Dark Shadows

Along with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, there was a spiritual revolution at the core of the 1960s counterculture. In “Turn Off Your Mind,” however, Gary Lachman (who, as Gary Valentine, was a founding member of the group Blondie) states, “There was a shadow side to all the love and peace that supposedly characterized the decade. Brotherhood and compassion were the face the Sixties showed the world, but underneath was a different picture. The most obvious emblem of this is Charles Manson and his Family, responsible for the gruesome Tate-LaBianca killings that ended the naive optimism of the flower generation.”

“Turn Off Your Mind” offers an alternative chronicle of what went on in the ‘60s when, somewhere along the spectrum of expanding consciousness, many hippies collided with a fascination with black magic. But Lachman’s book reads more like a list of references that could conceivably serve as an aid in preparing for a stint on “Occult Jeopardy!”

Here’s a sampling:

This group had a professional I Ching consultant who was paid to toss the coins at their office every morning. Who were The Beatles?

While on LSD, he had paranoid visions of secret messages coming from Jack Benny and Doris Day on television. Who was Timothy Leary?

In 1970 he received a bachelor’s degree in magic from the University of California in Berkeley. Who is Isaac Bonewits?

He was introduced to witchcraft in his teens by his 74-year-old grandmother, who taught him by taking his virginity. Who was Alex Sanders?

His black Mass included crushing a sugar cube soaked in LSD, urinating on marijuana and hanging a picture of Leary upside down. Who was Anton LaVey?

He wore a black armband to school, believing the rumor that Paul McCartney was dead. Who is Gary Lachman?

Lachman indulges in sodomic cosmology, giving readers a limited sense of how some of the Beats were connected to their mystic ancestors. Referring to Gavin Arthur, who wrote an astrology column for the psychedelic weekly, the San Francisco Oracle:

“But perhaps Arthur’s biggest claim to sexual fame was the fact that as a young man he had slept with the late 19th century mystic and gay activist Edward Carpenter, who was by then in his 70s. Carpenter himself had slept with the poet Walt Whitman, inspiration of Beat writers like [Jack] Kerouac and [Allen] Ginsberg, and Arthur’s presence on the Haight provided a link with the original Beat that was more than literary. Arthur slept with Zen lunatic Neal Cassady, who had slept with Kerouac and Ginsberg, who had slept with each other, thus forming an eroto-mystical chain spanning two centuries.”

As for the ‘60s, “Turn Off Your Mind” focuses on the negative aspects of a mass awakening that provided hope, inspiration, joyfulness and a sense of community to countless young people. In the process, Lachman resorts to the kind of mendacious generalizations--”As in most ashrams and hippie households, the kids were abandoned and pretty much left to themselves”--that will surely appeal to the fundamentalist Christians and ‘60s-bashing markets.

Though Lachman presents tidbits of truth, he fails to report interesting details. He discloses that Michael Hollingshead (who first turned Leary on) “dosed two undercover policemen” but omits the rest of that story: A pair of Scotland Yard agents had arrested Hollingshead and were extraditing him from Stockholm. During the flight he managed to slip LSD into their coffee; they were still disoriented and hallucinating when the plane landed, so he disembarked alone, breezed past customs and called Scotland Yard, advising that Thorazine be administered to ease the agents’ return to ordinary reality.

And his selection of anecdotes isn’t without errors. Although he reports that Manson wrote a weekly column in the L.A. Free Press, former Free Press publisher Art Kunkin told me that he “brought Ed Sanders out here to cover the trial, but Manson himself never wrote a column.” Lachman asserts that after Leary escaped from prison, he “smuggled twenty thousand hits of LSD into Algiers, but Eldridge Cleaver wasn’t interested.” Actually, Leary told me, Cleaver did take acid there, though he insisted on wearing his guns.

There’s also a fixation on fascism in the book that taints Lachman’s perceptions. He claims that, “With [Jerry] Rubin, [Abbie] Hoffman epitomized the new irrationalism that burst upon the radical scene in the late ‘60s....The association of late-’60s radicalism with the Nazis isn’t far-fetched. All of Hoffman’s and Rubin’s pronouncements are soaked in the political theories of the French syndicalist George Sorrel, whose ‘Reflections on Violence’ [1908] was a powerful influence on Mussolini.” And this: “The abyss isn’t some possibility in the future; it is ‘here now,’ whether it is the start of Germany’s trip to the absolute elsewhere, or the mud-splattered abandon of Woodstock.”

Of course, we all have the capability of surrendering to the forces of darkness within ourselves, but it’s a matter of choice, and the positive side of the ‘60s is still alive and celebrating. The annual Rainbow Family Gathering, which attracts 20,000 people, took place in the first week of July in Montana; the next weekend the Oregon Country Fair had 18,000 attendees; and the Burning Man festival begins Aug. 26 in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.

In “The Cultural Creatives,” Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson estimate that 50 million Americans are broadly sympathetic to hippie values. It has been 35 years since the original Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park; this September--indicating the role of technology in the counterculture’s evolution--there will be a worldwide Digital Be-In.

I suspect that, unless you are a hard-core enthusiast of occult esoterica, you will find reading this book a chore rather than a pleasure. Lachman’s scholarly approach is marred by his dependence on secondary research. He takes metaphors literally: “A famous Zen injunction advises that if we see the Buddha on the road, we should kill him. Cassady and some of the other mentors of the Beats might have done just that.” And his perspective seems virtually devoid of humor: He calls Adam Parfrey of Feral House publishers a member of “a quartet of modern satanic masters, hosting an unholy celebration.” In reality, Parfrey participated in a 1988 show at San Francisco’s Strand Theater with an intentionally silly rendition of “Valley of the Dolls” on the oboe.

Lachman writes, “Many believed that [Hermann Hesse] received the Nobel Prize less for his great novel ‘The Glass Bead Game’ than for the fact that he hadn’t been a Nazi. Hesse had become the focus of every literate late adolescent with a bad case of Weltschmerz,” admitting that, “Needless to say, I was one of these.” Ah, if only he had known that Oracle editor Allen Cohen was so enamored of Hesse’s “Siddhartha” that he changed his name to Siddhartha and moved to a commune, where everybody thought his name was Sid Arthur, and they all called him Sid. Maybe then Lachman would have lightened up.