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Hippie Capital Tunes In
Pubdate: Fri, 27 May 2005
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2005 The Vancouver Sun
Contact: http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: John Mackie
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
HIPPIE CAPITAL TUNES IN
The Counter-Culture '60s Come Alive In A New Vancouver Museum Display
In the mid-1960s, Megan Carvell Davis was rummaging through her mother's
stuff in the basement and came across a beautiful embroidered tablecloth.
It was a long-forgotten relic from a trip her grandfather had taken years
before to China. And she instantly knew what to do with it.
When she cut a hole in the middle, the tablecloth became a perfect hippie
poncho. Coupled with some cheap moccasins, they became her favourite
clothes to drop acid in during Vancouver's flower-power era.
"I took the soles out [of the moccasins] so I could be walking closer to
the earth," Carvell Davis relates.
"I only took acid maybe 12 times in those years...I found a safe place in
nature and took it. Then I could completely let go. But I knew it had to be
in a natural setting where I was sitting on the earth, lying on the earth,
so my whole body connected to the earth. That's what that poncho and
moccasins allowed me to be, clothed but naked next to the earth."
The poncho and moccasins have been tucked away for years. But Carvell Davis
dusted them off and donated them to the Vancouver Museum for its new
permanent gallery on Vancouver's 1960s and '70s counter-culture, Revolution!
Lest we forget, Vancouver was the hippie capital of Canada, the place where
countless thousands of wide-eyed youngsters came to tune in, turn on and
drop out.
It was a time when Kitsilano was Haight-Ashbury North, the Retinal Circus
and the Afterthought were the nightclubs du jour, and the Georgia Straight
was filled with news from "the tribes," back-to-the-landers who had left
the big bad city for a simpler life in country communes.
Amidst all the peace, love and understanding, there was a growing political
consciousness. Greenpeace grew out of the Vancouver counter-culture into
the biggest ecological organization in the world. Anti-freeway crusaders
stopped plans to raze much of Gastown, Chinatown and the downtown
waterfront for American-style roadways. Neighbourhood activists began to
agitate for local issues, rather than just accept what city planners told them.
"It seems to me that's when contemporary Vancouver, the Vancouver that we
know today, was really born," says curator Joan Seidl, who put together the
exhibit.
"By the end of this period, you've got the south side of False Creek in
place, you've got Granville Island in place, you've got this activist city
populist that has an opinion about everything and thinks they should be
listened to on every point. When I moved here in 1983, that's the Vancouver
that I encountered."
The exhibit cleverly intersperses cultural, artistic and political
artifacts to capture the era.
One section is set up like a typical hippie house in Kits or the West End,
complete with beaded curtains, a macrame peace symbol and a weathered old
overstuffed couch. The coffee table contains the essentials of the day: a
hookah pipe and a stash basket. Naturally, there's a vintage copy of the
Georgia Straight nearby, along with a Rand Holmes cartoon lampooning
Vancouver's hippie-hating late '60s mayor, Tom Campbell.
Another room represents the music scene, and comes with an authentic '60s
psychedelic light show (swirling globules interspersed with geometric
patterns). There is also an interactive display where you can punch a
button and hear a tune by some of Vancouver's finest '60s rock acts: The
Collectors, Tom Northcott, the Seeds of Time, the United Empire Loyalists,
Mock Dock, My Indole Ring, Mother Tuckers Yellow Duck, and Papa Bear's
Medicine Show.
Of course, no Vancouver '60s display would be complete without some of the
mind-blowing psychedelic rock posters done by the great Bob Masse. There is
an electric pink and blue poster for a 1967 Steve Miller show at the
Afterthought at Fourth and Arbutus featuring a hairy old man, and an art
nouveau-on-acid poster for a Country Joe and the Fish show at the same
venue, with the Painted Ship and the United Empire Loyalists opening.
There is even a copy of the poster for the Trips Festival at the PNE
Gardens in August 1966, a three-day event that featured bands like The
Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company (featuring Janis Joplin)
and Quicksilver Messenger Service, before they were famous.
"This is really crucial," says Seidl.
"The Trips festival is really a link between the artistic community and
when the scene goes mainstream. It was really artists who put on the first
Trips festival, and it was an extravaganza. It was a multi-media event,
with lots and lots of projectors."
Festivals were a big part of the '60s. One of the key events was the
Dewdney Trunk Pleasure Faire in Mission, an arts and crafts and musical
happening which Talonbooks commemorated with something called A Book in a Bag.
"It came in a tie-dyed bag," laughs Seidl.
"We've reproduced it and laminated it, so that people can flip through it.
There's all kinds of things here, from photographs to little bits of
poetry, people's little scratchy memories...dawn, bread rising, comfort and
a hug. Somewhere in here is a picture of a baby that was born at the
Pleasure Fair."
The latter part of the show is devoted to the political impact. There is a
tattered Greenpeace flag, vintage political buttons like "Support Your
Local Feminist" and "Mutate Now, Post Bomb Mutants," and a reasonable
facsimile of the courthouse steps where protesters used to gather,
festooned with all sorts of protest signs.
There is also a model of some of the wacky freeway proposals planners tried
to foist on the citizens, and a poster of the Canadian Pacific Railway's
late '60s plan to redevelop the north shore of False Creek with a series of
beehive-type towers. There is also a vintage documentary, To Build a Better
City, about the need to tear down huge swaths of east Vancouver to build
sparkling new highrises for the poor.
"It was a Canadian Mortgage and Housing pitch for why Vancouver needed
large-scale urban renewal in Strathcona to eliminate blight," says Seidl.
"Which they can't even say without their lips curling."
Dotted throughout the exhibit are authentic hippie clothes, such as a
toddler's jacket with a marijuana leaf embroidered on the back. Pot crops
up everywhere: there is a poster for an Easter Be-In at Stanley Park that
advises "to help repair any damage that may be done, everyone is urged to
bring plenty of grass."
And there is a family photo album featuring five Vancouverites who lived
the hippie life, including Carvell Davis and Anna Marshall, who named her
son Issac Cannabis Marshall.
Issac Cannabis Marshall is now 33. He says his distinctive middle name has
caused "a couple of run-ins" with the law over the years.
"I've had a couple of speeding tickets in my life and both times it's
caused hassles having the middle name," he explains.
"I didn't have it on my passport until after Sept. 11th. You have to put
your full name on your passport now, so I've got it on my passport. I said
to my mom and dad 'I'm going to change if it causes me any trouble, because
I have to be able to travel freely.' And my dad said, 'I wish you would
change it.' He's embarrassed by it now."
Asked if his parents were hippies, he laughs.
"Oh yeah. Ooooooh yeah. My mom lived on a commune when she was 17-18. When
she left the commune that's how she met my dad.
"My mom doesn't like me telling that story, but I'll tell it anyway. She
left the commune and she had some friends that she was living with. A
friend of hers said, 'If you ever need a place to crash, come to Vancouver,
we've got this real cool place, a real groovy place where you can come and
stay until you get on your feet.'
"So she left the commune a few months after her friend Joan did. She
arrived at this old Victorian house in Kitsilano and knocked on the door,
and this guy with a long beard and long hair answered.
"My mom said, 'Hi, Joan said I could stay here.' He looks her in the eye
and says 'F--- off!' and slams the door. And that turned out to be my dad.
"She sat on the front porch crying until Joan came home and she said,
'Ignore Phil, he's the jerk who lives upstairs.' My dad's side of the story
was that he was just sick of all these hippies showing up at the door
looking for a place to stay for free."
Carvell Davis thinks the word "hippie" was derived from the beatnik term
"hipster." But she says hippies didn't call themselves hippies.
"We were heads, which meant doing things to expand your mind," she says.
"It was the newspapers who called us hippies.
"I think the phrase was coined in San Francisco by the media. It came from
the idea of hipsters, people who were in the know. The other word for being
in the know was to be hip. And people were trying to look for a different
set of values, a different way of living. They were trying to become
knowledgeable and self-enlightened, so they were trying to become hip.
That's where the word hippies originated."
Seidl says the hippie era happened in stages.
"For most people [the '60s] started about 1965," she says.
"Some of the people started in 1961, but those were the rare birds, the
people who can recall the day the first guy came back from Marrakesh with
grass in the lining of his suitcase. Sixty-one, they say. More urban lore."
Carvell Davis says the counter-culture really started happening on a mass
scale about 1964-65.
"You started to see people with long hair, you started to hear about acid,"
she says.
"There was always drugs in Vancouver, but not hallucinogenics [LSD, peyote,
mescaline]. There was always marijuana, there was always heroin, that kind
of stuff. Those drugs people did them for pleasure and for escape.
"But when the hallucinogenics came to town, it was more for
self-enlightenment. I was living with a woman who was dating a guy and they
started tripping, which is what it was called, in I think '64."
The liberal attitude toward drugs reflected a liberal attitude toward
society in general. Carvell Davis says the hippie era did indeed spark a
revolution in people's day-to-day lives and the way they looked at the world.
"I think it profoundly changed everywhere it was happening, not just
Vancouver," she says.
"It opened up society if you will, so it wasn't just this very narrow
vision of what it meant to be successful. Today we see all kinds of dress.
You don't see the rigid code of behaviour, of dress, of what it means to be
successful. That all changed during those times.
"It changed thinking so that people approached life differently, because
they had changed their values. You could not be mainstream, and be acceptable."
That said, she says she has noticed an odd trend among the offspring of the
hippies.
"What's really interesting to me is how the children of the people who were
considered the hippies are primarily straight now," she says.
"I have two kids. And they're very straight. It's sort of like you don't
want to be like your parents."
Still, there must have been lingering connection between generations.
Carvell Davis's son Hubert Davis is a filmmaker, like his mom. Last year,
he received an Academy Award nomination for his documentary Hardwood.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom