1969, Another summer, sound of the funky drummer...

I've been fairly immersed in the 60s recently, you know, The Most Important Decade Ever...ever...ever [this should be echoing and fading out simultaneously]. For me, that decade combines a couple of things I've always been interested in - first, music; and second, California.

A couple nights ago I watched Zabriskie Point by Michelango Antonioni. I was rather hoping that this Italian director's take on the counterculture was going to be IN Italian, where hippies greet each other with 'ciao' and the whole movement seems somehow more urbane. It would have been even better if it was shot in Italy but set in LA. But that wasn't the case - it is set in LA and was done in English with a largely amateur cast [the lead actor subsequently robbed a bank and was killed in prison when he was in his 20s]. Though it was a bomb when released - this, mind you, despite a highly stylized orgy scene in the California desert with a noodling guitar accompaniment by Jerry Garcia; I know what you're thinking, How could it bomb?! - it's one of these movies that becomes more interesting with every passing year. I liked the way it was shot - Antonioni had a good eye for the ads of 60s LA - the billboards, commercials, cans, everything. The landscape has an Eggleston quality to it. The characters are less interesting, as is the story, but what this movie prompts is the question whether there has ever been a larger generation gap than during the 1960s? It's a 60s trope, and every generation sees changes social, cultural, material from the preceding generation and all children butt heads with their parents, but the 60s really seemed to have a more radical break. Antonioni's film feels like a late 50s early 60s movie, a style almost like the show Mad Men, where the hippies really seem on the fringes, and very different indeed from the older generation of advertising executives, night watchmen, and cops.

There's another interesting thing here, which is the way Antonioni tackles the utopiansim of the 60s. It's kind of amazing to see movies like this, and Easy Rider, made during the 60s that take such a dark look at the prospects of the counterculture, especially when the 60s are often depicted ss an optimistic decade, when change was seen as at hand. Antonioni's movie was started in '67 and it is not exactly a rosy picture of community. Violence hovers around both the anti-authoritarians and the authoritarians. But Antonioni hints that the 60s were a confrontation of utopianisms - on one hand you have hippy freedom, racial, social, sexual, but on the other you have the material utopianism of the 50s - a dishwasher in every home, a yard of one's own, a safe, racially divided neighborhood. So this clash is secular utopia against secular utopia. The orgy scene is like a Shakespearean nightmare, in which bodies dissolve into bodies and people lose hold of themselves and of reality. To some this may have promised liberation, but Antonioni's vision is distorted and seems disturbing.

Jerry Garcia did the music for that scene, and I just finished reading a biography of him. He notes that the scene in California had changed by 1967. That the heady days of the 60s were from about '64 or so until '66. Then it was still a very local scene, confined to San Francisco and Palo Alto. Here the musical events were the famous Acid Tests in which the Grateful Dead would or would not play. I think this local aspect is so interesting about the Grateful Dead and led to their unique success - they were part of a scene in which the lines between performer and audience were blurred. Garcia was an amazing guitarist, but you didn't go to the Acid Test to see him. You went, well, to take acid, but also to be with a lot of like minded people and for the psychedelic carnivalesque quality to it. It occurs to me that what should have happened for a counterculture to succeed is that people should not have started going to San Francisco in 1967 for the summer of love and should not have started following the Grateful Dead, but rather other Grateful Deads - of course they would have been completely different - should have developed in other cities, and that the movement should have been local rather then national. The problem was that hippies, as sons and daughters of the middle class, were as separated from a sense of place as their parents who had fled to the suburbs. But I think that this truly local association with a scene is what gave the Dead their longevity, because they were part of it and lived it, and even when they were touring nationally maintained this now traveling carnival quality, and as Garcia noted, it appealed to some people's sense of adventure.

I wish The Grateful Dead Movie, which I also just watched, got at that a bit more. I don't think you can get at the Grateful Dead with just one show. That was the most disappointing thing about that film, is it didn't really represent what was unique about the band.