Magic Bus (3 page)

The new generation sets out to change the world by changing itself, and not only in rich, post-war America. On the Mersey and in London, bomb-blitzed and ration-grey, down at Canning Dock and Wardour Street, ravers and hipsters begin the transformation. The Quarry Men play the Cavern Club. The Who grind out ‘My Generation' at the Marquee. Mods make five-bob deals at the
Flamingo. Michael Horovitz launches
New Departures
‘to make poetry and to realize visions in the way Blake realized his Jerusalem'. On Eel Pie Island in the Thames – once a Victorian pleasure garden – sixteen-year-old girls listen to John Mayall, buy the
International Times
at the Barmy Arms, then hurry home to finish their homework.

Teenagers are hacked off with the tired old ways and days. Economic prosperity and the welfare state have liberated them. They're casual about jobs, passionate about ideas, hungry for innovation. At Better Books on Charing Cross Road and on the BBC, they tune into Ginsberg chanting about ‘angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection':

World world world

I sit in my room

imagine the future

sunlight falls on Paris…

Trafalgar's fountains splash

on noon-warmed pigeons…

gold dolphins leaping

thru Mediterranean rainbow

White smoke and steam in Andes

Asia's rivers glittering…

London re-creates itself as a city of and for the young. East End boys sport winklepickers and drainpipe jeans. Capital punishment is suspended. National Service ends. Marianne Faithful, singer and girlfriend of Mick Jagger, writes about never renouncing youthful hedonism in favour of the insane world of adulthood. In art schools and at the 2-Is coffee bar, from dole-poor Notting Hill to hip Chelsea, kids abandon their parents' Kingdom Come of postponed pleasure to catch hold of the living, transient world. They sing love songs and never doubt the reach of their grasp. Their decade unfolds with a
feeling
, ‘out here at night, free, with the motor running and the adrenaline flowing,' as writes Tom Wolfe. A
feeling
that it is ‘very Heaven to be the first wave of the most
extraordinary kids in the history of the world'. Kids who face no unemployment, who fear no hunger, who have the chance to imagine no boundaries; a footloose generation devoted to the acquisition of experience and self-knowledge.

At home in Minnesota, Dylan reads Kerouac's
Mexico City Blues
. ‘It blew my mind,' he says, ‘because it was the first poetry which spoke my own language.' That same year, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi brings his simple form of meditation from the Himalayas to the West. In Arizona the next spring, campaigner Margaret Sanger witnesses her dream become reality, the approval of the birth-control pill. Three months later, John, Paul, George and Ringo, appearing as the Beatles for the first time, play ‘Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On' at the Indra Club in Hamburg.

In Turkey, the new, searching consciousness awakes when Erkin Koray sings his first protest song. In Tehran, the women's magazine
Zan-e Rooz
rejoices in youth by launching a Miss Iran competition. In Afghanistan, the country's first democratic constitution establishes basic liberties, permitting student demonstrations and giving rise to thirty-three independent publications.

In India, young people embrace political and spiritual regeneration as well as rock ‘n' roll. Nehru's socialist democracy champions an alternative Third Way that is neither dictatorial Soviet egalitarianism nor cold-hearted American capitalism. The caste system is reformed and feudal estates are discarded along with imperial subjugation. A generation adopts the Nehru jacket to celebrate the triumph of self-determination over colonialism.

In Nepal, the beginning is marked with the completion of the first road from the outside world to nirvana, in the same year that Hermann Hesse's
Journey to the East
is published in English. Two years later, the first Boeing 707 Clipper Jet lifts off from New York for Europe, doubling speed and halving fares across the Atlantic.

In 1960, Kennedy is elected, the first US president to be born in the twentieth century. This virile, attractive leader articulates the lofty values and poignant ambitions of the utopian revolution, heralding the opening of the New Frontier. At his inaugural address, he proclaims, ‘Let the word go forth from this time and
place to friend and foe alike that the torch has been passed to a new generation.' His brother Bobby helps to shine its light beyond America's shores. ‘There is discrimination in this world, and slavery, and slaughter and starvation,' he says. ‘The answer is to rely upon youth – not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity.'

Kids. Their decade begins all over Marshall McLuhan's ‘global village': on the Alabama bus where Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white passenger; at the first Greensboro Civil Rights sit-in when four black freshmen sing ‘We Shall Overcome'; in Washington with the first $5 donation to the National Organization for Women; in Greenwich Village at the gay Stonewall Inn; off Sunset Boulevard where novelist Aldous Huxley flings open the
Doors of Perception
on his first mescaline trip; on damp, impassioned Aldermaston CND marches; among the Paris Left Bank duffelcoat clique listening to Moustaki's
Métèque;
in dreamin' California when restless pioneer Ken Kesey fires up his psychedelic school bus; and, of course, in the music.

‘His voice is crude, his appearance scruffy and as a performer he lacks all traces of a professional,' writes
Village Voice
of an early Dylan performance. ‘But one brief listening to the emotional understatement in his voice emphasizes the power of his lyrics and his genuine concern for the state of the world.'

Dylan sings ‘The Times They are a-Changin” at Newport. Peter, Paul and Mary record ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane'. Ray Charles instructs, ‘Hit the Road, Jack'. On both sides of the Atlantic, lyrics inspire, guide – or in some cases misguide – the search for a new way of living.

Roger McGuinn of the Byrds speaks of the camaraderie between musicians as ‘a sort of international code going back and forth through records'. In a Manhattan coffeehouse, Dylan writes ‘Blowin' in the Wind', its melody derived from a black spiritual ‘No More Auction Block for Me'. His ‘Talkin' New York' inspires Pete Townsend's ‘My Generation'. After living in India, Jorma Kaukonen, Jefferson Airplane's lead guitarist, brings Asian tonality
to psychedelic music. Dylan's ability to write profound songs that huge crowds can sing encourages John Lennon to pen ‘Give Peace a Chance'. Keith Richards derives the riff of ‘(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' from Martha and the Vandellas' ‘Dancing in the Street'. When Ginsberg first hears ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand', he shocks his New York confrères by jumping to his feet to dance. Music and literature chronicle the generation's desire to love one another and all mankind.

‘Our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country and something geographical,' writes Hesse in
Journey to the East
, ‘but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times.'

I'm transcribing my notes, laptop surrounded by breakfast plates of honeydew melon, sweet cucumber and saffron-yolk eggs. To ease my labour, there's cherry nectar, tasting sugary and round on the back of the tongue, plus waisted glasses of strong, black Turkish tea. My binder is propped open by a chipped saucer of oregano olives so earthy that I'm tempted to spit the stones on to the grubby floor.

Modern Istanbul's complex geography renders it all but un-mappable: three dozen districts swelling over seven hills, no single centre, fingered by water, jumbled in time. Age dilutes its fluidity. I can't keep a grip on its currents of slippery politics, of chaotic transport, of residents drawn together to argue, talk and trade. Its light is maritime, a sea lies over each shoulder, yet the city is 2,000 miles from any ocean. A ten-minute stroll takes me from a sleepy Greek fishing village to a Hapsburg cul-de-sac reminiscent of a Klimt painting. Across the horizon surge waves of new world tower blocks. In the expanding spiral of my wandering, I find its anarchic streets, its shifting colours, its millions of voices, its dreams of a legendary past at once foreign and familiar.

I'm at the Pudding Shop, the first meeting point on the trail. In 1957, two brothers from the Black Sea, Namik and Idris Çolpan, opened the
L
â
le Pastanesi
across from Istanbul's Blue Mosque. For a couple of years, well-to-do Turks stopped by for frothy black
kahve
and honey-soaked
baklava
topped with green pistachios. Then, the tiny, open-fronted patisserie attracted the attention of the early overlanders, both because of its central location and their sugar-craving munchies. Overnight, the travellers made the
L
â
le
their place, renaming it the Pudding Shop. Outside its door, London double-deckers and fried-out Kombis parked along the Hippodrome. Pop music played in its garden. The well-to-do
Turks stood outside, their mouths agape, watching their sons and nephews – among them Ersin Kalkan – drink coffee with paradise-bound freaks in Apache headbands and paisley waistcoats.

Today, the cafeteria is indistinguishable from a dozen of its neighbours, apart from a few faded sixties photographs tacked on the rear wall. Beneath them, a handful of Lycra-clad Danish civil servants procrastinate over desiccated pizzas and
köfte
meatballs. At the next table, a sunburnt Englishman nurses an early Troy Pilsner.

‘In your book you can write that the hippies discovered Turkey,' Adem Çolpan tells me a few minutes later.

‘And that Turkish tourism started in our
pastane
,' adds Namik, as he and his nephew join me at my table.

‘Our country had no tourism policy, no telephones, no information in those years,' Adem explains, turning his neat, twirling moustache with long, manicured nails. ‘My uncle and father, because of their personalities, wanted to help our young guests to find their way. So they stuck announcements on the wall about the nearest Turkish bath and the next boat to Antalya.'

‘Our noticeboard was the first signpost along the trail,' confirms Namik.

On it, kids traded travel advice, found the address of the Iranian Embassy and checked out the safest route through Afghanistan. ‘Gentle deviant, 21, seeks guitar-playing chick ready to set out for mystical East,' read one message. ‘Anyone know where to crash in Kabul?' asked another. At times, the notices were so thickly layered that nails rather than tacks had to be used to post them on the board. Today, the messages themselves, as the first scribblings of an oral tradition, are nearly all lost.

‘We in return are grateful to the hippies,' concedes Adem. A mild sweetness has been instilled in him by a lifetime of serving desserts. ‘Because they taught us how to make Nescafé.'

The Pudding Shop was probably the first café east of Dover to serve Nescafé, delivered by bus drivers who refilled the tins for the return journey with hands of Afghan Black or Lebanese Gold.

‘The hippies didn't want to drink Turkish coffee,' he goes
on, with no hint of irony. ‘They wanted to eat ice cream and macaroni.'

‘And
sütlaç
,' I remind them. Sweet baked rice pudding.

‘My father always said to me, “If we don't live our dream, why live?” That is why we are still here.'

By 1969, the Pudding Shop was so popular that a refectory and an authentic-looking wooden façade were added. The self-service counter was introduced in the seventies. As travellers morphed into tourists, the Çolpans started writing bus tickets and making hotel bookings, charging a dollar for each service, pioneers of a national industry which now serves 12 million visitors every year.

I ask if any of their neighbours remain from the era; Sitki Yener, for example, the self-styled Turkish ‘King of the Hippies' with sweeping cloak, long black locks and beard. On his
pastane's
door, he hung a bilingual sign demanding universal free love. He painted the café walls with psychedelic mandalas and waived the bills of needy pilgrims. More than once, the newspapers carried photographs of him after he had been beaten by the police.

Adem shakes his head. ‘Sitki worked next door for twenty-six years but, in the end, his son wanted nothing to do with the restaurant. He was evicted and died of stomach cancer in Ankara.'

‘Now the East has come to the West,' says Namik. ‘Sitki's is Turkey's first Indian restaurant.'

I ask Adem about business.

‘Better not to say,' sighs Namik.

‘This year has been slow,' Adem admits, speaking softly as he's drawn back to the present day. Only two other tables are in use. Tourism is down across the region since the Second Gulf War. ‘I am anxious for the future.'

‘Travellers follow guidebooks today,' I say, getting him wrong. ‘A good recommendation can make a place.
Remake
a place. You know, in Hué in Vietnam, there are two adjacent restaurants, both with deaf-mute proprietors and both claiming to be the
Lonely Planet
original.'

Adem shakes his head.

‘I grew up behind that counter, learning about the world from
curious tourists,' he says in a sorrowful voice, looking across the street, his eyes focusing long-range. ‘Now, different Westerners come to Asia; first to Afghanistan, then Iraq; next, I am thinking, to Iran, to Syria and maybe even to Turkey.'

I feel my heart sink.

‘These visitors come not because they are open to different cultures,' he goes on, ‘but because they are hungry for power, for oil. They turn Babylon into a military camp. They kill innocent Muslims in Kabul and Baghdad and say only “Sorry.”' He lowers his eyes. He doesn't raise his voice. ‘All my life I am an atheist. Please understand this offence is the one thing which will make me go to the mosque.'