The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties

The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties
Dennis McNally
432 Pages
ISBN: #978-0306835667
Da Capo
2025

Dennis McNally knows whereof and whenof he speaks. On The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties, the author of books about beat icon Jack Kerouac (Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation And America (McGraw-Hill, 1980)) and those psychedelic warriors known as Grateful Dead (A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (Crown, 2003)) describes the inexorable (inevitable?) growth of a counter-culture.

In doing so from such varied perspectives, the author (intentionally or not) stipulates parallels with contemporary times that are eerily, not uncanny. McNally begins with what he knows best, the environs of San Francisco, and he presents its environs as a nexus of a burgeoning movement that becomes ever more clear as the three-hundred twenty some pages unfold. His narrative then bounces with a purpose to Los Angeles and New York, then to England. The veteran writer depicts artistic lifestyles that turn activist, wherein non-violent cudgels in the forms of demonstrations, occupations and sit-ins chip away at a self-satisfied conventional society.

McNally describes the numerous creative communities in those various locales with an undercurrent of wry, non-pedantic humor. Instead, a sense of wonder emerges from the prose as figures emerge from theatrical and musical cadres, fueled by the poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure, the latter dubbed beats (short for beatniks) by a skeptical world around them. Capturing in such straightforward prose the gestation of global environmentalism and alternative lifestyle choice—ranging from natural health to nutrition and beyond—may be more than enough to remove the proprietary pride baby boomers have in their generation.

The series of ripples spreading out from the paradigm-shifting works of Allen Ginsberg (Howl (City Lights Publishers, 1959) and the aforementioned Kerouac (On The Road (Viking, 1957)) renders marches against nuclear weaponry more than just contrarian gestures. Yet, like the efforts of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement, these are more than just symbolic gestures, but pragmatic initiatives that transcend expedient politics.

McNally presents a sequence of events that represents a foundation for multiple means of productive existence, creative and otherwise, with and without the benefits of psychotropic substances including LSD, espoused by Ken Kesey and his kindred spirits in Pranksterism, the Grateful Dead. Abiding interests in Zen Buddhism, for instance, are far more broadminded, not to mention colorful in scope, than the straitjacketed materialistic jingoism permeating America simultaneously with the feverish embrace of Christianity in the wake of World War II.

It is here in particular that the political manifestation(s) of a restrictive value system—a paranoiac McCarthyism and the corresponding 'red scare' of communism—echo with troubling reverberations through current events. Were it not for the advocacy and action set in motion decades ago by the Diggers of 'The City By The Bay,' for instance, the occasional insularity of such influential figures as artist and publisher Wallace Berman, might render our once new millennial selves as apolitical lost causes.

Ultimately, How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties deserves the author's self-professed designation of this book (and its companion pieces) as his life's work. Yet this tome is more than just punctuation for the aforementioned enterprises and the most recent (now ten year-old) entry in the series, On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom (Counterpoint, 2014).

The dense overlapping of people and places across all these efforts constitute valid documentation of recurring historical verities. Still, McNally is not proffering merely academic truths: he captures the self-propulsive energy and excitement in the changes he describes. i

Remarkably and perhaps unnervingly similar to the intricate narrative the writer weaves in this fourth in a 'series,' the course of current events compared to those laid out in The Last Great Dream might seem disturbingly similar and thus ominous. Race and gender issue perceptions tendered by a polite (sic) society, plus the near-fetishistic pandering to the notion of obscenity, all rings too true for its own good in modern terms.

Yet the various forms of past underground movements wrought permanent, such as the growth of a vigorous jazz community, compel thoughts about what corresponding schools of differing thoughts might right now be percolating under, behind and around the ephemeral guises of (self-) righteousness and proper (sic) behavior in the 2000s.

When the events of 1965 and beyond, including Monterey Pop two years later, begin to unfold at an increasingly rapid pace, it is hard to escape the notion that McNally may be just scratching the surface of the nascent hippie movement. But the extensive bibliography, comprehensive index and plethora of sources—nearly a hundred pages total in addition to the main content here—affirm his meticulous scholarship. And by the final third of the book, devoted largely to the musical evolution(s) in motion supporting the rapidly morphing societal metamorphoses, the scribe has left a distinct impression of exactly how perspicacious an observer of human nature he is.

For example, what might be a merely glib summary of The Doors—'brilliant and disturbing'—carries a knowing air. As does the psychological summary of the brilliant but doomed band called Buffalo Springfield. In the context of an ever-brightening process of illumination permeating the brand-new demographic originally (self-) described as 'freaks,' the insight becomes a prescient cautionary for the mental health of a generation (or two).

Sixteen pages of photos rare and otherwise clarify Dennis McNally's The Last Great Dream is no self-serving indulgence in nostalgia. On the contrary, images like the one of young guitarist Jorma Kaukonen (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna) accompanying emergent vocalist and feminist icon Janis Joplin certify How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties as an educational treatise worth keeping for reference, not just reading a single time and filing away.

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