Academia has never been shy about diving into popular culture, mass media, aesthetic waves, and broad social trends. (Madonna studies, anyone?) So even attendees were surprised to hear that we’ve now had the first major academic conference in the United States on the Summer of Love.
Turns out it happened last weekend in San Francisco in the minimalist and swank 18th-floor suites of Northwestern University’s Center for Civic Engagement on Montgomery Street. One of the main speakers, David Farber of the University of Kansas, declared this to be “a magical moment for counterculture studies,” and the topics ranged from the era’s ties to today’s cyberculture, and from gender-bending to health-equity issues.
On the day The Frisc dropped in, the main topics were music and drugs. Farber is an engaging speaker, and his thesis had everyone’s ears perked up: Pot and LSD were not accessories of the counterculture; they were central to its being and impact. “You don’t get the counterculture that we get without acid,” he said. What’s more, the counterculture isn’t 1966 and ’67, but what would come next — “a lived set of experiences that are mutually based and materially managed.” (This sounds like jargon, and it is, straight from my notes. But think of a food co-op and it begins to make sense.)
His thesis suddenly got slippery, though, when one attendee (a woman) noted during the Q&A that there was one more drug that was key to the whole counterculture, and that was the Pill. Another insightful comment was that after the late 1960s, young people were having their kids and also caring for aging parents, along with staying active in social movements and starting new things. Farber acknowledged from the outset that his wasn’t an all-encompassing argument, given that he wasn’t underscoring what was going on in communities of color, among other currents of the time.
I was delighted by a lecture about the deep Englishness of the Kinks — which included citations and references to moderate Toryism, Edmund Burke, J.B. Priestley, and George Orwell. I can’t be definite about what all this citing and referencing represents (and that’s on me, not on the academy), but the crux was how the Kinks in particular stood against what we understand as hippiedom and tuning in and turning on and dropping out, a counter to the 1960s counterculture itself. (See “Autumn Almanac,” with its “Tea and toasted, buttered currant buns / Can’t compensate for lack of sun / Because the summer’s all gone.”)
One professor argued that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band should be pulled out of the psychedelic canon; he even kicked things off with the OED’s definition of “psychedelic” in his PowerPoint deck. Afterward, my response and those of others to the paper took a similar tack: Doesn’t the audience decide whether a record is psychedelic, and therefore countercultural? OK, so there are no extended jams on Pepper in the literal sense (I do like the long fade-out of the pianos on “A Day In the Life”), but the tracks on Pepper run together with no gaps. People listened to it over and over on hi-fi systems, with headphones, for hours. Like the Kinks, don’t we take the parts of the culture and so-called counterculture that we want and ignore the rest? (Fun tidbit: While the Beatles were doing Pepper, what group was recording in the adjacent studio at Abbey Road? That was Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, cutting the inarguably psychedelic Piper At the Gates of Dawn.)
Just like the zillion-selling Beatles and then-anonymous weirdos Pink Floyd both were in the counterculture mix at that 1967 crossroads, the conference with all its threads was its own modern happening, with the spirits of openness, warm candor, and cross-pollination pervading. I wonder whether these spirits are as common anymore, and whether that in itself is/was a counterculture, so I can’t wait for the next academic confab. The Frisc will try to give you hippies and hipsters a heads-up.
Two final take-aways: After his talk, I asked Farber if he was on Twitter. His reply: “No, I’m not on Twitter. I’m an idiot.” Also at the lunch break, counterculture mainstay Diamond Dave Whitaker wiped sandwich crumbs, mostly his, off my pants.
Follow Anthony Lazarus on Twitter: @Sr_Lazarus