In Search Of The Lost Chord - 1967 And The Hippie Idea - Danny Goldberg

 IN SEARCH OF THE LOST CHORD -

1967 AND THE HIPPIE IDEA -

DANNY GOLDBERG

In one of the first ever interviews with the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten famously declared "I hate hippies and all they stand for." At this, music journalist and first division Punk inner circle member Caroline Coon rebuked Rotten for the tabloid journalism manner in which he was denigrating hippie idealism, warning him that "the gutter press did to hippies what they're going to do to you." She was right. What was at first deemed to be some sort of threat - as in Punk as an attitude and a state of mind - was very quickly recuperated and reduced to a style of clothes, a sequence of chords, a set of restrictions and a meaningless sneer. Distorted to cartoon level, a burnt-out memory of how it might have been, bought up, souped-up, sold out and served up as just another cheap product for the consumer's head.

Punk, however, was for a brief moment so much more than that, kicking open not only doors that had always remained tightly locked but also windows, emergency exits, cat flaps and any other sort of entrance to another world historically slammed shut upon the unwashed, the unwelcome and the unwanted. 

"If you want to understand the Sixties, you need to understand the Fifties," Timothy Leary once said, and it was good advice. Likewise, if you want to understand the Seventies, you need to understand the Sixties and ad infinitum with the Eighties, Nineties, Noughties, etc. The Sixties and the hippie idea didn't just come from nowhere and likewise with the Seventies and Punk.

The 'lost chord' of which Danny Goldberg writes in his book In Search Of The Lost Chord is the collection of energies that in 1967 harmonized and created a single feeling that briefly but deeply penetrated into the hearts and minds of those who could hear it. An ephemeral collective vibe that permeated the culture at that time. Those energies were myriad and diverse, emanating from the influence of psychedelics, rebellion, demands for civil rights, calls for peace, radical therapy, music, fashion, political critique and so and so forth.

According to Joe Boyd, one of the founders of the legendary UFO club in London, the Sixties peaked in 1967 and there's some across the board agreement with this, not least from Allen Ginsberg who said the Be-In in San Francisco in '67 was "the last purely idealistic hippie event". It's an idea shored-up further by the funeral procession held in Haight Ashbury that same year proclaiming the death of 'Hippie'.

"A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah," said the then governor of California Ronald Reagan but what did he know and what was he doing anyway attempting to mock those who were only asking that peace be given a chance whilst children burned to death from American napalm in Vietnam? As John Lennon later asked: "What in the world are you thinking of, laughing in the face of love?"

The problem with Goldberg's book is that in a way it's too polite, that Goldberg is a bit too nice about things. Through rose-tinted glasses he differentiates between the actual hippie idea and the distorted cartoon version of it but the actual version he proffers is so fragmented that it's almost incoherent. A vast chunk of the book is him joining the many dots so as to create a lineage, like mapping out the stars in the heavens to form constellations. If you look closely, you can just make out the Plough, Ursa Major and Orion though you really need to squint. To put it another way, it's like counting the pieces of a jigsaw to see if they're all there without actually making the jigsaw.

"I can't see this lasting because the media are going to get here and pretty soon (Haight Ashbury) will turn into Rip Off Street," said Paul McCartney whilst on a visit to San Francisco in 1967 and there's an unspoken consensus on this it seems. To such an extent, in fact, that it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. In San Francisco, coffee shops start selling 'love burgers' and tourist buses start including hippies as a highlight for sightseers - "Look! There's one!" In Amsterdam, people begin stealing and repainting the white bicycles. The term 'spiritual materialism' comes into play where pursuits of spirituality are turned into ego trips where supposed spiritual credentials are flaunted - rather like proto-versions of Russell Brand.

In London at the Roundhouse, a conference is held attended by the likes of RD Laing, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael and Allen Ginsberg. Founder of the San Francisco Diggers, Emmett Grogan is there too and delivers a fiery speech that receives a standing ovation, only for him to reveal the words had been an English translation of a speech Adolf Hitler had given to the Reichstag in 1937. The point Grogan making being to sensitize the audience to the moral emptiness of what in some quarters was being passed for revolutionary rhetoric.

The soul of hippiedom was a battleground where different warring factions were fighting it out for the upper hand and dominative representation. Some armed with flowers, some armed with guns. Some armed with hallucinogenic drugs and the Bhagavad Gita, some armed with the dollar and the power and influence of mainstream mass media - heralded by their attack dogs, the gutter press, as Caroline Coon later put it.

This is the nub of In Search Of The Lost Chord and what Danny Goldberg in a roundabout way identifies. It's easy to say, of course, that money won out but that's the narrative directed by the mainstream and as the mainstream is always conservative - enforced and maintained to preserve the status quo - it's only actually one side of the story. Danny Goldberg's 'lost chord' is another side. A single note buried in the symphony. A single flame flickering in blazing sunlight. A notion, an idea. An idea that's worth reading about, worth thinking about and worth preserving.

John Serpico