By Eric Le Roy
Years ago, as I was ‘coming of age’, so to speak, in the 1960s, the place I most wanted to be was Greenwich Village in New York. This was where the folk scene (in the musical sense) evolved commercially, meaning that the general public started taking notice of it. Of course, the very idea of ‘commercialism’ (abhorrent then, as now, to many who indulged in it daily – including me) was not part of my spiritual lexicon.
Oh, to be sure, the renegade seeds, perhaps planted at the time of my conception, were starting to sprout in all directions. My transformation from a promising high school student to a discombobulated domestic failure and then an aimless international grotesque was beginning in me, a shivering progression from blossom to tumor (in a manner of speaking). Except that I didn’t know that. I was still pretty much… oh hell, a virgin.
Neither here nor there, say I now, airily. I took myself way too seriously to be a cynic. I mean, no self-congratulating idealist ever has a fully operating internal bullshit alarm and custom-made crap-detector. To every question, I had five answers. (It’s the other way around now.)
So I believed in the 1960s. Believed what, you may ask, or in what? Well, not to oversimplify, but I guess that I felt sure that the good guys would eventually win. (I don’t think that way anymore.) No, I was never a Flower Power type, although I grew my hair as long as school, job, and family would let me get away with; I bought a pair of boots, so I would look exactly like Bob Dylan as he was photographed with Suzie Rotolo on a snowy day in or around ‘The Village’ long ago – the one that graces the Freewheelin Bob Dylan album cover. To my mind, that picture remains a classic, and there is no question that I looked exactly like Dylan as I tramped around in Charleston, West Virginia, during my teenage years. In my boots. I’m sure of it. A pity that nobody else seemed to notice the uncanny resemblance. They must have mistakenly thought I was a teenage pimple-pump trying to impersonate a folk singer.
I look back with a jaundiced eye on all the stuff they would now call ‘Woke’: the intrinsic sense of superiority that over-educated liberals have always had towards the dog-eared hicks, toothless hillbillies, and irate rednecks. I recoil. Intellectuals, as I see it, have no patent on truth, and academia is often a pretentious roadblock to creativity. The 60s had their share of that, too. I recall the virtue signalling, the condescending affectations, and the common pussy-hunger that was at the base of radical enlightenment. (After a while, I couldn’t help but notice that the choicest prime rib studs among the hippies and the hottest revolutionary females were all shagging each other deaf, dumb, and blind, while those of a lesser stock were left twiddling their love beads in the Commune parking lot.)
Now, years later, I have a clear understanding of the cavalcade of imposters and inadequate losers who hoped that the hippie gig would save them. As in every other Great Movement among ‘the people’, it involved a handful of gifted idealists, another set of narcissistic ideology-thugs who knew a good thing when they saw it, and a Cecil B. DeMille cast of fringe fleas, hangers on, wanna be’s, bit players, no-hopers, retards, and congenital assholes.
But it made sense back then, and I would add that an impulse toward some kind of cleansing or purifying element had arisen in scores of young people across the nation, even where true innocence was irrecoverable (and many of the wiser ‘hippies’ knew this), a volcano in the pulse that made hands reach out and minds that were lit with fires of insatiable curiosity – I encountered those sorts of people back then too, and I remember them with excruciating fondness.
They might have been on the Good Fairy side of naive, but they bore little resemblance to the vicious identity politicians of today. If you go wandering around most American towns, even now, you can expect to run into a few old hippies and a Vietnam vet or two. They look like the relics they are, and are regarded by burghers of short memory with a studied contempt. Undeservedly, but that’s how it is. Once upon a time, they were the main event and furious with each other, but now they seem like sour, arid old married couples who can’t remember the exact reasons for their peevish and obliquely shared discontent, buried in a haze of old beliefs.
I feel that time is full of invisible pockets of heat – cauldrons of energy – where clusters of blessed birds-of-a-feather artists somehow meet on a branch of some vivid tree under cerulean sky, and that every so often, their collective power trills amid bright-burning periods of relentless creativity. The ancient Greek philosophers, poets, and playwrights fit that description. So do the great Elizabethan writers and the painters and sculptors of the Renaissance, where guys like Michelangelo and Raphael were bumping into each other every day in the streets of Florence. Fast forward to the Romantic poets, and then onward to the Impressionists, and you will see that the presence of such ‘heat pockets’ really does exist, at least in the imaginative sense. In the 20th century, it took two World Wars to do the trick. The Lost Generation of Hemingway and company, and the Catch-22 world of dystopian horror after the Holocaust.
Likewise, there seem to be periods of stagnation and imitation, such as neo-classicism, ‘salon’ art of all descriptions, and the boring poets of the so-called Age of Reason, with all due respect to Milton and Paradise Lost. (The follow-up, Paradise Regained, is like most sequels – a commercial venture full of predictable tropes.) Nobody except dreary scholars reads Dryden, Pope, and Goldsmith anymore. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels still resonates to a degree, but, frankly, Pope is not stimulating in the way that the Elizabethan John Donne and the Tudor poet Thomas Wyatt still are. The reason is that the voices of Pope and Dryden (and those of their coffee house cohorts) do not come to life (or else dissolve into petty quarrels and animosity) and thus speak not to us, whereas Donne and Wyatt do. (Among the Romantics, Shelley, Wordsworth, and some of the others seem either vacantly tedious or annoyingly garrulous, but Keats comes through loud and clear. His evocative superiority is astonishing. Just saying…)
So, I speak of the furnace of creative energy that can seize a generation. If we look back at the 60s in that spirit, I think we can begin to appreciate the creative spark that colored those times. I believe I am being fair here, because the kids of the 60s were rebelling against the smug suburban complacency of the Eisenhower years (which, I confess, seen from a distant mirror, were pretty damned good in many respects). The kids were fighting ‘The Establishment’, rather than snorting ideological snot in each other’s faces, and they thought they were on the threshold of altering reality and reinvigorating society. “They’ve all come to look for America,” sang Simon and Garfunkel. Or maybe the pronouns should be ‘we’. And ‘I’. Back then.
Whatever the case, they had the fire in their brains and veins. I remember reading a line from Ian Tyson (of the great Canadian duo ‘Ian and Sylvia’) explaining how, after a typical vagabond evening in the Village with other artists, “I went home and wrote ‘Four Strong Winds, ‘” and Dylan went home and wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I don’t doubt that Tyson was telling the truth. Must have been exciting. Sitting back in Charleston, I recall yearning to be part of something like that. But I guess I was out of my league. So I am racked with nostalgia for something I never lived, something which for me, never was, except in spirit, like a distant campfire.
. Togetherness was the articulated goal, celebrated in poem and song, speech and chant. The idea was that young people would find each other if just left alone by the government, and especially by their parents. The enemy was not men against women, white against black, gay versus straight – but ‘the system’’ – that being our mortal foe, we discounted or dismissed the ‘wisdom’ of anyone much older than ourselves. We were going to put right every wrong, and never fall into the traps that had engulfed our parents.
And even more appealing was the prospect of saving the world all day long, and then celebrating our celestial labors evening and night by getting stoned, getting naked, and learning to ‘love the one you’re with’. For some, ‘free love’ was a duty. Long hair, love beads, and tie-dye T-shirts were standard issue. The men with scraggly locks, biblical beards, and scruffy sandals often had the look of psychedelic disciples searching for some kind of kaleidoscopic Jesus. The girls, granny glasses (like Janis Joplin), flowery earth-mother dresses (gowns easy for disrobing), and the obligatory bare feet (sweet or sour), were as abundant as strawberries in the summer. A proper lot of Horny Clowns and ‘Dharma Bums’, right? Human rainbows in the original sense (Not gay-signifying). The Hallucination Generation. That’s pretty much the truth, especially in big cities like NY and San Fran, which were ‘happenin places’ back then (ask Kerouac), and not the vomitous shitholes they are now.
BUT. Amid all the tomfoolery came some of the best songwriting and music that the world has ever produced. (I would not go so far as to extend this compliment to the poetry, which was notoriously undisciplined, but some memorable books came out of it.) Or so I believe today. I find most contemporary ‘pop’ music unlistenable. Probably I’m being unfair. Leonard Cohen, Carole King, where are you? And yeah, there are still innumerable ‘bricks in the wall’, but nobody is lyricizing them.
Coming as I am, not to praise Caesar but to bury him, I nonetheless think that ‘hippie’ philosophy produced many moments of bona fide, if only fleeting, union – perhaps revelation, even if it took a lot of weed and tabs of acid supplemented by special mushrooms to do it. Wistfully, I can imagine, if not always relive, those moments as I cling to the mixture of reality, fantasy, wild frantic bursts of inspiration, and more than a little ‘divine decadence’ – mostly at my periphery, but now and then a genuine experience. Well do I know that sometimes the value of a whole life can be reduced to five minutes.
I can see them now. The perfect enlightened hippie man and his perfect, enlightened hippie woman. Those ineffable combinations must have produced some great moments of sexual moisture and fluid, liberating pilgrimages of the carnal and the transcendent, serenaded by choruses of chanting, grunting, singing, celestial sobbing, sexual cries of “Oh God” and alley cat calls for “FREEDOM”, fueled by Morrison, Joplin, and Hendrix, et al. Those people were not all phonies, and I celebrate their moments. Now, the ones who aren’t dead are old, and a lot of the old ones might as well be dead. Meanwhile, the world they were trying to cure is still infected with the same old diseases.
So what has rendered me a cynic in my dotage? Why do I feel a philosophical anger bordering on nihilism? A longing for comprehensible closure of any kind? Is it a growing conviction that the human race is unsalvageable? A sharper sense of irreversible realities? Or merely a tantrum-like rage over being out of focus or removed from the picture, and, having been deleted and omitted from further consideration, now rationalize that all of those people back in the 60s were, in fact, fools? That the people whom I once idolized were full of shit? Was I a mug for having believed in them? Now I trust only myself, and, believe me, that’s not saying much. But why can I not cry anymore when I should, but then turn around and cry for no reason?
There is no such thing as a pleasant death. But isn’t it strange how desperately attracted we are to the Beautiful Losers? Morrison, Joplin, and Hendrix all self-destructed. And they weren’t alone. Yet we glory in them; we call them ‘courageous’ and assign to them a fatal idealism which we would be too frightened to pursue to the bitter end ourselves.
One of the best – and most cynical – lines I have ever heard is that “For ‘so-and-so (name your late superstar), death was a great career move”. And it’s true. Dylan is still with us, but he’s not Dylan anymore, is he? Just a fang-faced old man who means nothing to the ‘X-ers’ of today. Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe? Today? I dread to think. James Dean? Ugh. Try to imagine a fat old Jack Nicholson trying to mount sloppy old Roseanne Barr. Or a doped-up Kurt Cobain staggering down a street in Seattle in pursuit of a ghoulish, hoggish Courtney Love. Moreover, a lot of today’s deadbeats don’t even remember those people. They don’t know Elvis Presley from Abraham Lincoln.
You see, I never was a joiner, and everything I ever tried to link up with soon rejected me. That included the hippies. I never belonged with any of them. I raptured privately, in soul-masturbation and lost frenzies of delight. Or with honkey-tonk harlots who were the women I truly needed – I see that now. I belonged to the dusty roads between Jack’s Pool Hall and Cindy’s Beer Barn, not the green path to Buddhist Valhalla.
Today, I find myself living in an age where people scream constantly without really believing in anything. Spirituality is dying, I fear, though ‘religion’ still thrives among the fanatics and jihadists of all denominations. Idealism amounts to bellowing “Fascist” at anyone who disagrees with some kind of fucked up notion straight from social media. All hot air.
I still listen to the old songs now and then. ‘Four Strong Winds’ and ‘Blowin in the Wind’ retain a much welcome power over that crazy apparatus that I sometimes refer to as my Being. But I know that the jig’s up. The human race is now in escape mode. Off to the stars, we cry, meaning really, “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”
I was in love with a folk singer named Mary Travers. I spent five seconds with her after a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert in Charleston, West Virginia, back in 1965. Or something like that. I said, “Hello, Mary,” and she gave me an autograph.
My love.
Those times are not Blowin’ in the Wind, they’re Gone with the Wind. These days, as Dylan said years ago, it’s all Positively 4th Street. And I am bedeviled by a sense of never having existed even as I exist. Talk about a fucking paradox. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to say hello, and damned if it ain’t about time to say goodbye.
