It's easy to forget amongst all of the self congratulatory 60's retrospectives and reductionist nostalgic crap that's floating in our flickering medias that some of the Boomers were in fact, serious fucks.
Easy Rider features a lot of real serious fucks, but a lot of them are fictional. I think anyone who sees this movie will no longer be under the impression I know I had growing up in the Clinton era about hippydom: dated, and gross at it's most sinister, but usually just gray long hair on a dude, some tie dye, a black vest, maybe even the 70's have a nice day smiley. And a disco ball. With a tie dye background. Austin Powers did not help things. But, really, who can blame us for our vapid revisionism when the styles are recycled so many times over by now, the 60th annual cycle of totally renewed lines of consumer products and lifestyles to associate with them?
No, Hollywood serious fucks are revered by the same who program XL radio stations in places where old men drop benjis. Beach Boys, Doors I can understand, but the fucking Velvets, man? I like to think the man checking my stereo in to get repaired at Magnolia Hi-Fi just doesn't think about the music. If he did, it might occur to him that pushing expensive black boxes of nostalgic dream recreation would be a totally valid job description to put down on his resume. Maybe that's how people actually score jobs at head shops and pot clubs.
The serious fucks I'm talking about are all beginning to die. The dude who I would most want to talk to about all of this is already dead, he croaked at the Hospital down the street from my house when I was seven. In the TC Boyle book Drop City he is introduced as old. Thirty, maybe even late thirties. He was a professor in musicology, jazzy Beardo, musician poet, modern utopian, and legal visionary. This was before reggae music, by the way.
Like most Americans, I first discovered Morning Star, off of Coleman Valley Road near Occidental, in the Time Magazine article about the hippies from 1967. Unlike most Americans, this was on the internet three months ago, and I have been living within twenty miles of Coleman Valley Road my whole life. I asked my dad if he had any memories of the era, my parents having moved to Sebastopol in the early 1970s. He mentioned he was friends with a man who wanted to be a writer, whose mom had died in the Spanish civil war. Thanks to the internet, I now know this man to be this man. I should remember to tell my dad that he is a published writer. More importantly, I should write this guy and talk to him, I mean he's clearly a serious fuck.
Hippy aesthetics were sort of the easiest thing to take down when Reagan directed the Right at their culture war zenith, dopiness does not get money. Looking through the First Edition copy of the Morning Star scrapbook that my mom told me to look for in the house, they do seem awful naked. I'm hearing the Royal Trux song On My Mind were Neil Hagerty finally gives up, "Yeah We're a bunch of long hairs, what about it? What'da I care? What do I care?" and Jennifer Herrema is black and asks if we can feel it. The bubble gum pops, and it's the roller skate girl with the orange afro in NASHVILLE from Los Angeles who done the poppin'.
But the values were in the right place. I can't help but think of Alan Watts when I read the religious chants, the interpretations of Eastern theology so focused on the idea of expansive openness and intangible warmth and blue love. They sat next to doodles of naked men and women, their eyes closed, taken out of the comics of the New Yorker and finding themselves totally at peace in their voluntarily primitive surroundings.
One of them tells you how to shit. The description for preparing the earth is one part soil as vaginae metaphor, one part very funny to somebody who just read about the Korean war and all the human shit Americans encountered in that totally unfinished international dispute. But then that was the talk they talked in these yellowing pages my parents had kept for all these years between some book on The Sacred Pipe and another on California's Wild Coast.
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