This analysis is right on from my perspective - Alan Springwind
MICHAEL ROSSMAN, writer who continues to focus on counter-culture topics and building a huge poster archive at his home in Berkeley. THEN: One of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement, the UC Berkeley event that launched the era of student protest, Rossman became a regular visitor to the Haight-Ashbury and its community events.
I'm an old new leftie. I came up with the start of the new left before it was called the new left. I was at HUAC in '60 and a leader of the Free Speech Movement in '64. Came on to the Haight-Ashbury with considerable head of steam, in a couple of different ways. This is getting into too much details ...
Part of what was amazing about the Free Speech Movement is that it launched a movement for education reform, reform in higher education which came first to affect college campuses around the country and then spread out in the communities. After the FSM, I got very involved in that. I spent fall of '65 and early spring traveling from Berkeley to SF State, where the country's first working experiment called the Free University was in brilliant operation. Also in late '65, the rock dances started happening, the first public events of what came to be called the counter-community or in this local case, the Haight Ashbury. I spent a lot of time in the Haight Ashbury, coming in there wearing two or three hats. I was motivated as a curious man, thrill seeker and someone who wanted to come and dance to this amazing music. I was motivated as a sociologist who liked to stand back and observe cultural phenomenon. I was motivated as a political person because there was a deep and joyous strain of politics surfacing in the Haight. For that matter, I was motivated as a spiritual person because so much that was opening on that front became publicly identified with the Haight and I was curious to meet its representatives. Lastly, I was motivated as an educator interested in frontiers of thought and experience, particularly forbidden frontiers. The Haight was a working casebook for all of the above.
I got to travel pretty easily also for two reasons. I had a lot of political cachet from having been an FSM leader, so I could [approach] anybody in political, in mover circles who was straight enough to remember what the FSM was. And also I carried a camera bag over my shoulder because I had relatively recently become a very serious photographer and somewhat of a photojournalist. And in the time before media burn made people more camera shy, the person with the camera who recorded what was going on was a central part of the community and had entrance to all kinds of spaces, intimate and public. So I could just walk casually before the concerts at the Fillmore, I could go casually backstage and schmooze with people who didn't know I was a political person. The musicians were out of town and I don't know if it would matter to them. I could wander back and forth and I had a wonderful time playing out all those roles together.
I was living in Berkeley all that time. But crossing the bridge was not like crossing the bridge today. We could look at each other at ten minutes to eight on a Friday and say hey let's go dance at the Fillmore, we could be walking into the Fillmore at ten minutes after eight.
People would say the Haight is counter-cultural and Berkley is political, but the fact is that there were both counter-cultural and political happenings in both cradles at the same time -- just the relative weight was different on the two sides of the bay.
There was a definite difference in style between us in Berkeley who went through the Free Speech Movement and the SF State folks who were doing the experimental college and who were more like the Haight. We went though the FSM, sat patiently and listened. People tended to talk for a long time in structured presentations that had beginnings, middles and ends and asked for clear response. The SF State people talked in short darts of interchange that were not as logically coherent although they were very bright folks. There was a more reflective, didactic if you will, quality to speech in Berkeley and perhaps to the development of the counter-culture.
There was a question that was made general all over the country in movement circles from 1965 on and it was, Does the use of psychedelic drugs -- in which category I will count marijuana -- does the use of these drugs bring people into political activism or take people away from political activism? And the truth, of course, was both. But the argument really strictly polarized, and most classical leftists, new old leftists to speak, of most of the ideological sectarian groups after the new left found itself lacking on the issue of imperialism, they were down on that. Progressive Labor was prototypical on that. You couldn't belong to Progressive Labor if you smoked marijuana. Of course, that was, among other things, a way of breeding hypocrisy among the membership because there were always, of course, young dissident people who enjoyed smoking marijuana and wanted to smash the state and didn't see why these propositions were antithetical.
In spring 1970 Playboy published a poll of college student attitudes. The interesting part of what they said -- I'm making these figures up, you'd have to fact-check them, they're good figures, they represent roughly what the figures said -- roughly 97 percent of the people who smoked pot were against the war in Vietnam and roughly 97 percent of the people who were against the War smoked pot. There was as much coincidence of these two as you would find for any major thing that would characterize the generation. They published this a few months after the Cambodia/Kent State time when two million people flooded out in the streets and if you had gone out and counted the people who flooded the streets, you would have found an awful lot of them smoked marijuana. Noting that the ranks of the anti-war movement grew exponentially from '65 to '70, at a time when the ranks of marijuana smokers and acid takers were also growing exponentially, I think you'd have a real hard time making a case that weed deterred people from activism. What it did do was change their ways, modes and styles of activism as you can see in a superficial way by reflecting on differences in costumes. The uniform of the old left was the blue jeans and blue denim jackets of the SNCC field workers. The new left drew its roots from campus intellectuals who, so to speak, their stereotypical wear had been Army surplus wear. The new left was dowdy all through the Free Speech Movement. It's the next morning culturally when posters begin to appear and people change their costumes. By the time we go down to get the s--t beat out of us at the Oakland Induction Center in '67, we are out wearing helmets, but the helmets are painted bright colors, and we're wearing bells and feathers, and we're banging drums and in a great frame of jollity because you somehow had to maintain the spark of bright spirit when you were facing this interminable, ghastly thing that was happening. All that was an attitude that the old left didn't have. It wasn't until the Free Speech Movement that I saw a political pamphlet with a sense of humor. The old left didn't joke around.
The thing about weed and political action, in that era, when you sucked on a joint, you inhaled not simply some smoke, but you inhaled this whole complex of cultural attitudes, not only opposition to the war, but a liking for Madras bedspreads, an inclination to taste new and interesting foods, to feel less guilty about cutting class, to disrespect authority more because they were trying to make you a criminal for having these experiences and changes of perspective. When you made millions of young people criminals this way, on the narrow issue of whether they could put this plant's smoke or that plant's smoke in their bodies, you corrupted their attitudes about a whole lot in the culture.
This was a time when still in order to smoke the marijuana we locked the front door, we turned out all the lights, crowded in the bathroom and stood around the toilet ready to flush if the cops were going to knock on the door. We got high, went out and looked at MC Escher and listened to Bach with a new ear So when the Haight emerged as a place where people smoked marijuana openly, it was a deeper kind of transgression and statement of liberation than can be understood in this day or by people who didn't live through that time. God knows it drove the authorities nuts.
Draw a circle, cut it in half. Label the top half outer and the bottom half inner and draw a whole bunch of wedges to make a pie graph. Then start labeling. Wedges. The bottom part we label psychodrama, encounter groups, meditation, yoga, macrobiotic food, taking grass and acid and a number of the things and the intimate end of communal living and for that matter, free sex, freer sex.
That bottom half is the Haight as it came to be known, and came to be advertised across the country by the partially cooperating media and as a lot of people came simply to remember it, as a laboratory of exploration into the depths of the inner being -- from what it was like to live in a body and feed and so on, onto what it was like to share emotions with people on to spiritual being. But there was another Haight in the same time, the same place by people who shared the inner quest in various ways and ultimately effecting everybody who was involved in the inner questing. So we start labeling the pie slices in the upper half. Here's the Free Clinic (it was, by the way, the first free clinic in the country; four years later there's 200 hundred free clinics around the country). Here's a free grammar school and a free high school where the free not only stands for free tuition but for the spirit of education that is going on in them. Here is free legal services for the community. Here's a switchboard which is connecting all kinds of people -- a communication medium for the many social service agencies that are springing up in this community. Here is draft counseling. Here is the Digger's food distribution service. Here is the group linking with the emergent family farms 20 to 40 miles outside of SF. Here is - a primitive form of light industry, but it certainly is there - the making of bongs and psychedelic paraphernalia. Here is the communication company which is a free publication service. It publishes short and long things. You bring in something, they publish and distribute it. In that very limited time, limited place, these young people are experimenting with re-creating practically the whole range of social institutions. I forgot to mention Huckleberry House, the haven for runaways, detox. In a short time and space, they are at play with experiments on this very broad social canvas. Besides the wonderful breadth of the social curriculum is the fact that they're happening in the same time and place. When you put them all together, there was a kind of integrity, a fragile but deep integrity to this development in this place before it came to be known as The Haight. And it was that integrity that was the most precious and the most difficult to maintain and the easiest to destroy. Look downstream the next decade and what you see, if you look at the lore about the Haight is that any reference to the upper part of that diagram is completely missing. The Haight is a place where people freaked out, had good music and lots of sex and got crab lice and clap in public memory. The wedges of the bottom half have been separated out one by one and peddled as commodities -- consumable commodities -- for the entertainment of the middle class. Here is your yoga class, here is your encounter group, here is Swaami Yammi, and so on and so on. Your essentially commercialized and cult-like enterprises sprang up in each slice of the pie to set up franchise operations across the country.
When the Haight was healthiest was when it wasn't known as the Haight, particularly when it wasn't known as the Haight Ashbury publicly. There's a funny thing. I've known a number of people who've become famous and, by and large, the experience is really destructive. I think there's a rather precise way about how the experience happens. People come at you with some media image of you and they want to see you act like that and you act like that. But the image is not really you and it leads you progressively farther away from whatever your center is. That's a really short way of putting it. I saw Jerry Rubin lose his soul in this way and become a parody of Jerry Rubin. Why do I mention this? Because something certainly as destructive happened from media attention to the Haight. I haven't thought through it. . .I know it was a deep destruction. I saw it happen over and over in the late '60s after the Haight in smaller enterprises. . .
It was bad enough already when the Haight was basically just this unknown community growing by word of mouth in '65. By late '65/early '66, the era of the underground newspaper begins and it becomes a more visible place and more and more people come to see the Haight, where more and more of them come not just to stroll down Haight St. on a sunny afternoon not just to look at the hippies on the corner, but actually talking to them and having the time to take up their invitation of come visit our commune. But the real killer is when overground media get to it and the Haight becomes national and hungry kids all over the country who are going nuts in the swamp water of American delusion and cynicism and living in the straight towns and circumstances and getting shat on for growing their hair a little long and smoking roadside dope and getting popped, they give it up and they come out here because they hear this thing is happening that will meet their needs in ways that they couldn't possibly begin to define, but that is the feeling. So the much hyped Summer of Love is a kind of collapse, a kind of falling over the face of what's happening. These things would have happened anyway, if these same brave adventurous people who were trying to take some responsibility for the civic character of the Haight Ashbury as a whole -- of whom I count the Digger group at the very foremost -- the people who were trying to organize negotiations with the various levels of the municipal government from the police to the Mayor's office to the sanitation to the health services to get them to stop persecuting the various natural developments in the Haight, get them to respond to the various types of epidemics that were happening and stop doing cluster sweeps with the cops on the street arresting and beating people up. There were people who were not only trying to be responsible for the internal civic health of the Haight, in trying to get merchants to do a voluntary tax to support various types of ameliorating efforts and so, but were trying to interface with the larger society. They were the people who said, well, we're going to have Summer of Love. People were coming from all over the country. Well, people were coming from all over the country already. The Haight was in deep trouble by the dawn of 1967.
By the time the cold weather turns after winter '66 because the Haight is basically doomed because people are headed to it from all over the country.
The phenomenon that was happening was bigger than the Haight. The Haight was emblematic, for a time, a pressure cooker where the true vast curriculum outer and inner were being pursued. When the Haight got crushed as a functioning social environment, people were at work in many, many places around the country on both wings of this agenda though less and less often together. So by the time the Haight goes down, there's some semblance of counter-community in at least 100 American cities. By counter-community I mean more than just people dropping acid and protesting the war, but groups of people who actually say, this is our community, let's do something to make it work better. It needs a front end to deal with the town's police so fewer kids get hurt.
The range of experiments that characterized the Haight continued all over the country because it was a hydra with no central head. The whole range of inner exploration. . .We're 40 years downstream and if you go cruise the telephone poles you still see the advertisements for the gurus and the wellness center and the yoga classes.
The positive sides of the explorations have been very important in changing our attitudes. I myself -- this is peculiar perspective -- I think the modern ecology movement when a couple of hippies are sitting on Hippie Hill in the Panhandle and they're smoking a joint. They lean back and lie on the grass and one of them says 'Whoa, this stuff is alive -- the grass has a spirit -- I feel its spirit.' Because certainly there was some deep kind of revitalization, some reawakening of our connection with the earth that came through the counter-culture and was mediated specifically by psychoactive drugs that changed the perspectives as well as greatly multiplied the forces of the ecology movement. Shall we say gave the Sierra Club second wind.
-- Joel Selvin
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/20/MNSOLROSSMAN20.DTL
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