American Fun (46 page)

12

B
Y EARLY
1968, the
three tributaries of American fun—the commercial, playful, and radically political—were mingling beyond distinction in mainstream American popular culture. Case in point was that spring’s big-budget, major-release movie
Wild in the Streets,
whose LSD-terrorism plot was invoked by the Yippies to needle Mayor Daley’s office. The movie’s ingenious doomsday fantasy—lavishly edited with split-screen technology and psychedelic stars-and-stripes effects—both celebrates and satirizes the counterculture’s efforts to politicize acid-rock debauchery.

The actor
Christopher Jones, a
James Dean manqué who had played Jesse James for two seasons on television, stars as the miscreant teen Max Flatow—a bomb-building, acid-cooking rebel without a cause who lives for sex, flirts with his mother (played by
Shelley Winters), and Oedipally dynamites his father’s Chrysler before running away to rock-star freedom. At twenty-two, he has become multimillionaire Max Frost. He has a sprawling mansion in Beverly Hills and ownership of “
14 interlocking companies.” A dreamy and commanding Jim Morrison–ish heartthrob, Max is “a leader of men and of little girls” whose multiracial rock band and blissed-out entourage includes a fifteen-year-old Yale Law School
grad and his wisecracking drummer, “Stanley X,” played by
Richard Pryor. The movie’s election-year satire kicks in when California’s Democratic senatorial candidate, John Fergus (
Hal Holbrook), a well-meaning and affable RFK stand-in, recruits Max to promote his cause célèbre of lowering the voting age to eighteen. Commandeering Fergus’s stage, Max promotes his own idea that citizens twenty-five and younger are in the American majority (“
We’re 52% and we make big business big”) and that the voting age should be lowered to
four
teen—an idea encapsulated in his catchy pop song “Fourteen or Fight.” Max thus wheedles the candidate into a compromise (“Fifteen and Ready”), and so begins a rock ’n’ roll government takeover, thanks to Max’s fan base of teenage “troops.”

The takeover itself is unstoppable fun. Hundreds of thousands mob the Sunset Strip (reminiscent of recent sit-ins that had defied the strip’s curfews) and stage “
the biggest block party in history”—to the shock of geriatrics watching on TV. A rock revolution sparks off in California, where, as a TV pundit opines, “
the pursuit of happiness has long been replaced by a headier flight back into pubescence,” but soon it has intimidated all of the nations’ legislatures into lowering the voting age. Max quips that he has become “King,” Stanley X retorts that he has “sold out,” and their irony highlights the movie’s constant references, now comical, now earnest, that link youth suffrage to civil rights and the Revolution: For, indeed, are these starry-eyed youth “citizens” supporting a democracy or a monarchy? Do they want to participate in the nation’s governance or idolize a boyish rock star? The movie literalizes the Pranksters’ “Vote for Fun” in a speech to Congress by Patriot-tricorne-lidded Sally Leroy. The child star turned acidhead/nudist, now the nation’s youngest senator, druggedly beats her tambourine and plays to cheering kids in the gallery: “
America’s greatest contribution is to teach the world that getting old is such a drag. Youth is America’s greatest secret weapon.”

To unleash this weapon, she proposes the minimum age of fourteen for all public offices, including the presidency. (“Amend!” becomes young America’s rallying cry.) To ensure that the grizzled senators give their support, Max and his entourage dump LSD in D.C.’s water supply and wheel them in one by one—bug-eyed, cackling, wildly tripping—for one wigged-out special session. Only Senator Fergus, who prefers
being “
good old patriotic drunk,” is bummed out by the acid, dismayed to see democracy’s institutional collapse. The rest of the disabled senators are on “
a happy trip, a
voting
trip” that opens the gates for Max Frost’s election—as the 1968
Republican
candidate because, as his advisers argue, “They’ve been looking for a hero since they lost Eisenhower.” Anyway, Reagan and Nixon would look “dumb” with long hair, and “nobody’s going to take the country this year with short hair.”

The joke here, initially, is that both parties are the same, and that rock stars are, in essence, the greatest demagogues. Both parties serve the ruling-class
establishment, and Max only needs an expedient way in (he wins by the largest margin in history). But the joke suddenly darkens when Max, as president, out-tyrants even Nixon by becoming a militant fascist-for-fun. He makes thirty the mandatory retirement age and sends everyone over thirty-five to concentration-camp-style “
retirement homes,” where they wear blue robes with peace-sign patches and are forced to trip on acid every waking hour. His teenage goon squads notwithstanding, President Maximilian Frost, cruising the open country in his silver Rolls-Royce, enforces a
Diggers-style democracy: he disbands the military, Secret Service, and FBI (“Protection—who needs it?”); he gives free food aid to Third World countries; and he uses the nation’s “
immense wealth … to create the most purely hedonistic society the world has ever known.” But the results are unambiguously dystopian: Senator Fergus hangs himself from a tree, and his orphaned daughter (a premonition of the hippie-hating
punk generation) scorns Max, now twenty-four, for being “old.” This insult haunts him in the closing scenes, when he encounters a band of sneering minors who have taken his lesson to heart: “We’re going to put everyone over ten out of business.”

Historically, having fun had been an underdog position—it was the practice of Patriots, slaves, and forty-niners who enjoyed and empowered their out-group identities. Likewise, in the 1920s and the 1960s, whether
flappers or hippies,
Lindy Hoppers or heads, Americans who embraced rising cultures of fun positioned themselves against an established power structure that gave their pleasure an illegal edge. Historically, as this book has shown, that illegal edge defined American fun. It kept it nimble, resistive, reactive. It kept it witty, inventive, evolving. It
kept it from devolving into flabby complacency. But
Wild in the Streets
warns what could happen if youthful fun were to gain both market share and electoral power, if rock revolution became
real
revolution and youth pursued psychedelic hedonism unchallenged: it wouldn’t be much fun anymore. By this doomsday scenario, the combative attitude that characterizes fun (and deploys it against a closed-minded ideology) could slacken and lose its purpose; sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll would no longer signal rebellion but simply empty mainstream entertainment, and the aggression that historically was channeled through hilarity into forms of civil disobedience could come to behave as dominance, even tyranny, if nothing were there to keep it in check. Whether or not this warning had merit, it spoke to popular worries in 1968: hippie fun had become big business. Once-outlawed breeds of pleasure and license were looking like the norm. The “counterculture,” to this extent, was looking a lot like the “establishment.” And the acid tests, protests, and witty street theater that were amusing sideshows of the mid-1960s were exploding that spring (or so it seemed to many) into full-scale
riots. To consumers of
Life
and the evening news, the fact that fun had become political, as temperance had in the nineteenth century, suggested that one day it could be
enforced.

Wild in the Streets,
for a million-dollar send-up of populist fervor, delivers a pretty lucid verdict on the competing properties of late-sixties fun. On the one hand, the movie captures the counterculture’s efforts to make having fun a matter of right. Having fun, as these rebels had learned from history, was the essence of American freedom, the essence of American youthfulness, the essence of a mixed and open society, and for these noble reasons it was the worthiest antidote to an aging, conservative, exclusive establishment that recruited young soldiers to defend an ideology. Having fun represented the best of democracy, the power of people to struggle together, as kids throughout history tended to know best. On the other hand, more cynically, the movie also captures fun’s serious limits—limits the counterculture often blithely ignored. Hardly a substitute for good governance, hardly an ideology in itself, the right to have fun, especially as it was touted by the hippie generation, was also a highly volatile position that could easily give way to self-gratification, mob rule, or—for the stargazers of the “rock revolution”—mindless
demagoguery. And even ostensibly political fun was vulnerable to commercial forces; to the
Bill Grahams, drug dealers, and tour-bus companies that capitalized on the
Summer of Love; to the fashion, publishing, and record industries that mass-produced hippie accoutrements; indeed, to American International Pictures, which cashed in big on the fun revolution with their part-flattering, part-satirical
Wild in the Streets:
“We’re 52% and we make big business big.”

Much as
jazz and its Wild Wets acolytes drove 1920s popular culture, the counterculture’s fashions and rock and politics drove the late 1960s vibe. It was a heady, contradictory, psychedelic moment in which the entertainment
industry was alternately rejected (by Yippies and communally living hippies); aestheticized (by Robert Rauschenberg,
Andy Warhol and his Factory); and freely and easily embraced by the mainstream for giving open access to their exciting times. With the Barnumesque alacrity of Bill Graham Presents, the late-1960s culture industry flipped the people’s raw fun from the streets to the department-store shelves, often so fast it wasn’t clear which had come first. To be certain,
Wild in the Streets
was just the best of the new movies exploiting the hippie aesthetic and message:
Hallucination Generation
(1966),
Riot on the Sunset Strip
(1967),
The Love-ins
(1967)
, The Trip
(1967), and
Psyche-Out
(1968)
.
The
Monkees, 1966’s made-for-television fake American
Beatles, had become the real thing by 1967—and the entertainment industry’s latest test-tube teens. Mose and Lize for the Acid Age.

Laugh-In,
the comedy duo
Dan Rowan and
Dick Martin’s TV show, took its name in 1967 from the protest movement’s be-, sit-, love-, and teach-ins; it held prime-time airways for the next six years and emulated the scene with its weekly mod dance party (interlarded with hip-to-the-minute political jokes) and vaudeville-style sketches in a hippie vein.
Laugh-In
was the scrubbed-up, aging-teenybopper face of a late-sixties comedy renaissance, which had sprung from
Mort Sahl’s comic radicalism and
Lenny Bruce’s lacerating irreverence and had generated a star system of rebel stand-ups:
Woody Allen,
Mel Brooks,
Joan Rivers,
Bill Cosby, and the unflappable
Dick Gregory, who would respond to hecklers who called him “nigger” by saying the management was contractually obligated to pay him $50 every time an audience member said the
word:
“
So will you all do me a favor
and stand up and say it again in unison?”
In contrast to what was playing in the clubs—profanity, obscenity, anarchy, drugs—the comedy that made it onto
Laugh-In,
The
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,
or
The Steve Allen Hour,
for all of its certified drollery, and for all of its acid-rock optics, was as safe and clean (and hip) as B. F. Keith’s
continuous performance. Because it ran at the pleasure of its commercial sponsors.

Soon even the (ostensibly) radical press wanted its slice of American pie. San Francisco’s
Rolling Stone,
an acid-culture
magazine founded in 1967, aimed higher than the region’s gutter-punk
undergrounds by bringing the “
things and attitudes that [rock] music embraces” to a broad national audience—initially about six thousand readers. And when Detroit’s edgier
Creem
appeared in 1969, it was already mocking rock’s “things and attitudes” with a hipper-than-hip
Mad Magazine
tone, but also for a national audience. It became hard to tell the underground press from the straight.
The
Whole Earth Catalog
, 1968’s most radical
New York Times
best seller, ironically eschewed commercialism altogether. This shabby-looking clearinghouse of hippie enterprises everywhere was fashioned by a Stanford biology graduate,
Stewart Brand, after the recently issued L.L.Bean catalogue. It was tabloid-sized, like
Life
and
Rolling Stone,
but it had the mimeographed look of the underground press and was devoted to a
Digger-like economy. It positioned itself against “government, big business, formal education, church” and advertised the books and “tools” of a handmade, hands-on, self-starting ethos: “
personal power … power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.” Despite the
Catalog
’s hackneyed plea for subscribers (“save 25% off the cover price,” complete with blow-in cards) and its promotion of many mass-market books, its theme was low-impact, self-sufficient community: dome houses, tipis, kibbutzim, yoga, survivalism, recycling, camping, organic farming, solar energy, home auto repair, and home health care. It also featured the farther-out ideas of the era: ESP, cybernetics, self-hypnosis, dolphin psychology, student rebellion, space travel, even personal computing. Its advice was practical, and its tone ran the gamut from sanctimonious to
satirical, but its emphasis on action and getting involved was decidedly fun. A poem in its pages by
R. Buckminster Fuller says, “
God is a verb, / the most active,” and a poem lifted from the pages of the
Realist
suggests repurposing consumer society’s “garbage” as an imaginative way to “
act out our fantasies, use it for unimaginable gratifications.”
The Whole Earth Catalog
delineated the perimeter of a garbage-producing culture, and many of its advertisers gave an exit strategy, but at bottom it was just another catalogue, and amusing reading. As if acknowledging that its readers were
by definition
consumers, its pages also recommended
Consumer Reports.