Mid-sixties terms and references

I was in elementary school in suburban Los Angeles at the time.

We used "hairy" as an adjetive a lot. Also, if something was good, it was "tough brain".

I know. We were really stupid.

"Get hat", "hat up", and "hat time". They all meant exactly the same as "boogie".

The Brat Pack came along in the eighties. The Rat Pack was around in the sixties.

Love-ins, be-ins, sit-ins. Turn-on and turn on. Psychedelic. Man. Hippie. Yippie. Cool. Peace was a way of saying hello and good-bye.

Hell, no. We won't go. Protests. Make love, not war.

Thanks I actually meant Rat Pack. These are all great! Keep 'em coming.

Peace out

Tune out, turn on, drop out

All we are saying, is give peace a chance.

Flower child, mini skirts, micromini skirts, maxi skirts, tie-dyed.

Black is beautiful. Generation gap.

Narc.

Don't trust anyone over 30.

Folk rock, protest song. Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. Op art, pop art. Hot pants.

The essential Sixtie's word/term is, "Hip". I believe "hip" came into general usage in San Francisco. There were a lot of us who were associated with the Beatniks up in North Beach. We were an artistic bunch who hung out at City Lights, Mike's Pool Hall, The Chrystal Palace, and a dozen Beat Coffee Houses. It was an exhilarating time, and it was exciting to meet and know such Beat luminaries that still hung out there like Ginsberg, and Corso. We were very influenced by their bohemian ways, and the avant garde nature of their creative work.

As probably everyone knows, the Beats were very, very big into Jazz, especially Bop and the hot frenzy of the Bird. Beats weren't particularly musicians, but tended to be poets, experimental novelists, and abstract painters. North Beach had a number of Jazz Clubs, but they all had cover charges and drink minimums. We were generally unemployed struggling to pay rent, buy food, and get our own work recognized. We weren't paying customers. Out back, between sets we'd share joints with visiting Jazz men and they'd leave the doors open so we could all listen to the jam. "Ohooo, that cat's sooo hip!" The word/term was used a lot in regard to someone who had beatifically tapped into a sublime truth that could only be expressed gloriously in jazz improvisation.

By the time San Francisco was reclaiming North Beach for topless bars featuring Carol Dodas to finagle tourist bucks, our speech was riddled with, "Are you hip?", "I'm hip", "This is really hip!", etc. We were hip cats moving slow and fully understanding "square" hypocricy, and the boredom of ticky-tacky little hills on the hillside all made out of ticky-tacky and all looking just the same. That's from a Melvina Reynolds song of the time, and before Dylan. Folk music and the cool jazz of the MJQ were more the taste of us "younger" beats, and our own creative directions were a bit different as well. We were still intensely individualistic, but more likely to form communes than the older set.

Chasing us out of North Beach, was casting the seeds widely. Snyder went to Japan, and a bunch of folks went down into Mexico lured by letters from Bill Borroughs. Some went "On the Road" east in the tracks of Jack. Natalie and I moved from Russian Hill to ethnic enclave of Height-Ashbury where rents were cheap. Before long the neighborhood had a dozen communes going where middle-class drop-outs spent the nights talking, talking, talking. Everyone trying to be hip, more hip, maximum hip. Out of all that talking a vague outsider's philosophy emerged that envisioned a world transformed by individualism. Authorities, rules and taboos were all chains designed to stifle individual freedom and limit potential. The Marxists among us were quick to associate all that with Class Politics, and the political turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement seemed to "prove" their ideas correct. A schism began to develop between those who believed that change could only happen by violent confrontation with the Masters of the Square, and those who believed that violent confrontation was a sell-out, and that The Age of Aquarius had to be a peaceful awakening to the potential of each individual. We were Idealists. Colorful wacky idealists who made good copy.

It didn't really take very long for the inherent flaws to begin showing up. The Weather Underground and others like them were involved in murders, hold-ups, and other activities that brought a lot of heat down on everyone. Sit-ins to protest the War in Vietnam provoked the government and college administrations into doing foolish things. All the talk, talk, talk replaced creative productivity and so little serious writing, painting, etc, was ever really accomplished.

We saw nothing wrong in the use of drugs, and grass was very common. LSD and DMT were welcomed as keys to the Doors of Perception, and used by a whole lot of folks not really prepared to deal with the consequences. Unfortunately, the number of those who got caught up in Speed and Opiates increased alarmingly. Stepping over passed-out junkies on the street was too common and upsetting for many of us, and thefts soared. The frantic, often unpredictable behavior, of Speed-freaks was dangerous and they haunted the Movement. Little kiddies from boring mid-western towns flooded in to be turned into whores by pimps, or junkies by pushers faster than the old-time Hippies could rescue them.

Some left to found communes in the country away from the pollution of a society they regarded as terminally sick. There they faced prejudice and violence from bumpkins. See "Easy Rider", for a taste of that. Others returned more gradually to their middle-class roots. We continued our educations, with some becoming Academic Dons without giving up much of their Marxist Idealism. We got jobs so that having a secure roof over our heads, and plenty of food wasn't such a distraction. We married and had children, and eventually merged almost entirely back into the society we had pledged to reform as youthful idealists.

need more establishment
Thanks, this is all so very helpful! Now think of a wealthy 35+ man or woman, sitting on their Eames lounge, sipping a martini, listening to Frank Sinatra, circa 1964. How do you think this person would talk? Would he/she still say things are "hip" Would they say "cats pajamas" or "hep cat"?

Hep cat is 1940's. Of course, a 35 year old in 1964 might have still been using 40's slang. I think you'd hear "groovy", "cool", and like that. Media attention on the Hippie Movement helped get its slang into more general circulation. Your 35 year old might be picking up on the youth culture of the time. Free Love and "irresponsible" behavior was attractive to a lot of folks who entering middle age. They wouldn't wear tie-died, sandals, or grow their hair long, but everyone was familiar with buzz words, because by the mid-60s they were everywhere. Wealthy folks seemed to like hosting and funding revolutionaries of all sorts in those days.

Your character's might wear a "daring" necktie, but a true hippy wouldn't be caught dead in a square uniform. The Hip drank cheap wine while up-scale folks were still drinking cocktails. Your guy still thought folk music was Hip, even though most of the Hippies had moved on to the Living Dead, and Frank Zappa. "Bell, Book and Candle", and "Cactus Flower" were middle-class ideas of what Hippies were about. Not exactly wrong, but scrubbed clean, romanticized, and out of date. They were updated Maynard G. Krebs, where the reality was closer to "Easy Rider".

Americans were off-balance in the Sixties. Your older character may have seen the end of WWII, and been an enthusiastic supporter of Ike. During America seemed riding high while the rest of the world struggled with rebuilding and Communist takeovers. The Cold War was wearing down American optimism. JFK was popular because he brought style, inspiration and optimism back to the country. By the mid-Sixties, JFK was dead and the country was in turmoil. Civil Rights demonstrations often turned ugly, and there was a nasty smell of revolution beginning. That intensified as Vietnam nightly showed the folks at home just how ugly war can be. Many middle-class squares were torn between their desires for security and a quiet life and the more turbulent, but individualistic freedoms they supposed existed amongst the Hippies. America had seemed to lose its way, to have compromised its morals and Americans LOVE idealism.

OBTW, it's "Tune IN, turn on, drop out" -- Listen, open your mind, and leave the old society behind.

The sixties changed a lot almost year by year. Can you be more specific about what year or type of people you are interested in?

I was 22 in 1964, graduating from university after 5 years (another story, another time). I still used the words 'neat' and 'cool' to mean 'good' and wore either sort of preppy clothes, or sort of beat clothes, or so I thought.

On dates, then and for a couple of years after that, we'd still go to piano bars (manhattan, please) or dancing at the Ambassador OR, with another fellow, to a university Teach In, or to hear jazz in a variety of places. More often to quiet parties... So, 64-66 was transitional.

I never did say "groovy", sorry. One "transitional" evening stands out in my mind because I dressed wrong. Heh. I wore my nice camel hair coat dress with the (ick!) leatherette collar (was that a mandarin collar?) and nylons and short heels and I forget what he wore, let's say casual prep, and we went to his apartment where the roommates were all well stoned and the talk was desultory, the rest of them, not, uh, dressed for dinner at eight.

They were some neat (I still use that word) people, I gathered later, had some formidable musician friends, one of whom might have been there. (doh!) My friend and I went out to dinner or whatever else I forget, nothing bad about the evening, romance included. But.... I still remember me in that room, so out of place. Truth be told, if I'd have relaxed and just mellowed out, it wouldn't have been such a memorable dichotomy.

I hung out with a rather derelict beach crowd years before that, so it's not that I'd couldn't relax in a group. It was the "you're out of it" thing, staring me in the face. Can't remember the year. Maybe '67.

But if I was "out of it" that one evening, there were many people older than me walking around clueless.

There wasn't really any instant change, re the population as a whole. Just a certain gradual movement to issues of the day and pleasures of the day.

And vocabulary changed with all that, and changed often. Musical change was no small part of it all.




Since I've lived through that period of incremental but fast change, it tweaks some questions about decades before that I have always thought of as some kind of general lumps of time...

far out!

Right on!

Cool, man!

I still talk like that

things were sharp, neat, cool

Frats, Greasers, Nerds

madras clothing, tight jeans, straight skirts, capezio shoes, ratted hair, brush cuts or waterfall haircuts,

homecoming queens, proms, after game dances

tye-dye shirts,

vinyl records, stereo record players

princess phones

This is all middle class high school stuff.

My parents drank cocktails and listened to Jimmy Dorsey, Jackie Gleason albums.

"out of sight", "thats happening", "far out", "dig it",