American Fun Read online

  The Free Frame of Reference was the operating base for the Diggers’ wild ideas. That Halloween, they moved their yellow frame up the block and staged a show with two nine-foot-tall puppets by the sculptor La Mortadella. Five hundred spectators spilled out into traffic. When the cops failed to break up the crowd, they mirthlessly tried negotiating with the puppets and inadvertently “tickled the people silly.” In the end the cops seized the Diggers (their first arrest) and couldn’t quite get over the puppets—assuming that they were made to “hurt people.” “Will you look at how fuckin’ big they are!” Five performers were booked for “creating a public nuisance,” but Grogan remembered it as a “fun bust.” When the charges were dropped two days later, Grogan, Berg, La Mortadella, and the others were pictured pulling Marx Brothers antics (ass-kicks, obscene European hand gestures) above the fold in the San Francisco Chronicle.

  On Thanksgiving the Diggers opened their garage doors for a public “Meatfest,” and on December 16 they held their Death of Money Parade, a lugubriously fun, full-participation charade in which Mime Troupers (without R. G. Davis’s blessing) dressed like reapers, dwarves, and lepers; in which girls in togas passed out pennywhistles and hand signs (reading “Now!”) and pallbearers shouldered a black-draped coffin. The Hell’s Angels—who had become Haight Street’s sometime protectors since the Pranksters had turned them on to acid—provided a rumbling escort. Competing groups led the crowd in nonsense call-and-response: “Oooo!” and “Aaahhh!”; “Ssssh!” and “Be cool!” “A Munibus driver,” Grogan remembered, “got out of his coach and danced in the street with a girl, and his passengers disembarked to mix in the fun.” And despite the lack of a parade permit, the cops wisely honored the chants of four thousand insistent revelers: “The streets belong to the people! The streets belong to the people!” In the milling aftermath, however, when they busted Angels Hairy Henry and Chocolate George for ostensible parole violations, the crowd marched a noisy candlelight vigil in their favor (“We want Hairy Henry! We want Chocolate George!”) and filled the Death of Money casket with bail. Two weeks later, Hell’s Angels showed their appreciation by hosting a “New Year’s Wail” in the Panhandle—free music, free beer, the first free party of 1967.

  Most of the Diggers hailed from New York, but like the forty-niners they administered a California education. For all of their disruptions and childish absurdity, the Diggers were a force for civic good in a generally outlaw society—a subculture of runaways and distracted idealists who exposed themselves to rampant hepatitis, VD, meth addiction, poverty, drug wars, rape, and frequent abuse by pimps (who seized on “free love” teenyboppers), Hell’s Angels (who treated weak hippies like servants), the Mafia (who bullied dealers into their drug trade), and, constantly, cops and Feds. Unlike the self-interested Merry Pranksters, the Diggers fought for community values in a rough and improvised society. They organized free food and shelter and arranged for free medical and legal services. “The Digger Papers” offered free ideas on starting everything from free banks and automotive garages to “Balls, Happenings, Theatre, Dance, and spontaneous experiments in joy.”

  This Haight-Ashbury ethos, this Port Huron–style democracy played out in real time with “spontaneous experiments in joy,” metastasized throughout the country during the middle 1960s. More than popular music, itinerant teens, and alarmed reporting from the mainstream media, the “underground press” deserves recognition for disseminating the exciting news. The underground press gave unguarded voice to the ethics, pleasures, habits, styles, and generally leftist politics of the era’s urban and college-town youth cultures. Sold by mail or in the nation’s newsstands, cafés, and head shops (which likewise boomed, not coincidentally, after America bombed Vietnam), the undergrounds mixed radical politics with the hip new formulas for public pleasure: folk, rock, free love, gathering, and all the modern ways to get high. Originating in L.A. and the San Francisco Bay Area but soon spreading to most mid-sized American towns, cheaply produced and distributed by amateurs—indeed, often identifying their publications with revolutionary-era broadsheets—these typically mimeographed “newssheets,” as the historian John McMillian has convincingly argued, espoused an SDS-influenced “participatory democracy.” Their tone, like that of the rude and bawdy “underground comix” with which they shared a readership, was decidedly irreverent, reflecting the youth culture from which they sprang. They mimicked the scrappiness of Mad Magazine, one of the 1950s’ few mainstream outlets for biting satire and cynicism, and of the lavishly offensive Realist, a perfectly obscene New York magazine that gleefully skewered America’s sacred cows—and whose founder, Paul Krassner, “demand[ed] a blood test” when accused of fathering the underground press. But even as they took root in many regions and “scenes,” Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise was the dominant code in their DNA.

  Haight District denizens help Diggers celebrate the “Death of Money,” December 17, 1966. (Courtesy of Gene Anthony, © Wolfgang’s Vault.)

  For they made reporting an instrument of fun. More than just satirical opinion papers, they mixed the community-building populism of the 1830s “penny papers” with the out-group pride of the 1860s Washoe papers and supported local countercultural activity; they became what McMillian calls “community switchboards.” They fostered the Diggers’ lifestyle of “Free.” They helped hard-up folks in their teens and twenties track down food, clothing, shelter, wheels, health care, and lawyers. They also provided an open forum for the pursuit of drugs, music, protest, street theater, and all the bare facts of a purely groovy life. The underground papers were crucial to off-the-grid living, and in the summer of 1966 they expanded their reach by forming an “anarchistic organization” called the Underground Press Syndicate, or UPS. This national organ for the “Fuck Censorship press” allowed the undergrounds to swap their materials, inspired twenty-five new newssheets in just half a year, and led to a total national circulation of 250,000 by the start of 1967. The undergrounds aligned themselves with the Sons of Liberty, and they proved to have a similar effect. They helped lefties, hippies, dropouts, and heads form thriving “scenes” across the country.

  Fittingly, in the spirit of their nineteenth-century antecedents who refused to take fact-based journalism too seriously, it was one of the original and most influential undergrounds, the Berkeley Barb, that authored the 1960s’ biggest hoax, the “Electrical Banana.” In the Barb’s March 3, 1967, issue, Ed Denison, the music columnist, offered a tongue-in-cheek recipe for dried banana peels and suggested that smoking them had a cannabic effect. Denison, also the manager for Country Joe and the Fish, had smoked banana peels with the band a few months earlier; the only effects they had felt, as he well knew, came from the LSD they were taking. His article’s recommendation for “50 mg. of acid swallowed” said as much. But the underground press seized on the story, and quickly Time and Newsweek joined in. Suddenly there was a run on bananas in supermarkets from Berkeley to Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the spring of ’67’s loamy cultural soil, the rumor sprang up like dandelions. Watering it was Donovan’s song “Mellow Yellow,” which had been throbbing on the airwaves since January. Its third verse made the cryptic prediction: “E-lec-trical Banana is gonna be a sudden craze, / E-lec-trical Banana is bound to be the very next phase.” Even though Donovan would later specify that his banana was a yellow vibrator, his phrasing gave the rumor serious weight. And in May, the Velvet Underground’s first album, signed Andy Warhol, boasted a peel-able banana sticker—though it had been produced too early to be related. Coincidence? Who cared? It all became part of the big banana craze. As with the great Moon Hoax of 1835, or with Dan De Quille’s 1867 “The Traveling Stones of Pahrangat Valley” (which fooled geologists in far-off England), the people were too tickled to ask serious questions (banana smoking became a short-lived fad), and the scientists who tested it, like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, proved themselves to be total squares. To those in the know, sometimes a banana wasn’t just a banana. Thus did b
ananas become the people’s icon in the early months of the Summer of Love. Bananas were represented by a half-crooked, half-obscene finger gesture. Bananas inspired a “banana pledge” at the Central Park Be-In. Bananas also provoked U.S. Representative Frank Thompson (D-N.J.) to join the fun and propose the Banana Labeling Act of 1967.

  THE DIGGERS BELIEVED spontaneous fun was essential to a free citizenry. They goosed the public with pranks and jokes, and nearly every Sunday over the next couple of years—making good on their protests against Bill Graham and Chet Helms, whose concert halls they often picketed—they employed their skills at outdoor production and staged free concerts in Golden Gate Park, where they always served free food for the masses and featured bands that charged admission at the Fillmore. Reminiscent of the 1760s Stamp Act protests, where citizens of all classes swarmed into the streets to liberate themselves in masquerade, these Sunday gatherings attracted them all: “aborigines, Tonto, Inquisitor-General Torquemada, Shiva holy men, cowboy bikers, every shade of gender bender, flower children, urban junkies, stockbrokers with cautiously expressed face-paint, dentists on dope, real estate agents disguised as flower-children”—as Peter Coyote recalled. But these Sundays in the park didn’t protest anything. They simply were: the liberated people in all their glory. The first such party, the famed Human Be-In on January 14, 1967, was fortified with five thousand free turkey sandwiches (turkeys courtesy of Owsley Stanley) and what seemed like the lowest-key American fun. A sea of humanity filled the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park for no other reason than just to hang out. Everybody did their own groovy thing—“took drugs, danced, painted their faces, dressed in outrageous costumes, crawled into the bushes and made love, fired up the barbecues, pitched tents, and sold wares—crystals, tie-dyes, hash pipes, earrings, hair ties, and political tracts. Fifty thousand people played flutes, guitars, tambourines, tablas, bongos, congas, sitars, and saxophones, and sang, harmonized, and reveled in their number and variety, aware that they were an emergent social force.” Hell’s Angels babysat missing children, and afterwards everybody picked up the litter.

  Everyone liked the Be-In but the Diggers themselves. It was too white, too commercial (thanks to drug dealers and the Diggers’ archenemies, the Haight Independent Proprietors [HIP]), and too stage-focused on celebrities like Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and a sensational new radical named Jerry Rubin. (Emmett Grogan called it “the love shuck.”) So they planned a weekend-long happening of their own—“The Invisible Circus: The Right of Spring”—to educate the district about having fun. It was advertised by word of mouth and a limited number of psychedelic red pamphlets and slated to start on February 24 at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church on Ellis and Taylor, whose young black minister, Cecil Williams, had been widening his congregation in recent years to accommodate “San Francisco’s diverse communities of hippies, addicts, gays, the poor, and the marginalized.”

  But even this ultra-hip church wasn’t ready for what the Diggers and their co-conspirators, the Mime Troupe and the Artists Liberation Front, had in store. The chapel was split up into zones, each one vying to outdo the other in its “improbable and outrageous” activities. The basement hall was piled three feet high in shredded plastic and divided into a free-love recreation room and a cafeteria serving acid-spiked Tang. The church offices became dedicated “love-making salons”—tricked out with mattresses, “lubricants,” and dead bolts. A rather stuffy lecture on pornography was interrupted, from behind, by a penis appearing through a glory hole and got much more interesting when a couple was carried in for a live sex demonstration. Naked belly dancers burst in through a paper wall, someone played Chopin’s “Death March” on the organ, and revelers and reporters coursed in by the thousands. Congas, laughter, and microphoned voices echoed in the candlelit air; Hell’s Angels copulated in the pews with a woman dressed like a nun; prostitutes brought their johns, transvestites coupled, and the writer Richard Brautigan wrote and published “Flash!” bulletins of everything he witnessed, with the help of his “John Dillinger Communication Company” toiling away in the basement. “Several couples,” wrote Grogan, who was prone to embellishment, “were draped over the main altar, fucking, as a giant, naked weight lifter towered above them, standing on top of some sort of tabernacle in a beam of light, masturbating and panting himself into a trance.”

  Grogan praised the “surreal harmony” of this “incredible Fellini wet-dream”: “everyone moving, watching, seeing it all, and no one afraid, but laughing joyfully, happy, and then a scream followed by a hushed silence with everything still for a moment until the person who screamed would laugh and give away the joke.” Coyote, who was home sick for the Circus, reported from hearsay a similarly surreal sense of harmony: “Permission was the rule, and despite the chaos, the conflagration of taboos and bizarre behavior, no one was hurt, wounded, shunned, or scorned.” No one, perhaps, but Glide’s dismayed deacons, whose church had been thoroughly defiled and who had been misled as to the nature of the happening. With some help from the cops, Glide doused the party’s flames before dawn, at which point the attendees moved their circus to the beach and watched the sunrise in the jittery manner, as one might assume, of the stragglers at the end of La Dolce Vita.

  Wild fun was had at the Invisible Circus, Merry Mount’s blasphemous mission accomplished, and in this extreme case of American fun, Coyote’s “safety-valve” metaphor seems perfectly appropriate: “it was simply like letting steam out of a pressure cooker: once accomplished, it was not necessary to repeat.”

  Some Haight-Ashbury pressure may have broken, but the party was far from over. And from then on out, the Diggers’ indefatigably antic spirit didn’t always keep the peace, not even at the laid-back Sunday gatherings in the park. By the spring of that year, 1967, when banana peels were smoldering, when resistance to the draft was starting to catch fire, the crowds grew bigger and more intense. Peter Berg, known to fellow Diggers as “the Hun,” had recently alerted media outlets that the nation’s teens would converge on San Francisco; with this prank, he created what the historian Alice Echols calls the “disastrous Summer of Love”—when the Gray Line Bus Company ran a national “Hippie Hop Tour,” when “seventy-five thousand kids spent their summer vacation in the Haight,” and when commercialism, addiction, racial tension, and rape ran rampant among the disorganized masses. Some Mime Troupe members, under Berg’s leadership, seized on the chance to stir things up. During one of the late-spring parties in the Panhandle, while Janis Joplin played and people got peacefully high on the lawn, the politically moderate young writer Joan Didion observed Peter Berg and others, all in blackface, working the crowd with plastic nightsticks. On their backs they sported antagonistic signs: “how many times you been raped, YOU LOVE FREAKS?” and “WHO STOLE CHUCK BERRY’S MUSIC?” They distributed flyers that warned “by august haight street will be a cemetery” because by “summer thousands of un-white un-suburban boppers are going to want to know why you’ve given up what they can’t get.” At one point they surrounded an African American, prodded him with nightsticks, and “bar[ed] their teeth.” The hostility was lost on one cheery kid, who told Didion that it was a “really groovy” thing called “street theatre,” but it wasn’t lost on a small group of blacks. One of them said, “Nobody stole Chuck Berry’s music, man … Chuck Berry’s music belongs to everybody.” When a blackface girl badgered him about the meaning of “everybody,” he responded, simply, “Everybody. In America.” In one phrase he accounted for the spread of black fun from the earliest slave circles to events like this one.

  But these minstrels weren’t interested in that kind of fun. They wanted blacks to attack the hippies in the name of economic justice. The blackface girl shot back at the black man: “What’d America ever do for you?… White kids here, they can sit in the Park all summer long, listening to the music they stole, because their bigshot parents keep sending them money. Who ever sends you money?” The black man didn’t take the bait; he simply told her such tactics wer
en’t “right.” Predictably, their prodding came to nothing. For much as A Minstrel Show had updated stereotypes for the civil rights era, so did Peter Berg’s blackface agitation grossly oversimplify African-American rage. To be sure, it wasn’t irritating street theater, it was Matthew Johnson’s murder by a cop that had touched off the Hunter’s Point riots.

  11

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  Revolution for the Hell of It

  THE YIPPIES, American fun’s most notorious activists, found their soul in underground journalism, in ornery rock ’n’ roll, in Che Guevara’s street politics, in Herbert Marcuse’s Freudian Marxism, in Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, and in the Mississippi “Freedom Summer” of 1964. They were also inspired by the Diggers’ troublemaking. Like the Artists Liberation Front (founded by Mime Troupe members among others), the Yippies wanted to marry radically democratic politics with pranks, street theater, disruption, absurdity, and sophisticated media blitzkriegs. Their fun resounded on a global scale.