American Fun (41 page)

But that same night, November 6, 1965, a much more significant event went down in the Mime Troupe’s scruffy practice loft. Five days earlier, Ron Davis had been found guilty for the truncated
Il Candelaio
performance, a conviction that added to their financial woes, so their business manager, a talented young businessman named
Bill Graham, who had spent his childhood fleeing the Nazis, cruised the streets in a rented white Cadillac and pamphleted a festive “Appeal” for the troupe, a rock show starring the Airplane and the
Fugs that was all the sexier for its anti-censorship cause. Outside the warehouse, hopefuls snaked around the block. At the door they were met by a sliding donation scale—from $48 (for the affluent) down to just anything (for the broke). Inside the loft, the walls were Day-Glo, donated fruit dangled from the ceiling, art films were “
liquid” projected onto hanging bedsheets, and as the Haight-Ashbury historian
Charles Perry puts it, hundreds of “
people who’d never heard of the Family Dog dances or Kesey’s acid parties came out and experienced the same wide-eyed, unforeseeable freedom to act as strange as they felt.”
The Appeal “represented,” as Bill Graham remembered it, “
the artistic community coming together”—the writers, artists, actors, jazz and rock musicians, all of San Francisco’s sundry scenes; at the time he had also exclaimed: “
This
is the business of the future!” Davis remembers Graham being “
slightly hysterical about collecting this money.” The cops tried to shut it down at twelve, but Graham, in all his cocksure diplomacy, fibbed that the crowd was still waiting for Rudy Vallee and Frank Sinatra; he then bartered with the crowd to give up their places to the hopefuls waiting outside. As such, he kept it jumping till dawn, when
Allen Ginsberg led the cleanup crew in a few kitchen-yoga mantras.

The Appeal broadened the base
of countercultural fun. SDS activists met folkies and
hippies, and everybody felt the acid-test vibrations that would shake like earthquakes in the months and years to come. More profoundly, however, it marked Bill Graham’s debut as the P. T. Barnum of psychedelia. The next month he held a much a bigger appeal—“
for Continued Freedom in the Arts”—at the capacious
Fillmore music hall in the mostly African-American
Fillmore district. And in January 1966, he promoted the Pranksters’ gaudy “Trips Festival”—a two-night, three-ring acid test. The Trips Festival handbills read like Mime Troupe (even SDS) boilerplate, announcing “
a more jubilant occasion where the audience
PARTICIPATES
because it’s more fun to do so than not.… Audience dancing is an assumed part of all the shows, and the audience is invited to wear
ECSTATIC DRESS
and bring their own
GADGETS.
” “Maybe,” the handbill mused, “this is the
ROCK REVOLUTION.
” It was likewise the culmination of the Pranksters’ master plan (to freak out as many Americans as possible), but Graham wasn’t looking for trouble. The festival was billed as a “
non-drug recreation of a psychedelic experience.” Still, it was a Prankster event. The light shows, op-art, Thunder Machines,
acid rock, and six thousand open-minded participants rather begged for LSD—which California had outlawed months before. So if you wanted it, it was in the ice cream.

And the festival
did
offer participatory fun, just like the poster said. A mob the size of a midwestern town wore self-expressive costumes, danced improvised dances, dropped acid, spoke into randomly distributed microphones (when they weren’t being hogged by Babbs and Cassady), and got a taste of the Prankster and Red Dog scenes. The message was that fun and expression are one, but in fact the array of weirdish attractions better resembled Barnum’s traveling show, where paying customers gaped in awe at the wonders of the world—at bands, at spectacles, at Stewart Brand’s multimedia piece
America Needs Indians,
the Native American awareness show that had become a staple of the acid tests. Much of the spontaneity and danger was canned; only the freaks were real.
Jerry Garcia described it as “
old home week” for “every beatnik, every hippie, every coffeehouse hangout person from all over the state,” all of whom were “freshly psychedelicized,” some of whom were “jumping off balconies into blankets and then bouncing up and down.” Kesey, who had been convicted only days before for the La Honda bust, was forbidden by the judge (and by Graham) to attend. Naturally, he attended anyway, wearing “
a gold lamé space suit with a helmet.” A scene described by
Charles Perry, Graham, and others suggests a changing of
the counterculture’s guard. When Graham caught Kesey at the back of the hall, giving free admission to some
Hell’s Angels cronies, he let him have it: “ ‘
Goddamn son of a bitch, I’m busting my fucking balls out here to make a dime and you—’ Kesey simply closed his bubble helmet.” As Kesey recalled, “
It was one of those balanced-up helmets. I just nodded and it went
plop
.”

The Trips Festival’s psychedelic fun with toilet paper and drugs in San Francisco’s
Longshoreman’s Hall, January 1966. (Courtesy of Gene Anthony, © Wolfgang’s Vault.)

It was Kesey’s last stand. He bolted to Mexico to beat his drug charge. But Graham, who had turned the biggest profit of his life, was only getting settled. Within a month he had held his last Mime Troupe benefit and was staging for-profit shows at the Fillmore, under the Barnumesque title “Bill Graham Presents.” Following a marketing strategy that hadn’t missed a step since the
Gilded Age, Graham seized on the vogue for Day-Glo art nouveau posters and sound-and-light spectacles. It was Chanfrau’s “Mose” franchise all over again: Graham repackaged the latest California fun in an on-the-spot Wild West show. The big
magazines and
television played right into his hands, inadvertently advertising the far-out
hippie scene and making San Francisco, over the
next three years, the preferred destination for America’s restless youth. Along with the head shops and other Haight Street storefronts, the constant rock shows at the legendary Fillmore—and at Red Dog
Chet Helms’s
Avalon Ballroom—turned the counterculture into big business. With similar alacrity, as they had with
bootlegging during
Prohibition, crime syndicates bullied into the hippies’ pot market, and Owsley, who still owned the LSD game, was branching out to Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere. Whatever the rebellious origins of these pleasures, they were quickly becoming mass entertainment.

IN THE SPRING
of 1966, while new white argonauts poured into the Haight, the Mime Troupe rehearsed its most disruptive prank yet. They wanted a break from sixteenth-century Italy; they wanted to do an all-American show. They ran a stunningly tone-deaf attack on stereotypes called
A Minstrel Show: Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel.
Ron Davis got the idea when he discovered “
that minstrel shows were a part of our cultural heritage from 1830 to 1920 and, at its peak, there were three hundred floating companies, from town to city, amateur and professional.” As usual, he
meant
to stun: “
We were not for the suppression of differences,” he explained. “Rather, by exaggerating the differences we punctured the cataracts of ‘color blind’ liberals, disrupted ‘progressive’ consciousness and made people think twice about eating watermelon.” In other words, whereas early minstrels used black stereotypes for white entertainment, the Mime Troupe used them to poke fun at whites and what Davis called “tolerance.” In both cases, of course, African Americans themselves were simply tools, cartoons—objects, not sources, of biting comedy.

A Minstrel Show
generated little new material. Most of its jokes, songs, and walk-arounds were lifted wholesale from nineteenth-century playbooks.
The show corked up both whites and blacks (there were always four of each on stage), a seeming innovation to “unnerve” the audience and “fuck up their prejudices”; but Barnum’s sleight of hand had already been a staple of postbellum minstrelsy, when blackface was the closest black performers could get to legitimate theater, and in neither
century did blacks in blackface go far, of course, in fucking up anyone’s prejudices. On the contrary, blacks’ identity disappeared into blackface: their actual presence was traded for a joke, and in both centuries for jokes that were written by whites. Perhaps more pernicious yet, then, were the Mime Troupe’s
new
caricatures and stories, which seemed to update prejudice for the civil rights era. They added an aggressive
Black Panther–like “Nigger” and the story of a verbally abusive black “Stud” who picks up a fawning, vulnerable white “Chick.” They also resurrected “
Uncle Tom,” with full knowledge that this fictional figure had been “lambasted” by the
civil rights movement; as if by turning him into T. D. Rice’s Jim Crow, they made him a “
wise conniver” and, in Davis’s words, “learned to respect him.” The show recounts a comic black history “lesson” that makes revered African Americans (from Crispus Attucks to
George Washington Carver to Martin Luther King) the butts of crude and easy jokes. (The lessons behind such slurs and insults never come to light.) At center stage was the white MC,
Robert Slattery, not in blackface. And though Davis called him the “thing to be attacked”—“white America in the middle of these screaming, ranting darkies”—he had a “great, mature, stone WASPish face like a fine Clark Kent” and he made “the perfect ringmaster.” No ridiculous screaming and ranting for him. Dramatically, symbolically, he kept the old hierarchy firmly intact.

A Minstrel Show
met with some trouble in its two years on the road. Only two black actors stayed on for the duration; others either failed to meet Davis’s standards or were, he implied, just too sensitive. The show was frequently closed on college campuses as it made its first West Coast tour, but only for the script’s graphic
sexual content. Ironically, its controversy raised its prestige among the “color-blind” progressives it had meant to shock. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of California, for instance, called it “
a courageous and creative act.” The
ACLU stepped in that September when three of its actors were arrested in Denver. And drama critics welcomed it with rave reviews—not only in the
New York
Times
and
The New Yorker
but also in the left-wing
Nation
and
People’s World
. White liberals, as it turned out, loved to be shocked, even at the cost of African-American dignity. What’s more, it
was hip to throw their support behind the vaunted S.F. Mime Troupe. The performance scholar Claudia Orenstein praises the play as offering “
an empowering vision of black power … rather than merely a derogatory one.” (On the contrary, the play embraces the derogatory.) She misses the mark by suggesting that the play “deconstruct[s] and subvert[s] black stereotypes” (it
re
constructs them), but she also misses the troupe’s dark purpose. “
People thought we were on their side,” Davis wrote in 1975. “People thought it was a civil rights integration show. Not so, we were cutting deeper into prejudices than integration allowed.” They were
exacerbating
racial trouble. It was dirty work, but
A Minstrel Show
did it—all in a divisive sense of fun.

A Minstrel Show
marked only the edge of a chasm between San Francisco’s white hipsters and struggling blacks. Despite their attempts to understand each other, they were basically taking different trips. The largely black Fillmore neighborhood borders on the Haight, but the black and hippie communities had little to do with each other; in addition to historic race and class tensions, their needs and values were often opposed. Many blacks resented a young white movement that was bent on mocking, rejecting, and destroying all the middle-class privileges they had yet to achieve: suburban homes, political hegemony, and (perhaps most galling) good education.
Hippies called blacks “spades,” a hip and allegedly non-derogatory epithet—but an epithet all the same. It was hip for hippies to
appreciate
“spades,” kind of like the Mime Troupe did. The journalist
Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in 1968, “
[T]he hippies use black people as whites always have in America, as the people who are truly affective, emotional, sensual, and uninhibited.” For many white hippies, blacks were
real;
they were rebellious company to keep, in theory. But as von Hoffman observed, less than fifty blacks living in the Haight had “become a hippy.” And as the sociologist
Lewis Yablonsky witnessed at a Haight-Ashbury town hall meeting—where the citizens wore flamboyant costumes; where kids and dogs tussled in the
marijuana smoke—
real
black fun could be a tough sell. A well-known black activist named Scooter, joined by a line of thirty black men, stood up to promote tickets for a community dance. He could hardly contain his hostility: “
We don’t want violence or trouble. But we could have it, baby.
We want for our kids the things you people have put down. We want good food, jobs, houses, and cars. Dig?
 … The honkies downtown, the Birchers and the bigots like they’re all buying tickets. None of you hip people buy tickets. Don’t you love us?” The room applauded, and a few bought tickets (for $1.50—a buck less than a typical
Bill Graham ticket), but most people said they were hard up themselves.