Out of Tune and Lost in the Counterculture

By Timothy Tyler

The wrong people, the wrong drugs have taken over. English majors (ugh), fraternity boys and the down-and-outers who would have been bums anywhere are joining the culture. The aggressive psychotic drunk has sprung up now in the drug culture. Heroin and speed have replaced marijuana and LSD. Hippie violence against hippie has become commonplace. It is numbers: too many hippies. We can only afford so many people alienated from society.

These are the words of Charlie Whitman, hippie lawyer from Lawrence, Kans., a 27-year-old veteran of the counterculture who has seen it all. What Whitman sees happening in Lawrence is going on all over America: the counterculture losing its primal energy, which was, back in 1967, a beautiful, frightening thing to feel.

The counterculture began as an attitude, a radically new way of seeing life. Except on its political fringe, it was never translated into consciously conceived doctrine. It existed, in fact, mainly on the subconscious level, not so much a culture as a mass mental condition, a careless, peaceful state of arrested movement and introspection.

The culture sprang more than anything else from rock-'n'-roll music. The new awareness took its energy from the shattering, obliterating volume of electrically amplified music, so awesomely loud it made pant legs flap and ears go numb for days. This volume, so enormous it was more movement than sound, amounted to a new form of violence, and when it coupled with the anarchic, brute-sexual rhythm and lyrics of rock-'n'-roll music, it produced a mass catharsis.

The sound helped shape a generation whose aggressive urges were so effectively cauterized that they had little appetite for physical, intellectual or economic competition, and none for war. "Upward mobility" came to seem absurd, as did the educational system. With marijuana and LSD prolonging and deepening the disorienting effects of the music, the rock culture grew, so that today it is a predominant life-style among the 40 million Americans aged 15 to 25.

Paradoxically, as the movement waxed, the music waned. This began to happen in the spring of 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival, at a time when it seemed the movement would ensnare the whole country in its spirit. "It's hard to describe the feeling we had," recalls John Sinclair, chairman of the radical White Panther Party. "Everybody was taking all that acid and dancing and screaming in the music and uniting on every level with everybody else around him . . . We had a whole new vision of the world, and we knew that everything would be all right once the masses got the message we were sending out through our music, our frenzied dancing, our outrageous clothes and manners and speech, our mind-blowing, consciousness-expanding, earthshaking dope."

But at Monterey, in the warm spring sun, the hard-driving energy of the new music was exposed not only to the young people, but also to the commercial visionaries of the big record companies. "The musicians were bought off," says Sinclair. "The music was adulterated and repackaged and sold to us like hamburgers." Instead of reproducing the spontaneous violence and energy of a live performance, recording studios began to "simulate" performances, recording one instrument, one singer at a time, then "mixing down" eight or 16 separate tracks of tape into a final record.

With the music transformed into a neat consumer product, the record companies and promoters deluged the market with records and "festivals," making the counterculture suddenly accessible to anyone willing to grow his hair long and take drugs. As the culture swelled, reaching down to the twelve-year-olds and out to relative "straights," it underwent a basic change.

Instead of an earthshaking shift in consciousness, it became for many merely a change in superficial values. Once there was safety in numbers; growing long hair and wearing bell-bottoms became more a matter of fashion than a statement of any revolutionary attitudes. Whole chains of hip clothing stores--led by Los Angeles-based Jeans West, 46 stores strong--sprang up and flourished. Movies that pretended to be hip but spoke only to "plastic hippies" (Getting Straight, The Strawberry Statement) overwhelmed earlier, more truly radical pictures like Easy Rider. The most successful of the underground newspapers --Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Village Voice--became such large operations they were forced to depend more and more on straight advertising to survive, and thus rose approximately to ground level.

The communal movement has suffered too. Communes began when the movement was small, when hippies had such a tenuous hold on existence they were almost forced to band together in self-sufficient units. But when so-called hippies came swarming in millions over the land, the rigors of the true agrarian commune came to seem unnecessary. Many of the original experiments dried up; what remain are mostly semi-communes, work groups that are more or less directly dependent on the country's economic system for survival.

In the midst of all this "co-optation," came the onslaught of hard drugs. In the wake of the Government's Operation Intercept, which slowed the flow of marijuana out of Mexico, grass became expensive and hard to get. When rumors linked LSD with chromosomal damage, the counterculture also turned away from that No. 1 mind tripper. In 1969, the culture switched in large numbers to Methedrine or speed, a drug that led many to chaotic, aggressive behavior. Then last year the heroin pushers moved in, and the damage was complete. The drug deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were symbolic; across the country, thousands were dying of overdoses, needle infections and drug-related accidents. Terrorized by the influx of debilitating drugs, diluted by Woolworth hippies, the movement limped through the past two years a paranoid, fragmented version of its former self. Its political wing, which served mainly as theater, degenerated into bad theater, then the insane violence of the Weatherman. No longer buoyed by hope of a gradual takeover of the System, the culture finally faced up to the fact that General Motors was not going to go away and that some accommodation would have to be made with the larger society.

Now, as the masses of the movement's first generation leave school, they are faced with a grim choice of 1) continuing to exist outside the economy by a combination of panhandling, peddling their handicrafts and occasionally dealing dope; 2) becoming true outlaws and dealing dope on a large scale; 3) taking a straight job.

None of these alternatives is especially palatable for the members of the counterculture. In fact, they represent the end of much of the movement's dream. In that dilemma, some straight jobs have become acceptable. "Driving cabs is the In thing for hippies right now in New York," says the underground cartoonist Mad John Peck. In Berkeley, the freaks have formed their own cab company, and the cabs are psychedelically painted bombs navigated solely by longhairs. Being a letter carrier is also acceptable, and mailmen with Prince Valiant cuts abound. Some straight newspapers like the Boston Globe have allowed invasions of freak reporters, and "a lot of freaks are into cybernetics," according to Peck. But the acceptable straight fields are few, and most of them are near the bottom of the economic ladder.

All this means that the counterculture, the world's first (and probably last) socio-political movement to grow out of the force of electrically amplified music, has reached a grudging, melancholy truce with the straight world it set out to save. Surrounded, ensnared by a modern industrialized economic system, the movement has become fragmented, confused. That immaculate peaceful energy with which it began has been transmuted into a vast, yawning sense of futility, and there seems no way out.

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