The wrong people, the wrong drugs have taken over. English majors (ugh), fraternity boys and the down-and-outers who would have been bums anywhere are joining the culture. The aggressive psychotic drunk has sprung up now in the drug culture. Heroin and speed have replaced marijuana and LSD. Hippie violence against hippie has become commonplace. It is numbers: too many hippies. We can only afford so many people alienated from society.
These are the words of Charlie Whitman, hippie lawyer from Lawrence, Kans., a 27-year-old veteran of the counterculture who has seen it all. What Whitman sees happening in Lawrence is going on all over America: the counterculture losing its primal energy, which was, back in 1967, a beautiful, frightening thing to feel.
The counterculture began as an attitude, a radically new way of seeing life. Except on its political fringe, it was never translated into consciously conceived doctrine. It existed, in fact, mainly on the subconscious level, not so much a culture as a mass mental condition, a careless, peaceful state of arrested movement and introspection.
The culture sprang more than anything else from rock-'n'-roll music. The new awareness took its energy from the shattering, obliterating volume of electrically amplified music, so awesomely loud it made pant legs flap and ears go numb for days. This volume, so enormous it was more movement than sound, amounted to a new form of violence, and when it coupled with the anarchic, brute-sexual rhythm and lyrics of rock-'n'-roll music, it produced a mass catharsis.
The sound helped shape a generation whose aggressive urges were so effectively cauterized that they had little appetite for physical, intellectual or economic competition, and none for war. "Upward mobility" came to seem absurd, as did the educational system. With marijuana and LSD prolonging and deepening the disorienting effects of the music, the rock culture grew, so that today it is a predominant life-style among the 40 million Americans aged 15 to 25.
Paradoxically, as the movement waxed, the music waned. This began to happen in the spring of 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival, at a time when it seemed the movement would ensnare the whole country in its spirit. "It's hard to describe the feeling we had," recalls John Sinclair, chairman of the radical White Panther Party. "Everybody was taking all that acid and dancing and screaming in the music and uniting on every level with everybody else around him . . . We had a whole new vision of the world, and we knew that everything would be all right once the masses got the message we were sending out through our music, our frenzied dancing, our outrageous clothes and manners and speech, our mind-blowing, consciousness-expanding, earthshaking dope."