“Hippie” by Barry Miles

Hippie by Barry Miles (2005) is interesting and filled with information about the multitude of movements that happened in America and Britain from 1965 to 1971. It was a tumultuous, terrible, deadly, inspired, mystical, and hopeful time. During it all, I was in my formative years, watching the war and the riots on television. I am of the first generation to grow up with television for my whole life, yet I had no idea what kind of Happenings were going on. This book was informative. However, I found it wanting in some ways.

The Summer of Love and Woodstock are but idealistic dreams of my teen years, something I thought I would have wanted to be part of if only I’d known about them at the time. Of course, I learned over time that there were dark secrets hidden under the floorboards of these utopian dreams.

In fact, there were so many things happening during those years, there is no way to extricate them from one another. The flower children of San Francisco, the poets and musicians of New York, the rock bands of Los Angeles, and the London Underground emerged separately yet are undeniably connected. Woven through these growing pains of youth were the horrors of war, near and far.

The Vietnam War, the confrontations between police and protestors and hippies, the race riots, rape…all of these were violently wrapped around visions of hope represented by flowers and bright colors of youth at a Be-In. In this book, Miles brings all these aspects of the times together, giving the reader an overview of a decade, illustrated with photographs, newspaper clips, advertisements, album covers, and posters. It seems to have everything…almost.

One Amazon reviewer laments the lack of any mention of the Jesus Freaks. Now, the Jesus Freaks are one group I recall from my own experience. It does seem a shame that they are missing from mention, at least by name. Pop artist Peter Max doesn’t even get a sentence. However, I noticed something more important missing.

Throughout the book, we read of the great poets and artists who influenced the various movements or who became a part of them. Of all the poets, artists, and musicians who are mentioned, only a handful of them are women. Two female singers stand out — Grace Slick and Janis Joplin.

Singer Marianne Faithful gets a nod, but only as a girlfriend. One female visual artist is mentioned by name — Yoko Ono. Perhaps she was more than just the “girl who broke up the Beatles” after all! Finally, there is not one mention of a female poet in the book. Not one.

Does this mean that there were no excellent female poets of the time? Of course, it doesn’t. Denise Levertov, who attended a 1963 conference with Ginsberg, was writing during these times. Anne Waldman broke out in the 1960s and is considered an integral part of the latter Beat movement.

Lenore Kandel’s book of erotic poetry, entitled The Love Book, was deemed pornographic and was censored in 1966. Adrienne Rich was an anti-war activist and feminist and is one of the most highly-read poets of the 20th century. Susan Polis Schutz was a popular peace activist and poet.

These are hardly the only female poets who were actively writing and involved in the movements of the 1960s. Besides poets, of course, there were many amazing writers of all ilk including singer/songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. This book mentions these two only in passing.

Of course, Miles would be remiss if he didn’t discuss William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and their influence on what was to become the Hippie generation. Of course, it would be impossible to include everyone who created or was created by this volatile era; however, mention of other writers who emerged from the scene, like Maya Angelou and Beatrice Sparks would have been welcome.

The times became more explosive as the decade wore on. Hippies made way for Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies. Violence on campuses and in the streets, Charles Manson’s “Family” sneaking into homes and killing people in hopes of starting a race war…the sixties started with violence and ended with violence.

Of all the female writers and activists of the era, Miles chose to dedicate a full page to only one — Valerie Solaris, the founder and sole member of S.C.U.M. (sometimes said to stand for “Society for Cutting Up Men,” though Solaris denied it). Solaris was a radical lesbian feminist whose manifesto was published in The Berkeley Barb in 1968. What made her — and her manifesto — important was an act of violence.

In 1968, Solaris shot and wounded artist Andy Warhol, who had agreed to produce a play she wrote and promptly lost it. She demanded payment, so he hired her to act in a film for which he paid her $25, according to information I found on the internet.

When another publisher, Maurice Girodias, promised to publish her work, but retain all rights, she felt that they were all conspiring to steal her work. Solaris also shot art critic Mario Amaya, who happened to be with Warhol at the time. She would have taken a shot at Girodias as well, but he was out of town.

Interestingly, I had never heard of Valerie Solanas until reading this book. Yet her angry anti-male manifesto reflects the darkest frustrations of women emerging from a June-and-Ward Clever, Ozzie-and-Harriet fantasy. It is fodder for conversation — what did she say of value? Was anything she wrote intrinsic to the women’s liberation movement?

While Solanas’ attempted murder of Warhol (some call it an assassination attempt) may not be as “important” an event as the Manson murders, it seems that it has some value in finding a real understanding of the times…and a true understanding of those times is something I need.

I have lived most of my life imagining the Hippie life as a utopian, perpetually cool, idealistic commune of sunshine and flowers. I wished I’d been there, that I had not been only 11 the year of Woodstock. It’s been a wistful fantasy, wishing I’d been to anti-war protests and Be-Ins, instead of the Happenings of my own life, which seemed to pale in comparison.

The view that I’ve had has been skewed, in spite of having met many who not only lived it but were willing to admit it. Some of them, very young, had romanticized the Haight-Ashbury scene and went there, flowers in their hair. Yet, by the Summer of Love, the coolest street corner in America had begun to degenerate into a seamy district of junkies and teenage prostitutes.

As I read through Miles’ book, I noticed that all the photographs of Flower Girls and Hippie Chicks depicted thin, fresh-faced young women. This tells me that these women mattered more to the chroniclers of the era than other women.

In the book, women other than the handful of singers and artists mentioned were girlfriends or wives, most were unnamed. One wonders if the photographers bothered to ask the names of most of the women.

This was a time that is often referred to as the “Sexual Revolution.” One wonders whose revolution it really was. The Gurus of psychedelics touted group sex and called it enlightenment. They gathered women around them like harems.

Yet, rarely did they seem to listen to the thoughts and ideas of women. The only poetry deemed worth reading or listening to was written by men, the same men who either hated women or loved too many of them without ever really loving any of them.

Although Barry Miles's coffee table book Hippie is a fairly exhaustive exposé of the youth movements of the mid to late 1960s and very early 1970s, there is little reference to the work done by females, particularly in the areas of poetry and visual art.

Is it simply because a crowd of 7,000 would not fill a hall to hear the works of female poets at the time, as they did for William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Adrian Mitchell, and a host of others, all of whom were male?

Hippie was a fun book to read, and it sparked a lot of questions for me, but in the long run, it was a bit of a disappointment for me.

In Mind

There’s in my mind a woman

of innocence, unadorned but

fair-featured and smelling of

apples or grass. She wears

a utopian smock or shift, her hair

is light brown and smooth, and she

is kind and very clean without

ostentation-

but she has

no imagination

And there’s a

turbulent moon-ridden girl

or old woman, or both,

dressed in opals and rags, feathers

and torn taffeta,

who knows strange songs

but she is not kind.

Denise Levertov, 1964

This story first appeared on the author's LiveJournal blog, and was later published in Bouncin and Behavin Blogs on Medium