on earrings, belt buckles, chest medallions. Yet the opportunity to safely wear these was a path others had blazed at considerable risk. Obtaining any sort of job remained difficult if your appearance didn’t conform to how people dressed in the ads in Life magazine. Up the road at Disneyland, “hippie-looking” potential customers — men with beards and long hair, or women who were barefoot, beaded, and wearing too-colourful long dresses — still were routinely refused entrance. Crowd shots of happy Disneyland patrons were a feature on the Disney Company’s TV series, and Disney executives wanted only the image of “normal” Americans to be broadcast.
I surfaced momentarily from my hash-induced ruminations to hear CS&N’s counsel:
It’s been a long time coming
It’s going to be a lo-ong
Time gone.
Despite Woodstock, I didn’t want to exaggerate the hippies’ sartorial influence: most people on the street still looked like the date was 1959. The male ideal was to resemble clean-cut FBI recruits, and the female, to present variations of Doris Day — both sexes were garbed like department store mannequins. But visible amid the crowd now — in small numbers, admittedly — were freewheeling tie-dyed, multihued, unisex costumes. Stores had even opened that specialized in such clothing. Beards and beads and earrings on men were still the exception. Each month, however, a few more were discernible in public, just as more alternatives to the close-cropped businessman’s and bureaucrat’s pencil-thin tie and stiff white shirt were evident.
As outcasts, heads could share camaraderie. Hippiedom at its finest was a brotherhood and sisterhood: freaks giving rides to other freaks hitchhiking, freaks letting other freaks crash at their apartments or communal houses, the sharing of whatever you had — food, shelter, drugs. You recognized each other by how you appeared, by the buttons you wore, and you assumed you both agreed on some basic beliefs: opposition to the war, to the draft, to consumerism, to racism, to what Herbert Marcuse down in San Diego had termed a “one-dimensional” existence. You took for granted both of you wanted each day and every night to be as full of energy, beauty, humour, and raunchiness as our music.
In practice, though head acknowledged head on the street, flashed each other the “V” peace sign or the clenched fist of revolt, a spectrum of freakiness existed. Some suburbanite kids were heads only on weekends, or tourists at be-ins and rock concerts. That was okay: none of us had been heads from birth.
I became aware Jay had teleported himself from his stance by the rail to a chair. “All right. Let’s agree for the sake of argument that Woodstock was a commercial deal.”
“I knew you’d come around to my opinion,” Edward gloated.
“If Woodstock — the bands, the festival — was what the producers made happen,” Jay said, ignoring his brother’s interruption, “something also went down there that we created.”
“Yes — fifty tons of garbage.”
En route back from the April 15 anti-war demonstration in San Francisco at the start of the Summer of Love, we had picked up a hitchhiker in the early evening on the shoulder of 101 near Salinas: long hair, clean-shaven, army jacket with an “A” shoulder patch, jeans. Once in the car, our passenger rapped non-stop. First he apologized for his slowness of speech, saying he was just down from a week on Dexedrine. He had hitched to San Francisco for the march, we learned, from Marina del Rey. He’d been staying with his younger brother there for the past three weeks, having recently arrived from Dallas to assist his sibling with a light show the brother put on for money.
In San Francisco our passenger had crashed with the Diggers. These were the Bay Area hippie self-help group who took their name from a land reform movement during the English Civil War of the mid-1600s, suppressed by Oliver Cromwell as too revolutionary.
“Diggers are a good idea,” the hitchhiker informed us. “It just doesn’t work. They’re against leaders, but too many slack off. Like there was nothing to eat at the Digger House, despite what you hear, Friday night. And the commode wasn’t working. They run out of paper and don’t buy more. Somebody uses a rag, and the commode backs up. They can’t afford a plumber, so it stays that way. About five in the morning they start waking us up because they had some hot spaghetti prepared. My taste buds aren’t ready for that at that hour of the morning.”
After delivering himself of how bummed he was by his hosts’ shortcomings, our hitchhiker smoked a cigarette begged from somebody in the car, then nodded off. We woke him at 3:00 a.m. at the sign for Culver Boulevard. The last we saw of him was in the harsh illumination at the interchange as he dropped over the shoulder of the exit ramp.
“What I’m trying to tell you, Eddie,” Jay was holding forth, “is that when hundreds of thousands of heads arrived at Woodstock, dug the scene, and wiped out the intentions of the money-grubbing guys, they created another way of existing.”
“Yay!” Pump cheered. “The Woodstock Nation!”
“That tag is strictly a media invention,” Edward scoffed. “Someone probably would have talked about the Monterey Nation if they’d thought of it. All it means is —”
I didn’t disagree with our passenger’s criticism of the Diggers a couple of years ago. The hippie trip could be too disconnected from reality. Surely, a functioning toilet was a minimal requirement for a communal crash pad.
Plus, the ideal of love and peace could be an opportunity for the unscrupulous to rip off naive freaks who believed in the inherent goodness of other freaks. Already in the Frozen North stories were circulating about land communes gone wrong. Several people would pool money to buy a rural acreage, and somebody would volunteer that the title be put in his name “just for convenience’s sake,” since the authorities frowned on twenty-six names on a title. A year later the hapless commune members found themselves kicked off “their” land by their obliging compatriot, with no legal recourse. Bridget, in a pronouncement I could get behind, once summed up why she couldn’t adopt the Flower Power philosophy wholesale: “We are all beings of light, true enough. But some of us have our jerk suits on.”
The mysticism, the passivity preached by Eastern religions, and the belief in the eternal merit of non-violence that were stirred into the hippie mix resulted too frequently in pathetic scenes like the Laguna Canyon episode. Martin Luther King’s reward for preaching non-violence was a bullet, which I would’ve thought was a convincing argument against his approach to obtaining civil rights. Certainly, the ghettos didn’t express their dismay at King’s murder by adopting the peaceful forms of protest he advocated. To factor love into major social change, into revolution, that emotion had better be — to quote one of the new slogans I’d heard — Armed Love.
“No, man, you’re dead fucking wrong.” Pump was jabbing a forefinger at Edward. “Dig it — when we were in the army looking out, you could see two different groups. I never thought of them as nations, but that’s what they are. One with long hair and drugs and a way of life different from our parents. The other the straight world. Like Jay says, the Woodstock concert might have been the promoter’s idea. The Woodstock Nation is all ours.”
Not that I was a wild-in-the-streets, bloodthirsty violence advocate — far from it. I counted myself one of the biggest chickens alive. Brawwwk-awwk-awwk was my motto. One of the posters I kept tacked up on my wall on Cajon Street was issued by SDS after Malcolm X was shot. Underneath Malcolm’s portrait was the caption: HE WAS READY. ARE YOU? I looked at the words every day, and inevitably thought, Well, not really. No. The poster reminded me each time I glanced at it how far I was from measuring up to what social change probably would demand.
How
