Beats & Hippies

I decided Ramparts Magazine should check out the roots of the New Jerusalem. The question was what, if anything, the hippie phenomena represented besides a pleasant excursion into love, fun and flowers by the overprivileged middle-class kids who comprised the bulk of the hippie overpopulation in the Haight.

The big highs had been in 1965 and 1966, when the San Francisco Mime Troop under the brilliant Ronnie Davis was putting on free theater in the parks, the Diggers had surfaced to put out free food, and the great Human Be-In was looked upon in many quarters as truly the be-all and end-all for humankind. But by 1967, when I wrote some unkind words about what was happening to the love generation, new troops had occupied the Haight to degrade, corrupt and loot the original hippie idealists. One factor was the ascendancy of the merchant princes and media and marketing hypsters who in the space of a few years ripped off an entire generation. Another bad seed was a recessive gene from San Francisco’s other heralded renaissance of a decade previous, the Beat Generation. About that, Allen Ginsberg had some input.

Ginsberg began by talking about an evening in 1955—a moment of incubation for the Beatniks, who represented the most thorough repudiation of American middlebrow culture since the expatriates made for Paris in the 1930s. A group of men who were to be in the vanguard of the Beat Generation had gathered at the 6 Gallery on Fillmore Street for a poetry reading moderated by Kenneth Rexroth, a respectable leftish intellectual who was later to become the Public Defender of the Beats. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was in the audience, and so were Jack Kerouac and his then sidekick, Neal Cassady, the Tristram Shandy of the Beat Generation. They were listening to Michael McClure, Phil Lamantia, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen read their poetry. Ginsberg was there, too. He read a section of the still unfinished “Howl,” a poem that would become a Declaration of Independence for the Beats.

Ginsberg is too nice a guy to stress this point, but two quite different strains in the underground movement of the fifties were represented at this salient gathering. One trend was distinctly fascist, which can be found in Kerouac’s writing, and is characterized by a nihilism and totalitarian insistence on action for action’s sake, often accompanied by a Superman concept. That strain can be traced, running deeper and less silent, into the hippie scene. The recipients of this heritage were Ken Kesey and his friends, the Hell’s Angels, and, in a more subtle but no less menacing way, the LSD Mein Kampf of Timothy Leary. When the Hell’s Angels rumbled by, Kesey welcomed them with LSD. “We’re in the same business. You break people’s bones, I break people’s heads,” he told the Angels, who thereupon became regular studs in the Haight-Ashbury roughhouse.

The other, dominant, side of the Beats was a cultural reaction to the existential brinksmanship forced on them by the Cold War, and a lively attack on the prevailing rhetoric of complacency and self-satisfaction that pervaded the literary establishment. Led by men like Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, the early Beats weighed America by its words and deeds, and found it pennyweight. They took upon themselves the role of conscience for the machine. They rejected all values and when, in attempting to carve a new creative force, they told America to “go fuck itself,” America reacted, predictably, with an obscenity trial.

The early distant warnings of the drug-based culture that would dominate the Haight-Ashbury a decade later were there in the early days of North Beach. Marijuana was as popular as Coke at a Baptist wedding, and the available hallucinogens—peyote and mescaline—were part of the Beat rebellion. Gary Snyder, poet, mountain climber, formal Yamabushi Buddhist, and one of the few leaders of the hippie scene who retained his purity of purpose, first experimented with peyote while living with the Indian tribe of the same name in 1948. Ginsberg first took it in New York in 1951. Lamantia, Kerouac and Cassady were turned on by Beat impresario Hymie D’Angolo at his Big Sur retreat in 1952.

And Beat parties, whether they served peyote, marijuana or near beer, were rituals, community sacraments, precursing the hippie rituals of the sixties.

Those were some of the hand-me-downs, for bad and good, that the hippies got from the Beats. The two generations of Noncomformists shared a good deal, but their attitude toward the dominant society they were both opting out of could not have been more dissimilar. The Beats fought to remain out of and above commercial America, and lost. The hippies, at least commercially, not only accepted assimilation, they swallowed it whole.

Almost every society susceptible to the adjective “advanced” has allowed, usually with a perfunctory tsk-tsk, the sons and daughters of its more privileged classes to drop out and cut up. If one reads the history of Russia before the Revolution one will find a similarity of gamesmanship among the bored and alienated bourgeois youth. What I found objectionable about the hippies—or rather about some hippie promoters—was the attempt to make a serious political stance out of goofing off. Dropping out was the revolution; non- politics was the most serious politics.

One of the leading merchandisers of this counterculture bullshit was Rolling Stone, the rock culture tabloid that was started by two disgruntled Ramparts types. One of them was Jann Wenner, then a fat and pudgy kid hanging around the office. Wenner was considerably frustrated by my oafish refusal to print his dope and rock stories in the magazine, as I considered rock reporting as a state of the journalistic art on a level with Ben Gay ads. Rolling Stone has since become success- ful on its own rock journalism terms, and Wenner’s co-believers in the counterculture press have attempted to cannibalize him for being so successful while they remain failures.

Those underground press types who view Wenner as Goebbels look upon me as Hitler, and several articles dinging young Wenner for ripping off the rock revolution described him, in the ultimate insult, as having been “created” by me. The truth of the matter is that I hardly knew the kid; and the only thing Ramparts gave him to help start his paper was a bottle of rubber cement to paste up the first issue, and I screamed about that.

The second Ramparts’ evacuee to the Rolling Stone was Ralph Gleason, who resigned in a fury over my hippie article which dinged much that he held holy. Gleason said he quit because I quoted him in the article without interviewing him, which was true; he neglected to mention that what I quoted was a column he had written, and that is not the same nasty, but I will let the lumping stand as I liked having the Gleason on the paper (I once offered him a year’s salary, in escrow, to quit his Chronicle column for Ramparts, but he said no; smart) and am sorry that I dumped on his flower children without giving him a chance to defend the little fascists.

Since the blood-fest of Altamont in December of 1969 —-Pearl Harbor to the Woodstock Generation, I called it at the time, but I probably should have said Waterloo—no one is mouthing much more about the glories of the “love revolution.” When the hippie cultists argued that people should drop out of the unrewarding task of steering society, they left the driving to the likes of the Hell’s Angels. And Altamont showed that one of the results of dropping out can be getting beat up.

The only Haight-Ashbury stars who seem to be still functioning are those, such as Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, who had their own credentials outside of hippiedom. For a time it looked like Emmet Grogan might have staying power—the Diggers was a good idea and he carried it off outrageously well—but when he couldn’t make the rhetoric of a wholly cooperative subculture a reality, he opted to give up on the reality and take solace in the high of rhetoric and fancy, until now the poor fellow has become totally a figment of his own imagination.