A Colorful Slice of the Psychedelic Spirit

The psychedelic movement, whose flamboyant Haight-Ashbury manifestation gripped the nation’s attention in 1967, drew a lot of poets, musicians and actors but surprisingly few novelists. The best-known was Ken Kesey; but once he climbed aboard, he announced that he’d given up writing.

Maybe the intense subjectivity of a psychedelic high conflicts with the nature of the novel. Maybe it’s a problem that the Haight-Ashbury proper really only lasted from late 1965 to the middle of 1967. By the fabled Summer of Love, this small corner of San Francisco had been swamped by hordes of newcomers attracted by the media attention it had courted, and the people who had created the scene were fleeing town to escape the crowds. As Stewart Brand once told me, “As far as I can tell, it was a bunch of people who decided they wanted publicity for what they were doing, and then they got it, and then they found they didn’t like it.”

If a writer wants to deal with a space of time longer than a couple of months, a Haight-Ashbury novel is pretty much obliged to strike a rueful or elegiac tone. Unfortunately, nearly everybody still writing about the Haight wants to celebrate it. In his celebration, James Fadiman means to vindicate the hippies and ends the book with a heartfelt invitation to visit his Web site (https://www.othersideofhaight.com), which is mostly links to sites honoring the psychedelic movement.

I’d like to vindicate the Haight hippies too, at least for some things. They were not just the frivolous trippers depicted in the media (not before the summer of ‘67, at least). In their spaced-out way, they were highly serious about issues that seemed important to them, the main one being what psychedelics meant and how they should be used.

To me, the admirable thing about them was their experimentalism. Elsewhere in the country, most LSD was distributed by Timothy Leary’s network and came with a whole orthodoxy, embodied in Leary’s books, which made a fetish of avoiding anxiety at all cost. But the Bay Area had a more adventurous psychedelic tradition going back to the Beatniks. I knew people who’d drop acid and then go watch a fire or a race riot just to see what it would do to their heads.

Fadiman comes from the Learyite side of things and likes to have his characters (rather, the ones he approves of) utter soothing, sententious things such as: “Nothing that turns you on is strange.” In other words, the sort of high-calorie psyche-babble that Leary espoused and only a certain type of old hippie could love. For a book of vindicatory intent, “The Other Side of Haight” has rather a tone of preaching to the choir.

The author has higher novelistic ambitions, though, and he does create some credible characters, such as an over-educated unskilled laborer who goes by the name (scarcely Haight-like) Sweeps, and a flower child who takes the name Shadow Dancer. Sweeps’ self-doubt and the acid trip taken by a preppy named Angelo Borden, which vacillates between ecstasy and anxiety--as if ever on the verge of some urgent and profound revelation--ring quite true.

On the other hand, some of the other characters, such as Nitrous Eddie and the Vietnam vet, Easy, indulge in a sort of arch, stagy banter less characteristic of real hippies than of the actors (usually about five years too old for their roles) who played them in exploitation movies in 1967.

The action takes place from October ’66 to about the end of January ’67. Mostly it’s the story of how a bunch of oddly assorted people--artists, bikers, preppies, aimless dropouts--become intimate spiritual companions, which is one of the great themes of the Haight. There is an also somewhat confused caper plot toward the end, when Nitrous Eddie obliges Angelo to steal some LSD from a CIA-operated bawdy house (located, of all unlikely places, in the Haight) where Angelo works, to replace the acid the commune members scored for him to replace some acid previously stolen from the CIA (got that?). In escaping, Angelo gets killed by a car driven by a junkie, and then Nitrous Eddie organizes the communards (by that time including a Catholic priest who has decidedly broken some of his vows) to burn the CIA bawdy house down because . . . well, he’s angry, and they’re CIA.

Fadiman’s characterization of the people not committed to the psychedelic life, such as Angelo and the priest, is rather spoiled by his impulse to patronize them. His most successful creation--and the only thing that really ties the book together--is perennially childlike Shadow, who bounces blithely from commune to commune and bed to bed. Her conversion from sexually abused small-town girl to confident dispenser of psychedelic truisms takes only a couple of weeks. Which really was par for the course back in those days.

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Charles Perry was an editor at Rolling Stone magazine in San Francisco from 1968 to 1976. He is the author of “The Haight-Ashbury: A History” (Random House, 1984).