Part 4
John Lennon would be my first Acid Hero. The first in a LONG line of Acid Heroes. You could say "the 60s" was about a lot of different things, but one thing they were definitely about was Acid Heroes. The Acid Heroes came at you from every direction. There were the spiritual acid heroes, like Timothy Leary and Ram Dass and Alan Watts. There were the literary acid heroes like Aldous Huxley and Ken Kesey and Alan Ginsberg. There were the political acid heroes like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. There were movie star acid heroes like Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in "Easy Rider," man. And, of course, there were all the great rocknroll acid heroes like Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane and the Doors (of Perception). There were even jock acid heroes, like Dave Meggesey -- the first hippie in the NFL -- and Peter Gent of the Dallas Cowboys -- who wrote about his acid-tripping in his novel "North Dallas Forty," one of my favorite books as a kid -- and Phil Jackson -- the famous zen basketball coach of the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers, who started the first chapter of his jock autobiography with a heroic account of an acid trip that changed his life (for the better,naturally). And then there was the greatest of all the great 60s acid heroes: John Lennon, and Sgt Fucking Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Now a lot has been written about "the 60s generation." Probably too MUCH has been written about "the 60s generation." You know? The ones who protested against the war in Vietnam, the ones who went to the Haight Ashbury with flowers in their hair, and blah blah blah. But very little has been written about the generation that came directly AFTER "the 60s generation." MY generation of fuck-heads. And the fact is, from our slightly more objective vantage point, we might have seen "the 60s generation" more clearly than they saw themselves, in the same way that children usually see their parents more clearly than the parents see them (You ever notice how most kids can do a devestating impersonation of their parents, but it rarely works the other way around). We might have only been 7,8,9, and 10-years-old during "the 60s" but we nonetheless experienced all the turmoil, changes and confusion of that decade also. In fact, we were the first mutant flower to grow out of the 60s soil. So we knew the 60s in our BONES, man.
Theres been a lot of books written by a lot of tedious boneheads that purport to explain What Happened During The 60s. Well, I'm going to tell you a secret: If you want to know what happened during the 60s, you really have to look at what happened in the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s. Thats where all the real action was. The 60s was just the seed. What happened after that will tell you all you need to know about "the 60s." Or, as The Man put it: "By their fruits you will know them."