Tuned In, Turned On

Tom Wolfe recorded an analogous moment in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," his 1968 chronicle of Ken Kesey, the acid-powered Merry Pranksters, and their bus driver, Neal Cassady-who'd once been Dean Moriarty in "On the Road." Kesey had turned the Hell's Angels on to LSD, hitherto a drug for seekers and aspiring mystics. During a summit meeting between Kesey and Augustus Stanley Owsley, the Henry Ford of high-quality acid, an Angel named Terry the Tramp humiliated and terrified a harmless kid from San Francisco State; the Pranksters had to plead with him not to kill the boy. The Angels, Wolfe wrote, "came to symbolize the side of the Kesey adventure that panicked the hip world. They were too freaking real . . . The majority of the hip world . . . were still playing the eternal charade of the middle-class intellectuals—Behold my wings! Freedom! Flight!—but you don't actually expect me to jump off that cliff, do you?" The destination card on Pranksters' 1939 International Harvester school bus read "Furthur"—yep, two u's but how far did Kesey's psychedelic anarchists really want to go? As the Beatles sang, "When you talk about destruction/Don't you know that you can count me out?"

Compared to Wolfe's reportage-written in a free-form style meant to fit his subject-much of 1968's literary fiction was stuck in the past. John Updike's "Couples," set during the Kennedy years, had become a quaint historical novel by the time it was published. Journalists wrote better, and closer to the moment: Wolfe, Norman Mailer in "The Armies of the Night," his Pulitzer Prize winning "non-fiction novel" of the previous year's march on the Pentagon, and Joan Didion in her collection of reported essays "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." The title piece, a group portrait of San Francisco hippies during 1967's supposed Summer of Love, will still curl your hair. These people did have their limits—a subject told Didion that shooting crystal meth "can lead to the hard stuff"-but one woman gave her five-year-old regular doses of acid and peyote: she and the child both called it High Kindergarten.

Predictably, the mainstream entertainment biz did its damnedest to cash in on the hippie craze. The musical "Hair" presented a Broadway vision of the counter-culture, with gruesomely clueless "rock" music and mass full-frontal nudity in the first-act finale. And the sketch-comedy series "Laugh-In" tried to hide its vaudeville roots with obsolescent jargon (sit-in, teach-in, be-in, love-in) a painfully "wacky" style and a "mod" fashion sense dating from back when people called the Beatles the Fab Four. Leaving aside the debuts of "60 Minutes" and Mister Rogers, the TV event of the year was Elvis Presley's "comeback" special. It varied Vegas-style production numbers with a sequence in which the rebel angel of the 1950s, clad in skin-tight black leather, sat-sat!-with some of his old bandmates and revisited the songs that had made him famous. A startlingly powerful performance, but it wasn't the sort of thing Elvis did anymore, and nobody in the counterculture would have been caught dead watching it. Who even knew it was on?

Despite all its potentially rich tensions and complications, 1968 didn't produce much fiction, film or art worth remembering. But popular music, in energetic transition from old to new-and new to old-left its mark. Soul music still clung to its gospel roots: Otis Redding's posthumous "Dock of the Bay" was still on the charts, and Aretha Franklin had such hits as "Chain of Fools"; she won a Grammy for the previous year's "R-E-S-P-E-C-T." (Which provided "Laugh-In" with its catchphrase "Sock it to me!") Yet James Brown and Sly Stone ("Dance to the Music") were inventing funk, and the Dells ("Stay in My Corner"), the Delfonics ("La La Means I Love You") and Marvin Gaye ("I Heard It Through the Grapevine") were moving toward the urban R&B that would dominate the '70s. Country music veered between the traditionalism of Merle Haggard's "Sing Me Back Home"and Glen Campbell's modernist "Wichita Lineman."

The Beatles' untitled White Album raced off in all directions at once: the rustic sound of the faux-cowboy song "Rocky Raccoon," the Led Zeppelin-like "Helter Skelter," the bluesy shuffle beat of "Revolution," the art-noise endurance test that was "Revolution #9." (Roll over, Stockhausen.) This was also the year they visited the Maharishi in India and the cutesy-poo animated film based on "Yellow Submarine" put a smiley-face on psychedelia. And the Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat," with its proto-punk rave-up "Sister Ray," pointed the way to one of rock and roll's many futures-though its title song was driven by a pounding piano straight outta Jerry Lee Lewis.

Inevitably, the musical and cultural explosions of the '60s led to retrenchment. Creedence Clearwater Revival's 1968 debut album was a return to meat-and-potatoes two-guitar rock, as if in response to the Beatles' arty productions. On "Beggars Banquet," the Stones-always traditionalists at heart-balanced "Sympathy for the Devil" with a purist cover version of "Prodigal Son," by the old Mississippi blues and gospel singer Robert Wilkins, and their own acoustic hillbilly lament "Dear Doctor." The Byrds, whose 1966 "Eight Miles High" had featured a trippy twelve-string guitar solo inspired by John Coltrane, released "Sweetheart of the Rodeo," a straight-up country album with steel guitar and fiddle. For psychedelic rockers to embrace the music of the hippie-bashers was revolutionary-or counter-revolutionary-and began bridging one of the era's great cultural divides. The album opened with "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," a hitherto unheard Bob Dylan song with the exhortation to "strap yourself to a tree with roots"-as opposed to being on your own with no direction home. By the end of 1968, hadn't we had enough of that?