 and thereafter settled down to a
freewheeling communal existence in
California and later Oregon. Mel Lyman's
'Fort Hill' community adopted communal
living in 1966 in Boston, and had been
moving toward that model since Lyman had
first begun attracting followers in the
Boston area about 1963. These communes
had been developing new subcultural
mores and were helping shape the
emerging hip movement.
Moreover, other communes that were not
"hip" but that in some cases influenced
the hippies were also well established
at the time. Religious communalism, a
staple theme in American history, was a
part of the context, with groups
dedicated to such diverse centerpoints
as Catholicism, various Eastern
religions, and the Anabaptist tradition
all thriving in the early 1960s. There
were also secular communities devoted to
radical politics, anarchism, sexual
freedom, the sharing of labor, creation
of arts and crafts, land development,
ethnicity, and a dazzling array of
visions of assorted seers and cranks.
While American communitarianism has
historically had stronger and weaker
periods, it has been an ongoing theme in
American life for over three centuries,
and it was very much there when a new
generation of dissenters decided to give
it a whirl.
That is not to say that every new
commune deliberately studies the
historic communal tradition and tries to
build on it. As recent scholarship has
pointed out, most communal groups have
some independent reason for existence
and adopt communal living as a vehicle
for the achievement of specific goals.
Nevertheless, communes have had a more
substantial and consistent presence in
the United States than many have
realized. That ongoing presence has
often been overlooked by American
historians, who typically see a great
surge of colony building in the first
half of the nineteenth century, with
such groups as the Shakers, the Oneida
Community, the Fourierists, the
Owenites, and many others, but then a
near-void until the hippies came
along.
Communes represented the kind
of dissatisfaction with the institutions
of mainstream culture that has
frequently been manifested not only in
the founding of communes but in other
kinds of radicalism and bohemianism as
well. In short, the communes were more
closely related to the tradition of
cultural dissent than they were to the
breakdown of the hip urban centers.
Moreover, some hip communes did have
distinct ancestry in earlier American
communalism in that their founders and
key members had been involved, directly
or indirectly, with communitarianism
before becoming hippies.
Tolstoy Farm,
for example, deliberately built on its
founder's affinity for the
community-oriented ideas of Tolstoy and
Gandhi; the first residents of Drop City
all had family ties to communal or
collective traditions and deliberately
built an art colony, thus becoming part
of another pathway in communal history.
showing that the communal tradition was
still alive and well when the hippies
joined it.
Timothy
Leary,
1920-1996
Because of his
involvement
in the counterculture of the '60's, his
revolutionary ideas, and his connections
with the great 'Beat' writers of the
period, Leary is a central figure
important to understanding the rebellion
and philosophy of the 'hippie period'.
With his passing (or
"de-animation," as he preferred to call
it), several variations on the public
Timothy Leary will be brought up for
review. Leary was an extremely complex
man, and he leaves behind an enormous
legacy. Many legacies, in fact. Timothy
himself recently said, "Everybody gets
the Timothy Leary that they deserve."
There are probably three primary
Timothys that will pass through the
public imagination over the next few
years.
Leary 1 - The
Acid Guru:
The primary Timothy that will pass
through the mainstream media is the
gleeful, irresponsible purveyor of LSD
to an unsuspecting American public. Not
that people who believe in this cartoon
version of Timothy are necessarily
against him. Many postmodern world
citizens - from the relatively stable to
the criminally insane - understand that
they need to have their tight little
minds 'enlightened' by chemicals if
they're ever going to have any fun, if
even only for a moment.
Leary 2 - The Adventurer/Explorer: The
biographies will surely follow. For
those familiar with this real-life
legend of a mind, we have arguably the
most poignant grail-quest/adventure
story of the century: Overly optimistic
transactional psychologist who believes
it's possible to change the human psyche
for the better stumbles upon psilocybin.
He decides, "This is it!" and rushes off
to tell everybody. Next thing you know,
he's a figurehead for a heady moment in
history when the seeming vanguard of a
generation believes in a "total
revolution" in human relations and
consciousness. As the historic moment
passes, they retreat. But Leary emerges
from a series of byzantine adventures
with revolutionists, governments,
prisoners, spies, and outlaws (real
outlaws) still advocating novel
approaches toward radically transforming
the human situation, a sadder-but-wiser
"hope fiend." 
Not so sad,
however, that
he didn't party like it was 1999
throughout the '80s and '90s.
Leary 3 - The Philosopher: Finally,
there is the man's actual work: dozens
of books, monographs, and essays. Much
of his work is suffused with the
cultural and political context of the
moments in which it was written - a
testimony to his activism. Still,
Leary's essential arguments - in favor
of a generous and expansive humanism,
against rigid belief structures, in
favor of bravely embracing novelty,
against purism, in favor of levity,
against gravity - are eloquent, complex,
finely nuanced, and supported with
observations taken from science,
cultural theory, and experience.
Timothy Leary was, first and foremost,
the man who brought psychedelic drugs
into American culture. He was a
visionary hope fiend, a libertine, an
educator, an Irish drunk, a frontier
scout, a tarnished hero of the '60s
revolt, a highly original theorist, the
genial host of the world party, a
prankster, a stubborn individualist, a
space cadet, a huckster, broke, a fame
whore, rich, a holy fool, a well-rounded
generalist with a unique ability to
absorb and integrate technological and
scientific materials with cultural signs
and personal observations, a ladies'
man, an eloquent defender of individual
rights, one of the 20th century's most
astute philosophers, a snake oil
salesman, a sensualist, strong, brave, a
bon vivant, weak, an underrated writer,
funny, tragic, corruptible, inspiring.
And the man with the highest bail in
human history.
Colorful house in 1960's San
Francisco
