Spiro Agnew thought that the helpful friends were drugs, which is a reminder that the counterculture was indeed defining itself against something. The customary reply to a charge like Agnew’s was that he was mistaking a gentle celebration of togetherness for a threat against the established order—that he was, in sixties language, being uptight. Agnew’s attacks were ignorant and cynical enough; but the responses, though from people understandably a little uptight themselves, were disingenuous. Few teenagers in 1967 thought that the line “I get high with a little help from my friends” was an allusion to the exhilaration of good conversation. “I get high” is a pretty harmless drug reference. But it is a drug reference.
The classic case of this sort of thing is “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” also on the
Sgt. Pepper’
s album. When the press got the idea that the title encrypted the initials LSD, John Lennon, who had written the song, expressed outrage. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” he allowed, was the name his little boy had given a drawing he had made at school and brought home to show his father; and this bit of lore has been attached to the history of
Sgt. Pepper’s
to indicate how hysterically hostile the old culture was to the new. No doubt the story about the drawing is true. On the other hand, if “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is not a song about an acid trip, it is hard to know what sort of song it is.
Drugs were integral to sixties rock ’n’ roll culture in three ways.
The most publicized way, and the least interesting, has to do with the conspicuous consumption of drugs by rock’n’ roll performers, a subject that has been written about ad nauseam. Lennon eating LSD as though it were candy, Keith Richards undergoing complete blood transfusions in an effort to cure himself of heroin addiction (“How do you like my new blood?” he would ask his friends after a treatment)—these are stories of mainly tabloid interest, though they are important to rock ‘n’ roll mythology, since addiction and early death are part of jazz and blues mythology, as well. The drug consumption was real enough (though one doesn’t see it mentioned that since the body builds a resistance to hallucinogens, it is not surprising that Lennon ate acid like candy: he couldn’t have been getting much of a kick from it after a while). Some people famously died of drug abuse; many others destroyed their careers and their lives. But overindulgence is a hazard of all celebrity; it’s part of the modern culture of fame. That rock’n’ roll musicians overindulged with drugs is not, historically, an especially notable phenomenon.
Then there are the references to drugs in the songs themselves. Sometimes the references were fairly obscure: “Light My Fire,” for instance, the title of the Doors’ biggest hit, was a phrase taken from an Aldous Huxley piece in praise of mescaline (as was the name of the group itself, taken from the title of Huxley’s book
The Doors of Perception
[1954]). Sometimes the references were overt (Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” or the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin”). Most often, though, it was simply understood that the song was describing or imitating a drug experience: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Strawberry Fields,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” The message (such as it was) of these songs usually involved the standard business about “consciousness expansion” already being purveyed by gurus like Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts: once you have (with whatever assistance) stepped beyond the veil, you will prefer making love to making war, and so forth. Sometimes there was the suggestion that drugs open your eyes to the horror of things as they are—an adventure for the spiritually fortified only. (“Reality is for people who can’t face drugs,” as Tom Waits used to say.) The famous line in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” was meant
to catch both senses: “I’d love to turn you on.” It was all facile enough; but the idea was not simply “Let’s party.”
What was most distinctive about late-sixties popular music, though, was not that some of the performers used drugs, or that some of the songs were about drugs. It was that late-sixties rock was music designed for people to listen to while they were on drugs. The music was a prepackaged sensory stimulant. This was a new development. Jazz musicians might sometimes be junkies, but jazz was not music performed for junkies. A lot of late-sixties rock music, though, plainly advertised itself as a kind of complementary good for recreational drugs. This explains many things about the character of popular music in the period—in particular, the unusual length of the songs. There is really only one excuse for buying a record with a twelve-minute drum solo.
How the history of popular music reflects the social history of drug preference is a research topic that calls for some fairly daunting field work. It was clear enough in the late sixties, though, that the most popular music was music that projected a druggy aura of one fairly specific kind or another. Folk rock, for example, became either seriously mellow (Donovan or the Youngbloods) or raucous and giggly (Country Joe and the Fish), sounds suggesting that marijuana might provide a useful enhancement of the listening experience. Music featuring pyrotechnical instrumentalists (Cream or Ten Years After) had an overdriven, methedrine sort of sound. In the 1970s, a lot of successful popular music was designed to go well with cocaine, a taste shift many of the sixties groups couldn’t adjust to quickly enough. (The Rolling Stones were an exception.)
But the featured drugs of the late sixties were the psychedelics: psilocybin, mescaline, and, especially, LSD. They were associated with the Beatles scene through Lennon, who even before
Sgt. Pepper’s
had apparently developed a kind of religious attachment to acid. And LSD was the drug most closely identified with the San Francisco scene, especially with the Grateful Dead, a group that had been on hand in 1965 when Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took their “acid test” bus trips, and whose equipment had been paid for by Timothy Leary himself. It would seem that once a person
was on a hallucinogen, the particular kind of music he or she was listening to would be largely irrelevant; but there were bands, like the Dead, whose drug aura was identifiably psychedelic.
You didn’t have to be on drugs to enjoy late-sixties rock ’n’ roll, as many people have survived to attest; and this is an important fact. For from a mainstream point of view, the music’s drug aura was simply one aspect of the psychedelic fashion that between 1967 and 1969 swept through popular art (black-light posters), photography (fish-eye lenses), cinema (jump cuts and light shows), clothing (tiedye), coloring (Day-Glo), and speech (“you turn me on”). Psychedelia expressed the counterculture sensibility in its most pop form. It said: spiritual risk-taker, uninhibited, enemy of the System. It advertised liberation and hipness in the jargon and imagery of the drug experience. And the jargon wasn’t restricted to people under thirty, or to dropouts. In the late sixties, the drug experience became a universal metaphor for the good life. Commercials for honey encouraged you to “get high with honey.” The Ford Motor Company invited you to test-drive a Ford and “blow your mind.” For people who did not use drugs, the music was a plausible imitation drug experience because almost every commodity in the culture was pretending to some kind of imitation drug experience.
Psychedelia, and the sensibility attached to it, was a mediadriven phenomenon. In April 1966,
Time
ran a story on the Carnaby Street, mods and rockers, Beatles and Rolling Stones scene in London. In fact, that scene was on its last legs when the article appeared; but many Americans were induced to vacation in London, which revived the local economy, and the summer of 1966 became the summer of “Swinging London.” Swinging London was perfect mass-media material—sexy, upbeat, and fantastically photogenic. So when twenty thousand people staged a “Human Be-In” in Golden Gate Park in January 1967, the media were on hand. Here was a domestic version of the British phenomenon: hippies, Diggers, Hell’s Angels, music, “free love,” and LSD—the stuff of a hundred feature stories and photo essays. The media discovery of the hippies led to the media discovery of the Haight-Ashbury, and the summer of 1967 became the San Francisco “Summer of Love,” that
year’s edition of Swinging London.
Sgt. Pepper’s
was released in June, and the reign of psychedelia was established. The whole episode lasted a little less than three years—about the tenure of the average successful television series.
Once the media discovered it, the counterculture ceased being a youth culture and became a commercial culture for which youth was a principal market—at which point its puritanism (inhibitions are a middle-class superstition) became for many people an excuse for libertinism (inhibitions are a drag). LSD, for instance, was peddled by Leary through magazines like
Playboy,
where, in a 1966 interview, he explained that “in a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms.” This was exactly the sort of news
Playboy
existed to print, and the interviewer followed up by asking whether this meant that Leary found himself irresistible to women. Leary allowed that it did, but proved reluctant to give all the credit to a drug, merely noting that “any charismatic person who is conscious of his own mythic potency awakens this basic hunger in women and pays reverence to it at the level that is harmonious and appropriate at the time.”
10
Playboy
is not a magazine for dropouts, and the idea that counterculture drugs were really aphrodisiacs was an idea that appealed not to teenagers (who do not require hormonal assistance) but to middle-aged men. (“Good sex would have to be awfully good before it was better than on pot,” Norman Mailer mused, presumably for the benefit of his fellow forty-five-year-olds, in
The Armies of the Night,
in 1968.)
11
It was not teenagers who put Tom Wolfe’s account of Kesey’s LSD quackery,
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
(1968), on the hardcover best-seller list. Hippies did not buy tickets to see
Hair
on Broadway, where it opened in 1968 and played over seventeen hundred performances, or read Charles Reich’s homage to bell-bottom pants in the
New Yorker
. People living on communes did not make
Laugh-In,
Hollywood’s version of the swinging psychedelic style, the highest-rated show on television in the 1968–69 season. And, of course, students did not design, manufacture, distribute, and enjoy the profits from rock ’n’ roll records. Those who attack the counterculture for disrupting what they take to have been the traditional American way of life ought to look to the people who exploited
and disseminated it—good capitalists all—before they look to the young people who were encouraged to consume it.
After the Altamont concert disaster, in December 1969, when a fan was killed a few feet from where the Rolling Stones were performing, psychedelia lost its middle-class appeal. More unpleasant news followed in 1970—the Kent State and Jackson State shootings, the Manson Family trials, the deaths by overdose of famous rock stars. And even more quickly than it had sprung up, the media fascination with the counterculture evaporated. But the counterculture, stripped of its idealism and its sexiness, lingered on. If you drove down the main street of any small city in America in the 1970s, you saw clusters of teenagers standing around, wearing long hair and bell-bottom jeans, listening to Led Zeppelin, furtively getting stoned. This was the massive middle of the baby-boom generation, the remnant of the counterculture—a remnant that was much bigger than the original, but in which the media had lost interest. These people were not activists or dropouts. They had very few public voices. One of them was Hunter Thompson’s.
12
Thompson came to
Rolling Stone
in 1970, an important moment in the magazine’s history. Wenner had fired Greil Marcus, a music critic with an American studies degree who was then his reviews editor, for running a negative review of an inferior Dylan album called
Self-Portrait
(it was one of Wenner’s rules that the big stars must always be hyped); and most of the politically minded members of the staff quit after the “Get Back” episode following Kent State. There were financial problems as well. By the end of 1970,
Rolling Stone
was a quarter million dollars in debt. Hugh Hefner, who is to testosterone what Wenner is to rock ’n’ roll, offered to buy the magazine, but Wenner found other angels. Among them were the record companies. Columbia Records and Elektra were delighted to advance their friends at
Rolling Stone
a year’s worth of advertising;
Rolling Stone
and the record companies, after all, were in the same business.
The next problem was to sell magazines. (
Rolling Stone
relies
heavily on newsstand sales, since its readers are not the sort of people who can be counted on to fill out subscription renewal forms with any degree of regularity.) Here Wenner had two strokes of good fortune. The first was a long interview he obtained with John Lennon, the first time most people had ever heard a Beatle not caring to sound lovable. It sold many magazines. The second was the arrival of Thompson.
Thompson was a well-traveled, free-spirited hack whose resume included a stint as sports editor of the
Jersey Shore Herald,
a job as general reporter for the
Middletown Daily News
, freelance work out of Puerto Rico for a bowling magazine, a period as South American correspondent for the
National Observer
(during which he suffered some permanent hair loss from stress and drugs), an assignment covering the 1968 presidential campaign for
Pageant,
two unpublished Great American Novels, a little male modeling, and a narrowly unsuccessful campaign for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado. He had actually been discovered for the alternative press by Warren Hinckle, the editor of
Ramparts
, which is when his writing acquired the label “gonzo journalism.” But Thompson was interested in
Rolling Stone
because he thought it would help his nascent political career by giving him access to people who had no interest in politics (a good indication of the magazine’s political reputation in 1970). A year after signing on, he produced the articles that became
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
(1972), a tour de force of pop faction about five days on drugs in Las Vegas. It sold many copies of
Rolling Stone
, and it gave Thompson fortune, celebrity, and a permanent running headline.
Many people who were not young read
Fear and Loathing
in Las
Vegas
and thought it a witty piece of writing. Wolfe included two selections from Thompson’s work in his 1973 anthology,
The New Journalism
(everyone else but Wolfe got only one entry); and this has given Thompson the standing of a man identified with an academically recognized “movement.” But Thompson is essentially a writer for teenage boys.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
is
The Catcher in the Rye
on speed: the lost weekend of a disaffected loser who tells his story in a mordant style that is addictively appealing to adolescents
with a deep and unspecified grudge against life. Once you understand the target, the thematics make sense. Sexual prowess is part of the Thompson mystique, for example, but the world of his writing is almost entirely male, and sex itself is rarely more than a vague, adult horror; for sex beyond mere bravado is a subject that makes most teenage boys nervous. A vast supply of drugs of every genre and description accompanies the Thompson protagonist and maintains him in a permanent state of dementia; but the drugs have all the verisimilitude of a fourteen-year-old’s secret spy kit: these grownups don’t realize that the person they are talking to is
completely out of his mind
on dangerous chemicals. The fear and loathing in Thompson’s writing is simply Holden Caulfield’s fear of growing up—a fear that, in Thompson’s case as in Salinger’s, is particularly convincing to younger readers because it seems to run from the books straight back to the writer himself.
After the Las Vegas book,
Rolling Stone
assigned Thompson to cover the 1972 presidential campaign. His reports were collected in (inevitably
) Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
(1973). The series began with some astute analysis of primary strategy and the like, salted with irreverent descriptions of the candidates and many personal anecdotes. Thompson’s unusual relation to the facts—one piece, which caused a brief stir, reported that Edmund Muskie was addicted to an obscure African drug called Ibogaine—made him the object of some media attention of his own. But eventually the reporting broke down, and Thompson was reduced at the end of his book to quoting at length from the dispatches of his
Rolling Stone
colleague Timothy Crouse (whose own book about the campaign,
The Boys on the Bus
[1973], became an acclaimed expose of political journalism). Since 1972, Thompson has devoted his career to the maintenance of his legend, and his reporting has mostly been reporting about the Thompson style of reporting, which consists largely of unsuccessful attempts to cover his subjects, and of drug misadventures. He doesn’t need to report, of course, because reporting is not what his audience cares about. They care about the escapades of their hero, which are recounted obsessively in his writings, and some of which were the basis for an unwatchable movie
called
Where the Buffalo Roam,
released in 1980 and starring Bill Murray.
Thompson left
Rolling Stone
around 1975 and eventually became a columnist for the
San Francisco Examiner.
He began repackaging his pieces in chronicle form in 1979, and collections of his articles and his correspondence have been coming out regularly ever since. Thompson, in short, is practically the only person in America still living circa 1972. His persona enacts a counterculture sensibility with the utopianism completely leached out. There are no romantic notions about peace and love in his writing, only adolescent paranoia and violence. There is no romanticization of the street, either. Everything disappoints him—an occasionally engaging attitude that is also, of course, romanticism of the very purest sort. Thompson is the eternally bitter elegist of a moment that never really was—it is significant that his favorite book is
The Great Gatsby
—and that is why he is an ideal writer for a generation that has always felt that it arrived onstage about five minutes after the audience walked out.