A Column by John Sinclair
I would like to approach the question of attempting to establish a new revolutionary cultural movement by looking at the failure of our previous attempt in the 1960s & ‘70s to achieve ultimate success.
My first caveat would be to jettison the concept of a “counterculture” or similar sort of oppositional movement aimed at the dominant capitalistic culture that oppresses us.
In my experience, the “counter culture” is a social phenomenon that sells a watered down version of our revolutionary culture to consumers across the counter: tattoos, ripped jeans, clothing with holes built in, music which is carefully constructed to sound like the freely expressive music we create within our cultural movement.
What is required of us is not a ‘counter culture” but a new, revolutionary culture based in art and social equality, a culture which is shared freely by humans wherever they may be situated, a culture which is predicated on securing freedom and equality for all the people of earth.
This is not a “counter culture” but a liberated culture, a culture of liberation that has a space for everyone irrespective of their occupation, income or lack of funds.
We don’t need a stinking counter across which we can sell the products of our imagination to those whose imagination is more limited. What we need is to turn everyone on to the creative outlook and the capacity for every human to generate and practice cultural forms that are indigenous to our circumstances and freely available to all.
To generate ideas and art forms is not predicated on how much money one has or one’s access to the marketplace of goods and services. Generation and transmission of art and cultural forms is up to each individual artist and cultural practitioner and is not a function of the market or the marketplace.
In the early days of our culture, in the 1960s, our culture evolved because we were looking for new ways to think, act, create and live.The ideas and paths to art and culture emanated from within ourselves, and we struggled to keep up with them in our daily lives.
Inspired by the handful of black musicians who had created and developed bebop as an expressive art form, and by the handful of poets and writers who tried to emulate them in the world of words, we strove mightily to understand what was being said and how it was being said.
Our numbers were few and we passed on our limited knowledge,smoldering excitement and relentless curiosity from one person to another, often shared along with a little joint of marijuana to inflame our burgeoning consciousness even more. The weed put us in line with great American thinkers and creators like Louis Armstrong, Mezz Mezzrow, Billie Holiday, Lester Young and Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Herbert Huncke.
We wanted to be like them. We wanted to think new thoughts, create new artworks and art forms, share them with our friends and newly-found colleagues and make life as interesting as it appeared to us in the works of our idols.
We wanted nothing to do with the world of commerce or the endless stream of products it had prepared for us. We wanted to publish our works but were happy to print them ourselves without the benefit of advances, distribution or reviews. We wanted to make recordings of our music but only if they reflected our deepest artistic desires, and we didn’t care if they made the top 40 or were played on the radio at all.
Our community of artists and seekers grew slowly but surely to include more and more young people looking for a way out of the stasis of American life. Not only marijuana but LSD and other psychedelic substances helped lead the way to new land for all of us, and we worked hard to embrace the insights and new directions proposed by our psychedelic drug use.
But nothing was more important than the music which moved us along the new directions that had been revealed to us. Creative music was at the very center of our lives, and we accepted it as a source of inspiration and intellectual guidance without equal.
New musical forms inspired by American roots music—blues and jazz and gospel—became the stuff of everyday life, developed in hidden garages and practice rooms and spread through concerts and dances at abandoned or seriously underused venues like the Avalon and Fillmore Ballrooms in San Francisco, the Village Theatre in New York City, the Grande Ballroom in Detroit. and the Electric Ballroom in Chicago.
Supporting the music and illuminating the venues of the day were what became hundreds of what we called underground newspapers—hastily typeset and pasted up tabloid publications that reflected what was going on in the cities where they were published.
The five original underground papers that emerged in 1964-65—the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Village Other in New York City, the Fifth Estate in Detroit, the Berkeley Barb, and the East Lansing Paper—were quickly joined by outstanding exemplars of underground journalism like the Chicago Seed, the Ann Arbor Argus,The San Francisco Oracle, The Rag(Austin, Texas), and the Illustrated Paper (Mendocino, California), and membership kept growing for several years.
A 1971 roster, published by Abbie Hoffman in Steal This Book, listed 271 UPS-affiliated papers in the United States, Canada, and Europe. According to historian John McMillian (Smoking Typewriters, 2010), the underground press’ combined readership eventually reached into the millions.
Bob “Righteous” Rudnick, a journalist and underground radio disc jockey, soon founded the Underground Press Syndicate to coordinate the burgeoning movement as new papers continued to be founded and immediately joined the UPS.
A group of east coast journalists led by Marshall Bloom and Ray Mungo formed a group called Liberation News Service (LNS) to serve the Underground Press Syndicate as sort of a UPI outfit feeding news and information to all the underground papers.
While we didn’t have our own recording companies, our musicians and bands did well without them for several years from 1964-67 until “White Rabbit” by the Jefferson Airplane and “Light My Fire” by the doors hit the Top Ten in the “Summer of Love” in 1967.
For the next two years the long-haired rock & roll bands took over the charts and the music business in general while operating in an outlaw system centered on the psychedelic ballrooms, free concerts in the parks and similar public events that utilized the power of the music and its practitioners to draw incredible crowds of people to our musical and other public events events protesting the war, racism, sexism, and the arrest and imprisonment of innocent drug users.
But even before the underground press and the long-haired rock & roll revolution our culture pulsated with the publication of thousands of small poetry books and independent literary magazines printed by fanatics all over the country and distributed in small independent bookstores and other public outlets.
Very little of this artistic activity was undertaken on a profit-seeking basis but rather was motivated by the desire for self-expression and soulful communication on the part of the poets, publishers, booksellers, musicians, ballroom operators and other champions of cultural expression and meaningful interaction between artists and their audiences.
A further revolution would follow in the form of living arrangements for the new cultural renegades. Driven together by the high cost of rental housing and the need to band together for security and group realization purposes, the new American youth masses huddled together in beat-up houses and rental units where their tiny money would get them a room and a share in the communal kitchen, practice rooms and social areas of the venerable housing that existed all around the college and university areas of the nation’s cities.
Slowly but surely the new American youth was taking over and reshaping the cultural mores and living situations of the country. It is important to remember in terms of our historical development and the prospects for future redevelopment that our movement started out very small and grew organically, person by person, until it was apparent that hundreds of thousands and then millions of people had opted for a new way of life supported by one another and open to the possibilities that presented themselves on a day to day basis.
To paraphrase the British mystic Alastair Crowley, under the new social movement everything was true and everything was permitted. The school system, the legal establishment, the workplace, all of these institutions were regarded as enemies of the emerging youth culture and at best to be avoided, at worst to be confronted and opposed as need be.
The emerging police state was solidified around the cruel precepts of the War On Drugs without regard for the citizens’ constitutional rights, freedom of movement, nor heart-felt social practice. Billions of dollars were amassed by police departments of every stripe and the courts and prisons and probation and parole offices that supported their crusade to keep Americans addicted to alcohol and the practice of social drinking.
Our movement spread inexorably from households of four or five people to dance hall gatherings of 100, then 200, 400, 800, 1200 and 2000 people. Bands like the Grateful Dead, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Country Joe & The Fish, the Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, the MC-5 and scores more began to grow audiences from a handful of people to several thousand per night, all without the benefit of major record contracts, radio play, or mass media exposure and advertising.
After five fun-packed years of organic growth and a culture that grew joint by joint our culture reached a turning point that was dramatized by the crowd of 500,000 that turned out for the Woodstock festival which, multiplied by the audience for the mass-market movie produced from the event, ended the experimental, organic stage of our growth and accelerated our numbers into the millions.
Of course, at the same time, the impact, meaning and import of our movement was turned aside and replaced by the phenomenon of conspicuous consumption and the societal pressure on members of our movement to become more and more similar to one another and less and less defined by our differences from the mass culture of America.
The concept of sharing and passing knowledge, information, and societal kicks from one person or small group to another had become obsolete, replaced by the pressure to consume the same things at the same time as everyone else. In short, our culture creativity and opposition had been replaced by the mass market culture that had conquered the rest of Ameirca long before our emergence as a temporary alternative.
We’ve been stuck in this awful rut since the ascendancy of Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and the future seems to hold more of the same for all of us. Imagination and creativity remain at an all-time premium, and social forces thrive by driving us closer and closer together as rabid consumers of whatever they might be trying to sell us at any given time.
If we have a chance to enjoy anything more diverse and inspirational than what we have now, it will have to be actualized by going back to the very small numbers we started with sixty years ago and creating something new and different that reflects our most burning cultural wants and desires of today. Nothing else will possibly do.
-Detroit
February 9-10, 2021
© 2021 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
