The
Microbus, Cars, and the Hippies
What is of particular
interest is the overlap of worldviews that took place between a car culture in
America that had reached its zenith during the 1950s and the counterculture of
the subsequent decade. Both car culture and hippie ideology espoused freedom;
however, one had its origins in design, color, standardization and
industrialization, while the other was based on transcendentalism, shamanism,
free love, and drugs.
One contemporary view of hippies and
the automobile is that it was hippies who ultimately “killed the car,” or at
least killed the kinds of cars that people once loved during the 1950s and
early 1960s, but any discussion of hippies is bound to be superficial unless
one incorporates obvious social complexities.4 Hippies were mobile,
and some hippies did own cars, vans, buses, or motorcycles.
Sociologist John Robert Howard, a
keen observer of the hippies during the late 1960s, not only dated the
appearance of the term “hippie” to sometime in the Fall of 1966, but also
classified hippies into four various distinct groupings – visionaries, freaks,
midnight hippies, and plastic hippies.5 According to Howard, the
visionaries articulated a coherent ideology that was opposed to the automobile.
Visionaries inverted the values of their parents and substituted voluntary
poverty for wealth and status. In contrast, freaks were druggies who did not
figure much in the automobile story, with the exception of their hitchhiking up
and down California’s coast highway 101 and catching rides in battered vans. A Newsweek reporter described one such van
as having an “interior green with a purple dashboard and curtains and rugs
strung throughout. A set of copper bells jingles intermittently.”6
Midnight hippies, however, undoubtedly owned cars, and perhaps are most
relevant for our discussion. Midnight hippies were older, typically in their
30s, and bridged a world between the straights and the hippies. Often they were
academics, working in a world of tolerant ideas, but they still had functions
in everyday life and a steady paycheck. Finally, Howard labeled a group of
hippies “plastic.” These were individuals who joined the movement without a
deep commitment, ostentatiously wearing beads but without committing their
lives to “transformation by example.”
Although not “true believers,”
midnight and plastic hippies undoubtedly drove cars that were different. These
cars tended to be older, unusual, and often decorated. Little has been written
on this topic beyond commentaries on the VW Combi or the “Majic Bus.” . Painted
in psychedelic colors, often fitted with a mattress in the back, the Type 2 or
Transporter, was produced as a split window VW bus until 1967. Underpowered,
hippies often replaced its VW logo by the peace symbol.7 One former
hippie remembered that
From 1964 until the mid-70s, there
were an assortment of unusual cars that came into my life. I think back on
these as “hippie cars.” They were acquired as part of dope deals, abandonment,
and other unorthodox means and never really belonged to anyone in the sense of
title, insurance, etc. A major consideration was the amount of unexpired time
on the license. The first was a Saab Station wagon with a 2 cycle engine. One
of those Saabs that you poured a quart of oil in the gas tank to make a 2-cycle
mix. I think it made about 8 trips from Ohio to San Francisco, northern
California and back. Then came a baby blue Nash Rambler 2 door coupe, a 1954 Hudson
Hornet and a 52 Buick Special. The Buick was dark brown and called the “Roach.”
The Hudson had more room in the back seat than any car ever, was green, and of
course was called the “Green Hornet.” I also owned collectively a Volkswagen
bus with 2 hinged doors on both sides. . . .
Somewhere in between all these cars
was a 50-ish BMW motorcycle. A 500cc vertical single
cylinder. . . .The Beemer was slow and slow. It ran 62 mph flat
out. It lasted six years with absolutely no maintenance at all! Hippies didn’t
seem to own tools.
It’s easy to see what this
assortment of vehicles had in common. They were 10+ years old when cars lasted
five and were undesirable in a pre-energy crisis 70 mph interstate world. The
little Nash and Volvo were the epitome of automotive counter culture. The
Beemer’s name was “stodgy.” The Volkswagen van went to California and back on
the interstate and was passed by every other car on the road. The Hudson was in
that automotive limbo of being a car that wasn’t made anymore and the Buick –
well it was Buick.
These things became part of the
lifestyle with constantly changing affects. The Nash Rambler ended its’ days
covered with concert posters from the Avalon and Fillmore Ballrooms. The
Hudson’s swan song was a short stint as a demolition derby car since no one
could get a title for it.8
A similar sense of the cars that
hippies drove was described by Peter Jedick in his fictional account of hippie
culture and life in Kent, Ohio during the late 1960s:
Like I explained before, everything
back in the 60s was kind of communal:
our weed, our food, our albums, even our automobile. The vehicle of
choice was purchased the previous spring from Murph’s older brother for $25,
$6.25 apiece. Not bad, huh?
So what if it was a huge rusted out
’59 Chrysler New Yorker. The price was right even though its V-8 engine sucked
up gasoline like elephant drinks water. What the hell, gas was only a quarter a
gallon.
The Chrysler did look a little out
of place on a campus filled with hippie vans, Corvairs, and Volkswagen beetles.
We tried to compensate by decorating it with those yellow plastic stick-on
flowers that were in vogue at the time. We put them on the floor panels, the
trunk, the hood, even the roof, but all it did was make it look even more obscene.
Did we care? Hell, no. We were the
trendsetters, not slaves to the fashion dictates of the age. We were confident
that once our contemporaries saw the advantages of our ride they would want one
themselves.
After all, the Chrysler seated six
comfortably, ten if necessary, started on a dime and best of all, no car
payments. What more could a college kid ask for?9
Perhaps the quintessential vehicle
associated with the hippies was Ken Kesey’s 1939 International school bus that
he converted into a camper for his “Merry Pranksters.” One observer described
it as “the original psychedelic bus, the precursor of the wildest transit
system ever unloaded on the world’s roadways of rainbow colors and blaring
music and long-haired men and women packed together with their
necessities. . . ”10 The “Bus” reflected hippies’ high priority
for sound, as described by Tom Wolfe in his classic The Electric Kool-Aid Test:
Kesey gave the word and the
Pranksters set upon it one afternoon. They started painting it and wiring it
for sound and cutting a hole in the roof and fixing up the top of the bus so
you could sit up there in the open air and play music, even a set of drums and
electric guitars and electric bass and so forth, or just ride. Sandy went to
work on the wiring and rigged up a system with which they could broadcast from
inside the bus, with tapes or over microphones, and it would blast outside over
powerful speakers on top of the bus. There were also microphones outside that
would pick up sounds along the road and broadcast them inside the bus. There
was also a sound system inside the bus so you could broadcast to one another
over the roar of the engine and the road. . . . There was
going to be no goddamn sound on that whole trip, outside the bus, inside the
bus, or inside your own freaking larynx, that you couldn’t tune in on and rap
off of.11
Hippies not only drove cars, they
also owned tools and fixed them. Perhaps the most significant development in
do-it-yourself automobile repair post-WWII was the consequence of an
engineer-turned-hippie’s efforts to teach everyday folks to repair their VWs.
In 1969, the first edition of John Muir’s
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the
Compleat Idiot appeared, and its 5,000 copies quickly sold out. By the
1990s this clearly-written and well-illustrated repair manual had gone through
16 editions, and became the first of a series of eclectic publications from
John Muir Publications. Muir’s intentions were simple: to enable those who had previously thought of
themselves as mechanically challenged to perform everything from regular
maintenance to the rebuilding of a VW engine. Muir, educated at
California-Berkeley in civil engineering, had held a series of technical jobs
for much of his working life, but found himself in Taos, New Mexico in the late
1960s and the owner of John’s Garage. Beginning with the writing of simple
instructions for a woman to grind valves, Muir and his third wife Eve compiled
a manual that featured the remarkable illustrations of artist Peter Aschwanden.
Throughout the narrative, Muir inserted bits of philosophical wisdom, including
the following:
While the levels of logic of the
human entity are many and varied, your car operates on one simple level and
it’s up to you to understand its trip. Talk to the car, then shut up and
listen. Feel with your car; use all of your receptive senses and when you find
out what it needs, seek the operation out and perform it with love. The type of
love your car contains differs from you by timescale, logic level and
conceptual anomalies but it is “life” nonetheless. Its karma depends on your
desire to make and keep it – ALIVE!12
To this day, no
automobile repair manual is as clear or as easy to use for the shade-tree home
mechanic than How to Keep your Volkswagen
Alive.
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