Home Free (15 page)

As a result, I sometimes found these weekends a little . . . taxing. A night at the movies and then home to bed would have been just as mind-expanding. But I didn't complain. It was understood that the collective experience was more important, more fun, than most of the things that couples did on their own: dates, for instance. Dates were old-fashioned. We wanted to experience the new consciousness as a group, to bounce around on it together like a trampoline.

But underneath the giddiness there was also a more momentous sense of being on a genuine frontier. This was new. Nobody thought about where the experience might take us or what we could make of it; that was what “the system” did, boxing up the future.
We want the world and we want it now.
Our job was to be in the moment.

Unfortunately, smoking marijuana tended to pluck me
out
of the moment, not into it. (“Wow, my heart is beating fast. Maybe my aortic valve is leaking. . . .”) But sometimes getting stoned did feel like a revelation—an irrefutable, visceral sense of what
could
be. Since then, decades of avid horticulture have bred stronger strains, but there were times when the gentle dope of the day made me think: yes, this is how I ought to feel
all the time
, this plush connection to the low hum of life in everything.

For my poetry-writing boyfriend, I think drugs were exactly what they were meant to be: an X-ray that exposed hidden truths. A do-si-do of the
weltanschauung
. Getting stoned wasn't just about lying around listening to
Dark Side of the Moon
and falling madly in love with the patterns in the rug. Marijuana still had an aura of sacrament about it. We were initiates into another avenue of higher education.

It's hard to imagine now,but drug use was not part of the mainstream, and “rehab”was something you had to do if you broke a leg. Before the 1960s, only Thelonius Monk and beatniks smoked weed. Until grass,mushrooms, and acid came along, our culture of intoxication didn't go far beyond a case of Molson's Blue on the dock. Alcohol wasn't as much of a fixture on the scene as it is now. Binge-drinking was still Skid Row behaviour, not a prom-night ritual.

Long before weed, however, there was speed, a dangerous but curiously tolerated drug. When my mother went to her GP in the 1950s complaining about weight gain and a lack of “pep,” the doctor routinely prescribed amphetamines.

“You should have seen me run around with the vacuum,” she recalled with a certain relish. Speed was around the way antihistamines are now. Some writers thrived on it: Jean-Paul Sartre wrote voluminously on speed; Jack Kerouac famously tried typing on one long scroll of paper so he wouldn't have to stop to roll in a new page.

But speed didn't deconstruct your world view; it just kicked it up a notch. It gave people energy they didn't actually have. Acid and marijuana, on the other hand, rearranged the whole grammar of things and melted down the words.

To point out the obvious, dope and acid fed a lot of the new music as well—not just the lyrics, but the perceptions that woke up language.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
is one long pipe dream, the album that revolutionized pop music. (A year later came the song “Ob-La-Di,” a tune John Lennon referred to as “Paul's granny shit,” but never mind.)

Drugs fought cliché until they began to generate their own. Getting stoned can become a case of chasing the dragon, trying to recapture that initial visionary rush. But for a brief time—in the late '60s and early '70s—I think we had it: that first, fresh uncorrupted glimpse.

Not that we were so original or groundbreaking; it was mostly a matter of being the right age at the right time. There was an assumption that smoking dope or taking acid was not just a lark but a new
technology
, a way to draw aside the curtains of the ordinary world. It didn't feel like escapism; it felt more like tuning in, Timothy's Leary imperative. Turn on, tune in, drop out.

Leary was not, in the end, the best advertisement for the long-term effects of taking acid, having turned into a sort of Joan Rivers of enlightenment toward the end of his life. Aldous Huxley exited more gracefully. His last words, to his wife, were “LSD. 100 Micrograms I. M.,” to which she responded by injecting him with the requested amount.

In 1968 taking drugs wasn't considered seedy; getting stoned was almost an act of civic hygiene, like volunteering at a food bank. It was about
seeing
, and
seeing through
, the rules, hypocrisies, and convention our generation had all grown up with—values that had helped our parents raise protected, secure, well-fed, well-educated children,who then grew up to become questing, idealistic, naïve, self-involved, and somewhat careless young adults, unconcerned about careers or making pots of money. My friends joined CUSO or signed up for Katimavik. They drove Volkswagen vans overland to India, and slept in hammocks on the beach in Mexico. Marriage, houses, and having children were postponed until the last possible moment.

We didn't worry about the future; indeed, it rarely crossed our minds. It was taken for granted that we could invent our own futures in a world that was environmentally and economically well-disposed toward us. The young were golden. Nothing stood in our way—jobs grew on trees, travel was dirt cheap, the war in Vietnam was troublesome and probably immoral, but self-contained. The world was still intact, and so were we.

All the more reason to take it apart, along with our consciousness.

This enterprise,however, had some grave consequences. A girl I knew in university took acid and began to experience one orgasm after another, like a set of rapids, and it wouldn't stop. She had a breakdown and disappeared. Acid probably contributed to the suicide of two other friends. The term “mind-blowing” wasn't accidental.

In our son's growing-up, I think Casey preferred Jamaican over-proof to smoking dope. We never had to go through chats with the principal or the drug busts and showdowns that are a rite of passage for many parents. No, the irony in our family is that drugs were probably more important in our lives than they have been in our son's.

But music was an even more defining force. This was before pop culture became the great hairy beast it is today. Even in 1968, when rock 'n' roll was 12 years old, the new music was still relatively self-contained, an upstart genre in a world of classical music, bland ballads, and
Masterpiece Theatre
.

I remember the night that rock 'n' roll first breached TV, in 1956, when Elvis Presley appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. As my mother and I sat in the den watching Elvis sing “Don't Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog,”I felt a blush of embarrassment;we were watching something sexual together, on the television, which had never happened before.

And well before the civil rights movement, even though the face of rock 'n' roll was mostly white, it was rooted in black culture— in gospel, R&B, and the southern blues that the Rolling Stones emulated and made popular. Unlike the rest of society, the early televised dance concerts, like
The T.A.M.I. Show
, were racially integrated.

Open-air rock shows like Woodstock and the Stones' Hyde Park show in London were new. Many of us had grown up in nuclear, secular families in the suburbs and had never experienced a sense of community on that scale. Drugs,music, political activism, and the sheer demographics of the postwar baby boom created a culture that we felt we was ours, and ours alone.

Music had a political voice then too. On May 4, 1970, when students protested Nixon's plans to bomb Cambodia, National Guardsmen opened fire on the protesters and killed four of them. Neil Young's song “Ohio”came out a week later, a song full of anger and pain that hit like a passionate editorial.

But as Young reflected in a 2008 interview with
Uncut
magazine, “It's a different world now than it was in the 1960s. I am not under any misconception that my next record is going to change the world.”The headline for this story was “Rock's last great battle cry.”

The great bonding experience for our parents' generation was the Second World War and its jittery aftermath. For us, it was the new music. It mirrored us—and it excluded our parents. That was sort of the point.

The role of the arts shifted, too, from a marginal, high-brow pursuit to something that felt more urgent, relevant, and personal.
The Battle of Algiers
,
Revolver
,
Exile on Main Street
,
Astral
Weeks
,
Blonde on Blonde
, Jackson Pollock's action paintings, Jean Luc Godard's movies, The Living Theatre's performances—these weren't
divertissements
, they were works that challenged and changed the rules of their particular medium. Art also began to take on a more political role, charged with uncovering the truth in a buttoned-down era that was full of elisions, hypocrisies, and constrictions.

The culture of the 1950s tried to construct a safe, controlled world, whose buried fears nevertheless found expression in the Cold War,with its bizarre domestic accessory, the fallout shelter. It was an era with little interest in sexual expression or social justice. The civil rights movement was still to come. The closet was not just for homosexuals; it was a crowded, dark place filled with female poets, secret Buddhist meditators and suburban teenage girls like me, who thought there must be more to life than mastering touch typing, wearing crinolines, and tolerating sweet but silent boyfriends.

Since I wasn't up to full-blown rebellion, art was the only acceptable way out of innocent, upholstered Burlington in the '50s; that's why I lay on the dining room rug listening to Charlie Mingus records, read the existentialists, and took a suitcase full of poetry to summer camp. That's why I got on the bus to Toronto see the exhibit of mildly erotic paintings by Robert Markle and others at the Dorothy Cameron Gallery, before the police shut it down.

Now, of course, there's no need to get on a bus to find the edge of pop culture; you can't open your email without being forced to wade through it. The
New York Times
and the tabloids have converged in the middle, both eager to report on the “news” of a drunken celebrity who drives up on someone's lawn. The boundaries of visual art have become fluid and permeable; a work of art is just as likely to be a business deal (Damien Hirst's paycheque) or a display in a department store window. Art is a shoe. Women's shoes are self-help. (“I'm worth a $595 pair of platform booties.”)

The days of one homogeneous culture that reflects the prevailing political winds are gone. Pop culture, protean and ever-changing, now scintillates in a million little pieces. The recording industry has collapsed, atomizing into self-marketing ventures and musicians who earn their living online or on tour. The combined worlds of TV,music, and social media have become a hall of mirrors, a Babylon of self-expression, a chorus of cooing, like pigeons in the grass. It's fertile and febrile and maybe healthy in the end—I'm trying to avoid Codgerville here—but the scene is so mercurial. I can't figure out how anyone makes money online, unless they sell their coffee tables on Craigslist.

Meanwhile, our lives are simultaneously more connected and more isolated, as we tunnel from one suburb of the web to another. Potential artists have access to an audience of billions long before they can figure out if they have anything to say.

Okay, that does sound codgerish. But the creativity of the new generation is difficult to evaluate because it's so raw and evolving. Something more twitter than Twitter will have come along by the time you read this quaintly jet-lagged book. Art has become more about audience, less about artifact. Everybody's first drafts are out there, topped and tailed with great-looking credits. We're all thinking out loud, en masse.

Pop culture now irradiates us from every side, like a vast tanning salon. But in the 1960s, especially in music, there was an outburst of energy, non-conformity, and self-expression that was idiotic in some aspects (I won't quote Donovan although I have upon occasion) but it also helped define us.

Our parents didn't like it or want to be part of it. Rock 'n' roll was “jungle music” (note the racism). So music was our crucible.

Now whole families buy tickets to Springsteen concerts or share downloads of K'naan. Ads selling electronic equipment show silver-haired men playing air guitar. Is there a male left on the planet who does
not
play guitar? Casey listens to one or two genres of music that we don't have the stamina or wardrobe for, but on the whole our two generations bathe in the same murky Ganges of pop culture.

Our son's musical palette is deeper and broader than ours was but it doesn't necessarily define community for him. There are so many musical genres now that they've become a badge of personal identity: shoegazer bands vs. ambient-doom-metal. Indie is no longer short for “independent.” But in many cultural ways, our two generations have meshed. What is his and his alone? I'm not sure. It will be something he spots on the horizon that we can't see. Something his parents can't understand.

That would be interesting for all of us.

Our relationship to our parents was markedly different. We had a proprietary sense of seeing through the world of our “materialistic” parents. Protest music, rock 'n' roll, the exploration of the psyche, the new science of consciousness—these were
our ideas
. India's 10,000 years of spiritual practice or William Blake's universe in a grain of sand? Our discovery. We were as engorged as ticks with a sense of being the first generation to see things
as they
really were
.

Our families lived,we thought, in benighted stupefaction while we were all waking up. Even as we drank our parents' scotch, we made fun of their crystal decanters. I did, however, secretly admire my parents' attention to tradition, their seasonal centrepieces and silver carving knives. I viewed their domesticity from an anthropological distance, and with a prescient nostalgia: I knew early on that I would not live like them. In many ways, I felt claustrophobic about family, but I was also hungry for more.