One Last Time-At The Ebb Tide Of The 1960s- With Helter-Skelter Charles Manson Who Passed At 83 In Mind

By Greg Green  

[Recently, shortly after the death of Charles Manson [November, 2017] was announced and then later when I felt under some pressure at the time to write a bit more about the 1960s than I was aware of at the time which had more to do with the beginnings of the internal struggle over the direction this site was taking and going to take, as something an introduction of myself into this space, I wrote two shorter versions of this piece.

I felt those pieces were as much about my understanding of went on, and what went wrong, in that big 1960s “jail-break” that the then administrator of this space Allan Jackson (who used the moniker Peter Paul Markin on this site) now deposed and off in “exile” (his term according to Sam Lowell his close friend who wound up as the lone older writer siding with the “Young Turks” as they styled themselves in the internal struggle) somewhere in Utah looking for a by-line in some Salt Lake newspaper was looking at from me when he was in charge. That was before a sudden vote of no confidence was taken by the whole staff at the urging of the younger writers whom he had brought in over the past several years but who were in their words, under-utilized and narrowly directed to write, as I was asked to do as well, about the turbulent 1960s whether they knew or cared a damn about those times or not. I, who had come over from the American Film Gazette where I had held a similar position, was supposed to take over the day to day management of the site and pass out assignments under Allan’s guidance, found myself asked to run the whole operation without him after the vote (with the assistance of the newly–formed editorial board, an organization which Jackson had virtually ignored during his tenure).

Jackson ran a funny mix, a core group of writers whom he had either known since high school and who had been exposed to the Peter Paul Markin who was the guy who Allan was trying to honor by using his name as his moniker and who was a big influence on that whole group exploring all kinds of situations in the 1960s or had met in hotbed places like San Francisco, LA, the Village, Harvard Square after high school when everything according to the older guys exploded and you had to take sides from drugs to sex to wars. Then several years ago he brought in those young guys (and a few gals but they were mostly stringers, free-lancers) who knew nothing of the 1960s but were force-pressed to write about subjects related to that time which they only vaguely had heard about (or again cared about). His argument to the younger writers something not necessary to throw at the old guard “true-believer” older writers was that this was a watershed period, a period when many were “washed clean” and the period needed to be dealt with accordingly.    

So the gist of my article was as much about Allan and the older writers being “washed clean” by the experience as about what the criminal mind of someone like Charles Manson who while a sensational figure and a prime example of what went wrong with the 1960s when the still thriving cultural counter-revolutionaries took to the offensive and needed an example to feed off of when that moment ebbed. Some of the writers in this space like Sam Lowell, Frank Jackman, Bart Webber, Si Lannon, and Josh Breslin knew the real Markin, known to them as always as “Scribe” either from the North Adamsville neighborhood where they grew up or met him as a result of a very fateful (according to Sam Lowell’s estimate in any case) decision that he made during the turbulent days of the Summer of Love in 1967. That year and that event marked them all once Scribe was able to fire them up to head out west to San Francisco the epicenter of the whole explosion and consummate the jail-break.        

I am, like Zack James, Jack Jamison, Bradley Fox, Jr. and Lance Lawrence at least a decade removed from that 1960s experience and sensibility and that second-hand knowledge was reflected in the original articles. I had no axe to grind with those times. But neither did I bow down to what guys like Frank, Sam, and Josh told me about their experiences. That said, Allan Jackson the then supposedly soon to be retired administrator and something of a guiding light in this space (and the on-line version of The Progressive American) suggested after several talks that I expand my article somewhat to include his and the others reflections of the 1960s in order to give a more rounded approach to those days and events. As I did with that second article I do here as well-Greg Green]      

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A couple of writers in this space, I think Zack James and Bart Webber, have spent a good amount of cyber-ink this past summer commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the San Francisco-etched and hued Summer of Love in 1967. The million things that occurred there from free concerts in Golden Gate Park by the likes of Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and the Grateful Dead, names that I recognized although I was not familiar with their music (the free concert concept in line with a lot that went on then under the guise of “music is the revolution” and the recruits would be those who got turned on by the music, straight or doped –up, and lived by it too), to cheap concerts at the Avalon and Fillmore West (the beginning of an alternative way to entertain the young in formerly rundown arenas which would keep ticket costs down and provide indoor night space for those same young patrons against predators and cops), to plenty of drugs from Native American ritual peyote buttons to Owsley’s electric Kool-Aid acid much written about by “square” Tom Wolfe in a book dealing with writer Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters (I think that should be capitalized at least I have always seen it that way in books) to high end tea, you know, ganga, grass, marijuana, which you can smell even today at certain concerts in places where the stuff is legal or the young don’t give a fuck who knows they are smoking stuff, communal soup kitchens (to curb those midnight ganga cravings taking a tip from the old hobo, bum, tramp railroad “jungle” camps and just throwing everything in a stew pot and hope for the best), to communal living experiment (say twelve people not related except maybe some shacking up sharing an apartment or old house and dividing up tasks and expenses or in country on an old abandoned farm not very successful although I hear in Oregon and Vermont if you look closely enough will find the “remnant”), communal clothing exchanges (via ironically given the pervasive anti-war sentiments Army-Navy Surplus or Goodwill/Salvation Army grabs)and above all a better attitude toward sexual expression and experience (the “pill” helping ease the way, the drugs too and a fresh look at the Kama Sutra no doubt) reached something like the high tide during that time.

(According to Josh Breslin who at the time was just out of high school and looking for something to do during the summer before his freshman year of college much to the chagrin of his hard-working parents who expected him to work that summer to help pay for tuition it was almost like lemmings to the sea the draw of San Francisco was so strong. For many kids like Josh and others he met out there aside from Scribe and the North Adamsville guys it really was something of a jail-break although I still can’t feel the intensity which drove Josh and the others to forsake, most for just a while, some family, career, settle down path during those admittedly turbulent times. My generation, and I was among the loudest up in Rockland, Maine where I grew up and where a cohort of the hippie-types encamped once the cities became too explosive, kind of laughed off the whole experiment as the hippies liked to say “ a bad trip,”  a waste of time and energy. Although the idea of free or cheap concerts seems like a good idea especially when you see the ticket prices today for acts like Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones who were ready to perform gratis then, the rampant uncontrolled use of illegal drugs, the idea of communal living outside of say very safe dorm life, wearing raggedy second or third hand clothes which looked like and were out of some Salvation Army grab box or Army-Navy surplus store, the idea of even eating out of some collective stew pot of who knows what composition and unbridled and maybe unprotected sex seemed weird, seemed seedy when I would see these people on the streets in town when they came for provisions or whatever they were looking for that brought them to town.)     

So as even Josh and a couple of others would admit not all of it was good or great even at that high tide which he personally placed at 1967 (others like Sam placed it at the Stones’ Altamont concert in 1969 and Scribe for his own reasons had placed it at May Day, 1971 when the government counter-attacked a demonstration in Washington with a vengeance and they took devastating amounts of arrests, tear gas, and billy-clubs) since casualties, plenty of casualties were taken, from drug overdoses to rip-offs by less enlightened parties to people leeching off the work of others who were doing good works providing energies to go gather that food, work that kitchen, rummage for those clothes, keep the house afloat with the constant turn-over of desperate “seeking” something people. (Allan chided me on this point originally because he did not believe that those he knew, he met were desperate, most had come from comfortable middle class homes and just wanted to shake things up a little before, which many, too many according to him did, going back to that lifestyle without a murmur when the tide ebbed.)  

Not good either which was also noted by Zack James (who got the information from oldest brother Alex another veteran of 1967  who while on a business trip to San Francisco this spring stepped back into that halcyon past at a Summer of Love exhibit at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park) and which I used as a counter-argument to Allan’s wisp-of-the will attitude about desperate people flocking to the coast a photograph taken at a police station where one whole wall was filled with photographs from desperate parents looking for their runaway children. No so much the runaway part, all of those who flee west that year and the years after to break out of the nine to five, marriage, little white house syndrome were actually doing that, but the need to do so just then against the wishes, in defiance of those same parents who were looking for their Johnny and Janie. Who know what happened to them.

Frank Jackman, another writer in this space, basing himself on his friendship with Josh Breslin and with the latter’s with Scribe spent some time a few years back taking a hint from the gonzo writer Doctor Hunter Thompson trying to figure out when that high tide crested and then ebbed.  The Scribe as far as I know the story himself a classic case of those who started with high ideals and breath of fresh air attitudes who wound up getting killed down in Mexico after a busted cocaine deal in the days after he became a coke head and was dealing and who now sleeps in a potter’s field grave down in Sonora. Years like 1968, 1969, 1971 came up as did events like the Chicago Democratic Convention in the summer of 1968, the disastrous Stones concert at Altamont in 1969, and May Day, 1971 in Washington when they tried to bring down the government if it would not stop the damn Vietnam War and got nothing but massive arrests, tear gas and police batons for their efforts. Those things and the start of a full-bore counter-revolution, mainly political and cultural which Frank has said they have been fighting a rear-guard action against ever since. 

Whatever the year or event, whatever happened to individuals like Scribe and those forlorn kids in that police station photograph, there was an ebb, a time and place when all that promise from the high tide of 1967 to as Scribe would say seek a “newer world,” to “turn the world upside down” as Frank likes to say when recounting his youthful days out west and in New York City when he was starting out as a writer and make it fit for the young to live came crashing down, began to turn on itself. A time when lots of people who maybe started out figuring the new world was a-borning turned in on themselves as well. My very strong feeling after having had a small personal bout with cocaine when that was the drug of choice and you could hardly go anywhere socially without somebody bringing out a mirror, a razor and rolling a dollar and daring you not to snort just to be friendly maybe it was the drugs, too many drugs. Maybe too it was the turnover as those who started the movements headed back home, back to school and back to the old world defeated and left those who had nowhere to go behind (those photographs on that forlorn wall in that anonymous police station a vivid reminded that not everybody was “on the bus” as Allan mentioned was a term used frequently to distinguish the winners from the losers in those days).           

And as if to put paid to that ebb tide there were all the revelations that something had desperately gone wrong when cult figure and madman leader of a forsaken desert tribe of the forgotten and broken Charles Manson who died the other day [November 2017] after spending decades in prison had been exposed for all the horrible crimes he had committed or had had his followers commit. Allan, Frank, Josh, Sam and I am sure Scribe if he were around would write that off as an aberration, a fluke. Still sobering thoughts for those guys like Frank and Josh who are still trying to push that rock up the hill toward that “newer world” that animated their youth.