American Fun (47 page)

The commercial embrace of ’60s fun didn’t stop at the entertainment industry. In 1963, the agency Batton, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn made advertising history by marketing an entire generation. They branded the baby boomers fun: “
Come alive! You’re the
Pepsi generation! This is the liveliest, most energetic time ever … with the most active generation living it. You’re part of it. Pepsi-Cola is part, too.… It’s the official drink of everyone with a thirst for living!” By 1965, emboldened by the success of adman
Bill Bernbach’s creative innovations, marketers, advertisers, and manufacturers of all kinds suddenly saw the folly in scorning youth rebellion, as buttoned-down advertisers routinely had just a couple of years before. From the mid-sixties onward, at the same time the counterculture was finding its feet, Madison Avenue was reforming its strategies and changing its culture to appeal to youth. Ironies and humbug abounded. 7UP was the psychedelic “
Un-Cola,” and airlines and liquors sneered at conformity, but the auto industry took the cake. Dodge promoted the “Dodge Rebellion,” Ford said “Mustangers have more fun,” and Oldsmobile betrayed its own stodgy image: “Today, millions of
Life
readers are getting young ideas. The ’68 ‘youngmobiles’ from Oldsmobile are here.” Kids were indeed “the 52%,” a target market that had come of age—but they weren’t necessarily playing along. For instance, in the March 4, 1966,
Time
, an issue that featured a teen dancing the Watusi to sell the idea that “
Sugar swings,” an article covering America’s recent countercultural parties, “
Happenings Are Happening,” reported on the “spectators” who “joined” the
Merry Pranksters’ Trips Festival’s “fun”: one was dressed in “a toga made from an American
flag,” another wore a sign that read “You’re in the Pepsi Generation, I’m a pimply freak.”

By 1967, as Thomas Frank shows in
The Conquest of Cool,
the ad industry was reorganizing itself to maximize the popular new kinds of fun—by absorbing them into its corporate structure. The people’s war on “organization” and its stuffy “technocracy” was infiltrating the biggest firms. The “establishment agencies,” as they came to be known, scooped up talent from the upstart startups and nurtured what Frank calls “
a stripped-down, flexible, ‘democratic’ arrangement” among its staff “that privileged creative nonconformists.” What resulted was a culture of “rebellion” and “democracy” safely ensconced within
advertising,
an industry that half a decade earlier had been following the social protocols of insurance and banking. This move gave the industry a friendly new face that flattered (and exploited) the Pepsi Generation. It slaked their thirst for edgy fun.

This creative new wave in advertising—like the racy new big-distribution movies, the trippy new music dominating the airwaves, the op-art fashions filling department stores, and all the hippie-themed variety shows playing on prime-time television—did more than disguise the old-guard interests of its “establishment agencies.” It was part of a speedy cultural revolution that was changing the agenda of the establishment proper, as
Wild in the Streets
had warned. The draft carried on, and the Nixon administration and many college administrations did little to endear themselves to America’s youth: these enemies held a valuable, ugly status for a generation that identified with rebellion. But other powerful institutions, likewise
Vietnam War profiteers, saw the gain in kids’ rebellious pleasure. They built it into a monoculture that sold its thrilling rebel
feeling
(if not necessarily its
fact
) to the masses. In an era when government was the towering bugbear, big business stood to turn a profit off the youth rebellion against it. It was the
Gilded Age all over again: risky fun made safe for unlimited consumption. And the institutional thresholds for what was safe—set by censors, marketers, producers, sponsors—had gotten so high by 1969 that it seemed as if the
Merry Pranksters were finally driving the bus.

When in fact they were nowhere to be found.

……………

NINETEEN SIXTY-NINE WAS
a dark year for fun. That year youth actions turned more subversive, also caustic, and
Abbie Hoffman (who was turning to violent anarchism) would be arrested seven more times. That year the vogue for what
Yippies called “monkey warfare”—water pistol antics and the like—had been replaced with something closer to the real thing by an SDS faction of highborn bomb throwers who called themselves the
Weathermen. “
These hip outlaws made revolution look like
fun,
” Gitlin writes—criminal fun, to be sure. Weathermen enjoyed orgies and acid, like old-school hippies, but their heroes were that year’s Hollywood gunslingers—Butch and Sundance, Bonnie and Clyde—and their objective wasn’t to end the
Vietnam War (that cheerful hippie dream had passed) but to move it onto American soil. In October of that year, they spearheaded the “Days of Rage”—three days of incendiary actions in Chicago that they hoped would rouse the black population, but the Panthers, who denounced them, didn’t take the bait. A few days later thousands of supporters from a march on the Washington Monument rained projectiles on the Justice Department. The grand marshals of the parade, Abbie Hoffman and
Jerry Rubin, had a special gripe with that particular department, by whom they were currently being tried for conspiracy.

In June 1969, in New York City, a routine police raid on a West Village gay bar—recalling the raid in
Mae West’s play
The Drag—
was met with unexpected resistance. Patrons of the
Stonewall Inn, unwilling to skulk away in shame, vigilantly gathered along the street to watch for signs of police brutality. At first it may have seemed as if rebellious fun would prevail: As the crowd grew in number, their resistance turned vocal and theatrical. Evacuees performed for the cheering crowd, and drag queens, as they boarded the patrol wagon, directed quips and come-ons at the cops. And while at first only a few dared to shout for “
gay power,” a virtually unknown concept at the time, before long the crowd sang “
We Shall Overcome” and, dissatisfied with the standard protest song, “began to camp on the solemn lyrics.” Their antic satire in the face of oppression had a distinctly Sons of Liberty cast.

But it was the cops’ rough struggle with a powerful lesbian that
touched off the legendary Stonewall riots. They hit her with a billy club, she escaped their squad car twice, and the mostly male crowd erupted in violence, starting the riots that would rage for four days and end in bloody clashes with police. In the months to come a young movement would form, led by activist groups like the
Pink Panthers and the
Cockettes, a guerrilla street-theater troupe whom
John Waters called “
insane hippie drag queens on and off the stage.” Like many of that year’s rebel actions, however, Stonewall was an act of grim determination; there was nothing lighthearted about it.

THE THREE “TRIBUTARIES”
of American fun, springing from three different eras, could be said to constitute three kinds of citizens: consumers, partiers, and activists, respectively. By the late 1960s, these three fun-loving citizenries showed significant overlap: advertisers trumpeted radical slogans, protesters chanted rock lyrics, and everybody knew it was cool to have fun. “
Rock revolution” was a shibboleth of the era, and there was truth to it. Rock stars motivated the newly gathering people like prophets and presidents of earlier eras. The
Beatles called for calm in
“Revolution,” but Berkeley demonstrators, not knowing the words to old left-wing solidarity songs, ignored the message. They sang and marched to “
Yellow Submarine.” The
Rolling Stones’ “Street-Fighting Man” became a rallying cry. It equated rock ’n’ roll with violent resistance: “My name is called disturbance. I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the king, I’ll rail at all his servants.”
John Sinclair—the manager of MC5, the headlining band at the “
Festival of Life”—echoed a popular sentiment when he called “
rock and roll music … one of the most vital revolutionary forces in the West—it blows people all the way back to their senses and makes them feel good, like they’re alive again in the … monstrous funeral parlor of western civilization.”

If the fictional President Maximilian Frost was the satirical composite of these “revolutionary forces,” Woodstock was the reality. In August 1969, American fun’s three rivers swirled together into a muddy whirlpool. Four hundred thousand rock fans piled onto a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for what was billed as a three-day festival of “Peace & Music.” In the weeks before the event,
Abbie Hoffman and fourteen
other
Yippies staged a mock police raid on the commercial offices of
Woodstock Ventures, the show’s promoters. They urged them to make it a free political happening, something along the lines of their “Festival of Life.” To no avail, of course. But neither would it succeed as a commercial enterprise: Woodstock Ventures didn’t have the means to reap even half the intended ticket sales. On the days of the event,
hippies, refusing to act like consumers, gushed by the thousands through holes in the fence. And yet, as a laid-back be-in of drug-culture youth, rolling in the mud and standing in line for the woefully insufficient latrines, it worked well enough, which, after the
riots in Chicago the summer before, must have been a relief. At this mass experiment in spontaneous community, the carefree partiers carried the day. Folks stripped naked, took drugs, had sex, and a general feeling of camaraderie reigned. Nobody was killed, and a baby was born. And yet whether or not it turned a profit, Woodstock smacked of what Yippies called “
the old America,” a land of easy entertainment. Which is to say, it was a big rock concert.

As a political event, Woodstock was shallow: it lacked the purpose, organization, and will of the era’s clearly focused demonstrations. “
For the most part,” as the rock critic
Ellen Willis observed, Woodstock attendees “took for granted not only the discomforts but the tremendous efforts made by the state, the local communities, and unpaid volunteers to distribute cheap or free food and establish minimum standards of health and safety.” A pacifist collective called the
Hog Farm distributed free food and supplies. “Movement City” was Woodstock’s camp for radical politics, but most attendees didn’t take much interest. They were just there to have some fun. At one point during the show, while the
Who performed, Abbie Hoffman, zonked on acid, jumped up on the stage, grabbed the mic, and said it was a “pile of shit” that everybody was lounging around while MC5 manager
John Sinclair, that outspoken proponent of the rock revolution, languished in prison for
marijuana possession. Irony carried the day:
Pete Townshend, the king in his castle, knocked the court jester of radicalism over the head with his infamously dangerous guitar. The blow sent Hoffman “
crumpl[ing]” to the stage, affirming his own claim that rock stars were the “
real leaders” of the revolution.

But what sort of “revolution” were they leading? Proto-blogging the event in his book
Woodstock Nation,
which he rushed into print before the conspiracy trial began, Hoffman recorded his experiences down among the dirty, tripping crowd. He drew a sharp distinction between “
the za-za world” of the “ROCK EMPIRE” and the millions of people who were moved by it, “Woodstock Nation” itself. “Clearly I love their music and sense in it the energy to liberate millions of minds. On the other hand, I feel compelled to challenge their role in the community, to try and crack their plastic dome.” Outside this dome of wealth and celebrity, Hoffman saw Woodstock citizens like himself “running around setting up hospitals in the hills of the NATION and trying to wreck the government that claims it owns our land.” He also saw a multitude of others, just having a good time in the rebellious pulse of the crowd, and he believed this collective pleasure in itself, the Artaudian “festival of the streets,” was a positive source for change, the heart of what he called a “cultural”—as opposed to “political”—revolution. By his argument, whereas “politics breeds organizers,” cultural revolution encourages “outlaws” to strike out on their own. In keeping with this outlaw mission, Woodstock Nation stood in opposition to what he called “PIG NATION.” It stood for liberty, rebellion, and fun.

But the cultural revolution had already happened, sometime in the middle sixties, and Abbie Hoffman had been one of the players. Woodstock Nation was up and running, but it wasn’t quite what he wanted it to be. Thanks to promoters, advertisers, movies, television, rock stars, and popular fashion, it rather resembled the frictionless freedom that had bored him at
Antioch College: even the most radical fun had somehow become the status quo, and the mass of young white citizens felt entitled to it. It left some Americans wanting more—bomb-throwing
Weathermen, acidheads turned heroin addicts, even the hardened Hoffman and Rubin—but what they wanted wasn’t exactly fun.

THAT SAME MONTH
, in
California, the “rock revolution” lost what moral force it may once have had. On the eighth and ninth of August, in the canyons of Los Angeles, a cult called “the Family” that had made
a religion out of the
Beatles’
White Album
(1968) followed the orders of its leader, Charles Manson, and went on a gruesome killing spree—most notably stabbing to death the actress
Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant at the time. Among the messages they scrawled in their victims’ blood were references to “pigs” and the song title “Helter Skelter.” And in December of that year, at a free rock concert at San Francisco’s Altamont Speedway,
Mick Jagger looked on in apparent nausea while some
Hell’s Angels, who had been hired as security, stabbed a young black man to death by the stage.

The late-1960s rock revolution had dubious democratic potential. Not lively and kinetic like the “jazz revolution,” where bands and dancers goaded each other to higher levels of personal achievement, the rock revolution was a
spectator sport, demanding nothing but echoes and applause. Not risky and kinetic like the pranks of the era, it welcomed passive participation. Rock led its would-be revolutionaries out beyond the law, and often it just left them there.