Without trying to generalize too broadly, I would say the following: saturday evening post Readers probably didn’t understand much of what was happening in San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Or at least they didn’t until the magazine was launched. ”lean forward toward Bethlehem”, a simultaneous report and obituary of Joan Didion from the drug-fueled seeker scene that formed around Haight-Ashbury. Perhaps her single most widely known work, this work depicts her direct and indirect encounters with unknown and prominent participants in the counterculture.
The latter group includes San Francisco hippie groups no less than the Grateful Dead, but Didion’s interview was not included in the final article. But for nearly 60 years since then, the typescript has remained in her papers, and was recently discovered by Didion’s biographer, Timothy Dennevy, in the Didion and John Gregory Dunne Literary Archives at the New York Public Library. Just a few days ago, music journalist Jeff Weiss posted the 1967 text onlinedescribes it as a “groundbreaking early interview with the band, shortly after the release of their self-titled debut album, but before national stardom thrust them onto a golden path to unbridled devotion and drug-taking.”
In a sense, the members themselves were at the center of the counterculture storm. “I told the dead that I was trying to figure out what was going on,” Didion wrote. Topics of discussion include venues they dislike (such as the Cheetahs in Los Angeles, where “there were computers and everything was programmed”), their resentment at the Summer of Love Council’s attempts to organize the burgeoning scene, and the continuing deterioration of that scene (“small, productive creative things”, the The energy eventually attracted “all these people in tacky bags or something”), the then new radio hit “San Francisco (Always Have Flowers in Your Hair)”, and the unfortunate temporary absence of Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (“arguably the most photogenic member”).
It was also around the same time that Dead was interviewed on CBS TV News for “Hippie Seduction” and had previously been featured in Open Culture, a segment about the popularity and dangers of LSD. They looked like denizens of the belly of the beast in that context, but they also seem decidedly straight (in the terminology of the time) when compared to most of the other interviewees in “If they’re reasonably articulate.”lean forward toward Bethlehem”: a disoriented groupie, an aggressively enlightened bohemian brawler, and a notorious acid-crazed five-year-old in “High Kindergarten.” It’s no surprise that the Dead, with their highly permanent formlessness and lack of political platform, inspired one of the few enduring movements to emerge from that heady utopian era. As Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner often recalled, everything was perfect when he spent a few weeks there in 1966 — but then Joan Didion showed up in 1967. Click here for her lost interview with the Grateful Dead.
Related content:
Every Grateful Dead song will be annotated with hypertext: Web project reveals deep literary underpinnings of Dead lyrics
Stream an extensive archive of Grateful Dead concerts from 1965 to 1995
“Hippie Seduction”: An unsettling CBS TV show warning of the risks of LSD (1967)
The night Miles Davis opened for the Grateful Dead (1970)
Read 12 of Joan Didion’s best essays, spanning her career from 1965 to 2013, for free online.
Joan Didion created a handwritten list of 19 books that changed her life
Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
