Dirty Eddie founded a commune on the farm we were renting, at the other end of the hayfield from the dynamite hole. The generation that had bitterly protested even the slightest of yard work chores decided, for a moment, to go back to the land. There was only one vegetable the commune had any success growing, until they got paranoid after seeing a sheriff’s department car go by the end of the farm’s driveway and smoked the single plant when it was three inches tall.
The commune members were building wigwams, teepees, yurts, and geodesic domes. Although it was difficult to tell which was supposed to be what. These structures were held together with tangled skeins of cordage and big snarls of rope tied in hopeless clumps of failed half hitches, sheet bends, and bowlines. As I mentioned earlier, the Boy Scouts had not engaged the Baby Boom’s attention.
Whenever it rained or the wind blew or they needed to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water or cook something, the commune members were, quite communistically, in our house. Jumbo said they should study Kim Il Sung’s North Korean doctrine of Juche, or self-reliance, and go rely on themselves in their yurts. The fact that North Korea is still around indicates that Kim Il Sung was not a fellow member of Bat Patrol, Troop 44, with me and Steve Penske, in the Methodist church gymnasium. Dirty Eddie’s commune lasted a month.
It was a decade without quality control. And it was not, of course, a decade. The “sixties” as they are popularly remembered—what might too well be called “The High Sixties”—was an episode of about seventy-two months’ duration that started in 1967 when the Baby Boom had fully infested academia and America’s various little bohemian enclaves such as Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury, Big Sur, and the finished basement at my house and came to an abrupt halt in 1973 when conscription ended and herpes began.
Meanwhile all dreck broke loose. There was the music. We must not be deceived into nostalgia. The word is from the Greek nostos, to come home, and algos, pain. Let us recall what a pain we were when we came home and turned up “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” by Iron Butterfly on the stereo in the finished basement.
Do what you can to banish from your mind all balmy impressions of the sixties. Fill out a tax form. Have a phone chat with your insurance agent. Play Grand Theft Auto V with an eight-year-old nephew. Get a prostate exam. Now listen to a Jerry Garcia guitar solo.
As Al Bartz put it in 1973, “What did the Grateful Dead fan say when he ran out of pot?”
“What a shitty band.”
Andy Warhol was a revelation, though not his Marilyn Monroe portraits. (The Baby Boom never understood Marilyn Monroe as a sex object—too much of an adult fantasy for a perpetually young generation. Although a few of us understood her as a role model if we wanted to dress up as somebody our mother was jealous of and die tragically.) It was the Brillo and the Campbell’s soup that we liked. Artistic brilliance was right there staring us in the face. Everything was artistic. And anybody could be artistically brilliant.
Diane’s art class started turning out paintings of Kleenex boxes, Dixie cups, Lifebuoy soap bars, Prell shampoo tubes, and Ban aerosol deodorant cans. The lettering is surprisingly hard to do in egg tempera.
There was a poet in those days, Aram Saroyan, son of the novelist and playwright William Saroyan. Here is an Aram Saroyan poem:
priit
That’s all. That’s the whole thing. Aram Saroyan received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
I was nominated for a grant myself, a fellowship to go to graduate school. A professor put me up for it, and not the one smoking pot with Jim Fisk’s Constitutional Law class. My ambition was to write incomprehensible novels, although James Joyce seemed to have a lock on that, so maybe I’d write incomprehensible poetry. I was sure I could do it in greater quantity than Aram Saroyan. Then, as now, graduate school was thought to be the route to such glory.
I submitted the requisite essay in incomprehensible prose and received a letter saying I was a finalist for the fellowship. The winner would be decided by a committee of five academic worthies, who would interview each finalist at Big State University.
I arrived at Big State the night before my interview and went out beer drinking and pot smoking with Leo Luhan and Joe Brody until dawn. I was supposed to be at Big State’s English Department at 9 a.m. I came to on the couch in Leo’s apartment at 9:15, pulled on my Schlitz-drenched blue jeans and work shirt reeking of sinsemilla, and rushed unwashed, uncombed, and unshaven to the campus. I was shown into a seminar room and placed on a hard chair facing a table behind which sat the five academic worthies, each with a notepad. I remember only one of the questions.
WORTHY: Which literary critic has had the most profound influence on your thinking?
ME: . . .
I could not think of the name of a single literary critic. Not John Crowe Ransom, not Cleanth Brooks, not R. P. Blackmur, not even Leon Edel from whom I’d cribbed my junior thesis on Henry James. (Joyce was too incomprehensible.)
ME: Henry David Thoreau.
WORTHIES (more or less in unison): Henry David Thoreau wasn’t a literary critic.
ME: His whole life was an act of literary criticism.
I got the fellowship.
It took all the Baby Boom qualities to make a successful sixties. Maybe we were only the tailgate party but let us not forget that the tailgate party is where the fun is and that tailgate-party personal interaction is of broader and deeper social significance than what the quarterback is up to.
At the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Baby Boom political protesters stopped in the middle of getting whacked with police billy clubs to chant “The Whole World Is Watching!” What other political protesters would have paused to announce the importance of their self-image instead of fighting back or running like hell?
What other hopeless romantics could feel, the way the Baby Boom did, such unrequited love for inanimate objects—and not sailing ships, fast trains, or speeding automobiles but inanimate objects that were good for nothing but conking us on the head like Dirty Eddie’s geodesic dome and lysergic acid diethylamide?
What other pious acolytes were ever so earnestly convinced in their faith as we who believed that there is a transmigration of souls (if they’re going to San Francisco), that all things are one (or two, if she’s a babe), that Jim Morrison is a poet, Hubert Humphrey is a Nazi, Diane’s best friend is a witch, and Transcendental Meditation isn’t just sitting there?
Our salient trait is self-consciousness, our signal emotion is the crush, our default mode is intense, but our genius is being funny. We just didn’t know it yet.
Not even, especially not, at Woodstock. The long weekend of August 15–17, 1969, was the Baby Boom’s great where-weren’t-you? moment. Along with 75,550,000 other Baby Boomers, where I wasn’t was at Woodstock.
Though not for lack of trying. The eternal love of my life, that month, was Chloe Dobsonberg, a raven-haired, more exotic version of Marsha Matthiessen. Chloe attended Pricey College for Women, a very liberal arts school next door to Mediocre State.
Chloe had a Pre-Raphaelite upper lip, fully, lusciously coiled back on itself in carnal invitation. I have never seen a Pre-Raphaelite upper lip on another living woman, Botox do what it will. I knew this was a Pre-Raphaelite lip, I had taken Art History (or “Darkness at Noon,” as it was called) because the class met only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One of the slides in the Art History slide show was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Persephone who looked just like Chloe Dobsonberg except, fortunately, Chloe didn’t have Persephone’s great big nose. Hers was cutely pug.
Chloe lived in exotic Massapequa, Long Island. I came east by motorcycle with the idea of Chloe riding pillion to a “Woodstock Music and Arts Fair,” which, according to a poster in a record shop in Yellow Springs, Ohio, was to be “An Aquarian Exposition” featuring “Three Days of Peace and Music.?
?? I pictured something on the order of a wind chime sale with evening hootenannies and maybe a surprise guest appearance by Mimi Fariña.
Chloe, alas, chose the Sunday prior to make a feeble gesture at doing away with herself. (Such feeble gestures were more or less obligatory among students at liberal arts women’s colleges in the sixties—too much reading of Sylvia Plath poems is my guess. There was an old stone bridge on the PCW campus from which at least one student per semester would plunge. The drop was less than three yards into a foot-deep duck pond.)
While her parents were out slicing Titleists and lobbing Wilsons, Chloe emptied the family medicine cabinet, swallowing upward of a half a dozen Midol, One A Day, and Miltown tablets. There was a crash of Cadillacs backing into each other as mom, dad, aunts, et cetera, raced from the parking lot of the Massapequa golf club, Par Venu Links. Ambulances were called. A tummy was pumped. (A rather cute little tummy, if memory serves.)
I was deeply upset because Chloe’s suicide attempt was the result of a fight with her mother about a Bloomingdale’s charge plate bill for a $108 fringed suede vest with genuine Native American beadwork and had nothing to do with Chloe’s desperate romantic feelings for me.
I was also slightly disappointed about missing Woodstock until the nightly news reported that it had turned into a catastrophic, drug-addled, rain-drenched disaster area lacking food, shelter, drinking water, and Porta Potties. Then I was furious about missing Woodstock.
What this says about Baby Boomers I needn’t tell anyone who raised, was married to, or has ever known one.
A few years ago, on the fortieth anniversary of too many people needing haircuts going to an upstate New York dairy farm for no good reason, I paged through some of the books published to commemorate the occasion.
The books have photographs, particularly nude photographs. Two facts are evident. The gym had not been discovered. And the ratio of boys to girls at Woodstock was of almost Castro District proportions. At least the fellows on Castro Street didn’t go there hoping to meet girls. Woodstock looks sad and drab and inspirational only in an “Every Litter Bit Hurts” way.
But Woodstock had tremendous cultural impact. In one of the books, one of the event’s promoters, Michael Lang, says, “The lighting of candles would set a precedent that carries on to this day. The candles became lighters, which have since become cell phones.”
And Woodstock had tremendous political impact. “Out of that sense of community, out of that vision, that Utopian vision, comes the energy to go out there and actually participate in the process so that social change occurs,” Abbie Hoffman is quoted as saying shortly before he killed himself. In the meantime Abbie had written a book, Woodstock Nation. Like everybody else, I’ve never read it, but later I’d go to this country—overcrowded, muddy, lacking in food and public order. It’s called Bangladesh. (Wasn’t there another concert having something to do with that place?)
And Woodstock had tremendous socioeconomic impact. In another book, another of the event’s promoters, Artie Kornfeld, says, “That mud was like heavenly water washing away all that was wrong with the world at that time.” In case you were wondering where the 1970s came from.
The be-in required some “Be All You Can Be.” The Woodstock books praise the National Guard for using its helicopters to deliver donated food and medevac attendees. No mention is made of the mission the National Guard would accomplish the following spring at Kent State.
But there was all that wonderful music—the Doors (not there), Led Zeppelin (not there), the Byrds (not there), the Moody Blues (not there), Jethro Tull (not there), Joni Mitchell (not there but wrote “We’ve Got to Get Ourselves Back to the Garden” after she heard about it), and Melanie (there but didn’t write “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” until someone told her she’d been there).
Less well remembered for playing at Woodstock were people who played at Woodstock—Bert Sommer, the Keef Hartley Band, Sweetwater, a group called Quill with a song called “That’s How I Eat,” and Country Joe McDonald without the Fish, a McDonald’s Happy Meal without the toy.
The show opened with three hours of Richie Havens. That’s a lot of “Handsome Johnny,” but the other performers had not yet arrived. There was no one to follow Havens. Michael Lang got an idea: “My old friend Peter Max . . . had brought the swami.” Swami Satchidananda was duly trotted onstage. “He put a wave of peace out there,” said Artie Kornfeld.
Snigger, if you will, about Swami Satchidananda’s wave of peace, but the crowd did not murder sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar when he played “Raga Puriya-Danashri/Gat in Sawaritai,” which, if it was as long as its title, must have tried the patience of even the most blissfully stoned.
And Jimi Hendrix’s famous psychedelic rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” was performed at 8:30 on Monday morning when everyone who was able to leave Woodstock had done so.
Not many epoch-defining phenomena can be completely analyzed, thoroughly critiqued, and given their entire historical due in just one word. Except Woodstock. Altamont.
However, I’ve looked up the birth dates of the four people who organized (if that word can possibly be used here) Woodstock—Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, John Roberts, and Joel Rosenman. None of them was a Baby Boomer. So, once again, we have the luxury (a luxury that grows rarer and rarer now that we’re over fifty) of knowing it wasn’t our fault.
You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way and made impossible.
—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
The Communist Manifesto
14
THERE SHALL NO SIGN BE GIVEN UNTO THIS GENERATION
The sixties produced various enigmas. One of which isn’t: Why were Baby Boomers acting like chuckleheads? Because we could.
But the Vietnam War remains a puzzle. Not that there was anything puzzling about why we opposed it. The Baby Boom was having a party, and the Vietnam War interrupted it. Try it yourself. Go to a beer blast at midnight and suggest all the guys leave, get buzz cuts, and do push-ups.
Joe Brody, who wasn’t quite clinging to a draft deferment grade average, said, “The government wants to send me to a distant place to shoot people I’ve never met. And they’re expected to shoot back. How come the government doesn’t want to send me to my house to shoot my drunk stepfather while he’s snoring on the couch?”
Inner-city rioting was another puzzle. We were all for Black Power, but we were perplexed. Why were they burning their homes instead of ours? I never got up the nerve to ask any of the black students at MSU. There weren’t many, and most of them were football players. Possibly they weren’t very radical, but definitely they were very big.
Our antiwar demonstrations, where we showed more talent for running around and squealing than for violence, were puzzling too. We thought that if we dressed like zanies, acted like Vancouver Canuck fans after the Boston Bruins won the 2011 Stanley Cup, and came up with chants that rhymed better than “The Whole World Is Watching” such as “Hey, Hey, LBJ! How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?” we’d stop the war.
Mostly, we were just enjoying ourselves. The Vietnam War was a permission slip for nice middle-class kids to mock authority figures, vandalize property, and get chased by the police. Then we’d watch ourselves on TV and some authority figure with lots of property who had never been chased by the police in his life would come on and say we were “The Conscience of the Nation.” Plus it was a great way to meet girls. I’d get all covered in tear gas with some girl who called herself Sunshine and go back to her place, and I’d say, “We’d better double up in the shower, Sunshine, to conserve earth’s resources.”
Given how long the Vietnam War dragged on, this didn’t work. On the other hand, people aren’t enjoying themselves very m
uch protesting the war in Afghanistan, and that’s dragged on even longer.
Jumbo—actually Arthur—said Karl Marx explained all this. Jumbo was called Jumbo because he was a large presence as well as a large person; also his last name was Jumbold. Maybe Jumbo really had read Karl Marx, although he was known to be a kidder. Ana Klein brought back reports from Selective State about students who read Karl Marx and argued, for many hours, about whether they were Marxist-Leninists or Trotskyites or Maoists and whether they should get a haircut to campaign for Gene McCarthy.
Jumbo, Dirty Eddie, Jim Fisk (who actually did get a haircut to campaign for Gene McCarthy), Uncle Mike, Diane, and I had arguments like that, for a few minutes, until Uncle Mike got out the rolling papers and the argument became about how many pizzas to order.
Jumbo said, while we were waiting for pizza, “Karl Marx explains everything.”
Diane asked, “Why would anybody want everything explained?” It’s a sensible question that should have been pondered then and still should be now. Diane was a sensible woman, even if her best friend was a witch (and wicked in bed, I’m ashamed to report).
Jumbo said (high, squeaky, hold-your-breath voice), “I could have explained a few minutes ago.”
Diane said (high, squeaky, hold-your-breath voice), “You shouldn’t believe everything you think.”
Which is yet another mystery of the sixties. Why did we think we were such big ideological left-wingers? The political left, always on the lookout for more people with a beef, had been good on civil rights issues. The left’s neocolonialist Saran Wrap exploitation analysis of the Vietnam War did include that it stank. And, of course, we agreed with the left that everybody should have lots of everything except for people who have lots of everything who should have it taken away. That’s just human nature.
But what really appealed to us in leftist politics was the politics, the quantity of the politics. As Jumbo was about to explain, before Uncle Mike got out the rolling papers, the left makes everything political. And anybody can get into politics—look at the people who do. The threshold is low. The skill set is easy. The power—“How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?”—is enormous. Put absolutely everything together with absolutely anybody in some absolutist system—Marxist-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Social Democratic Welfare State, whatever—and . . .