LIKE AN OVERRIPE BANANA

1969 was a time when the psychedelic idealism of the counterculture of the late 60s was beginning to rot. Living communally, forsaking all material goods, and sharing partners, children, and living spaces, was turning out to be a lot more difficult than people expected, and grifters and narcissists were beginning to take over.  Increasingly, use of psychedelics to seek enlightenment, merged into simply getting high, with whatever was available, including hard drugs, like cocaine, speed and heroine.

Among the “hippies” a rising sense of paranoia hung in the air, though nobody had a name for it yet. It was just an ether.

Still, thousands of kids, inspired by Pop guru Timothy Leary’s admonition to “turn on, tune in, and dropout“, continued to run away from their safe Midwestern middle class homes to escape the stifling strictures of post World War II America on behavior, dress and manners, to seek enlightenment, attempt to join these steaming communities, and simply see what was going on.

Sidd Smith, a Midwestern teen and his buddy Carl, like Herman Hesse’s character, Siddhartha and his devoted friend Govinda, abandon their safe, Midwestern town to join thousands of kids invading California like a plague of locusts. It’s an intoxicating time, and the youth of the world are redrawing the world as the millennium dawns, and they think they see the age of Aquarius on the horizon.