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The Sixties
Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'Roll
Aired August 14, 2014 - 21:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are colonies of hippies springing up in most American cities.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And it's all related the psychedelics and the war, the protesting.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm planning on having a good time as long as I can.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Smoke pot with your kids and then you'll understand a lot of kids they're happy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's a giant loving.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: People should be inhibited in our sexual expression.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You cannot ignore a change in morality.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They're fascists. They don't like hippies and they don't like the things we do.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We do have to maintain law, order and decency on the streets.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What we're thinking is about is a peaceful planning. We're not thinking about anything else.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They are trying to do what no one else has ever done before, find a new way for humanity.
KEN BABBS, AUTHOR, WHO SHOT THE WATER BUFFALO: America in the early sixties, it was a real good time of prosperity but it was also kind of stagnant time in terms of spiritual growth. Things were kind of a standstill.
PETER COYOTE, ACTOR: The baseline culture was materialism and also the feeling that the culture itself didn't honor the human spirit and didn't honor creativity.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In the early 1950's the nation recognized in its midst a social movement called Beat generation. A novel titled "On the Road" became a bestseller.
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, EDITOR, JACK KEROUAC: ROAD NOVELS: When Kerouac's book comes out it became a revolution, defined a new generation of what being beat means. And it defined it as a spiritual revolution. But if we're living in an age of conformity, if everybody is trying to work the corporation that you're loosing a sense of self.
JACK KEROUAC, WRITER: I was traveling west on time at the junction of the state line of Colorado and I saw in the clouds huge and massed above theory golden desert of Even Fall a weighed image of God with fore finger pointed straight at me. Come on boy, go down across the ground, go moan for man. Go moan, go grown, go home alone. Go roll your bones alone.
BRINKLEY: Jack Kerouac became like a Godfather for the counterculture.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The village has a life and language on its own. If you dig it you're a hip. If you don't, man you're square. Coffee houses, the neighborhood bars of Bohemia where the strongest potion is coffee and the coffee house poet is the specialty of the house.
KEROUAC: Define a place where the eyes can rest.
HENRY DITZ, THE MODERN FOLK QUARTERLY: Beatniks, they have these coffee houses they would go in and play chess and read poetry and those same coffee houses became kind of a proving ground for folk singers. And all the young kids we're running out to buy guitars and banjos.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well it gives me a lot more than the popular music of our own time does
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My outlooks is that Papa song should be sung because we don't anything about say the bomb, you know, the whole situations comes to an end.
JOAN BAEZ, SINGER: There's going to be an alternative to whatever ways in life are offered to them, you know, I mean Democrat, Republican and I would like to offer some kind of alternative somehow, you know.
BRINKLEY: Folk revival scene had a big part on politics. You can get left politics out of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger. And so the Greenwich Village Movement was there to celebrate people's culture.
CHRIS CONNELLY, JOURNALIST: If you like the music you really were signing for their ways of looking at the world too. And then eventually one guy emerges as being special.
JOEL PERESMAN, PRESIDENT, ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME: During that time in the sixties as that Cultural Revolution was slowly bubbling and kids were starting to question authority, question what was happening in their country. They're looking for answers.
BRINKLEY: Bob Dylan thought that folk music was poetry. He took beat energy and mixed it with folk culture and it's more lyrical intensity than anybody's put a song before.
DITZ: Up until the time of Bob Dylan they were the song writers and they were the singers. Dylan started writing his own music.
DAVID WILD, MUSIC CRITIC: He says, "I'm going to comment on the world. I'm going to comment on the nature of this human experience." Bob Dylan was in this sort of white hot moment of saying more in the popular song than anyone ever had before.
After the revolution of Bob Dylan, the music world moves west. Laurel Canyon becomes the epicenter of the rock revolution.
MICHELLE PHILIPS, THE MAMAS AND THE PAPAS: The music scene was not happening in New York anymore. It was now L.A. Everybody move to Laurel Canyon.
DITZ: Actors, musicians, artists, and so was a kind of whole community very open. If you're driving over Laurel Canyon and you saw somebody hitchhiking, you just automatically pullover, "Hey brother come get in, I know where you're going."
GRAHAM NASH, CROSBY, STILLS & NASH: Laurel Canyon was an incredibly interesting place for living those days. I live on Lookout Mountain with Joni Mitchell. Crosby was close, Steven (ph) was close.
WILD: Now, it was all this artist who were singing the truth. And they're truth was this idyllic sort of sense of freedom. There was a thriving community of kids that were discovering their new life and couldn't wait to play the new song that they written.
NASH: It was a lot of freedom. There was a lot of drugs, there was a lot of beautiful women, there was a lot of good rock and roll being made, it was a fabulous time.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These are student at a suburban high school in Los Angeles. They reflect the sun and sensuality and affluence which dominate life in Southern California. The latest fad is the Sunset Strip. During the past year it has become a playground for Southern California's mobile, restless, teenagers. It is the place to go.
PHILLIPS: People would meet down at clubs on the Sunset Strip and they would go to the Trip or they would go to the Whiskey A Go Go. It was a real happening.
WILD: We changed from the culture of grownups that sort of looked down on kids to kids leading.
CONNELLY: It is the creation of the teenager. And the revolution begins.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office has begun foot patrol on the Sunset Strip to cope with the growing influx of youngsters.
JOHN HEILEMANN, MANAGING DIRECTOR, BLOOMBERG POLITICS: The notion of teenagers who had a culture of their own. They weren't listening to their parent's music kind of opens up this giant space for rebellions large and small.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I believe 10 percent of the students have used and are using marijuana. And also a very -- probably a very significant thing is that acceptance is gaining steadily and the usage is really increasing very, very rapidly.
DITZ: In L.A. we were all kind of, you know, smoking God's herb. When I was up in San Francisco it seemed like they were experimenting more with mind expansion, you know?
BRINKLEY: Ken Kesey took classes of writing at Stanford University and he wrote the great novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and this makes Kesey a celebrity.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (inaudible) Stanford?
KEN KESEY, WRITER: I was given the opportunity to go to the Stanford Hospital and take part in the LSD experiments.
BRINKLEY: Kesey had volunteered to test for LSD, a government sponsored test.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: LSD was isolated by (inaudible) the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company of Basel, Switzerland.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you feel happy?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The hell you want, because you have tears is in your eyes. Is that a beautiful experience would you say?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I would say yes.
BRINKLEY: Some people think it's when Kesey discovers LSD that the counter culture in California is born because more and more people then want to try experience what Kesey experienced and he becomes a promoter of it. Kesey created a drug commune at La Honda which an hour from San Francisco. Great artist loves smashing traditions and at his best Kesey was doing that. Everybody would have this communal LSD trip together. Tom Wolfe would write the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test about it.
TOM WOLFE, AUTHOR OF ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST: People were constantly slipping drugs into my food. The number of times that I would get, "Man, what the hell had happen to me", they said their doing me a favor.
BABBS: They're having the world's fair in New York, so bunch of us were going to go. But the bunch of us were too big to fit in his station wagon so he bought this converted school bus.
BRINKLEY: Kesey, he was going to put the bus in day glow bright colors and then go what he called unsettling America, blowing people's minds. BABBS: The whole idea of blowing people's minds was that you have to present something to him that is so different, there's a crack comes open where something new can come in. And the reaction of all these people is wonderful because what it was in 1964 there was no other thing like this happening.
BRINKLEY: Its part of a kind Cultural Revolution going to on making the squares pay notice to this underground of America.
BABBS: When we got New York City which is the home of the beat where Kerouac lives and picked him up because we were in his presence. We were just acting as groovy as we could, playing music, putting on costumes, doing all kinds of acts and stuff like that. And then Kerouac sat on the couch drinking a big (inaudible) of Budweiser, he was obviously a not an enthusiastic guy. Those beats, they had done their thing, you know, I really felt like the torch should been passed from those guys to the psychedelic generation.
BRINKLEY: Kesey in many ways was very messianic and he started feeling that acid would allow you to see a larger truth. And they started saying let's get as many people to try LSD as he can.
BABBS: And so we started running halls. We called the thing the Acid Test. And the band of course was known as the Warlocks. As time went on they changed their name to the Grateful Dead.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: LSD was not an illegal drug. When Kesey held these Acid Test as they were known, they had two batch, one was punch and one was punch with LSD.
LISA LAW, PHOTOGRAPHER: And the Acid Test was like a party, a scene is a lot of lights shows and music and people dancing. And when the Dead were playing it was a way to feel that acid in waves. And I looked down I saw kids in front of me moving to the music. They looked up at me and I said yeah.
PERESMAN: The rug culture really took hold and that's where artist played there was a Grateful Dead or the Jefferson Airplane, to be able to embrace it and put it in their music.
BRINKLEY: The counter in California is born because more and more people didn't want to try to experience what Kesey experienced. And he became the kind of grand Puba (ph) of the carnival of San Francisco in the 60's.
RONALD REAGAN, GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA: There's nothing grown up (ph) or sophisticated in taking an LSD trip at all. They are just being complete fools.
(COMMERICIAL BREAK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: CBS News without any flowers in its hair is in San Francisco because this city has gain the reputation of being the hippie capital of the world.
COYOTE: I now accepted in San Francisco State and I found an apartment at Haight Clinton Street right in the center of what would become the hit spray.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The psychedelic shop on Haight Street started just over year ago, its spreads the gospel of dreamy new utopia based on brotherhood and love and LSD.
RON THELIN, CO-OWNER OF THE PSYCHEDELIC SHOP: To all of people out there that are confused and hungry for some kind spiritual meaning life. That's why all these people are down here, that's why there is so much interested in (inaudible) because it offers some kind of hope.
LAW: We moved up and (inaudible) down the street from this psychedelic shop. People were growing their hair long, they're bids, they are playing music on the street. It was just an incredible environment at that pointed at the beginning. That's when it was just like one big giant family.
COYOTE: Before you knew it, it was a congregating place for artist. And the dividing line seemed to be the psychedelic experience. You couldn't understand the poster, you couldn't understand the fashions, you couldn't understand anything, if you hadn't gotten high.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The diggers (ph) (inaudible) food and money to feed free those who arrive in panhandle pack with a bowl and an appetite. Diggers are people who shares system manifesto and their aim is the society where everything is shared, everything free.
LAW: The diggers were one of the first groups that were into social consciousness about what was needed to take care of this huge group of people that were coming in to the Haight-Ashbury.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Their free shop looks more like a playground at first sight. Here they make treat and clothes for other hippies who can come and take what they want without paying anything for it.
COYOTE: Everything in the store was free, tools, clothing, televisions and so we where inviting people to imagine the way of life that would please them and then, to make it real by doing it.
JERRY GARCIA, GRATEFUL DEAD: What we're thinking about is a peaceful planet, we're not thinking about anything else, we're not thinking about any kind of power, we're not thinking about any of those kinds of struggles, we're not thinking about revolution or war or any of that.
That's not what we want. Nobody wants to get hurt. Nobody wants to hurt anybody. We were all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life, you know, and like think about moving the whole human race ahead of step or a few steps.
DILTZ: We wanted to learn more about a real meaning of life. Why are we here? Certainly, not kill each other but here to celebrate life to make music and do art, and love each other.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These people are hippies. They represent a new form of social rebellion. It is hard to figure out what positive things they are unfavorable of. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The reason we can no longer identify with the
kinds of activities that feel their generation are engage in is because those activities are for us meaningless. They had lead to a monstrous war in Vietnam for example.
GRACE SLICK, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE: We did want change from war, from rigid ideas of what the sexist ought to be doing. A change from black people ought to be here and like people ought to be here. No, why can we trying and make that work?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Haight-Ashbury community has created the counsel for a summer of love in San Francisco.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The counsel is calling for creative love happenings for every weekend throughout the summer. We ask all who come here to come here and love. And we ask all to live here, to great all the man with love.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They at their best are trying for a kind of group sainthood. And saints running and groups are likely to be ludichrist. They depend on hallucination for their philosophy. This is not a new idea. And it has never worked.
BRINKLEY: There was sort of divide of generations, a lot of mistrust, young people didn't trust old people, old people did understand young people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What so offensive about long hair?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It looks sloppy. It doesn't differentiate the boys from the girls enough.
COYOTE: We did ourselves hippies. The hippies are a fabrication. They were an attempt to diminish young adults and infantilizes. And it certainly serves to exclude the people that were deeply thoughtful about the world that were ready to dedicate their lives to making change and that question the paradigm materialism.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Look around you, nothing works. The only thing were -- the kids presented with is playing grow up look, you know, you can join the army, you can go to where you can get a gig, working as an engineering and become a vegetable and try to work in your own car, your own big metal box, you know, it just -- it looks absurd. You know, people in the metal boxes is like just going all over from job to job, frustrated uptight. What joy is there in life? Life is should is and should be -- life is and should be ecstasy.
BRINKLEY: The counterculture had the arrogance to tell everybody else what they were doing is wrong. And nobody likes that.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: As estimated that anywhere from 10 to 200,000 youngsters may pour in to Haight-Ashbury this summer. Many people are apprehensive, they feel that black power or other political activist groups may us Haight Street as a stage setting for riots.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Haight Ashbry can not handle a 100,000 (inaudible).
COYOTE: The tension between the government and the people began to be evident.
THOMAS CAHILL, SAN FRANCISCO CHIEF OF POLICE: Nobody should let their young children come into San Francisco unsupervised to be a part of a group such as that.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (inaudible) as far as I'm concern. And they don't like hippies and they don't like the things we do and they try to harass us, embarrass.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In some way, there are revolutions of war between generations. The hippies rally and riots never trust anyone over 13.
CONNELLY: The war of youth culture against the establishment is in full swing on every front.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: About four policeman and (inaudible) came in and said, "Everybody get out, everybody get out. The store is close." They wouldn't give a reason, they wouldn't identify, you know, under what premise they were doing this. When we ask them they started pushing people around, they pushed people physically out of the store.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The mayor is -- this is really very insidious what he's up to. He wants to stop human growth.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The hippy leaders say all will be well. (inaudible) will prevail. They say it will be a summer of love, the great pilgrimage. Hopefully, they'll be right.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If it's necessary to bring a National Guard, I'll bring in National Guard. I'll use whatever force, is necessary.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We now seem to be witnessing in this country and elsewhere an intense preoccupation with the pursued of pleasure. Call it hedonism, call it job gratification, call it what you will. You cannot avoid noticing it. You may not like it. You may not accept it but you can not ignore it, a change in morality.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Turn it on, tune in, drop out.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I spend sometimes in New York and I spend sometime in London and I'm here to tell you it's happening allover.
TODD GITLIN, AUTHOR, THE SIXTIES YEARS OF HOPE DAYS OF RAGE: In any large city, there were other Haight Ashburies, if people could point to. See, we're on the map. We're big and we're far more interesting than what you all have to offer.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How do you answer the questions of parent who are concerned about the use of LSD and marijuana of their children?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These are young people who are hungering for older people, for their parents to listen to them. These youngsters want to share with their parents the (inaudible) and the glory that they are encountering and that perhaps, eventually when you're spiritually ready you'll turn on with your children if you think that's the right thing to do.
LAW: Moderate pop, it was the absolutely ultimate slogan.
SLICK: (inaudible) that I've played pretty much ever is Monterey pop festival.
D. A. PENNEBAKER, FILM MAKER, MONTEREY POP : Monterey hit like lightning popular music was to changing and become something different and there was a whole new generation of people that wanted to march with it. It said, "Get onboard. We're leaving town."
PHILLIPS: You realize this is Janis Joplin before she was know, before she'd ever gotten her first album, before she'd ever done her first single.
It's just music at its freshest. Its music that is just been born and the audience is like.
LAW: (inaudible), love and peace and music and the policemen who was in charge brought flowers out to his men and he said, don't bust anybody.
WILD: Monterey was that hippie dream come true.
GITLIN: Culture was changing the Hippie movement, it was sway in the Mainstream.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is where the youngsters come to buy their clothes and not just the youngsters, it's the young adults and the man who are 40, 50 and even 60 years old.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In the states, pop is going middle class and spreading like (inaudible). As more and more citizens get (inaudible) out of their minds, the drug (inaudible) enters the bloodstream of American life. Like it or not, we're living in this stoned age.
BRINKLEY: At its best, the counter culture came in with hard punches the mainstream culture.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: People have already changed their minds about contraception, abortion, premarital sex.
MICHELLE ASHFORD, SCREEN WRITER AND FILM PRODUCER: 1960s were absolutely a sexual revolution. Because of the pill women could take charge of their own bodies, that they could be sexual that they didn't have to get pregnant. Everything sort of (inaudible) sort of a perfect storm of societal forces come together.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Here, if you love somebody and people here love everybody, if you want to make love somebody then you should. There's no reason why you shouldn't. DILTZ: Free love was all well and good and there was a lot of accidental sex but we didn't look at it as hedonism. People were just so open to each other and life is beautiful, you know, and people weren't judgmental.
BRINKLEY: The mainstream of young people for telling their parents you've been prohibiting my sexual freedom and the puritan work ethic is punk.
WILD: So it was clear, the rules were changing and the rules were really that there were no rules.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The topic tonight is the hippies. We have with us Mr. Jack Kerouac over here who was said to have started the whole beat generation business.
BRINKLEY: Jack Kerouac never wanted to be a prophet. He wanted to be a great American writer but fame destroys people in America.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: To what is that do you believe that the beat generation is related to the hippies? What do they have in common? Was this an evolution on the (inaudible)?
KEROUAC: Which is the older ones.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.
KEROUAC: I'm 46 years old. These kids are 18. The beat generation was a generation of the attitude and a pleasure in life and tenderness. I believe in border and (inaudible).
BRINKLEY: Here's the progenitor really of the counterculture kind of disowning his own babies and try to make sense of a decade, the 60s that he didn't feel (inaudible) too.
KEROUAC: Apparently some kind of Dionysian movement in which I did not intend. This -- (inaudible) at my heart. So ...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All sorts of people have been writing various articles about the hippies. Usually about the hippies as if they were animals, something to look at. As we've gotten hundreds and literally thousands of people coming up to Haight-Ashbury to watch people. It makes Haight-Ashbury a terribly unpleasant place to be in.
LAW: The news got out about the Haight-Ashbury. It became overrun.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right now we're entering what is known as the largest hippie colony in the world. (inaudible) ahead of the hippie subculture. The nickname is Hashbury, a marijuana of course, that LSD is being used.
WILD: Literally people made the trip to San Francisco to be a part of something. About the time they got there, that trip was over.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the latest stage in the evolution of the hippie movement. The hippies are trying to get away.
So they go out to a cabin in the Countryside and start to commune. Here they can get away from the terrorists and the reporters (inaudible) them in San Francisco.
BABBS: Communes has started and this was really what the hippie movement was all about, an idea of sharing everything, clothes and food and everything, people could just help themselves, you know.
COYOTE: We live communally because it was the cheapest way to live. A lot of people began to clarify and simplify their lives.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What will follow this dispersal of the hippie movement to the Countryside is hard to project.
They maybe, as they say coming here to build the foundations for a new society in this nation or they maybe coming like the rolling mammoth to find their own extinction.
RICHARD REEVES, CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, NY TIMES: I was working for the New York Times in the (inaudible) and it was just a couple of what's going out there.
As we went north to the city, we began to run into traffic jams. I finally say, "(inaudible) what the hell is going on?" He says, "I don't. There are thousands of people here and they're all going to some farm." And it was of course Woodstock."
WILD: I think Woodstock was an opportunity for people to realize they weren't alone. A lot people who are in their hometown, are in their family felt isolated, realize they weren't.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The towns people quite frankly were terrified at the prospect of the hippie arrival.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I was apprehensive. This little hamlet as a population of under a hundred people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When I started hearing the figures of 200,000, 300, finally 500,000, we had to see if people (inaudible).
LAW: The word got out. Everybody in their brother came from all over the country.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: First it sudden rain then the thirst and hunger from the shortage of water and food just for the opportunity to spend a few days in their country getting stoned on their drugs and grooving on the music.
LAW: We got together had a little (inaudible) about what are we going to do to feed these people. We went in to New York to buy 1,500 pounds (inaudible), 1,500 pounds (inaudible), a 130,000 paper plates, 130,000 Dixie cups and I believe we served 200,000 people.
GITLIN: Right now, there are tens of millions of people who feel themselves to be an irresistible river of change. And you get something (inaudible).
DILTZ: We had loved (inaudible) in L.A. on the weekends where everybody gets dressed up and goes to the park and brings an instrument but to see hundreds of thousands of people like meeting of all the tribes from all over the country. Well we didn't know there were so many of us have felt the same.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We must be in heaven men.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A rock music festival that drew hundreds of thousands of young people to a dairy farm in White Lake, New York over the weekend became grand today.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Admittedly, there was marijuana as well as music at the rock festival but there was also no rioting. What did not happen at that dairy farm is possibly more significant than what did happen.
These long haired mostly white kids in their blue jeans and sandals were no wide-eyed anarchist looking for trouble. They remained polite.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Residents and resorts freely emptied their covered for the kids. Merchants were stunt by their politeness.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And while such spectacle may never happen again. It has recorded the growing proportions of this youthful culture in the mind of adult America.
QUESTLOVE, MUSICIAN/RECORD PRODUCER: Whenever you see a phenomenon, especially if you're living in it at the time you tend to think that's the rival. This is the joining and the start of something new.
Unfortunately, Woodstock just marked the end of it.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is going to be Woodstock West.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, it's going to be (inaudible).
NASH: Woodstock was followed by Altamont, you know, only a few months later and that couldn't have been to more different concepts.
SLICK: We have had the Hells Angels, the security at a number of free in the park concerts that we have done and they were fine. They were funny. They were doing what they were supposed to do. So, we suggested using Hells Angels.
What happen was a lot of speed in alcohol, that's a deadly combination for bikers.
Marty said the F word to one of the Hell Angels. While we were on stage the Hells Angels knocks him down. That was just the beginning.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'd like to mention that the Hells Angels just smash Marty Balin in the face and knock him out for a bit for a bit. I'd like to thank you for that.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're talking to me. I'm not talking to you.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm not talking to you men, I'm talking to the people that hit my lead singer in the head.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're talking to my people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And let me tell you what's happen.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You ...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What's happening?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, that's not the (inaudible).
(Off-Mike)
SLICK: When we left, it was dark and the Rolling Stones were on and we were on a helicopter. (inaudible) look down, he said, "Wow, looks like somebody is getting killed down there. Well he was right, they were.
(Crosstalk)
DAVID BRINKLEY, ABC NEWS REPORTER: In California five members of a so called religious cult including Charles Manson, the Guru or high priest had been indicted in the murder of Sharon Tate and six other.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All the elements are present from one of the most sensational murder trials in American history. Seven people brutally murdered in glare of Hollywood publicity, the involvement of a mystical hippie clan which despised the straight affluence society, young girls supposedly under the spell of a bearded (inaudible) who allegedly masterminded the seven murders.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hi.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hi.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The sun is shinning this morning.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is, yeah.
VINCENT BUGLIOSI, AUTHOR, HELTER SKELTER: Charles Manson clearly masqueraded behind the common image of being hippie goes up to the Haight-Ashbury district, surrounds himself with a young bunch of followers. Their lifestyle was sex orgies and LSD trips. Eventually he gets them to commit mass murder for him.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This drug, the killer had scrolled under a refrigerator door the words death to pigs. BUGLIOSI: You see prior to these murders no one associated hippies with violence and murder. People would pick up a hitch hiking hippie. There was no big deal but after the Manson murders, you saw a hippie with long hair hitchhiking and the image of Manson would enter the drivers mind and they'd drive right by.
BRINKLEY: By the time of Charles Manson and watching and seeing what happened there it symbolizes the drained idealism of the spiritual quest of the beats and early hippies.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Today the magic is gone. Aimless and disorganized, the hippies have fallen prey to their own free spirit, free love, free drugs and too much free publicity have gradually corrupted them.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's something happened to Haight-Ashbury since last year. We hear it's not the same place.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Well no, it isn't. The loving brought more and more people and then people who are just bummed, they're just trying get into a good thing, you know, free food, free everything. And so they all just came yeah, you know, and a lot of really rotten people. And so now you've really got a bad thing. I mean it use to be you could set your stuff down beside the road and nobody would touch it. And now it got so you couldn't even put your things inside the building. Somebody would come along and take everything you had.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well one day I woke up very hungry and, you know, very dirty and tired and disgusted. So I decided to, you know, get a job and settle down, to get serious.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Joe's job is making Jewelry. He's been taking a six month course to learn how.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's hard to be getting up at 8:00 every morning and doing all these changes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Joe bought the suit, uncomfortable how it looked. Will he be equally uncomfortable in his new life? There had been generation gaps before but today is (inaudible) widest yet. Can the Joe's of America Bridge the gap and conform without society making concessions in return?
COYOTE: I'd say there was a common element in the counterculture of people trying to invent a new world. But people mature, their point of view gets more nuanced. The cost start to come due, children come into the world.
WILD: That idea of sex, drugs and rock and roll, it's a youth dream then youth dies.
BRINKLEY: Yet our mainstream culture took what it needed from the hippies.
WILD: The actual movement of the sixties was the movement towards something more authentic. LAW: In the sixties we thought of other people as part of our own family. We were into caring for society as a whole.
BABBS: This is what the revolution is all about, mercy is better than justice. A carrot is better than the stick and the most important lesson is be kind, be kind.
COYOTE: To me everyday was a high watermark. We played music all day long. We worked. We did not have jobs. It was the most carefree period of life. Dylan has this great line in the early song he says, "I wish, I wish, I wish in vain that we could sit simply in that room again, a thousand dollars at the drop of hat, I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.
