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

4. The Natural Persona: Freedom, the Grateful Dead, and an Anticommercial Counterculture

Chapter Four The Natural Persona Freedom, the Grateful Dead, and an Anticommercial Counterculture In July 1969, Columbia Pictures released the movie Easy Rider, cowritten by the ‹lm’s two starring actors, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, directed by Dennis Hopper in his directorial debut, and aurally illustrated by a rock-and-roll soundtrack featuring the folk-turned-psychedelic rock band, the Byrds. Fonda’s and Hopper’s characters, Wyatt and Billy, are longhaired , drugged-out bikers from Los Angeles who take a crosscountry trip through the South in order to reach New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Their travels bring them into contact with a range of people—a rancher and his family, a hitchhiker, prostitutes , “rednecks,” a lawyer for the ACLU, and “hippies” on a commune. Before reaching the promised land of New Orleans, the freedom-loving, self-gratifying Harley riders explore a host of environments from the natural landscapes of Monument Valley to the open highways of the Southwest, from smalltown streets to local graveyards. Like their namesakes, Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid, the ‹lm’s heroes are rebels, not because of crimes they have perpetrated and consequences they have avoided, but rather for crimes they have not committed and 91 punishments about which they are naive. Theirs is a tale of freedom, not action, a world of anything goes, not of rules and penalties. There is no need to wage a war against mainstream conformity when the goal is to do whatever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want. Easy Rider’s popularity at the Cannes Film Festival and with young audiences that year spoke to a quality of yearning that permeated popular culture at the end of the sixties. The ‹lm nostalgically lauded a countercultural sensibility that had seemed viable only a few years before its release. Even as the ‹nal credits roll down the screen, potentially shattering the movie’s two hours of fantastical freedom with the names and achievements of those who had constructed it, the longing for a countercultural autonomy still holds on with the sound of the Byrds’ “Ballad of Easy Rider.” The ballad rides the movie out to its end—“All I wanted was to be free / And that’s the way it turned out to be.” In one sense, the ‹lm’s popularity can be attributed to people’s general desire to enjoy freedom and pluralism vicariously through ‹ctional characters. But with Easy Rider, there was something more tangible and more palpable going on. Moviegoers were emboldened with a nostalgic idea not only that the ‹lm’s characters were victorious in their quest for unlimited freedom, but that, with the right music and attitude, they too could ride out the credits of the constructed world around them and be self-made, unfettered, and free. The irony that lingers around Easy Rider and other stereotypical depictions of the countercultural sensibility is that the illusion of freedom that drives it is the same one that propels the very nationalistic, goal-directed concept of the American Dream. The dream, countercultural or national, is about having the freedom to be whatever you want to be. The problem for the counterculture before it became a media spectacle during the 1967 Summer of Love was that, if anything, it de‹ned itself by what it was not—not allied to the mainstream, not alCounterculture Kaleidoscope 92 lied to any one thing. So while the freedom of the American Dream is goal-directed, de‹ning a course of action to get from what you are to what you want to be, the freedom of the counterculture was the availability of all courses of action to get to no place in particular. Inevitably, the counterculture included scores of items also found in the mainstream—women, men, sex, food, drink, drugs, clothing, shelter, laughter, humor, and so on. The difference between the counterculture and the mainstream, then, was in how those items were used, treated, and valued. The fact of sharing the motivating ideal of freedom with the mainstream was not a blight on or blow to the counterculture because it didn’t conceive of itself in dialectical opposition to the mainstream. What was important for the counterculture was to distinguish itself and its brand of freedom from that of the mainstream. Nature was the key to making that distinction. In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, a book that, thirty-‹ve years later, was...