American Fun (63 page)

1.
“
A Vote for Barry Is a Vote for Fun
”:
Magic Trip,
dir. Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney, A&E Indie Films, 2011, 33:33.

2.
“
pudding
”: Tom Wolfe,
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
(New York: Picador, 1968), 238.

3.
“
We don’t propose to have
”: David Halberstam,
The Fifties
(New York: Random House, 1993), 417–78.

4.
Over the next five years
: Ibid., 134.

5.
“
one swimming pool was built
”: Ibid., 137.

6.
machine-made “freedom
”: Herbert Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man
(1964; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1991), 6.

7.
women, now housebound
: Halberstam,
The Fifties,
587–92.

8.
“
paranoia, delirium, frenzy, hysteria
”: Ellen Schrecker,
Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 46.

9.
the languishing HUAC was energized
: Griffin Fariello,
Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition; An Oral History by Griffin Fariello
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 255–314;
McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare; A Documentary History,
ed. Albert Fried (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1–47, 119–56.

10.
“
This was the great and final
”: Jack Kerouac,
On the Road
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1955), 248.

11.
“
cross-country truckers
,”
black store on Beale Street
: LeRoy Ashby,
With Amusement for All: A History of Popular Culture Since
1830
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 340. See also Halberstam,
The Fifties,
457.

12.
“
literary James Dean
”: “The Ganser Syndrome,”
Time,
September 16, 1957.

13.
“
kicks
,” “
fun
”:
Rebel Without a Cause
. Dir. Nicholas Ray, perf. James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, and Dennis Hopper, Warner, 1955.

14.
at Gregg’s Drive-In
: Wolfe,
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
38–39.

15.
“
participatory democracy
”: “Port Huron Statement,” The Sixties Project, Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia at Charlottesville;
http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html
. Accessed July 17, 2013.

16.
“
Wilde West
”: Wolfe,
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
56.

17.
“
Funk Art
”: Charles Perry,
The Haight-Ashbury: A History
(New York: Wenner Books, 2005), 14.

18.
“
introduced the idea of
pranks
”: Wolfe,
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
63.

19.
“
superprank
”: Ibid., 67.

20.
“
tootled
”: Ibid., 112.

21.
“go with the flow”
: Ibid., 84; emphasis in original.

22.
“
doing rock dances and the dirty boogie
”: Ibid., 91.

23.
“
the first annual tour
”: Ibid., 106.

24.
“
I feel like we’re a pastoral Indian village
”: Ken Babbs and Paul Perry,
On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990), 96.

25.
“
out-front
”: Wolfe,
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
329.

26.
“
We’re Clean, Willie!
”: Ibid., 150.

27.
“
It was fun
”: Ibid.

28.
“
hipster Christ
”: Ibid., 153.

29.
“
THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME”
: Ibid., 169.

30.
“
Oh, but it’s great to be an Angel
”: Ibid., 173.

31.
“
the inordinate boredom of middle-class life
”: R. G. Davis,
The San Francisco Mime Troupe: The First Ten Years
(Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1975), 13.

32.
“
pleased its audience
”: Ibid., 31.

33.
“
guinea pig
”: Ibid., 21.

34.
“
riff[s] of jazz
,” “
participatory fun
,” “
riffs or bits
”: Ibid., 20.

35.
“
indecent, obscene, and offensive
”: Susan Vaneta Mason, “Introduction,” in
The San Francisco Mime Troupe Reader,
ed. Susan Vaneta Mason (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 11, 12.

36.
“
This is an Old Western town
”: Perry,
The Haight-Ashbury,
10
.

37.
“
an outlaw enclave
”:
The Life and Times of the Red Dog Saloon,
dir. Mary Works, 1996, 2:18–2:32.

38.
“
We knew we were American
”: Ibid., 20:00–20:72.

39.
“
The bottom line
”: Ibid., 48:00–50:00.

40.
“
a fireball
”: Ibid., 25:22.

41.
But Virginia City was still the Old West
: Perry,
The Haight-Ashbury,
10–11.

42.
“
improvised lyrics
”: Ibid., 32.

43.
“
liquid
”: Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield,
Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out
(New York: Da Capo, 2004), 120.

44.
“
people who’d never heard
”: Perry,
The Haight-Ashbury,
31.

45.
“
the artistic community coming together
”: Graham and Greenfield,
Bill Graham Presents,
120.

46.
“
This
is the business of the future!
”: Ibid., 123.

47.
“
slightly hysterical
”: Ibid., 125.

48.
“
a more jubilant occasion
”: Trips Festival handbill, reproduced at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_first_rays/5247960620/
. Accessed August 25, 2012.

49.
“
non-drug recreation of a psychedelic experience
”: Perry,
The Haight-Ashbury,
41.

50.
“
old home week
”: Graham and Greenfield,
Bill Graham Presents,
140.

51.
“
a gold lamé space suit
”: Ibid., 138.

52.
“ ‘
Goddamn son of a bitch’
”: Perry,
The Haight-Ashbury,
46.

53.
“
It was one of those balanced-up helmets
”: Graham and Greenfield,
Bill Graham Presents,
139.

54.
“
that minstrel shows were a part of our cultural heritage
”: Davis,
San Francisco Mime Troupe,
49.

55.
“
We were not for the suppression of differences
”: Ibid., 63.

56.
The show corked up both whites and blacks
: Ibid., 50.

57.
“
wise conniver
,” “
learned to respect him
”: These and the remaining quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., 52. See also R. G. Davis and Saul Landau,
A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel,
in
The San Francisco Mime Troupe Reader,
ed. Susan Vaneta Mason (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 26–56.

58.
“
a courageous and creative act
”: Mason, “Introduction,” 27.

59.
“
an empowering vision
”: Claudia Orenstein,
Festive Revolutions: The Politics of Popular Theater and the San Francisco Mime Troupe
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 118.

60.
“
People thought we were on their side
”: Davis,
San Francisco Mime Troupe,
63.

61.
“
[T]he hippies use black people
”: Nicholas von Hoffman,
We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against
(1968; Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1989), 124, 123.

62.
“
We don’t want violence or trouble
”: Lewis Yablonsky,
The Hippie Trip
(New York: Pegasus, 1968), 218–19; emphasis in original. The black community wanted the
hippies’ “bread,” but they didn’t think much of their freely expressive dancing. Von Hoffman was at the Straight Theatre on Haight when “three hundred dopeheads” followed instructions “to find the moving, rhythmic spot inside [themselves].” As a result they “stamp[ed]” and “flutter[ed] their arms” to the Grateful Dead. A black girl watching them exclaimed, “They can’t dance. They can’t keep time, what
are
they doing, and they’re so ugly!”(125).

63.
On September 27, 1966
: Walter C. Rucker and James N. Upton,
Encyclopedia of American Race Riots,
vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), 584.

64.
“
Psychedelic Community
”: Emmett Grogan,
Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps
(New York: Little, Brown, 1972), 238–39.

65.
“
Go back to school
”: Ibid., 242.

66.
“
Places of entertainment
”: “Take a Cop to Dinner Cop a Dinner to Take a Cop Dinner Cop a Take,”
The Digger Papers
(August 1968), 14. The Digger Archives,
http://www.diggers.org/digpaps68/takecop.html
. Accessed August 11, 2012.

67.
“
Regarding inquiries concerned with the identity
”: Grogan,
Ringolevio,
239.

68.
Within a week the Diggers
: Ibid., 246–50.

69.
“
Are you a digger?
”: George Metevsky [
sic
], “Delving the Diggers,”
Berkeley Barb,
October 21, 1966, 3. The Digger Archives,
http://www.diggers.org/digger_papers.htm
. Accessed August 25, 2012.

70.
“
charity
”: “The Diggers Mystique,”
San Francisco Chronicle,
January 23, 1967, Digger Archives.

71.
“
life acting
”: Peter Coyote,
Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle
(Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998), 64–65.

72.
“
the white kids are more advanced
”: Von Hoffman,
We Are the People,
123.

73.
“
tickled the people silly
”: Grogan,
Ringolevio,
250–51.

74.
“
Meatfest
”: Perry,
The Haight-Ashbury,
104.

75.
“
Oooo!
,” “
A Munibus driver
,” “
The streets belong to the people!
”: Grogan,
Ringolevio,
259–60. See also Coyote,
Sleeping Where I Fall,
96–97.

76.
“
We want Hairy Henry!
”: Grogan,
Ringolevio,
260.

77.
“
The Digger Papers
”: Quoted in
“Takin’ It to the Streets,”
ed. Alexander Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 321.

78.
“
community switchboards
”: John McMillian,
Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties
Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 32. Discussion of undergrounds sourced from McMillian, 140–72. A representative example of the
Realist
’s take-no-prisoners
satire is Krassner’s early 1960s piece on the women’s gun craze in South Africa, titled “I Dreamed I Shot a Nigger in My Maidenform Bra.”
Best of the Realist: The
60’s Most Outrageously Irreverent Magazine
(Philadelphia: Running Press, 1984).

79.
“
anarchistic organization
,” “
Fuck Censorship press
”: McMillian,
Smoking Typewriters,
73.

80.
“
Electrical Banana
”: The story of the hoax is nicely detailed ibid., 66–71.

81.
“
aborigines, Tonto, Inquisitor-General Torquemada
”: Coyote,
Sleeping Where I Fall,
95.

82.
The first such party
: Helen Swick Perry, “The Human Be-In,” in Bloom,
“Takin’ It to the Streets,”
313–16.

83.
“
took drugs, danced, painted their faces
”: Coyote,
Sleeping Where I Fall,
75.

84.
“
the love shuck
”: Grogan,
Ringolevio,
276.

85.
“
San Francisco’s diverse communities
”: The Glide website,
http://www.glide.org/page.aspx?pid=412#1960s
. Accessed August 10, 2012.

86.
“
improbable and outrageous
”: Coyote,
Sleeping Where I Fall,
78.

87.
“
love-making salons
”: Grogan,
Ringolevio,
283.

88.
“
Several couples
”: Ibid., 284.