How Should We Remember the Hippies?
Country Joe McDonald died a little more than a week ago in Berkeley, at the age of eighty-four. He was best known for his turn in the documentary “Woodstock,” in which he led the crowd in an antiwar chant of “F-U-C-K” just before he and his band, the Fish, performed their song “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” with its rousing chorus, “And it’s one, two, three / What are we fighting for? / Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn / Next stop is Vietnam.” McDonald was, as much as anything, a man of his time. Born during the Second World War to parents who were card-carrying members of the Communist Party—and who named their son after Joseph Stalin—he kicked around the West Coast, joined the military at the age of seventeen, and then drifted to Berkeley at the height of the Free Speech Movement, where he started a band. After writing a few songs about the war and playing Woodstock, he did what so many in his folksinging generation did: he kept at it, recording a Woody Guthrie tribute album, trying to save the whales, and making a life that was in line, at least as much as it could be, with the ideals of his younger self.
Reading accounts of that life this past week got me thinking, not for the first time, about how we should remember the hippies. I admit that I’m unusually occupied by this question, because I live in Berkeley and they are still everywhere. I see them in the same coffee shops with the same friends talking the same bullshit, driving their Subarus slowly around the traffic circle near my house, and even at the municipal golf course, where they feed the occasional coyote and take three minutes to line up each putt. I also see them protesting Tesla dealerships, gathering to block new housing developments, and litigating the same old disputes against the same old antagonists. It’s hard not to feel a sense of loss at such sights, a comedown from Woodstock to this. But there’s also a hardened vitality that I can’t help but admire—to imagine that anyone, especially so far along, could be so sure of their convictions. They have a political identity that comes with an aesthetic, one signified not just by tie-dye and long hair but by an aura of rebellion.
Along with their contemporaries in the civil-rights movement, these hippies, for better or worse, established the image of protest in this country. They set the template for what it should look like, what sacrifices it should entail, who should do what and why. Country Joe McDonald and his fellow-folksingers, in particular, set an expectation that moments of great political unrest in this country would come with a soundtrack, preferably one involving a lot of acoustic guitar. This, for the most part, has not materialized during the Trump era, outside of a few stirring but notably nostalgic attempts by artists such as Bruce Springsteen, who wrote the song “Streets of Minneapolis” about the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
If there is a modern audio component to what we can loosely call the Resistance, it exists in the form of podcasts and the vertical-video clips they generate: a million short-form videos of people talking into USB microphones have replaced not only rousing political speeches but also music as the main vehicle for rabble-rousing. What this transformation means is that we are producing a flood of effective, enervating, and disposable media about political dissent. It is a theatre for pundits and satirists but not for poets and artists. What I have not been able to decide, reflecting on the legacy of Country Joe, is whether this is a good or a bad thing.
I first saw the clip of McDonald at “Woodstock” when I was in the eighth or ninth grade. It left a deeper impression on me than anything else in the film, save for the flashes of crowd nudity. Around this same time, a kid at my school let me listen to a truly profane album that his father, Patrick Sky—another folksinger, whose career followed a trajectory not unlike McDonald’s—had recorded in the early seventies. “In the draft board here we sit / Covered o’er with Nixon’s shit,” Sky sang. All the cursing and naughtiness felt pretty thrilling, which was probably why I was so struck by Country Joe spelling out “F-U-C-K” with the Woodstock crowd. I also thought these songs were very funny. And although this might sound precocious for a seventh grader—especially one who wasn’t as smart as he thought he was—I recall appreciating that the song was so explicit not only in its language but in its message.
Thinking back, I wonder if my attraction to the directness of the “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” might have been a sign that, for work, I would ultimately choose political commentary over novel-writing, which was what I did in my twenties. There was something distinctly unsatisfying to me in a song like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” which felt far too plaintive, almost passive in its protest. What I wasn’t thinking about then—and, frankly, don’t really worry much about now—is how those words would age. A fiction-writing friend of mine back in my youth told me that he wanted his books to feel timeless and eternal. My work, I’ve long accepted, is ultimately ephemeral and meant only to change opinions, not move people’s hearts. It is simply true that direct and topical political dissent is ultimately disposable. We don’t remember “It’s one, two, three / What are we fightin’ for?” as much as we remember “How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man.”
Still, Country Joe did provide a beat and a melody, something large crowds of people could dance to—watching him and the Fish at Woodstock was probably a lot more fun than tweeting angrily on your phone in your bedroom. There is no question that the hippies did a better job at turning dissent into something appealing and dangerous. At the same time, I suspect that what I perceive as the spiritual arrogance of the aging hippies comes from the aesthetic allure that the sixties and seventies still hold over this country.
Why can’t the left generate that kind of aesthetic political identity anymore? Why isn’t there a giant movement of neo-hippies starting phone-free communes somewhere up among the pot farms of Humboldt County, or even in arid West Texas? My suspicion is that the atomized way we now experience so much of what we take in, through social media, discourages it. We get blunt talk and, occasionally, stirring images of big rallies. Nothing else feels as efficient as firing off a tweet, maybe trying to organize an instant protest. The right, by contrast, has produced new tribes that wear the same hats and come up with names for themselves, such as the Groypers, even though they, too, mostly express themselves by talking into microphones and webcams. What I’ve previously called the ideology of the internet—a broad anti-authoritarianism, and a hostility to institutions—is perhaps better suited to reactionary culture.
It’s a strange situation. I tend to think that political talk should be direct rather than swathed in pretty verses and the sound of a dulcimer. But I admit to feeling a bit jealous of the old hippies. They did not all age gracefully, but so many stayed committed to some cause, which is more than I fear I will be able to say for myself. When the war finally ended, the books had been written, and the country more or less agreed that they were right about Vietnam and civil rights, there was still the music and an idea, however increasingly faded, of living free. ♦