Skid Marks In The Sky

While neither the first nor the last Hippie, Backstreet was in many ways the quintessential Hippie. Today the Hippie experience has been glamorized and sanitized by the dreaming of the young and the gleaning of the old. When confronted with the word "Hippie" most people today would respond with words such as, "peace, love, communes, and togetherness," Backstreet was only into peace and love (as he used to say), "Upside your head." And while he played and partied through a number of communes, and while he constantly had large crowds of people living at his various homes his most telling comments on communal relationships were: "Ten zeros still equals zero," and "All you get for nothing is nothing." From beginning to end the idea of togetherness to Backstreet was always a distillation of the gang motto, "You see, there's US and then there's THEM."Backstreet's experiences covered the whole range of experimentation and rebellion that the Hippies came to symbolize. From the "Summer of Love" in People's Park and Haight Ashbury, (he helped bury the Hippie in San Francisco) through Drop City, Colorado to the Armadillo in Austin, Texas.Backstreet was there. Dropping acid, smoking dope, snorting coke, and constantly drunk he led, followed, or got out of the way for fifteen years from coast to coast. More than the Lost Generation of the post W.W.I era or the Beat Generation of the 1950's the Hippie Generation represents the ultimate in missed opportunities, lost dreams, and eventually counterproductive goals. This is so because of the sheer size of the movement. Instead of tens of thousands there were millions directly involved, and through the wonders of commercialization there were and are tens of millions of fellow travelers who adopted the clothes, music, slang, hair, and drugs. But, underneath there was something hollow, something with the feel of the sordid, the wasted, the lost. Millions of tacky experiences glossed over and called love. Millions of lives filled with talent wasted and called freedom. Millions of lost opportunities for real contributions called peace. The peace of the grave yard in the lives of so many Hippies came to symbolize a rebellion against those who conquered the world by those who benefited the most from that conquest.Most of the stories in this book have been transcribed from interviews with participants, newspaper accounts, tapes from fireside and gang Rap Sessions, and an extensive collection of letters written by Backstreet himself. Backstreet always said, "I'll record my whole life and then when I'm gone you can just play it back." In a large sense that is what I have done in compiling this biography. The extensive tape archives constructed and compiled by Backstreet represent a treasure trove of oral history and ethnographic research relating to the Hippie era. The first person is used whenever the records justify a complete re-creation of the account in Backstreet's own words.