Prologue

Full disclosure: I lived these events

In August of 1966, I wore out a pair of earth shoes walking and hitchhiking to Applestock, Maine, where, rumor had it, something new was about to occur: a gigantic, free, outdoor festival of rock and more—a new way of living, possibly a cosmic leap for humans, certainly a lot of sex and drugs, along with the rock ‘n’ roll. I was 16 then, a hungry thing—strung out, misunderstood, clinically shy, a vagabond, a runaway. Over all the years since, I've accumulated roles the way sunken hulks pick up barnacles and become hotels for stingrays—I am the Cohn Professor of History at Penn, I am an unremarkable but loving husband and a father (my last daughter graduates from Brown this year). I am in all ways ordinary.

But in those days I was a walking harbinger, an unwitting avatar of a new age, not a revolutionary age but one that would change things anyway, though fit quite comfortably into the folds of the old one. Who knew? In 1966 you couldn’t have gotten a simple declaratory statement out of me. I was no more than a feral hippy misfit, traumatized by everyday American life, yearning for a better one in the boundless freedom of the road.

I arrived in Applestock a full two months before the Festival, and quickly found my way to the white-hot center of new culture, Clover Farm, the now famous (for some, infamous) rural commune outside of town, where I crashed all summer, no questions asked. Miraculously, for someone who had mulled over suicide as vigorously as most teenagers obsess on sex, I had my spirit healed in no time at all. I have to say, responsible father that I now am: this would never have happened without “drugs.” Drugs alone, however, might have been my permanent downfall. There had to be another crucial factor, and that factor was a little man called “Captain Jim” (a.k.a.“the Sacred Goat”), the only home-grown American guru who ever did make sense—and he really, really did, even if he was, as he put it, a “black Irish lush.”

“My life has no purpose,” I told him.

“Well, then stop trying to hunt it down, your fuckin’ purpose, that is,” he told me. “Wait for it to turn on you and hunt YOU down, brother. Listen to some music. Get fucked up. Get a girl. Get a dog. Take your mind off the future. The future’s like a pre-ghost, it doesn’t know it’s dead yet—it’s just the undone past that hasn’t even happened, no more’n that alone. Way over-rated, brother.”

He got it exactly right.
One morning after days of not thinking the future, I awoke with this irresistable compulsion to start a journal. Purpose had hunted me down, and I surrendered to it. One thing always leads to another, and so I end up now, thirty-six years later, the unofficial historian of Applestock '66. The journal, it seems, was the first step in what became a substantial, fully realized professional academic career. Jim's casual dictum (not-so-casual, I’ve come to understand) made a man of me.

Thus, 40-odd years later. . . this book.

It is not “my” book, I hasten to add. It is the book of Applestock and it belongs solely to Applestock Nation and the memories of the lost organic phantasms who peopled it. Beyond an occasional “WMH,” you wil find me nowhere in this story. This is appropriate since no one has ever remembered me from those days anyway. My uniqueness, I believe, was that I had absolutely no presence, zero charisma among those charismatically charming and outrageous characters. Nor was I intimate with any of them, sexually or otherwise. I was invisible, the weird little guy who watched, wrote non-stop, but you never heard him talk.

In the beginning, Captain Jim was my principal focus. But that changed: Ray Riffles, the future Baba

Ray (founder of the Institute for Lost Human Potential), ultimately surplanted Jim as the major figure in the design. Although I could never bring myself to call him "Baba," I slowly came to recognize, then and now, his peculiar role as an avatar of sorts. Of course, if Ray had written this book, I'm sure it would read as a whole different story. But he never sat down and wrote it; I did. And any historian worth his salt will tell you that history belongs to those who publish.

So, welcome, reader, to my version of Applestock ‘66. If you were ever what came later to be called a “hippie,” try to recall to action as much of that as remains in you. Find a comfortable position, as I dust off the old Clover Family mantra one final time. Let's kneel. Let's close our eyes and join hands. Chant along with me now, as I prepare to withdraw permanently into the wallpaper of this narrative—

I. . . ME. . . NOW. . .  I. . . ME. . . NOW. . .   I. . . ME. . . NOW. . . . |

—WMH
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2003

 

                                        *            *            *

 

                                      Better Sex on the Radio

Ray Riffles—Assistant Dean Ray Riffles— contemplates the marijuana cigarette or joint, or whatever the heck you call this skinny little thing that he has just confiscated from Robby Cahill in English class.
Dope has come to Newton Academy for Boys. It had to happen.

Ray sniffs the sticky-sweet aroma and admires the hand craftsmanship. Reefer—that’s what you call it. He lets his lips wrap around the word silently.

Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeefer. . . .

Otherwise, it has been a slow day.

Dean McGarrigle is out of the office, so Ray has the radio on, tuned to one of those Top-40 stations the boys listen to—and whoops, here’s that remarkable song again: “Ha-a-a-ang on Sloopy, Sloopy hang on. . .” He fingers his tie, and tugs on the muscular little Windsor knot at his throat.  Sloopy hang on. . . bomp-bomp, bomp-bomp. . . .

What should he do about this thing in his hand, this puny smoke?

Marijuana is a serious matter, yet he can’t bring himself to be harsh with the Cahill kid, who has never been a discipline problem, just. . . very much his own boy, with his mismatched clothing and the florid Beat-style poems he pens out for his girlfriends (he has plenty). Contrast him with Rodney Duke, for instance, that rude little boor whose future is to grow into a clone of his over-moneyed drone of a father.

Ray wedges the unlit reefer between two fingers and pretends to suck on it, drawing in a lungful of raw air.

“Rodney almighty little fucking Duke. . . .” he spews, letting it go.

Becky has warned him not to let these boys occupy so much space in his mind. But in fact, the boys are only flotsam and jetsam in the wake of his true malaise, an ache of the soul that has afflicted him through most of '65 and will seep right on into '66 if he can’t break its spell.

Oh, agenbite of inwit!

Someone once said that around age 28 you lose your bearings while passing out of youth and into full maturity. Ray is exactly 28, still young, but too old to be stalled here, English master and Assistant Dean of Students inside this ivy-clotted asylum for young upper-class snits. Outside, the world is madly changing, becoming pliant and youthful in the most exotic ways, and he isn’t a part of it.  Here, on a daily basis, he’s soaked in the contempt of tradition. Today young master Rodney Duke beaned him with a spitball the size of a hockey puck—at his own blackboard, in front of 16 other snarfling little carnivores.  Smack.  Heavy and wet—take that, Dean Riffles!
        
“This is not the real me,” Ray remarked to Peter Upjohn just the other day, as they crossed the quad.  Upjohn, Newton’s youngest English master, is fresh out of Yale with not a mark on him. "I was put on earth for a reason, damn it,” Ray goes on. “I’m not just some random time-serving slob. But this job, Pete, this place. . . it's erasing me from the universe.”
        
Lately, Pete has affected a grave, pipe-smoking image to counteract his boyishness. He sucks on a droopy meerschaum, like some old Dutch Master, and puckers his brow in an absurd show of measured contemplation. “Ray, did you ever do something stinky to your parents, just for the hell of it?”
        
“I refused to go to Groton.”
        
“No, not that.”
        
“I didn’t go to law school, if that’s what you mean.”
        
“No, no—I mean something so stinky it flushed the rebelliousness out of your system so you could take your place in life without crying about it.”
        
Ah.  “Crying” about it.  Upjohn the moralist, Upjohn the ethical philosopher.
        
“Well, once I took my Dad’s pipe and crammed it full of boiled oatmeal.”

Upjohn, who did go to Groton, throws up his hands in a pretense of helplessness.  “Okay, fine, I’m only trying to help.” 

Help. Oh, please, how in the world can Pete Upjohn help?  This is a boy Mr. Chips, right where he wants to be, teaching The Great Books to young donkeys, married to a girl named Miffy (no kidding), penning his own short stories—wistful, perfumy little tales of infidelity in the suburbs, full of self-pity and, as he puts it, "tiny revelations."  At times like this, Pete feigns an old man’s condescension toward Ray’s clutter of ideas, anxieties—this from a stripling, hardly old enough to order a beer!  Ray has been able to maintain at least a pretense of seniority—until last month, anyway, when one of Pete’s little literary excrescences was accepted by, God help us, Playboy!  Suddenly Peter J. Upjohn, published author, has taken on a new substantiality that drives Ray crazy.  ("He's got it made!" Dean McGarrigle once crowed in Ray's face.)

Worst of all, validation by Playboy allows Pete's maleness, which has been held in check by a membrane of modesty, to expand like a ballooning gas.

"You're on the rag, Ray.  Just wait a few days and you'll be fine."

On the rag.  Now, that’s the kind of bully-ragging bravado that would never have passed Pete’s lips before acceptance by Playboy.

"Come on, Pete, I don't understand why you have to fake obliviousness to my problem.  You're an author, you're supposed to be able to see into the human soul, right?  Well, look at me.  Pretend I'm a character in one of your tiny fictions or whatever you call them.  I'm desperately unhappy.  I hate my work. I'm going nowhere.  You may not get it, but I'm in quicksand.  I know I have to change my life and I don't have the moral courage to do it.  Now there, there's a tiny fiction for you—"

"Revelation," Pete snaps.  And for a half-second, Ray sees the callow vulnerability beneath this poor kid’s cocky preppiness.

“Sorry, man.”  Ray felt an absurd thickening in his throat.  “It’s just—I mean, when nothing turns out like you ever thought it would—”

“But what did you expect, Ray? 

“Something. . . bigger.  Everything about my life is just so miniscule in scale.”

“But that is life, Ray. Life is tiny. It really is.”
        
“Let’s stop for minute.  My knees are shaking.”
        
They sit for a while on the Senior Bench. 
        
Ray decides to give it one more try.  “When I was a kid, Pete, I had this recurring dream in which I transformed all the nuclear missiles in the world into ice cream cones and served them to the kids at my birthday party—”
        
“You brought about world peace, saved the planet!”
        
“Exactly—I did.  I really did.  That was not tiny.”
        
“That’s interesting.  Phallic symbols—cones, dripping ice cream.  What flavor was it?  Tutti-frutti. . . oh-rootie?”
        
“Oh, shut up.”  Ray rises abruptly and stalks off toward the parking lot. Pete catches up with him and they walk in silence, kicking up leaves, which blow in little clusters all over the quad.  Once again, the year is dying in mortal agony, spinning its leafy messes to the ground to be raked and burned— 
        
"I know what you need, Ray," says Pete finally, slobbering on his pipe. 
        
Look out­, something smutty and male on the way.  “Forget it, Pete.” 
        
"What you need is to get—"
        
"—so long, Pete!"
        
"Now, don't go away mad, guy."
        
Sure thing, "guy," and I hope you choke on your perfect little tiny life.
        
"—to get laid, Ray!"
        
Delivered of that one, Pete Upjohn splits offtoward home and lunch—crustless sandwiches, no doubt, prepared by clever little Tootie, and a quick roll in the chinz, if he can coax her out of her tennis skirt long enough to concentrate on his tiny dork.

        
Okay. That was yesterday’s icky little melodrama. Today’s is The Reefer. And thus the days roll by, each with its load of indignity to be dumped like a truckload of dung at your door.  Ray takes another mock puff on Robbie Cahill’s reefer and expells his breath with a heavy shuddering sigh.

Today, at least, is Friday!  

He’ll take Becky out somewhere for a few drinks and a movie, then home to his apartment—and we'll see if Pete might be right after all.  About getting. . . laid.

Not that they don’t. Ray and Becky have sex on occasion. Perhaps not often enough to qualify as “lovers,” but the genital part has never seemed so all-fired important. Certainly nothing earth-shaking, or even just redemptive, as Pete seems to envision. Is it love? Who knows? What Ray feels isn’t phallic so much as a general obsessiveness that’s almost anti-phallic.  He sees Becky as deliciously commonplace, in a sisterish way that is unaccountably appealing—so much so that he is hooked on on her, much like an explorer who is fixated on some perfectly ordinary mountain or rain forest that hardly deserves a second look—yet he’s drawn to explore it again and again, never having had enough, never feeling that he’s penetrated to the magic center core of the experience.

It’s clear that Becky has a strong sexual effect on other men. There is a zone of attraction around her slim, no-frills body, even though she seems oblivious to it. To be blunt, men immediately want to fuck her, and some of them let her know it, politely but unequivocably. But being desired, in itself, never seems to arouse her. You’d think she views those parts of her body as not particularly intended for pleasure.  Even making love to her, Ray feels almost divinely tolerated, as if he were a trespasser in a church where he doesn’t really belong.  The physical part—the “getting laid” part—is restrained, mechanical.  Ray suspects she not only doesn’t enjoy the act but thinks of it as some kind of rude incursion and performed it as a chore.  But then, isn’t that true of most “nice” girls?  Hasn’t good sex always been more of a backstreet thing?

        
In Ray’s experience, there is better sex to be had these days on Top 40 radio.  There’s Sloopy, for example. 
        
“Yeah, (yeah)—yeah, (yeah),
        
Yeah, (yeah)—yeah, (yeah). . . ." 
        
Oh, what you’re missing, Pete Upjohn—what we’re all missing!  "Haaaaaaang onnnnnn Sloopy!  Sloopy hang on!"  Sex is so clearly good with Sloopy—my gosh, how are they getting away with songs like that?  Sloopy, the girl from the wrong side of town, just an ordinary poor kid, but she'll let her hair hang down on you. She’ll drive you wild—so wild that the nameless schoolboy narrator, far above her socially, doesn’t even care "what your daddy do."          
        
“Hm, ‘do’. . .” Pete Upjohn immediately vectors in on the grammatical boo-boo. “The guy couldn't be too awfully elevated and talk that way, could he?” 
        
Pete’s snobbery is boundless. It’s also a constant unpleasant reminder to Ray of his own mother’s reflexive hoity-toityness.  Of course Mother couldn’t fathom Ray’s high school attraction to the Sloopys (though he always dated the Muffys).  She raised her son to prefer all things high church and deplore vulgarity wherever it raised its sweaty, snorting, head—vulgarity as in girls who chewed gum and wore tight sweaters and let you touch them.  Guys who said “dis” and “dat” and worked on their own cars.  Vulgarity as in all popular music (with the exception of Nat “King” Cole and Edith Piaf)—and most certainly rock ‘n’ roll.  Barbarians were writhing at the gates, Mother believed.  Blame it on Elvis, blame it on the Beatles, blame it on all these rampant slobovians and “easy” girls!
        
Dad would get in on it after a few martinis.  “Why is it so bloody goddamned important to you to defend these yokels and louts?”  That sort of thing.  Of course there was no answer, certainly not one Ray could articulate.  The only answer Dad would have accepted was already implicit in his question:  BECAUSE I’M AN IDIOT, FATHER.
        
But it was important, it really was.   
        
Even as a kid, Ray sensed something momentous happening outside the polite world.  Whatever it was lay entirely beyond the ken of social bullies like Mother or snotty diaper intellectuals like Peter J. Upjohn.  At Oberlin (the non-Ivy compromise he and his parents agreed upon), Ray really tried to swear off low culture.  But the more he listened to Brahms’ Requiem or The Magic Flute, the more he ached to spin the dial.  Whenever he did allow himself to watch a little TV, or pig out on Top-40 radio or take in a dumb Hollywood flick, the need to purge would drive him back to the tabernacle to torture himself with several hours of late Beethoven string quartets.
        
He really was a good boy, after all.  He hadn’t been put on earth to wreck or destroy.  Try to tame the baser instincts, he had been taught, and if you fail, just keep trying.  What else but a desire to please could have kept him here at Newton?  Would any self-respecting destroyer be sitting in this same miserable closet of an office, year after hopeless year? 
        
Ten past four. . . .
        
Ray leaves his desk and peeks into Dean McGarrigle’s office, where Becky is pecking away at one of her error-free secretarial masterworks.  He’s been hoping he can talk her into knocking off a few minutes early, since the Dean had left for the day. What a piece of work she is. He takes a full minute to watch her, hunched over the IBM. Her precise, trim back.  Her tweedy skirt.  The long rum-dark hair that hid her rather plain, girlish face.
        
"Becky?  Excuse me?"
        
"Not right this second, Ray." 
        
Fingers flying.  Mental stopwatch ticking.  Flesh into office machine. 
        
Back to his desk, back to the reefer.
        
What if he lit this thing and smoked it?
        
It would certainly shock her, all right. Becky lives a pretty buttoned-up life.  Like Ray, she isn’t functioning anywhere near up to her potential. UCLA graduate, Art History major—and doing clerical work because, as she puts it, she can’t think clearly enough to figure out what else to do with her life. 
        
“Trying to think about almost anything puts me into a complete fog,” she once told him.  “Plan my life?—forget it, I’d end up sleeping sixteen hours a day.”
        
Ray, who thinks about his life constantly, finds this fear of self-awareness almost incomprehensible, Yet still she exerts a huge attraction on him, even though he has to wonder sometimes at the source of it. She’s so damned ordinary. Haven’t his previous infatuations always been grounded in the extraordinary, the unattainable? Girls as pop goddesses. Cheerleaders and Homecoming Queens. Movie stars or folk singer goddesses. Joan Baez, or “Joanie” (as insiders called her) was his first mature crush.  He spotted her through the Club 47 window as he rambled along Mt. Auburn Street, trying to walk off his insomnia. She was perfect—this dark-haired waif who promised soooo much with her bare feet and her perfect voice and those haunting (and respectable) Appalachian ballads.  He haunted Club 47 every night, in his schoolmaster’s jacket and tie, worshipping her dark gypsy sexuality from the back of the club.  He even purchased a guitar and learned to play a few chords, sing a few songs.  “The Sloop John B”. . .”Sinner Man”. . .”Tom Dooley.”  Ready to make a complete fool of himself if the opportunity ever arose, he even saw himself standing beside her on a stage someday!  He imagined her gaze tilted up at him as they harmonized. He’d seen her shine this exact look on Bob Dylan.  Bring him onstage, yield to him, sing along with him, drown him with an innundation of love from those eyes. Oh, yes, Joan Baez fit his pattern all right—dark, Edenic, erotic, unattainable. 
        
But how to explain Becky’s allure? It certainly isn’t her conversation, which could be characterized as unadorned LA drone. She’s from Beverly Hills, where her father is an entertainment lawyer, so maybe a certain Hollywood shallowness is inevitable.  And again, not much going on in bed, even though she claims to have read Anais Nin!  Some emanation she puts forth simply has the power to make him desire her in an absolutely sentimental way.  And to complicate matters, it’s largely one-sided. Becky “likes him a lot,” as she puts it, but she once let it drop that he doesn’t turn her on. Is there anything more deflating for a man to hear than that? 
        
This isn’t the first time he’s heard it, either. Women aren’t turned on by him, it seems. Joan Baez wouldn’t have given him a second’s worth of notice had he approached her with his open-faced, white-bread looks. That’s why he contented himself to ache from afar. And just as well, too, because it wasn’t long before the vulgarian Dylan rose up and turned folk-society niceness right on its ear—and ravished Joanie.  This was confusing, to say the least, because Ray had strongly positive feelings for Dylan.  He had memorized the words to “The Times They Are A-Changin’” which struck him as an uncanny, prophetic song.  He was drawn to the roughness and the rascal’s image. Mother would hate him—which was a plus—whereas she’d probably approve (mildly) of Pete Seeger because he was polite and mannerly, and came from a “nice” family.  But damn it, this business with Joanie—and Bob Dylan going on the road with her, publically sleeping with her, and Joanie so obviously turned on by a walking unmade bed.  The ineluctable modality of the vulgar.
        
And just as Ray was struggling to get a handle on the Dylan business, here came a brand new gusher of ineluctable vulgarity... The Beatles! They weren’t sleeping with anyone he knew, but jeez—! Collectively these guys seemed to be getting every girl over 13—which tempted Ray to conclude that, if getting girls was what you wanted, good breeding was death.  Vulgarity had to be the answer.          There’s a certain sense to it, even a dash of historical precedent—after all, hadn’t the Barbarians who swamped Rome transformed a dying empire and sparked the beginning of what we now called Western Culture, the fancy flower show of European art and letters? 
        
Dean Riffles, Mr. Grinning WASP with his outer air of milky niceness and his inner jungle of irony and despair, finds himself slipping into a new and fascinating cultural limbo. . . wanting to be not some dashing avatar of tradition, a Leonard Bernstein or a Van Cliburn—not even a perky, well-bred Pete Seeger—but the growling homespun marauder, Bob Dylan. 

           

What he wants most desperately, of course, is to be out of Newton Academy. Doesn’t anyone understand his dismay at being trapped here while the world outside is dancing in the streets? Becky’s stubborn refusal to get it astounds him. How can she be so persistently oblivious, not just to him, but to the intoxicating turbulence outside her tidy little box of a life? What makes this girl tick? What turns her on? To hear her talk, nothing. But certain things sure do get her undivided attention: heavily muscled men, cops, scary movies, roller coasters. They all make her eyes go wide. What can we infer from that? What does it add up to?
         
"Almost finished retyping the Gutenberg Bible?"
        
"One more sec.”
        
“Becky, I want to get out of here.”
        
"I'm trying to get this thing done, Ray, do you mind?" Her fingertips cascade over the keys.
        
Ray slams the door and returns to his desk in a pout.  Why so all-fired dedicated when it came to getting out one of Dean McGarrigle's soporific memos?  For a moment he stared at the artifacts on his desk:  smudgy student papers, a half-eaten Snickers bar, a smug copy of The New York Review of Books. . . and Robby Cahill's marijuana cigarette.
        
Joint, that's what you call it.  A joint. Hmmm. All right. Latest studies indicate that, contrary to government propaganda, a joint won’t turn you into a homicidal maniac or make your pecker rot.  It isn't addictive, it alters your mind.  And by God, if there is one thing Ray could use right now, it’s an altered mind.  He shoves the joint into his mouth and lights it . . . .