The Setting
The San Francisco Bay Area was not the only geographic setting in the United
States where the counterculture could have originated. But from a historical
perspective it was the most fitting. From its frenzied, chaotic and violent
inception during the Gold Rush of the late 1840s, San Francisco (and the area
surrounding its capacious bay) was a place where, as one historian put it,
"the bottom fell out" of nineteenth-century assumptions about moral
order and progress.(15)
In some ways, the history of San Francisco undermined an important assumption
about the American advance to the West: that it fostered moral elevation as well
as national greatness, economic opportunity and social progress. "Manifest
Destiny," the idea that a transcontinental America was tantamount to a
divine charter for the creation of a new empire, implicitly linked moral and
economic progress. The transformation of untamed wilderness and uninhabitable
desert into cultivated farms and vibrant, commercial cities represented not only
the triumph of progress and order over an anarchic wilderness. It promised as
well, in the words of Walt Whitman, "immense spiritual results."(16)
On the moral plane, this marriage between commerce, nationalism and Christian
rectitude was compromised somewhat by the daring and determined sensuality
exhibited by San Franciscans throughout the nineteenth century. From the
beginning it was an open city, where behavior deemed deviant or scandalous by
nineteenth-century standards was not only tolerated, but at times even admired.
This was not unusual for frontier boom towns. But well past the city's frontier
stage, San Franciscans openly professed their relish for the pleasures of the
flesh. A number of its streets were named for notable madams who ran the city's
numerous houses of prostitution. The city also possessed a determined
predilection for feeding the senses. Its citizens were as famous for their
insatiable desires for good restaurants and fine wines as they were for openly
negotiating sexual companionship in saloons. San Franciscans boasted of their
city's luxurious hotels and its ornately appointed theaters and opera houses.
[p. 105]
Toleration toward others, and inclinations toward a life both sybaritic and
sophisticated, characterized the city from the start.(17)
To some degree, these conditions were a legacy of San Francisco's almost
overnight transformation from a sparsely inhabited town to a major city. Its
population soared from 1,000 in 1848 to nearly 30,000 five years later.(18)
And the city's ethnic diversity made sharp contrasts in behavior inevitable,
and toleration of different cultures (with the notable exceptions of Asian
immigrants and African Americans) an imperative of survival. Gold, adventure and
the willingness to start life anew made San Francisco a magnet for immigrants
from Chile, China, Italy, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, England, Australia, France,
Canada and Russia. The city's architecture, a mosaic of cultural styles drawn
from scores of cities around the globe, reflected the diverse national origins
of its inhabitants.(19)
The thousands of native-born Americans thrown into this mix were as alien to
the area as the numerous non-Americans. American nationals were in no position,
therefore, to impose their values upon white ethnic groups from other countries
or to overtly discriminate against them. For example, San Francisco did not
replicate the discrimination aimed at Irish Catholics during the middle of the
nineteenth-century in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. The simultaneous
settlement of the Bay Area by native-born Americans and white foreign nationals
compelled the former to be more tolerant than they otherwise might have been.(20)
Because San Francisco rested on the western edge of the continent, its
isolation from the populous cities of the East and the farming communities of
the Great Plains provided its inhabitants with the freedom to create their own
version of America. In some ways, the early denizens of San Francisco turned
American assumptions about propriety and decorum on their heads—almost as
gleefully, publicly and scandalously as would their colorful heirs in the
Haight-Ashbury one hundred years later.
At the Parker House or the El Dorado women dealt the cards, a brass band or
banjo music played, and gold nuggets were piled high on the tables. One could
take a brandy-smash at the bar, then stroll the crowded streets rakish in hussar
boots, corduroy pants, red flannel shirt, and sombrero. Costume was posturing
and romantic.(21)
As the nineteenth century progressed, the city's combination of refined
hedonism and toleration toward white newcomers and the morally deviant was
institutionalized rather than eliminated. Its inhabitants managed to balance
acceptance of the ongoing rowdiness, robust sensuality and raw individualism [p.
106]
characteristic of San Francisco since its Gold Rush days with a sense of civic
pride for the city's sophistication and the refined tastes and civility of its
citizens.(22) To be sure, the majority of its citizens were temperate, church-going folk.
They complained about the sensuous ways of a city that by the 1890s had justly
earned its title as the Paris of North America. There was much to complain
about. San Francisco possessed a saloon for every 96 inhabitants, along with an
untold number of brothels and opium dens.(23)
But challenges to these and other infractions of Victorian-era morality, a
staple of moral reform movements in New York, Chicago and other cities at the
time, were tempered in San Francisco. Its citizens were inclined to define
themselves as a people liberated from the country's Puritan heritage.(24)
By the late nineteenth century this comparative tolerance, along with a
heritage of living on the continent's western and, perhaps, moral edge, made San
Francisco the country's first enclave of bohemia. Avant-garde painters,
novelists, dancers, actors, sculptors and photographers from around the nation
and the globe gravitated there. After the earthquake of 1906 many of them,
including Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Jack London and Frank Norris, moved to
Carmel, a hundred miles south of San Francisco, and commuted between the two
sites.(25) As Richard Miller pointed out, San Francisco's unique heritage of toleration,
"Wild West traditions" and European sophistication made it a port of
entry into the United States for European bohemianism. San Francisco
was the epitome of the Wild West refined by Paris. In San Francisco the
American frontier tradition of the self-reliant free spirit combined with
Europeans and college-bred Argonauts, with seamen and French sporting girls,
with savage criminals from the slums of Sydney and New York, and learned how
to read and write and build a city.(26)
San Francisco's bohemian ways continued into the twentieth century. In the
thirties the city's North Beach section became its bohemian quarter. In 1955
Alien Ginsberg gave the first reading of his epic poem Howl at the Six
Gallery in North Beach (his friend Jack Kerouac supplied the wine).(27)
In the twentieth-century, as in the nineteenth, San Francisco possessed
"a culture of civility" that, according to sociologists Howard Becker
and Irving Louis Horowitz, was unique among large American cities. More than any
other American city San Francisco was a "natural experiment in the
consequences of tolerating deviance." Its inhabitants "know that they
are supposed to be sophisticated and let that knowledge guide their public
actions, whatever their private feelings."(28)
San Francisco's traditions of civility and tolerance would experience their
most challenging tests in the 1960s—and came close to cracking under the
stress. [p. 107] In the early years of the decade a surge of political activism among
students at the nearby campus of the University of California at Berkeley
challenged the political repression of the fifties. And from 1965 on, the center
of the city's cultural radicalism shifted from North Beach, with its enclave of
Beat writers and bohemians, to the Haight-Ashbury district. The fixtures of the
small Beat movement—poetry, jazz, alcohol and discreet use of marijuana and
amphetamines—were replaced by tens of thousands of hippies who lived in
communes, listened to and created new forms of rock music, openly displayed
their sexuality and boldly experimented with hallucinogenic drugs.(29)
In the early sixties, two unanticipated and very different forms of rebellion
erupted among young people in the Bay Area. Their impact would ripple through
the rest of the country during the remainder of the decade and to a great extent
define for many Americans what the sixties youth culture represented: incessant
political unrest among college students and a Dionysian hippie dance of abandon
choreographed by hallucinogenic drugs and rock music.
Prior to 1964, most Americans viewed college students as a privileged class
poised for a future of security, affluence and influence. One of the first
public signs that some students viewed themselves in a different light—in fact
thought of themselves as oppressed victims of an impersonal, repressive, boring
society— appeared across the bay from San Francisco. In the fall of 1964 the
Free Speech Movement (FSM) erupted on the campus of the University of California
at Berkeley.
The FSM was a response by Berkeley students to new restrictions on student
political activity imposed that fall by the university's administration. The
restrictions were pushed by conservative members of the university's Regents. As
early as 1960 conservative Regents were upset by the involvement of Berkeley
students in left-wing causes. Students from Berkeley had played a prominent role
in the massive demonstrations against the House Un-American Activities Committee
that occurred in San Francisco in May 1960. In the early sixties, they were
active as well in efforts to end both capital punishment in California and de
facto racial segregation in the Bay Area.(30)
Since the beginning of the Cold War, political activity on campus had been
generally prohibited. This was especially true of activism perceived by the
university administration as "left wing," which in the repressive
climate of the fifties meant almost any form of protest against the status quo.
By the early sixties this included civil-rights activism. For instance, the new
regulations prohibited students from engaging in off-campus acts of civil
disobedience, a tactic regularly [p. 108] used in civil-rights protests. Also, students
were prohibited from proselytizing or passing out political literature on
city-owned sidewalks at the main pedestrian entrance to the campus, the
intersection of Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft Way, where student political
activity had traditionally been tolerated by the university.(31)
On October 1 the civil-rights activist Jack Weinberg and others defied the
ban. Weinberg was arrested for distributing literature for the Congress of
Racial Equality. When police placed him in the back seat of a squad car,
hundreds of students surrounded it. In the first, and perhaps most memorable,
act of massive student defiance toward campus authorities in the sixties, the
squad car was prevented from moving for 32 hours. While Weinberg remained in the
car, and the crowd surrounding it grew to a few thousand, dozens of students
took turns standing on its roof, making speeches about the pros and cons of the
ban on political activity. Most of the speakers removed their shoes to avoid
damaging the squad car. And a few weeks later, FSM leaders voluntarily collected
over $400 from students to pay for repairs to the vehicle.(32)
The outrage created by the university's prohibition on student political
activity, along with the arrests of Weinberg and others, created a semester-long
uproar on the campus. The lies and duplicity of a feckless university
administration, which portrayed the dissidents as little more than puerile
adolescents engaged in a fraternity-style lark, made matters worse. From the
students point of view, they were fighting to secure their First Amendment
rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Acrimony and frustration mounted on
both sides, and on December 2 Sproul Hall, the university's administration
building, was occupied by nearly 1,000 student protesters who staged a sit-in.(33)
Edward Meese, Berkeley's assistant county prosecutor (and later attorney
general in President Ronald Reagan's administration) told Governor Pat Brown
that the students were "busting up" Sproul Hall. Meese was being less
than truthful. The occupation of the administration building obviously disrupted
the campus. But the demonstrators, unlike many campus protesters later in the
decade, carefully avoided abusing university officials or damaging property.
They spent the day singing FSM-inspired folk songs ("Don't know if I'm
subversive," went one, "just want to say what I please.") Some
studied for final examinations, while others watched Charlie Chaplin movies.
Jewish students organized a Chanukah service. The governor ordered the police to
remove the students, which they did at 3 A.M. on December 3. Nearly 800 students
were taken into custody in the largest mass arrest in California history. A
campus-wide student strike ensued. Finally, on December 8 an overwhelming
majority of the faculty voted to support the FSM's claim that the First
Amendment guaranteed students' rights to freedom of speech and assembly [p. 109] on the
campus. The administration caved in, lifting the prohibition on student
political activity. The students had won a stunning, nationally publicized
victory.(34)
On the surface, the Free Speech Movement was an ardent defense by students of
their right to enjoy fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. For
this reason, even politically conservative student groups, such as the Young
Republicans, supported the FSM (most of whose spokespersons were liberal to
left) and participated in its rallies. But as the crisis deepened during the
fall, issues unrelated to free speech unexpectedly surfaced among some of the
leftists involved in the movement. These students began to question the right of
the university to restrict their behavior in any fashion, except when the
well-being of others was clearly imperiled. In their view, the university's
traditional power to act in loco parentis was illegitimate.
More significantly, these students started to see themselves as fodder for an
educational system—and a society—determined to mold them into efficient and
compliant components of what FSM leader Mario Savio amorphously but ominously
referred to as "the machine" of American society.(35)
White middle-class college students saw a contradiction between their
expectations of becoming autonomous, independent adults and the ultimate
purposes of their education as it was defined by the society. In a famous
metaphor, the president of the University of California, the liberal Democrat
Clark Kerr, called Berkeley a "knowledge factory." Berkeley and the
country's other major research institutions were what he called "multiversities."
They promoted diverse forms of knowledge that not only reflected
"middle-class pluralism," but were also, according to Kerr, "instrument[s]
of national purpose" as well.(36)
Some students took a dim view of Kerr's vision, and of the impersonal nature
of the university's academic and administrative environments it tacitly
sanctioned. They saw it as proof that they were perceived by society as
"products" and "resources" whose destiny was to serve the
needs of an undefined "national purpose" not of their choosing.
Particularly those students involved in or sympathetic to causes for social
justice saw a parallel, however inexact, between themselves and victims of
racial discrimination and economic inequity. Their sense of being
"oppressed" was rather vague and undefined, but it brought to the
surface powerful undercurrents of resentment. "For the first time,"
FSM leader Michael Rossman said years later, "the question becomes, What
about us? For the first time we took the conditions of our lives, the
institutionally determined conditions of our own lives, not as a base from which
to address others' problems but as the ground of our own oppression. When people
began to make this sort of connection, the floodgates opened."(37)
[p. 110]
On June 14, 1964, while some of the Berkeley students who would lead the FSM
in the fall were being trained to participate in the Mississippi Freedom Summer
project, Ken Kesey and thirteen companions, who called themselves the Merry
Pranksters, boarded a colorfully painted bus at his ranch in La Honda,
California. La Honda was a small town located on the southern part of the San
Francisco peninsula. Ostensibly, they were headed east, for New York City. Their
actual destination was wherever the drug LSD might take them.
Kesey had purchased and refurbished the bus with money from the sales of his
1962 best-selling novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. The exterior
of the bus was painted in swirls of bright primary colors. The destination sign
in the front was deliberately spelled "Furthur." The warning on the
bus's rear door read, "Caution: Weird Load." The interior contained
bunk beds, benches, a sink and a refrigerator. A sophisticated wiring system
linked record players and microphones to exterior speakers, allowing those
inside the bus to broadcast their music and conversations to the outside world.
Exterior microphones captured the sounds of America, transmitting them to those
inside the bus. The Merry Pranksters had sobriquets (a common practice in the
counterculture they helped create) that captured new dimensions of their
identities revealed by LSD. Among them were: "Intrepid Traveller,"
"Hardly Visible," "Stark Naked," "Mal Function,"
"Zonker" and "Highly Charged."(38)
The principal driver of the bus was the legendary Neal Cassady, called
"Sir Speed Limit." In the fifties version of the "trip"
across America, captured in his friend Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road,
Cassady was the model for Dean Moriarty, who drove the car at furious speeds
back and forth across the country. Kesey, called "The Chief" or
"The Navigator," purchased expensive camera equipment to make a movie
of the voyage. He called the 45-hour filmed chronicle of the trip "The
Merry Pranksters Search For The Cool Place."(39)
The "trip." It was a powerful metaphor linking an LSD-inspired
interior journey to the historic American inclination to take to the road in
search of another place, "cool" or otherwise. But Kesey's bus trip
reversed the historic direction of American movement. He and the Pranksters went
from west to east. They wanted to discover what might happen to themselves and
the country when the East experienced what had been uncovered in the West a
hundred years after the Gold Rush: the liberating qualities of LSD.
Kesey was an accomplished novelist and a charismatic, rambunctious westerner—equal parts intellectual and cowboy. A native of Eugene, Oregon,
Kesey was a drama major and on the wrestling team during his undergraduate [p.
111] years
at the University of Oregon in the late fifties. He was exposed to LSD in 1959,
while working as a psychiatric aide in a veteran's hospital in Stanford. The
experiments there were part of a secret operation funded by the Central
Intelligence Agency to determine the potential utility of hallucinogens as
weapons in the Cold War. Hospitals and psychiatrists across the country,
carefully selected by the CIA, conducted these government-sanctioned and
financed experiments on patients. Many individuals were unaware they were being
given the drugs. Others, like Kesey, were volunteers.(40)
LSD, peyote and other hallucinogens were revelations to Kesey. Unlike other
enthusiasts of LSD, such as Timothy Leary, Alan Watts and Richard Alpert, Kesey
was not interested in studying the drug's biological, neurological or
psychological effects. Nor did he care about its potential for enhancing
spiritual insight.
Kesey used LSD as a catalyst of personal liberation and social interaction.
Drawing on both his wrestling experience and his college major, he had an
action-oriented, theatrical, muscular approach to the drug. The individual
should "act" in public while under its influence. Spontaneous public
performances while under the spell of LSD was a way of uncovering, exposing and
enacting elements of personality normally hidden from consciousness. Equally
important, it was a means of tapping into interior spaces of personality that
might be immune to social control. The drug might liberate the individual from
both the limitations of normal consciousness and the constraints of social
conventions and conformity. In effect, Kesey viewed LSD as a chemical bridge
that connected hitherto unchartered realms of the mind with unexplored spaces of
social territory.
The purpose of the bus trip was to see what might happen when spontaneous
behavior inspired by hallucinogenic drugs confronted what Kesey saw as the
dreary conformity and dismal rationality of American society. The Pranksters
were like the Indian Chief in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, who
escaped from the superficially benevolent but manipulative and ultimately brutal
state-run insane asylum. The asylum reflected what Kesey saw as the banality,
conformity and violence at the core of American culture. The bus trip was a way
of telling the country that the strange-looking, drugged young
"inmates" on the brightly painted bus were "breaking out" of
their American confinement. To where, or toward what end, was unclear. They
assumed, as had so many peripatetic Americans before them, that the road would
reveal everything they needed to know.
As the bus made its way through Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, New York and other
states during the two-month trip, it is doubtful that people who encountered the
Merry Pranksters understood what was happening. Few [p. 112] Americans in 1964 had heard
of LSD, despite the Central Intelligence Agency's extensive testing of the drug
on thousands of people in the fifties and early sixties. This changed after the
bus trip, when Kesey and the Pranksters returned to California and initiated the
"acid tests"—Kesey used the word "acid" as a shorthand for
LSD. Initially held at homes of friends, then in large halls rented by Kesey,
the acid tests brought together hundreds of people and ample supplies of
LSD-spiked punch. The acid tests also included two phenomena that seemed natural
complements to the hallucinogenic state: light shows created by overhead
projectors and strobes and rock music (embryonic "acid rock"). The
music at the acid tests was usually performed by Jerry Garcia, an early Kesey
acolyte, and his band the Warlocks. The band would shortly change its name to
the Grateful Dead.
The acid tests were soirees of spontaneity. People confronted each other,
displaying normally inhibited qualities of their personalities liberated by the
drug. The point was to summon the courage to expose in public the
"natural" self unlocked by LSD. As Kesey put it, unless "you get
very near that precipice where you're likely to make a fool of yourself, you're
not showing very much of how you feel. You're playing it safe."(41)
The Pranksters' "trip" and the acid tests were the genesis of the
counterculture. Both were designed to reveal the "authentic" self that
lay beyond the claims of convention, conformity and personality. The right to
exhibit this natural self took precedence over socially acceptable behavior. As
Kesey told the Pranksters at the start of the bus trip:
Here's what I hope will happen on this trip. . . . All of us beginning to
do our own thing, and we're going to keep doing it, right out front, and
none of us are going to deny what other people are doing. If saying bullshit
is somebody's thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker,
then that's what he's going to do on this trip, kick asses. He's going to do
it right out front and nobody is going to have anything to get pissed off
about. He can just say, "I'm sorry I kicked you in the ass, but I'm not
sorry I'm an ass-kicker. That's what I do, I kick people in the ass."
Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not
going to be anything to apologize about. What we are we're going to wail
with on this whole trip.(42)
More than anyone else in San Francisco, Bill Graham grasped the potential for
transforming the various media used in the acid tests for the purposes of mass
entertainment. Graham took the disparate features of the acid tests—electronic
[p. 113]
music, strobe lights, film, slide projectors and, by implication, hallucinogenic
drugs—and transformed them into a new form of entertainment: the psychedelic
dance-hall experience.
Graham was an unlikely candidate for this enterprise. He was New York tough
and brash, rather than San Francisco civil and tolerant. Graham was also
"straight." He avoided drugs in those years and had a temper that was
as volatile as its threshold was low. If these traits were not sufficient by
themselves to distance Graham from San Francisco's emerging hippie "love
scene," they were supplemented by an obsession with the economic bottom
line and a genius for money making that frequently inspired the wrath of the
city's radicals, especially the Diggers.(43)
Graham was indeed different from San Francisco's cultural avant-garde, and
not solely because he came from the New York area (so did the most notable
Diggers). His toughness was hewed from personal travail and tragedy. He was born
Wolfgang Grajonca in 1931 to a Jewish family in Berlin. He escaped the Nazi fury
in 1939, fleeing first to France, then to Spain, on a long march with 63 other
Jewish children, including his sister. Living mostly on oranges and relentlessly
pursued by the Germans, only 11 of the children survived the journey (Graham's
mother was murdered by the Germans; his sister survived Auschwitz). The
ten-year-old Graham made it to the United States in 1941, where he experienced a
painfully long stay in an orphanage before being adopted by a Jewish family from
the Bronx. He changed his name to Graham as a teenager by searching the
telephone book for an Americanized approximation to Grajonca.
Hoping to become an actor, Graham moved to southern California in the late
fifties. He didn't make it in Hollywood, and eventually headed north to San
Francisco. R. G. Davis, the director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, hired
Graham as the theater company's business manager. Davis's theater company, which
performed for free, was perennially impoverished, and Graham quickly gained a
reputation within the city's music and artistic communities as a creative,
driven and successful organizer of benefit shows produced to raise money for the
Mime Troupe. But the experimental theater group also needed money to pay the
hefty legal fees incurred from ongoing battles with the city's Parks Commission.
Notwithstanding San Francisco's hoary reputation as an urbane citadel of
tolerance, Davis and his actors were bounded by censorious city officials. Mime
Troupe performers were repeatedly arrested on charges of nudity and obscenity
during their performances.(44)
Toward the end of 1965, Graham convinced some of the city's artists, poets
and musicians to perform in benefit shows to raise money to defray the Mime
Troupe's legal expenses. The Mime Troupe benefits were so successful that [p.
114] Graham
was asked to organize the legendary three-day "Trips Festival" at the
Longshoremen's Hall on the weekend of January 21, 1966.
The Trips Festival was the supreme acid test. It was the formal
"coming-out" party for the LSD experience, the event that helped
launch LSD and San Francisco's hippie scene into the national spotlight. It
included Kesey and the Pranksters. The music was provided by the best of the
emerging San Francisco rock bands, including the Grateful Dead and Jefferson
Airplane. Another new band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, which would
shortly hire Janis Joplin as their lead singer, also performed at the festival.
The music was deafening, as bands played simultaneously at both ends of the
hall. There were vats of acid-laced Kool-Aid and light shows. Films were
projected on ceilings and walls. And a play produced by a group called America
Needs Indians was performed. All of this was going on at the same time. A poster
advertising the event said the Trips Festival would include
"Revelations—nude projections, the God Box. The endless explosion. The
Congress of Wonders, the Jazz Mice, liquid projections, etc., and the
unexpectable."(45) Perhaps as many as 6,000 young San Franciscans, most of them
"stoned," passed through the doors of the cavernous hall that weekend.
They were dressed, as a journalist who covered the festival for the San
Francisco Chronicle noted, in styles reminiscent of old San Francisco:
Long-haired girls in trailing dresses skipped along the street. Tall men
with mustaches, long hair a' la Bonnie Prince Charles or, sometimes, Buffalo
Bill Cody, wearing high boots and Stetson hats. They all seemed to be cued
into [San Francisco's] Frontier Days and [their dress] ranged from Velvet
Lotta Crabtree to Mining Camp Desperado.(46)
Graham had no interest in hallucinogenic drugs and, at this time, precious
little in the visceral, improvisational music blasting from the Grateful Dead's
amplifiers. But he understood that something new was happening among the young
of San Francisco, and that there was money to be made from it. Lots of money.
This was not simply "fun" or drug-inspired hedonism, though both were
central features of the experience. It was also what Graham called "living
theater," a free-form exhibition of the spontaneous self.(47)
It was self-exploration unself-consciously carried on in public. No one
seemed "uptight" or repressed, much less constrained by social
convention. And, he was convinced, people would pay to be part of it.
Within a week of the Trips Festival, Graham leased an old beige brick
building on 1806 Geary Street in the Fillmore district, a predominately African
American neighborhood. The building housed storefronts on the street level and
[p. 115] a
spacious ballroom above them. It had a stage, a balcony in the rear, a large
dance floor and a huge turn-of-the-century bar. Graham staged his first show,
modeled on the Trips Festival, at the Fillmore Auditorium in February 1966.
From the Mime Troupe to the Trips Festival to my first show in February [in
the Fillmore] I realized what I wanted to do. Living theater. Taking music and
the newborn visual arts and making all of that available in a comfortable
surrounding, so it would be conducive to open expression. What I saw was that
when all this truly worked, that space was magic.(48)
By the end of 1966 Graham's Fillmore, along with his rival Chet Helms's
Avalon Ballroom on Sutter Street, had created the sixties dance-hall experience.
At the center of the light shows and the drugs was the live music performed by
scores of San Francisco rock and acid-rock bands that developed from 1965 on.
The music they composed and played, the "San Francisco Sound" as it
was called, was an indigenous American music combining blues and hard rock with
electronic guitar feedback. The feedback often created a distortion evocative of
the hallucinogenic state. The bands that emerged in San Francisco during this
period had a seminal impact, along with Bob Dylan and the groups of the
"British Invasion" like the Beatles and Rolling Stones, on the
development of rock music for the rest of the decade. From 1965 on they included
the Charlatans, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the
Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), Hot Tuna, Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger
Service, Sly and the Family Stone, Country Joe McDonald and the Fish, Santana,
the Steve Miller Band, Creedence Clearwater Revival and many other groups.(49)
Beginning in 1966, the San Francisco Sound was a powerful medium for
disseminating to the rest of the country what had been going on among the Bay
Area's young people since 1964. Bill Thompson, the road manager for Jefferson
Airplane, described the impact of the group when it played in Iowa during its
first national tour in 1966:
You should have seen it when we came out to play. We had a light show. But
all the girls were in ruffled dresses all the way down to their ankles with
corsages, and their families were there. We started the light show and we
had three sets to do that night. The first set, it was like we were from
Mars. Guys with their hair cut like Dobie Gillis were standing there and
staring at us. The parents were all farmers. They were looking at one
another and saying, "What the hell is this stuff? Too loud for me,
Maude. Time to go home and milk the goat." So they all left. The second
set, people started dancing a little bit. They started getting into it. The
third set, people went nuts. Off came the corsages. Shoes [p. 116] were coming off.
Guys were ripping off their ties. They went nuts. It was like the turning of
America in a way.(50)
By 1966 the expressions of unrest percolating within young people in San
Francisco were ready to move east. The rest of the country would be infiltrated
by the sense of oppression and alienation among college students that had
exploded during the Free Speech Movement; by the extreme "do your own
thing" individualism exhibited by Kesey and the Pranksters during the bus
trip, the acid tests and Trips Festival; and by the experiences of personal and
collective ecstasy produced by the music and light shows of San Francisco's
Fillmore and Avalon dance halls. The San Francisco scene, with its odd
combination of seething rage, quests for personal liberation and the hippie
spirit of "free love" and community, worked its way through America in
the second half of the decade.
In a way, San Francisco's relationship to the rest of the country had come
full circle since the middle of the nineteenth century. Restlessness,
nationalism, a hunger for wealth and adventure and the search for a new life
precipitated the country's "Manifest Destiny" to the Pacific Ocean in
the previous century. "We go eastward to realize history and study the
works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race," wrote Henry
David Thoreau in 1862. But "we go westward," he continued, "as
into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure."(51)
That adventurous western spirit was about to head east in 1966.
In the early months of 1966, the national news media descended on San
Francisco. Reporters from Time and Newsweek, as well as
correspondents from network television news programs, did stories on the Trips
Festival, the acid tests, the San Francisco Sound, the dance halls and the first
Human Be-In, held in Golden Gate Park in January 1967.(52)
Most of all they focused on the Haight-Ashbury and its hundreds of young,
long-haired, bizarrely dressed denizens. A San Francisco columnist had recently
christened them "hippies."(53)
The hippies looked as though they came from another time, or another country.
This inspired a bus company to launch a tour of the Haight-Ashbury. It was
immensely popular with tourists. Each week hundreds of visitors from around the
country were driven through the strange scene that was Haight-Ashbury, The bus
company advertised the excursion as "the only foreign tour within the
continental limits of the United States."(54)
What the tourists saw must surely have struck them as "foreign."
Many of the huge, run-down but still stately Victorian homes of the neighborhood
had been transformed into hippie communes. They contained hippie "crash
pads" [p. 117] and rehearsal halls for bands who lived in the district, like the
Grateful Dead and Big Brother. The tourists were driven past the many recently
opened shops that catered to the counterculture. There were the I-Thou Coffee
Shop and Love Burgers, where hippies and other young people purchased or
panhandled meals. And the Wild Colors Boutique, where they bought Victorian-era
clothes, cowboy hats and the new "mod" bell-bottomed pants that hung
low on the hips. Observant tourists on the bus who looked into the boutique's
large display window might see an employee sitting on a mock throne and dressed
as the pope. Her job was to sell penny "indulgences" on a piece of
paper to shoplifters as they left the store. The indulgence read "You Are
Forgiven."(55)
As the bus drove past 1535 Haight Street the tour guide pointed out the most
famous "head shop" of the sixties, the Psychedelic Shop. The
Psychedelic Shop was the creation of Ron Thelin, a "hip" Haight
merchant who made it the general store of San Francisco's counterculture. It
sold drug paraphernalia and tickets to Graham's Fillmore dances, books on
transcendental meditation and the Kama Sutra. The Psychedelic Shop featured a
bulletin board where hundreds of young runaways from around the country could
get messages from their parents. And Thelin set aside a "meditation"
room, where one could search for inner tranquility or experience more sensual
delights.(56)
The tourists might also see the recently organized Diggers, who created a
mime play in which Haight-Ashbury hippies surrounded the tour bus. The hippies
aimed mirrors at the people on the bus. The mirrors reflected back upon the
tourists the wonder, shock or fear they experienced when they saw the unbridled
freedom enjoyed by hippies of the Haight. In effect, the Diggers were asking a
silent question of the American tourists who had stumbled on what must have
struck them as so un-American a place: who, indeed, were the real
"foreigners?"
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