LOST RACE UNEARTHED

LOST RACE UNEARTHED

THE HAIGHT-ASHBURY: A HISTORY by Charles Perry (Random House)

Richard C. Walls

Bohemia is always with us. But in the late ’60s a curious thing happened in that Bohemia. Instead of merely budding colorfully on the national periphery, it actually extended its multi-hued tendrils into the very heart of mainstream popular culture. Suddenly it seemed that almost everyone was hip or at least making a game try at it.. .and though hipness came, then as now, in regional flavors, the visible center of it all was San Francisco, specifically the part of town known as the Haight-Ashbury district. Most praised, damned, and imitated, the Haight-Ashbury edition was the one that stuck. The phenomenon began there around ’65 and had already peaked and began its slide by ’68, which was just about when other cities were beginning to respond with their own versions. By the time the Democratic Party held its convention in San Fran (last summer, remember?), and the Republicans (formerly known as the lunatic fringe of the right-wing but currently riding high on a wave of faddish and edgy patriotism, the kind that often appears between national screw-ups) were getting mucho mileage out of the appropriateness of the site since (as everybody knows SF is, and always has been, weird-o heaven, an enclave of punks, pinko’s, pansies, and pornographers)—by then the dreaded hippies were nowhere to be skewered. Gone. Along with acid tests, be-ins, spades, bananas, freeform radio, Diggers, Hell’s Angels...even Jerry Falwell would not be so corny as to bring up “hippies.” True, a few of the era’s more prominent relics still walk the land, e.g., Dr. Tim Leary, forever taking it on the road, Abbie Hoffman, tilling more conventional lefty fields, and Ronald Reagan, repression’s kindly frontman who, at the time of Haight-Ashbury’s glory, was the governor of California. But the hirsute wave that threatened to engulf the whole planet had vanished into thin air. Or so it seemed.

People tend to look back on that era with either nostalgia (the kids today are so fucking boring) or hostility (John Milius, writer/director of Red Dawn, has referred to the period as “the pansification of our culture”) or embarrassment (what could have possessed me to wear that in public!), but Charles Perry has undertaken to examine all the minutiae of the Haight’s ebb and flow objectively. And for that reason his book is, for the first four-fifths of its length, a little on the boring side—after all, who really cares what corner the 24-hour House Of Donuts was on (Frederick and Stanyan, if you must know) or that the health food store on Page Street named Far Fetched Foods was commonly referred to as Blind Jerry’s? On the other hand, there are here the seeds (get it?) of a new edition of Trivial Pursuit. Sample Questions: Who invented the light show? (Professor Seymour Locks, in 1952); who coined the term “love generation”? (SF police chief Thomas Cahill); who popularized the word “acid”? (Ken Kesey); and what are the true origins of the names Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe & The Fish? (I’m not telling.) Also of more than passing interest is Ferry’s chronicle of the Diggers, organizers of the free food/free store hustles, whose bracing skepticism toward the love/peace revolution sounds distinctly up to date.

But the book really (finally) heavies up with the essay What Was That? which attempts to put the HaightAshbury outburst into some sociological and cultural perspective and tells how various things—the ’50s beatnik subculture, avant-garde trends in the arts (specifically music and theater), the affluent society, the baby boom, the cold war, Viet Nam—set the stage for the HaightAshbury heyday, while other things—speed, heroin, overpopulation—led to its decline. The book ends on a note of hope that this reviewer finds more wistful than substantial, though one does hope that the next visible widespread rebellion will be less naive, less idealistic, and less prone to nurture pseudo-mystical fascists. At least one knows it will have, if it’s really true that human beings learn from the tragic errors of their past, a less florid dress code.