Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment.

—Jean Paul Sartre

When they’re out to get you, paranoia is good thinking.

—Johnny Fever, “WKRP in Cincinnati”

The Chicago police riots at the Democratic National Convention brought to the fore of public conscious the violence that had festered during the Sixties civil-rights movement. The brutalizing of blacks with fire hoses and police dogs, the murders, somehow had remained only in the subconscious of a somnolent public, unfazed by the militarization of local constabulary until confronted by billy-club justice live and in color on network news. But only in later years, following insistent reportorial probing using the Freedom of Information Act, did it become apparent the depths old perv J. Edgar Hoover would sink to in his quest to maintain control, expanding his beloved FBI Cointelpro program from its original mission in the Fifties of commie hunting to include protesters—first black then white. (After the public humiliation of Joe McCarthy and his schizoid obsessions, Hoover’s fixation on commies led one Justice Department prosecutor to say that Hoover may have kept alive the witch hunt because his “informants were nearly the only ones that paid the party dues.”)

In an October 1956 memo, Hoover targeted black leaders, claiming the movement was infiltrated by communists, subsequently tacking on protesters of most any ilk under the rubric “national security.” In the Sixties, when an FBI special agent wrote that the Black Panther Party in San Francisco seemed to mainly be engaged in feeding breakfast to children, Hoover blasted him, implying that the agent’s future in the organization relied upon finding proof that the Panthers were a “violence-prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means.” Evidence be damned, Hoover embraced extra-legal methods to attack his perceived menace, writing, “The purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt the BPP and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge.”

Subsequent investigations, most notably by the Church Committee in 1976, revealed increased collaboration between the FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense. The CIA launched its own domestic espionage project in 1967 called Operation CHAOS. The head of CHAOS, James Angleton, was fired as counterintelligence chief in December 1974 after it was revealed he had presided over a massive program to spy on opponents of the Vietnam War. Resistance to the war had blossomed, challenging the mighty machine that sought to reinforce the politics of status quo.

By 1967, a draft system calling up as many as forty thousand men for induction each month had heightened tensions. The draft and its college deferment favored white, middle-class men, relying on the poor and minorities to stock its larders. Although blacks only represented 29 percent of the draft-eligible pool to 63 percent of whites, 64 percent of blacks were drafted, 31 percent of whites.

The 1967 Gallup poll showing a majority believing Vietnam to be a mistake had grown to 58 percent in October 1969. By May 1971, only 28 percent supported the war—at which point Gallup stopped asking the question. Not surprisingly, college enrollment reached nine million by the end of the Sixties. Colleges and universities in America had more students than ever before—many only to avoid ending up as kabobs on Viet Cong sharpened-bamboo punji stakes—and these institutions sought to control increasingly rowdy campuses.

An incident in 1968 at the predominantly black campus of South Carolina State University presaged the campus violence to come. A protest over a segregated bowling alley in Orangeburg led to the arrests of several students, followed by more vociferous demonstrations—at which point police began beating protesters, men and women, with billy clubs, sending eight to the hospital. As tensions escalated over the next few days, some two hundred students gathered to protest and the governor called out the national guard, saying that black-power advocates were running amok on campus, ascribing the boogieman of the day with a descent into chaos.

On the night of February 8, 1968, students there started a bonfire on campus, and a thrown object injured one officer trying to put out the fire. Eight South Carolina Highway Patrol officers opened fire into the crowd with carbines, shotguns, and revolvers, lasting only ten to fifteen seconds. Twenty-seven people were injured in the shooting, most shot in the back while running away, and three blacks killed—one a local high school student sitting on the steps of the freshman dormitory waiting the end of his mother’s work shift. This didn’t rate as much as a nod in the media, in the pre-dawn light of the civil-rights era, as this was just one more case of dying while black.

Only when white students began falling did a blip register on the national radar. The stage had been set earlier at Berkeley in California, presided over by the rigid law-and-order mindset of Governor Ronald Reagan, who derided campus administrators for allowing protests and called Berkeley “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants.” Chafing that students had claimed a trashed-out plot of university land and cleaned it up as their “People’s Park,” Reagan sent the Berkeley Police and Highway Patrol officers in to fence it off. A subsequent protest quickly festered into confrontation, bolstered when Reagan’s chief of staff, Edwin Meese, sent Alameda County sheriff’s deputies in to beef up forces in the park.

Meese, a rock-ribbed control freak, unleashed cops against protesters, instructing them to use whatever methods they chose against the crowd. Officers in riot gear with badges obscured to hide their identities began flailing away with nightsticks. As protesters retreated, the law followed, firing tear gas and buckshot at the crowd’s backs—opening up on all present. One bystander sitting on a nearby roof died from gunshot wounds to the chest, and another, a carpenter, suffered a shotgun blast to the face, leaving him permanently blinded.

Reagan declared a state of emergency and sent in twenty-seven-hundred National Guard to patrol the city (against the wishes of the Berkeley City Council, who voted 8–1 against the measure). Nationally, upright politicos took note: A bill surfaced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would cut off Federal aid to universities that failed to head off campus disorders. Nearly a year later, Reagan, in an address before the California Council of Growers, defended his decision to use the California National Guard to quell Berkeley protests: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”

Such was the rigid imperative of the establishment, yet the tumult in factious Berkeley only received passing notice in the media—until four days later and the violence spread to Middle America. Nationwide protests had erupted following Nixon’s April 1970 incursion into Cambodia (after promising to end the war during the 1968 election). At Kent State University in Ohio, though, only a fraction of the school’s nineteen thousand students took part. Antiwar rallies attracted no more than three hundred people at best, and even the appearance of Jerry Rubin of the Chicago Seven drew only about a thousand. Rubin, a practitioner of the escalating rhetoric that goaded the powers that be, intoned: “The first part of the Yippie program is to kill your parents. They are the first oppressors.” Not a great PR move, though not really serious either.

It certainly succeeded in yanking the chain of Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes, who called out the National Guard for the latest protest, saying:

We’ve seen here at the city of Kent especially, probably the most vicious form of campus-oriented violence yet perpetrated by dissident groups. They make definite plans of burning, destroying, and throwing rocks at police and at the National Guard and the Highway Patrol. This is when we’re going to use every part of the law enforcement agency of Ohio to drive them out of Kent. We are going to eradicate the problem . . . They are not going to take over [the] campus. I think that we’re up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America.

The governor had made campus disorder a key issue in a campaign for the U.S. Senate, and after calling up the guard, he showed up in the city of Kent, pledging: “We are going to eradicate the problem. . . . It’s over within Ohio.”

Without consulting guard officers or the university administration, he ordered that all campus assemblies should be broken up. On the afternoon of May 4, 1970, National Guard troops fired on a group of protesters, killing four and wounding nine. Two of the dead were students walking to class, one a member of the Kent State ROTC.

Nationwide shock at the killings led to a new wave of campus protest. Four days later, eleven students at the University of New Mexico were bayoneted in a confrontation with the guard. In New York City, two hundred construction workers, mobilized by virulently anti-communist union bosses, attacked a protest of a thousand protesting college and high-school students, reportedly beating those with the longest hair with hard hats, clubs, and steel-toed boots while a token showing of police stood by and didn’t interfere. And on May 15, forty Mississippi State Highway Patrolmen opened fire with shotguns at predominately black Jackson State College, killing a college student and a high-school student (standing behind police lines) and wounding twelve others. Once again, the death of black students garnered little notice.

The Kent State shootings, though, led to a nationwide student strike, closing more than four hundred campuses across the country, and a hundred thousand demonstrated in Washington, D.C., against the war and the killing of unarmed student protesters. As a precaution, Nixon was taken to Camp David for two days for his own protection, and the military was called up to secure the city.

Amid the bedlam of a nation threatened by the specter of insurrection, the Fillmore did seem an island of sanity. After Kent State, Graham decked the theater’s marquee in black bunting and posted a memoriam to the students killed. It expressed well the angst we in the Fillmore family felt over the rapidly deteriorating social roil. The general anxiety gripping the nation did wear on us, and in the spring of 1969 I found myself descending into malaise, casting about for a new me. The influence of people like Fillmore GM Kip Cohen certainly helped. In life, it seems we’re always guided to a better (or at least different) way by those who have gone before us, an older person perhaps who can provide some new insight, a new path. In a way, the soundtrack of the Sixties, led by the Beatles and a whole slew of new bands, served that purpose, as the musicians seemed a step ahead of the young, showing the way. Right after Kent State, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young rushed out the tune “Four Dead in Ohio,” the obligatory lament of current events expressing the shock and rage of the generation.

Sinking in melancholy while busying myself being there and doing things, I suffered too from having no outlet to channel my physical energies and maintain a sense of physical well-being I’d achieved for a time on the basketball courts at Syracuse. Here I was in the middle of all that happened, working at the Village Voice and the Fillmore, one of the hotspots of the Sixties, and I grew increasingly bummed out by my lot in life.

This sort of disquiet, I maintain, represents one of the greatest forces for the changes we go through growing up: Life isn’t always a primrose path we gaily traipse down towards our preordained goal (like my youthful aspiration to be president one day). Rather, we stumble along the path of our existence until a building internal strife brings you to an angry epiphany: Man, I can’t fucking stand this. I gotta do something different.

That revelation came to me through the busy spring of 1969. Constantly on the move, I lived the hippie dream, yet a growing inner discontent nagged at me. I had decided that the only thing a person is guaranteed of attaining if so inclined is happiness, that notion intoned by the Donovan Leitch tune “Happiness Runs in a Circular Motion.” You put out a happy vibe and it’s returned to you. That of course presupposes personal happiness. I felt that I surely could attain happiness (a feeling sorely tested in a lifetime of trying) and worked to that end. At the Fillmore, interacting with thousands of people, some ripped out of their minds on their drug of choice, that did seem to serve me well (and probably kept me healthy). But I still had to face what I was—and wasn’t.

For one, I had to confront that I wasn’t cut out to be a lead singer in a band. My self-consciousness, overriding shyness, and lack of social confidence made for a painful experience standing out front and trying to put on a show. No Mick Jagger or Roger Daltry, I felt like the fifth wheel in a four-man band. I just didn’t have it in me. While Ricky V. and Carlito and a drummer friend made earnest attempts at rock-guitar stardom, I struggled to forget myself in performance and play the lead man, the showman and “star.” I just didn’t have it in me. I couldn’t get out of my head. And I alone knew how totally worthless I really was as a human. My salvation du jour came from friends drawn in by the gravity of the Fillmore orbit.

Several already-accomplished musicians had begun hanging out with us, oftentimes gathering in the front room of our humble abode for impromptu jam sessions. Guitarists Andy and Tony and bass player Stephen joined with us and filled the room with professional sounds, resplendent with four-part harmony. In that setting, I didn’t have to worry about getting out of my own way, but rather lost myself in the music created by the whole. I wish I could have packaged that. Following one session and aglow with that extra-spatial feeling singers, for one, can reach, I remarked to Stephen that I wished that could have been in a studio recording. “That’s where it’s at,” he told me.

Stephen had already gone there, doing studio work on several records, and what’s more had jammed with the likes of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. He had that cred. He came into our group as a friend of Bro—who had since left to check out the scene in San Francisco—and in response to my disquietude suggested yoga, lending me his book of exercises. Thus began my transformation, steered into an exploration of Eastern philosophy and the Wisdom of the Ages.

I had tried unsuccessfully to find something in a religion class at Syracuse that might address the spiritual inklings that teased at my consciousness. But I found instead the husk of religion beaten to death in a mountain of pompous posturing. Yoga and its attendant philosophies promised a path towards a spiritualism, a way of moderating the internal clamor—that inner voice creating such restlessness and dissatisfaction over what I had yet to become. Making peace with myself. I jumped in with both feet.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

—George Bernard Shaw

The first and best victory is to conquer self.

—Plato

What I saw on a daily basis in the bowels of the city, the depths of depravity we experienced every day when we stepped out of our hovel into the Bowery, had opened me up to an alternate way of thinking, of searching for some good in all the bad. For a time, maybe, that meant getting out of my head onto some medicinally induced plane, tempting fate as it were. At times, that led to the strangest of circumstance.

On one such occasion, Ricky V., Carlito, and I planned a happy jaunt into psychedelia, and each dropped a tab of what was purported to be mild acid. Carlito had to finish up in the box office, so Ricky V. and I caught the subway up to Dad’s apartment to visit. We had a nice chat there but shortly began to notice the designs on a rug in the apartment begin to crawl around, so we quickly begged off and made our way back to the subway station—consumed in gales of laughter (as often happens when lifting off on LSD). We struggled to maintain a straight face to the world in the subway station, but as Ricky V. remembers:

While waiting for the train, we noticed brand-new posters for 2001 [the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey]. Holy CRAP! IT’S THREE-DIMENSIONAL! When it dawned on us that it was a two-dimensional poster, we looked at each other and burst out laughing again. We did calm down enough to get on our southbound train, although we had to sit apart from each other to prevent another outburst. You sat in the middle of the front car and I stood at the front, watching the oncoming tracks. We came to a station, stopped, the doors opened and a police officer got on. The train waited for what seemed like a week, the doors still open. The policeman stood rocking up and down on the balls of his feet like Barney Fife. I felt like I should turn around and did so, noticing you sitting with your face in your hands hiding your mouth. I knew you were laughing because the veins in your forehead looked like a road map of the Smoky Mountains. I nodded politely to the officer. This guy looked like Ichabod Crane, thin with protruding chin and Adam’s apple. The officer turned and stuck his head out the doors and just then they closed, trapping his head. When he pulled it out, his hat popped off and fell on the platform as we pulled away. I was looking right at him. He turned and looked at me right in the eye. I began unraveling and had to turn back to face the front. Laugh? Uncontrollably. I could see your reflection, tears streaming down your hands, your forehead now looking more like the Rockies.

The strangest things happen to you when you’re tripping. We managed to make it back to the Fillmore and help Carlito close up. A couple cops stopped by to escort Carlito to the bank, but he just told them there weren’t any deposits that night. We couldn’t face a ride with the police in our condition. Rather, we stuffed the day’s receipts—some thousands of dollars—into a bag and cavorted merrily the mile or so to the bank, skipping and singing without a care to make the deposit. A guardian angel surely watched over us that night.

Such antics played out in the off days between shows, as the job required full use of all mental faculties to cope in the maelstrom of drugged-up music fans. I wouldn’t partake of as much as a joint when working. Only in days away from the Fillmore could you get high, though one heavy psychedelic experience turned me off to the “thrills” of LSD.

Sis, Spud, and I had dropped a tab one evening, thinking of getting high then maybe checking out the nightlife. But the rapid onset of supremely strong acid quickly left us lying on the kitchen floor of the apartment, immobile. We became totally incorporeal—three souls bobbing in a field of energy. I perceived a great light and began moving toward it, at which point Sis stopped me, telling me not to go there. We somehow recovered sensibility a while later, but I never again tried acid. Was that a near-death experience or just a mind-blown drug ride? No idea, but the closest I’d want to come to finding out.

I entered a seriously contemplative phase of life then, spending the better part of the next couple years on a macrobiotic diet, eating mainly vegetarian with some fish thrown in (quite the challenge, given my childhood experience in seafood had been limited to fish sticks and Howard Johnson’s fried clams, all slathered in tartar sauce). Like other hippies, my readings ranged far and wide, encompassing the writings of Kahlil Gibran (author of The Prophet), Buddhists, and Hindi philosophers but never straying far from a search for some kind of spiritual meaning. Enlightened Dad, long into the esoteric, encouraged my quest, loaning me his books on Sufism, one of the main tenets of which struck a deep chord: If you say you are a Sufi, then you’re not—i.e., if you say you’re spiritual or religious, you’re not. Or more prosaically, the proof is in the pudding. I remember telling Dad that I felt I could be anything I wanted to be, but I just didn’t know what that was. “You’ve still got time,” he advised.

In innumerable ways, what we sought didn’t venture far afield from Christian precepts, and many of the generation gravitated ultimately towards established religion. One bit of Eastern philosophy advised that there are many paths up the mountain. Or as George Bernard Shaw wrote, “There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.” Of course, the hippie brand of religion didn’t sit well with bedrock America, which initially accepted the conservative portrayal of the hip as dirty, smelly, unshorn heathens—the subject of scorn if not outright violence. In truth, those unfortunates who went off the deep end in drugs or had been loosely tethered to reality anyway fit that description. Water seeks its own level.

But many of those I had grown up and went through the changes with were anything but the slovenly derelicts characterized in a conventional media looking for the sensational. That wouldn’t have been cool. For them, morning ablutions involved all manner of powder, creams, deodorant, sprays, and an inordinate time spent in front of a mirror. Peacocks could learn from them. Walking in a group on New York streets, you’d see all checking out their reflection in large store-front windows for the desired effect. On one such promenade with the gang, we joked about that tendency, at which point I piously intoned that I didn’t do that anymore: It only served to build myself up or tear myself down.

You’re never smarter than when you’re twenty-one . . . or twenty . . . or nineteen. And in my budding self-righteousness I saw on the streets some signs of what must surely be my life’s clues for sought-after serenity. Walking one day testing my inner peace, I looked in the eyes of each person I went by—out of character in New York in most any time, as people avoid looking at each other, fearing the worst. Not judging, only observing. I met the eyes of a young black, and as we passed he leaned over and whispered, “Peace, brother.” A revelation. And an affirmation. As has been said, we wear a different mask for each person we meet, without realizing it. What if you tried doing away with a mask?

Floating down the street another day in a rough part of town feeling somehow liberated and at rest momentarily with myself, I passed an older religious sort, long gray hair and beard dressed in an assortment of full-length robes—like he stepped out of the movie The Ten Commandments. As I approached, he smiled and turned his hands up in supplication as if preliminary to asking for alms. I didn’t have anything to give (even if I would) and just returned his smile and shrugged, turning my hands up slightly to so indicate. No words were exchanged. His smile broadened, and a beatific light emanated from his face, and in that moment I saw what the old illustrations in biblical texts depicted when they showed a circle of light around a religious figure’s head. Extraordinary. We see what we choose to see.

The man depends on others for his joys and sorrows, which generates an uncertainty of moods. His sincerity is impure and contaminated with external influences.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was yet casting about for what that me should be. I wanted to be shunt of that boisterous boob I had been as a teen, acting out as a mask for my own serious doubts about my self-worth. What I’d seen in the joyful aura of the be-robed supplicant beggared any notion I had held of life, of right and wrong—of happiness itself. As one prescription of my nascent spiritualism taught, you can be happy whether you’re at the top of the mountain or the bottom. I had a lot to learn.

I had come in to the NYC apartment with my own concept of how life and particularly home life should be, carried over from the routine I had become accustomed to at home. Mom, for all her faults, ran a tidy ship, true to her Germanic roots, and expected us all to keep a clean house, continually carping at us through childhood. Everything in its place. That was my norm. Only in retrospect can I see how anal I grew to be with that upbringing. And now, for the first time, I lived with high-school buddies with different concepts of what “clean” represented (something often reserved for when a male and female first move in together). Their casual approach to maintaining some semblance of orderliness chafed at my niggling fastidious nature, further grinding on my growing angst.

In an act of sanctimonious fervor, I decided on one of those precipitous decisions that mark growing up fueled by youthful impatience. I would leave New York and head back upstate, venturing forth to find a true spirituality in those eternal truths that would lead to inner peace and happiness. I would spread the light to the environs of small-town Canandaigua. To his credit, Stephen tried to counsel me against it, advising that wherever I went I would face the same problems in myself. But I knew better.

I headed off on the next grand venture. The center would not hold. Ricky V. and Spud would stay in New York, Carlito ultimately following a love interest to California, where he’d work for Bill Graham at the Fillmore West.

My first great idea upstate was to immerse myself in yoga, opening up a studio to gather like-minded aspirants in an abandoned shed on land near Mom’s house. I would live the contemplative life, exploring my inner space and teaching myself music on a cheap acoustic guitar I picked up. But the farmer who owned the old building rebuffed my request to rent the shed and fix it up—aghast that this long-haired weirdo might even think it possible. Canandaigua sported only a handful of hippies still and didn’t cotton to the freaks. I then bummed a ride out to the racetrack to see if Johnny Rowne might consider hiring me on again, only to find Johnny near death.

Disconsolate, I stuck my thumb out to return home—only to be picked up by a state trooper. He didn’t try to hassle me, only give me a lift, but he seemed to know a lot about me, about the apartment in New York City. He said that “they” had someone watching the place—which struck me as a bit funny, some poor schlep having to hang out with the bums on the Bowery to monitor our little dump. Like we were some kind of big-time drug dealers. I guess he figured this was some cautionary tale to drive me back to the straight-and-narrow.

But such was the tenor of the times in small-town Canandaigua. A growing rift separated the small hippie enclave from the devout Americans. Friends from high school passed by without a word, some even more belligerent. On one occasion, an old poker-playing buddy singled me out to ask if I could get him some weed. I saw in my periphery his friend, a student of police science at the local community college, carefully following the conversation. I gave him the trumpian two-step—I lied through my teeth. “No, I don’t do that, man.” Word had spread that the wannabe cops received an “A” in class for information that led to the bust of local miscreants. I began to see that my move had been a big mistake.