The Best Baby Boomer Rite-Of-Passage Storyteller

well I was essentially out of it as a teenager until I discovered beatnik beatnik er II and that sort of saved that sort of saved my adolescence you know the kids that ran the school the the heroes the ones that everybody wanted to be like the popular ones were these were these crew-cut football players and their and their cheerleader girlfriends and that was the that was the oppressive hierarchy that that dominated everything and then then when we discovered Allen Ginsberg and and jazz and black people and stuff like that we carved out our own little Empire yeah it was a way of well well the big word then was conformity that was one of the great threats everybody's worried about conformity and everybody was and and and then and then so you wanted to become a nonconformist you knew that a certain kind of shirt that that that all the other guys wore that had a button here and a button here and another button back here but that was the kind of shirt that you were supposed to wear you knew that a certain the certain details of haircut you're supposed to have whether you had a little wave that went up here like that or whether you had a flat top whether your hair was cut square there were all these ways of being or not all of these there were actually very few you knew what they were you knew you weren't supposed to be a brain and yet and yet you also knew that there was something uncool about about about all this I mean this was a period we're talking about a period when when the idea of mass Bohemia had not been invented when when when when there wasn't there wasn't a mass rebellion there was a kind of a there was a there was a there was a quiet resistence to a great huge bland uncooked muffin of a culture that in that included included Eisenhower and everything that Eisenhower represented all of the sort of blandness and and prayer breakfasts and and civic piety z' and reassurances that America was the greatest and all of this all of this all of this great bland piety that was that was just kind of sitting there in Newark Lee and it was incredibly boring and so the the rebellion wasn't was as much as anything else a rebellion against this it's just stupefying boredom that was the official official everything of the time the ideal the sort of male ideal at the time was the Charles Atlas advertisement was the was this huge muscular pumped up kind of Arnold Schwarzenegger creature and if you didn't have these huge muscles then then you were you know a ninety seven point pound weakling and an object of an object of contempt so when the Beatles came along and they were kind of skinny and yet the girls liked them this was a gigantic liberation for all the sort of skinny guys in the world and but this didn't really exist that this didn't really exist in the in the mid-50s in late 50s except in some of these marginal worlds like like the jet like the world of jazz the world of beatniks that sort of thing we had a young teacher when I was in the 11th grade a kind of a charismatic young teacher and he assigned us Catcher in the Rye and which which we we just devoured I mean this was a book that really spoke to us and then one day the principal came into the class and had us all pass up our copies of Catcher in the Rye and told us to forget that we'd ever seen this book and we learned fairly quickly that this had been there that the book had been banned by the school board and this was such a this was such a this turned out to be a real learning experience for all of us because fart we learned a lot more than we would have learned if we just been allowed to read the book because this way of course not only did we read the book but everybody in the school suddenly wanted to read the book in fact my friends and I went to New York bought cartons of the book and sold them right outside the school ground because suddenly all these thick-necked jocks you know wanted to read would say you got the catch in a rival book you got a who that's really you know hot stuff my favorite teacher in high school the head of the English department and and his he taught the senior honors class and the big the big thing every year for him was that he taught brave new world Aldous Huxley's brave new world that was the kind of high point of the year of senior year in English well that book got banned by the school board and there was an enormous fight over it and and it was kind of my first experience with this sort of rebellion and political political a kind of political rebellion where I didn't I I did feel like with it I had adult allies you know we all wore black armbands to school to show to protest the banning of this book and it was just a wrenching wrenching experience for for this teacher whom we loved so much you know who saw his livelihood threatened and and and and his everything is his whole life thrown into question by this horrible controversy and it was a school board it was these they were kind of Yahoo's on the school board who would read a dirty word in a book and or who would who would somehow or would read a flyer from some organizations saying that this book was communist or this book was radical or you know this book questioned Christian values that sort of thing and suddenly the book would be I was a clean-cut young reporter and and I started going to to some rock concerts some rock concerts at a place called the Fillmore auditorium another place called the Avalon Ballroom and I was seeing these rather amazing rock groups with names like the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane and the Quicksilver Messenger Service and you'd go to these rock dance halls and there were these there were these amazing you know 50-minute hour long songs sets being played and these Liquid Light projections on the on the walls and and plenty of plenty of chemical help to to to get you into the groove and oh and I remember at the film where there were there was there were great baskets of free apples everybody to come and take an apple and would you like some of my tangerine and and there were there was a there was a there were songs being created almost hourly that resonated so powerfully there just anthem after anthem after anthem coming out from from these groups from these California groups like the Jefferson Airplane and from Bob Dylan and and from the stones and from the Beatles and it's it seemed to be it seemed to be all over the world there seemed to be there seemed to be some places that it was erupting from especially strongly like London and San Francisco in the Lower East Side of New York but it would be but it would become national almost immediately there was a feeling that this that this upsurge was was I had a religious significance a kind of millennial significance that everything was going to change and change forever and that people were going to change and that people were going to love each other and they were going to they were going to learn had to live together and that this was this wasn't just people learning to live together but this was a sort of harmony of the whole universe we were going to achieve some sort of enlightenment I mean this was this was the view I don't know how many people really took it seriously I never quite took it seriously myself but there were certainly a lot of very articulate important hippies artists mystics leaders of the time who took it completely seriously and who who certain who believed that would change the world forever who believed that who believed that the music the music was not just music was not just something nice to listen to but was an instrument of global enlightenment you know that that it was that it was going to that it was going to that it had a kind of the significance of a sacred text it wasn't just music and it certainly wasn't business and it certainly wasn't just a way of getting money or having fun or partying it was very very much more important serious and consequential and then then you had all the the characters descend upon the counterculture with their brand-new Paisley shirts and their love beads and going you know peace and love brother would you like to buy one of these and and so you had that that whole that whole parasite phenomenon coming in to the to the counterculture and you know it was in all kinds of forms I mean initially it wasn't really hippie capitalists it wasn't so much hippies who who who became capitalist it was capitalist dressing up like hippies and in fact I think from the point of view of the counterculture there was this there was a lot of admiration for for some hippie who could who could get rich by making herbal tea or something like that but some character some character from Madison Avenue who was it was coming in to package you know to package a rock group or two to put out a youth magazine or something like that that was seen as a threat to the integrity of the of the whole of the whole movement you know the man can't bust our music didn't mean just the police I mean it also meant Wall Street and Madison Avenue all of a sudden all of a sudden television the newspapers everywhere was full of these these very exotic looking people you know with extremely abundant hair with very peculiar clothes with with with very strange with very strange speaking a very curious language and and now it's funny now you look back and and it looks incredibly dated I mean now if you now you look back at a newsreel or a movie from the 50s it looks a lot more current than one from the 60s that the counterculture was just drenched with with eroticism and even if you leave sexual activity overt sexual activity out of it you had you had an enormous amount of just sensuousness the very act of having long hair that that blows in the wind and that you can you can shake and and that's that grows out in profusion and majest that is an act of sensuality and if you throw in if you throw in the music and the sort of the the the rage for feeling for feeling the prestige of emotion it greatly increased in the the counterculture and in the 60s as against the prestige of thought and intellectuality so there was an enormous lee erotic atmosphere created and then you and then you add to that the fact that there was also an enormous amount of sex much more I think there's no doubt that people were having an awful lot more sex than people of their of the same age at had a decade before certainly certainly in the 50s I mean I came I became interested in girls in in the middle 50s and believe me it was all talk and until in 1960 in the 60s it meant essentially reject Authority or or and the and the subtext was embrace this new sort of Authority the authority of of enlightenment and and the spheres and the music and our own authority it was a it was an anarchist sentiment essentially it meant create yourself it meant it meant don't fit in to the to the to one of the preset patterns that's been prepared for you that's a trap that's a game invent yourself be true to yourself learn what you want to do and do it it means tell it like it is means be truthful it means forget about the official version the official versions a lie find out what the real version is and tell that everything isn't everything isn't okay so so tell it like it really is don't tell it like it tell it like somebody would like it to be tell it like it really is a fairly radical notion at the time well you know the Beatles The Beatles said it but the Beatles were just repeating it everybody with everybody had been saying it I mean everybody who was a hippie it meant that that that that love and the harmony of people was going to change everything and of course that was something that they were that a lot of more tough minded radicals as well as people who could totally outside the counterculture could see was nonsense that they you needed an awful lot more than love but but when you had millions of people who who actually believed that all you needed was love some extraordinary things did happen yeah well the the 50s that the mass education that that was a great accomplishment of the 1950s I mean this do not fold spindle or mutilate it comes from Berkeley and comes from the University of California and the Free Speech Movement of the very early 60s of 1962 I guess 63 and and it means I'm an individual I'm not just I'm not just a standardized category you know don't don't don't turn me into a card with a bunch of little holes in it I'm a human being I'm a person I'm me and I'm unique and and the the the it's really a reaction to the mass education of the 50s which necessarily treated people in categories and in masses and herded them from place to place into huge lecture halls don't folders spindle or mutilate I mean meant treat me like a person I insist on being a person an individual yet there also is an anti-technology today yeah well it's a factor that was it's a factor that it was is certainly now seen as negative about the counterculture it remains to be seen whether ultimately it's a negative factor certainly there was a need for a correction in our our society's single-minded worship of Technology and of course the the the has was as many people noticed at the time here was here was a group the hippies using using amplified instruments and and all kinds of technological advances to to advance to to put across on an anti technological message but but there was a part of that of that anti technological message was based on a feeling that that the needs of life had been taken care of and that that that we all weren't going to starve no matter what happened and that we could get along we could get along without so much excess money would be of it they'd always be enough to get by I mean it'd always be enough so you could get a place to live and something to eat and you know in a couple of joints to keep you happy and that you didn't need so much I mean there was a that we this this side of the sixties and the whole all you need is love side and the anti technological side is what's now viewed with the most contempt I think in the and is the most ill understood part of the 60s we can understand the part about you know wanting to have justice and equality and civil rights and even the anti-war part of it and wanting to have some better music than it was available Earl but but all of this idea of all the the anti technological aspect of it we just looked back on that with puzzlement it was like who's gonna pay the bills it's how we look at it now the media reacted initially quite positively because this all seemed very benign and it all had to do with love and being colorful and that sort of thing but rather quickly it became frightening I think parents were were rather justifiably frightened because it looked to them like the complete destruction of any kind of certainty or structure or ambition and that that that their children were going to get caught up in something that was going to leave them that was going to leave them helpless and bewildered a few years down the road I think I think people I think the parents of daughters were more alarmed on the parents of sons there was and there was certainly an overtly anti parental or kind of war of the generations aspect to all this where people were people were urged to to reject their parents and and even if the rejection was basically only verbal and or in a matter of a bit of yelling and yet junior or the daughter was still you know didn't drop out of college and and was still sort of on track to a to a good middle-class life later on the the hurt would still be there and the and the fear would still be there and for those whose for whose children ended up dropping out of school moving away living in communes taking massive quantities of drugs speaking in an incomprehensible way this was very very frightening and and the reaction to the counterculture is at least as powerful a legacy of it as the counterculture itself

Channel: David Hoffman

Views: 99,210

Keywords: rick hertzberg, hendrik hertzberg, liberal, Politics, growing up in the 50s, growing up in the 60s, Jimmy Carter, New Yorker, documentary, David Hoffman, Jimmy Carter speechwriter, The New Yorker, new Republic, American history, 1960s history, 1950s history, PBS documentary, great storyteller, conformity, 1950s conformity, rock 'n roll history, rock and roll, Beatles, personal story, family friendly, baby boomer, rite of passage

Id: d5zHW_jstfg

Length: 21min 19sec (1279 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2019