Richard Neville - Hippie hippie shake: the dreams, the trips, the trials, the love-ins, the screw ups ... the sixties

HIPPIE HIPPIE SHAKE

the DREAMS, the TRIPS, the TRIALS,
the LOVE-INS, the SCREW UPS ...
THE SIXTIES

RICHARD NEVILLE

Published in 2009 by
Duckworth Overlook

LONDON
90-93 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BF
Tel: 020 7490 7300
Fax: 020 7490 0080
info@duckworth-publishers.co.uk
www.ducknet.co.uk

NEW YORK
141 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10012

1995, 2009 by Richard Neville

All rights reserved. No part of this publicationmay be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,without the prior permission of the publisher.

The right of Richard Neville to be identified as the Author ofthe Work has been asserted by him in accordance withthe Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

PICTURE SOURCES
Doug Palmer: page 1 top
Courtesy of Jill Neville: page 3 middle, 8 bottom right
Evening Standard: pages 3 bottom right, 13 bottom, 21 top,
Robert Whitaker: pages 3 bottom left, 4, 5 bottom, 6 main picture,
7 top right, 8 bottom left, 14, 16
Courtesy of Jenny Kee: page 9 top right
Courtesy of Caroline Coon: page 18 top left
Daily Mirror: page 20 bottom
Courtesy of Felix Dennis: pages 19, 22, 23
Courtesy of Martin Sharp: page 24 middle
Supplied by Richard Neville: page 1, page 2 top and bottom right,
3 top middle and right,5 top,8 top, 11 top, 15 top right,
17 bottom, 18 middle, 20 top, 21 bottom, 24 bottom

The Publishers would like to thank Martin Sharp for permission to usemany of his illustrations which appear throughout the book.All remaining material taken from Oz magazines

SONG LYRICS
Im a Wild One by Johnny OKeefe, courtesy of Southern Music: page 10
The Times They are A-changin by Bob Dylan, courtesy of Sony Music: pages 52, 327.
Tales Of Brave Ulysses by Martin Sharp and Eric Clapton, courtesy ofWarner Chappel Music Ltd:
pages 96, 114. Suzanne by Leonard Cohen, courtesy of Polygram: pages 221-2.
God Save Oz by John Lennon, courtesy of EMI Music: page 273

The publishers have made every effort to contact all holders of copyright work.All copyright holders who have not been contacted are invited to write to the publishersso that a full acknowledgement may be made in subsequent editions of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
from the Library of Congress

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-0-7156-3955-9
ePub ISBN: 978-0-7156-4036-4
Adobe PDF ISBN: 978-0-7156-4037-1

To everyone who was there, and their children.

For this new edition I have seized the chance to correct errors, update biographies and quicken the pace. At the request of the publishers Ive added this preface and talk about extracting blood from the stoned provided an afterword: The Fruits of Flower Power.

In the early sixties a handful of Sydney students banded together in my familys suburban home to hatch a plot against the Australian Government. The weapon was a little magazine and the gunpowder was satire. From the very first issue of Oz, published on April Fools Day, 1963, the Government hit back. Its weapon was the law and its mission was censorship. The local cop arrived with a summons at dawn, much to my fathers surprise. The subsequent trials served to boost sales and inflate the self-importance of the Oz crew especially my own. A wilder version of Oz was later launched in London with spectacular results, climaxing in a trial at the Old Bailey. How do I feel now about the decade that never quite faded away?

I dont regret a single moment spent on a beach, on acid, in love, at the printers, in jail or throwing parties, though I am often shocked at the extent of my selfishness, sexism and self indulgence; and boy, did I spout some rubbish. Yes, come the mutterings now from the next room, he still does. Having listened to one of my soapbox rants, a journalist likened it to being button-holed outside a lavatory. All the high-and-mighty moralising on the deceptions of government did not deter me from some shifty behaviour in the bedroom. Overall, I probably should have listened less to Bob Dylan and done more for Amnesty International. Yet it cannot be denied that heaps of fun was there for the taking, as we rolled around nude in vats of jelly, smoking pot and shaking our fists at the American Embassy. Okay, Im not a hundred per cent sure about the jelly.

What made the sixties stand out? The fact that they werent the fifties. My army officer dad arrived home from the Second World War ahead of everyone else and for once my mother was pleased to see him, which technically makes me Australias first baby boomer. Like many in the 1950s, I spent more time at school than at home. As the sixties approached, so did the waves of an information revolution TV, rock n roll, cheap paperbacks. Bandstand, Chuck Berry, Jack Kerouac. It rattled the oldies and delighted the teenagers. In 1963, Australian Vogue called it a youthquake. Five years later, as students stormed the worlds capital cities, the media called it revolution. By 1973 it was fizzling out.

For me, the era kicked off with an act of vanity. Having emerged too often from the barber with a strict military haircut, I decided to boycott them altogether. One day, bounding off the tram, I bumped into my father heading for the pub. He reeled back in surprise: I thought you were a woman!. We both laughed. In 1961 a shy Russian boy at university now an esteemed architect showed me a picture of the Beatles. Theyve copied your hairstyle, he said, and I felt smug.

Student protest wasnt all moan and groan against the war machine. The first demo I witnessed in Sydney was a bunch of students calling for the State government to let the architect Jrn Utzon finish building the Sydney Opera House. But no, the politicians were so spooked by the challenge of concrete sails that Utzon was sent back to Denmark. These days theres much wringing of hands that Utzon never returned to see the finished masterpiece.

The counterculture evolved through several stages: student power, flower power, peoples power. The Free Speech Movement leapt from the Berkeley campus in California soon after I left school, in response to the stifling of political discourse. This ignited a spirit of protest that helped transform the West. The Berkeley sit-ins coincided with anti-nuclear protests in London and encouraged students and academics in Sydney to protest against censorship and the oppression of the lands original inhabitants.

The war in Vietnam upped the stakes. Gung-ho politicians steeped in too many war movies imagined they were crushing a Third Reich. Such was the outcry from the youth that the warmongers were eventually overcome. It happened back then but it doesnt happen so easily now. Even in the early seventies, protest still simmered. In Berkeley 30,000 demonstrators marched to rescue a community park from the jaws of developers, armed with flowers, peace signs and a huge banner: LET A THOUSAND PARKS BLOOM.

Great. But what actually bloomed were parking lots.

Three things lured me to London in the mid sixties: the pursuit of love, a thirst for fun and escape from stuffy Downunder. The love was squandered, the thirst was slaked and Downunder has been upgraded. In September 1966, when I landed on my sisters Notting Hill doorstep, the week-long Destruction of Art Symposium was in full swing. The aim was to link theoretical issues of destruction with actual destruction taking place in society, according to the catalogue of Tate Britains 2006 retrospective, which listed the enemies of freedom as planned obsolescence, popular media, pollution, urban sprawl and perpetual war. In his performance piece