Baby boomers, why did you sell out?
I get chills every time that I hear Jimi Hendrix play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” or when I watch Richie Havens tapping his foot and hear him singing about finding freedom. I am not a baby boomer, of course, but I know about the Woodstock Festival in 1969. That said, I’ll pose a question to boomers (or members of that generation who were once hippies): Why did you sell out?
Woodstock was about peace, love and darn good music — not making money, right? The same could be said of the fabled “Summer of Love,” 50 years ago.
Inspired by the writings of Jack Kerouac or perhaps the lyrics of Bob Dylan, many young Americans embarked in search of a lifestyle that was different from the conformity of 9-5 jobs and staid lives that grounded their parents and grandparents.
As wave after wave of baby boomers came of age in the late 1960s, some were drawn to the magnet of San Francisco. A youthful counterculture thrived there and beckoned the young with “free love,” easily accessible drugs such as marijuana, and a burgeoning rock music scene.
Many found “enlightenment” in the city by the bay. This counterculture enticed members of my own family, and relatives of my mother were very influenced by the scene. Michael Lang, one of the co-founders of the original Woodstock Festival, owned a “head shop” in Coconut Grove in the late 1960s. No doubt some of my kinfolk frequented the place in South Florida.
I appreciate the celebration of individuality that girded the counterculture, especially during the time of social upheaval in the United States, and the frustration that spurred many to push back against conformity. This “love generation” was at odds with commercialism, consumerism and exploitation. How improbable, then, if I could whisk myself back in time to the late 1960s, to ever imagine that the counterculture and its tenets could ever be accepted in mainstream U.S. culture. As historian Douglas Brinkley puts it, “The counterculture came in with hard punches to the mainstream culture.”
Some of these punches were the extension of women’s rights and civil rights, which today are part of our cultural norm.
But such progress is overshadowed by boomer consumerism, and whether intentional or not, the counterculture was overtaken by mainstream society. Back in the heyday of the counterculture, who ever thought aging hippies would fork over money for overpriced, cheaply made T-shirts just for the privilege of advertising their favorite nowgeriatric rock bands?
In 2017, social networking and e-commerce sites drive sales of T-shirts with rock-band logos. Let’s call this merchandising and marketing for aging baby boomers what it is: selling out, piling on for profit.
There are still pockets — would they still be called communes? — where the ideas and individuals who made the counterculture tick reside. If there’s a genuine counterculture today, it’s a niche. For example, I have an uncle who lives in California, eight hours north of San Francisco. He plays in a band and lives in a community of people who, you could say, have fallen off the grid, except they’re the ones who refused to change.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.”
He’s right. The real-deal counterculture is long dead. In its place, there’s a sale on Tshirts at an Urban Outfitters near you.