1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (45 page)

According to journalist Philip Norman, the FBI and Britain’s MI5 conspired to bust the Stones.
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After the 1967 police raid at Richards’s residence, Jagger was given three months for a single speed tablet, while Richards was given a year in prison for allowing marijuana to be smoked in his home. This backfired when public outcry over the severity of the band members’ sentences led to their early release and enshrined them as rock’s ultimate bad boys.

Conversely, the Lovin’ Spoonful were undone when guitarist Zal Yanovsky gave the authorities the name of his dealer, to avoid deportation after he and bassist Steve Boone were arrested for possession of pot in San Francisco. To the rock community, such an act was as treacherous as when film director Elia Kazan named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Yanovsky quit the group and went back to Canada.

Donovan was also busted for pot, and fined two hundred fifty British pounds. The Byrds were not busted, but their song “Eight Miles High” was called out as a drug song by the trade publication
The Gavin Report
,
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resulting in a ban by many radio stations, and bringing to an end the group’s time as a major commercial force.

The marijuana that the bands had celebrated had become their Achilles’ heel, allowing authorities to persecute them in ways they couldn’t have had the musicians just been politically outspoken. But the musicians didn’t need the government to destroy them; they could do it themselves. Many rapidly progressed from pot and LSD to coke and heroin, just like the educational films had warned. The musicians’ realization that they had the heroin monkey on their back, along with the police busts and acid casualties, turned the music dark and downbeat in the last two years of the decade. Four of the scene’s biggest luminaries would self-destruct by age twenty-seven: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Brian Jones.

Media overhype and the John Phillips–penned anthem “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)” drove countless young people and tourists to Haight-Ashbury, and as a consequence, runaways, hustlers, and pimps overwhelmed the neighborhood. Speed and heroin replaced pot and acid. Rape, ODs, and crime escalated, despite the best efforts of community groups such as the Diggers to provide free food and crash pads. A schism developed between the Beautiful People/“trust fund hippies” and the “ghastly drop-outs, bums and spotty youths, all out of their brains,” as George Harrison’s wife, Pattie, called the kids she met in the Haight. After the 1969 murder spree by Charles Manson’s “family,” rich LA hipsters quickly walled themselves off from the street, just as the Stones did after one of the Hells Angels fatally stabbed a black man in front of their stage at Altamont.

Minds opened by drugs made many receptive to the growing number of cults. The Process Church of the Final Judgment broke off from Scientology in 1965 and was an early influence on Manson, with its embrace of both God and the Devil. The same year saw the release of a movie about the drug addiction program Synanon, which would soon declare itself a church where women had to shave their heads, married couples had to sleep with other cult members, and men had to have vasectomies. These cults were just the tip of the iceberg as the consciousness movement of the next decade saw an explosion in new organizations, some benign and some abusive.

Beyond the counterculture, the dark side of the sexual revolution would manifest in skyrocketing divorce rates and the return of sexually transmitted diseases. As the availability of the Pill allowed women to forestall pregnancy and their financial independence increased, divorce for all Americans doubled from 10.6 per 1,000 in 1965 to 22.8 per 1,000 in 1979. For baby boomers specifically, the divorce rate tripled in the 1970s. Since the 1960s, the number of families with just one parent in the household tripled.
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Per the Centers for Disease Control, gonorrhea shot up from 259,000 cases in 1960 to 600,000 cases in 1970, though syphilis shrank from 122,000 reported cases in 1960 to 91,000 in 1970.
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There was also an increase in the annual number of outpatient visits for genital herpes in the United States, rising from 20,000 in the late 1960s to 150,000 in the mid-1990s. By 1982, more than 20 million Americans had acquired herpes II in a population of 232 million.
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At the height of
American prosperity, President Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. believed the United States had a chance to win the War on Poverty and eradicate slums. But Johnson’s Great Society was put to the side almost immediately as Vietnam continued to eat up more of the federal government’s tax dollars.

The civil rights coalition split between those who believed in nonviolence and a militant faction that initially found its spokesman in the SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael began using the term
Black Power
during the March Against Fear in June 1966, and released his manifesto
The Basis of Black Power
that year. After the SNCC’s Lowndes County Freedom Organization adopted the black panther as its symbol, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, in October 1966. Briefly, SNCC and the Panthers worked together, but the FBI’s undercover COINTELPRO program sowed division between the two groups, leading Newton to accuse Carmichael of being a CIA agent. Carmichael moved from the United States to Guinea in 1968.

Meanwhile, the long hair and incendiary proclamations of many in the antiwar movement alienated middle-of-the-road citizens who might have been more receptive to the message had it come from people who dressed and acted more conventionally. Beyond appearances, drugs compromised the mental clarity of many radicals, who believed that a socialist American Revolution was imminent. The Weather Underground (named after a line in Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”) began a campaign of bombing government buildings and banks affiliated with the war effort in Vietnam. They warned the people in the buildings before the bombs went off, but one of their bank robberies resulted in the death of three people. The excesses of the Underground were easy for conservatives to vilify, scaring the mainstream white majority toward the Republican Party of Nixon and Reagan.

Still, perhaps the radicals would not have been able to succeed even if they had dressed as conservatively as Martin Luther King Jr. In the spring of 1968, King announced plans to build an encampment in Washington, DC, for his Poor People’s Campaign. The idea behind the campaign was that it would bring the city to a halt through civil disobedience and force Congress to pass an Economic Bill of Rights for the poor, which would guarantee jobs at a living wage or adequate income for those unable to find jobs. With the campaign scheduled to begin on May 2, King was assassinated on April 4.

Meanwhile, riots became an annual urban event for the latter half of the decade. In cities such as Detroit and Newark, most whites quickly moved away, but black capitalists were not able to replace the white businesses with their own on the scale necessary to generate the tax base needed for quality schools and police. Crime and the heroin epidemic swamped the inner cities of the 1970s, to be replaced by the crack wars of the 1980s. South Central Los Angeles rioted again in 1992. By then, Detroit was long a ghost town.

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In 1968, Richard Nixon branded
Americans who loathed the hippies, activists, and radicals the Silent Majority, but it was Ronald Reagan who most effectively mobilized this majority to end the era of progressivism.

Reagan began as a Roosevelt liberal in his youth, but his politics began to shift once he became president of the Screen Actors Guild in the early 1950s. During his tenure he worked secretly with the FBI, alerting them to Communists in the film industry. After his term as SAG president ended, he became spokesman for
General Electric Theater
, a CBS anthology show that ran from 1953 through 1962. He also performed many speaking duties for GE, then the largest corporation on the planet. He increasingly espoused the need to shrink the growing federal government and, in particular, lower taxes. Reagan denounced Medicare as socialism and warned that if it weren’t stopped, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”
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His 1964 speech made in support of presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, “A Time For Choosing,” put Reagan on the map as a serious political contender. In 1965 he wrapped his final job as an actor, hosting the TV series
Death Valley Days
, and published his autobiography
Where’s the Rest of Me?
He toured the state of California to see if he could successfully run for governor there, and spoke out against the Fair Housing Act, saying that “if an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.”
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He vowed “to send the welfare bums back to work” and “clean up the mess”
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at Berkeley by investigating “charges of Communism and blatant sexual misbehavior on the Berkeley campus.” These included “sexual orgies so vile I cannot describe them to you,”
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not to mention Vietnam Day Committee dances in which underage kids reveled while psychedelic movies featuring nude torsos were projected.

Reagan branded antiwar demonstrations “the fruit of appeasement,”
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and didn’t need to say much about the Watts riots—he just sat back and let the white vote oust liberal governor Pat Brown and sweep him into power.

In 1980 he chose Philadelphia, Mississippi, as the place to announce his campaign for president, using it as an opportunity to speak out on his belief in states’ rights. The city was most famous for being the place where the Klan murdered three civil rights workers in 1964.

After LBJ, Republicans controlled the White House for twenty of the next twenty-four years, followed by a Clinton administration that was accommodating to business. The end of liberal consensus meant that there was little political opposition to globalization, as corporations escaped the American unions into the developing world with the help of technology, outsourcing, and automation. CEOs continued to live in the United States, but employed workers elsewhere at subsistence wages, then sold the goods back to Americans. Well-paying manufacturing jobs declined as nonsustaining service-sector jobs increased. The weakening of organized labor, loss of the industrial sector to globalization, return of Germany and Japan as economic competitors, the rise of China—plus the added competition as women and minorities rose in the U.S. workforce—resulted in the stagnation of middle-class wages for half a century (when adjusted for inflation).

In some ways, it was as if the yin and yang had flipped. In the early 1960s, the country had been repressed and unequal, but offered economic security for many. Now the country was culturally free, but the middle class was shrinking.

Neuroscientist Marc Lewis wrote in
Newsweek
,

The serotonin drugs we favor today shift human experience in the opposite direction from LSD. SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) like paroxetine (Paxil) and fluoxetine (Prozac) are the most prescribed pills in the U.S., used to treat depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and undefined feelings of ickiness. Instead of getting rid of serotonin, these drugs block the reabsorption process so that serotonin keeps piling up in the synapses. The result: an extra-thick blanket of serotonin that filters out the intrusions of anguish and anxiety, making our inner worlds more secure. Instead of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, they help us turn off, tune out, and drop in—into a solipsistic safety zone, protected from too much reality. What do these newer drugs tell us about our culture and how we perceive our world? Apparently, now is not a time of exuberant exploration but a time to hunker down and play it safe. Instead of letting the world in, with all its uncertainties, we try to keep it out. And a barricade of serotonin makes that possible. The drugs we create, the drugs we take, the drugs we abuse—they offer an idealized antidote to the cravings of our times. LSD was born from our craving for freedom. SSRIs reflect our need for security.
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But if the utopian goals of ending poverty and war did not succeed, the efforts still produced results. For those who opposed the war, the peace movement provided a community in which to take refuge. Political activist Frank Bardacke said in the film
Berkeley in the Sixties
,

The whole national mythology was that Vietnam was a consensus war, was bipartisan foreign policy. All significant sectors of the American public accepted the war, and the people who opposed it were marginalized freaks, kooks, you know, unimportant people. It was a real statement for a person to say, “Yes, I am willing to march out against the war.” And when thousands of people did that, it broke that consensus … After the Tet Offensive, when [General] Westmoreland came to Johnson and said in order to continue the land war in Vietnam we are going to need a million men, Johnson was told by J. Edgar Hoover that if we tried to get a million men out of this country, he could not ensure the domestic security of this country. And that was one of the questions, one of the considerations that he made when he decided … to end the land war and resign … We did put limits on America’s ability to wage the war in Vietnam.
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Since the draft ended in 1973, it has not been reinstituted. While equally tragic, the 5,281 American deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were significantly fewer than the 47,424 American combat deaths in Vietnam.
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As more people experimented with psychedelics, and then afterward tried to hold on to the feelings of serenity and wonder through natural means, there was a boom in the exploration of alternative forms of spirituality. The Beats had promoted Buddhism since the 1950s, but it was George Harrison’s songs espousing Hindu philosophy and featuring Indian musicians, and the Beatles’ study of Transcendental Meditation, that truly kick-started the human potential movement of the 1970s (rebranded New Age in the 1980s). In this way, the musicians helped expand the freedom of religion that the United States was founded on to encompass options outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. At the same time, the hippie “Jesus freaks” contributed to the rise of “born-again” evangelical Christianity at the dawn of the ’70s.