Historical documents reveal that people actually took Jane Fonda seriously in the Sixties. Photograph: Paul McConnell/Getty
It is Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane who is supposed to have said, "If you can remember anything about the 60s, you weren't really there."
That's clearly not true, because in this Sunday's coming Observer Music Monthly magazine, Kantner talks to Ed Vulliamy at fascinating length about the First Summer of Love, 40 years ago. By 1965, in San Francisco, says Kantner: "The music was just another thing to do at the concert. Sometimes it was the least interesting thing. Everything was exploding, a challenge to the establishment: DON'T TRUST THESE PEOPLE. There was a nexus of intelligent people: costume had changed, there was this window between the invention of the contraceptive pill - God bless it - and contagious diseases... People call it hedonism, but it wasn't. It was: 'We will break your laws at our leisure.'" Right on!
For the the same piece, Vulliamy has interviewed Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, Gary Duncan of Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish and several more. What emerges is a vivid portrait of the times and a forceful reminder that we're right back in the thick of things: the culture wars are still raging in America; for Vietnam then, read Iraq now. "There is something about the malevolent greed of Cheney and his kind that is almost as dangerous as fascism," says Kantner. "But we're still there, saying, 'Get out of your fucking SUV! Put down that cell phone!'"
That said, by Christ it can be hard to take these people seriously. The latest Rolling Stone is their 40th anniversary issue and features interviews with Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Norman Mailer, Bob Weir (again), Keith Richards, Jane Fonda and more. Even Ringo Starr. It's full of moments of unintentional hilarity.
I particularly relished magazine founder Jan Wenner's conversation with Dylan. "Your records are about power, knowledge, salvation," Wenner asserts. To which Bob gives the same old answer: "That would not be so easy for me to relate to, what a record is about." Despite everything we know about Dylan, Mr Rolling Stone still sees him as a prophet and of course Bob won't play ball.
"Do you think it's gloomy on the horizon?" "In what sense do you mean?" "Bob, come on." "No, you come on."
Best of all is when Wenner twice misquotes the same Dylan lyric, and you get the sense that Bob has lost patience with his baby-boomer peer. For a giggle, it's only pipped by Jane Fonda's claim that "My personal journey has kind of mapped the zeitgeist.... Something new is being born - in me, in the country and in the world. I feel it in every cell of my body."
Silly hippies! It seems hopelessly naive of anyone to have ever looked towards these kind of figures for any practical solutions to the world's problems. But to be fair, most of Fonda's peers aren't as keen on blowing the 60s' trumpet as their inquisitors from the old counterculture bible. Patti Smith attacks the advent of the mass drug culture; Stewart Brand has a pop at everything from free love ("which led pretty directly to Aids") to tie-dyed art.
In the end, it's bracing to hear these architects of change confront their failures, just as it's heartening to hear Pete Coyote, who co-founded the anarchist "Digger" movement in Haight-Ashbury, tell Ed Vulliamy that "although none of our political aims were achieved - ending racism, imperialism, capitalism - almost all of the cultural and social agenda has become mainstream: environmentalism, women's rights, organic food... well, if not mainstream, then sufficiently present to create tension where before there was no tension. A situation in which people like Dick Cheney have to stumble over their own lies."
Coyote took his ideas into mainstream America by becoming a member of the California State Arts Council in 1975, and then its chairman. In this role, he revolutionised the state budget, urging Governor Jerry Brown to increase Arts Council funding from $1m to $20m, upping the grants to orchestras and opera houses, getting "the arts into jails, schools, places where theatre, poetry and things had just never been".
Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll? Pah! Sure they made great stories then, and they make great stories now. But after the parties, is that not when the hard work really begins?
