FORTY YEARS AFTER

By Paul Krassner

Actually, 1967’s Summer of Love was born on Oct. 6, 1966, the day that LSD became illegal. In San Francisco, at precisely 2 o’clock in the afternoon, a cross-fertilization of mass protest and tribal celebration took place, as several hundred individuals simultaneously swallowed tabs of acid while possession of it was still not against the law. The CIA had originally envisioned using LSD as a means of control, but millions of young people used it to explore their own inner spaces. Acid was serving as a vehicle to help youth deprogram themselves from a civilization of insane priorities. The nuclear family was exploding. Extended families were developing into an alternative society.

America has always had a spirit of counterculture, taking different forms along the way. Just as the Beats had evolved from the bohemians, the hippies evolved from the Beats. No longer did you have to feel like the only Martian on your block. There were subcommunities developing across the country. “Make love, not war” had become more than just a simple slogan. The banning of LSD also affected the Bay Area underground papers. The political Berkeley Barb got psychedelicized, and the psychedelic San Francisco Oracle got politicized. The CIA’s scenario had backfired.

The blossoming of the flower children—encompassing sex, drugs and rock’n’roll—was at its core a spiritual revolution, with religions of repression being replaced by disciplines of liberation, psychotropic drugs becoming sacraments, sensuality developing into exquisite forms of personal art, and the way you lived your daily life demonstrating the heartbeat of your politics. It was an epidemic of idealism. Altruism became the highest form of selfishness.

The Greek philosopher Socrates said, “Know thyself.” Novelist Norman Mailer said, “Be thyself.” And the ’60s counterculture said, “Change thyself.” Comedian George Carlin—who had entered showbiz in the late ’50s, wearing a suit and tie, performing traditional stand-up shtick—started surfing that wave. He reinvented himself visually—jeans, T-shirt, beard, ponytail—and acknowledges that smoking marijuana really helped him fine-tune his material.

“My comedy changed because my life changed,” he says. “The act followed what was going on in me. Humor is very subjective, and what I was doing onstage didn’t match up with what was going on in my life or the country. 1967 was the Summer of Love; it was the height of the cultural revolution—love, peace, free sex all crested that summer. Everything was changing. I was playing big shows like Jack Paar and Ed Sullivan, but inside I was anti-authority and I hated that shit. Parents might not have been able to relate, so I went to the kids. I was using my act to further my ideas about the times.”