- 2 months ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00The summer of 67 was a moment that rewrote history.
00:08Nature boys, truth seekers and politicos converged on the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco to forge a new way of being.
00:18The hippie was born.
00:20People in the Haight-Ashbury are seekers of a more meaningful human experience.
00:26Free love, free drugs and free thinking were the mantras of these cultural revolutionaries.
00:38And yet no sooner had the party begun than it started to unravel.
00:44What started happening with the summer of love was a lot of hard drugs started coming into the Haight-Ashbury.
00:50And that changed things a lot.
00:53The atrocities that have yet to surface from women's treatment by the hippie movement are considerable.
01:02The US government mobilized to stamp out the first signs of an uprising.
01:07We were afraid.
01:09And those of us who are alive today can tell you that we all thought that we were going to get killed.
01:13We never imagined living past 30.
01:15The hippie movement is like any other extreme action on the part of people.
01:24It will die a natural death.
01:26But the hippies would not be beaten.
01:28We were gassed.
01:30But we were prepared to fight again.
01:32The summer of love lasted just a few idyllic months.
01:37And yet it launched the biggest cultural shift in living memory.
01:41The revolution it unleashed not only changed the way we think about ourselves, each other and our planet,
01:49but shaped the world we live in today.
02:08June 1967 and San Francisco is on the brink of a hippie revolution.
02:37Thousands of dreamers have come to look for an alternative way of life, turning the city into the flower power capital of the world.
02:52It was an incredibly exciting time.
02:56Incredibly optimistic.
02:58And we felt as young people, very empowered.
03:02People were inventing themselves and inventing the way they wanted to live.
03:07And there was a kind of implicit scale of revolution, which went from the guys that wore little mullets.
03:16You know, their haircut looked normal from the front, but they had a little pigtail.
03:20So on the weekends they could let it down and be hippies to guys who were like tattooing their faces.
03:26There were head shops on Haight Street.
03:32There was the psychedelic shop.
03:34There was the garden of earthly delight.
03:37It was a wonderful place and it was in a way self-sustaining.
03:42We had established a tribe, a community that took care of each other and made money and distributed the money and made music.
03:53So it was paradise.
03:56People in the Haight Ashbury are practicing what people have spoken about for centuries and it threatens to overthrow the rest of the American establishment,
04:11which is built upon the motives of greed, anger, lust, and self-interest.
04:24At the heart of the community were an anarchist troupe of artists and radicals called the Diggers,
04:30the Robin Hoods of Haight Ashbury, who stole from the rich and gave to the beautiful people.
04:37Their plan was to turn the hate into a living experiment to create a money-free, self-sustaining anarchist community with a collective conscience.
04:47A group of hippies called the Diggers provide free food to hungry hippies in Panhandle Park.
04:53Diggers are people who share, says their manifesto, and their aim is a society where everything is shared, everything free.
05:00Initially, the free food started by putting out digger stew.
05:05It was stew.
05:07And it was actually hot food that was cooked in an apartment somewhere and then brought out onto the street and fed to people.
05:13And all we asked them to do was step through a frame six feet by six feet painted yellow.
05:20And it was called the free frame of reference.
05:23And when they stepped through it, we gave them a little one inch by one inch frame on a shoelace.
05:30Hung it around their neck and just invited them to look at the world as if everything they saw was free.
05:36Most of these people had just, they just discovered social change.
05:41They grew up in a soft middle class family or something and then all of a sudden they found out there was injustice in the world.
05:48Oh, my God! Oh, my God! There's injustice. Social injustice. We've got to do something about it.
05:54I know. We'll give away clothes, free clothes. Yeah, that'll be great.
05:59You know? And free food. That's what the people want.
06:02They can have the free food. And, you know, if it's past the sell date, who the fuck gives a shit, you know?
06:07Imagine me and you. I do. I think about you day and night.
06:13By the height of a summer of love, half a million starry-eyed kids had defied their parents' wishes and descended on the hate.
06:21Among them were two teenage runaways, Taj Galeran and Cat Castro.
06:28Every, but the place was just, there was like a thousand people on every block.
06:33I mean, the street was completely lined with body, you remember?
06:37I do. I do. Everyone.
06:40And anything that you needed or wanted, you would just ask around and somebody would give it to you.
06:46It was a community. It was a community.
06:48If there was food, if you needed money, if you wanted something to drink, if you wanted to join.
06:54It was all over the place. It was a community.
06:56And everybody shared. That's what was really cool.
06:58It was a community. It was a community. That's what I call it.
07:00When you share, like back then. That was a community. It was a true community.
07:03It was like family.
07:04Yes.
07:05And it was better, more like family, than the family I had at home.
07:09Exactly.
07:10Because when I came up here, I'd just turned 16 and just put down my Barbie dolls the month before.
07:15So, I mean, I was pretty, pretty sheltered.
07:18They kept acid in their cupboard like vitamins.
07:21They did. The day of that big vegan, I said, you know, can I get any kind of acid?
07:24Yeah, help yourself, Kathy.
07:25They're in the shelf.
07:27They're in the cupboard and they're in a little mall. Pop, pop, pop.
07:30Hopped in the park, I swish. I know.
07:36Summer of Love wasn't actually a real thing. It was a media creation.
07:40It was describing the influx of teenagers to San Francisco who had heard about or read about the subculture in Haight-Ashbury and flocked there.
07:54You can be yourself. You don't have to be what adults want you to be and everything like that.
07:59What do you want to do here that your parents wouldn't want you to do?
08:03Nothing. That's it.
08:04Exactly.
08:05Nothing. I don't have to do anything.
08:07Underage children poured into the Haight-Ashbury, totally unprepared, no resources, no way to feed themselves, no way to live.
08:16Kids with no shoes, girls on the street, 14, 15-year-old kids.
08:20What's the point in going around dirty? Do these people bathe?
08:24Are they dirty?
08:25Yes, half of them smell so bad I don't want to say anything.
08:28Well, I've never got that close to them.
08:30That was the one thing I hated about the whole period and the whole movement was girls with dirty feet and the same odor.
08:38They all put this like, they thought it was perfume and it smelled like hay from a horse shed with shit in it.
08:45You know, it was horrible.
08:55Today we went down to the city clinic and we talked to the people down there about the vernal disease that is spreading through Haight-Ashbury.
09:03They would have belly at LSD trips, drug overdoses, they'd have gonorrhea, they'd come from the Midwest to California thinking it was sunny California and they'd get pneumonia.
09:14We were seeing 250 patients a day with no government support.
09:21In fact, we asked the health department to, you know, help us because we had this public health crisis.
09:28There are a number of people in Haight-Ashbury who have this after syphilis, gonorrhea, and a clap.
09:34And it has to be stopped because if it isn't stopped now, it's just going to spread.
09:38And if it spreads, everyone here is going to catch it.
09:41If you're bawling some chick and she's got it, well, you say, well, that's cool, and you go get yourself fixed up,
09:46in the meantime she's giving to somebody else.
09:48I don't know just where I'm going.
09:59Naive young kids living on the streets of Haight-Ashbury became easy prey for adults who hadn't come for peace and love.
10:08There were more and more unsavory characters that started to exploit the drug culture, which had been primarily marijuana and LSD.
10:23And now, all of a sudden, amphetamines and other things were being hawked.
10:30And so, you know, a much rougher element, more like a long organized crime, came as time progressed in there because there was a buck to be made, you know.
10:42I started to notice that there were people on the street, if you will, who seemed different.
10:49They kind of looked like a lot of people looked, but they were into different things.
10:53They had no interest in social activism.
10:56They had no interest in politics.
10:58They had no interest in helping other people for any reason whatsoever.
11:03They had no spiritual center.
11:05They had no ethical compass.
11:07They were just there for the party and for the hard drugs.
11:10It became a nightmare.
11:12It was a nightmare.
11:13I mean, Charlie Manson was cruising the main strip just looking for those stoned, heavy eyes on some little girl, you know.
11:24And he'd just, like, get them under his wing and give them more of the same.
11:29And eventually they were going on creepy crawls with him and his gang, you know, out to kill people.
11:38Charles Manson and his cult of teenage followers would go on to murder seven people in a drug-fueled frenzy.
11:47I find that I have to stay out of people that I know that are getting stoned because when I see them on it, then I know that I want to get on it too, you know.
11:59By August 1967, the Haight-Ashbury had turned into a human freak show.
12:06The tourists coming into the Haight-Ashbury, for me, was an indicator that this thing had turned the corner.
12:17We became a destination, a tourist destination.
12:21We'd hold up mirrors in front of the bus so they could see themselves in the mirror.
12:25Instead of looking at us, there was a blossoming of head shops and hippie stores.
12:30You know, you'd go into stores and you could buy hippie clothing, right?
12:34You could buy beards and wigs and stuff and go to Haight-Ashbury for the weekend.
12:38My parents came here looking for me over the Fourth of July weekend.
12:44By then, I was in Milwaukee getting my ear pierced.
12:47But my parents dressed up like hippies.
12:50So did my dad! My dad tried to look so far.
12:53My mom had these, like, white plastic go-go boots and a miniskirt.
12:58And my father, who was like, you know, portly, got a Nehru jacket and a peace sign.
13:05The media attention to the subculture destroyed most of its meaning.
13:12And the external symbols by which we used to recognize each other,
13:15long hair on guys, long dresses on girls,
13:19this language using the word hip or cool or groovy or, like, pad or whatever,
13:25that all of those things were completely drained of meaning
13:28and became kind of cartoon things that were easier to make fun of than to emulate.
13:35In October, just four months into the summer of love,
13:49the social experiment into an anarchist community had run its course.
13:53The diggers staged a mock funeral in the Haight to symbolize the death of hippie
13:58and to persuade the college kids and runaways to go back home.
14:04Death of hippie was an event basically to float this notion about hippie.
14:12You know, that it was a bad idea, that it was a contrived, conceptualized, now commercialized idea.
14:19This was street theatre that was meant to, hopefully, to be evocative and provocative.
14:25This eye-catching and dramatic performance caught the attention of two politicos from the new left.
14:37Abbie Hoffman and Gerry Rubin had emerged out of the free speech and anti-war movements
14:43to form a new political party called the Yippies in December 1967.
14:50To achieve their aims, they too staged spectacular stunts designed to attract maximum media attention.
14:58You see, the dollar in American society is a symbol of property, and we believe that property is theft.
15:07And one of the things we like to do is burn up the money.
15:11It was a famous emergence of Abbie Hoffman into the public stage in 67 when he and half a dozen friends
15:19went to the New York Stock Exchange and scattered dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange
15:25and watched all of these millionaires scurrying to pick up a dollar as sort of a comment on materialism.
15:31The idea was that the system operated on a structure of logic,
15:35and if you undercut that structure and subverted it, the system could not function.
15:40So when Abbie Hoffman went to the New York Stock Exchange
15:43and threw a barrage of dollar bills down from the visitors gallery onto the floor of the Stock Exchange,
15:49it disrupted the proceedings, and brokers actually tried to pick up the money.
15:54They were serious anarchists, revolutionary anarchists.
15:58And now I introduce a presidential candidate, Pegasus.
16:03The Democratic Party is going to nominate a paper president and a paper vice president.
16:09Abby and Jerry, they had to pick a pig to nominate for president.
16:18Their candidate for president was a pig called Pegasus, you know.
16:22Well, that's good theater. I like theater. Theater's really great.
16:26But they got in a fight over one of them wanted a good-looking pig and one of them wanted an ugly pig.
16:33So they really were not talking to each other that night, you know.
16:37And I thought, wow, these guys are a little...
16:42Do-do-do-do-do-do-do.
16:46Political pigs, your days are numbered. We are the Second American Revolution. We are winning. Yippee!
16:52With the support of hippie heavyweights like Allen Ginsberg and John Lennon,
17:00Abby Hoffman was one of the most charismatic leaders of the Revolution.
17:04But not everyone fell for his impish charms.
17:07Yippee was an anarchistic, you know, do what you want. And I must say at first I was taken by their style
17:14because their style seemed insouciant and witty and was not rhetoric-filled.
17:24But the hypocrisy of Yippee, you know, the Revolution is about free everything, free food and free drink,
17:32well, that sounds good, free housing and free grass, okay, and free women.
17:38Many women who were free sexually in the 60s, that consent was too easy to come by
17:45and that there was this feeling that they sort of had to go along with this.
17:49Men, especially in the hippie counterculture, especially in Haight-Ashbury,
17:53used quote-unquote free love as an excuse for violence against women.
18:00Groping, raping, there was an awful lot of that that was hidden at the time.
18:06Don't say I can't go with other boys.
18:16The New Left and the hippie movement were led by white men, were led by men.
18:22So the women mostly rolled joints and made coffee.
18:27And if you said no, it was like, why are you being so bitchy?
18:31Why are you being so counter-revolutionary?
18:33Everything was defined by guys as what was revolutionary.
18:36So I decided, okay, well, I'll just learn to roll a...
18:39Nobody will want my joint.
18:41And I just, they fell apart the minute you got hold of them,
18:44and I was never asked to roll a joint again.
18:47Robin Morgan formed a breakaway guerrilla theatre group
18:51to give women an independent voice in the revolution.
18:55Which stood for women's internationalist terrorist conspiracy from hell.
19:01I mean, when we hexed the stock exchange of New York,
19:05we announced it to the press we were going to go on such and such morning
19:09and hex the stock exchange, and the stock exchange would not open it.
19:12And the doors did not open because at 4 o'clock in the morning the night before,
19:16two of us, three of us went and oozed crazy glue in the locks.
19:21There's a picture over there of me and my supporters,
19:25my women supporters, all of us dressed as a version of witch,
19:29because witch was an idea.
19:31In a sense, it was like yippie.
19:33Anyone could be a yippie.
19:34Any woman could be a witch.
19:36Witch was actually very important, I think it was,
19:38in terms of putting an alternate identity for women out,
19:43for radical women out in the world.
19:46R-E-S-B-E-C-T
19:48Find out what it means to me
19:50R-E-S-B-E-C-T
19:52Take F-T-C-T
19:54Suck it to me, suck it to me, suck it to me, never explain
19:56As the hippies took on the American establishment,
19:59America's corporations responded in kind
20:02by buying into the one hippie commodity they thought they could sell,
20:06the music.
20:11Before the record companies came in,
20:13you could just go to the Sons of Champlin or Big Brother and the Holding Company
20:17and they were just the guys in the neighborhood.
20:19And they would hold these parties and we would celebrate ourselves.
20:23It was quite wonderful.
20:25But then the record companies came in and they started giving out $100,000 advances.
20:31And the musicians were ambivalent.
20:33They were getting $100,000 as an advance, which is about $700,000 today maybe, more.
20:39And they were told you can do whatever you want, we're not going to interfere.
20:43You have the studio, do whatever you want.
20:45So they took the deal.
20:47And I don't think any of the groups that were at all significant resisted.
20:53When the record companies showed up, it was the end of that golden era of three-day concerts
21:00and unity and that kind of feeling.
21:04Because the thing about being a recording artist is that you become a personality along with it
21:11because they're marketing you.
21:13If it's Moby Grape, then you try to make them seem like the American Beatles or the American Stones,
21:19the bad boys of San Francisco.
21:22The bad girl of San Francisco, Janice Joplin, was another artist to be signed up.
21:28But she wasn't going to bow down before the man.
21:31In this case, Columbia Records' overlord, Goddard Liebertson.
21:36There was a party in Goddard Liebertson's room.
21:39So Janice is there and...
21:42Oh, man, I don't know if I should tell this story.
21:46Go on.
21:47Well, she went into the bathroom, you know,
21:51and found that he had all these, like a hairbrush and comb that had his initials on there, G-O-D, God.
22:00And she didn't like that.
22:02She went in and piled them on the floor and then came out and said,
22:09Go on, check what I did, dude.
22:11You know, I walked in there and she peed on these toiletries of disguise.
22:16And I thought, well, that's really a cool thing to do, but it's not something I wanted to see in particular.
22:22But that's cool.
22:23I mean, if you could get on...
22:25If you can not care enough about your career to do something like that to the head of Columbia Records,
22:30I'm right there with you.
22:37Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills album with Janice, starring Janice,
22:42became the first number one album to come out of the Bay Area in 1968.
22:47So that was a real change, that someone could actually produce a number one album from the Bay Area.
22:52No one in Bay Area music had ever done anything like that before.
22:58As San Francisco's musicians were enjoying commercial success,
23:02by 1968 the revolutionary edge of the hippie music scene had moved to Detroit with a band called the MC5.
23:12We used to say that the Summer of Love didn't make a stop in Detroit.
23:19I was underwhelmed by the West Coast music. It didn't move me.
23:25We would open for them.
23:27If they were lame and they got up and started playing some lame sunbeams and flower, folky crap,
23:37we'd yell at them from the side of the stage,
23:39Hey, kick out the jams, motherfucker!
23:42Kick out the jams, motherfucker!
23:50The difference between MC5 and the other rock bands is that they were openly political.
23:55At a time when most rock bands did not feel that it was wise.
24:00We know that Lyndon Johnson as president would call up owners of television or radio stations
24:06and tell them, you know, make sure that that particular record isn't played.
24:10But MC5 performed songs that were openly political and actually revolutionary in the words.
24:17The MC5 were closely connected to the revolutionary White Panther Party, the white counterparts of the Marxist Black Panthers.
24:42The band would often carry rifles onto stage and their uncompromising political stance was exactly the type of music needed to kick off the revolution.
24:55We thought of ourselves as revolutionary because we wanted to use this music to change the society.
25:03We wanted to overthrow the government with rock and roll.
25:06We had a government that was waging a war in our name at home against black people, which had been going on for quite some time.
25:35A couple of hundred years.
25:38And then another war abroad in Vietnam, waging a war against Vietnamese people.
25:48So we were saying, no, not in our name.
25:53Young people had just reached a point where they said, enough.
25:57The hypocrisy of the older generation was not tolerable anymore.
26:02And we weren't going to, we weren't going to stand for it.
26:05We were going to raise our voices.
26:06We were going to raise our guitars.
26:08And at some points, some of us said, we'll raise our rifles and our pistols.
26:14That was the idea of total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and roll dope and fucking in the streets.
26:24That was our slogan.
26:25By the summer of 68, one year on from the summer of love, word of revolution had spread across the world.
26:44Wave after wave of student uprisings, from Mexico to Tokyo, promised to sweep away the old order and usher in a new age of freedom and equality.
26:57In America, the Yippies made an alliance with the Black Panthers and arranged for the MC5 and a number of Californian bands to play a free concert in Chicago in front of 15,000 hippies.
27:11It would coincide with the Democratic National Convention being held in the city at the same time and culminate in a huge anti-Vietnam War demonstration.
27:22They were going to have an alternative rock festival in Chicago to counterbalance the Democrats' convention.
27:30They would be the convention of death and we would be the convention of life.
27:34And did we want to come and play?
27:36And we said, of course.
27:38We wanted to invite rock bands from all around the country, like the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, the Motor City Five.
27:46And we were going to have literary figures speak and comedians and theater people.
27:52It was going to be a joyous occasion.
27:54It was.
27:56We're going to go there and we're going to do this.
27:58Man, it's going to be great, you know.
28:00And what could possibly happen?
28:02What could happen?
28:04Beat the shit out of you and throw you in jail.
28:08That's what can happen.
28:10Actually, I think Country Joe came and he was in an elevator and somebody punched him out or something.
28:18Right, right.
28:19And then he left.
28:20We were the only band that showed up and played.
28:22And from my experience, when the band stops playing is when the riot starts.
28:28Once the crowd doesn't have anything to focus on, then the tension between them and the police explodes.
28:35The Chicago police, they were the most brutal police force in the country.
28:50And they, you know, took out their clubs and wailed away at people on camera.
28:56And that made the demonstration an incredible success.
29:00However, if you were in the middle of this, as I was, you were in terrific danger.
29:06Tear gas, if it does not knock you out, it deranges you.
29:11So, everybody was crazy from the tear gas.
29:15And mace and all of that.
29:17And I had, you know, I had a t-shirt around my mouth and nose for the tear gas.
29:21We were gassed.
29:28Oh, yes.
29:29We were ran from that.
29:30And that gas was, you know, you couldn't breathe.
29:34Tears ran down your face.
29:35And the gas stuck to our clothes.
29:38It stuck to our eyes.
29:39And we would come back the next day, sort of.
29:41But we were prepared to fight again.
29:43Finally, they called out the National Guard.
29:45The troops arrived.
29:46There are pictures of hippies putting flowers in the rifle barrels of the troops,
29:50which, you know, understood perfectly what these kids were up to.
29:54So, the troops actually saved us from the most horrible possibilities.
30:00And what happened then was that the hippie movement lost its quietism
30:05and began to become combative.
30:07We're here as a new breed of people with our own message and our own style.
30:14And what we've seen in the last two days, the birth of a new white street revolutionary who's ready to go to jail,
30:20ready to get clutch on the head, ready to get clutch on the head, and ready to die and change the country.
30:42The Chicago riot was a huge turning point in the revolution.
30:52Eight of the festival organizers, including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin,
30:57were tried and convicted for incitement to riot and imprisoned.
31:01The manager of the MC5, John Sinclair, also got ten years for selling a single joint to an undercover police officer.
31:13But far from stopping the revolution in its tracks, the new left reorganized themselves into even more militant groups,
31:20many of whom were prepared to fight fire with fire.
31:24The most extreme of these were the weather underground.
31:29There's no way to be committed to non-violence in the middle of the most violent society that history's ever created.
31:34I'm not committed to non-violence in any way.
31:37The United States was the greatest force against humanity and justice and peace in the world.
31:44It was the greatest force against humanity, that we had to oppose it with every tool at our disposal,
31:50and that we were part of a global struggle.
32:00In 1969, the Webber Underground declared war on the government of the United States
32:06and launched a bombing campaign to try and force political change.
32:11Their terrorist actions were echoed by other anarchist groups around the world,
32:15including in Britain, the Angry Brigade, and the Bader-Meinhof Gang in Germany.
32:21The weather underground had planted a bomb inside the U.S. Capitol building,
32:26and the Senate staircase did quite a bit of damage to the building.
32:29Perhaps most famously, they blew themselves up, three of them, in the New York City townhouse,
32:35where they were trying to actually build bombs, but that something went awry with the dynamite.
32:40So they managed to destroy the entire building and themselves as well.
32:45Comrades of ours were killed, killed themselves in an explosion in New York that March,
32:52and I disappeared, along with a lot of other people.
32:57Well, I was a fugitive for 11 years.
33:00People took those wanted posters off post office walls and put them in their windows and said,
33:13welcome here. You know, we felt protected by a bigger seat.
33:18Some hippies were only too happy to offer the weather underground and other revolutionaries on the run safe haven in their houses.
33:28The American government took the threat of guerrilla groups so seriously that President Nixon launched a national counter-terrorism campaign to try and stop them.
33:38J. Edgar Hoover developed a program to discredit American descent.
33:47It was called COINTELPRO, and it targeted every opposition group that was functioning in the country in those years.
33:58The Black Panthers, the Yippies, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, anyone that opposed the Nixon administration's policies,
34:09as benign as the group might be or as militant as the group might be.
34:15And they sent in undercover operatives, so you kind of didn't know who to trust.
34:21One of the models for all would-be revolutionaries were the Marxist-Leninist Black Panther Party,
34:31under the joint leadership of the charismatic Fred Hampton.
34:35Their armed struggle was seen as inspirational by other guerrilla groups.
34:40When it came to the Black Panther Party, Hoover decided and stated in 1968 that the Black Panther Party
34:57represented the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.
35:02Now, what J. Edgar Hoover said made us so dangerous was that we were getting other people
35:08to be aligned with this philosophy of revolutionary change.
35:13The Black Panther Party not only had coalitions with white organizations,
35:19starting with the Peace and Freedom Party, which was mostly whites.
35:22SDS was a partner at one point with the Weather Underground.
35:26At that point, everything was done to, as Hoover said,
35:32disrupt, discredit, or destroy the Black Panther Party.
35:36And in December of 1969, with the murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago, it was really horrible.
35:46The people who felt the stomping most were actually people of color.
35:50That's right.
35:51Like, they assassinated Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in their sleep.
35:56Right.
35:57A joint task force of the FBI and local police.
35:59So, we took some losses, but not like that.
36:05Right, exactly.
36:06I mean, they said they were going to prevent the rise of a Black Messiah.
36:09Right.
36:10And that was, and to destroy and neutralize.
36:13These are FBI terms.
36:14Destroy and neutralize the Panthers.
36:16Destroy and neutralize the New Left.
36:18I think that the reason that I was under so much surveillance at the end was,
36:22and I know this from my files, that they were looking for Abby, who was underground.
36:27And so, it was, it had, there's no question, it had a chilling effect.
36:32Those of us who are alive today can tell you that we all thought that we were going to get killed.
36:36You know, we never imagined living past 30, or 25 in some cases.
36:41And so, we were, um, afraid.
36:46The storm is threatening.
36:51People realized if they went head to head with America, they would be shot.
36:56And we were not in such a hurry to start a revolution.
37:01You could see what it would be.
37:03When a student protester was shot dead at a sit-in at the People's Park in Berkeley in 1969,
37:12and 50 others were injured, it was clear that the government wasn't going to back down.
37:18This convinced many would-be revolutionaries to abandon going head-to-head against the state.
37:24I was under surveillance, and it became uncomfortable to live feeling as if somebody was listening to my life.
37:39So, at a certain point, I felt like, um, going out of their reach.
37:48Harriet Beinfield sought refuge in the Black Bear Commune in the remotest reaches of California.
37:57Those who once dreamed of changing society now opted to reject it and start afresh.
38:03Between 1966 and 1973, as many as a million Americans became involved in communal living,
38:09many of them heading back to the land to do it, as they said at the time.
38:12Moving to rural areas, buying a patch of land, living with something between 5 and 50 friends.
38:17Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground.
38:28A sociologist handed out questionnaires to 60,000 residents of rural communes,
38:34and he asked a very interesting question.
38:36Have any of you been arrested for protesting in an anti-war movement or a civil rights protest?
38:42And half said that they had, but the other half said they had not.
38:47And then he said, since moving to the commune, have you been arrested?
38:51And everyone said no.
38:53The new communalist critique of society, in many ways,
38:56was not perceived as a threat by the central state.
38:59You know, if they want to go live in Colorado, grow their hair long, smoke dope,
39:02I mean, big deal, right? That's, you know, rural Colorado. I don't really care.
39:05Lay your body down.
39:13Black Bear Ranch was really deep in the woods and many miles on old logging roads to get there.
39:23When we arrived, there was one house. There were 60 of us.
39:28So we had to build shelters for ourselves out of the materials that were there.
39:37And you had, you know, 50 urban people who'd never lived in the wilderness before.
39:43And every hour and a half, they would run around the house,
39:47beating frying pans and pots to scare away the bears and the mountain lions.
39:53The communes had first been created by the Nature Boy tribe of the hippies.
40:02Here at Black Bear, they were determined to implement the hippie experiment in alternative living,
40:08based on ecological and communal values.
40:12We shared our money. We shared our food. We shared our bodies. We shared our children.
40:18You know, we shared everything, and we were trying to figure out how far we could take that.
40:26Black Bear was so distant that strange ideas could spread like a virus through it.
40:34So, for instance, a group of radical women took over one winter,
40:40and they passed a law that you could only sleep with the same woman twice,
40:46because otherwise you were encouraging coupling, which was too bourgeois.
40:52So, for instance, that would, when I had slept with all the women that I wanted to sleep with,
40:56I would figure out a reason to run back to the city and do a food run.
41:01But one aspect of communal living continuously threatened to undermine the experiment in a sharing society.
41:10In the winter, 60 people slept in one space.
41:14And the sort of habits of patriarchy meant that—this is going to sound a little harsh—that the men were predators,
41:28and the women were under sort of peer pressure to oblige.
41:38I mean, women were literally hauling firewood at those communes and being the property of six men,
41:45and not using birth control because the men didn't want them to, and it was natural.
41:49I mean, the atrocities that are yet to surface from women's treatment by the rural hippie movement are considerable.
42:00You and I travel to the beat of a different drum
42:06Oh, can't you tell by the way—
42:09Old patriarchal prejudices had plagued the hippie movement since its earliest days.
42:14Now women form consciousness-raising groups where they could share their experiences of sexism with other women.
42:22I went to my first consciousness-raising group, and I said,
42:27I have to admit that I have sometimes, on occasion, like more than once, faked an orgasm.
42:39And every woman in the room said,
42:41Oh, you too?
42:44And I cannot tell you—I can laugh about it today.
42:48But, my dear, my posture changed, you know.
42:52I sat up in a different way.
42:54I—I—such a weight was lifted for me.
42:59And the, it's not just me, was huge.
43:04And, of course, if it's not just you, then what is it?
43:11Robin Morgan finally broke her ties with the hippie movement
43:14when she wrote a damning expose of sexism in the New Left called Goodbye to All That,
43:20urging other women to break away as well.
43:23Goodbye forever, counterfeit left.
43:26Counterfeit male-dominated cracked glass mirror reflection of the American nightmare.
43:33Women are the real left.
43:35We are rising with a fury older and potentially greater than any force in history.
43:42She named all the names of the men who ran all the different organizations,
43:48and she pointed out some of their problems.
43:52Quite clearly.
43:54Clearly.
43:55But I also didn't like it.
43:57I mean, I was incredibly uncomfortable when it came out
44:00and felt really defensive about it.
44:03Well, because I knew it was right.
44:05Yeah, there you go.
44:07It was another version of U2.
44:09It was the first time a woman had blown with leftist credentials,
44:16known and respected by the guys, so she must be good,
44:20who had just boom.
44:22We were surrounded by all kinds of liberation movements.
44:26Black liberation, Chicano liberation,
44:28the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam,
44:31all these various liberation movements that we admired and emulated.
44:35But where were women?
44:38And then light bulb.
44:40Well, okay.
44:41And that's where the phrase women's...
44:43That's why we started out before feminism.
44:45We called it women's liberation because it was, in a sense,
44:48we were inspired by all these various other liberation movements.
44:52It was like a series of steps that were an advancement in consciousness.
44:59There's no question, at least for me, that Goodbye to All That,
45:03the title of that piece was, as I said, germinal,
45:06but it was one in a series of steps that,
45:09and ultimately, at a certain point, I said,
45:11all right, I am, in fact, saying goodbye to all that.
45:17Whilst women's liberation was a response
45:19to the chauvinism of the hippie movement,
45:21the message of peace, love and music
45:24was reaching out to an even bigger audience.
45:35In August 1969, plans were hatched
45:38to stage a massive three-day concert outside New York.
45:43When revellers broke through the fence,
45:45it became the biggest free festival of all time,
45:48symbolising all the hope and chaos
45:51of the hippie movement in one event,
45:53as immortalised on film.
45:57Woodstock was a very interesting experience.
45:59When we were flying over it,
46:01it looked like an encampment of the Macedonian army.
46:05And, you know, when you get, you know,
46:08400, 500,000 people all together,
46:10and you're flying over them in a helicopter,
46:12and there's fires, and rain, and mud, and music,
46:15it was a fascinating experience.
46:22Woodstock was great.
46:24It was like Monterey, only bigger.
46:26I mean, I watched lots of the show,
46:28the other acts, I saw them perform,
46:32and they were great, the music was great,
46:34the vibe was great, the audience was great.
46:43I mean, Hendrix was just so emblematic
46:45of the emergence of the Woodstock nation.
46:51His presence at Woodstock summarised the lifestyle,
46:55the freedom, the brash resistance to conformity,
47:00status quo, the sexual threat, you know,
47:04kind of the black sexual threat
47:06and the countercultural sexual threat,
47:08the mainstream America.
47:09It's all embodied, you know, in Hendrix.
47:12I saw him, I stayed, and I was standing there in the mud
47:18when he played Star-Spangled Banner,
47:20and I thought, oh, fuck, this is like,
47:22this is an incredible musical moment,
47:27and he is the best guitar player that ever lived.
47:31He shredded the national anthem.
47:33He shredded it, I mean, he tore it to bits.
47:36It was fucking mind-blowing.
47:38It's still mind-blowing today.
47:46That Star-Spangled Banner performance
47:48just seems to be the piece of music
47:50that just spoke to the chaos, the zeitgeist of the moment,
47:53you know, the most authoritatively,
47:55the most disruptively.
47:57Very heraldic of an apocalypse in a sense of,
48:00you know, something that removes the veil.
48:03Jimi Hendrix's performance of Star-Spangled Banner
48:08in the Woodstock film
48:10both encapsulated the distorted dystopian vision
48:13of a nation caught up in a war it didn't believe in,
48:16and at the same time was a requiem
48:19for a political revolution that was not to be.
48:22The confrontational attitude of the hippies
48:32had given way to a new sense of reflection.
48:39The political became personal,
48:41and this found a voice in a new laid-back sound
48:44emerging from a community
48:46of inward-looking singer-songwriters,
48:48and it came not out of San Francisco,
48:51but the affluent leafy canyons of L.A.
48:55It's all very close together, hodgepodge, you know,
48:58of little cabins and little windy streets,
49:00and you literally walk out of your door
49:02and walk over to Danny Huntin's house,
49:05walk up to see the turtles,
49:07go down to see Joni Mitchell and Alice Cooper.
49:12Laurel Kenyon was a small area of beautiful countryside.
49:16It was very close to the center of Los Angeles,
49:18but there there was this collection of musicians and artists
49:23that lived close to each other that would interact,
49:26and that's what everyone was doing.
49:28You know, it's what Jackson was doing,
49:29it's what Joni was doing,
49:31some of the eagles, you know,
49:33la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.
49:35It was a great time in Laurel Kenyon in those days.
49:38Tears and fears and feeling proud
49:42To say I love you right out loud
49:47Dreams and schemes
49:49Joni Mitchell was typical of a new generation
49:52of Laurel Kenyon artists
49:54who took the peace-loving spirit of the hippies
49:57and turned it into music that conquered the world.
50:00They shake their hands
50:02Laurel Kenyon is in the Hollywood Hills
50:04and became a magnet for the hip young gunslingers
50:07of the L.A. film industry
50:09who felt a natural affinity with the hippie movement.
50:12There were also, of course, at the time,
50:15the new young bucks of Hollywood
50:17like the producers of the Monkees,
50:19Bob Rafus and Bert Schneider.
50:21And they were, indeed, creating the new Hollywood film industry.
50:26With brilliant improvised direction by Dennis Hopper,
50:34Easy Rider tells the story of two hippie drug dealers
50:37on a road trip across the Midwest.
50:48Easy Rider was a smash hit at the box office
50:51and paved the way for an explosion of new Hollywood directors
50:55as anti-establishment films flooded out of Tinseltown's dream machine.
51:11The hippies were transforming American culture
51:13with their music and their values.
51:16Now, the pioneering psychological experiments
51:19of the truth-seeking hippie tribe
51:21promise the ultimate dream.
51:24A revolution of the mind.
51:27The mystical experiences that enough people had on LSD
51:30led them to seek out other ways of looking at the world.
51:34I read a statistic that you'd have to verify
51:37that the I Ching went from selling 1,000 copies a year
51:40to 50,000 copies a year by the end of the 60s.
51:43And there were all sorts of mystical texts and books
51:47that entered the culture very, very quickly.
51:51The centre of what would become known as the New Age Movement
51:55first established itself in 1962
51:58in a former spa hotel on the coast road outside San Francisco.
52:03Here at the Esalen Institute,
52:06intellectual gurus of the hippie movement
52:09like Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary
52:12had used their experiments with LSD
52:14to create new models of psychological and philosophical inquiry.
52:20People were coming for a weekend or for five days
52:24or for several months
52:25to deepen your understanding of yourself and others.
52:30how to become, you know, a better person.
52:34How to try out new ways of being.
52:37That's central to what Esalen's about.
52:39It's not to withdraw from the world.
52:41It's to help the world come to a greater birth,
52:45to give rise to a greater life.
52:47We were catalytic for the dispersion of these practices.
52:52I mean, a lot of people said that when we started
52:55there were about 20 yoga studios in America.
52:57Now there are 20,000.
52:59None of us had ever heard of the word mindfulness
53:02in the way it's used now in 1962.
53:05We're actually experiencing right now, I must say Esalen,
53:10this is kind of like we're having a second beginning.
53:13A new beginning because we have so many young people now coming in.
53:18And there is a kind of marriage afoot with Silicon Valley.
53:23Our new executive director has sold an algorithm to Google
53:28and there's a kind of a new marriage in the making.
53:39The hippie experiment to explore new ideas in consciousness
53:42and human connection was first reimagined in Silicon Valley
53:46by the pioneers of the information age.
53:49And although the means they used were not chemical like LSD
53:53but digital like computer code,
53:56the spirit of invention and adventure was pure hippie.
54:02Silicon Valley required sort of this proto-state of hippiedom,
54:08a California mentality, a California perspective
54:12where you didn't ask permission, you just did it,
54:15where there was a bias to the open and sharing
54:19rather than to the proprietary,
54:21where there was the expectation that you would try things
54:25and do it yourself
54:27and the fact that when people get rich
54:30what they do with their money is they invest into other crazy ideas.
54:40Perhaps the most famous hippie to turn their ideas and values into a business
54:44was a Zen Buddhist LSD advocate
54:48who went on to become one of the most successful computer magnets of all time.
54:53Steve Jobs, who was very much a hippie living in the Bay Area,
54:58was involved in an early computer co-op project in Menlo Park
55:04that was only six blocks from where Jerry Garcia was living.
55:08And Jobs and others were interested in developing a personal computer
55:13because at the time computers meant IBM and Honeywell and other giant computer corporations.
55:20And what the inventors of the PC, the personal computer, had in mind
55:24was that they could put an IBM on everybody's desk
55:27and that they could give everyone that power,
55:29that they could take it away from IBM and democratize it,
55:33and indeed democratize it globally, not just in the United States.
55:37Computer designers, marketers, users begin to imagine the microcomputer
55:42as a tool for personal transformation in terms set by LSD,
55:47in terms set by the counterculture.
55:49We begin to imagine the internet and network computers
55:52as the kind of community that communes were once supposed to be.
55:57Communes didn't work out, but now with interlinked computers
56:00we can make a world of interlinked minds just as we hoped once
56:05to make a world of interlinked consciousnesses.
56:09Teach your children well...
56:14We are connected today in ways the hippies first imagined only on LSD.
56:19The revolution of the mind that was unleashed
56:22has given birth to the cyberspace generation.
56:25The hippie vision of creating a global community
56:29based around sharing and not profit
56:32is now being acted out through Facebook and YouTube.
56:36It has come about through technological innovation,
56:39a cognitive, not political revolution.
56:44It's probably fair to say that the counterculture lost
56:47all the political arguments, all of them.
56:50We didn't end racism, we didn't end imperialism,
56:53we didn't end war, we didn't end misogyny,
56:56we just lost them all.
56:58But on a cultural front, we won every single one.
57:03And there's no place you can't go today
57:05where there's not an organic food movement,
57:08a slow food movement, a women's movement,
57:11an environmental movement, alternative medical practices
57:14like homeopathy and naturopathy and acupuncture,
57:18alternative spiritual practices like Tibetan Buddhism,
57:22Tibetan Buddhism, Vietnamese Buddhism, Hinduism.
57:26So culture runs a lot deeper than politics.
57:31The children's hell will slowly go by.
57:37The things that the hippies stood for still apply.
57:40Peace is better than war.
57:42Love is better than hate.
57:44It really is.
57:45And those ideals are still as strong today as they ever were.
57:50I still believe it.
57:51I'm still a hippie, really.
57:54That's the big thing.
57:55See, we won the fight.
57:57Now we're allowed to grow marijuana.
58:00Legally, five big bushy plants.
58:04And the cops can come and look at them and they can walk away
58:08with scratching their heads saying,
58:10how do we ever let this happen?
58:12I believe in hippie values.
58:14Inclusion rather than exclusion.
58:18Be kind rather than unkind.
58:23Remember your hippie days, Jerry Garcia used to say.
58:27Have more fun than anyone else.
58:30Well, you won't be chained.
58:33In the fallen range.
58:36I drive a Rolls Royce.
58:39Cause it's good for my boys, but you won't fool.
58:40The children of the revolution.
58:45Now you won't fool.
58:51The children of the revolution.
58:55Now, now, now.
58:58Yeah!
Be the first to comment