Monocled Alchemist

Playboy Magazine: October 1967

A sympathetic portrait of those far-out and fanciful west coast hippies, diggers and new leftniks who spark the action on today’s youth scene – and generate bemused consternation among their elders

60s Hippie Culture in San Francisco: The intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco is the pulsating epi-centre for the hippie shocks that have been felt throughout the world.

Guru Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary embrace at a be-in. The poet has made an easy transition from angry beatnik to joyous elder hippie and Leary has become more mystically involved in his experiments with hallucinogens.

Lysergic acid diethylamide – “acid” – has advanced from the unreliable sugar-cube stage and can now be easily obtained in pills of uniform dosage.

Two flower children set the tone for this most gentle of insurrections. Myriad blossoms bedeck the hair, clothes, cars and homes of the psychedelic set, and the kids eagerly bestow bouquets on members of the square world – most notably the fuzz, tourists and local businessmen.

A celebrant communes with light and water in the breath-taking Big Sur country of northern California.

The peaceful privacy of the area has attracted the more meditative hippie group that practice Eastern-flavoured religious rites.

60s Hippie Culture in San Francisco

HERE SEEMED TO BE NO AIRPLANE. There was just this parachutist sailing down through a cloudless sky. His face was masked. His chute was decorated with psychedelic-ecstatic colours.

And below him, as he sailed so free, 20,000 grokkers said Ooh and Ah.

The occasion was the first Human Be-in on the Polo Field of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Tim Leary and Allen Ginsberg were there, the Hell’s Angels were there, the Berkeley New Left politicos were there, the Provolike Diggers were there.

There were children and parents, on a fine January day. There were banners, flags, costumes, drums, incense, chimes, many San Francisco rock bands, feathers, candles, heads and non-heads, families, lovers, heroes, animals, cymbals and symbols.

What was the cause? Just to grok and groove.

The police were absent. The crowd danced and played and loved each other all afternoon, and then Allen told them to pick up their litter and they did and then they went home.

Hell’s Angels

Nearby, the lawyer who represents the Hell’s Angels in their continual hassling with the police was engaged in a rugby match, his legal talents unneeded.

The Diggers passed out free food. Smiles and pats and kidding. Twenty thousand participants in the “Powwow, a Gathering of the Tribes
for a Human’ Be-in” remember this as a causeless, meaningless and beautiful moment in their lives.

A kind of history was truly made, an ecstasy, a memory of ecstasy and no police and no litter.

The whole thing was the conception of a couple of super-groovy wave makers. There have been succeeding episodes, and why not? All those bodies willing to be nice and knowing now, really knowing.

60s Hippie Culture in San Francisco

Where are these wave makers leading themselves and us? Should we follow? How can we follow? How can we not follow? How can we follow and not follow, all at once, picking up our litter?

FREAKY DOINGS DOWN ON EARTH, WHICH IS ONE OF YOUR TOP TEN PLANETS. Why add “‘the wave makers,” another instant cliché, to the churning mass of language?

Do we need another bumper sticker, another button, another dirge or
snigger for the funny doings of the people who make the action? It is a matter of focus.

After all, what are we standing on—peanut-butter—flavoured yogurt? These are the people who are floating up all sorts of alien kicks through the fock-
‘n’-moil air.

Some of them are developing products that will quickly be disposed of—rockets, missiles and youth itself.

Some of them are working on a style of drugged psychedelic expansion or tripping with music and dancing and natural ease.

“The Rise of the Uglies” would tell the story of the beards and the Goodwill Industry clothes and the haircut boycotts, except that the uglies are not ugly. Their charm comes in lumps, but it is charm all the same.

They are spontaneous. “I used to live with him,” says the girl at a party, pointing across the room to a guitarist, “but now I live with him,” as her finger crooks two ways southward toward a bearded postman, who is sleeping with his head on his mail sack.

bicycle blues

It is probably filled with Social security checks. “Do you have a bicycle?”

“Yes.”

“How many speeds?”

“Nine. It’s Italian.”

She absorbs this interesting data with gleaming eyes. Nine speeds is such a help getting up hills.

“Would you like me to live with you?” she inquires. “Just for the weekend, I mean; it’s such a drag making plans. But I do so love a man with nine different speeds.

Their older brothers and sisters were called beatniks, but the youths have other names now. The Zazzeroni of Italy, the Raggaren of Stockholm, the Provos of Holland, the Ladybugs of the Soviet Union, the Chuligans of Czechoslovakia, the Halbstarke of Austria, the Gammler of Germany, the Gamberros of Spain are all their cousins.

60s Hippie Culture in San Francisco

An International is being created, with the students and wandering loafers and the nervous-breakdown people and the remittance men and a few draft dodgers providing a network of communication; plus rumours, the telemouth; plus the conditions of industrialization and hard fear of war and disgust with mass culture that are settling over the western world.

“Arise, ye prisoners of affluence, arise ye processed of the earth.”

They let their hair and beards grow, they find God or godliness (fanatic atheism is very close to religion), they seek out motorcycles and electronic music, they get high in a thousand different ways, they like leather and / or flowers, they question the traditional forms of work, they question

From New York’s Tomkins Square to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the love-in is continuous and each ecstatic celebrant is the Wizard of his own Oz.

The hippies environment is total and McLuhanistic – he takes from it anything that will aid his daily flights of freak-out fancy.

The range of dress and activities is unlimited and a child’s bubbles can instantly provide a fragile, ephemeral sculpture whose floating grace captivates a joyful and eagerly enchanted crowd.

In fantasyland, the well-dressed voyager is psychedelically correct to the tip of his umbrella. Even more dazzling is the Day-Glo bus of San Francisco’s Merry Pranksters. (The emblem on the flag represents a marijuana leaf).

A maiden grooves in flowery meditation. The war-like symbols of the Hell’s Angels stimulated the garish sartorial style of the hippies. The stolid personage is Pigpen, percussionist for The Grateful Dead and a trend-setter in his own right.

The prismatic frenzy of a light show at San Francisco State College counterpoints the improvised undulations of a nude coed. Ravi Shankar, whose music has influenced the Beatles, brings the good vibrations of his sensuous sitar playing to the Monterey Pop Festival.

Also at the festival was a rock group obviously weary of the name game that has obsessed West Coast ensembles – this one called The Group With No Name.

Dancer do their thing in the heady atmosphere of the Fillmore Auditorium. A young hippie girl goes into temporary exile in the alien topless world to earn some bread.

60s Hippie Culture in San Francisco

Pot is the staple of the hippie diet and it is usually a shared pleasure, as in this Los Angeles pad. Religious eclecticism – stressing Eastern meditation and primitive Christian communality – is evident in the “soul-touching” trance attained by a young Haight-Ashbury painter and his wife.

The beads he is wearing are the one necessary adornment in the acid culture: In them, the artist presumably finds the inner light that enhances self-illumination and inspires creativity.

Physical exuberance is the kick at the free beach in San Gregorio, California. There are neither rules nor membership requirements for joining in the fun, and the Free Beach Movement is healthy and thriving, with new areas for nudeniks opening all along the sunny west coast.

A paisley paint-in precedes uninhibited swinging at a party in San Francisco.

Unabashed nudity, ear-zapping acid-rock, strobe lights and redolent incense provide a total mind blast at a party in the inner regions of Psychedelphia.

The extreme energy input produces a fuse-blowing electrification of the senses.

“A complete turn-on. It’s a pure wipe-out!” says one girl participant. “It’s like an orgasm, but it lasts longer. This is life, everything else is death.”

The increasing ubiquity of the sitar as a hippie instrument is evident at another party.

The hippie-discovered psychedelic vividness of the American flag is demonstrated at a Trips Festival in San Francisco. The festival was an indoor version of a be-in, the only difference being that stroboscopic light pulsations replaced the sun as a source of psychic energy.

A San Francisco couple strolls the Hashbury streets in the early dawn. The boy’s jacket reflects the all-embracing leitmotif of the hippies: Love- spiritual, physical and non-possessive love – is The Answer.

They say they seek a world that is free of and unfettered by money, rules or cops. As the Beatles tell it, they want to go down to Strawberry Fields Forever, where “nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about.”