The entire thing is indicative of the failure of the hippy project to even contemplate enacting real change. You wanna change the world? Nah, take LSD instead, “don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”.
The idea that any of these people genuinely believed they were doing anything other than assisting in the maintenance of the status quo is laughable.
Of course I’m not saying I thought rock stars represented the ideological pinnacle of the movement, but I’d claim that this sort of thought is indicative of the wider milieu.
they estranged phil ochs for being too radical despite hanging out with him all the time
dude killed himself due to this and because a guy broke his windpipe because he liked mao and he couldnt produce music anymore
I think it was more untreated bipolar that got Phil in the end.
Before he killed himself he was writing an album about the last year of his life where he was having a psychotic break, due to the loss of his voice and increasing paranoia, and going under the persona of John/Luke Train, and it genuinely sounds like his voice was healing in this recording 4 months before he killed himself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFQBASpfKk (2 years after the mugging) in comparison to this from the year before https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy26mFpn3eo (1 year after the mugging).
Personally, I think he was in a particularly depressive and paranoid state and he made a rash decision. Ultimately though, I don’t know exactly what happened but either way it’s a sad fucking state of affairs and the lack of proper mental health care is disastrous.
“He was planning an album that would be an unflinching narrative of his psychosis over the past year and had at least ten songs in various states. Five of those songs are represented here. The working title for the album was Duel In The Sun. Soon after the New Year Phil started to come around less until he eventually moved in with his sister Sonny in Far Rockaway. We would talk on the phone but I would never see him again.” - from the description of the last recording.
Along the same lines, the fact that Timothy Leary existed as a public figure was a deathblow to the counterculture of the time. That asshole is almost as bad as Nixon in terms of responsibility for the demonization of LSD, too. Hunter S Thompson had a great quote on this (which touches on the generation’s heavy drug use as a whole):
“We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60’s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously… All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody… or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.”
no i will not read another Hunter S Thompson book that’s not Fear and Loathing stop asking