Feed your head. Find somebody to love. Take another piece of my heart. Gimme an F!
Everybody remembers something about San Francisco in the Sixties. Even if they weren’t there, magazine covers with swirly Day-Glo graphics, dancing nymphets, flowing hair cascading down naked backs, bell bottom Levis, flowers, beads, and peace signs told them something was happening here. And of course, there was the music.
Back in the days of fat beanbag chairs, skinny joints and massive headphones, I confess I’d barely heard of the Grateful Dead – and then only because they were mentioned in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. My jam was Beatles, Byrds, Animals, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Kinks, Rolling Stones … But Country Joe and the Fish defined the era with their Fixin’ to Die Rag: “And it’s one, two, three what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Viet Nam…”
Behind the music beat America’s heart of darkness – 27 million young men living under a gruesome Sword of Damocles called the Draft. Mere fodder for a voracious war machine, between 1964 and 1973, over two million teenagers were forced into war in Southeast Asia. Thousands more signed up to avoid the Draft. The ultimate Catch 22: Sign up for war to avoid being forced to sign up for war.
Only 100 years earlier, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865 that was assumed to free the slaves, kicked off another 100 years of systemic racism and subjugation by replacing slavery with the Convict Lease program, which begat the police system to arrest and jail freed slaves for loitering and then rent them out to be worked to death. The Convict Labor System begat Jim Crow laws, which begat the war on drugs — all adding up to incarceration of Black people and slavery by another name.
We thought we were woke by supporting civil rights. Little did we know how much worse it really was. On top of that heavy karma, in our DNA we carried a Trail of Tears.
Early on, the Beats and the Blacks raged against the machine in music, poetry, books and art. The Beats begat the Pranksters who heralded the Hippies on a coast-to-coast psychedelic bus called Furthur – all of it fueled by a burning desire to wage art. All of it fueling the primal scream of rock & roll.
Gimme an F!
