The antihero in Fahrenheit 451 faced the same challenge in a society where television grew all-consuming and “firemen” burned books in an effort to “make history more flexible and to maintain sameness among the masses”. This movie inspired a few Boomers to drastic action… they actually began to read. 1984, Animal Farm, Stranger in a Strange Land, Catch 22 and Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest all contained a favorite hippie theme similar to that in Fahrenheit 451: “Who should be called sane in an insane society?”
Americans watched TV news in horror as nightmare images filled their living rooms with mass murderers, Richard Speck (eight student nurses, stabbed and strangled in Chicago) and Charles Whitman (13 cut down and 31 wounded in a sniper attack from a tower at the University of Texas at Austin), more race riots (the biggest in Cleveland’s Hough Ghetto), a riot of WASP kids on the Sunset Strip, growing antiwar demonstrations at the White House and at Dow Chemical (makers of napalm and Agent Orange) headquarters, as McNamara calmly announced to the press that more than 2,000 American kids died in Vietnam during the first five months of the year, and that more than 285,000 Boomer teens were now in the combat zone.
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Dylan sang, “Sooner or later one of us must know/ And, only time will tell/ Which one of us has fell/ And, which one was left behind/ When you go your way and I’ll go mine.” Boomers dropped out of the Great Society in droves, but where were they headed?
Boomers turned away from TV, traditional Hollywood films and Top 40 radio for the remainder of the decade, and instead, searched for better reflections in counterculture flicks, underground newspapers and psychedelic music from small, independent FM radio stations. They dug a subterranean counterculture Teen Utopia all their own.
“Who could imagine that they would freak out in Minnesota, mina-mina-mina-Minnesota?” mocked Frank Zappa in the title cut of his first album, Freak Out, in late 1966. It was true… Boomers all over the United States rapidly converted to hippism.
Dylan warned in “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, “Look out, Kid, they keep it all hid,” and the obscure lyrics cleared the censors, and gave Bob his first Top 40 hit. Zappa didn’t care about his chance on pop radio in “Trouble Every Day”: “And, there ain’t no Great Society as it applies to you and me/ Our country isn’t free and the law refuses to see/ That all you can ever be is just a lousy janitor/ Unless your uncle owns the store.” Frank belonged to a new breed of Rock musicians who mocked hit singles and Bandstand. The Mothers of Invention packed them in on the Sunset Strip and didn’t need the Music Establishment. In “Who Are the Brain Police?” Zappa enticed Boomers to question traditional values: “Is that what you really believe, or is it what the media hype and your mama told you to believe?” First Wave Boomers understood, and then began to resent all the media manipulation and censorship on TV and AM radio. As Zappa continued to insult everyone, including his fans, the audience grew: “You’re probably wondering why I’m here/ Not that you care, you plastic freaks.” The Mothers traveled to New York in the fall and advertised their show as “Absurd and a total waste of three dollars.” Anti-hype instantly caught on with the counterculture.
The music scenes in LA and NYC were just a seed in the lid compared to the explosion in San Francisco. An estimated 1,000 psychedelic rock bands called the Bay area home by 1967. San Francisco already claimed the title of “dropout capitol of the West Coast” (Greenwich Village in the East), dating back to the Beat era and Kerouac’s On the Road. Hippies and freaks fit right in. Freedom of Speech headquarters lay just across the bay at Berkeley, and underground newspapers, like the Berkeley Barb and Mojo Navigator put the real buzz out into the community.
As might be expected, the US government supplied the largest single contribution in the development of the counterculture. They selected Ken Kesey as one of their $75-a-day human guinea pigs for a “mind control” experiment with LSD at Menlo Park Clinic in late 1959 and early 1960 (before Leary’s research at Harvard). Ken helped himself to some free samples, and soon he and friends back at Perry Lane conducted their own experiments. They deduced that LSD was a mind-expanding, rather than a mind-controlling drug, and thus, felt compelled to spread the good news to the freak community. By 1965, Kesey, Augustus Owsley Stanley III (“The Henry Ford of acid”), a little-known band called the Warlocks (who soon renamed themselves the Grateful Dead) and a group of Ken’s friends presented The Merry Pranksters’ Acid Tests. Kesey explained his mission: “As navigator of this venture, I try, as much as possible to set out in a direction that, in the first place, is practically impossible to achieve, and then along the way mess up the minds of the crew with as many chemicals as we can lay our hands on.” With everyone in the proper frame of mind, the Pranksters proceeded with their mixed media experience: strobe lights, movie projections, taped sound effects, live cosmic raps, black lights, and some stoned-out Rock & Roll from Jerry Garcia and company, in an effort to provide a thought-provoking, mind-expanding experience and a lot of fun. The performers encouraged the audience to join in the fun, as Garcia explained: “We all preferred the anarchy of the Tests in a lot of ways. Every person was a participant and everywhere was the stage. We didn’t have to entertain anybody. We were no more famous than anybody else.”