PSYCHEDELIC SHOW MAY BE A DOWNER FOR BOOMERS by Dick Feagler
Copyright (c) 1997, Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
The Plain Dealer March 26, 1997 NATIONAL; Pg. 2A

This bulletin just in from the drug war trenches: The
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum has called a
ceasefire to celebrate the contribution illegal substances
have made to popular culture. Far out!

In May, the rock hall plans an exhibit called "I Want to
Take You Higher: The Psychedelic Era, 196569." Let Drug
Czar Barry McCaffery put that in his bong and smoke it! The
exhibit will be a trip down memory lane for anybody who
survived the era with a memory. It is commonly said of the
'60s that if you remember them, you weren't there.
Fortunately, this isn't true, or it would ruin the planned
festivities. There is nothing like amnesia to throw cold
water on nostalgia.

But the exhibit will make things a little awkward for
Mommy and Daddy Boomer. After all, times, they have
achanged. Daddy Boomer drives a BMW now and Mommy Boomer
subscribes to Martha Stewart's serene little magazine. When
telling the kiddies about their parents' childhood, Mommy
and Daddy Boomer are apt to skip the years that came
between "Leave It to Beaver" and Jimmy Carter.

It is a solemn duty of parenting to warn your children
away from those sins that you have either outgrown or
become bored with. Many parents with kids in the DARE
program would just as soon not reminisce around the dinner
table about their carryingson back in the Summer of Love,
when incense was the deodorant of choice to mask
copproducing household smells.

Politicians were the first crop of Boomers who were
forced to invent a cover story for their adventures during
the psychedelic era. The leadoff fudger was Bill Clinton,
who copped the plea that he had smoked marijuana but had
not inhaled roughly the same imagery of imperviousness he
is currently using to describe the effects of campaign
contributions by Chinese arms dealers. But this did not
ring true to the masses of his peers who suspected perjury.
So democracy was put on hold until another way could be
found for a Boomer to admit to psychedelic sin without
seeming to endorse it.

Finally, some brilliant nominee, appearing before a
confirmation committee, invented the right spin to put on
his confession.

"I support the administration's current stern antidrug
policies," he said. "But I would be less than candid, Sen.
Grouch, if I did not admit that I, myself, experimented
briefly with marijuana back in 1968."

That worked. Pretty soon, every candidate for office was
remembering a period of "experimentation" with marijuana.
There was a certain sober detachment in putting it that
way. It conjured up an image of earnest young people in
white laboratory coats standing in front of beakers and
test tubes, getting zonked as a kind of science fair
project.

Probably I am the only person on the planet who actually
experimented with marijuana. I was out in San Francisco
covering the Summer of Love and interviewing many of its
celebrants, who have since grown up and become, to their
astonishment, the very thing they hated: concerned and
preachy parents with middleclass values. In
HaightAshbury, in that period that the rock hall will soon
memorialize, the question wasn't whether kids were on
drugs. The question was, what kind of drugs were they on? I
saw a lot of tiedyes and motorcycle colors and sandals.
But if anybody wore a white lab coat, I was absent that
day.

In keeping with the "when in Rome" theory of journalism,
I smoked a little marijuana to see what the euphoria was
all about. But being a person of intense loyalties, I
remained true to my anesthesia of choice, the martini
cocktail. This, after many eventful years, I subsequently
divorced on grounds of incompatibility.

Now we are in the middle of a multibilliondollar war
against drugs. The president has asked for some of this
military budget to be spent sending messages to children
that drugs are lethal, terrible, dumb and uncool.

And here comes the rock hall with an exhibit dedicated
to the years when drugs were considered liberating,
wonderful, mindexpanding and hip. What is little Johnny to
believe?

I don't blame the rock hall for this. History is
history. Half the reason rock 'n' roll got off to such a
flying start was that its listeners were too stoned to hear
it. Leaving drugs out of the history of rock 'n' roll is
like leaving the violin out of the history of Mozart.

But it's apt to be confusing to the kids. The glamorous
and colorful psychedelic era left a lot of dead bodies in
its wake. Somebody better tell the kids that the museum is
also a morgue.