Oct 192011
Hippie
New York Times bestseller! Sales phenomenon! Now in an entirely new compact-sized paperback…at a mind-blowing price.
Experience the ultimate flashback with this celebration of an era. Rich in illustrations and filled with the history, politics, sayings, and slogans that defined an age, this tribute to the 1960′s counterculture is as groovy as it gets. For those who were there, this volume will invoke the spirit of the time. Those who weren’t, will wish they had been.
Sex, drugs, and
List Price: $ 14.95
Price: $ 8.96
Which Side Were You On?,
Hippie is a glossy coffee table book covering the rise and demise of the counterculture during the years from 1965 to 1971. For those who lived through the era, the full-page photos are bound to get some synapses firing (presumably bypassing all those drug-damaged neural junctions). This is essentially a People magazine version of the sixties: lots of breathless headlines and celebrity photos. Writer Barry Miles has dug up some good music gossip, including not very flattering John Lennon anecdotes.
Some serious issues of the era get raised – Vietnam, civil rights, woman’s liberation, gay rights – but in a, well, glossy coffee-table-book way. The editorial difficulty in putting together a book of this sort is deciding whether you’re celebrating sex, drugs and rock and roll or chronicling a culture in crisis.
The young people in America rose up in mass revulsion against Jell-O molds and tract homes with bomb shelters in the back yard. They hit the road looking for something more optimistic and more fun. Enormous energy went in to trying to alter or bring down the dominant culture. In the civil rights and antiwar movements, people were literally putting their lives on the line. People’s “lifestyle choices,” as we now call them, had profound repercussions, personally and politically, in ways unimaginable to young people today (soldiers in Iraq excepted). Similar upheavals were happening in Europe, especially France, where the student – worker alliance only dreamed of in the US actually came to pass in the heady spring of 68.
You can get a good debate going by asking which specific event signified the end of the sixties in America. Was it Kent State, where the Ohio National Guard gunned down four student protesters? Altamont, where the peace and love culture broke down on its own without any outside interference? The breakup of the Beatles? Or, even earlier, Nixon’s election in 68, which demonstrated the difficulty of changing hearts and minds in America? Barry Miles covers them all here, so you can make up your own mind.
But America has a genius for absorbing new ideas into its vast, spongy middle. Hippie notions of casual sex, recreational drug use, and quirky personal style seeped into suburban living rooms, stripped of any cultural or political critique. In the 1970s, the revolution was not only televised, but merchandised, and the momentum had for sure crested and started to recede. On the plus side, protests at the Miss America pageant led by a tortuous route to housewives in Sioux Falls filling cubicles at insurance and credit card companies. African Americans got access to academia and began moving up the economic ladder. George W. Bush notwithstanding, we work harder to prevent industries from poisoning our air and water.
But there was a time, my children, when hope hung in the air, and personal liberation was a radiant promise. All you had to do was stare out at the future with the right kind of eyes. Clearly the old structures would topple, and gleaming new edifices of our own making would rise to replace them. The apocalyptic change didn’t happen, but whether you were partying or protesting, it was a grand time to be alive. Hippie, for all its slickness, is a great memory jogger for those who participated and not a bad introduction for those who missed out on the Age of Aquarius.
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|Bargain price, excellent pics, ambitious text,
Having had my 6th birthday the month Sgt. Pepper appeared, my memories of the hippie era are tied up with childhood. I don’t idealize or denigrate the hippie era, and I was curious, after reading TC Boyle’s commune novel Drop City, to discover more about what now’s forty and not “twenty years ago” today, or close to it now. Miles takes a rather bi-locational look at the era 65-71 or so mostly switching between London and California. Politics are downplayed and music is highlighted, along with drugs, as the forces inspiring fashion, mores, ecology, and sexuality to change. The text may not get the attention that the photos do, but Miles tries hard to hit all of the high points within the parameters described above. A few typos (Mondo Carne, Tasahara, Berry Melton) escape the editor’s eye, but I admit that he crams a lot of material into short, easily accessible mini-essays.
One on People’s Park, Berkeley effectively distills the whole conflict into a few well-written paragraphs. He gives a quick rundown on the French ’68 risings, and notes how–given the lack of translations of Tim Leary, for example, the French took their radicalism more from rock n’ roll from abroad to mix with Gallic activism and literary bohemianism. Miles stresses how remote the Beatles had become by the later 60s, influencing from a height what others scurried about to copy and further commodify.
In one essay on the drug culture in SF, early ’67, he captures the aftermath of the idealistic Human Be-In in January, in that night’s police crackdown on “soft” drugs like pot and LSD and how as if overnight, they and their purveyors were replaced on the streets along with new dealers, of speed and heroin. Miles hints strongly that there was a concerted effort from authorities to undermine SF culture that escalated into the decline of the movement just as it looked at its most utopian, while even by the Summer of Love, the decline has become irreversible.
Other essays, like that on the Weathermen, seem diffused, and confused–the Manson murders are celebrated by Bernadette Dohrn before the murders themselves are examined a few pages later; the SDS receives nearly no attention prior to the Chicago trial; the end years peter out into a dribble of unrelated vignettes before stumbling to a halt with Woodstock ’99. One problem: many shorter entries read as if made to fit the page and the graphics, and they suddenly stop at the bottom while leaving you as the reader expecting more coverage on the non-existent next page’s continuation. This staccato pace throws off the flow.
Miles wisely stays out of the way himself in nearly all of his narrative, allowing others to be quoted at length. You do learn about personalities like Vito and Szou in ’65 on the Sunset Strip, the conflict between the Family Dog and Bill Graham approaches to doing business with/as the counterculture, and the Diggers vs. HIP Haight-Ashbury merchants ideological differences. Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto gains citations at length, as does a key ad by Frank Zappa warning the hippies about their smug conformity. What it felt like to have Neal Cassady driving the bus, play at London’s Roundhouse, be at Woodstock, or watch a light show in SF all gain credence through carefully chosen details and quotes. Alice Cooper and Led Zep are astutely credited with ushering in the death of the love generation (named by SF police chief Thomas Cahill that night after the Be-In!) and the era of the no-message, good-time arena rock that followed the earnest 60s.
I do wish a glance at the hippie influence abroad–Brazil, Israel, Nepal, Japan, Mexico City–could have been included; the lack of international attention as well as how hippies filtered into suburban life would’ve been salutory. However, given the “heavy” heft of this large-format work, Miles and his photo compilers have pulled off a handsome and very inexpensively priced presentation. In summary, if you wish to see the rise and fall of the hippie ideals more from an Anglo-American rather than a global perspective, this book offers a glossy and engrossing, if not comprehensive, look at the London-California axis.
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|A Posers Review,
I was born in 1965 so that makes me 40 now so there are a lot of people who might say I have no buisiness writing a review of a movement I really knew nothing about. Maybe they’re right…maybe I am just a poser but I can remember my older relatives being hippies and I grew up thinking that when I grow up I want to be just like that.
Be careful of what you wish for, kid.
I’m a hippie in my own way. I mean, I don’t dress like one, I don’t have long hair, I do have a beard and I am greatly impressed what the hippie generation tried to do; they attempted to win over a point that Love is where it’s at, that Peace can happen, and that the individual is very important. Hippies brought to Light a lot of things that were previously in the dark; different religious beliefs, meditation, the use of psycho-active substances that may or may not lead to a deeper realization of the self and his/her relation to not only each other but to the universe.
Dude…I’m trippin’…
This book is a wonderful testament to those times. There are also a lot of pictures of some really hot hippie chicks. My dad laughed when he saw it on my coffee table after he removed the Nag Champa incense off its cover and read the title. I know I’m a poser! I know I have no right to review this book! Geezh…don’t rub it in…but I think everyone has the right to pursue a deep inner peace, a greater love, and a willingness to know that all belong to the same planet, so let’s hold hands, brothers and sisters…c’mon, people, smile on your brother, got to love one another right now…
RIGHT NOW…
Yeah, in some ways hippies were “mis-guided” in their attempts to create a better world. We know now that we don’t have to support the war in order to support our troops. We know that having sex with everyone in sight may not be the smartest thing in the world. We know that certain chemicals may lead to a greater inner awareness but what do we do with the awareness once we’ve been blessed enough to receive it?
Once, you’re past 30, you can’t be hip anymore…but you can always be cool…you can always be well read…you can always stand for what you believe in. Maybe we need a term now for people who still have the passion, the enthusiuasm, and the energy to change things.
May Hippie Power prevail.
C’mon, c’mon…break out the loot and buy the dang thing…
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