At The Ebb Tide Of The 1960s- Helter-Skelter Charles Manson Passes At 83

At The Ebb Tide Of The 1960s- Helter-Skelter Charles Manson Passes At 83

By Greg Green

A couple of writers in this space, I think Zack James and Bart Webber, have spent a good amount of cyber-ink this past summer commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the San Francisco-etched and hued Summer of Love in 1967. The million things that occurred there from free concerts in Golden Gate Park by the likes of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, to cheap concerts at the Avalon and Fillmore West, to plenty of drugs from Native American ritual peyote buttons to Owsley’s electric kool-aid acid to high end tea, you know, ganga, grass, marijuana, to communal soup kitchens, to communal living experiment, communal clothing exchanges and above all a better attitude toward sexual expression and experience reached something like the high tide during that time.

Not all of it was good or great even at that high tide since casualties, plenty of casualties were taken, from drug overdoses to rip-offs by less enlightened parties to people leeching off the work of others who were doing good works providing energies to go gather that food, work that kitchen, rummage for those clothes, keep the house afloat with the constant turn-over of desperate seeking people. Not good also noted by Zack James (who got the information from his brother who while on a business trip to San Francisco this spring stepped back into that halcyon past at a Summer of Love exhibit at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park) a photograph at a police station where one whole wall was filled with photographs from desperate parents looking for their runaway children. No so much the runaway part, all of those who flee west that year and the years after to break out of the nine to five, marriage, little white house syndrome were actually doing that, but the need to do so just then against the wishes, in defiance of those same parents who were looking for their Johnny and Janie. Who know what happened to them.

Frank Jackman, another writer in this space, basing himself on his friendship with Josh Breslin and the latter’s with the late Peter Paul Markin known in his growing up hometown and in Frisco as Scribe, spent some time a few years back taking a hint from the gonzo writer Doctor Hunter Thompson trying to figure out when that high tide crested and then ebbed.  The Scribe as far as I know the story himself a classic case of those who started with high ideals and breath of fresh air attitudes who wound up getting killed down in Mexico after a busted cocaine deal in the days after he became a coke head and was dealing and now sleeps in a potter’s field grave down in Sonora) Year like 1968, 1969, 1971 came up as did events like the Chicago Democratic Convention in the summer of 1968, the disastrous Stones concert at Altamont in 1969, and May Day, 1971 in Washington when they tried to bring down the government if it would not stop the damn Vietnam War and got nothing but massive arrests, tear gas and police batons for their efforts. Those things and the start of a full-bore counter-revolution, mainly political and cultural which we have been fighting a rear-guard action against ever since. 

Whatever the year or event, whatever happened to individuals like Scribe and those forlorn kids in that police station photograph,  there was an ebb, a time and place when all that promise from the high tide of 1967 to seek a “newer world,” to “turn the world upside down” and make it fit for the young to live came crashing down, began to turn on itself. A time when lots of people who maybe started out figuring the new world was a-borning turned in on themselves as well. Maybe it was the drugs, too many drugs, maybe it was the turnover as those who started the movements headed back home, back to school and back to the old world defeated left those who had nowhere to go behind (those photographs on that forlorn wall in that anonymous police station a vivid reminded that not everybody was “on the bus.”)           

And as if to put paid to that ebb tide we had all the revelations that something had desperately gone wrong when cult figure and madman leader of a forsaken desert tribe of the forgotten and broken Charles Manson who died the other day after spending decades in prison had been exposed for all the horrible crimes he had committed or had had his followers commit. Sobering thoughts for those of us who are still trying to push that rock up the hill toward that “newer world” that animated our youth.