Highway 1967 Revisited

Just thinking about it makes me want a joint, badly. I know, Nancy says we should just say no, but something tells me she spent the Sixties in an Adolfo suit and an air-conditioned room, her head under the pillow. But I was out--in the streets with the panhandlers, sleeping in the field at Woodstock, marching against war, driving a VW on acid, cadging food from folk singers, dancing in Day-Glo, being at be-ins--and now every magazine has politely informed me that it's 20 years later, and I have a hankering for some grass.

Somebody once told me that if you say you remember the Sixties, you weren't really there. I never think about the Sixties. Really. Just like I never think about my childhood. It's simply that everything I am right now started then.

One day I was wearing a Peter Pan collar and a circle pin and Bob Dylan came onto the radio, and immediately everything I had thought was my world fell into a yawning chasm and I figured something was happening here; I didn't know what it was, but then neither did my mother, and she never would, so I left home.

Next thing I knew, I was living with an entire rock-'n'-roll band. But I had my own room--with purple-silk curtains, purple Indian spread and the mattress on the floor, rush matting and incense. I anointed my body with lemon-verbena oil, wore miniskirts that barely covered my crotch, walked dreamily in the rain, never slept and fell in love every day.

Girls had simple roles in the Sixties: We cooked lentil casseroles and baked hash brownies. We changed the record once the guys decided whether they wanted to hear the new Cream or Procol Harum. We put mascara on draft-board-bound boys. And we kept explaining that it wasn't that we were uptight and, no, we weren't afraid of sex; we just didn't feel like it.

Listen, it wasn't anything like feminist Utopia. But I remember going to a gynecologist and being fitted with an I.U.D. As I lay in bed, bleeding and in intense pain, I was happy as a lark, I wouldn't get pregnant! I could sleep with boys I wasn't engaged to! I didn't have to marry anybody!

Was it only the giddiness of youth, this euphoric feeling of freedom, of things' breaking wide-open, of nothing making the same boring sense it used to? Or was it the Sixties? Were they magic, the way we thought they were at the time?

Yup, they were. My apartment is now incessantly overrun with 16-year-olds, my son and his gang. They are adorable, smart, openhearted kids. But there is no sense of joyous possibility in their eyes; these kids are cynical bastards--Reagan sucks, society sucks, the future sucks, but they'll play the game; they have no choice.

Yet they get a gleam in their eyes when I tell them what the Sixties were like. Yes, I was in the audience when Dylan started acoustic, finished electric. Yes, Keith Moon actually spoke to me once. Yes, I saw Janis Joplin, the Beatles, the Mothers of Invention. Yes, I once sat at Jimi Hendrix' bedside. Yes, I sat in, marched, went to SDS rallies, heard Abbie Hoffman crack great jokes.

I know what these kids pine for. They want the feeling that we had back then, the feeling that there was us, and then there was them--the straight people. The feeling that you were either on the bus or off the bus. The feeling that good and evil were clear-cut, that those who believed that we should be in Vietnam and that guys should have short hair were evil. And, most important, the feeling that there was a good chance that we would win. These days, we all assume that Ollie North was lying and know there's not a damned thing we can do about it.

Arlo Guthrie once told me, "I remember when you could look down the street and you could tell who was your friend and who wasn't. There was a six-month period there--you knew who had a roach on him. He was holdin' on to it for dear life--but then you had guys who looked exactly like you sellin' you oregano." And I remember the day the band and I were hanging around the commune and someone came in with the first press kit for a rock band (Moby Grape) that any of us had ever seen. It looked psychedelic, yet it had been done by ad people. I believe the word hype was coined on that very day. We felt a sinking awe; we grokked that hippies (a media term we adored) were about to be swallowed by the maw of corporate America. The loophole we had found would soon be closed, and nobody would be playing guitar for the hell of it anymore.

A couple of years ago, I was with a boyfriend at one of those trendy New York night clubs where people wear black leather and look bored while they grovel shamelessly to get into the VIP room. "Why do you come here? These people are all wankers," he said.

"At least they're not straight," I snapped.

"Doll," he said, "you're a moron. You still think there's such a thing as a counterculture. These people would all sell their mothers for their big break on MTV. The term selling out is obsolete."

Of course, he's right. I don't have to tell you about the morally bankrupt Eighties; we're all living here. But I am here to testify incessantly that the Sixties, contrary to popular belief, are not dead. Many of the things that we were ostracized for fighting for--civil rights, natural foods, consumer advocacy, ecological purity--are now commonplace.

And deep in the heart of every 40-year-old accountant is the secret knowledge that he was there then. He may not admit it, he may not want to do anything about it, but he still gets a twinge of fury when he hears Day Tripper in Muzak, and a hidden part of his brain sings, "What a drag it is getting old" at three in the morning while he's trying to get some sleep. He knows what's been lost.

And pretty soon, all those kids hanging around my apartment and their brothers and sisters all over the country may rise up with a mighty hue and cry, and the Eighties will be over. And we can start having fun again.