Changes

:::'''THAILAND TURNS BACK FRENCH HIPPIES''':::'''Bangkok, May 27, 1968 -- Two French 'hippies' who crossed the Mekong river into Thailand from Laos, have been turned back by Thai immigration officials, who said they were too dirty and broke to come into the country. A police report said the two men obtained a free ride back to Laos.''' (''Times'')

:::'''Rome -- a hundred 'capelloni', young people with long hair, were arrested here on Tuesday evening and taken to the police headquarters. Most of them were French and Germans. Those without sufficient means will be returned to their countries of origin. (Agence France Presse)'''

:::'''YUGOSLAV 'WAR' ON HIPPIES''' :::'''Belgrade, July 27, 1968 -- Youths in the South Adriatic resort of Dubrovnuk have declared war on hippies and beatniks visiting the town. Groups of boys armed with scissors have been forcibly carrying out haircuts on long-haired visitors.''' (''Times'')

:::'''NO BEATNIKS IN FRANCE''' :::'''Paris, April 4, 1966 -- The frontier police have received orders to ruthlessly turn back any foreigners whose appearance is incorrect or who are without resources. Henceforth access to the national territory will be denied to persons of either sex who cannot show they have sufficient means for their stay and whose slovenly clothes, shaggy hair and evident state of unwashedness, constitute, one feels, an undesirable spectacle. '''(''Revue de Crime et de Police Intenationale'')

:::'''PROTESTS IN DELHI OVER HIPPIES''':::'''Delhi, October 23, 1967 -- Police report that complaints are increasing and that the Hippies, in spite of repeated warnings, continue to beg and live off Indians, peddle drugs and flout conventions. In the past few weeks twelve hippies, including a Rhodes scholar, have been arrested on drug charges.''' (''Times'')

:::'''CRETE EVICTS THE HIPPIES''':::'''Athens, June 4, 1970 -- The hippies, who formed a picturesque troglodytic community in the ancient caves of Matala, the South coast of Crete, are being turned out of their Minoan sandstone beds to make way for archaeology and propriety.''' (''Times'')

::The huge, fluid anti-community moving ceaselessly over Europe and Asia depends for its amazing mobility almost entirely on thumbing lifts. The size of the hippy hitch-hiking migration along the classic route of the sixties between Europe and Afghanistan and then on to Nepal is hard to estimate with any accuracy. The ''Observer'' (24 September 1967) hazarded this informed guess:

:::'''Figures provided by the immigration departments through which they pass suggest that the number moving between Europe and India and back at any one time is not less than 10,000.'''::In 1970 the ''Times'' Athens correspondent, Mario Modiano, reckoned that the hippy population of the Cretan caves fluctuated between a low-season figure of about 150 and rose to a high of 1,000 in the summer.

::In the caves of Matala the hippies seem to have achieved the ultimate in setting up an anti-community. They lived apart from the host community, relying on it simply for the purchase of a simple diet. They neither molested nor were molested. A sign on the beach at Matala read:

:::'''Stranger, you who come here' forget Vietnam and Biafra and love man and nature.'''::In the cliff caves of Sourhern Crete, the hippies established a successfully functioning, unharassed social unit of their own an anti-community similar in some ways to the sort of anti-community a monastery is. It is the human warmth and comradeship of places like Matala (now no longer thanks to the Greek church authorities and the colonels) that make the roamings of the international hippy bearable. Stays and stop-overs in places like this, in the heart of his ''own'' community, away from the incomprehension and hostility of the outside, allow the hippy to refuel emotionally and then move on.

::One of the most incredible documents to come into my hands is the Paris Prefecture of Police report on beatniks published in the Interpol journal (''Revue de Crime et de Police Internationale'') in the November 1968 issue. One might have hoped for a serious and unbiased examination of the phenomenon of the Seine-bank hippies and beatniks, but the writer of the piece mixes his statistical evidence with paragraphs like this:

:::'''The real beatnik -- at least in Paris -- is distinguished by dirt, sloppiness, laziness and a liking for the tramp's life. Red wine flows freely, they search each other for fleas, couples make love unashamedly. Even if only a few indulge in such behaviour, the spectacle they make of themselves is still intolerable.''' ::This kind of writing on the contractors-out is of great interest. The author's ludicrous hostility of tone shows the extent to which these young people's contracting-out of his society worries him. If alI they are doing is drinking red wine and picking mutual fleas why should we get so hot under the collar about it? In fact the police writer's descent from objectivity of presentation into subjective abuse betrays his anxiety.

::All the same the obstrusion of the author's own state of mind does not rob the statistics collected by the Paris Police of a certain qualified interest. Of the 1,000 'beatniks' questioned in June, July and August 1966 in central Paris, 818 were men and 182 (18.2%) were.girls. Just under half were foreigners, 491. 33 nationalities were represented, with the Northern Europeans in the numerical lead:

*German: 79 *Swedish: 78 *Danish: 46 *British: 45 *Dutch: 44 *U.S.: 34 *Italian: 30 *Algerian: 28 *Swiss: 14 *Belgian: 12 *Spanish: 12

::'Nomadism' is one of the features of the beat anti-community which most struck the Paris police investigators:

:::'''Travelling, especially by hitch-hiking, is one of the main attractions of this type of life. The beatniks on the banks of the Seine are always passing through, on their way from Amsterdam to Rome and elsewhere. There was even a plan for large numbers to meet in Istanbul on 15 August 1967. During the summer they travel throughout Europe.'''

::One of the things the police wanted to find out was why young people joined the anti-community. These were the answers they got: *38% Rejection of family, professional or social restrictions *25% Liking for cheap travel *12% Love of freedom *10% Pacifist ideals *15% Friendship, equality, atmosphere, fashion for long hair Some of the verbatim replies they got were:

*No one offered me a job I liked. *I refuse to be exploited by the boss. *I don't want to work or be ordered about. *My father complains because l've got long hair. *My parents don't understand me. *Society is rotten and nothing will change it. *I hate middle class life, the house, the car .... The police were curious to know how beatniks got enough money to live -- these were percentage answers:

*12% live with their parents. *18% don't live at home but return there for food and money. 6% are kept by their boy or girl friends. *15% have a regular occupation. *6% work occasionally. *3% are on paid vacation. *2% say they beg. *32% say they are artists (of these 13% pavement artists, 14% musicians, 5% poets or actors) Clearly these results must be read with some disbelief as the 1,000 respondents were questioned at police stations by uniformed police officers or by people from the juvenile crime squad under conditions of temporary arrest -- a bizarre interview situation. This explains why no mention is made by respondents of income from sales of drugs, and prostitution is not touched on. Only 2% speak of begging. These 3 activities, especially drug trading, would certainly figure in less abnormally collected information.

In Clearly these results must be read with some disbelief as the course 1,000 respondents were questioned at police stations by uniformed police officers or by people from the juvenile crime squad under conditions of interviewing contractorstemporary arrest -out I hit on one man who has been on the road on and off since 1964 and who expresses the feel and thought processes of the international anti-community so well I want to let him speak in a piecebizarre interview situation. This explains why no mention is made by respondents of income from sales of drugs, without the interruption and prostitution is not touched on. Only 2% speak of analytical commentbegging. These 3 activities, especially drug trading, would certainly figure in less abnormally collected information.

In the course of interviewing contractors-out I hit on one man who has been on the road on and off since 1964 and who expresses the feel and thought processes of the international anti-community so well I want to let him speak in a piece, without the interruption of analytical comment.  Brought up by his grandparents in Leicester, he used to go on huge bicycle trips in early teenage. He first hitched at 14, while still at school. He left the dominant community at 16 and had been in the beat anti-community for the 6 years previous to the interview. He was 22 at that time. 2 of the 6 years had been spent in a Greek prison on a hashish smuggling conviction:

'''This trip was March '65, that I left England, just meaning to go some place, any place, any place at all that would get me away from this place, any place that would change .... I went with some other guys, wanting to do the same kind of things and never get worried about working and things like that, cos, er, work sort of puts you in a narrow little tunnel and you can't get out of the tunnel till you're right at the end, and it's ridiculous. In the process you reject beautiful things and you may not accept new ideas, in a way. You know, I've spoken to a lot of guys that work and they're really decent people but they've been there for twenty or thirty years. They've got kind of set to have been working twenty years. The thing is they allow themselves to get set. They just didn't know it was happening, but it has. I mean it's an accepted way of life, well, I mean, no way of life is really acceptable because it's a little unbalanced, by war, by politics, by having to ... you know .... We just wanted to get ourselves basically clean, we felt we were getting ourselves very rubbed in the muck, so we wanted to get clean and we just set off: not too much communication, a little quiet and plenty of fast lifts to get where we wanted to go. '''

'''First we hit Vienna because I had a girl friend in Vienna. We stayed there a couple of months until the place we were staying was busted for being a brothel, but it wasn't a brothel. The cops raided an apartment where we were staying, all of us in an apartment, a big eight-room place. We were paying for it out of our wages, you know, from painting, it's ridiculous. I don't know, man, I don't know, man, there were certain personalities all mixed up there together which made it an unbelievable ... sort of an unbelievable happy plac' like; there was always a lot of dancing, singing. In the morning, the person who had this place knew a lot of people because he was local, would have a lot of school chicks coming up to listen to the music, do the washing up for us, talk to us, and um ... generally fruit around the place, just sort of walking around. Afternoons a lot of girls from the university'd come up -- it was strange you'd get your small girls in the morning about 16 or 15 and then in the after noon these old students coming up, about 18, 20, 22 and creating havoc, man! And just bombing ourselves out every night, afternoon, after we'd finished painting, because we used to do the scene in the mornings and finish about 2 or 3. All these girls going to this apartment attracted attention because in Vienna you always attract attention if you're unusual or do something unusual -- it's the conservative attitude of their minds which makes them notice this and all these girls tip-toeing and running upstairs, not to mention the music and the floating wine bottles in the air on their way descending to the street, below, you know, not to mention what the neighbours said. '''

Next he went to Copenhagen: '''Well it was a very freaky time, things were coming ... things were coming to a head after being subterranean for so long, you know ... people, blues, jazz, happenings, poetry, it was all reaching the surface, now, '65. Remember the epidemic of '66, '67, you know, Sergeant Pepper scene, you know, flower children in Hyde Park. I mean '64, this was happening in the smaller groups and it just got ... circle became stronger and more intense and burst open and then flooded around and created more ... larger circle until it finally exploded and this was going on in Copenhagen. It was my really first contact with poetry and jazz sessions, introduction to poetry and jazz that really turned me on. Poetry was just an imaginative thought to me, never really realised. So when this happened to me I changed a lot of outlooks .... ''' He married Maria: '''... And this girl Maria, she was there, and she looked after me and we became involved, we listened to the jazz and about three days later it was just too much, we couldn't stand it, we just -- she asked me at the same time as I asked her. The whole scene was really created for us by a ... some poet who conducted this marriage ceremony (laughs), it was so crazy ... ever heard of Ted Jones? American Negro poet? He's a European sort of ambassador for the Beat underground ... One of the jazz musicians playing in Copenhagen most of the time was Dexter Gordon, he was always playing ... this cat turned himself on so much that ... to his sounds that he just couldn't switch off -- you know, he was so basically into them, I mean they flowed off in a rhapsody. He was another creator of tightness and community -- he'd come down and sit among you and have a beer and talk to you, and you would ask him questions and he'd tell you and answer the questions about music and it was ... quite a close thing. ''' He's tried street painting in Copenhagen but the police stopped that. Then he got a labouring job, but still needed a visa:

'''... So off I trot down to the immigration authorities. I thought it'd be all right, it'd be OK, you know, I was working, nothing wrong in that, working is a respected way of earning a living. At work I'd been going to work with a hat on, you see with all my hair lounged up in my hat, it was a Cockney style hat, and then when I got out of work I'd comb it down again. But I didn't take it up when I went to this cop station and the immigration cop just looked at me, screamed, leapt out of his chair and screamed: 'Nej! Nej! Nej! No! No! No! No visa! No visa! Get out! Get out!'. He asked me: '''''''Would you fight for this country if there was a war?' I said:''' ''''Ah, I'm not Danish, I know that, but it depends on what you're fighting against ....'''' ''''No, no, you're not good enough for Denmark,' he says, 'No, your hair's too long, get out! Get out!''''

As winter approached he and Maria went South West to Istanbul: '''Would We stayed in Istanbul about two weeks. We blew our brains out, you fight know, we smoked hash every night, um, we managed to make it down to the hospital to get our immunisation shots, smallpox and cholera, we managed somehow to make it to the consulate to get our visas for this country if there was Iran and somehow through a war?remarkable escapade we managed to get out of Istanbul, which is so hard to do, as I know.''' I said:

'Ah, I'm not Danish, I know that, but it depends on what you're fighting against ....'   'No, no, youInterviewer: 're not good enough for Denmark,' he says, 'No, your hair's too long, get out! Get out!' As winter approached he and Maria went South West to Istanbul: We stayed in Istanbul about two weeks. We blew our brains out, you know, we smoked hash every night, um, we managed to make it down to the hospital to get our immunisation shots, smallpox and cholera, we managed somehow to make it to the consulate to get our visas for Iran and somehow through a remarkable escapade we managed to get out of Istanbul, which is so hard to do, as I know. Interviewer: Why, because you wa... you want to stay? ''' '''No man, because there's kind of inpenetrable barrier which I enter when I go there which makes me love that place. I just have a very very deep tolerance and feeling for that place, for what it is. Like, it's just where I want to be, it's just the place where I like to be myself, in between East and West. We see the both sides. I sit there; I meet people coming from the East, I meet people coming from the West .... It's a kind of cross-roads, it's like sitting in a cafe watching the road go by: you see people and you look at them and you drink your coffee, and you think: 'I bet that guy's a banker,' and you think: 'Maybe this guy's a bus conductor,' or you just think anything. You might even like the trees across the road, or the weather for that matter, but you can't miss the people who are passing through there. This is why I like Istanbul, it's a place where nothing really dies in a way, it's kept alive, everything is alive, very much alive. It doesn't get boring there for a minute. To me this is everything that Leicester isn't ''' (home town and place of interview). Maria and he went as far as Afghanistan but turned back with dysentery. The return to Istanbul brought the end to their marriage. He left her, went to Greece, and was jailed for being in possession of pot. At the time of the interview he was about to set off on a trip to Australia.

The above extracts from the interview with the Leicester contractor-out show clearly how the international beat-hippy anti-community flows this way and that over the map of capitalist Europe and Asia, coagulating into definite, tangible scenes in various crossroad cities.

One senses from Robert's words how vital these focal points of the anticommunity are. The contractor-out can fully be himself once he reaches a haven like the net in Vienna or the cafe scene in Copenhagen. While hitch-hiking the beatnik or hippy is an alien, he is a member of an anti-community entering the world of the dominant community. Drivers may often treat him kindly but they perceive him as an alien, and over a long period this in itself is wearying, like being Gulliver on exhibition in the land of the giants.

The hippy anti-community emerges as a pretty structured society. It has its own uniform, hair style, vocabulary, travel habits, cultural orientation and practical philosophy. Its attitude to life, as seen through Robert, is a quietist-hedonistic one. He perceives the dominant society as having an upside-down set of values but his reaction is to withdraw and live his own scene quite independently -- he shows no signs of wanting to convert anyone else to his way of thinking. He refuses permanent work, a permanent place to live, when travelling he refuses to pay fares and usually to pay for hotels. But all these are negative refusals, not active, positive, confrontational refusals -- they do not interfere with the day to day business of the dominant community.

It is the quietism of the hippies that confuses and angers the conformist members of the dominant culture. They know how to react to left wing protesters, student demonstrators and people actively intent on transforming society: throw the book at them, use vice-chancellors, police and judges to repress them on every front. You can imprison a man who actively protests, but what can you do with a man who, turning his back, forms his own new community? Robert feels that the frontier authorities in many of the countries along the road to India would like to stem the flow of beats and somehow contain them -- he says this attitude is '''hitting people who are still creating, you know, their own movements, by themselves without paying; they're going from A to B without paying, you know, they're hitch-hiking. It's a kind of capitalism in a way wanting to make them go by trains and buses. '''

The impotent, pent-up rage of the Danish immigration official at shoulder length hair is typical of society's reaction to the hippies' implicit calling in question of the dominant cultural values. Robert's reaction to him was simply to move on and remain unconstricted. He talks of settled work being a narrow tunnel, he compares the breadth of Istanbul to the restriction of Leicester, he insists on the right to move, to meet and to be free. He spent 2 years in a Greek jail for his right to smoke pot if he wants to. He and the whole of his scene stand very close to Walt Whitman when he writes in Song of the Open Road:

:From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines, :Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, :Listening to others, considering well what they say, :Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, :Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of holds that would hold me :I inhale great draughts of space; :The East and the West are mine, and the North and the South are mine