The Great Speckled Bird Sept 8,1969 vol. 2 #26 pg. 15
Cultural stomp
Atlanta theater has been dying a painful death for the past several years. And Atlanta audiences have been suffering from cultural deprivation. But Michael Howard, director of the Alliance Theater is taking a step to improve the situation.
On September 6, a group of young people from Austin, Texas, is giving Atlanta an opportunity to witness what may be part of the rebirth of theater.
Mixed media-a live rock band, film, song, audience-actor participation—is combined with the story of a kind of Everykid in the new and exciting way of communicating what these young people are trying to say.
“Stomp” is an experiment in communal Theater. Under the direction of Douglas Dyer, the “Stomp” cast has been living and working together since the play was first created. Although it uses a tightly structured plotline, it is also an experiment in breaking down the antiquated isolationism of the audience and drawing the audience into participation. It is an experiment in speaking with eyes, hands, minds—not just stage voices. It is an experiment in which Atlanta audiences must participate in order to understand.
If this new, relevant, real theater is to survive, people must open their minds and support it by involving themselves in the experiment and remembering it.
Opening Saturday, September 6, at 8:30 p.m. Be there and be open.
STOMP!, written and directed by Douglas Dyer, in the crypt of the Mausoleum for the Arts.
Nothing is so flaccid as an idea whose time has come and gone. The idea for Hair was timely conceived, executed, and fully realized. Stomp! is an almost-frank attempt to exploit the concept of Hair, to resonate to its sounds, and to reproduce the responses to it. Stomp! is too tiny in conception and too weak in execution: it is almost a tiptoe.
The performers are young, from the University of Texas, where the show started as a campus production. They try hard and are almost enthusiastic most of the time. I, too, tried hard. I really worked to believe. In the end 1 could not believe; the show said nothing to me. 1 kept the beat of the music even when (most of the time) I could not hear the words. The words I heard eddied around in an intellectual circle, in the service of no central conception.
The message of the show is purportedly revolution, but it is an all-purpose revolution, one uniting or deceiving everyone and no-one: the clichés of brotherhood, war-resistance, sexual liberation, and left liberalism. In the end you stand on the lawn outside, the Experience past and quite meaningless to you.
Some of the media things come off; some of the people are obviously very good people; some of the ideas were very good ideas and now entitled to a dignified old age. These do not make a play. Go. It only costs $3. Try very hard, and see how hard you can work, without direction, to accomplish nothing.
– Morris brown
The Bird wails: “Atlanta theater has been dying a painful death for the past several years.” But hail the new hero: Michael Howard comes. Stomp in hand. offering a mixed-media novelty.
But that is all wrong. Theater has been dying/not in Atlanta but in the West, the same painful death that all culture must undergo before revolutionary rejuvenation or eternal mummification. The best of it, the Living Theatre, Che, are merely crumbs from the grand repast of the future at best or a safety-valve offering moments of escape from an eternity of perversity.
Nor did the theater ever die in Atlanta: it was never alive here to begin with! Not, at least, in the grand sense, but only in the form of a few experimental fragments most notably at the Academy Theater and, lest we forget, Arthur Burghardt’s efforts in Dutchman. True, Atlanta has built an imposing mausoleum for a never-was theater as part of the High Museum, ranking just below Rich’s as an architectural wonder. Stomp, then, may he fine despite the company it keeps. But the real theater cannot be reborn where it never lived, certainly not in the High Museum. Theater must be now where the people are: there, out there, at work, at play, at war, at death, at hunger. In the streets: guerilla to date, not too successful here, despite tremendous success elsewhere, but that’s where it’s at or got to be at. Not the Atlanta Pop Festival, but the aftermath in Piedmont Park was the real. Not what the people from Austin can do on the stage, but what we all do here: that’s real. Possible scenarios: Riot on Fourteenth Street, Layout on Bird Night, Park Scene on Sunday, County Jail, etc. In fact, they’re all being staged, again and again, nor is there any danger of a future takeover alienating the spontaneous culture from the community by the activities of culture sharks a la [Steve] Cole. It’s ours, because we live it.
A free booklet given out at the Community Crisis Center on Spring. This was the place to go for help withbad trips, bad drugs, anythingconscientious guide to drug abuse
Open the Doors of perception, alter your consciousness
Do You have Prince Albert in a can?Then you’d better let him out.
The Prince Albert can gave one an excuse to have cigarette papers. The can full of marijuana was called a lid, still the name of the basic unit for selling ganja, or marijuana.
When most people hear the word hippie, their next thought is Drugs!
While not untrue, they need to define both their terms to get the true picture. There were many types of people called hippies, just as there are many varieties of drugs. Lumping the benign marijuana with truly addictive drugs under the sobriquet DRUGS and declaring war on it was a Nixon idea that hasn’t improved with time. Remember this was Nixon’s reaction to the Congressional 1970 report that found marijuana should be legalized and thus better controlled.
People who couldn’t buy into a rat race to achieve some ticky-tacky rewards of questionable value usually referred to themselves as freaks. (See the song ‘Little Boxes’ now heard at the start of Weeds) The flamboyantly visible freaks were labeled hippies by the media.
In the late 60s when we freaks began to emerge from small and large towns everywhere, the only thing we had in common really was a yearning for something different. It was sort of a response to growing up on the cold war battlefield huddling under your desk to protect yourself from nuclear attack (?); an early, “Can’t we all just get along?” response. Freaks decided at least we could do our small part to live in a yellow submarine and avoid materialism as much as we could.
The media derided hippies, but many freaks did not fit their definition. Some freaks played dress up much of the time. These were the ones the media named hippies. Many other freaks dressed and looked like mainstream “straight” society most of the time. Men had trouble hiding beards and long hair, but many hippie women passed as straight in the work-a-day world with just a change of clothes. Those hippies on the street downtown were just the visible tip of a subculture of freaks. Young idealistic flower children and hardened civil disobedience veterans were all freaks because they felt they couldn’t get no satisfaction from the Great Society.
Mescalito
We had grown up in a world where miracle drugs had improved our lives at every step. As kids we knew people crippled by polio and odds were many of our generation would have followed. Then we swallowed a sugar cube from Salk, and that prospect all but vanished. Better living through chemistry. Later many tried another drug on a sugar cube.
Freaks came in all kinds, especially when it came to drugs. In Atlanta members of one of the best known freak bands of the late 60s never even tried cigarettes or drank alcohol much less tried any drugs, but they were still very much freaks. To identify what people were “in to”, “their trip”, there were freak subgroups like music freaks, vegetarian freaks, Jesus freaks, etc.
The philosophy of most freaks was and is still,” Don’t force your trip!” meaning this may be enjoyable and marvelous to you, but realize it may not strike others the same. Each person has their own trip, or set of experiences and baggage as they travel through life, don’t let your ego sit in judgment, just continue on your own trip. The only exception was when someone was in danger or too obviously out of it. We were, after all, our brothers’ and sisters’ helpers in a community aborning.
Now some freaks sought enlightment and illumination by their path, but most heads just wanted to get high A head sought ways to get extreme experiences with and without drugs. Getting high in some way was a central activity of most heads. Some of the biggest heads did not look like hippies I think the extreme was illustrated by a friend who reported to the Atlanta draft center early in 1968 and was asked,” Do you do drugs?”
He replied,” Why, What drugs do you have?”
They asked which ones he had used and, since he wanted to be found unfit for the draft, he listed everything he had used or ever heard about being used by some freak trying to get high. The length of the list and how many common items were listed dumbfounded them. My friend calmly explained to the psychiatrist how each could be misused. They respectfully rejected him, but soon revised their have-you-ever-used list to include many of his suggestions.
Marijuana served as a “gateway drug” only because it opened your eyes to official hypocrisy and took you past a social taboo. The majority of hippie freaks went through a ritual of initiation by being turned on to marijuana by a trusted friend. That decision to try something the authorities had told such incredible horror stories about was like stepping through the looking glass. It was a choice you willingly, if timorously, sought. Once you survived, and even enjoyed the experience, you had a seed of doubt about these authorities that had been so more than wrong. Unfortunately some people took that realization to an extreme and concluded the official story even on things like heroin must be also lies. Thus the insanity of the lumping so many varied substances as the boogie man DRUGS.
Hippies main drugs of choice were marijuana and psychedelics. Marijuana was the social lubricant for most freaks in the 60s-70s. Sharing marijuana with a new friend was a bonding, sometimes like “sharing water” in “Stranger in a Strange Land”. ‘Smoking dope’ we called it as a giggle on the official lies. The ritual of rolling a joint or prepping a pipe then passing it repeatedly around the circle as everyone talked and laughed was very bonding. Whenever freak friends met up and it was cool, they shared the pipe of peace, marijuana smoke.
Freaks into the herb were always on the look out for the new experience to be enhanced by being herb high. Physical labor was a rush stoned. Much of Atlanta’s suburbs were built in the late sixties, early seventies by Grateful Deadhead carpenters stoned as much as they could manage. I knew three crews of about six guys who worked together, shared a house with girlfriends, worked full out for three months then followed concerts all over the southeast for a month or so before returning to the job.
Popular culture of the times show how marijuana was pervasive. Finally in 1970, Congress established the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse to study marijuana and make recommendations about how to control its use. The Commission’s final report recommended decriminalization of simple possession, finding:
[T]he criminal law is too harsh a tool to apply to personal possession even in the effort to discourage use. It implies an overwhelming indictment of the behavior which we believe is not appropriate. The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only ‘with the greatest reluctance.
Yet President Nixon ignored the Commission’s findings and launched an all-out war on marijuana users and increased intrusion and collision with youth culture. This unified many freaks who felt used by an unresponsive government eager to send them to Vietnam while pushing them outside the law at home. The government response was to lower many states’ drinking age to 18, draft age. Alcohol was still the acceptable gateway drug for kids.
Every new generation has to find its own way, but generational differences had a different shimmer in the sixties because of psychedelics. Turn on, tune in and drop out was a media sensation. It was simultaneously condemned and admired. Psychology had become cutting edge in the early sixties now we found the world was within. As reports filtered back first from intellectuals and artists, then celebrities of psychedelic breakthroughs clearing mental cobwebs, LSD became cool in the media. Anti-drug warriors had to manufacture horror stories or use CIA COINTELPRO reports of mental breakdowns engineered under duress to support their spurious claims. But it failed. Even scared people were curious to see this new dimension. Some freaks took the next step into a psychedelic experience. Freaks who were students pored over anthropology writings to discover new highs from nature, while chemists synthesized and tested known psychedelics and new chemicals. In South Georgia people discovered LSD was a synthesized version of compounds in the morning glory seeds for sale at the hardware store and psilocybin mushrooms sprouted in cow pastures after every rain.
The psychedelic experience changes the way you look at the possibilities in life. There is no path back to unenlightenment. A bell can’t be unrung.
Marijuana and psychedelics were standard fare for freaks called hippies. Many lived a dual existence in this reality and wonderland. They were called acid freaks or acidheads. The large festivals like Woodstock and Byron showed a society experimenting with integrating informed drug use into daily life.
Without a framework of support, many who were unprepared or unstable had bad drug experiences. Many drug users went to extremes and “burned out” or fried themselves mentally for a while. Hippies all knew people who had bad trips, and later knew folks who overdosed. Most recovered, but not all. It was a steep learning curve for individuals and society.
The Strip Project can’t ignore the 300 Lb. Dancing Shiva of drug use, so we wish to collect hippie tales of drug culture as popular culture documents. Drug use is a personal decision and is not advocated, but such tales are a vital part of the history of hippies.
There was a picture of Lenny looking forlornly through jailbars. The caption said so much with just one letter change. “Americans love non-conformity and often reward it with the metal of honor.” A book that opened my mind :
How To Talk Dirty
and
Influence People
by Lenny Bruce.
Paul Krassner editor.
Grok this in fullness! Share water!
Stranger in a Strange Land.
Robert Heinlein’s religious metaphor.
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,
A Separate Reality, Tales of Power, Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan
by Carlos Castaneda
People’s Chronology
Be Here Now by Ram Dass
Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Zap Comix (Number 0)
The Tibetan Book of the Dead (The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding in the Between) by The Dalai Lama
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson
The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
Joy of Sex : A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking by Crown
Whole Earth Catalog by Peter Warshall, Stewart Brand (editors
Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver
The Bhagavad Gita
I.Ching
I seem To Be a Verb by Buckminster Fuller
Howl by Alan Ginsberg
Meetings With Remarkable Men by G. I. Gurdjieff
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Brave New World , The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Man and His Symbols, Synchronicity by Carl Jung
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive
Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus by Henry Miller
In Politics of Ecstasy, Dr. Timothy Leary states “Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground process. For every visible hippy, a barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.”
Americans of all walks were fascinated and titillated by the idea of this free and feral group – the hippies. Documentaries and exploitation flicks flooded the brains of Suzy Creamcheese and her extended family.
Atlanta theater has been dying a painful death for the past several years. And Atlanta audiences have been suffering from cultural deprivation. But Michael Howard, director of the Alliance Theater is taking a step to improve the situation.
The Bird wails: “Atlanta theater has been dying a painful death for the past several years.” But hail the new hero: Michael Howard comes. Stomp in hand. offering a mixed-media novelty.
