September 17, 2007

Sitting On a Stool at the Counterculture

My friend Mary recently showed me a photo she took on vacation. It’s a close-up of a blue sign with white letters, painted on steel and a little rusty around the edges, nailed to the wooden siding of a cabin. The sign says, “Hippies Use Back Door – No Exceptions.” There’s also an arrow presumably pointing to where the hippies might find the back door, letting us know that the sign means to provide navigational instructions rather than a lifestyle suggestion.

I’m not sure whether to be amused, insulted or maybe just a little bit flattered. Having spent my teen years wandering through the 1960s, I’m not ashamed to admit that I was a hippy then and am still an unreconstructed hippy at heart.

Of course, the same might be said for pretty much everyone my age who is not a Fox News personality or serving somewhere else in the Bush administration.

So how do we define a “hippy”? I think Timothy Leary said it best in his 1967 book “The Politics of Ecstasy”:

Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.

Of course, in the next chapter Dr. Leary reminisced about a three-way argument he once had with a bag of pretzels and a shovel, over whose turn it was to drive home.

For me and my friends, being a hippy was never really all that political. It was more about seeing how long you could grow your hair before the assistant principal nabbed you, gave you a dollar, and sent you across the street from the high school to the barber shop, “Bob’s Buzz Cut Emporium.”

That, and about girls who didn’t wear bras.

Then of course there was The Band. I was a member of a five-piece garage (that’s where we practiced) rock band that probably enjoyed more success than musical ability. Like every other band in the ‘60s, we worked hard to cultivate our wild, free, counterculture image.

Somewhere around the house, carefully hidden from my impressionable son (OK, he’s 25 and probably not all that impressionable any more, but he could still be emotionally scarred), there is a photograph of The Band, taken for some sort of promotional thing. In this photograph we are posing on somebody’s rooftop, the drummer hilariously using the brick chimney as his drum kit. We are all scowling at the camera in what is either brooding musical genius or the aftermath of a trip to White Castle.

And there, front and center, stands a pathologically scrawny me, wearing a headband, a tank top and hip-hugger bell-bottom jeans with peace-sign patches on the knees and at least two feet of flare at the bottom. My Fender guitar is slung low and covered with hand-painted peace signs and flowers. My hair is blonde, stringy and approaching that universal happy hippy goal of shoulder-length – indicating that when the picture was taken it had been some time since one of those involuntary trips to Bob’s.

Looking into the photograph at my whiskerless face, you can almost see the spirits of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison surrounding me. You can almost hear them whispering in my ear that I should let my Freak Flag fly, that I should go out and stand up against The Man, that I should use my music to strike a lasting blow for Peace, Brotherhood, Love and Freedom – just as long as I could save up enough energy to join the Revolution after studying for that biology test coming up next Monday.

No wonder they wanted us to use the back door.