1968 - Mark Kurlansky [105]
The disappointments felt by the new crop of students were not so different from those felt by the earlier group. Tom Hayden too had been disappointed in the University of Michigan, which he found to be in league with a corporate world. The new students may have just felt the same thing more intensely. Mark Rudd said of Columbia, “I entered the university expecting the Ivy Tower on the Hill—a place where committed scholars would search for truth in a world that desperately needed help. Instead, I found a huge corporation that made money from real estate, government research contracts, and student fees; teachers who cared only for advancement in their narrow areas of study; worst of all, an institution hopelessly mired in the society’s racism and militarism.” The prestigious schools, the ones that attempted to use their status to skim off the brightest, most promising of the generation, were the worst.
New York, albeit many blocks downtown in the East Village, had become the center of a hip counterculture. Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders—who had a group called the Fugs that was named after a word used by Norman Mailer in his novel The Naked and the Dead because he could not use his F-word of choice—were all in the East Village. Hoffman frequently appeared at East Village events with his special honey laced with a distillate of hashish. The East Village, a dilapidated section of the Lower East Side, had only recently acquired its name because the once beat Greenwich Village, now the West Village, had become too expensive. The enormously successful Bob Dylan still lived in the West Village. The same thing had happened in San Francisco, where Ferlinghetti remained in the North Beach section that the beats had made too fashionable, while the hippies moved out to the poorer, less central Fillmore and Haight-Ashbury sections.
The East Village became so famous for its “hippie” lifestyle that tour buses would stop by the busy shops of St. Mark’s Place—or St. Marx Place, as Abbie Hoffman liked to call it—for tourists to view the hippies. In September 1968, East Village denizens rebelled, organizing their own bus tour to a staid section of Queens, where they questioned people mowing lawns and took photos of people taking photos of them.
San Francisco and New York were the bipolar epicenters of America’s 1968 hip. This was reflected in rock concert producer Bill Graham’s two halls, the Fillmore West in the Fillmore section of San Francisco and the Fillmore East, which he opened in 1968 on Second Avenue and Sixth Street in the East Village. The new rock concerts began in the neighborhood at what had been the Anderson Yiddish Theater. John Morris, who managed the Fillmore East, had been there years before to see the Anderson’s closing show, The Bride Got Farblundjet, starring Menasha Skulnik and Molly Picon. Reopened by Morris, the theater featured such groups as the Fugs and Country Joe and the Fish, who were stars from their grizzly anti–Vietnam War satire, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag.” They then persuaded Graham to open an East Village Fillmore across the street.
Graham was not only a dominant force in 1968 rock music, he frequently gave benefit concerts for political causes, including one for the Columbia students when they went on strike in April. Rock music and college campuses had become closely connected. “The college market today accounts for more than 70 percent of the professional concert activities in the United States,” said Fanny Taylor, executive secretary of the Association of College and University Concert Managers in 1968.
College students also represented a large share of record sales. In 1967, record sales in America had reached an all-time high of $1 billion, having doubled in ten years, and for the first time in history, record albums were outselling singles. These trends continued in 1968.
The late sixties are often remembered for heavily amplified music full of electronic vibrato, slow fades, and other gimmicks pleasing to drug users, much of it pioneered by the