10. The Three Admonishments
10. The Three Admonishments
From an invitation to spiritual growth, to a military recruitment slogan, and finally an ad for running shoes. The flowering and fall of the 1960s counterculture in three iconic slogans.
“The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.” — Walter Isaacson, prominent author, journalist and biographer of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
“People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They’re still being passed around: the music and the ideas.” — Bob Dylan (1992)
Whether remembered with hazy reverence on the left, or fear and loathing on the right,
the 1960s remain our political and cultural touchstone, either a high-water mark in social progress or the low tide of anarchy and depravity, depending on your point of view.
Personally I’m a high-water guy. And while, of course, the sixties literally began on January 1, 1960, I nominate as opening day Friday, November 23, 1963, the day the gunfire in Dallas jump-started a generation.
The ‘60s were off and running: JFK assassinated. Freedom Summer marchers murdered. Malcom X assassinated. MLK assassinated. RFK assassinated. America destroying Vietnam beyond Vladimir Putin’s wildest dreams.
And rising up in opposition to this culture of death is, miraculously, a full-blown, unprecedented youth counterculture.
Be Here Now - Published 10/12/71
According to The Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Be Here Now: The Transformation of Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D into Baba Ram Dass, is “the seminal counterculture text.” It has sold more than two million copies.
Or, as GQ Magazine puts it : “Be Here Now was a fixture on every bona fide hippie bookshelf in the 1970s.”
Richard Alpert was a wunderkind psychologist who taught at Stanford and Berkeley before heading east in 1961 with faculty appointments to four different departments at Harvard.
But as fate would have it, Alpert and his equally brilliant colleague Timothy Leary managed to obtain from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals a legal supply of purified magic mushrooms, and thus began the infamous 1962 Harvard Psilocybin study.
The researchers ingested the psychedelics themselves, and also provided the drug to students at Harvard’s Divinity School to study its efficacy as a tool for spiritual enlightenment. Despite having secured prior approval from the university, Alpert and Leary were both fired when their exploits became front-page news.
They regrouped as a nonprofit institute, in a mansion nestled on a 2,300-acre estate in upstate New York, bankrolled by an heir to the Mellon fortune. The two researchers continued experimenting there, this time with LSD-25, another Sandoz compound, which the CIA had been testing as a possible tool for mind control. [You can’t make this shit up!]
Alpert said he tripped more than 400 times. Somehow, he also found time to co-discover, edit, and publish, for the first time the in the West, the 14th-century Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Entranced by the eastern approach to human consciousness, Alpert moved to India in 1967 and immersed himself in yoga, meditation, Hinduism and Buddhism. After six months in the Himalayas he returned to the West and wrote Be Here Now, named for an admonishment from his spiritual mentor.
Richard Alpert had been reborn as Ram Dass, “Servant of God.”
Be Here Now was a 416-page illustrated guide that introduced America’s rebellious youth to the full panoply of Eastern spiritual practices — yoga, massage, mindfulness, meditation, karma, the I Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads — work that would occupy him for the rest of his long life as a spiritual teacher and prophet of love.
Love love love. All you need is love. And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
Be All You Can Be - Premiered 1/1/1981
The US Army didn’t need a catchy recruitment slogan prior to 1973. It had done just fine with the draft, aka mandatory conscription, ever since 1917.
“I Want You For U.S. Army,” accompanied by Uncle Sam’s accusatory finger, was all they had to say, through two world wars and beyond.
Vietnam was another story entirely; America’s youth had begun to just say no in record numbers. By June 1973 — more than 575,000 Vietnam-era draft resisters later — the US ended mandatory conscription.
But the transition to an all-volunteer force was a tad rocky, to put it mildly. During the remainder of the 1970s alone, the army cycled through three different recruitment slogans, none of which was attracting sufficient volunteers… even in peacetime.
So AW Ayer, the Army’s advertising agency, went back to the drawing board and this time they struck paydirt. Their basic insight was both simple and brilliant:
Don’t put the stress on serving your country, let alone killing anybody. You have to make it about them individually, the recruits. Show them what’s in it for them. Offer them personal growth along with future well-paying careers.
The resulting slogan was “Be All You Can Be.”
“You’re reaching deep inside you,” intones the soundtrack vocal, “for things you’ve never known.”
Remind you of something? It was the perfect blend of 1960s counterculture and 1970s human potential movement.
“Be All You Can Be” was an instant hit when it started airing in 1981. Recruitment metrics went off the charts. It remained the Army’s slogan for 20 years and was eventually elected to the Advertising Hall of Fame.
“Be Here Now,” on the other hand, was RIP.
And thus was the hippie generation’s universal invocation to prayer transformed into Gen X’s ur-military slogan. It took all of ten years. Capitalism was much slower then.
These first “Be All You Can Be” spots aired on national TV during college football bowl games over New Year’s Day weekend in 1981, three weeks before the inauguration of President-Elect Ronald Reagan.
Just Do It - Shouted 1/17/77; Repurposed 7/1/88
Even the US Army can’t claim to have given the ultimate middle finger to the prostrate corpse of the 1960s. That dubious honor belongs to a sneaker company. Here is the true story.
Dan Wieden, co-founder of Nike’s upstart ad agency Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, Oregon, recounts the “Just Do It” origin story in the 2009 documentary Art & Copy. It seems that Wieden got his inspiration in 1988 from the very last words shouted a decade earlier by the infamous murderer Gary Gilmore, who, like Wieden, was originally an Oregonian.
Hooded and strapped into a padded chair, and just before being executed by a five-man Utah firing squad, as he had specifically requested, Gilmore’s exact final words were, “Let’s do it.”
Wieden, exercising a bit of artistic license, juiced it up into Nike’s famous slogan.
The first iteration was gentle enough: A folksy network television spot featuring a beloved San Francisco character, the 80-year-old ultra marathoner Walt Stack (who was, incidentally, a retired bricklayer’s hod carrier and a lifelong communist).
Nike’s first “Just Do It” ad from 1988, featuring Walt Stack on the Golden Gate bridge
A gentle enough message, yes? But over time, as American society has changed, so has the subtext, to something more along the lines of “Just Do It: I don’t care what your excuse is.” Or even, “Just Do It because I said so!”
To my ear, at least, this slogan has acquired some vaguely fascistic baggage. It’s the assertion of the internal (or external) authoritarian command voice. So perfectly appropriate to our current day! Now that’s a slogan with legs.
And that’s the way it is.
To thank you for reading all the way to the end, here’s an inspiring example of Peak Sixties, Be Here Now energy.
It’s the great keyboardist and vocalist Billy Preston (the ‘Fifth Beatle’ during their last year as a group), shown here in a rare 1973 performance of his hit, “That’s the Way God Planned It.” Preston also recorded and toured with Little Richard, Sam Cooke, the Everly Brothers, Ray Charles, Sly Stone, Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, among others.
You may recall him performing this very song with an all-star backing band at the famous 1971 Concert for Bangladesh in Madison Square Garden. This more intimate version features Preston with an outstanding quartet. It was apparently recorded on the fly in a local studio in front of a small live audience. He takes them to church, a few video glitches notwithstanding.
Enjoy and Namaste! -Art