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But at Monterey, in the warm spring sun, the hard-driving energy of the new music was exposed not only to the young people, but also to the commercial visionaries of the big record companies. "The musicians were bought off," says Sinclair. "The music was adulterated and repackaged and sold to us like hamburgers." Instead of reproducing the spontaneous violence and energy of a live performance, recording studios began to "simulate" performances, recording one instrument, one singer at a time, then "mixing down" eight or 16 separate tracks of tape into a final record.
With the music transformed into a neat consumer product, the record companies and promoters deluged the market with records and "festivals," making the counterculture suddenly accessible to anyone willing to grow his hair long and take drugs. As the culture swelled, reaching down to the twelve-year-olds and out to relative "straights," it underwent a basic change.
Instead of an earthshaking shift in consciousness, it became for many merely a change in superficial values. Once there was safety in numbers; growing long hair and wearing bell-bottoms became more a matter of fashion than a statement of any revolutionary attitudes. Whole chains of hip clothing stores—led by Los Angeles-based Jeans West, 46 stores strong—sprang up and flourished. Movies that pretended to be hip but spoke only to "plastic hippies" (Getting Straight, The Strawberry Statement) overwhelmed earlier, more truly radical pictures like Easy Rider. The most successful of the underground newspapers —Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Village Voice—became such large operations they were forced to depend more and more on straight advertising to survive, and thus rose approximately to ground level.
The communal movement has suffered too. Communes began when the movement was small, when hippies had such a tenuous hold on existence they were almost forced to band together in self-sufficient units. But when so-called hippies came swarming in millions over the land, the rigors of the true agrarian commune came to seem unnecessary. Many of the original experiments dried up; what remain are mostly semi-communes, work groups that are more or less directly dependent on the country's economic system for survival.