Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late Sixties San Francisco

1. Refusing to Play, Pluralism, and Anything Goes: Defining the Counterculture

Chapter One Refusing to Play, Pluralism, and Anything Goes Defining the Counterculture In the American popular imagination, the sixties are remembered as a time of widespread political upheaval and social unrest , fueled by both fervency and idealism. The torchbearer of these mythologized sixties was an emergent youth culture, actively rebelling against ‹fties social norms that had seeped into every corner of human activity. Indeed, there were major progressive movements in the sixties, and many of them politically driven and goal-oriented. Martin Luther King Jr., the best-known leader of the civil rights movement of the ‹fties and sixties, spoke repeatedly about the movement’s goal— “justice and equality” for people of all races and creeds—while guiding campaigns throughout the country to end racist practices in everything from voter registration to interstate bus travel.1 Similarly, supporters of the antiwar movement of the late sixties and early seventies participated in protests, marches, and acts of civil disobedience speci‹cally aimed at ending the war in Vietnam. Leaders like Tom Hayden (author of the Port Huron Statement) of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) helped to rally thousands of youth, encouraging their participation in politics and eliciting their support for core democratic causes such as freedom of speech. In retrospect, it is possible to outline the putative goals of key political causes like the free speech movement, the antiwar movement, or the civil rights movement, ask what each accomplished, and assess degrees of success or failure. Yet however politically savvy and directly involved in sociopolitical movements many young people were at the time, it is a romanticized myth (encouraged by both liberal and conservative histories) that everyone during the sixties was actively seeking to change the world. Equally mythical is the idea that everything during the era was driven by oppositional forces. The work of renowned historian Todd Gitlin re›ects a common thread in much politically liberal sixties scholarship, implying that the era as a whole was de‹ned by laudable attempts at progressive social change in the face of a dominant, oppressive system.2 Many American historians—Howard Zinn, Doug Rossinow, Gerald Howard, David Halberstam, to name a few—share Gitlin’s historical and political perspective. They considered the sixties to be a formative time in their own lives and history, and they converse, at times nostalgically, about the sixties in relation to the current sociopolitical climate.3 As parallels emerge between the Vietnam War and America’s current war on and occupation of Iraq, nostalgia leads to liberal laments over our current corporate society, which is compared invidiously to a conscientious sixties that triumphed over social oppression and moral repression. Not surprisingly, conservative interpretations of the sixties provide fuel for contrasting polemical ‹res. Among the era’s prominent critics on the right is columnist George Will, whose diatribes against the evils of “hippie radicalism” echo the sentiments of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who, in 1994, argued in front of Congress that sixties’ radicals were “taught self-indulgent, aristocratic values” that catered to “the Counterculture Kaleidoscope 2 indulgences of an elite few.” By crafting an image of the sixties as maniacally radical, and then using the image to denounce current liberal policy and policymakers, Gingrich attempted, among other things, to discredit President Bill Clinton by associating him with the sixties “counterculture.”4 Often lost in this mythologizing of the sixties is the decade’s complexity. Like any other, it was populated by varied , heterogeneous groups, many of whom had nothing to do with one another, even within the smaller circles of the budding youth culture. Speci‹cally, as this book will show, many elements of what we now refer to as the sixties “counterculture ” have had ascribed to them political and social platforms that they never embraced. Unlike the civil rights movement, for example, large portions of the “counterculture” were far from being an organized sociopolitical community: they were not oppositional in orientation, not bound by speci‹c agendas , and not determined to bring about major changes in the system.5 In fact, many parts of this sixties “counterculture” were not, as the name implies, counter to anything. Yet these very parts often assume the largest share in our collective memory of the “counterculture” because they spawned the de‹ning cultural products—the music and the lifestyle—that came to be associated with an entire era. It is with this part of the...