Transcripts For CNNW The Sixties 20140831 : vimarsana.com

Transcripts For CNNW The Sixties 20140831

Else. Theyre trying to do what no one else has ever done before, find a new way for humanity. America in the early 60s, it was a real good time of prosperity, but it was also kind of a stagnant time in terms of spiritual growth. Things were kind of at a standstill. The baseline culture was materialism, and also the feeling that the culture itself didnt honor the human spirit and didnt honor creativity. The early 1950s, the nation recognized in its midst the social movement called b generation. A novel titled on the road became a bestseller. When kerouacs book came out, it became a revolution, defined a new generation of what being beat means, and it defined it as a spiritual revolution. That if were living in an age of conformity, if everybodys trying to work for the corporation, that youre losing a sense of self. I was traveling west one time at the junction of the state line of colorado. I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the golden desert of even fall, the great image of god with four fingers pointed straight at me. Come on, boy, go thou across the grown, go moan for man. Go moan, go groan, go groan alone, go roll your bones alone. [ applause ] jack kerouac became like a godfather for counterculture. The village has a life and language all its own. If you dig it, youre hip. If you dont, man, youre square. Coffey houses, the neighborhood bars of bohemia, where the strongest potion is coffee, and the coffee house poet is the speciality of the house. To find a place where the eyes can rest. Beatniks, they had these coffeehouses they would go in and play chess and read poetry, and those same coffeehouses became kind of a proving ground for folk singers. All young kids were running out to buy guitars and banjos. Folk music gives me a lot more than the popular music of our own time does. Popular songs should be sung because we dont do anything about say the bomb, you know. The whole situation come to an end. Theres got to be an alternative to whatever ways of life are offered to them, you know . I mean, democrat, republican. And i would like to offer some kind of alternative, somehow, you know . Folk revival scene had a big part of politics. You cant get left politics out of Woody Guthrie or pete seeger. So the Greenwich Village movement was there to celebrate peoples culture. If you like the music, you were really signing on for their ways of looking at the world, too. And then, eventually, one guy emerges as being special. A bullet from the back of a bush took medgar evers blood during that time in the 60s, as that cultural revolution was slowly bubbling and kids were starting to question authority, question what was happening in their country, theyre looking for answers. Bob dylan thought that folk music was poetry. He took beat energy and mixed it with folk culture, and its more lyrical intensity than anybodys put to song before. And the negros name is used, it is plain for the politicians gain as he rises to fame up until the time of bob dylan, there were the songwriters and there were the singers. Dylan started writing his own music. He says, i am going to comment on the world, im going to comment on the nature of this human experience. Bob dylan was sort of in this whitehot moment of saying more in the popular song than anyone ever had before. Only a pawn in their game [ cheers and applause ] after the revolution of bob dylan, the music world moves west. Got to go where you wanna go, do what you wanna do with whoever you wanna do royal canyon becomes the epicenter of the rock revolution. The music scene was not happening in new york anymore. It was now l. A. Everybody moved to Laurel Canyon. Actors, musicians, artists, and so it was a kind of whole community, very open. If you were driving over Laurel Canyon and you saw somebody hitchhiking, youd just automatically pull over. Hey, brother, get in, you know . Where are you going . Laurel canyon was an incredibly interesting place to live in those days. I lived on Lookout Mountain with joanie mitchell. Crosby was close, stephen was close. Now it was all these artists singing this truth, and their truth was this idyllic sense of freedom. There was a Thriving Community of kids that were discovering their new life and couldnt wait to play the new song they had written. It was a lot of freedom. There was a lot of drugs. This was a lot of beautiful women. There was a lot of good rock and roll being made. It was a fabulous time. When people ask me what im wearing, i tell them aveeno®. [ female announcer ] aveeno® daily moisturizing lotion has active naturals® oat with five vital nutrients. [ aniston ] because Beautiful Skin goes with everything. Aveeno®. Naturally beautiful results™. Aveeno®. Here i am. Rock you like a hurricane fiber one now makes cookies. Find them in the cookie aisle. Lactaid® is 100 real milk . Right. Real milk. But it wont cause me discomfort. Exactly, because its milk without the lactose. And it tastes . Its real milk come on, would i lie about this . [ female announcer ] lactaid. 100 real milk. No discomfort. These are students at a suburban high school in los angeles. They reflect the sudden sensuality and affluence which dominate life in southern california. The latest fad is the sunset strip. During the past year, it has become a playground for southern californias mobile, restless teenagers. It is the place to go. People would meet at clubs on the sunset strip and they would go to the trip or they would go to the whisky go go. It was a real happening. We changed from a culture of grownups that sort of looked down to on kids to kids leading. It is the creation of the teenager, and the revolution begins. I got a light on you, babe the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Office has begun foot patrol on the sunset strip to cope with the growing influx of youngsters. The notion of teenagers who had a culture of their own, that werent listening to their parents music, kind of opens up this giant space for rebellions large and small. At least 10 of the students have used and are using marijuana. Also, probably a very significant thing is that acceptance is gaining steadily and the usage is really increasing very rapidly. In l. A. , we were all kind of, you know, smoking gods herb, whereas up in San Francisco, it seemed like they were experimenting more with mind expansion, you know . Ken keasey took classes of writing at stanford university, and he writes the great novel one flew over the cuckoos nest, and this makes him a celebrity. While i was at stanford, i was given the opportunity to go to the stanford hospital and take part in the lsd experiments. Keasey had volunteered to do tests for lsd, a governmentsponsored test. Lsd was isolated in a Pharmaceutical Company in switzerland. Are you happy . Yes. You have tears in your eyes. Oh. Is that a beautiful experience would you say . I would say yes. Some people think its when keasey discovers lsd that the counterculture in california is born, because more and more people then want to try to experience what keasey experienced, and he becomes a promoter of it. Keasey created a drug commune at la honda, which is an hour from San Francisco. Great artists love smashing traditions, and at his best, keasey was doing that. Everybody would have this communal lsd trip together. Tom wolf would write the electric koolaid acid test about it. People were constantly slipping drugs into my food. Id wonder what happened. They thought they were doing me a favor. They were having the worlds fair in new york, so a bunch of us were going to do. But the bunch of us were too big to fit in his station wagon, so he bought this converted school bus. Keasey, he was going to put the bus in dayglow, bright colors and then go with what he called unsettling america, blowing peoples minds. The whole idea of blowing peoples minds, you have to present something that is so different, theres a crack comes open where something new can come in. And the reaction to all these people was wonderful, because what it was in 1964, there was no other thing like this happening. Its part of a kind of cultural revolution going on, making the squares pay notice to this underground of america. When we got to new york city, which is the home of the beats, where kerouac lived, and picked him up, because we were in his presence, we were just acting as goofy as we could, playing music, putting on costumes, doing all kinds of acts and stuff like that. And then kerouac sat on the couch, we would get a big, tall budweiser. He was obviously not an enthusiastic guy. Those beats, they had done their thing, you know . I are i really felt like the torch had been passed from those guys to the psychedelic generation. Keasey was very messianic, and wathought he wanted to get many people to try lsd as they can. So we started renting halls. We called the thing the acid test. The band of course was known as the warlocks. As time went on, they changed their name to the grateful dead. St. Stephen with a rose, in and out of the garden he goes Country Garden in the wind and the rain wherever he goes, the people all complain lsd was not an illegal drug. When keasey held these acid tests, as they were known, theyd have two vats. One was punch and one was punch with lsd. The acid tests were like a party. The scene is a lot of light shows and music and people dancing. When the dead were playing, it was a way to feel that acid in waves. And i looked down and i saw kids in front of me moving to the music. They looked up at me and i said, yeah. The drug culture really took hold. And thats where artists, whether it was the grateful dead or jefferson airplane, were able to embrace it and put it in their music. The counterculture in california is born because more and more people want to try to experience what keasey experienced, and he kind of became the grand poobah of the carnival in San Francisco in the 1960s. Theres nothing a grownup or sophisticated in taking an lsd trip at all. Theyre just being complete fools. Dust irritating your eye . singing visine® gives your eyes relief in seconds. Visine®. Get back to normal. Cbs news, without any flowers in its hair, is in San Francisco because this city has gained the reputation of being the hippie capital of the world. I got accepted in San Francisco state and i found an apartment at haight and clayton street, right in the center of what would become the haightashbury. The psychedelic shop on haight street started about a year ago. It spreads the gospel based on brotherhood, love and lsd. For all the people out there hungry for meaningful spiritual life, thats why all these people are down here. Thats why theres so much interest in the haightashbury. It offers hope. We lived right down the street from the psychedelic shop. People were growing their hair long, they were wearing beads, playing music on the street. It was just an incredible environment at that point, in the beginning. Thats when it was just like one big, giant family. Before you knew it, it was a congregating place for artists and the dividing line seemed to be the psychedelic experience. You couldnt understand the posters, you couldnt understand the fashions, you couldnt understand anything if you hadnt gotten high. The diggers group scrounges food and money to feed free those who arrive in panhandle park with a bowl and an appetite. Diggers are people who share, says their manifesto, and their aim is a society where everything is shared, everything free. The diggers were one of the first groups into social consciousness about what was needed to take care of this huge group of people that were coming into the haightashbury. Their free shop looks more like a playground at first sight. Here they make sheets and clothes for other hippies, who can come and take what they want without paying anything for it. Everything in the store was free tools, clothing, televisions. So we were inviting people to imagine a way of life that would please them, and then to make it real by doing it. What were thinking about is a peaceful planet. Were not thinking about anything else. Were not thinking about any power, were not thinking of any of those kinds of struggles. Were not thinking of revolution or war or any of that. Thats not what we want. Nobody wants to get hurt, nobody wants to hurt anybody. We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life and think about moving the whole human race ahead a step or a few steps. We wanted to learn more about the real meaning of life, why are we here . Certainly not to kill each other but here to celebrate life, to make music, to do art and love each other. These people are hippies. They represent a new form of social rebellion. It is hard to figure out what positive things they are in favor of. The reason we can no longer identify with the kinds of activities that the older generation are engaged in is because those activities are for us meaningless. They have led to a monstrous war in vietnam for example. We did want change from war, from rigid ideas of what the sexes ought to be doing. A change from black people ought to be here and white people ought to be here. No. Why cant we try and make that work . The haightashbury community has created a council for a summer of love in San Francisco. The council is calling for creative love happenings for every weekend throughout the summer. We ask all who come here to come here in love and we ask all who live here to greet all men with love. They at their best are trying for a kind of group sainthood, and saints running in groups are likely ludicrous. They depend on hallucination for their philosophy. This is not a new idea and its never worked. It was sort of a divide of generations. A lot of mistrust. Young people didnt trust old people. Old people didnt understand young people. Whats so offensive about long hair . It looks sloppy. [ laughter ] [ applause ] it doesnt differentiate the boys from the girls enough. We didnt call ourselves hippies. The hippies are a fabrication. They were an attempt to diminish young adults and infantalize us, and it certainly serves to exclude the people that were deeply thoughtful about the world, that were ready to dedicate their lives to making change and had questioned the paradigm of materialism. Look around you. Nothing works. The only thing a kid is presented with is when you grow up, you can join the army, go to war, get a gig as an engineer, become a vegetable, drive to work in your own car. Your own, big, metal box. And it just looks absurd, people in their metal boxes like this going all over from job to job, frustrated, uptight. What joy is there in life . Life should be life is and should be ecstasy. The counterculture had the arrogance to tell everybody else what they were doing is wrong. And nobody likes that. Its estimated that anywhere from 10,000 to 200,000 youngsters may pour into haightashbury this summer. Many people are apprehensive. They feel that black power or other political activist groups may use haight street as a stage setting for riots. Haightashbury cannot handle 100,000. Of course, there isnt room. The tension between the government and the people began to be evident. Nobody should let their Young Children come into San Francisco unsupervised to become a part of a group such as that. Theyre fascists as far as im concerned, and they dont like hippies and they dont like the things we do and they try to harass us and bother us. In some ways, their revolutions are war between generations. The hippies rallying cry is Never Trust Anyone over 30. The war cry of the youth establishment is on full swing on about every front. About four policemen came in and said everybody get out, the store is closed. They wouldnt give a reason or identify under what premise they were doing this. When we asked them, they pushed people around. They pushed people physically out of the store. The mayor, this is very insidious, what hes up to. He wants to stop human growth. The hippie leaders say all will be well. Flower power will prevail. They say it will be a summer of love, a great pilgrimage. Hopefully, theyll be right. If its necessary to bring in national guard, ill bring in national guard. Ill use whatever force is necessary. You think you take off all your makeup before bed. But do you really . [ female announcer ] neutrogena® makeup remover erases 99 of your most stubborn makeup with one towelette. Can your makeup remover do that . [ female announcer ] neutrogena® makeup remover. With a newt a volkswagen turbo. Ed reward card can your makeup remover do that . So why are we so obsessed with turbo . Because theres nothing more exhilarating than a powerful ride. And you can get that in places you might not expect. Like the passat. And also in the funtodrive jetta. In fact, volkswagen has sold more turbos than any other brand over the last ten years. 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