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THE
SIXTIES - AN EASY RIDE? by
Carol Middleton When
I was at university in England from 1964 to 1968, I was only aware of
three students who smoked dope - a group of young men in my social circle,
mainly from the English department. Then, one day, there were only two.
The third had thrown himself off a bridge spanning the campus to prove,
said one of the remaining two, that death and life were not so different
- you were free to choose death. Although
taken aback by the indifference of his friend, I couldn't help admiring
the "suicide"'s ultimate act of authenticity in what he saw
as a meaningless world. It
was the bleak, terminal world of Waiting For Godot, the world Beckett, Pinter and Camus portrayed in the fifties. It was
the Theatre of the Absurd in action. The
fatal jump had been made on an acid trip. It was an extreme act, but it
took the philosophies of those years to their natural conclusion. It echoed
the dark, godless, existential writings of Camus and Sartre which I had
absorbed as part of my studies of French literature. We were floundering
in a world where the individual had to make his own moral choices without
recourse to religion, social mores or tradition. It
was 1969 before I smoked my first joint and started my own journey away
from the safety of the shore into an indifferent sea..... 1969
was the year Easy Rider was made. Yesterday I watched it again,
nearly thirty years on. It is the only film I can think of which captures
something of those times, those conversations, those people that we were.
George the lawyer, played by the young Jack Nicholson, is new to the drug
scene and able to articulate the philosophy of freedom that motivates
the drop-outs and sets society against them. The old hands, Wyatt and
Billy (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) are often stuck for words, caught
as they are in the search for truth in a meaningless world. These conversations
remind me of our own, where we were often unable to find words for new
experiences and unwilling to categorise them in terms of the old. Also,
we were afraid of being uncool, at a time when "cool" characters,
who seemed to have some superior insight, were the leaders, and where
a tyranny of cool speech, cool dress and patterns of morality began to
rise out of the chaos.
My own self-expression was inhibited by the new social bylaws that
took the moral high ground and banned any conventional attachment to family
or authority. Like Christ's disciples, we had a higher calling than the
biological family, we had a new family of brothers and sisters. The highest
authority was the self, although many resorted to gurus of one type or
another for guidance. The nearest I came to having a guru was living briefly
at the commune-style Scottish home of a poet/playwright, Neil Oram, an
eloquent free thinker who exposed all our lingering middle-class attachments
in sudden bursts of spontaneous poetry. He was uncompromising in his dismissal
of family values, and women who fell into the earth mother role and looked
on the place as a home for their growing families were encouraged to leave. The
Pill came under scrutiny. The Pill had been a new source of freedom in
the sixties. I had started taking it at university, when I married a fellow
student. Now it was suspect, not part of an authentic life. That was hard.
If you lived in the city and were a "weekend hippie" as they
were called, taking drugs at weekends for recreation or as a more effective
way than church to uplift your spirit on Sundays, the Pill was just another
compromise. But if you had left the city, like the hitchhiker in Easy
Rider, to live close to Nature, with Nature and little else as your
guide, it was a cop-out.
It sounds pretentious and humourless, and I suppose it was. It
was the moral sobriety that went hand in hand with moral freedom. Looking
now at that solemn row of faces of people in the commune in Easy Rider,
I am reminded of so many friends... The
sixties are often thought of as a heady time of freedom - of free thought,
free love and an explosion of musical ideas. The soundtrack of Easy
Rider is a catalogue
of that music: Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan in particular. They were both
uncompromising in their chosen field of music. I went to one of the first
concerts where Dylan brought his electric band on stage, playing through
the jeers and hisses of a large part of the acoustic-loving audience.
Dylan was one of the most influential figures of our time, a David fighting
the Goliath of the corporate world,
a sad and lonely figure throughout his life's quest. Hendrix was
one of the many bright stars in our firmament that burnt themselves out. As
the film comes to an end and all three easy-riding heroes are dead, the
Dylan song which plays over the closing credits fades out, but all the
filmgoers of 1969 knew the next line: It's
all right ma, I'm only dying.
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© copyright 2003 Carol Middleton
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