A psychedelic article by a guy who made a stir in more than one way

Given my periodically recurring interest in seeing what people were actually saying in The Sixties, I can across an article called "The Sociology of the Now" in the eleventh and final issue of Psychedelic Review (1970-71).

The piece struck me as largely superficial, the kind of thing that one would have found at the time in standard and generally superficial coverage in the mainstream press about the hippie scene and the "youth movement." Someone would describe the author later in life as "an intellectual dilettante"; more on that below.

But the one thing that struck me as something more enduring was this:

The development of the Beatles and the entire popular-music field in the past few years is reminiscent of the 1909-14 era, when an entire artistic generation rose to heights that have not since been equaled; yet there is a great difference, for Stein, Joyce, Picasso, Matisse, and Schönberg were speaking to an extremely small audience: the pop people are directing their statements to the entire world. The increasingly critical attitude of this new elite with respect to the older generation, and their ability to dramatize their feelings, are rapidly changing the consciousness of an entire generation.

Now even this sounds like advertising copy for an art exhibit. But there is something to be said for the ways in which popular music in the 1960s played a particularly important role in popularizing new ideas and other lifestyles. The Beatles' St. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band album, for instance, included an old-fashioned pop song, "When I'm Sixty-Four"; "Within You Without You," musically and thematically heavily influenced by Indian music and Hindu understanding of life; and the very contemporary "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," which reflected a psychedelic imagination, whether or not the title actually was a play on LSD.

Other parts were much less substantial than even that. For instance:

The psychedelics are new forms of energy, whose use will depend upon the situation in which they occur - hence the careful planning of the research worker interested in investigating a few linear parameters: a deep contrast to the teenager who downs 500 ug of LSD and goes out to a rock concert. One has expectations of particular results; the other wishes to experience new structures. One activity is based on a linear model the expansion and improvement of an old form, the energy being directed to maintaining the old game; the other activity opens up the individual to manifold experiences which will allow him to create a new game.

Apart from the likelihood that the kid will take damaging doses of LSD and/or something else, it seems more plausible to assume that most teenagers doing that would mainly have been looking for entertainment, rather than "manifold experiences which will allow him to create a new game." Actually, the more serious LSD researchers would seem to have been more likely to have "a new game" in mind.

There's this notably Reagan-esque comment: "California is quickly becoming overpopulated
and over-extended financially - the paradise has a serpent lurking in the garden." Say what?!

This also jumped out at me:

We can see the same progression in the psychoanalytic world as it moved from individual therapy to group therapy to marathon (twenty-four-to-thirty-six hour sessions) to a situation similar to that of Synanon, wherein the encounter goes on continuously, twenty-four hours a day, until the individual is converted - Wagner's idea of the Gesamtkunst functioning within a totally controlled environment (Bayreuth) that allows for the experience of conversion. We live in the age of the true believer.

He seems to be confusing psychoanalysis with psychotherapy more generally.

And Synanon was a cult, a relatively nasty one even in the cult world. But the author pretty clearly sees it as the cutting edge of a desirable development. Even though even by his description, it sounds like a particularly demanding cult.

I wish I had written down by comments on the article before I did an online search to see what the author, Ira Einhorn, had been up to since 1970: Ex-Fugitive Convicted in 25-Year-Old Murder New York Times 10/18/2002:

Ira Einhorn, a former counterculture leader who preached peace and love while battering his lovers, was convicted today of first-degree murder for killing a former girlfriend in 1977 and stuffing her body into his closet.

Mr. Einhorn, who fled the country and spent nearly 17 years in Europe after being arrested in the death of Holly Maddux, was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

After the verdict, Judge William J. Mazzola called Mr. Einhorn, 62, "an intellectual dilettante who preyed on the uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting and inexperienced."

See also: Joseph Geringer, Ira Einhorn: The Unicorn Killer TruTV.com (n.d,, 08/25/2011?).

Rightwing shrieker Michelle Malkin tried to use the fact that Einhorn was involved in some way with the original Earth Day to slam a later version of the event.

Actually, I did read the original article before I searched for information on his later life. I didn't see anything in the 1970 article that indicated to me he was on track to become a violent criminal. But the original piece does read like hype cobbled together from then currently fashionable notions among the hippie subculture. But most people who write superficial tripe don't murder their ex-girlfriends and hide their bodies in a trunk in the closet for weeks.

Tags: hippies, psychedelics, sixties

A surprisingly good Psych-Out from 1968

I recently saw a 1968 movie called Psych-Out about hippies in Haight-Ashbury called 1968, produced by Dick Clark. (Yes, the eternally young Dick Clark.) I think it's considered a bit of a "cult movie" and I expected it to be entertainingly hokey. But sometimes low expectations are an advantage. It's actually a pretty good film.

It stars Jack Nicholson as Stoney [groan], who has a psychedelic rock band called Mumblin' Jim that's trying to get a gig at the Fillmore, which is called the Ballroom in the flick. He meets a run-away named Jenny (Susan Strasberg) who's searching for her long-lost brother Steve (Bruce Dern) who she believes is in the Haight. Strasberg was 29 or 30 when the movie was made, though she has to look younger for the part. Since Jenny is described as a runaway, presumably she was no older than 17. Here's Jenny meeting her first flower child in San Francisco as she arrives in town on the bus:


I was a little surprised at how familiar the scenery looks. Although since I've lived in the Bay Area most of my life, I guess I shouldn't be. Shoot, I even go to the annual free bluegrass concerts that have happened in Golden Gate Park every October for the last few years. For that matter, I went to the Summer of Love 40th anniversary event in 1967 held in the same place that the bluegrass concerts take place.

Psych-Out has pretty much all of the stock features you might expect: tie-dyed clothes, hippie coffee houses, dope and more dope, paisley designs, beads and crystals, gurus and hippie-sympathizing ministers, stiff cops, group living, a psychedelic sex with Nicholson and Strasberg. And, of course, the bad trips. Pretty spectacularly bad trips, actually. And groovy music.

Stoney (Jack Nicholson) and Jenny (Susan Strasberg)

But what saves it from being hokey is that the writers evidently made some effort to understand the hippie culture as it was at the moment, and the actors play the parts in a serious way, so that it doesn't come across as either a moral instruction tale or as camp. And while it may still have the capacity to scandalize conservative cultural warriors - shoot, even Disney pablum can do that!- it's certainly not a propaganda film for the alternative hippie lifestyle, either. You do get a sense that the characters in the film are looking for more personal and collective freedom than they were finding in "straight" society. (Straight meant non-hippie at that time.) That there were looking for a life with more sense of living in the moment and a greater appreciation of joy in life.

But a character named Dave played by Dean Stockwell has the role in the movie of being a kind of devil's advocate to Stoney as well as a rival for Jenny's affections. At one point, Stoney is about to sneak off to sleep with a groupie but has to explain his absence to Jenny. Dave confronts him with the fact that he either has to stick with his "do your own thing" ethos or with his value of being honest and direct, but can't do both. Stoney winds up lying to Jenny about where he's going. But the scene is played as though this was a serious conversation between two people who were both committed to certain alternative ways of living. Dave doesn't come off as a simple hippie moralist, and Jack Nicholson's Stoney doesn't come off as a manipulative hypocrite.

The movie doesn't demonize the drug culture. But it also makes it clear that there are definite risks involved. Jenny has the mother of all bad trips with flames spurting out of the ground at her and so forth. She winds up right in the middle of Golden Gate Bridge at night in heavy traffic. You don't get the idea that it was a pleasant experience for her.

Another reason the movie doesn't come off as hokey is that it doesn't stick with stereotypes. In one scene, Stoney and two of his band members are helping Jenny search for her brother and they wind up in a junkyard surrounded by street punks. One of the hippie guys is in the middle of an LSD trip. The street punks assume that the hippies are gutless peace-and-love types and start getting aggressive with them. And then the hippies just beat the crap out of the punks. The guy tripping sits out the first part of the fight smiling and saying, "Peace, man!" But then he picks up a thick board and joins in the fight, thinking he's fighting a knight and a dragon. At the end of the fight when the punks are lying unconscious in the dirt, he hugs his club smiling and says, "It was beautiful." This is the funniest scene in the film to me just because it plays so deliberately against the stereotype.

Jenny, in line with the screen conventions of the time, had to cower in fear while the guys did the fighting. There were already some popular culture images like the TV shows The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and The Avengers where women were allowed to kick butt themselves. But the age of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was still a ways off.

One of the first scenes is a reminder that long before Starbucks, the hippies had used coffeehouses as a social meeting place.

One of the special features on the DVD is a short about the making of the film, called "Love and Haight". [groan] It features the eternally young Dick Clark from several years ago, before his stroke, talking about making a film. In the process, he makes this comment, which is pretty psychedelic itself:

I've always been a square individual. I mean, I've attracted a very strange group of friends, from Hell's Angels to junkies and psychopaths and a lot of other people. For some reason or other, they're attracted to me, knowing that I'm not of them.

I'm still trying to get my head around the image of Dick Clark hanging out with the junkies and psychopaths.

The Web site of San Francisco's artsy-alternative Red Vic Theater quotes Michael Weldon from the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film calling Psych-Out the "(t)he best Haight-Ashbury drug film".

Someone has posted at least major parts of the movie on You Tube. No telling how long it will be there.

I got another period movie from NetFlix, Getting Straight (1970). I made it through about the first ten minutes and that was all I could take. The hokey stereotypes and the script were so nails-on-the-blackboard bad it was amazing. A real contrast to Psych-Out.

Tags: hippies, psychedelics, psych-out, sixties

Timothy Leary's revenge?

Scientific American Mind Dec 2007 reports on Psychedelic Healing? Hallucinogenic drugs, which blew minds in the 1960s, soon may be used to treat mental ailments by David Jay Brown. Their helpful summary reads:

• The drugs that put the "psychedelic" into the sixties are now the subject of renewed research interest because of their therapeutic potential.

• Psychedelics such as LSD and the compound in magic mushrooms could ease a variety of difficult-to-treat mental illnesses, such as chronic depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and drug or alcohol dependency.

• Clinical trials with various substances are now under way in humans.

Brown writes, "Though still in their preliminary stages, studies in humans suggest that the day when people can schedule a psychedelic session with their therapist to overcome a serious psychiatric problem may not be that far off."

What will we tell the children?

(Note to culture-war trolls: Nothing in this post encourages or condones recreational usage of controlled substances. And only a moron would think so.)