Sole Sacrifice

Carlos Santana practically invented "Latin Rock" in the 1960's. He had started out as a blues and jazz influenced musician, but in San Francisco he met Latino and African drummers who beat different rhythms. Hanging around the developing hippie scene in San Francisco, he and his band noticed that girls would spontaneously dance in new and interesting ways to the exotic sounding rhythms--usually with much more hip gyration. He and the band liked this from a stage's eye view, and so the fusion stuck.

The band Santana made its national stage debut at Woodstock in 1969. Three successful albums later, the band had begun to fray, with Carlos wanting to move more towards jazz. Caravanserai (1972) was the last Santana album that I liked. Half the band left him afterwards and later formed the core of the band Journey.

A favorite track from Caravanserai, called Waves Within:

Don't Get Cocky!

Stub for Woodstock in Europe, September 21, 1979, Turin, Italy

No matter who wins, this is the dawning of the Age of Austerity

"Kick in their asses if you have to"

Jack Muller (1923-2005)

Kids are constantly telling me, for instance, how 'the pigs' caused the 1968 Democratic Convention fiasco in Chicago and the Conspiracy Eight trial which followed. No way. There were no doubt some sadistic policemen brutalizing the demonstrators. Cops are people, and we have our rotten apples. But the majority of us, like the majority of you, would like to come home each night feeling we've done a good job. Only we can't if we're ordered to do a bad job, to act like pigs. 

The 1968 Democratic Convention? Mayor Daley--not the kids--provoked us. It's that simple. Take it from someone on the inside. 

When the Yippies first started coming in and trying to get permits to sleep out in the park and demonstrate, it was our wise Mayor who went right on TV and orated to this effect:
No bunch of hippies and yippies are going to come into this town and take it over. Our police department knows how to handle people who get out of line! 

He made the same waves in private that he did in public. And every policeman, high and low, felt the backwash. 'Daley wants us to keep the Convention quiet at any cost,' one of my superiors told us. 'Kick in their asses if you have to.' 

Not that some of the kids weren't deliberately trying to provoke violence. Not that some of them weren't high on drugs. Not that a lot of them weren't kids at all, but forty-year-old guilt-ridden liberals looking for purpose and excitement. But if you really want to know where it all really started, who is really guilty for the 1968 Democratic Convention fiasco, don't put it on the pigs. 

Blame the farmer.

_____________________
Excerpted from "I, Pig Or How The World's Most Famous Cop, Me, Is Fighting City Hall" by Jack Muller (with Paul Neimark) William Morrow & Co. New York, 1971.  The book is out of print but deserves to be republished. I first read it as a teen. I see that it is available used here.

Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl? (1965)

Released as a single in 1965, and on album in 1966. I like this video version better but blogger won't let me embed it.

One Nation Rally (1969 Edition)

Woodstock Nation

Click to enlarge

The iconic photo used on the album cover (top) seems to have cropped out a lot of the trash and litter. Hippies weren't exactly proto-Tea Partiers.  

I'm in a fowl mood tonight.

The Hippies: By Hunter S. Thompson

As a youth I found this inspiring:

The British historian Arnold Toynbee, at the age of 78, toured San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and wrote his impressions for the London Observer. "The leaders of the Establishment," he said, "will be making the mistake of their lives if they discount and ignore the revolt of the hippies and many of the hippies' non hippie contemporaries on the grounds that these are either disgraceful wastrels or traitors, or else just silly kids who are sowing their wild oats."

Toynbee never really endorsed the hippies; he explained his affinity in the longer focus of history. If the human race is to survive, he said, the ethical, moral, and social habits of the world must change: The emphasis must switch from nationalism to mankind. And Toynbee saw in the hippies a hopeful resurgence of the basic humanitarian values that were beginning to seem to him and other long-range thinkers like a tragically lost cause in the war-poisoned atmosphere of the 1960's. He was not quite sure what the hippies really stood for, but since they were against the same things he was against (war, violence, and dehumanized profiteering), he was naturally on their side, and vice versa.

--Hunter S. Thompson, The Hippies (1968)

Now I wonder what I was thinking then.

The Hippies: By Hunter S. Thompson

My parents bought us a set of Collier's Encyclopedia when we were kids.  They may have been conned into it by a door-to-door salesman.  If so, I'm glad they were. I can remember poring through those volumes as a kid, much like I do now with Wikipedia, just randomly looking stuff up.

The Collier's Encyclopedia came with a supplementary annual Yearbook and we got that too, well into the early 1970's. The Yearbooks had feature articles covering the year's previous events. Two articles from those books stand out in my memory: The first was a black and white photograph of Jimi Hendrix (which I had never seen before nor have seen since) in the 1971 (covering the year 1970) volume.  The second was an article from the 1968 volume written by none other than Hunter S. Thompson, covering the Haight-Ashbury scene of that infamous Summer Of Love the previous year.  Now Hunter Thompson ended up doing do some pretty weird things later on but to me, as a kid, he wrote and sounded like everybody else who wrote for an Encyclopedia in 1968:

The best year to be a hippie was 1965, but then there was not much to write about, because not much was happening in public and most of what was happening in private was illegal. The real year of the hippie was 1966, despite the lack of publicity, which in 1967 gave way to a nationwide avalanche in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and even the Aspen Illustrated News, which did a special issue on hippies in August of 1967 and made a record sale of all but 6 copies of a 3,500-copy press run. But 1967 was not really a good year to be a hippie. It was a good year for salesmen and exhibitionists who called themselves hippies and gave colorful interviews for the benefit of the mass media, but serious hippies, with nothing to sell, found that they had little to gain and a lot to lose by becoming public figures. Many were harassed and arrested for no other reason than their sudden identification with a so-called cult of sex and drugs. The publicity rumble, which seemed like a joke at first, turned into a menacing landslide. So quite a few people who might have been called the original hippies in 1965 had dropped out of sight by the time hippies became a national fad in 1967.

You can read Thompson's whole essay here (scroll down about a third of the way).