American Fun Read online

  The Appeal broadened the base of countercultural fun. SDS activists met folkies and hippies, and everybody felt the acid-test vibrations that would shake like earthquakes in the months and years to come. More profoundly, however, it marked Bill Graham’s debut as the P. T. Barnum of psychedelia. The next month he held a much a bigger appeal—“for Continued Freedom in the Arts”—at the capacious Fillmore music hall in the mostly African-American Fillmore district. And in January 1966, he promoted the Pranksters’ gaudy “Trips Festival”—a two-night, three-ring acid test. The Trips Festival handbills read like Mime Troupe (even SDS) boilerplate, announcing “a more jubilant occasion where the audience PARTICIPATES because it’s more fun to do so than not.… Audience dancing is an assumed part of all the shows, and the audience is invited to wear ECSTATIC DRESS and bring their own GADGETS.” “Maybe,” the handbill mused, “this is the ROCK REVOLUTION.” It was likewise the culmination of the Pranksters’ master plan (to freak out as many Americans as possible), but Graham wasn’t looking for trouble. The festival was billed as a “non-drug recreation of a psychedelic experience.” Still, it was a Prankster event. The light shows, op-art, Thunder Machines, acid rock, and six thousand open-minded participants rather begged for LSD—which California had outlawed months before. So if you wanted it, it was in the ice cream.

  And the festival did offer participatory fun, just like the poster said. A mob the size of a midwestern town wore self-expressive costumes, danced improvised dances, dropped acid, spoke into randomly distributed microphones (when they weren’t being hogged by Babbs and Cassady), and got a taste of the Prankster and Red Dog scenes. The message was that fun and expression are one, but in fact the array of weirdish attractions better resembled Barnum’s traveling show, where paying customers gaped in awe at the wonders of the world—at bands, at spectacles, at Stewart Brand’s multimedia piece America Needs Indians, the Native American awareness show that had become a staple of the acid tests. Much of the spontaneity and danger was canned; only the freaks were real. Jerry Garcia described it as “old home week” for “every beatnik, every hippie, every coffeehouse hangout person from all over the state,” all of whom were “freshly psychedelicized,” some of whom were “jumping off balconies into blankets and then bouncing up and down.” Kesey, who had been convicted only days before for the La Honda bust, was forbidden by the judge (and by Graham) to attend. Naturally, he attended anyway, wearing “a gold lamé space suit with a helmet.” A scene described by Charles Perry, Graham, and others suggests a changing of the counterculture’s guard. When Graham caught Kesey at the back of the hall, giving free admission to some Hell’s Angels cronies, he let him have it: “ ‘Goddamn son of a bitch, I’m busting my fucking balls out here to make a dime and you—’ Kesey simply closed his bubble helmet.” As Kesey recalled, “It was one of those balanced-up helmets. I just nodded and it went plop.”

  The Trips Festival’s psychedelic fun with toilet paper and drugs in San Francisco’s Longshoreman’s Hall, January 1966. (Courtesy of Gene Anthony, © Wolfgang’s Vault.)

  It was Kesey’s last stand. He bolted to Mexico to beat his drug charge. But Graham, who had turned the biggest profit of his life, was only getting settled. Within a month he had held his last Mime Troupe benefit and was staging for-profit shows at the Fillmore, under the Barnumesque title “Bill Graham Presents.” Following a marketing strategy that hadn’t missed a step since the Gilded Age, Graham seized on the vogue for Day-Glo art nouveau posters and sound-and-light spectacles. It was Chanfrau’s “Mose” franchise all over again: Graham repackaged the latest California fun in an on-the-spot Wild West show. The big magazines and television played right into his hands, inadvertently advertising the far-out hippie scene and making San Francisco, over the next three years, the preferred destination for America’s restless youth. Along with the head shops and other Haight Street storefronts, the constant rock shows at the legendary Fillmore—and at Red Dog Chet Helms’s Avalon Ballroom—turned the counterculture into big business. With similar alacrity, as they had with bootlegging during Prohibition, crime syndicates bullied into the hippies’ pot market, and Owsley, who still owned the LSD game, was branching out to Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere. Whatever the rebellious origins of these pleasures, they were quickly becoming mass entertainment.

  IN THE SPRING of 1966, while new white argonauts poured into the Haight, the Mime Troupe rehearsed its most disruptive prank yet. They wanted a break from sixteenth-century Italy; they wanted to do an all-American show. They ran a stunningly tone-deaf attack on stereotypes called A Minstrel Show: Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel. Ron Davis got the idea when he discovered “that minstrel shows were a part of our cultural heritage from 1830 to 1920 and, at its peak, there were three hundred floating companies, from town to city, amateur and professional.” As usual, he meant to stun: “We were not for the suppression of differences,” he explained. “Rather, by exaggerating the differences we punctured the cataracts of ‘color blind’ liberals, disrupted ‘progressive’ consciousness and made people think twice about eating watermelon.” In other words, whereas early minstrels used black stereotypes for white entertainment, the Mime Troupe used them to poke fun at whites and what Davis called “tolerance.” In both cases, of course, African Americans themselves were simply tools, cartoons—objects, not sources, of biting comedy.

  A Minstrel Show generated little new material. Most of its jokes, songs, and walk-arounds were lifted wholesale from nineteenth-century playbooks. The show corked up both whites and blacks (there were always four of each on stage), a seeming innovation to “unnerve” the audience and “fuck up their prejudices”; but Barnum’s sleight of hand had already been a staple of postbellum minstrelsy, when blackface was the closest black performers could get to legitimate theater, and in neither century did blacks in blackface go far, of course, in fucking up anyone’s prejudices. On the contrary, blacks’ identity disappeared into blackface: their actual presence was traded for a joke, and in both centuries for jokes that were written by whites. Perhaps more pernicious yet, then, were the Mime Troupe’s new caricatures and stories, which seemed to update prejudice for the civil rights era. They added an aggressive Black Panther–like “Nigger” and the story of a verbally abusive black “Stud” who picks up a fawning, vulnerable white “Chick.” They also resurrected “Uncle Tom,” with full knowledge that this fictional figure had been “lambasted” by the civil rights movement; as if by turning him into T. D. Rice’s Jim Crow, they made him a “wise conniver” and, in Davis’s words, “learned to respect him.” The show recounts a comic black history “lesson” that makes revered African Americans (from Crispus Attucks to George Washington Carver to Martin Luther King) the butts of crude and easy jokes. (The lessons behind such slurs and insults never come to light.) At center stage was the white MC, Robert Slattery, not in blackface. And though Davis called him the “thing to be attacked”—“white America in the middle of these screaming, ranting darkies”—he had a “great, mature, stone WASPish face like a fine Clark Kent” and he made “the perfect ringmaster.” No ridiculous screaming and ranting for him. Dramatically, symbolically, he kept the old hierarchy firmly intact.

  A Minstrel Show met with some trouble in its two years on the road. Only two black actors stayed on for the duration; others either failed to meet Davis’s standards or were, he implied, just too sensitive. The show was frequently closed on college campuses as it made its first West Coast tour, but only for the script’s graphic sexual content. Ironically, its controversy raised its prestige among the “color-blind” progressives it had meant to shock. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of California, for instance, called it “a courageous and creative act.” The ACLU stepped in that September when three of its actors were arrested in Denver. And drama critics welcomed it with rave reviews—not only in the New York Times and The New Yorker but also in the left-wing Nation and People’s World. White liberals, as it turned out, loved to be shocked, even at
the cost of African-American dignity. What’s more, it was hip to throw their support behind the vaunted S.F. Mime Troupe. The performance scholar Claudia Orenstein praises the play as offering “an empowering vision of black power … rather than merely a derogatory one.” (On the contrary, the play embraces the derogatory.) She misses the mark by suggesting that the play “deconstruct[s] and subvert[s] black stereotypes” (it reconstructs them), but she also misses the troupe’s dark purpose. “People thought we were on their side,” Davis wrote in 1975. “People thought it was a civil rights integration show. Not so, we were cutting deeper into prejudices than integration allowed.” They were exacerbating racial trouble. It was dirty work, but A Minstrel Show did it—all in a divisive sense of fun.

  A Minstrel Show marked only the edge of a chasm between San Francisco’s white hipsters and struggling blacks. Despite their attempts to understand each other, they were basically taking different trips. The largely black Fillmore neighborhood borders on the Haight, but the black and hippie communities had little to do with each other; in addition to historic race and class tensions, their needs and values were often opposed. Many blacks resented a young white movement that was bent on mocking, rejecting, and destroying all the middle-class privileges they had yet to achieve: suburban homes, political hegemony, and (perhaps most galling) good education. Hippies called blacks “spades,” a hip and allegedly non-derogatory epithet—but an epithet all the same. It was hip for hippies to appreciate “spades,” kind of like the Mime Troupe did. The journalist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in 1968, “[T]he hippies use black people as whites always have in America, as the people who are truly affective, emotional, sensual, and uninhibited.” For many white hippies, blacks were real; they were rebellious company to keep, in theory. But as von Hoffman observed, less than fifty blacks living in the Haight had “become a hippy.” And as the sociologist Lewis Yablonsky witnessed at a Haight-Ashbury town hall meeting—where the citizens wore flamboyant costumes; where kids and dogs tussled in the marijuana smoke—real black fun could be a tough sell. A well-known black activist named Scooter, joined by a line of thirty black men, stood up to promote tickets for a community dance. He could hardly contain his hostility: “We don’t want violence or trouble. But we could have it, baby. We want for our kids the things you people have put down. We want good food, jobs, houses, and cars. Dig? … The honkies downtown, the Birchers and the bigots like they’re all buying tickets. None of you hip people buy tickets. Don’t you love us?” The room applauded, and a few bought tickets (for $1.50—a buck less than a typical Bill Graham ticket), but most people said they were hard up themselves.

  On September 27, 1966, in the African-American neighborhood of Hunter’s Point, cops chased Matthew Johnson, a black teenager suspected of stealing a car, trapped him against a chain-link fence, and shot him in the back. This murder—and its immediate dismissal by city government—touched off two days of riots and vandalism and a military-style retaliation from the National Guard, 1,200 of whom had been mustered in Candlestick Park. An unseasonable heat wave elevated tensions. The Guard marched and drove tanks down Third Street, soon shooting into buildings with automatic weapons and drawing gunfire, rocks, and bottles from the locals. In the end, 44 were injured, 146 arrested; $100,000 in damage was done, and a citywide curfew was enforced. Just as the hippie community was starting to thrive, the San Francisco black community—like so many others in late 1960s America—was plunged into devastation that would plague it for decades.

  In the aftermath of the Hunter’s Point riots, SDS and other activist groups staged protests outside the Mission Street Armory. They also marched their cause down Haight Street, waving signs reaching out to the “Psychedelic Community,” some of whom heckled their own messages in return: “Go back to school where you belong!” Emmett Grogan, a twenty-two-year-old Duke University dropout from Brooklyn (a Mime Trouper who spuriously claimed the army had discharged him for clinical schizophrenia), was amused to see activists butting heads with Haight-Ashbury merchants over the correct response to the curfew. The activists wanted to make it a cause; the merchants wanted to keep the peace. Grogan, along with Mime Troupers Billy Landout and Peter Berg, preferred to stir up the conflict itself. Letting themselves into the SDS offices to liberate the mimeograph machine, they ran off a series of nose-thumbing screeds that have since been known as the Digger Papers. Maintaining their anonymity (like the Sons of Liberty); pulling pranks in the spirit of Holland’s anarchistic Provos and Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty”; naming themselves after seventeenth-century English rebels who “defied the landlords” and “defied the laws” (as the traditional song about them goes) and redistributed food among the poor, these new Diggers deplored private property and reveled in nonviolent disruption. The Digger Papers accosted the general public from telephone poles and storefronts; they called bullshit, usually with excellent humor, on everyone from the Learyites’ Oracle to the Berkeley-based radical activists. The most commonly reproduced Digger Paper, called “Take a Cop to Dinner,” burlesqued a campaign by Haight Street’s commercial association (HIP) urging hippies to sit down and eat with the cops. It accused all of society—“Pimps,” “Racketeers,” drug dealers, the “Catholic Church,” “Establishment newspapers,” et cetera—of pandering to the police. Its joke was built on parallel structure:

  Places of entertainment take cops to dinner with free booze and admission to shows.

  Merchants take cops to dinner with discounts and gifts.

  Neighborhood Committees and Social Organizations take cops to dinner with free discussions offering discriminating insights into hipsterism, black militancy and the drug culture.

  Cops take cops to dinner by granting each other immunity to prosecution for misdemeanors and anything else they can get away with.

  Cops take themselves to dinner by inciting riots.

  All of the Haight (especially the ridiculed merchants and leaders) wanted to know who the Diggers were, so the Diggers responded in their papers and by personal telegram: “Regarding inquiries concerned with the identity and whereabouts of the DIGGERS: We are happy to report that the DIGGERS are not that.”

  Within a week the Diggers were backing up their papers with bold community action. Most notably, they tapped San Francisco’s food surplus (some stolen, some donated, some day-old leftovers) and prepared ten-gallon milk cans of hot stew and wooden crates of green salad to serve to the rising numbers of street people. It was called “Free Food Theatre,” it was passed through a one-story-tall yellow “Frame of Reference,” and it happened every day at 4 p.m. under a eucalyptus in the Panhandle. “It’s free because it’s yours!” pamphlets announced. A hundred or so customers appeared every day, recognizable by their bowls and spoons. Grogan and the others spent their days foraging, and a group of women (some of them Antioch College dropouts) ran the primitive kitchens, in keeping with hippies’ typically retrograde gender roles. The Berkeley Barb, one of the Bay Area’s new radical newspapers, followed the Diggers’ operations closely and saw their high spirits and irreverence rub off on the patrons. When a reporter asked who the Diggers were, a girl smiled and responded: “Are you a digger?” Another kid shouted “ ‘FUCK THE DIGGERS!!!’… and everybody laughed and repeated it.” They horsed around with apples and stew, shouting “Food as Medium!” But mostly the people got their fill, then passed around their cigarettes. Free food could be counted on every day at four, despite occasional meddling by cops and the Health Department (who were told it was just a “picnic”), but as the numbers of patrons doubled and quadrupled, the Diggers made the hungry work for it—making them chase down their famous gold bus (known around town as the Yellow Submarine) or pry their own dinner from the hot, hammered-shut milk cans. For at bottom these liberators were Mime Troupers, pranksters.

  Throughout the fall of 1966, as capitalist horse sense took root in the Haight, the Diggers waged war on private property. Disgusted by condescending “charity,” insisting they weren’t “he
lping anybody” but only “doing [their] individual thing,” they stepped up their free food efforts; they worked with the Human Switchboard to find free “crash-pads” for the homeless, and they turned a six-car garage on Page Street into the first of their “free stores.” Named for the empty picture frames left behind in the garage, which they painted and nailed into a puzzling mosaic, The Free Frame of Reference, as the first store was called, posted a surprising policy: Everything is free, and “you’re in charge.” Everything: kitchen supplies, furniture, knickknacks, books, a surplus of white oxfords that the Diggers tie-dyed, even a box of “free money” in place of a cash register. It was impossible to shoplift; those who tried were instructed to take more. Peter Coyote, who managed the Cole Street free store, called A Trip Without a Ticket, described the Diggers’ stores and stunts as effects of their “life acting” philosophy. Their message was unequivocal activity: “The Diggers attracted actors (trained or not) who wanted to employ these skills in their everyday lives, constructing events outside the theater that were ‘free,’ financially and structurally, so that they might exist outside of conventional expectations and defenses.” Any American had to be shocked by their willful anti-consumerism. But Roy Ballard, the twenty-seven-year-old civil rights activist who managed the Fillmore’s Black Man’s Free Store, took a more practical stance: explaining the hippies’ fantastical ideas for restarting their parents’ game from scratch, he said “the white kids are more advanced but also less realistic.” Of all their theories, pranks, and pipe dreams, only free merchandise made sense to him.