Beat poet helped create early hippie movement

By Adrian Chamberlain, Times Colonist:

One of his multitudinous claims to fame is having been one of five poets who read at the San Francisco's Six Gallery in October of 1955. This reading is regarded as seminal in the launch of the Beat literary movement.

That night, Allen Ginsberg delivered an excerpt from his new (and immediately notorious) poem, Howl. McClure read For the Death of 100 Whales, inspired by a report of American soldiers who, feeling bored, shot an entire pod of killer whales while stationed in Iceland.

The Gallery Six event was McClure's first public reading. He recalls it as a foggy fall night in San Francisco. The audience was diverse: an elderly college prof, young anarchists, conscientious objectors, avantgarde painters, poets.

"Jack Kerouac was yelling 'Go, go go!' in the audience," McClure said. "He was running out to get gallons of wine from a winemaker who made it in his garage, two blocks away."

The boho Beat writers were, among other things, precursors to the hippie movement. In the name of art and joie de vivre, they gleefully smashed through the restrictive Ozzie and Harriet conventions of the 1950s. Upstanding citizens were scandalized; obscenity trials abounded.

I always wonder whether participants in such history-making events instantly realize their significance. McClure says, in the case of the Gallery Six reading, he did.

"We had all decided to put our toe on the line and stand for it. We knew that something had happened. There was no doubt."

When it comes to hip happenings of the 1950s and beyond, McClure's seeming omnipresence rivals that of Forrest Gump. He wrote the song Mercedes Benz, made famous by Janis Joplin. He became a key figure in San Francisco's 1960s counterculture. He was buddies with Kerouac, Dennis Hopper, Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan (Dylan gave McClure the autoharp he used to compose Mercedes Benz). He was at Ken Kesey's famous party with the Hell's Angels, later written about by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In fact, McClure helped a Hell's Angel -Freewheelin' Frank -write a book about his life. In the 1978 concert film The Last Waltz, McClure is on stage reciting Chaucer. ...

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