So notes an unnamed head in Jack O'Connell's REVOLUTION (1968), a crazy, narrator-free documentary about the Haight Ashbury community that still glimmers with a bid of LSD sparkle even today. And he's right. The evolutionary progress of man was changed, two steps forward and in 1968 we were yet to start stumbling back."What we're seeing is a basic change in the evolutionary progress of mankind - something only priests and monks were into until a very long time ago, and that is consciousness expansion."
It's hard to imagine a moment remotely similar in the history of the human race to 1967:. LSD was still legal and becoming hugely popular, as much a middle class rage as Twitter is now, changing an entire age demographic from self-absorbed mopes into free-spirited truth seekers (Twitter would be perhaps vice versa). And not only the young kids but adventurous parents were jumping into the fire and disappearing from the 9-5 fidelity-minded spousal system. Kids began to grow up in communes instead of two car garages; LSD was everywhere--in clinical psychiatrist offices, research, and middle American homes. Owsley gave out thousands of pure 'purples' from which "Purple Haze" gets its name as free samples at Monterey Pop.
Radical new paradigms could be soaked up very easily on acid. Evolution sped up on psychedelics. It was pretty 'hip' to at least have tried LSD even if just so you might have some actual insight into the hippie movement before you condemned their lifestyle. Having tried it made you cool, like skydiving or bungee jumping in the 1980s, or ecstasy in he 90s.
The always insightful Flickhead writes:
In the free spirit of the times, O’Connell doesn’t bother with conventions like linear construction or identifying subtitles. Themes and locations shift at whim, interview subjects go unidentified. Anonymous faces provide scant commentary on David Smith’s Free Clinic, and The Diggers’ Free Store and free food program, both deserving more time and respect. As does the mystery existentialist envisioning a cash-free future run by computers necessitating the need for a pot-smoking leisure class. But these shortcomings don’t diminish some otherwise perceptive passages in Revolution, the most nostalgic of which concern the reach for a communal utopia, one the counterculture — countering greed, materialism, superficiality — believed would erase ego from the equation, to render the desire for personal reward obsolete… (cont.)Damn right, Flickhead. What the fuck happened to the pursuit of egolessness? Backed by music by the Steve Miller Band (freshly formed), Country Joe and the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, we get some ideas of how to pick up the egoless thread. The crunchy psychedelic guitars are a most welcome presence in one's living room (dig, the "living"... room) even if you're not paying full attention to the kids onscreen or the squares gawking from the sidelines at the never-ending parade of panhandlers along the Haight.
Whoa man. I'm totally tripping after seeing it. Pupils dilated in the mirror. 20-years old and foxy, dancing like a girl who just found freedom, who done stepped out her shell like... a girl named... Today.
No man, that's like her name. She changed her name to Today, because that's all we have, that's everything there is. Her big LSD trip--captured by O'Connell from start to finish--anchors the whole second half of the film: she begs for change in a really attractive, clean looking brown and light green poncho; she climbs trees and frolics in the park; she drives up the coast to dig the old growth; there's more squiggly light shows. Flowers! Flowers! She strokes an apple --it's breathing! Someone eats a banana. Some dude paints some crazy colors. She lies in the grass with two girlfriends, giggling hysterically. Even with the 21st century's roseless, untinted glasses you can feel her whole body sigh with relief as socio-genetic programming is short-circuited and overcome with a single white pill and good set and setting.
Unfolding with one eye on the exploitation market, it could be argued REVOLUTION was--at least on some level--pitched less at the kids themselves and more at adults curious about all the free love, as in the lengthy naked dance light show to Country Joe and the Fish's most psychedelic instrumental, "Section 43" (below), but prurience is addressed too: hippies interviewed include a girl from the Sexual Freedom League who explains how only couples are allowed into the orgy to keep the numbers even (so dirty old men don't capsize the boat). Ah the logistics of orgy-mongering!
As someone who's done decades of grieving for the loss of the countercultural revolutionary dream, I've always had a resolved hatred for male sexual aggression. You can't have a free utopia with members who are obsessed with sex. It's like over-eating - dude, once you have some sex, move on. But America's trained men to be hungry ghosts when it comes to sex -- I guess you need to have a lot of it before you can see the forest for the trees. Look at Siddhartha! Or Mick Jagger! But that doesn't make it any less of an issue. No one wants to sleep with these ugly raincoat pervs, so the pervy aspect remains.
The peak moment in all this is the writhing naked theater group dancing in front of the wild psychedelic light show to Country Joe's most psychedelic instrumental, "Section 42." With one eye to the bush shots, the long takes with the light show definitely have a certain magic Kenneth Anger-style power. You can feel the amount of LSD that surged through the audience, as if the black magick strength of their lysergic gaze is captured in the celluloid itself! Hey, acid is grooovy.
Decades later watching all this on our laptops we can either grin cynically at all the naive spiritual tomfoolery or we can cry in thinking what we lost. The counterculture failed, or maybe it didn't. I used to argue this point with my guitarist all the time. He said no, the counterculture was alive, it had been integrated--driven underground perhaps--but all the stronger for being more exclusive. I argued that we failed, but now of course I'm in AA and my guitarist's in Ibiza with jet-set supermodels, so there you go.
REVOLUTION keeps up the even-keeled in its discussion, even into the thick of the tripping, interviewing cocktail hour executive types relaying the pre-trip adult opinion, cops, and hospital doctors who deal with the bad trip freak-outs. Many of the adults think the hippies are just slumming middle class college dropouts. Change the world through love and spiritual union if you can--power to the flower!--but damn get a job or stop using public bathrooms to wash your sandals! The rest of us work to pay taxes so those bathrooms can stay clean --that's the adult's message. The doctor talks about LSD casualties in the hospital, as if it's the drug's fault and not the hospital's! I wanted to scream at the screen: "Bro! the people who brought these poor kids to your gleaming white sanitary gulag are the problem. A tripping person has no place in a hospital - they belong in the garden, with the sunflowers, or on the roof deck, sunbathing in their body paint and funny hats. Being strapped in a hospital straitjacket is no way to come out of a downward spiral. Blame the youth again for though they don't pay taxes or acknowledge the relevance of the establishment, the minute something goes wrong on their acid trips they demand the hospital take their twitching friend off their hands.
Another interesting moment comes when a hippie leader (the one discussed by Flickhead above) discusses the rise of "cybernation," or the increased use of computers, resulting in something called: "massive compulsory leisure." The realization that "this job could be better done by a machine" becomes the prelude to dropping out: "Many, I think, need to learn to do nothing."
He also thinks "LSD should be used to reveal the divine, it's no accident that it entered the world right at the time nuclear fission did." He adds, "If you deny yourself access to that kind of experience, to that kind of energy, then you are simply a fool!" Word, brother. But what about if you continue to take it, over and over, every day, until you're a gibbering mess sitting in a puddle behind the stage at a Phish show? Don't say it can't happen.
I remember feeling all lysergically connected to this kind of youthful hippie revolutionary moment, back in 1987 when I lucked into an instant loving relationship with my future bandmates and a cadre of beautiful, brilliant, blazing hippie chicks, and I feel deeply sorry for kids who many not have had such a 'trip,' - it truly changed my life forever. But after awhile I realized LSD was like reading the same travel brochure over and over. Eventually you have to try and get there, like, permanently, the hard way, via meditation and good deeds, and AA meetings. My gorgeous Connecticut hippies got married and had mutant kids and I got sober and then stopped going to AA and now I white knuckle in an antisocial rapture like Max Von Sydow in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS. The revolution never quite happened for me, no matter how many trips I took. "But we have the music," and the hopes for a next generation of snotty youth to latch onto something bigger than themselves even if the adults tell them its dangerous.
Hopefully, this time, they'll figure out a way to shut out the pervs, tourists, and freeloaders who inevitably cohere around such a righteous fire like metal shavings to a beautiful magnet.
That's the ultimate problem with utopias... to really do them right you need to have brutal ways to keep the scum out of the garden - or you need to keep evolving so fast the losers can't catch up. Exclusivity and a high vantage point are needed, as is a bouncer, a gate-keeper, otherwise, forget it. And if you need a gate-keeper, what kind of utopia is that? It may look a lot like 2012.
There was sequel made to check up on Today Malone and see where those hippies are now, it's called THE HIPPIE REVOLUTION, from 1996. Avoid it! Who wants to see a flower child get old? If you must witness such tragedy, check out my tale of time traveling psychedelic gumshoes and the desire to return to that high water mark when LSD almost changed the entire world overnight for the better -- HIPPY IN A HELLBASKET.
Not available on DVD but 'out there' if you know where to look--like everything, man, it streams, dig?--REVOLUTION is from a different time, one where the word "revolution" hadn't been co-opted by the media to sell shows. I bet now even the word 'revolution' is trademarked by The Beatles-Macintosh Inc. What can you do about it? Capitalism controls the very words out of our mouths. No way to fight it, that's what we say today, no way to stop the corporate leeches. They're already in our bloodstream. But the hippies didn't know that, and in 1967-8 they did something about it, until they got sleepy, and strung out. And they forgot what they were supposed to be fighting against. And needed to go home and get money from their corporate dads so they could buy Dead tickets and red feather boas. This is their story
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