60's REISSUED : Books: Publishing whiz puts manifestoes of the counterculture back on the shelves, in reach of those once caught in its spell and those too young to remember the Summer of Love.

By JOSH GETLIN

Aug. 10, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

NEW YORK — It came to Dan Levy midway through a Grateful Dead concert on a hot afternoon in July, 1988. As a crowd of mesmerized Deadheads listened to the band in Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, the 30-year-old publishing whiz kid suddenly had a crystal vision all his own.

Here were thousands of loyal fans, he thought, many of them veterans of the 1960s music scene. An even larger number weren’t born when the Dead, the legendary San Francisco band, was formed 25 years before. But they were all shelling out money for tickets, T-shirts and other rock memorabilia.

If the Dead could still draw huge crowds, Levy reasoned, wasn’t there also a demand for counterculture books ? Could a hip, enterprising publisher tap a vast, unexplored market for bohemian classics and avant-garde works?

“I decided there was an opportunity here to make books about the 1960s relevant in the ‘90s,” he says. “In a way, I missed out on that decade, but I picked up a lot through osmosis. And I figured that if I was interested in reading about that era, other people would be too.”

Vietnam. Freedom marchers. Women’s liberation. Hallucinogens and free love. Like a second Civil War, the ‘60s roiled America and sparked bitter debates that continue to this day. Although the generation that fought in Southeast Asia, tripped at Woodstock and marched in Century City is now saddled with mortgages, millions of people have not forgotten their past.

They also have been known to read a book now and then.

Levy, a Stanford business graduate, says he was in a “receptive state” on that afternoon two years ago, and credits his inspiration to the “colorful environment” around him. But now an established Madison Avenue publisher has gone Beyond Bliss and is betting that Levy’s hunch is right on the money.

In June, the Citadel Underground Press was launched by the Carol Publishing Group. Under Levy’s direction, the division has reissued four out-of-print classics on topics ranging from Haight Ashbury in 1967 to New York’s turbulent East Village scene in the early 1960s. The handsome paperbacks are being marketed under the slogan: “Take Back Your Mind.”

Citadel’s first titles include “Tales of Beatnik Glory” by Ed Sanders, a New York author and rock musician; “Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes” by Terry Southern; “Ringolevio,” Emmett Grogan’s book about the San Francisco Diggers and Haight Ashbury, and “Moving Through Here,” a collection of columns about ‘60s San Francisco and New York by Don McNeil, the late Village Voice columnist.

Will anyone buy these books? Some publishing experts dismiss the venture as a noble but futile trip down memory lane. Closet hippies in pinstripe suits are not going to plunk down $8 to $10 for flashbacks to the Summer of Love, says one skeptical editor for a leading New York firm.

But others are not so sure. After shopping the idea to several houses, Levy persuaded Steven Schragis, owner of Carol Publishing, to take a chance.

Schragis, who also owns Spy magazine, says the prospect of cornering a potentially large market outweighed the financial risks. He noted that the rights to the initial titles did not cost a fortune because each was out of print.

More important, they are fascinating documents. Martin Asher editor-in-chief of Vintage Books, believes Citadel “is trying to reconstruct a very special time and place, and when you go back to these books it’s a barometer of how much you’ve changed. It can be a very powerful attraction for some readers who lived through it all.”

The ‘60s are a good business gamble, he adds, because “there’s been an unquestioned resurgence of interest in the period. If the mass media can take a second look at that time in movies, television and in music, there’s no reason it can’t be marketed in books as well.”

Publishers nationwide seem to have gotten the message, continuing a trend that first surfaced two years ago.

For example, in the recently issued “After All These Years,” Lauren Kessler, a former member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), explores the continuing hold of ‘60s values on the fortysomething set.

Similarly, “Beyond the Barricades,” co-written by Richard Flacks, a UC Santa Barbara professor, examines the persistent idealism of students who lived through the 1970 radical bombing of the Bank of America and ensuing violence in Isla Vista.

In “Destructive Generation” by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, the two former New Left writers turn on the ‘60s and argue that their former colleagues were nihilistic and immature. Their book, recently issued in paperback, blames many of today’s social and political problems on the excesses of the counterculture.

On the lighter side, current novels by Thomas Pynchon (“Vineland”) and Tom Robbins (“Skinny Legs and All”), are flavored by the ‘60s and, in some cases, feature characters still in the grip of Flower Power. Meanwhile, Brooks Hansen and Nick Davis have written “Boone,” which deals with the tragicomic life and times of an imaginary ‘60s cult hero.

In the months after Abbie Hoffman’s death, two publishers rushed out commemorative editions of his books and essays. The current issue of Rolling Stone magazine includes a retrospective on ‘60s music, while “Local Deities,” a forthcoming novel by Agnes Bushell, offers a woman’s view of the decade and the evolving fate of latter-day radicals.

Later this year, “Medium Cool” by Ethan Mordden will examine the films of the ‘60s, and “Blown Away,” a cultural overview of the decade by A. E. Hotchner, will argue that former Rolling Stone Brian Jones was murdered in 1969 and did not accidentally drown. This summer, “The Family,” Ed Sanders’ study of the Charles Manson case, will be reissued in paperback.

To Levy, a curly-haired Los Angeles native who used to hang out at the old Free Press Bookstore on Fairfax Avenue, this renewed interest in the ‘60s is welcome for personal and professional reasons.

By his own description, he grew up as a “Frye boots-L.A. cowboy-troubador kind of guy” who still remembers the day he pulled up next to Joni Mitchell’s Mercedes at a Westwood intersection. The kind of guy who thinks Laurel Canyon is heaven on Earth, even though he never lived there.

“I think the counterculture impulse is like a virus, because it never goes away once you’ve been affected,” he says. “It can flare up or go into remission, but once enough people are inflamed, bohemianism erupts.”

It doesn’t matter that yesterday’s protesters are today’s doctors and lawyers, Levy adds, because “no matter how imbued someone is in the straight world, there is a wistful longing for a time when things really mattered.”

To be sure, the ‘60s had its share of bummers. New Left activism deteriorated into a paroxysm of violence by the Weathermen at decade’s end. Rampant drug use turned spirited communities such as Haight Ashbury and Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue into crime-ridden slums.

“Every generation makes its mistakes, and in the ‘60s we found out that freedom is meaningless without an understanding of its limits,” says actor Peter Coyote, a former member of the San Francisco Diggers, who gave away food in Golden Gate Park. “We pursued absolute freedom about as far as you could go, and it carried some people right over the line into death. But that’s what you gain from a historical perspective--that’s why it’s important to look back.”

Although Citadel’s initial titles focus on the good ol’ days of the counterculture, Levy insists he is not trying to cash in on nostalgia. He sees a world of difference between his efforts and mass-marketing campaigns that use ‘60s themes to sell everything from sports cars and jogging shoes to cigarettes and soap operas.

“This isn’t the ‘Big Chill,’ OK?” he says. “We’re not trying to sell anybody a bill of goods. We’re asking the same question for people who were there and for those who wish they were: ‘What did it all mean?’ and ‘What does it mean today?’ ”

Across the nation, a host of writers is grappling with the same demons. Kessler, who teaches journalism at the University of Oregon, says she was prompted to re-examine the turbulent decade because of the growing tendency of politicians and advertisers to trivialize the idealism of her youth.

The idea that the women’s movement could be manipulated to sell tobacco disgusted her. She also took exception to the prevailing stereotypes of ‘60s survivors, such as the Gutless Yuppie, the New Age Flake and the Burned-Out Hippie.

“I refuse to believe that everybody just disappeared, that they’re all out driving BMWs and talking on their cellular phones,” Kessler says. “A lot of people may have discarded their bell-bottoms, but they didn’t discard their values and the core of beliefs they brought with them from long ago.”

To prove the point, Kessler interviewed more than 150 activists, artists, political organizers and students from the ‘60s. Virtually all of them said they were trying to retain their youthful idealism.

Naomi Foner, for example, was a Harlem Head Start teacher in 1966. Today, she is a successful Los Angeles screenwriter and an activist in several liberal causes. Foner wrote the critically acclaimed film “Running on Empty,” about a family of ‘60s radicals who continue to live as fugitives.

“People are waking up again,” she says in Kessler’s book. “And either it’s in direct relation to having gotten old enough as a generation to have families and see what things look like from the position of parent, rather than child, or just because these things come in cycles. But I feel more hopeful than I have for a long time.”

In “Beyond the Barricades,” UC Santa Barbara’s Flacks and Jack Whalen, a sociology professor at the University of Oregon, produce a more varied picture of the ‘60s generation. But the message is pretty much the same.

Focusing on the 1970 Isla Vista bombing, the authors compare the lives today of former UC Santa Barbara students who were anti-war protesters to a second group of students who had no political involvement. (By prior agreement, the authors did not identify any sources by name.)

Among the former activists, Flacks and Whalen find high levels of political idealism. Even those students who have since become more conservative show unmistakable signs of having been influenced by the ‘60s.

In one case, a woman who had lived in a feminist commune is now the editor of a Southwestern daily newspaper. Although her economic views have become quite conservative, she nonetheless sponsored a fair, well-researched series on the local gay community.

“This woman could not have done that if she hadn’t gone through the ‘60s,” Whalen says. “For all the changes she later went through, she had a core of values and beliefs, a sense of tolerance that did not change.”

The non-activists, who put a higher premium on careers, nowearn significantly higher salaries, the authors found. But none of the Santa Barbara students who joined the anti-war movement had any regrets.

“Nobody told us, ‘I was a fool,’ or ‘I shouldn’t have done this,’ ” says Flacks, who was a founding member of SDS. “It was encouraging that the identity which crystallized for people back then remains with them today.”

Not so, say Peter Collier and David Horowitz. Both once worked at Ramparts magazine, a leading left-wing publication. But they now have taken a hard turn to the right, as shown in “Destructive Generation.”

The authors helped form Second Thoughts, a group of ‘60s activists who have disavowed their pasts. Horowitz, for example, bitterly criticizes the anti-war movement for its naivete about Vietnamese totalitarianism. He blames young radicals for ignoring signs that North Vietnam would inflict a bloody retribution on the south after the war.

Brushing aside any positive contributions, the authors say the New Left was virulently anti-American and had a juvenile disrespect for law and order.

“Fundamentally, the ‘60s generation were children who didn’t want to grow up and were longing for discipline,” says Horowitz, who lives in Los Angeles. “But they didn’t get that discipline. Today, we’re all suffering because that authority collapsed and didn’t rap our knuckles.”

Amid the flood of books on the ‘60s, “Destructive Generation” is one of the few to take a critical stance. Earlier works by sociologist Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden are the products of “nostalgia artists,” Horowitz says. “It’s hard to ignore this period because, demographically, it’s like the 800-pound gorilla. You’ve got millions of baby boomers out there, and I can’t recall a generation that was so obsessed with itself.”

Not surprisingly, veteran ‘60s leftists have denounced the Second Thoughts movement as a sham. But younger critics have also taken shots.

“I think these two guys are pathetic jokes,” says Levy, who was 10 when demonstrators clashed with police at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. “I mean, I feel sorry for them. And I also feel angry that people from Ronald Reagan on down have tried to make fun of this generation, as if it had something to be ashamed of and should forget what happened.”

Even for those too young to remember, the ‘60s are not forgotten.

Kessler, Whalen and other teachers say that college courses on the period have become popular, especially among students whose parents were politically active years ago. The “Sixties Papers,” a compendium of speeches, essays and manifestoes, has become standard reading in many classrooms.

For some students, the decade of political activism seems more attractive than the current laid-back atmosphere on many campuses. Others are intrigued by the period’s cultural richness, finding their own scene drab by comparison.

To reach this market, Levy says, Citadel will issue two offbeat novels next year. “Negrophobia” by Darius James is about a racist white girl who comes under a voodoo spell and experiences violent nausea every time she has a prejudicial thought. A second book will tell how the daughter of God comes to Earth disguised as an 18-year-old MTV junkie.

“Hey, it’s all a goof, a chance to have some fun,” Levy says. “The idea of a thriving counterculture isn’t just something for people over 40. We’re really going to try and develop some loyal readers in this age bracket.”

Merrill Feitel, a sophomore at UC Santa Cruz, is one candidate. To hear her tell it, she has suffered cultural deprivation by not having lived through the ‘60s. She reads voraciously about the period and looks forward to taking courses on the political ferment that erupted years before she was born.

“There’s a real resurgence of the ‘60s in my generation, and people who would have never been interested in this stuff before are now calling me up and asking how they can get Grateful Dead tickets,” she explains. “There are a lot of kids like me who want to drive across country, like (writer Jack) Kerouac did. We don’t just want to hang out at downtown clubs and get bombed and wear black, you know?”

At UCLA, Paul Von Blum, 47, teaches a communications course that focuses on the ‘60s. A former member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he supplements his lectures with cultural artifacts, such as political buttons and recordings by Country Joe and the Fish, one of the seminal San Francisco bands.

“Kids today are fascinated that a large minority of American students could have made such a strong commitment to political change, one that went beyond their grades or their future careers,” he says. “They hear me talk about the period, and in my middle age, I’ve become a primary source. That’s fine, but I’m not ready for the geriatric ward. If I can get them reading about the ‘60s, it’s wonderful.”

Susan Becker, a sophomore who is taking Von Blum’s course this summer, says it has opened her eyes. She previously viewed the decade as a bizarre, noisy interlude of psychedelic music, long hair and mindless drug use.

“Now I see the relevance of it, because back in the ‘60s, women had to fight for the right to go to law school or medical school, even the right to wear pants to classes,” she says. “These are things we take for granted today, and you’ve got to admire people who fought for what they believed in.”

Will she be changed by these discoveries?

“Put it this way,” Becker says. “We have a policy at UCLA where you can return textbooks at the end of the year. But I’ve been reading that book, ‘The Sixties Papers,’ you know, and it’s fascinating. Really fascinating. That’s one book I’m going to keep.”