1967: A SUMMER OF LOVE, AND THE LONG, HOT SUMMER

Descending into dreamland, your thoughts drift. A cascade of images filter through the fading contraceptive semi-conscious veil. Is that you wearing flowers in your hair? Maybe you whiff the scent of a seductive fragrance. Possibly a trace from your gleaming yellow floral adornment, or pungence wafting from snugly rolled paper aglow in all its intoxicating glory. Inhale deeply now to trap every wisp of this heady time warp. Where is this trip taking you?

In a purplish swirling flash you are beamed to San Francisco. To Haight-Ashbury. It’s 1967. What was in that little pill your comrade gave you? You’re acting funny and you don’t why. A haze is all around as you gaily glide through Haight during the Summer of Love. Maybe you can kiss the sky, or at least bundle with your intimate new mates. Many are just like you. To butcher a phrase from Timothy Leary: they are turned on, tuned in, and dropping out. The district is ground zero for the counterculture. Hippie heaven. Yes, love was in the air. Shed those inhibitions. Copulate to your heart’s content. Do your own thing. One-hundred-thousand bohemians packed in the euphoric nirvana can’t be wrong. All youth qualified for the orgy of elation and excess.

If the Bay Area wasn’t on the docket, buy a ticket, motion pictures could cue a heartbeat flutter. In The Graduate, a lovesick Dustin Hoffman finally snatched his bride (Katherine Ross), but only after bedding her bewitching mother (alluring Anne Bancroft). Illicit love and West Coast ecstasy; Berkeley style. Sometimes romance can be a tangled web. Maybe the English had a better idea. To Sir, With Love didn’t follow the usual formula, students loved their teacher, Sidney Poitier. Not in the carnal sense of course. It was an affair of admiration and respect. Sir had standards. A surefire prescription for a short career today.

Even the villains shared in the passion. Bonnie and Clyde loved each other and relished robbing banks too. The latter led to their downfall. A demise captured in a grisly finale that represented a watershed in the industry by pushing blood splatter past the censor grade. The hemorrhage continued. Apparently violence and carnage worked. Sometimes twelve-fold. The Dirty Dozen featured an all-star cast led by Lee Marvin in a World War II massacre mission. Sprinkle in a grain of gravitas as it was loosely based on an actual event. It engrossed the audience and was one of the top grossing films of the year. Superstar Paul Newman added to his aura when he took a bullet for moviegoers in his portrayal of a rebellious inmate shackled to a chain gang in Cool Hand Luke. A nod of tribute to the anti-hero. A rifle shot from a guard extinguished Luke’s body in the taut climax. But his free spirit endured. A metaphor for the sixties? The studios kept cranking out the crowd pleasers. In The Heat of the Night featured Poitier at the top of his game again. Alongside Rod Steiger (who won the Oscar for Best Actor), the daring film spoke to deep-seated bigotry in the South. It captured five Oscars and is considered a landmark in tackling racial relations via cinema.

1967 was certainly a banner year for movies as you never knew what would pop up next, and that was also true when a bride and groom cemented their relationship in holy wedlock. Sometimes would-be blissful unions encountered troublesome interference. Race mixing and love inflamed some heads. As a legacy of longstanding white supremacist traditions, anti-miscegenation laws were still on the books in Southern states. The 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act prohibited marriage between “whites” and ” coloreds”. Mildred Jeter (black) and Richard Loving (white) were sentenced to a year in prison for violating the statute. The honorable Supreme Court of Virginia unsurprisingly upheld the conviction. Would the United States Supreme Court be amenable to a reversal? A surprising outcome awaited. In the 60s the highest court in the land under Chief Justice Earl Warren consisted of more enlightened members than the bulk of current immoderate right-wing ideologues. Warren et al showered the Lovings with affection by unanimously vacating the prior decisions and declared all race-based restrictions on matrimony unconstitutional. The decree had profound impact. People wept. Others raced to wed and Loving Day is celebrated on June 12 in honor of the ruling. It also established precedent for legitimizing same-sex bonding. Although that was much longer in coming.

Justice does experience delays. In April, Muhammad Ali refused induction into the military and was summarily stripped of his Heavyweight title and primary source of income for three and half years. An all-white jury who heard his case delivered a damaging blow to the Black Achilles. He was declared guilty. Perhaps their decision had an underlying racial motivation. After the usual appeals sojourn, Ali was acquitted by the Supreme Court, not as many believe, on religious grounds, but because of a prior administrative error. Justice Thurgood Marshall, himself a warrior in due process battles for decades, and the first black to be appointed to the Supreme Court bench in August of ’67, had recused himself from the Ali 1971 hearing because of prior involvement. Still, the verdict was unanimous.

Elsewhere there was less peaceful resolution to racial tumult. Detroit experienced the worst riot in the U.S. since the 1863 Civil War New York City draft uproar. For five days the streets were aflame and it required the intervention of the Michigan National Guard, and the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions to squelch the mayhem. The casualty rate was significant, 43 died and nearly 1200 were injured. Two-thousand buildings were destroyed and 7200 people were arrested. It was just one incident in the Long Hot, Summer where civil unrest bubbled over in Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Newark, and Rochester (reprise of ’64). Even Tampa participated in the tempest after a white police officer shot an unarmed black teen in the back. The young man subsequently died. The officer was acquitted. Imagine that.

With all the commotion the boomers needed music as a narcotic to ease the pain. Let’s resume your swoon as you ” Picture yourself in a boat on a river.” Ahh, you absorb a wave of psychedelic glitter of ” tangerine trees and marmalade skies.” And those diamonds in the sky are so sparkling. The Beatles have clearly struck the mother lode again. This time with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which would become among the most critically acclaimed albums in rock history. Score that as a major achievement for studio mastery, but it was back to the West Coast for the live fireworks. The Monterey Pop Festival in June was the main event on the year’s musical calendar and it brought the counterculture into the mainstream. Hendrix was there and beginning his ascent into rock stardom. The feisty Janis bawled and strutted her hour upon the stage, and so did the immortal Otis Redding who gave an intense, arousing version of I’ve Been Loving You Too Long. Monterey was later regarded as a tune-up for Woodstock. But the crowning triumph of the 60s Generation was two years and a continent away. At the time Monterey stood as a sensation in its own right.

All the spectacle was very exciting for sure, but even the most stout of the frisky youngsters needed a respite. Lighting up the incense and snuggling up for a relaxing read was often a nice diversion. The baby boomers incurred the disdain of stiff-necked, sexual and mental dullards in later years. Maybe they received an F for orthodoxy, however the offspring of the Greatest Generation were cerebrally facile. They could cope with provocative material such as William Manchester’s The Death of a President, released in November. The author was an admirer of President John F. Kennedy and the book was an account of the beloved leader’s lamentable assassination in Dallas. Jacqueline Kennedy commissioned the work and the former First Lady obliged Manchester with multiple interviews for the content, as did a host of others. One who did decline was Maria Oswald, the assassin’s widow. Perhaps she suspected it might present her husband Lee in a less than flattering light. Regardless, before it could be released, Manchester managed to antagonize everybody. Instead of he said, she said; it was he quoted what she (Jackie) shouldn’t have said. The Kennedys didn’t like it, LBJ and his staff didn’t like it. The public loved it. The sales ticker hit the million mark in a short time. What good is history if it doesn’t have bickering and a dash of scandal as part of the package? It even mentioned that Jackie smoked cigarettes. Who would have thought? Camelot going up in smoke. Certain revisions were made, then Manchester sped off to the hospital to enjoy his well-deserved nervous breakdown.

It was definitely not a good year for the Irish, why even the seemingly invincible Boston Celtics lost to the Philadelphia 76ers in the NBA finals. Chamberlain had his revenge on Russell at last. There was a reprieve for the fine folks and exemplary fans in Boston though. After years of futility on the baseball diamond, the Red Sox finally made it to the World Series. There they would fall prey to the St. Louis Cardinals, or more specifically to pitcher Bob Gibson. The hurler was an otherworldly figure: glaring, scowling, ferocious, indomitable. He was recovering from a broken leg which seemed to affect his temperament. He appeared more ornery than usual, and he broke the Boston hearts allowing only 3 runs in 3 games. He won the Most Valuable Player Award. One report even claimed Gibson smiled. Tom Landry never smiled. His Fundamentalist God didn’t permit joy. Grief would come to the stone-faced coach and his Dallas Cowboys on the last day of 1967 on the last play of the NFL Championship. The determined Packer quarterback Bart Starr nudged the ball in from the one yard line as players scrambled for traction on the frozen turf of Lambeau Field in Green Bay. In football lore, the contest has been dubbed the ” Ice Bowl” because of the glacial conditions where the recorded wind chill was – 48 F. It has made for a great conversation piece over a hot cup of coffee ever since.

A chill descended as the Summer of Love and the Long, Hot Summer wound into fall, then winter. In November the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, declaring that Israel must return the land it seized in the 6-Day War earlier in the year. Israel refused, and the morass of competing interests made the Middle East an enduring political and diplomatic minefield for succeeding generations. That same month in an audacious act, Senator Eugene McCarthy announced he would challenge sitting president Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination in 1968. McCarthy signaled intent to run on an anti-Vietnam War platform. LBJ felt secure, his commander of the American forces in Vietnam, William Westmoreland, assured him ” There is light at the end of the tunnel.” Military triumph was inevitable. U.S. forces were nearing their peak of half a million and engaging in their bloodiest exchanges in the conflict. There was growing skepticism about government claims, maybe McCarthy was onto something. Probably not. You don’t know because your slumber is interrupted. Tap, tap, tap. A big furry orange creature with big green eyes fix their piercing stare: somewhere a food bowl is empty. Reverie surrenders to the mundane. But somewhere in the recesses of your mental canvas the hum of an organ purrs. Did you really skip the light fandango? Perhaps another dream session awaits, perhaps another odyssey of love, and and perhaps even less hate in 68.

 

 

 

 

 

1966: Sounds of Silence, and Loudness

” You have a right to remain silent.” Even the most casual crime show fan knows those lines are a standard part of the mandatory arrest dialogue. They are embedded in the famous ” Miranda Warning.” In June, 1966 the Supreme Court established that a citizen is afforded certain constitutional protections, including the right to an honest attorney before interrogation can proceed and potentially doom said citizen to years in a potentially unpleasant jail cell. Or worse, make them watch twenty years of Cleveland Browns’ game films. Miranda vs. Arizona would have far-reaching implications, a failure to advise a suspect of the prescribed rights could vacate convictions. This could allow seedy types back on the streets; bloody hell, even employing them at McDonald’s to fondle your nutritious Big Macs. Silence is golden you might say, and while the Court first meditated on the merits of Miranda, silence rollicked to a ringing start in the decade’s transition year. Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence sat at the top of the Billboard charts in January as the duo counseled listeners that ” The words of the prophets were written on the subway walls.” However, in New York City there would be no one to glean the portents because peeved transit workers went on strike that month. How about that? Yes darling, you could sleep in the subway and feel secure. Hell, that is probably true any time. Although it might have been prudent to take a furtive glance about if footsteps were heard in the vicinity. Adopting caution was also sensible in Red China where self-preservation was a paramount concern. No Miranda safeguards there, scholars never knew when rabid fanatics may come crashing through the door. Intellectuals were being hushed as the portly, anally clogged Chairman Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in May. While highly dedicated assistants pried imprisoned feces pebbles from Mao’s troubled chubby rectum other underlings terrorized revisionist and bourgeois elements, or anyone whose thoughts lacked sanction from the tea gulping opium-dazed leader. The campaign to further the cause of utopian Communism stifled dissenting voices and writings. Any works with a taint of Western influence were consigned to the bonfires. Mentally hollow conformists found it emotionally intoxicating to banish the canons of science to the inferno. Record that as a grotesque festival of flaming fealty to their infallible leader. Americans can be serene in their confidence that such abject subservience can never happen here. We are a democracy and our leaders revere the Constitution.

Quietude was hardly universal. Rowan and Martin triggered the laugh buttons when their show commenced on NBC in June, and you could hear the punches and pows of Batman and Robin as they rattled the television screen while felling sinister foes. The Caped Crusaders struck blows of fanciful justice for the commoners. Yet more uncommon horizons beckoned. A new audience cult surfaced among those who enjoyed having their imaginations run rampant: you could boldly go where no man (or woman) had gone before when Star Trek took viewers zooming into space for the first time in September. Fussy physics folks could tell you that time travel was not possible but how about ousting autocrats and crime syndicates? It’s what the crew of Mission Impossible made their objective in each enterprise. It was all fun fiction of course. Unless it wasn’t.

Actually, evicting and installing dictators seemed to be a form of mainstream recreation in 1966. The loutish, ill-mannered President for Life, Field Marshall Doctor Idi Amin Dada, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, seized control of Uganda. Some claimed he was not always the most amicable dinner host because you never knew when something fishy was up and he might later drink your blood or have your head preserved in a freezer. One might become a victim over something as trivial as not addressing him by his full title. Amin was considered an overweening type. Drunk with power. A rule of thumb says countries should avoid having leaders like that. Sadly, the devilish Amin Dada was hardly unique in horror headline grabbing. In Nigeria a military faction staged a coup and removed a democratically elected government. This ruffian version proved inept which led to a counter-coup mixed with relentless rounds of tribal warfare and the Biafran secessionist movement. That regional uprising was suppressed after four years of savagery, and claimed at a minimum, a million lives. The oil rich but unstable nation endured discord and atrocities for nearly thirty years and simmering resentments linger.

And what kind of world would it be without the CIA sneaking into the overthrow show? Down with demonic socialism ! In February, to promote the benefits of capitalism and democracy in Ghana, the American spymasters helped a mutinous group assume power while the leader, Nkrumah, was off hobnobbing with Mao in China; presumably to discuss the finer points of Marxist doctrine and to sip some tea. The new Ghana ruling outfit stumbled along for a few years, selling cocoa and piling up debt until they were bounced by another disgruntled army clique in ’72. The yield from the cocoa crop bubbled hot and cold over the years, and of course the introduction of the market system guaranteed that income inequality prevailed. Tedious toiling was and is of little merit, the average farmer still earns just 84 cents per day. Less than the international poverty baseline of $ 1.90 per day. Mayhem, financial corruption, and volatile political swings raised troubling moral questions then, and the problems persist in a continent floundering in the entrails of European colonialism. There is also a valuable historical lesson here. It is this: No matter what kind of “ism” drives a nation — it is well-advised to avoid having a buffoon for a leader. Really.

If you were digesting all the political and social dislocation in the news at the time, you might have needed to chill somewhat, and Kraft Foods introduced the solution: Cool Whip. Just advance on the fridge, whip it out, stick your finger in it and lick it, or squirt it on your favorite cake or pie. To be really bold, it could be added to Quaker Instant Oatmeal which was also hit the market in ’66. And there was no more need to guess what you were swallowing because the first Truth in Packaging Laws were on the books. That may not sound like much to toot your horn about but at least you could be confident of the ingredients when you nabbed a bag of Bugles; a popular treat fresh on the shelves. You could slobber away with the snacks when you watched Johnny Carson play the hot new game Twister with Eva Gabor on late night TV.  Some naysayers were appalled, claiming the new kink in entertainment was nothing more than ” sex in a box.” An interesting turn of the phrase, to be sure.

The vice sniffers may not have been able to prevent people from their warped contortions so they took aim at books. Six years after its publication, the Hanover County School Board in Virginia ordered To Kill a Mockingbird banned from classrooms as it was found “offensive”, ” improper”; and sweet Jesus – even ” immoral.” Now I don’t want to offend any Christian sensibilities, but fuck it, if a book has all those attributes, it damn well should be read. Who in the hell did these reading referees think they were? A bunch of witless Mao worshippers running around waving Red Books dictating reading subjects? Surely the 1960s South was more progressive than Red China. Who else ran afoul of the thought police and should be censored? Faulkner? J.D. Salinger? Hell, throw out the whole literary canon, it reeks of smut, violence, and odious content. An hour browsing the Bible reveals that. While nose deep in unearthing literary abomination, the arbiters let one slip by when Jacqueline Suzanne’s Valley of the Dolls became a heady success. Drug addiction! My, the thought of it. What a soiled playground. Well it was the mid-60s, the proletariat were getting aroused by one thing or another, Masters and Johnson even told us so with their timely release of Human Sexual Response. People beat a path to the bookstore and helped make sex a popular topic.

Talented performers were providing enticing music to assist people in working out their orgasm rituals. The Beach Boys had their creative juices pumping at full steam with Good Vibrations, and the Rascals brought some bounce to the party with Good Lovin’. Disgruntled lovers no doubt took some satisfaction when they heard Nancy Sinatra sing These Boots Are Made For Walkin’. All in all, as her father Frank told us, It Was a Very Good Year. Or maybe it wasn’t. Ray Charles informed us it was Crying Time and B.J. Thomas concurred because he sang I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry. What was all the caterwauling about? Maybe one’s 19th Nervous Breakdown (Rolling Stones); or worse, a Psychotic Reaction by The Count Five.

There was weeping aplenty in Los Angeles when the Boston Celtics broke the hearts of Laker fans again in a scintillating seven game NBA duel, and even the Dodgers took a turn in the sorrow lane when they were swept by the upstart Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. What about the Bills ?, you might ask. Surely the Ginger Ale swigging Irish and Polish fans of Buffalo had no cause for gloom. Well, sad to report, it was time for ashes and sackcloth, Kansas City trounced the Bills 31-7 in the AFL Championship. Down in despairing Dallas, the Cowboys lost a zany error-laden NFL Championship to the Packers 34-27. Tickets were a mere $10. (The game was played on January 1, 1967, but was still technically part of the 1966 season.) Two weeks later Kansas City and Green Bay would meet in the first Super Bowl. Evidently to assign some status, the event was back-dated and designated with a Roman Numeral, ergo Super Bowl I. Assuming we have a season, the next one will be LV. Fifty-five and counting. Ha, the Bills have never won one if you can believe that. As shocking as the Bills futility may be, some racial conventions were zapped on the hardcourts. March Madness is now an esteemed part of the sports slate. But well before the current post-season revenue bonanza took hold, March of ’66 saw the college basketball universe jarred when Texas Western fielded an all-black starting team in a championship game for the first time, and they earned immortality by taking the measure of Adolph Rupp’s all-white Kentucky basketball dynasty. It sent a message about the prowess of black athletes and the peril of failure to recruit them. The next such dynasty would be led by a coach at UCLA named John Wooden. He was indifferent to a player’s color and his line-up included one of the greatest players ever to don a jersey – Lew Alcindor, later known as Kareem-Abdul-Jabbar.

Texas Western marched to glory in the sports arena but several months hence, the “March Against Fear” in Mississippi exposed the darkness that still lurked in the white supremacist delta. Initiated by James Meredith (the first black to attend the U. of Mississippi), it was originally intended to be a modest affair to promote voter registration and protest racism. The benign endeavor went south when a trigger-happy white shot Meredith (he was only wounded) and created a media sensation. Civil Rights organizations rallied to his cause and the number of marchers swelled. Among the throng was Stokely Carmichael. He began as an apostle of Martin Luther King Jr. but was becoming increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of change and non-violent doctrine. He was arrested during the march but quickly released, then delivered a speech that sent shivers through the white community. The content included a call to embrace ” Black Power.” A rallying slogan was born, the protest movement was splintering, some would take it as a call to arms. More riots in urban areas ensued, and a group called the Black Panthers would form. You could hear the volume of bitterness increasing.

Amidst the noise, Clint Eastwood rode to stardom in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, a loud film featuring greedy gunslingers. Flames crackled when books burned as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was converted to the screen. Julie Christie played two roles in that dystopian monument. And Steve McQueen received his only Academy Award nomination for starring in The Sand Pebbles. Although the plot focused on events in China in the 1920s, some saw the exercise of American military power having grim parallels with a more contemporary misadventure in Vietnam. The country’s name became one word in media circles, contrary to the wishes of its inhabitants, both North and South, who preferred Viet Nam. What’s in a name? Or even a spat over government? To prop up fragile South Vietnamese leadership now required nearly 400,000 U.S. troops. Preserving democracy or some facsimile was becoming increasingly costly…and loud. Bombs exploded, noisy helicopters rescued screaming mutilated soldiers, terrified civilians abandoned their meager possessions as bullets and flames ripped through their homes. Whether they perished by accident or via massacre, a euphemism was employed – ” collateral damage.” The early tremors of dissent grew into a roaring counterpoint as anti-war protests became more widespread. The social consensus was eroding. In December, 1966 in the backroom of a club in London, a guitarist was tinkering with a song that would blare among the strident voices. His name was Jimi Hendrix. The song was Purple Haze. 1967 promised to be a very loud year.