Why Punk Began in New York City Part Two
Hippies Hated New York City! Fuck'em. Greatest City Ever!
I’ve enjoyed many conversations with music fans about the differences between New York City and California when the ‘60s “music revolution” took place. “The San Francisco Sound” produced bands like The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape and Country Joe and the Fish: Mostly white hippie bands (Sly and the Family Stone are a notable exception). Around the same time, New York City produced a lot of weird bands that were rejected at the time, but had a great influence on music later on. (Kind of what PUNK Magazine, the New York Dolls and the Ramones dealt with).
According to biography author Robert Greenfield, “Jon McIntire [manager of the Grateful Dead from the late sixties to the mid-eighties] points out that the great contribution of the hippie culture was this projection of joy. The beatnik thing was black, cynical, and cold.”
Damn straight! To me? Hippies were selling a fantasy of how life could be lived: Living in communes where everything would be shared equally, peace and love, flowers in your hair, taking all kinds of drugs with no consequences, and especially “going back to nature.” (I grew up working on a farm, picking vegetables during the extreme summer heat is no fun, believe me!)
This was all the opposite of what Lenny Bruce spoke about: Dealing with “What is,” and not “What should be.” There is a great danger in listening to any political or religious figure who promises to make everything “great” whether they are on the left or right of the political system. To me? It’s dangerous to listen to anyone who promises a utopia dream with “Hope” and “Change.” Left or right. Politicians suck: All they want is power, and they will tell any lie to achieve it.
The hippie movement was selling a fantasy of what could be if everyone took drugs, protested the Vietnam War and lived in a commune sharing everything (including “free love” (a movement that began in the 19th century). In New York City, we dealt with street life: Crime, drugs, poverty, prostitution and… Real Life Stuff!
For instance, before the Manson Family murders, the Big Story about New York City Hippies was “The Groovy Murders,” when a hippie couple were found murdered in a basement on Avenue B. In October 1967, Linda Fitzpatrick and James “Groovy” Hutchison were in Tompkins Square Park looking to buy drugs, and encountered Thomas Dennis, who led them to 169 Avenue B where a party was in progress. A bunch of men were drunk and high on LSD and methamphetamine. When the men began to sexually assault Miss Fitzpatrick, Groovy tried to stop them. The men beat him to death with a brick, then murdered Linda to cover up the rape. Their bodies were found the next day, which led to a national news scandal about the dark side of the hippie movement. All of which further demonized New York City as the worst place in the world to be a hippie.
So much for “Free Love.”
The “Groovy Murders” became the face of the Hippie Movement (before the CIA operation involving “The Manson Cult,” now seen as a CIA-directed MK-Ultra operation) shocked America with the violence that the hippie movement was suddenly branded with. In a way, it was a reality check when it came to hippie idealism. Again, “how things should be” ran into “what reality is.”
There was a love/hate thing with hippies in the media back then, with many entertainment outlets promoting the “Love and Peace” aspects of the hippie movement, while conservative media warned about the Communist influences on the New Left, exaggerated the dangers of LSD use, and promoted sending more troops to Southeast Asia to stem the Communists (The “Domino Effect”). All so crazy.
Hippies hated New York: It was the antithesis of their movement, which was based on “going back to nature,” communal living, taking LSD, and dancing badly to bad music. And they hated New York City with a passion!
I dare you to check out these two songs by one of the original psychedelic San Francisco bands: Country Joe and the Fish. These songs (below) appeared on their third album Together. I bought it in a cut-out bin back in the day since it sold poorly and sold for a couple of bucks. I liked their first two albums. After I listened to it? It seemed to be meant as their humor album, since it contains song parodies instead of psychedelic music (which was already dying out when the albums released in 1968).
“The Fish Moan” and “The Streets of Your Town” by Country Joe and the Fish
This is one of the most anti-New York songs I have ever heard. “The subway is not the underground.” Yeah, well, fuck you too, “Country Joe.” Sorry that you don’t appreciate a great mass transit system that makes people’s lives better. Sorry we aren’t still using horse carts for transportation.
I liked this band until I heard this bullshit. But it got even worse on the next song:
THIS ONE IS SO MUCH WORSE!
WARNING! VERY OFFENSIVE CONTENT! DO NOT LISTEN IF YOU ARE EASILY TRIGGERED BY RACIST LYRICS!
“Harlem” by Country Joe and the Fish:
Did you hear that? It’s might be the most offensive song ever written and recorded (and that is a long list!). But this was part of the hippie ethos. Many of the hippies thought they were politically correct because they supported radical causes like ending the war, and as a result could be politically incorrect.
In my opinion a song like this exposes the hypocrisy of the hippie movement. Hippies loved black people and “minorities” should be celebrated… I guess unless blacks lived in Harlem? So if they live in New York City they can become a target of humor with Amos and Andy jokes? I never understood this. I moved the New York City in 1972, a few years after this record was released, and worked at Charas, where there was a vibrant alternative cultural scene, and where I was accepted by people of all ethnic backgrounds (even though I am as “White Bread” as you can be).
So from then on (and due to other stuff) I began to distrust “the hippie movement.” There were just too many red flags: The Manson Murders, the corporatization of Rolling Stone magazine, the sense that the hippies had sold out and no longer represented alternative culture. By the early 1970s the hippie thing became mainstream: Boring. I moved on. No more San Francisco scene for me. Too racist. Too corporate. So I looked for alternatives.
Early on, I was also exploring other music scenes: The “Boston Scene” in Boston, the MC5 and Stooges scene in Detroit, the 1960s/early music scene of the 1960s taking pace in New York City. The music wasn’t always as good, but I enjoyed the cultural diversity:
1. The Velvet Underground
I first heard of them from Eddie McNeil’s big brother, Craig. After I heard “White Light/White Heat” and “The Gift” from their second LP on an alternative radio station, I was hooked. They were beatnik-cool, and feuded with many psychedelic bands. Oddly, both the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground were “The Warlocks” before changing their names.
2. Silver Apples
They are probably the first techno band, preceding Kraftwerk and Suicide (the first band to call themselves “a punk band” in 1971, who must have influenced by Silver Apples). For some strange reason I bought the first LP by Silver Apples when it came out, and yeah, it is very strange music. I like to think that this broadened my cultural horizons and all that.
3. The Fugs
Lower East Side poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg along with drummer Ken Weaver formed The Fugs in 1964, using the euphemism for “fuck” for their name that famed writer Norman Mailer used in his novel The Naked and the Dead to get around the censors. Sanders published Fuck You: A Journal of the Arts in 1962 and opened the Peace Eye bookstore on 383 East 10th Street in New York City around the same time. As a result Sanders, Fuck You, and the Peace Eye bookstore were hounded by censors and subjected to police raids. Free speech, anyone? Back in the 1960s and early 1970s , cultural pioneers like Lenny Bruce, Ed Sanders, Tom Forcade and Al Goldstein (SCREW magazine) and many others fought for First Amendment rights, an paid a price for it.
4. David Peel and the Lower East Side
Peel was discovered by none other than Danny Fields, who also got the MC5 and The Stooges signed to recording deals with Elektra Records. Peel was later rediscovered by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who co-produced The Pope Smokes Dope for Orange Records. For the most part Peel wrote songs about marijuana, but he also wrote a lot of protest songs, and he is very fondly remembered by a large contingent of fans to this day.
5. The Holy Modal Rounders
The band formed in 1963 in New York City as a psychedelic folk rock band (they were the first to use the term when they released their first LP in 1964, twisting the norms for the flies who played Washington Square Park back in the day. They joined up with The Fugs in 1965 and helped them produce their first LP.
Although these bands all received a fair amount of publicity (and notoriety), none of them sold a lot of records. But they set the stage for the glam rock scene of the early 1970s and the punk rock scene that developed at CBGBs in 1975. One thread that connects all of these scenes is that so many musicians were also poets. They had a literary background that inspired an understanding of lyrical creation and context. They were all inspired by influences beyond pop music and mainstream culture.
New York wasn’t just the financial center of the United States (which is why America-haters, Communists and hippies hate my home city). however, it was also the center of print publishing in the 19th and 20th centuries: Newspapers, books, magazines and comic books were a huge reason why New York City became not just the financial center but also the literary and cultural center of the USA. Everyone important literary figure had ties to NYC such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, Norman Mailer… Too many to list here, but the Algonquin Round Table might be the best example of New York’s literary history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquin_Round_Table
Anyway, this is my explanation of the cultural history of New York City that inspired the punk movement at CBGB (where early on, they hosted poetry readings at the club). I like to think that most of the people who established the New York punk scene were influenced by stuff other than mainstream culture.
On the other hand? PUNK Magazine often took inspiration from non-literary sources like 1960s surf movies, MAD Magazine, R. Crumb and so many underground publications from the 1960s that didn't toe the anti-establishment line.
IN OTHER NEWS:
I am putting together a new issue of PUNK Magazine (PUNK #24) that will explain the history of the many counter-culture movements that started in New York City’s Lower East Side , beginning with the introduction of Bohemia to the USA at Pfaff’s around 1850, and the later beat movement, and the hippie flameout that led to the punk movement. It will be dedicated to the history of punk as a social movement, At the same time, we will be collaborating with MANI, which will be covering the contemporary punk music scene.
A lot of other amazing PUNK Magazine stuff is happening very soon to celebrate our 50th Anniversary at the Ki Smith Gallery. We all be hosting a lot of events from 11/28/2024 to 1/11/2025 to celebrate the months that the magazine started up in 1975 until the publication of PUNK #1 in early January 1976.
If you enjoy the content/ you can support this newsletter by liking and commenting, and buying something from our supporters (like Worn Free, link is above).
Thanks! Hope to see you soon.
Yeah, but the point I am trying to make is that hippies hated New York City so much that we ended up with Yippies instead of Hippies. Then Zippies! I'll try to explainn it more in the next newsletter.