The Hippies and American Values

Chapter 3: The Ethics of Rock [Contains Image Plates]

Chapter 3 The Ethics of Rock Rock music is one of the most exciting phenomena of our times. At its best in concert it is complete synesthesia, combining all of the arts and appealing to several levels of appreciation at once—emotional, intellectual, physical and metaphysical. —Ron Jarvis, Space City! January 17–30, 1970 Sound, like sex and the magic weeds, is a turn-on. —Tom Sayles, East Village Other, August 19–September 1, 1967 Rock and roll was as integral to the counterculture as dope and sex. Rock swayed a generation both physically and emotionally. The hippies lived and breathed it and believed that it was the most important new musical form to come along in centuries. As Chester Anderson put it, rock “engages the entire sensorium, appealing to the intelligence with no interference from the intellect . Extremely typographic people are unable to experience it.”1 The point of this chapter is not to analyze the appeal of rock to a generation of American youth, but to look at the ways in which the music influenced the feelings and behavior of its devotees, and to see why hippies regarded a musical genre as pivotal to the generational rebellion. Insofar as this chapter is rational, it will, the hippies would have said, miss dealing with the real 42 the ethics of Rock power of rock, since the music was preeminently something to be experienced and could not be explained entirely rationally. To the hippies, rock was not just sound; it was part and parcel of a way of life. Its ethical dimensions were therefore substantial. The underground press during the flowering of hip focused overwhelmingly on rock, but folk music was also important to the countercultural musical scene. Folk was the music of cultural rebellion until around 1966 or even later, when the Beatles began to take on mythic significance as interpreters of the culture, new specifically hip rock bands (the Grateful Dead, for example) began to appear, and Bob Dylan incorporated rock into his previously folkish music. Earlier 1960s folk music (Joan Baez, Dylan) continued to be played on hippie stereos. The counterculture had little sense of history, so many hippies undoubtedly were not concerned with the folk roots of their music. But certainly the folk revival of the 1950s and early 1960s cultivated the ground for the advent of rock. The protest music of Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and a host of others was full of peace and justice themes as well as loaded with distrust of the cultural and political Establishment. As rock historian Geoffrey Stokes has pointed out, folk was a critical catalyst for sixties rock because it bridged the musical gap between the fifties and the sixties: the originally pioneering, revolutionary rock of the fifties had given way by the early sixties to musical styles represented by the likes of the Beach Boys (catchy but formulaic), on one hand, and Andy Williams (smooth but utterly unchallenging and reminiscent of the music of the hippies’ parents’ generation), on the other. “Faced with the choice between teen and treacle,” Stokes writes, “a lot of young people turned to folk music.”2 And from the energized folk scene major portions of the new rock emerged. Rock as a cultural Language Dope usually involved inward experiences; liberated sex in most cases involved interpersonal relationships on a one-to-one basis. Rock, however, was communal, and thus it provided a medium for cultural communication. “Rock music,” Ron Jarvis wrote, “is responsible more than any other single factor in spreading the good news. For joy and ecstasy is the essence of rock.”3 Media philosopher Marshall McLuhan, whose ideas circulated widely in the counterculture, reminded us that in our time the content of communication could not be separated from its means of propagation, and that went in spades for rock. the ethics of Rock 43 Rock and roll is the music of right now, every minute, pounding and screaming at your head, twisting inside your belly, pulling you up off your ass to give it up and let energy flow through your cells and into the air so you can be free again.4 People need music to live. We believe that and act on it, all ways. Only straight people—honkies—think music is superfluous, that it doesn’t make any difference what you listen to, and their lives demonstrate their ignorance . Music shapes us and makes us...