In 1957 Jack Kerouac called
Salt
Lake
“a city of sprinklers.” It fit.
In an era typified by blind jingoism, bland consumerism and squeaky-clean conformity—it was a whole country of sprinklers, really—S
alt Lake City
distinguished itself by being even squeakier.
But in what would later be called by marketers and historians as “The Sixties,” sweeping changes would hit the nation, and not even Utah, isolated as it was, would be left out of the party.
“It hit here in ’67 or so,” says Steve Jones, who opened
Salt
Lake
’s first psychedelic shop, the Cosmic Aeroplane, in June of that year. “But it really started to happen on the coast—the Bay Area—and that kinda filtered inland. And it was not just teenagers; a lot of different people responded all at once and this whole bland, Perry Como kind of cultural thing just started to lift, like fog.”
One of the things that helped clear the cultural fog in
Salt
Lake
, like everywhere else in the country during the mid-to-late ‘60s, was music. Due to a “happy accident of geography,” as bookstore owner Ken Sanders puts it,
Salt
Lake
lay directly in the path of any band touring out of
San Francisco
. And
San Francisco
was the scene du jour in 1967: Country Joe, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service—they all were forging a revolutionary new sound, psychedelia, and they all played Salt Lake City on their way to bigger markets to the east. This put
Utah
in the enviable position of seeing San Francisco “garage” bands at some of their earliest tour dates. Sanders remembers one early gig particularly well.
“Me and a bunch of friends went to the Terrace Ballroom one night,” he chuckles. “Half the time we didn’t even know who the band was—the place was a social thing, a scene. So anyway, some band called Big Brother and the Holding Company comes out and plays this set, and this hippie chick clutching a bottle of Southern Comfort takes the stage and just starts wailing on the mic. Everybody’s like ‘Who is that?!’ By the end of the tour the band was called Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company.”
The old Terrace wasn’t the only hoppin’ joint in town, either. Bands played the several locations of the
University
of
Utah
, as well as the Old Mill, the Fairgrounds Coliseum, and
Bountiful
’s
Old
Valley
Music Hall
. Strangely, kiddie amusement Lagoon seemed to get the best acts: The Doors, the Who, Herman’s Hermits, the Stones. And, in one of history’s goofiest lineup blunders, Jimi Hendrix opened for the Monkees at Lagoon.
And while Jones’ Cosmic Aeroplane was a good place to find out about bands coming Utah and purchase “imported beads and bells from San Francisco,” the shop, originally located on 900 E. and 900 S., provided a rallying point for Utah’s expanding consciousness until its closure in 1991. Books, used records, underground comix and dope paraphernalia were available, and with a move to larger digs, the Aeroplane opened an experimental theater in back (the Human Ensemble, then featuring KSL news fixture Shelley Osterloh). The larger space also accommodated a draft counseling center run by Hal Sparck, who had frequent legal wrangles with the Selective Service as a result, but always prevailed. Aside from the Aeroplane and a handful of similar shops to spring up later (the General Store on State Street, the White Rabbit in the Avenues), there was no real hangout for people, no “Mormon Temple for the counterculture,” as Sanders puts it; the closest thing Utah had to a Haight-Ashbury “Hippie Hill” was Sugarhouse Park. Author/filmmakrer Trent Harris remembers it with a chuckle.
“
Sugarhouse
Park
was like a drive-in restaurant drug center—pot, speed, mescaline, LSD—they’d come right up to your car. And there’d be 4,000 cars lined up in there. The cops finally busted it. They wouldn’t let you have any fun. I got beat up by them—they cut off all my hair and just beat the shit out of me. So I took ‘em to court, got screwed over by my lawyer, and had to take him to court as well.”
But even before the Summer of Love, groundwork was being laid to help throttle
Utah
into the 20th century. In 1965, the NAACP had successfully lobbied the state legislature for the passage of a Public Accommodations Act (to prevent unfair housing discrimination, among other things), as well as a repeal on
Utah
’s ban on multiracial marriages. One NAACP member, Robert “Archie” Archuleta, cofounded a Hispanic awareness organization in 1967 called the Spanish Speaking Organization for Community, Integrity and
Opportunity
. Archuleta also founded the Joe Hill Club (named after the slain Industrial Workers of the World unionist who was executed in
Utah
—under suspicious circumstances—in 1915). And despite exhortations from publications like the Church News that women eschew the “so-called freedom” of careerism and “understand their true destiny” as wives and mothers, women’s groups were forming in
Utah
.
Straight-laced Salt Lakers started to grumble. Anti-hippie letters filtering into the
University
of
Utah
newspaper, The Daily Chronicle, accused “chronologically misplaced Neanderthals” of emulating beatniks, go-go girls, surfers and—worst of all—“in general doing as they please.” But with the formation of a local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at both the university and Granite High School, things were about to get a whole lot weirder in Utah. Just four months after forming, the SDS organized a “disruption” of a speech by Ronald Reagan, while simultaneously running a Reagan film festival—ostensibly to illustrate the then-California governor’s lamentable acting skills. Later that year, both Utah Governor Calvin Rampton and U. President James Fletcher received Christmas packages with bags of marijuana included, presumably courtesy of the SDS. The organization was able to lure the Grateful Dead for a benefit gig and controversial Yippie leader Jerry Rubin for speeches.
Antiwar protests began to boom in
Utah
. An April 1965 demonstration had only drawn about 40 people—but within five years more than 100 times that many were showing up to voice their disapproval with the war.
Utah
crowds were generally well behaved, but by this time less pacifistic expressions were starting to happen, too: The ROTC building at the
University
of
Utah
was firebombed in 1970. There was little actual damage to the brick and concrete structure, but the FBI was more than a little curious. Topping their list of suspects? Cosmic Aeroplane cofounder Sherm Clow.
“One day Sherm asked me for a ride up to the U.,” recalls Sanders. “So I’m pulling up on 1300 East and University Avenue to let Sherm out, and there’s this black sedan behind us, full of FBI agents—these guys in suits and dark shades, so stereotypical, there’s no way you could mistake these guys for anything else! They were following Sherm becase they suspected that he was the mad bomber that had blown up the ROTC building. Anybody that knew Sherm Clow knew what a klutz he was—the mere idea that he could have blown up anything at all was laughable.”
While the FBI never found the mad bomber, they had a few things to take their minds of it after
May 4, 1970
—the day of the
Kent
State
killings in
Ohio
. Within 48 hours, an empty WWII-frame building near the Student Union was in flames, and the next morning the National Guard Headquarters, just a block off campus, found its front wall blown out. Other, less destructive protests, involved local street protestors hurling
Dee
burgers at the fast-food chain’s giant clown mascots. (Had the FBI investigated these incidents, they could’ve nailed organizer Clow no problem.)
Artistically, the
Utah
counterculture had more going on than the psychedelic posters. It generated at least one great book (Ed Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, a memoir by which all naturalist writing is judged today) and at least one great folksinger in Utah Philips (whom singer Ani DiFranco recently collaborated with). The scene also produced at least one great hippie with “Charlie Brown” Artman. Self-described as the “Grand Poo of the
Temple
of the Rainbow Path,” Artman owned a psychedelic schoolbus with a teepee tied to the top (both of which he used for a home), dressed insanely (flowing cape, bare feet, and whatever clashed with either), and founded a haven for transient teens called the
Alameda
Street
Church
. When
Salt
Lake
cops confiscated his marijuana-packed medicine pipe in 1968, Artman actually expressed concern for their well-being, telling the Chronicle, “The pipe is a very powerful thing, and anyone who’s got that pipe cannot prevent himself from being turned on by it.”
“Looking back at it, a lot of the ‘60s were frivolous and silly–youthful idealism run amok,” says Sanders. “But I think there’s a lot of good that came out of it too, certain sensibilities like this real social and environmental political connection. And there are a lot of people from those days that are still involved in doing good here. Certainly a lot of it was just mindless protest for protest’s sake. But a lot of it did have meaning and did have impact.”
Author’s note: Inclusion of all or even most of the activists, artists, and general freaks who helped enrich the culture of
Utah
in the 1960s (and ever since) is beyond the scope of this story, and beyond the research skills of this writer. Much appreciation to all of you.