A few days ago I did an online search for the song, “Get Together,” which was perhaps most famously covered by The Youngbloods, who recorded it in 1967. I’ll link it here so you can find it if you like. It was the quintessential “hippie song”. As a child I remember being so moved by the music and its message that later when it was used as background for a TV ad, I’d pause and watch the commercial.
This was during a time in our history when many corner stop signs read: “STOP THE WAR,” with the words “the war” having been added to the bottom. Sometimes these added words appeared to have been hastily scrawled in with a marker, sometimes it looked like they’d been methodically spray-painted through a stencil. Living in the college town of Ann Arbor, by the time I turned 8, within a few short years I had witnessed a sudden shift: the men with long hair, the colorful, sometimes outlandish dress, and a real shift in mood.
I was often a passenger in a family car with my older sister at the wheel. Newly licensed, she liked to drive, and I soon learned that the cheapest gas in town was to be found at a gas station without any identifiable oil company branding located on Packard near Stadium Blvd. My sister and others called it The Freak Station. This was before self-serve gasoline, and the men who worked there always had some of the longest hair of any guys around.
I remember once my sister took me downtown to a coffeehouse called Mark’s. These kinds of places were not called ‘cafes’ very often back then; they were ‘coffeehouses’. But what I recall was, you could rent a chess set there by the hour. Even as a kid I wondered how they made any money in that place. It didn’t seem like they sold anything. It was more of a hangout. I don’t think it lasted long.
Sometime in that same time period, I also recall going on a field trip with my third-grade class to a local organic garden, also in Ann Arbor. We saw the plants growing — I was big on that, even then. A longhaired (sorry but I can’t resist) “garden-variety hippie” explained what they were doing there and directed our attention to a compost pile, heaped taller than us little kids. Using a shovel handle, he opened a tunnel in the pile so we could put our arms in to feel the heat generated deep inside.
At this point you might be thinking that I’m glorifying old times, getting misty-eyed and nostalgic for a bygone era, or maybe that I’m just an old man who was too young at the time to be a hippie but still longs for a badly remembered past. And while I can’t claim my memory is perfect, let me share a little story with you.
I remember driving up to Brighton from Ann Arbor with my mom to visit a friend of hers one time. This would have been somewhere around 1970. A small kitchen countertop radio was on when we arrived. The radio announcer was reporting “body count” numbers from the war in Vietnam. For those unfamiliar with the concept, I think the idea was that the loss of American lives and treasure in Vietnam could be justified because we had this metric to show for it: the current tally of Vietnamese dead. Those numbers vaguely suggested that the war might be winnable, and that U.S. forces were “making progress”. This was normal. Of course, in the end the war proved not to be winnable and any “progress” being made was pretty quickly reversed. So what we were being told was false. And that turned out to be pretty normal, too. Surprising to me how quickly everyone seems to forget these things.
Anyhow, mercifully, the lady turned off the radio. She then walked us back into her laundry room and demonstrated her newly purchased automatic clothes dryer. It had a novel feature: it chimed the melody of “How Dry I Am” when it finished its drying cycle. That was kinda cute.
If memory serves, though, that family had a son in Vietnam at the time. I sort of remember hearing that he eventually died over there, but I can’t find anything to verify that recollection. The war cast a pall over the lives of many families – that, I know.
My own draftable-age older brother had, by dint of the timing of his birth, narrowly missed a birth date with a very low draft number and thus a much higher likelihood of being called up for service. Nonetheless, tensions in our house frequently ran high over war-related issues. To this day I vividly remember a shouted argument breaking out on the day reports of the Cambodian Invasion hit the news. Each escalation in the overseas conflict brought waves of protests and apprehension here at home.
So please, I’m not romanticizing that era. But the current stereotype of a semi-stoned 60s-era hippie drawling “Peace, man” does nothing to capture how that image connects with the ongoing horrors and contrasts of its time. And even though I can certainly see the validity of calling “Get Together” a hippie song, I am also aware that doing so could very conveniently sidestep the ferocious critiques of prevailing power structures and of commercial values that emerged from that social movement, and the fact that they were starting to gain a very inconvenient amount of traction with the general public after a while. Not long after, Watergate and the ignominious withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam left quite a few mainstream folks here in the United States wondering if the hippies had been right all along about some things. By the end of the 1970s, though, the hippies were sort of morphing into many different things — which they really always were, anyway — but of course the horrors and abuses continued.
Regardless of what became of the movement, in my opinion the desire for a world based on love and peace was never a foolish or childish sentiment, despite later attempts to frame it that way. Far from being impractical and unworkable, peace and love are the only things that really do work, if by “work” we mean make life worth living. That’s why, even though such values are always conspicuously lacking in commercial sponsorship, peace and love remain worth standing up for, embodying and sharing. We never outgrew these values and ideals. Culturally, we’re still trying to grow into them.
These are the thoughts that came to me after listening again to the song “Get Together”. C’mon people, give it a listen and see how it lands. Feel the feelings it brings up.
Personally, my sense is, it’s a message long overdue for a comeback.
Have you read "Down by the Riverside?"
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