Hippie and Punk Culture

I missed the Hippie period in the 1960s and early 1970s as I was just a boy at the time. I do however have memories of lava lamps, colourful flower power shirts, streakers, cars with massive paintings of flowers on them, the wonder of television along with men walking on the moon, the global Coca-Cola advert, etc.
Perhaps it's no coincidence that the emergence of this new global village was accompanied by the sight of our planet, viewed from space. While partial photographs of Earth were beamed back from spacecraft for some time, it wasn't until 1966 that the first Whole Earth appeared to the wonder of millions of people. Younger readers who've been raised from birth with this image might not easily appreciate the difference that the Sixties generation felt between a dull classroom globe and an actual photograph of our planet. For all we know this symbol itself may have kick started the psychedelic cultural revolution of the mid-1960s.
Along with the psychedelic mood came the poppy eyed Flower Children. Film footage of the time shows plenty of their antics based on playing out friendly weak behaviour. One of the best and most potent symbols is of a Flower Child putting flowers into the barrel of a threatening soldier's rifle.
Words like 'groovy' and 'spaced out' give a good description of the mix of mind-expansion and gentleness. Motown and Rock 'n' Roll mutated into new psychedelic styles. Try dancing to Strawberry Fields by the Beatles or Pink Floyd's early music and it's difficult not to feel like as if one has become very much like a fluffy, gentle angel. Other music such as Mike Oldfield's earthy Ommadawn gives off an aura of beanbags and communes.
The drugs most fussed over in the period also have an expansive and delicate aura. The word psychedelic (which took off in the mid 1960s) can be split into psyche, the Greek word for soul or mind and the Latin, delic, which has given birth to words such as delicate, delightful and delicious. The word psychedelic then can be defined as the mind giving delight and clarity (delos).
The safest quadrant in the transactional analysis grid to dwell in while under the influence of L.S.D. or psilocybin has to be delicate friendly weakness. The careful user makes a point of taking the drug within a supportive environment, thereby allowing themselves to take on the role of friendly weakling. Like a new-born baby they are 'Ok' only in condition that their surroundings and company are 'Ok'. Also interesting is the similarity to a tripper's eyes to that of a baby's. Both take in so much information that they find it difficult to focus attention onto any given item or shape. To avoid spectacular hallucination both must shift the gaze around while letting information come in without accompanying analysis or thought. Pink Floyd even went as far as to exploit the similarities in their lyrics, in early tracks such as Flaming.
As Western culture absorbed the psychedelic mood into its structure the most die-hard Hippies settled into their communal families to keep the original vibe alive. A small number also took to creating festival culture thereby giving birth to the modern nomadic scene.
By the summer of 1976 a new mood had entered into the bohemian underground. Excitement of a 'tight' variety was in the air. Even Hippie bands such as Planet Gong were gearing up to give expression to the new mood. Something exciting and big was just about to happen. Like the previous intensification of social chaos, nobody could quite put their finger on what was going on but everyone knew that a new cultural event was about to explode....

The first time I saw some Punks I was 12 years old. I had a fascination for smelly health food shops when I was a boy. I had just emerged from such a shop along with some exotic sweets when I saw a small group of 'Punk Rockers' walk past, dressed in bin bag liners, tight tartan trousers, bondage gear, razor blades, safety pins and spiky coloured hair. Behind them followed a group of children in awe of their appearance. Remember, this was spring 1977, few people had witnessed this kind of thing before. It was mind blowing. I figured the psychopomps at the front of the procession must be 'students'. I knew that 'students' went to college and did strange things to raise money for charity. I thought they were dressing like this to collect money for a local hospital. So, I joined the motley crew at their back and followed them through the streets, sharing my sweets and staring at the new youths, getting off on the buzz. It felt a bit like Christmas, in the sense that complete strangers were talking to each other.

By the end of the next year I'd been to my first Punk gig where I watched a teenager fall to the floor to throw himself into a convulsive fit in time to the music. I realised then that something profound was happening.
At this time I had no idea about the roots of Punk in the cities of London and New York. For most people, Punk just suddenly appeared out of nowhere and then blew out in the space of a year. Once it was dead, the post-Punk mood started up with a collection of styles ranging from the swirling childlike morbidity of Siouxsie and the Banshees to the tuneful depression of Joy Division.
Hostile weakness can be seen in early Punk film footage from the Seventies. Study the put-on petulant antics of John Lydon and other humourous guides to the archetype, such as Kenny Everret's Gizzard Puke character. Gizzard comes over as a bull-like image, with his sluggish would-be aggressive stance, but too drunk to fight.
Alcohol, in the form of cider, along with glue is associated with Punk. Obviously, amphetamine played a major role in early Punk culture with its aura of speed and contraction, but when it comes to finding a drug which 'links in' with the Punk archetype, most people think of glue or cider. Again, we're back to the head-down pose of the hostile weakling. One early, well worn phrase from the Punk band Crass ran, 'I ain't thick, it's just a trick': fake stupidity ties in with the pose of the bull or the last stance of a defeated enemy.
The word punk is most likely derived from the Jewish word puscht meaning a little upstart. Later in New York puscht seems to have become corrupted into punk to denote a male prostitute in prison. After this it soon spread back into mainstream American culture to mean a 'bum' or 'creep'. (Interestingly, one of the earliest meanings of 'punk' in England is a rotten piece of wood but it's very unlikely that New York street culture knew this.) By the mid-Seventies bands such as the Ramones latched onto the word as a joke on their stance to life. New York journalist Caroline Coon then spread the word in the British media as a catch phrase for the new youths.
Early Punk by most accounts, can be traced back to New York's seminal nightclub, CBGBs and to aggressive pub rock in London. By 1976 John Lydon appears to have spearheaded the London scene along with the Sex Pistols and his other contemporaries. Like many people involved in instigating social change from within music culture, Lydon came through a near-death experience in childhood. Early film and photos of his antics show up the usual traits of shamanism, such as the ability to go off into a trance-like state (in Lydon's case as a public performance), the vacant stare left over from childhood illness and an ability to play out the complementary feminine side of his character when in the mood.
Most of the same traits can be found in the tragic case of Nancy Spundgeon, the girlfriend of the Sex Pistol's bassist, John Ritchie. Nancy starts off in life with a near-death experience in infancy, moves onto hyperactivity before she starts school. Later in childhood she finds solace in listening to and rocking in front of a record player as she repeatedly plays the album, Hair. She plays the album so much she wears the record and the stylus out. A year later she is standing with her parents in New York when she notices dozens of Hippies running past to go to a live performance of Hair. She runs away from her parents and is lost in the crowd for the whole performance. When the police find her later she's in a vacant state unable to talk. She remains in this state for the next few days, completely blanked out. Her mother senses that this episode will mark out a future role in her daughter's life.
Later in adulthood Nancy shows a very high level of intelligence but has severe emotional problems coupled with hyperactive behaviour. By the time Punk arrives she is ready and willing to throw herself into the central hub of the game. With a combination of heroin and previous emotional instability she finally dies in violent circumstances as the first wave of Punk collapses in on itself. Her mother, Deborah, remarks at the end of her tragic autobiography, 'And I don't Want to Live This Life', that her daughter appears to have gone 'too near to the flame'.
Plenty of performers however bathed in the flame without having to die in it. The interesting thing about Deborah Spundgeon's biography is the link between her own Hippie background and her daughter's drift into the central hub of Punk culture. Anarcho post-Punk bands such as Crass, Flux of Pink Indians and KUKL, also offer a useful insight to this link between Hippie and Punk culture. Some people might say the whole 'anarcho-punk' scene of the early 1980s represented a crossing of the two, if not in music then definitely in their social outlook. Many a Punk met their aging Hippie counterparts in the peace camp and travelling scene in Europe, in the very late 1970s and early 1980s. Other crossovers can be found in the ecology movement in the same period, in places like Scandinavia and West Germany. Later on of course, the hippie-punk crossover emerged as a full blown movement with Grunge culture.
So we can find an obvious link between Hippie and Punk culture of a complementary nature. What of treating Punk as an archetype representing hostile weakness ?
Strangely some aging Punks feel offended at being described as hostile weaklings. Such an attitude is unnecessary. A balanced and sincere hostile weakling has more integrity than say, an imbalanced friendly strength of an insincere nature.

A problem sometimes occurs with emotionally rigid people who can't understand the nature of friendly and hostile attributes. Some people are hung-up on hostility and see it as being somehow 'negative' or 'wrong'. They forget that the hostile play within Punk and early, aggressive Hip-Hop was played out as a celebration. Only the most thuggish types used this hostile edge to the scene to cause any serious risk to others. The same imbalanced people would just as easily have found excuses to hurt others in a malicious way during say, the Hippie phase.
Punk or the currently gestating Storm culture, is not malicious in its make-up. The wholistic violence in such culture is played out on the dance floor. Basically if you get on the floor to mosh or slam dive from the stage you take a risk of being hospitalised, but no one forced the situation onto you on the first place.
Each celebration of love, openness and togetherness attracts its polar complement of celebrating hatred, contraction and social isolation. To deny either one is to deny a wholesome outlook on life both personally and socially. Anger and grief should be given expression as rage, not left to fester as long term disease.

By the time 1987 came along, the post-Punk mood was dieing out. Little did anyone know that in a few years time, 'hardcore' would describe a very different form of music than the sound of thrash...

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