The End of the Fillmore East

...After years of failure in lib...

...The liberals talk a good line, but very few of them would really want to live next door to a police chief...

...He shouldnot be forced to compete directly with lib...

...The "ticky-tacky" song craze finally ended but the intellectual malady it represented lingers on...

...proof that no matter what I had seen with my and, by God, let's have an end to quibbling ! Were there not dozens, nay, scores of books laboriously fashioned by professors and other holy men which proved we were conformists...

...The filth will remain...

...Now it so happens that the rich do indeed have a lot to feel guilty about...

...The latter, by and large, have been peaceful, whereas a check at the local police station will corroborate the claim that, for example, the largest proportion of crimes are committed by transients - - by hangers-on...

...The dabbler in nostalgia will, of course, continue to prowl the back isues of the Village Voice, but not everyone finds that type of boredom palatable...

...His re, duced estimate of his own humanity must be eliminated...

...Commercialism was another factor and one difficult to rationalize for the cultists...

...He hustled dope, picked pockets, robbed apartments, loafed on people's stairs, or panhandled in the street...

...The same people will be floating on the streets of the "East 18 The Alternative October, 1971 Village," the same fifteen-year-old girls, bra-less and in college T-shirts, the same groups gathered around lone guitar players who struggle with the same two or three chords...

...Despite disclaimers by the management, they had their effect...

...who had highly praised The True Believers ), he rediculed the very idea that intellectuals should have a leading role in governing our society...

...It seems that every time a millionaire opens his mouth nowadays he confesses t~e sins of our society in public...

...garded as intellectual equals...

...He has a way of saying obviously sensible ~hings in an outrageous way...

...The trouble is not chiefly that our universities are unfit for students but that many present-day students are unfit for universit ies...

...running from the folly of American intellectuals he seems to me at times to swing too violently to the other side and overpraise working people, seeing in them civic virtues even they wouldn't claim to possess...

...Fewer and fewer people see the Lower East Side as a place to live and most often the disenchantment stems from the unsavory street elements that inhibit normal life...

...But the Hoffer fad soon ended when it was discovered that he had all the wrong (i.e...

...The reasons were, of course, multifold -among them drugs...

...They were all at the Fillmore East at one time or another-- Janis Joplin, Elton John, Jimmi Hendrix, the big rock groups...

...The conservative who has lived on the outskirts of liberal culture has come to know the liberal even better than the liberal knows himself...

...Most unforgivable of all, to card-carrying literati, he resisted on publicly exposing his love for the United States of America...

...T~eir tickets were in hand, and they did not worry about parking their Rolls or Maserati in the no parking zones...

...The Counter-Thinker First Things, Last Things By Eric Hoffer Harper, $4.95 A few years ago a woman from California wrote one of those songs that just happen to catch on...

...The Fillmore as a symbol of peace and new ideals lost its glitter...

...candidate at the University of California at Santa Barbara...

...To deny us the right to participate in academic society any longer is a negation of liberal intellectualism...

...The housing developments may have a looked alike from the outside, but the inside of each development home was different, reflecting the laarticular taste (or, if you wanted to get nasty aboutit, lack of taste) of the owner...

...In a year or so the Fillmore will be forgotten...

...The highs made one appreciate the music ( or did they merely help bear it...

...They live in exclusive neighborhoods, send their children to private schools, and use every loophole to avoid paying taxes...

...The answer is ohvions...

...t~eorge Nathan to a college chump cidentally) came a faster growing population of hangers-on...

...There are cafes here advertising "bring your own head," which set aside small hashish dens for their customers...

...I suspect the closing was in order...

...Drugs are rampant in the neighborhood...

...That is a damning commentary...

...But juveniles are juveniles and given to ignoring the play of irony in their lives...

...11, box 360, bloom ington, ind iana 47401...

...It is a commentary on this area that the closing of the Fillmore East will have little lingeririg effect...

...Thus, we must demand that his first year be ungraded, as each conservative student seeks to find his place in the academic community...

...instead of humbly paying obeisance to the power-hungry intellectual :ypes like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...But as always, reality played a trick on the cer, ified public intellectuals and Hoffer proved to be a maverick...

...It became all to much for the potentates of the media and the Gauleiters of the intellectual magazines...

...It really was time to close...

...While the establishmentarian intellectuals think, he counter-thinks, throwing aphorisms like jabs, blinding them with his intellectual foot-work and, all in all, having a good time for himself...

...Hoffer is the intellectual counterpuncher par .excellence...

...They - - the rock people, the juveniles -were initially the heralds of success...

...A multitude of rock stations covered the farewell and the airwaves were punctuated with periodic reports on the proceedings...

...Conservatives have never had equal opportunity in school...

...The hanger-on came here because, "this was where it was at...

...His appearances on CBS with Eric Sevaried were immensely popular...

...eral students who have had all the advantages of a first-class liberal education...

...eral-dominated public education, what conservative high school graduate feels prepared to go to Yale...

...The original exuberance and euphoria of the rock scene gradually lost its pristine aspects in favor of an even greater crassness...

...Americans were conformists...

...F a r from being proof of conformity, the mass-produced homes of the developments were proof of the incredible diversity of American life...

...It became a commercial success, was listened to and talked about for a while and then died a natural death from over-exposure...

...When the early influx of hippies came to this area, the number that came to dawdle, to gape, and clog the streets was rather small, but along with the rapid rise of the hippie population (now in decline, inGreat American Series "If you are lucky enough to have lived at a major American university as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for the American university is a movable illness...

...According to the Liberal theory, any self-instructed, formally untutored longshoreman who showed intellectual brilliance would fit in nicely, thank you, among the pages of the New Republic...

...The conservative is the only one who has bothered to read liberal balderdash wRha critical eye...

...As popularity skyrocketed, the entertainers asked incredible fees and the smaller houses like the Fillmore East were hurt...

...Since most of our anointed thinkers have made their careers saying outrageously silly things in an obvious way, Hoffer is a man to be revered...

...modernity forgets quickly and completely, for neomania demands the new...

...A few token conservatives lave been picked up by the Ivy League schools from time to time, but tokenism is an insalt to a people with a long cultural heritage...

...While it lasted it had its say, but it could not, in effect, cope with the time...

...It has only been a heritage that put emphasis on other thin~zs, like thrift, diligence, and deferrei gratification...

...The conservative student may need special tutoring in his first year...

...They were never the ones to stand around and wait in lines...

...An institution was coming to an end and the media were there with effusive eulogies...

...It so happened that at the time I was working as a meter-reader for a gas and electric company in a large eastern city...

...And the streets - - one need not be a "head" to note their effect on the teeming streets of the "East Village...

...The gap between the fashionable ides of the intellectual and Vhe realities of America life has, if anything, widened...

...His breed was harder, a breed bred on the streets of New York, a breed to whom no form of vice was foreign...

...Continuity to the historical process...

...It is provocative to speculate on how much the juveniles themselves are responsible for the very commercialism they so decry...

...If I had not had the opportunity as a meter-reader to see the reality of the housing-development, I would perhaps have gone along, willy-nilly, with the intellectual attit ode represented by the song, for at that time the "conformity" thesis was the fashionable idea without which no cocktail party could be a success...

...Oddly enough, for a few years he had a certain vogue among the intellectuals...

...Perhaps even with a touch of cynicism, for the audience at this last (all night) fete was by invitation only, while the faithful children milled the streets in an uncalculated display of sentiment...

...instead of hating the racist hard-hats, he said they were more deserving of praise than their intellectual masters...

...Instead of worshipping black militants he said they should stop yapping and start working...

...It is time to end the hypocrisy...

...But the worshipers of Mecca, the juveniles, were again left in the cold, not realizing, because of their youth, that they had been had...

...It does not permtt true pluralism, open discussion, and honest dialogue to flower...

...Those of us who have lived on the Lower East Side (preferentially labeled the "East Village" by the publicity-minded) during these years have seen the deterioration of the rock cult gathered at the Fillmore...

...At times, his attacks on in:ellectuals often seem to border on attacks on intellectuality itself...

...My job took me to many types of dwellings, from six-family walk-ups to enormous housing developments, and the more homes I saw, the more I became convinced that the song was wrong...

...But what they confess in public are not their private sins but the sins of society, the sins ~of the rest of us, and it is our breasts they are beating into a pulp...

...No one ever denied the rather substantial use of "grass" within the theater...

...The faded slogans of liberal culture are denied daily by the outcast status of the conservatives who have never been re...

...Conservatives have supposedly learned their place in the rural ghettos, with only a few of them straying close to the cities in olaces like Orange County, California...

...it would be the most radical kind of liberal intellectualism to demand that each conservative student be forced to compete directly with liberals at the very start of his academic career...

...The problem came from the rather typical "East Village" phenomenon, the hanger-on...

...Coming in vast numbers from all over the country to see and listen, they literally created the rock stars...

...unorthodox) ideas on race relations, the war and LBJ...

...It is as if a bar-room brawler got in the ring with a professional boxer and proceeded to beat the helI out of him...

...Oh, how they loathed capitalism I They had not in them a touch of gratitude for the Fillmore...

...The common people of Europe eloped wilh history to America and have lived in common-law marriage with it, unhallowed by the incantations of men of words...

...It is a valid heritage...

...The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us...

...But the active discrimination that has been directed against conservatives by liberal faculty members over an entire generation has discouraged conservatives from applying...

...Yet day after day I would hear that song and, what was worse, would listen to people tell me how accurate the song was in exposing the outrageous conformity of our national life...

...What this has done is to give the area a rougher atmosphere, a hardness that was missing, say, ten years ago...

...Here, after all, was the man they had been looking for: the proleterian intellectual, the natural man who read Montaigne, Roosevelt's common man, but one who knew big words, egalilarianism incarnate...

...Needless to say, the Fillmore devotees were hurt by these roamers and the theater itself was hurt...

...He continues on his merry way, saying things like the following: "The cores of our cities are packed with people who lack the enterprise to take advantage of opportunities, and the character to resist temptation...

...This is, in fact, one of the most frequently adduced reasons given for the Fillmore's end...

...The Alternative October, 1971 17 to college just as much as liberals do...

...Herded like animals into midwestern Bible colleges and southern universities, they have feared to apply to Harvard...

...Hoffer is, obviously, one of a kind...

...Lower East residents implicitly agree to this - - the hanger-on has wrought more havoc in this area than any of the hippies...

...The only person who truly knows, understands, and shares the love, hate relationship with the liberal intellectualist is the conservative...

...And the victim has been everybody from the weekend visitor to the Fillmore, to the local citizenry...

...Hoffer has courageously refused (continued to page 19) the alternative is available for classroom use by faculty members and teaching associates, bulk rates are availab~ on request, address all inquiries to the alternative, circulation department, r.r...

...The Fillmore's Bill Graham could not meet the fees demanded by singers who sang of purity and love, who belabored the horrors of modern commercial society, who cried in lament over the war...

...This is no reason to exclude us from the campus in the final third of the twentieth century...

...And what of Hoffer...

...Unfortunately, the hanger-on could never be classified with the harmless hippie tourist...

...The song told us of "ticky-tacky" houses inhabited by "ticky-tacky" people...

...Being voguish it also drew the fashionable-minded who invariably stood out from the rest...

...The intellectuals dropped Hoffer and continued their search for a proleterian intellectual, this time one who would play by the rules...

...Indeed, the uniqueness of modern America derives in no small part from the fact that America has kept intellectuals away from power and paid little attention to their political views...

...Admittedly there are times when, to use his own words, he has "an old man's lendency to snort at the self-important young," and other times when he lets his righteous anger dictate his thoughts...

...These people, though drawing some opprobrium from the blue-leaned and mod, were not a problem...

...And, to their surprise, he turned out to have all the wrong ideas...

...The conservative, in asShining the role of the outcast for the liberal, has permitted the liberal to define himself in terms of the man on the lowest rung of academic life, namely, the conservative...

...I'm afraid that is the extent of my reaction to the end of the Fillmore East...

...For a generation conservatives have been relegated to second class academic citizenship...

...All the more reason to be grateful for the existence of Eric Hoffer, the major thrust of whose career from The True Believers to First Things, Last Things might be summed up in the phrase, "a lot of what intellectuals know just ain'v true...

...in some places it is an insan~ asylum...

...Report From New York The End of the Fillmore East N i c k o l a s Lupinin On 27 June of this year the great rock haven of the East, the Fillmore, closed with appropriate fanfare, tears, and logic...

...When I raised this point with my intellectual betters, I was inevitably told that no matter what I had seenwith my own eyes, no matter how much evidence of diversity ! saw every day as a meterreader, no matter how much empirical evidence piled up to disprove the fashionable doctrine - - the doctrine was right...

...Far right onl" [ ] • .Garry North is a Ph.D...

...In the final analysis, the modern liberal intellectualist needs the conservative...

...But these are quibbles...

...One does frequently find it difficult to separate hard rock and drugs -- certainly on the Lower East Side...

...The juveniles were not the only ones to attend the Fillmore...

...The message was clear: we live in a nation which is being smothered by conformity...

...No, most conservatives never learned to takedrugs in their teens, and the American Revolution was the closest thing to anarchy we could ever muster, but this is hardly to say that we have been without a culture...

...The symbol began to crumble...

...Our conformist suburban "ticky-tacky" housing developments reflect the personalities of their robot-like inhabitants and the conformist spirit of the nation...

...Who knows who is sadder for it...

...What the liberals in Cambridge and New Haven are really afraid of is an influx of "undesirables" into their neighborhoods...

...The only thing wrong with that idea was that it wasn't true and it was most demonstrably untrue precisely where the intellectuals told us it was most true, i.e., in the Levittowns and other developments...

...The intellectuals who shape our opinions told us we were conformists and what could be better proof of our conformity than our mass-produced homes, each indistinguishable from the other...

...Crime in the streets and insolence on the campus are sick forms of adolethcents self-assert ion...

...If you simply went to the developments and looked at the seemingly identical houses, you couldn't help but notice that each house was different because the people who lived in the houses were different...

...All power to the competent...