Counterculture

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead

Sooner or later, this blog was going to have to get around to MAD, right?  We could have done the 1968 election issue, with all of the candidates’ pictures scrambled (and maybe we’ll get to that one eventually).  But this issue — this cover, at least– is priceless:  Alfred E. Neuman– by this date universally recognized as the archetypal dope–decked out as a “hippie,” with a decorative border incorporating some distinctive five-part leaves and a classic MAD motto:  ”Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead.”  (”Drop dead” was a favorite MAD expression.) Here, Al is sporting a scraggly beard and longer red hair than usual, but he has the familiar gap-toothed grin, freckles, jug ears, and vacant expression.  Plus beads, flowers in the hair, cowbell and bear-claw necklace– like, wow.

“The Hippie”: Becoming a laugh line and a stereotype

To land on the cover of MAD in the 1960s was to achieve some sort of pinnacle of pop-cultural notoreity; MAD editors wouldn’t have bothered with you if you weren’t somehow culturally “of the moment.”   But the famous individual, or trend, or icon, or sacred cow had to have attained enough breadth of recognition to allow for sufficient pungency as a MAD lampoon.  And so the arrival of the hippie get-up on MAD in April 1968 tells us quite a lot about the hardening and the codifying of this stereotypical “Sixties” character.

It all happened pretty quickly.  Etymologists generally point to an early-1965 usage of “hippie” (in TIME magazine) as the first “conventional” use of the word, as opposed to earlier, more marginal uses– as variants of the beatnik-era “hipster,” for example.  So throughout 1965 and 1966– and especially by the January 1967 “Be-In” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and, later that year, the “Summer of Love”– the hippie moved rapidly from being “sub-cultural,” socially detached, and “different” to being an utterly familiar archetype–AND a figure of nearly bottomless hilarity.  I would not be surprised if there were “hippie” Halloween costumes in stores by 1968–as there are today.   I wonder when the first sitcom hippies appeared– 1968 again would be a pretty good bet. ( I know that some kind of nadir was reached the following year, when Lawrence Welk showed up in wig and full hippie regalia on his show:  not hard to find–but hard to watch–on YouTube.)

A “weird sub-culture”

So here’s MAD, throwing its considerable weight behind this process of Stereotype Formation.  I remember this issue well (I was 17 when it appeared on the newstands, its price now “30 cents– Cheap” instead of 25), not so much because of the cover but because of the hilarious (well, maybe you had to be there) send-up of one of my favorite TV shows, “Mission: Ridiculous.”   But the issue also includes an extensive “cover story”– a mock magazine called “Hippie: The Magazine that Turns You On (if you’re cool enough to light it up and smoke it!)”  The introduction says:  ”There’s a wild new group of people who have become prominent in America recently.  They have their own unique language, their own strange behavior, and their own bizarre philosophy which is commonly misunderstood by many oldsters.  The group is known as ‘Moderate Republicans.’”    It goes on to explain that there’s another “weird sub-culture” kn0wn as hippies, and MAD is going to explain them in this magazine as a public service.

For sentimental hippies?

The magazine includes fake movie ads (”The Wild Freakout Acid Trip at the Hippie Teeny-Bopper Love-In Orgy on the Strip”); classifieds (”Help! I’m being held prisoner in my Hi-Fi and TV-equipped own room in the suburban home of my materialistic, conformist parents”); a takeoff on the Peanuts “warm puppy” bestseller, this one called ”Uptight is a Dry Sugar Cube”; a gossip column (”Drachma the Digger has made arrangements for starving N.Y. orphans to receive food packages from Vietnam War Orphans”); and a gift guide for “sentimental hippies who want to collect relics of the past:  shoes, ties, soap, bras, draft cards, combs.”

You get the picture.

Finally, it’s been so long since I looked at MAD that I forgot that they carried no advertisements–except gag ads, like this takeoff on ads for “100 millimeter” cigarettes from the back cover of this issue:

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EYE magazine, where hipness met consumerism, was a brief candle amidst the flickering lights of the 1960s.

EYE magazine was a short-lived (15 issues, 1968-69) effort by the Hearst Corporation to cash on the exploding youth market in publishing (and, of course, in advertising profits).  The rainbow logo, with its echoes of Peter Max and  ”Op” art, gives you a hint right away.  Hearst was already publishing Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, and Harper’s Bazaar– and EYE, it seems, was largely meant for younger, female readers, to judge strictly by the advertising in this issue:  makeup, perfumes, hair products, more makeup, handbags, and a Wonder Bread (”Helps catch boys!”) ad inside the back cover:  ”Don’t forget this: boys love to eat. And they love Wonder sandwiches.”).

The Beatles–two of them, at least–and “Beautiful Persons.”

This issue features counterculture superstar John Lennon, in an oddly unmemorable (not to mention poorly focused) photograph by Linda Eastman, already gaining a reputation for her portraits of rock musicians.  He and Paul McCartney had been in New York in May for a whirlwind visit in connection with the creation of Apple Corps, their new company.  Their “101 hours” in New York are chronicled by Lillian Roxon, the Australian journalist who would soon be publishing her “Rock Encyclopedia,” a landmark in rock history.  Roxon was a Contributing Editor at Eye, and was responsible in this issue for two other pieces.  The first is a feature called “Elevator: People on the Way Up (and Down),” in which she calls the reader’s attention to 27-year-old “Mike Cimino,” who had just won the award for the World’s Best Television Commercial (a spot for Eastman Kodak), and who had his eye set on doing something big in Hollywood.  (As Michael Cimino, he would direct The Deerhunter and win an Oscar in 1978).   The second is an embarrassing one-page sermon on “Cosmetics of the Soul,” described as “the art of being as beautiful inside as outside. . . . Whatever you want to call it, it’s what everyone wants to be these day.  A Beautiful Person.”

Glitz, glamour, and guys with money

EYE was well known for its high-quality inserts:  foldout posters of celebrities, a record, a comic book (Spiderman).  In this issue, there are record reviews, a car review (the Bond-ish Lotus Europa), a fashion spread (fake furs, sexy models), an article about flying a glider, an interview with Jean-Luc Godard, an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s best-selling The Pump House Gang, an article about student radicals, and a gushing profile of four under-30 male entrepreneurial success stories, with the guys posing together in a bank vault: “Members of a generation in a hurry . . . not likely to stand still waiting for Success to happen.”

The conquest of cool

Though it was a brief candle in the life of Sixties publishing, EYE might well stand as Exhibit A for the “rise of hip consumerism” so well documented by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool (1997)–the rather rapid “discovery” that hipness and the counterculture were easily converted into commodities, and could be effective bandwagons for making money, even for corporations as historically identified with the conservative Establishment as Hearst.

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In the long hot summer of 1968, the ordinarily staid Saturday Evening Post published this astonishingly risqué cover.  (The Post was by now several  years into its attempt to re-brand itself as just the four-letter “Post,” to compete with Life, Look, and Time; it would change back to the full title in 1968 in a logo re-design, but the entire magazine folded in 1969.)   For most of the 20th century, the Post was famed for commissioning wholesome, high-quality (read: expensive) illustrations for its weekly covers.  Norman Rockwell was only the most famous (and probably the most wholesome) of the commercial artists who worked for the Post.  By the 60s, most of this had gone by the boards, though the Post continued to turn to Rockwell occasionally, at least until December 1963; his last cover for the Post was a memorial portrait of president John F. Kennedy.

Even Playboy cover girls in the 1960s were a lot more covered up than this model–the 23-year-old (maybe 24; accounts vary) Lauren Hutton, already a Vogue cover favorite.  (Ms. Hutton is probably not crazy about the nearly universal Internet descriptor of herself as the “gap-toothed supermodel.”) The model (unidentified in any way inside the magazine) displays a lot of midriff and a provocative decolletage while modeling what appears to be some art director’s idea of the garb of a Middle Eastern concubine.  ”What they’re wearing instead of clothes,” the headline says: “The Big Costume Put-on.”  ”They” in this sense is clear: “they” is not “us,” the middle-class, more than a little conservative grown-ups who read the “Post.”  ”They” is, simply put, “American youth.”  As the magazine’s editor, Bill Emerson, explains:  ”The turned-on people of today wear all sorts of extraordinary things instead of clothes. . . . You can very easily think . . . of clothing as weaponry. . . . It looks as if that curious subculture known as youth has ambushed us fogy-boppers with their costumes and is firing away.  The ammunition is not deadly, but it does make you feel angry and 150 years old.”
Buttressed by a photo essay deeper in the magazine, featuring numerous young people bedecked in slightly Edwardian or Indian or Elizabethan or military surplus or even vintage American fashions, Emerson waxes anthropological:  ”Man is changing his attitude about himself . . . This mind-boggling costume party has a much more serious message than simple disguise.  It may well be a part of a ritual effort to isolate a personality, and there is some question as to what will emerge.”

This cover story belongs to a genre that would by now be quite familiar to readers in 1968.  It might be called “Look at what those kids are (fill in the blank) now!”  The blank could be filled in with: wearing, saying, listening to, smoking, drinking, watching, listening to.  Magazine editors and photographers loved the so-called “counterculture.”  ”Those kids” made great pictures, they made great copy, and they sold magazines.  And if you could layer onto this head-shaking voyeurism a veneer of scholarly perspicacity, all the better.  Here that’s provided by none other than Marshall McLuhan (”maestro of media,” as SEP calls him), quoted extensively in this “Fashion” section.   A little McLuhan goes a long way, so here’s a little (we’ll revisit him again in a later post):  ”The mini-skirt, of course, is not a fashion.  It is a return to the tribal costume worn by men and women alike in all oral societies.  As our world moves from hardware to software [Ed. note:  This is 1968!], the mini-skirt is a major effort to reprogram our sensory lives in a tribal pattern of tactility and involvement.”

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