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Unknown: Read your article for jazz, I've listened to the tape, and I've made some notes, and wow, I'll see what we can do. To begin with, the thing about my hands. It's not that I can't type, it's that I'm sort of hung up with them, and I'll try to

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explain it in detail sometime, but depending on the weather and nervousness, tension and exhaustion, they're all right. It's just that the whole thing has set me up so that I don't like to type any more than I absolutely have to at this

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point. The reason I hadn't say anything about the Mothers of Invention in that piece is that I really don't dig them. Now, none of the points that you raise, or almost none of the points that you raise, are things that I haven't discussed

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in the Chronicle, even if I didn't get them all into the piece that I sent you, did I ever send you the original and uncut version of the Dylan article from ramparts? They took about 2000 words out of it for reasons of space, and I've got

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some mimeograph copies of it, and I'll send you one if you want them. I think that you have got to start on the assumption that Dylan is central to this thing. And if you will get the Dylan records, don't get the first record, but any of the

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others, and play them for a while. It's like accustoming your ear to Coltrane, or accustoming your ear to Sonny Rollins, you have really got to listen to it and to have it on the phonograph a few times before it gets to you. And if

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you ever have the chance to see his documentary, don't look back. Be sure and do that. Dylan really is the central philosopher of this whole thing, just casual and random comments. Clyde McPhatter and the drifters, as far as I know, they

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don't sing songs they write themselves. I know the coasters didn't. I think that the drifters are a very good group, and a lot of their songs are very interesting songs, and sometimes they're songs of alienation. They certainly are

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songs when they do things like the rat race that have applicability to the condition of our time, even. And I think that it is a mistake to dismiss them in the same way that you dismiss the Supremes. I don't think they're the same thing.

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Also the also the drifters do not play instruments themselves. They're just a vocal group, the Supremes, I think, follow the same tradition that almost all rhythm and blues, Negro organ, jazz music and second grade jazz follow, which is that you can

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get away with damn near anything, as long as you make it swing. And the point about the Supremes and the point about all those Motown groups is that Barry Gordy, who is some sort of a production genius, has choreographed their ass off and

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has got them working more and more with an eye on appearing at the Copacabana and the Fairmont Phoenician room, and less and less in speaking to teenagers. But they are undoubtedly popular. And the thing that they do do on the records. They do do

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very well. I don't think that there is any possibility whatsoever of Bob Scheer ever becoming a leader of the hippies in the first place. The hippies don't listen to speeches. This was one of the outstanding facts at the be in, and I'd appreciate

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seeing your brother's letter about the LA be in. Did you ever see the column I did about the San Francisco be in the speeches were a drag. Nobody wants to hear political speeches. These kids will not listen to political speeches. And Bob

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Scheer doesn't swing and he doesn't move and he doesn't get to them, even if he may adopt positions supporting some of their positions, this is not going to happen. He will not be a leader of them. There's nothing to worry about that at

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all. I don't think that they can be politicized in the sense that Scheer is a political person, and I think that looking at what they are doing with the view towards politicizing or not politicizing them is discussing them in the wrong framework. Now

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I know that the corporations run this country, and so do the so do the hippies. But the hippies are saying, If we walk away from the convention that agrees that we have to accept the fact that the corporations run this country and begin to do our own

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thing, which, in a curious way, is parallel to Black Power, we may be able to make it so that the corporations do not run the country. I look to the day and it won't be too far away when nobody's going to go to baseball games and Life magazine will not

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be read by everyone, if it's read by anyone at all. The manifesto, incidentally, as far as I know, was written and distributed here by the young anarchists. I don't know which particular ones did it. I thought it was very funny,

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because they are aware of the power of non politics and the power of this movement, just as shear is aware of it. A number of other people are aware of it, but they don't have the faintest fucking idea in the world of how to connect up to it. You're

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quite right. This is not teenage rock and roll. Teenage rock and roll is the monkeys, but this other stuff is not teenage rock and roll. Now I don't dig the Mothers of Invention. I've heard them on two occasions in person, and I've listened to their.

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Album. Perhaps I ought to listen more to their album, but all my intuition tells me that they aren't important. And what is more, the people whose opinions I have begun to trust in the rock world never talk to me about the Mothers of Invention

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at all, which is a very interesting thing. Now, the reason for this is, I believe, is that they are a product of Hollywood, and the center is not Hollywood. It's San Francisco, because Hollywood is contrivance. The Mothers of

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Invention are fundamentally a group of older people who have decided to make this kind of music and to sing these kind of songs because they think that is what the younger people are interested in. They're too fucking old, really, to do this

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thing. I believe that there is something in their relationship to the rock movement that's parallel to brubeck's relationship to the jazz movement. I did a column sometime towards the end of last year about this whole business

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of James Brown and the Negro people, Negro artists not providing content anymore, but merely style. And you do not look to them, to the Negro artists on the r&b stations or in their records, except very rarely, to say anything in terms

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of content anymore. What they do is they contribute a style and they contribute an emotion, but they almost never say anything that's worth listening to. I may tend to dismiss Marx, but I don't really dismiss Marx. I merely think that the way in

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which the American society is eroding is a way that Marx did not envision. It is eroding and it is collapsing, and it's crumbling at the edges, not because of the inevitable conflict between classes, but because of the business of

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alienation and the business of having to be true to oneself and to get something really valuable out of life, which is a non scientific kind of erosion. There is a change in drive and a change in point of view, which the hippies and the rock kids

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imply, which is really not accountable in Marx's structure, as far as I can see, this may or may not result in a permanent and widespread change. I suspect that it will. I think that it's got something to do with what Tara was talking about in

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religion and the rise of capitalism, because I think that this is essentially a religious movement. In fact, I really do believe that it is the new religion, and what these kids are creating is the new American and IE, therefore, worldwide

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religion. And it goes back to absolute beginners, it goes back to a whole lot of things, but I think that the religious aspect of it is what is going to make it really important, as soon as people begin to behave by these standards and to do these

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things, not completely in love, and not completely to the extent that they talk about them, but to do them at all, they are going to shake the whole world up. And they are beginning to shake the whole world up. And of course, it's the fear that they

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really do mean it and that they actually are making it work that's got their whole establishment traumatized. You get treated in the Hans Ashbery by the cops, the same way you get treated in Hunters Point by the cops. I think this may not

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be true in Pittsburgh or New York, but it seems to me to be true in the Hans Ashbury. It's just the same thing they beat you up because you have long hair, just as they beat you up because you're black and you don't have any rights because

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you have long hair, just as you don't have any rights because you're black. I don't think that the hippies understand the negroes, but that's another matter. That whole business about the white groups like the young rascals and Spencer Davies

00:08:07.260 - 00:08:21.380

is something that I think you ought to reconsider. I don't dig Spencer Davies because he's imitating Negroes. But on the other hand, I do dig the young rascals because they are able to do something which is good and isn't just simply an

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imitation of Negroes. They sound very, very groovy. They're much better than contendolu although that's a good point. Spencer Davies hasn't discovered that they've got to take Negro music and other kinds of music and put it together and come out with

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something of their own. But this is all related to the fact that this is the first generation of white people who actually can swing Frank one of the things that's going to be necessary for you to do here is to listen to a lot more of this stuff. I can't

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listen to love or the doors particularly, I don't find them important. I find the San Francisco groups incredibly important. And one of the reasons is that unlike Los Angeles, where everything is aimed towards the recording

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studio, and where the recording studio and where there are no dances, not, certainly not in the sense that there are in San Francisco, or like New York, which is also aimed at concert appearances and recording studios. The San Francisco

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bands, which are almost all of them cooperative bands in the fullest sense of the word, with no leaders and living together in a communal sense. These bands are all playing two and three times a week for dances. They have got a tremendous personal

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following and a tremendous personal rapport with their audience. They function together. And the bands and the audience create something. They create it together. This is a real, a real different use to which music is being put. There

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has been no, there has been no point in American history that I know of, except with the street bands in New Orleans, where music has had such a direct role in the culture of any area as it has in San Francisco at this point in our history. And it

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seems to me that far from its tending, the die out is becoming increasingly important now the Mamas and the Papas, I think, are a. Bridge between the LA thing and the San Francisco thing. I'm not sure that any of these people, with the possible

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exception of Dylan, really understand how their words are being taken literally by the people, by their audience, by their young 20s audience, and listened to and acted upon as religious revelations. I think that you've got to get with

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Dylan, and that the way to do this is to expose yourself to it for some period of time, and that the investment will pay off. I think that you've also got to get with the Beatles, past Rubber Soul and past revolver. All the Beatles albums

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are delightful and enjoyable to listen to now, the Beatles started out with Chuck Berry and Howlin Wolf and muddy waters, and they began like The Rolling Stones. Began as straight out imitators, but the point about them is that they became, in the

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process of this, something very individual. They certainly do not sound like a negro group. Now, all the music that they made and all the original songs they wrote, going back into the beginning, has got a very, very positive yea saying, stance in

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favor of life and of love. And I think that this is the quality that has made them instantly acceptable by almost everybody. I also think that their electronic music is the most important electronic music be made in the world today. Now,

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the Rolling Stones who, as opposed to the to the to the Beatles, were a bunch of reasonably well educated and literate kids started out actually to prove that jazz was old fashioned. I mean, that's what Mick Jagger said. I've

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talked with Jagger, I've talked with with Charlie Watts, the drummer in the band. I've talked with Linley, I've talked with McCartney and with Harrison and Ringo. Now I think that the that the Rolling Stones represent a slightly different thing than

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the Beatles. I tried to bring it out in that piece. Though, I know I haven't really gotten all those points out there clear, but I think that they're equally important. I think you've got to listen to the love and spoonful. The love and spoonful songs

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bring into all of this business of folk music and rock and roll and R and B, they have legitimatized The sound of the electric guitar, which was anathema to me all my life, because it meant redneck hillbillies. The electric guitar

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was hillbilly music, and hillbillies were nowhere. This. This is no longer involved with these people. They do not they are not ashamed of being white, and they are not ashamed to use white originated material, because the electric guitar

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doesn't mean a bad thing to them, since they themselves have no prejudice going for them, their attitude towards all of these things is to regard them not as symbols, but to regard them as what they are themselves, such as their

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attitude towards the surface Cross, which does not mean concentration camps and ghettos he didn't really get to see very kind of like a goddamn meaning. They took him over to the Panhandle in Golden Gate Park and showed him some of the

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hippies. We walked down Hay Street. We went to the Fillmore book. Second side, 1234, I don't remember where the hell I was in the other side anyway, I think you've got to go all the way back with the Beatles and go all the way back with the stones and

00:13:00.280 - 00:13:10.920

listen to all this stuff, just as you would if you would if you were going to take on the business of listening to a new jazz artist. The bands in San Francisco are wild. You should get the Grateful Dead album on Warner Brothers and listen to

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that guitar player and listen to that bass player. The Jefferson Airplane is the best group in the country. In this country today, ranking with the spoonful and the Beach Boys are really, I think, more important to all this than Frank Zappa. They're

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certainly important as sort of John Birch, Orange County beer drinking, Hot Rod folk music, and some of the things they have done with their most recent album, Pet Sounds are very interesting electronically, but I don't have much hope for them,

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because I think they're all idiots. There's really nothing going on anywhere in the country like what's going on here in San Francisco, and it's going to get much more important this whole business that Friedenberg had to say about Los Angeles and the

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Sunset Strip is magnified and much deeper and much more significant up here than it is in Los Angeles. There is actually a community functioning in San Francisco. That's what the Hans Ashbury is all about. These people have got a job Co

00:14:08.940 - 00:14:20.600

Op. They've got street cleaning organizations. They're working on free things in the park every afternoon, every every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. They've got all these bands playing free in Golden Gate Park. For Christ's sake, there's going to

00:14:20.600 - 00:14:33.680

be a big thing here on June 21 in the park, another sort of a be in I don't know what will come out of that. The diggers are an incredible group, and are having a fundamental effect on this whole thing. Much, much of this is causing everybody to

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revise the ways in which they consider the future of American society. And as I said before, I don't want to go back and rank Marcus for not having envisioned something that was unproductive unpredictable. But this has all got to do with a change in the

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basic drive and redefinitions of all values. It's not without significance that the word dope is used all the time by these kids they smoke. Dope, they say. Now, dope had a pejorative meaning in the adult society. It is being used with tongue in

00:15:07.080 - 00:15:21.320

cheek by the kids, but it is also being used because it's being given a new meaning to them. Now they're giving new meanings to love. They're giving new meanings to cooperation, to free, to the whole thing the loading zone is refusing to join

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the American Federation musicians. This is giving everybody traumas. I don't think that any of these groups, including the diggers, function at all times in a predictable way. And sometimes, from where I stand, they seem to function in

00:15:33.560 - 00:15:48.220

their own disinterest, rather than in their own interest. But nevertheless, what is going on here and all is bubbling, seething, frothing, incredible turmoil. And as I might say that there's so much going on that you can't keep up to it. What's

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going on here is going to eventually end up with some very, very fundamental changes. I think that there is more hope for peace in the world, and for stopping the Vietnam War, and for you know, getting the situation with Standard Oil

00:16:03.300 - 00:16:18.960

worked out in what the hippies represent than there isn't what Bob shear represents. And the square left, the square left is Jerry Rubin, who ran for mayor. Now, Jerry Rubin was was subpoenaed to appear before the house and American Activities

00:16:18.960 - 00:16:30.860

Committee, and before he went to it, he asked me in the street one day what I thought of his idea of appearing in a revolutionary war uniform. And I laughed, and he said, Why are you laughing? And I said, Because so you're going to be on

00:16:30.860 - 00:16:41.560

TV with that Jerry, and everybody's going to think that you're a member of Paul Revere and the Raiders. And he said, What are Paul Revere and the Raiders? So I told him, and he disagreed with me. And when he came back from Washington, he

00:16:41.560 - 00:16:55.120

said, How could you be so wrong? He said, everybody took me seriously. I said, Sure, they did inside the committee, but when you were on TV, man, the kids all thought you were funny. And that's true, they did. Jerry Rubin spoke at the bee, and

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nobody wanted to hear him. You can't communicate with these people in the old forms any longer. We have got to face the fact that they are demanding and they are getting new forms. Now, McLuhan is hip to this thing. Though I can't go all the way

00:17:10.080 - 00:17:24.620

along with him, and I really haven't been able to make myself get in there and read all of McLuhan. And seriously think about it, but some of the superficial things are obviously true, and I think he has good concepts. We you ought to read

00:17:24.620 - 00:17:38.060

Norman Mailer's analysis of Lyndon Johnson that appeared in them. That's, well, it's in his latest collection of essays, whatever it's called. It came out sometimes in the last six or eight months, and it was reprinted in that little booklet

00:17:38.060 - 00:17:53.320

about the the Vietnam day thing in San Francisco and in Berkeley, which was called we accused mailer analyzed Johnson and the American society as being more interested and believing more reality was expressed in the

00:17:53.320 - 00:18:05.040

news that was on the front pages than in the events which actually made those news stories in the front pages. And there's something involved in this, which is true, because people are working by symbols. The adult society is certainly

00:18:05.040 - 00:18:15.240

working by symbols. And these kids, even while they while they may work by symbols, they're at least smart enough to realize that they shouldn't work by the symbols of the adult society. Now, in the process of all this, they may make up their own

00:18:15.240 - 00:18:26.960

symbols, and God knows, they aren't all full of love, and they aren't all functioning like they want everybody else to function. And that, of course, is one of the tragedies of the thing. But we can't expect them to be that much better than us,

00:18:27.080 - 00:18:41.200

particularly since they have turned off into this thing, and everybody is against them. I'll get around to sending you more things that I've that I've written, and I'll get around to sending more tapes, and I'll try to communicate here. I really

00:18:41.200 - 00:18:55.480

dug your letter. And thank you very much. The thing, the hysterical and frustrating and frightening part of it is that I've been writing all these things in the Chronicle, and not in places where they will be referred to by people that are

00:18:55.480 - 00:19:13.200

studying and where the the the forum that I occupy is one that gives dignity to what I say. That's why I'm so knocked out by the American scholar. They asked me, I can't get into any place else, as far as I can see with this stuff. And I think that my

00:19:13.200 - 00:19:27.740

insights into it are more useful even than friedenberg's, who comes to it really as a square and really as a sociologist, although he's the only one of them that makes any sense at all, but Friedenberg thinks it's him, you know, he's full of of

00:19:28.040 - 00:19:41.680

irrelevant facts about the stuff that goes on. Like he thinks it's significant that two of the members of the Buffalo Springfield are are Canadians, whereas the only thing important at all about the Buffalo Springfield was that Steve sills

00:19:41.680 - 00:19:53.020

happened to write that song, just as the only thing important about Barry Maguire is that he happened to write Eve of Destruction the Buffalo Springfield is something of a drag to hear in person, and they're not at all important in

00:19:53.020 - 00:20:05.460

this scene, except for the fact of that one song. And that goes on with a lot of people, but then you get other groups that continually. Bring up songs like the like the love and spoonful like The Beatles, like The Rolling Stones, like the

00:20:05.460 - 00:20:17.760

Grateful Dead, and like the Jefferson Airplane that can and like Donovan who is very important. You must listen to all the Donovan records, and particularly to the sunshine Superman album and the and the Mellow Yellow stuff, these

00:20:17.760 - 00:20:32.960

people who bring up songs continually, the lyrics of which are saying the things that these kids fundamentally have felt and are now beginning to articulate, and which represent their real life beliefs. And you know, Marty balance said that he

00:20:32.960 - 00:20:44.320

wanted Grace sick, to be Grace Slick, to be the first girl singer to say fuck in a song on a stage and blow everybody's mind. That's a great thing, because there again, it's a freeing of the society and a freeing of the culture and a

00:20:44.320 - 00:20:58.660

freeing of ideas to do things. And this is what these people are doing. Allen Ginsberg is infinitely more a leader of this than Scheer can ever become. And yet, one of the great facts about all of it is that is that they don't follow leaders. As

00:20:58.660 - 00:21:12.480

Dylan said to them, don't follow leaders. Watch the parking meters. They do not follow leaders. They don't follow Dylan. They don't follow Tim Leary. They don't follow Ken keesey. They follow none of these people. So anyway, listen,

00:21:12.480 - 00:21:25.220

listen, listen, play, play, play. And get to see these bands where they function in front of people, and not in those goddamn nightclubs, which are the worst place to see them. You know, never take your band into a whiskey club, said banana Ed

00:21:25.220 - 00:21:37.400

denston, the manager of country Joe and the fish. That's a good album to get that. It's on Vanguard. There's some very interesting songs on that. They're much more important than the fugs, who were really kind of corny and old fashioned now,

00:21:37.700 - 00:21:57.040

and particularly so because they're such terrible musicians, the only thing they got is Ed Sanders. Okay, I got to go. You know, the thing about Johannes is fascinating, but then we know all about that. You know, from the jazz clubs, we know that

00:21:57.040 - 00:22:09.420

Leroy Jones's play that the Dutchman was not a frightening play to anybody who spent any time in the jazz clubs, because that's what goes on, man all the time, and we know that it only frightens people who've never been around the jazz clubs. I

00:22:09.420 - 00:22:24.320

might also point out another or might also mention another observation, which is that the jazz club milieu, which was described so well by Colin McInnis, moved to the campus coffee shops and out to the plaza at Cal the racial milieu,

00:22:24.680 - 00:22:37.640

and it's now beginning to spread around in other ways, but the hippies are doing something else. The hippies are saying it's we are not accepting guilt because of the color of our skin, and we ourselves are not going to practice guilt now.

00:22:37.640 - 00:22:51.820

Certainly, it's a racist society, and that's true. And this cat, who's now riding for down beat, is in a weird position, and Don demichael will never understand how Don demichael is a racist. But these kids are trying, really trying,

00:22:51.820 - 00:23:03.960

to function in an open and a straight ahead way. And if you are black, you are welcome, but you've got to come to where they are and to where they're going. It's wrong to think that they ought to go up to Harlem to sweep the streets. That's not

00:23:03.960 - 00:23:15.420

what they ought to do at all. The streets in Harlem should be swept by the people that are living in Harlem. You know, even though that statement now brings up a whole other thing, and I mean it as the as you know, step 15 in a series of things to the

00:23:15.420 - 00:23:26.960

first 14, of which have not yet been done, but they shouldn't be doing that. They shouldn't be going into the negro community and doing anything at all any more than the SDS should be. What they should be doing is getting the white community

00:23:26.960 - 00:23:39.620

straight, which is what Stokely told them to do, and which is correct, and which the hippies, in their own way, without even planning it, are beginning to do. It is all hung up with Eastern philosophy, Eastern religion and Eastern music, and

00:23:39.620 - 00:23:51.820

in terms of emotions rather than intellect, and in terms of feelings, that was a great line of was it? Albert Eilert, it was, this is more about feelings than it is about notes, or less about notes than it is about feelings. That was a great line.

00:23:52.960 - 00:24:05.760

And the thing that Grogan the digger says, the futility of either entering the system or fighting the system, seems to be seems to have all sorts of possibilities that nobody thought of before, because when you go up against them at the

00:24:05.760 - 00:24:18.360

polls and when you try to buy stock and Standard Oil and change the way it functions, you are accepting the conditions that Standard Oil has defined by its existence. And this is one of the things that Marx did. Marx defined all this stuff in

00:24:18.360 - 00:24:33.860

terms of capitalist functioning, and these kids are involved in defining it in some other terms. We don't know what the hell they are, yet. Over to you, God bless and for Christ's sakes, get out here and stay in the Hans Ashbury for three or four weeks.

00:24:34.220 - 00:24:43.360

It's a pretty wild scene, sweetie. And there is more than this than is in your philosophy. Polonius, or whatever his name was. Later he.