Joe Bob's America: Hey man! Groove on this

NEW YORK, July 22 (UPI) -- Hey, man, can you groove on this? Remember black lights and Lord Buckley at the Suzie Q? Acid rock and rocks of acid? (First acid rock concert? Anybody? Red Dog Saloon, a bar in Virginia City, Nev., that invented the psychedelic light show.)

Or the time when a phone phreak could take a whistle toy out of a box of Cap'n Crunch and blow it into the pay phone and make all the free long-distance calls you wanted.

It's deep. It's heavy. Are you down with it?

I'm talkin' 'bout the 1960s, man. We're gonna let it all hang out, flick our Acapulco Gold ash onto the flares of our bell bottoms and drop some Alice B. Toklas brownies into the oven. Put on some Joan Baez while you're it, because she IS the first cosmic hippie chick. It's all about ch'i, baby.

It's not just the '60s, of course, it's the HIPPIE '60s -- and '70s, too, because the encounter groups continued even after Nam closed down, with everybody doing their own thing in their own place and time. Attica! Attica!

Excuse me, but I can't help it. I've been reading "The Hippie Dictionary" (Ten Speed Press, 670 pages, $19.95), which you can bet your bippy is a total gas that blew my mind. It's the creation of John Bassett McCleary, a photographer and self-described "aging hippie" who lives in Monterey, Calif., where he spent eight painstaking years documenting the phraseology and enthusiasms of the generation everyone either loves or hates.

He's a good hippie, too. He doesn't obey any rules. So it's not exactly a dictionary and not exactly an encyclopedia (although the subtitle is "A Cultural Encyclopedia of the 1960s and 1970s") and he's even invented his own term for it: "Phraseicon." Fifty percent of the entries are not words or topics but phrases like "trip out," "tune in" or "turned on" as well as biographical entries (Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary) and cultural events. (Remember the Human Be-In Gathering of the Tribes? McCleary does. It was at the polo fields in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on Jan. 14, 1967.)

McCleary is obviously a true believer, so the book has all the humor and wacked-out philosophy of the era but also deals with its dark side. At one point he interjects how much he agonized over whether to include Charles Manson or not, because Manson is a part of the hippie experience he wishes had never happened, but he goes ahead and does the Manson entry in the interest of being an exhaustive reference work.

He also doesn't skimp on drug terminology. Marijuana alone occurs in the form of bhang, ganja, leaf, bud, Maui wowie, Michoacan, alfalfa, boo, bud, cannabis, and about 70 or so more names.

There were also many ways in the '60s to PACKAGE your "recreational drugs" -- and, come to think of it, I do believe the hippies invented the term recreational drugs. You could get from a bag, to a Z (along with dozens of other names for it.)

And, of course, as long as you were stoned, wasted, high, bombed, tripping, nodding or whacked out, any real hippie would need to dance. Can't remember those moves that went out of style every five minutes? Check out McCleary's entries on the Boogaloo, the Breakdown, the Bristol Stomp, the Bump, the Chuckie, the Clam, the Electric Bump, the Funky Broadway, the Frug, the Hitchhike, the Hustle, the Jerk, the L.A. Hustle, the Lock, the Mashed Potato, the Monkey, the New York Hustle, the Philly Dog, the Pony, the Ride-a-Bike, Skanking, the Scooby Doo, the Skate, the Slop, the Swim, the Twist, Walking The Dog and the Watusi.

You see why this book is irresistible? H.L. Mencken, a man who would have hated the hippies, would have loved this book. It perfectly catches the fusion of beat generation slang, the lingo of jazz musicians, the blues terminology, the British Invasion terms and the ghetto patter that resulted in a new dialect that most people now don't even recognize -- so deeply has it seeped into the whole culture, spoken as often on Wall Street as the Berkeley campus.

It makes you think that ultimately the hippie's greatest contribution to America was to reinvigorate the language.

Consider just a few of these hippie inventions that we still use in everyday speech: get a grip, get a handle, ain't no great shakes, airhead, all-out, all she wrote, get a load off, do a number, go ape, are you for real?, back at ya', back off, get out, ... well, you get the drift.

But thank God there are OTHER hippie terms that didn't survive the '70s. It would be uncool today, for example, to say, "That's just not my bag, man." And although some are still used by the terminally dorky, we can all safely assume they'll be gone soon.

"Bummer," for example, or "Chill out," as opposed to the simple "chill."

Nor do I see much long-term stock value -- except in Austin Powers movies -- for crash pad, get down, far out, feed your head, feeling groovy, gimme some skin, go with the flow, get your groove on, lay it on me, let's get it on, let it all hang out, blow my mind, no problemo, outta sight, party down, pig (for a cop), get with the program, radical, rat fink, right on, say wa'!, make the scene, way out, wild!, what it is!, what's going down?, and where it's at.

The best thing you can do with "The Hippie Dictionary" is open it to a random page and play Hippie Trivial Pursuit with any geezer long-hairs who happen to be around. Sample questions: When was the beanbag chair invented? (Answer: 1968, by three Italian designers). What's the difference between cybernetics and Dianetics? (Answer: Cybernetics comes from Norbert Wiener's 1948 book "Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine." Dianetics is the philosophy behind L. Ron. Hubbard's Scientology movement.) Who said "Don't trust anyone over 30"? (Kind of a trick question. Most people think it was Mario Savio, founder of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, but it was actually Jack Weinberg, a Berkeley grad student and CORE member.)

McCleary peppers the entries with hippie philosophy, forgotten hippie icons like Baba Ram Dass (the fired Harvard professor who wrote "Be Here Now"), and investigative debunking of cherished hippie mythology. (The "Desiderata," for example, which was widely reproduced on a famous black-light poster, was supposedly found in Old Saint Paul's Church in Baltimore in 1692. It was actually written by an Indiana lawyer named Max Ehrmann in the 1920s.) My favorite entry of them all may be "sports of the hippie era," defined as "sex, psychedelics, dancing and Frisbee."

There's a massive number of musical entries, of course, everything from Canned Heat to "Boom Shacka Lacka Lacka" (coined from Ike and Tina Turner's cover of Sly and the Family Stone's "I Want To Take You Higher") to the sitar (18 strings, 20 frets) to Bob Dylan (real name Robert Allen Zimmerman) to "Hullaballoo" (a season and a half) to Funkadelic (formed in Detroit, 1969) to "Mellow Yellow" (Donovan claims he was NOT advocating the smoking of banana peels for a drug high) to "Puff the Magic Dragon" to "Purple Haze" (Hendrix, not Prince) to the first concert at the Fillmore Auditorium (Dec. 10, 1965, with Jefferson Airplane on the bill) to an entry on the Moody Blues that includes this research tip from McCleary: "No study of the hippie era can be complete without listening to at least five of their albums."

I was a little disappointed in the entry for the word "hippie" itself, though.

McCleary doesn't really nail down the term's origin, aside from it being obviously derived from the beatnik term "hip." Of the many possible theories, he gives most credence to the story that, when beatniks moved to the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco in the early 1960s, they were idolized by University of San Francisco students.

Since the older beats were known as "hip," they started referring to the young tagalong groupies as "hippies." "Actually, the counterculture seldom called itself hippies," writes McCleary. "It was the media and straight society who popularized the term. Most often, we called ourselves freaks or heads."

The sparse etymology for "hippie," though, is more than made up for if you flip over to the T's, where you'll find an entry called "true hippie."

McCleary's definition: "A person who lives by the Golden Rule. Someone who believes in allowing others to pray to any god, sleep with any consenting 'adult,' eat, drink or ingest whatever and dance to any music. True hippies are evolutionaries, not revolutionaries; we will convince you with words, not weapons.

"We believe passionately in democracy and free enterprise (not capitalism). We will not go to war for peace; we will love the world into it, talk people into it or shame them into it. Some people may think we are a joke; they may think we are naive, or that we are unrealistic, but we have high ideals. Some may think we have ulterior motives, some agenda to make ourselves rich and take over the world, but that is only their value system speaking; we have no other reason for our actions than to see peace, prosperity and love for all. That will be our reward.

"We are everywhere, and some day, if the world wises up, it will listen to us. Sept. 11, 2001, would never have happened if people had listened 30 years ago."

Is that a wacky work of hippie genius or WHAT? There, in one rambling definition -- the hippies were always wordy -- you have inner contradiction (starting with a Biblical principle but lower-casing "god"), an assertion of "Footloose" rights ("dance to any music"?), a rhyming catch-phrase ("evolutionaries not revolutionaries"), a political slogan ("words not weapons"), an incomprehensible economic theory (free enterprise but NOT capitalism), a restatement of "love is the answer," paranoia ("Some people may think we have ulterior motives"), delusions of grandeur (implying that the hippie COULD take over the world if he wanted to), the put-down of "value systems," utopian idealism (peace, prosperity and love for all), topical politics (Sept. 11), and the idea that all wars would end if everyone would just get in touch with their inner hippie bliss.

In other words, it's all over the lot -- like everything in hippie land. Such superb ramblings are sprinkled throughout this voluminous work, including McCleary's opinion as to who the REAL hippies are. You'll never guess what biographical entry has a place for McCleary's highest encomium (and I quote): "With his music and his attitude, he exemplifies what the true hippie should be."

He speaks not of Bob Dylan, nor of Jim Morrison, nor of John Lennon, but of my fellow Texan Willie Nelson. Who knew?

And then a few pages later he reveals that Pop Tarts were introduced into the hippie diet in 1964.

As Zippy the Pinhead would say, "Are we having fun yet?"

Yes, we are.

Keep the faith, baby.

--

(Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his Web site at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.)