I came across a post on the Lashtal site this weekend — BBC 4 is playing a series about the Summer of Love and the first episode featured two mentions of Aleister Crowley. I found the documentary’s trailer online, but couldn’t manage to find the full episode. I’ll keep and eye open for it, but while I was searching I discovered that Crowley has his own channel on YouTube. I’ve seen lots of documentaries and profiles on Crowley, but there’s plenty of fresh content there including this illuminating video featuring Robert Anton Wilson explaining Crowley’s magick…

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After recent posts about The Doors and Easy Rider, I’m on a bit of a hippy jag, and the fact that 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love means that I’ll likely linger on the longhairs for a lot of posts during these warm weather months. It’s always fun to celebrate the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll generation, but what about the darker side of that cultural revolution? What if the flower children were actually grown by the military industrial complex in order to undermine opposition to the Vietnam War? And what if Laurel Canyon was the hothouse where this strange strain was synthesized?

Meet writer Dave McGowan, author of Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon…

David McGowan was born and raised in Torrance, California, just twenty miles south of Laurel Canyon. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in psychology and has, since 1990, run a small business in the greater Los Angeles area. Currently single, he is the proud father of three daughters. He is also a lifelong music fan who still frequently keeps his radio tuned to classic rock stations. McGowan’s previous books include Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder, and Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion.

How did an uncanny amount of rock superstars emerge from the rustic Laurel Canyon scene of the mid 60s when the primary music centers of the US at that time were NYC, Nashville, and Detroit? Why were many of these future stars sons and daughters of the military/intelligence complex and extreme privilege who just happened to all arrive in LA at the same time? From the Lizard King Jim Morrison to Frank Zappa, the Mamas and Papas, the Byrds, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, even the Monkees, they all had conspicuous family heritages that did not exactly jive with what would become the free love, anti war soundtrack of a generation. Meanwhile, looming behind these musicians was a dark underbelly of Hollywood stars, young turks, the mob, shadowy intelligence assets, and charmers like little Charlie Manson who everyone liked at first.. How and why did this all happen? And what about that covert military installation on Lookout Mountain? Are you ready to have your rock and roll fantasies challenged? You may never listen to this music the same way ever again.

Here’s The Antidote interview with McGowan…

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This week we celebrate the birthday of comic artist R. Crumb who turned 73 on August 30. With a hat tip to my {R}emnants partner Ezra Buckley who turned me on to this article in The Paris Review…

In honor of R. Crumb’s birthday today, here are a few of my favorite outtakes from his interview, the first Art of Comics, which appears in our summer issue, still on newsstands. Interviewer Ted Widmer asks Crumb how he feels about publishing hardcover books:

INTERVIEWER
You’ve taken what was a medium of thirty pages of flimsy, low quality paper with a paper cover and now you’ve conquered the hardcover book format.

CRUMB
Reluctantly. I love the old, cheap comic book format so much because the format itself is a statement. It keeps you from becoming too pretentious. I like that about it. Keep it cheap and low-grade, the format, keep it cheap and accessible and then you’re not required to be overly artistic or have overly deep, profound meaning or whatever, you know, all that stuff that can make you very self-conscious. I got reluctantly dragged into hardcover books.

INTERVIEWER
But I think your fans are happy that those hardcover books exist because you would have to be a maniacal collector to get all of your stuff otherwise. It’s basically impossible to find back issues of The East Village Other, but for hardly any money you can buy The R. Crumb Handbook and see your greatest hits.

CRUMB
Yeah, that’s true. And also, the whole context of cheaply produced comic books is gone, basically. All those newsstands, that kind of distribution is gone.

Here’s a great interview with the man himself discussing the 1960′s, acid, hippies, beatniks, Janis, and Zap Comix…

Stay Awake!

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This weekend I wrote a review of the new DVD release for Janis: Little Girl Blue. It’ll be out in The Contributor next week, and I’ll try to remember to drop it here later with some more info about the actual DVD &emdash; I had to watch an online screener as I didn’t get my review copy in time for my deadline. I watched some of it with my assistant, but she seemed to burnout quickly on what looked like yet another documentary about the 1960′s counterculture. It’s easy to feel like you’ve digested the radical left of mid-century America, and I feel that way too, sometimes. Other times I’m back in touch with the feelings, ideas, and inspirations that were sparked by the Beats and combusted by the Hippies, and Janis made me feel like that. I also discovered a great little Jefferson Airplane doc. The Airplane plays a big role in the Janis film. Janis was actually considered as a possible vocalist for the Airplane before they asked Grace Slick to join. What a different world it might have been, but not necessarily a better one.

In a year of huge losses of our musical heroes, Airplane guitarist and co-founder Paul Kantner’s passing away on January 28 is one that won’t be overlooked on this shimmering page. Here’s the 2004 documentary Jefferson Airplane: Fly Jefferson Airplane…

Stay Awake!

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This spring we mark 50 years since we lost Richard Fariña in a tragic motorcycle accident on April 30, 1966. The author of this great article at The Guardian assumes most readers will be familiar with Fariña as a literary figure who wrote the novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me which was published only weeks before Fariña’s death. The article looks at Fariña as a literary link between the Beats and the hippies.

Of course every songwriter in Nashville and I know that Fariña was a folk singer in the same Greenwich Village scene where Bob Dylan made his name, and that Fariña’s most memorable music can be found on the records he recorded with his wife, Joan Baez’ sister, Mimi.

I haven’t read Fariña’s novel, but it’s fun to find out something unexpected and new-to-you from an artist you already respect, isn’t it? Looking forward to reading that one. If you already have it on your shelf fill us in with a comment about the book. If you’re not familiar with Fariña’s music or if you just haven’t heard Richard and Mimi in awhile here they are killing it with Pete Seeger on his Rainbow Quest television show about two months before Richard’s death…

Stay Awake!

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Today marks the anniversary of the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, first held on this day in 1970 on Michael Eavis’s family farm in Pilton, Somerset.

Along with the utopian idealism of the time came an invention of the “free” music festival, a social movement based on collaboration and responsibility for one’s own expectations. Admission to these festivals was free with the idea that concert-goers would be concert-participants, helping out in some way by working, bringing equipment and/or amenities, and contributing to any number of big chores made smaller by a collective.

Eavis, a former naval officer and dairy farmer, was inspired by hippie sightings around the town (an area that has historically attracted bohemians with its “mystical vibes” since the medieval construction of a monk’s hermitage at Glastonbury Tor), his own personal Methodist ideologies, and a particularly impressive Led Zeppelin outdoor performance.

Eavis got together with friends to invest in the stage and managed to bill The Kinks as headliner, who ended up being replaced at the last minute by Tyrannosaurus Rex—both Insomnia favorites. Tickets were a nominal £1, and it was such a success that they tried a free festival the next year. Official attendance jumped from 1,500 to 12,000—an apparently less manageable volume. Prices and sales have been climbing ever since. While it’s no longer free or cheap, it’s still organized by the Eavis family who divide the profits for local and worldwide charities, and it’s still held at their aptly named Worthy Farm.

Here’s Eavis himself talking about the beginnings of the fest and his mindset at the time, along with some great (possibly NSFW at times) footage:

Stay awake!

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Adding to my recent posts about San Francisco in the 1960′s, I think it’s important to look at the hippies themselves — who were all these long-haired freaks? The question matters for anyone interested in understanding where more recent counter-cultural movements have come from, and it’s one that reveals surprising answers, offering deep, novel veins to be explored, rediscovered and sifted through.

The long-haired kids all over the Bay Area came from many backgrounds for many reasons. I can’t begin to address all of them here, but let’s look at a handful: The New Left, anti-war protest movement was based in Berkeley while their militant, black brothers fought for civil rights out of Oakland. Many of the kids were there for the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, making claims to interest in higher-consciousness with various levels of commitment. Of course, there was a lot of overlap. Of course, I’m forced to generalize in a brief blog post.

The group that most interests me, stood apart from all the others in important ways while simultaneously engaging the city’s culture with provocative performance, theater and art experiments. The Diggers began as a mime troupe that decided that political change was only possible through cultural change so they set about living as if the revolution had already been won.

This is their story:

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Jack O’Connell’s 1968 film Revolution captured the craziness, the chaos, the hope and the hippies that defined the Summer of Love. Some of these interviews seem a little staged, but, for the most part, he captures some really candid moments and some extended music sequences that seem to embody the times. The soundtrack is noted for the inclusion of Mother Earth, Steve Miller, Country Joe and the Fish, and The Quicksilver Messenger Service. The soundtrack was re-released in 1973 and the film was also revived and amended with additional interviews. A strange, psychedelic curio, Revolution is a real turn-on, man. Keep your eyes peeled for Daria Halprin – she’s the beauty who goes on to star in Michael Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point in 1970. After that she went on to become one of a few Mrs. Dennis Hoppers.

Stay Awake!

The San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive is full of gold. There is tons of material here from the ’60′s including lots of great footage of the Black Panthers and plenty of Haight Street hippies to be had.

The Maze is a television news documentary that was made in 1967. It features 2nd generation Beat poet Michael McClure as a tour guide on this ramble through the patchouli-choked purgatory that was the Summer of Love. Part Paradise, part fool’s vision, that season passed like all the others and took much of its idealism and peaceful potential with it. However, at that time, it seemed like McClure and his ilk just might change the world. As the narrator here observes:

“Some call Haight-Ashbury another bohemia, like the Left Bank, Greenwich Village and others … But it’s more like Brigadoon: a magical land that appeared only yesterday and may be gone tomorrow. But if it lasts, the effect on the rest of society could be far reaching. And that’s why the outside world must try to understand what is happening here.”

Check out The Maze and the SFBATA here.