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From: digaman@hotwired.com (Steve Silberman)
Subject: Freak vs. Hippie, for Dario
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 12:26:00 -0800

"Freak vs. Hippie"
for Dario Wolfish, a goddamned freak

The original hippies were freaks who hated the word "hippie," so freaky 
were they.  Hippies smoke "the kind" but freaks smoked "grass."  You can 
fool a hippie some of the time, but you can't fool a freak nohow.  
"Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads," which makes this point about 
hippies and freaks under the term "Dead Freaks Unite," was written by a 
guy who grew up wanting to be a hippie, but ended up a freak, because he 
was just too freaky - doing freaky things in bed with brother freaks - to 
be a hippie. (Anyone who speaks of themselves in the third person is 
probably Bob Dole, who is a fucking freak, and no hippie.)  Hippies are 
beautiful blond goyim with fancy expensive backpacks who still look all 
yummy under the grime, but freaks are grimy in their souls - all freaks 
are Jewish.  Hippies live on "garden burgers" and other pseudo-healthy 
jive, but freaks went to Gem Spa in the acid dawn after the Fillmore East 
shows for an egg cream and a fucking cigarette.  Thus most hippies are 
thin, but some freaks are fat, showing more crack than Harlem when they 
bend over to pick up a greasy roach from the cat-littered floor because 
that's all the stash they have left.  Hippies have tantric sex, but freaks 
eat pussy, suck cock, and fuck every chance they get. ("My thing," said 
David Crosby once, who was a freak who mistakenly got famous as a hippie, 
"was diving into huge piles of bodies.")  Hippies live for good vibes - 
but a freak will settle for a vibrator.  The Dead taping scene was started 
by freaks, but Phishheads are strictly hippies, bless 'em.  (Trey is a 
hippie with freak pretentions, Mike is a fucking freak in hippie drag, 
Fishman is a goddamn freak, and Page is a good keyboard player.  I won't 
do the Dead that way, but Pigpen was no hippie.)  Most good things are 
started by freaks - but most hippies know a good thing when they see it, 
and then love it to death.  If you had the choice to be trapped on a 
desert island with a hippie or a freak, freaks have better survival 
skills, but also unsightly habits that will eventually have you swimming 
away and betting against the sharks - a losing game. Abbie Hoffman was a 
freak, Jerry Rubin a wannabe.  The Fugs were a freak band.  Jimi Hendrix 
was a fucking freak who did hippie better than anybody because he had the 
biggest dick - which only a freak would care about.  Jim Morrison was a 
goddamn hippie who took freak drugs.  The original punk bands - like 
Richard Hell & the Voidoids and Patti Smith - were freaks in disguise.  
Hippies wear the disguise of having no disguise.  Allen Ginsberg: freak, 
freak, freak.  Robert Hunter?  Poet.  Hippies fear coming down, but freaks 
couldn't sink any furthur.  Freaks live the blues, but hippies would 
rather see Blues Traveller.  Anything pretty is hippie, but Nico's weird 
Nordic beauty made her a freak.  The hippies want to claim the Dead as 
their acid house band, but Chocolate George knew better.  The 
Haight-Ashbury is Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum of Hippie - while the freaks 
puke in the park.  New York City is the capital city of Freakdom, while 
the hippie capital goes where the wind goes.  Emmett Grogan's "Ringolevio" 
is a great freak book about hippies.  AOL?  Hippies - they wish.  There 
are a lot of hippies on the WELL, and some freaks.  Usenet has a lot of 
wannabe freaks, and a couple of real ones, who don't have to ask.  Hippies 
love mirrors, freaks avoid them.  Charles Mingus, Frank Zappa, Thelonious 
Monk, Diane DiPrima, Neal Cassady and his pal Jack, Mezz Mezzrow, Lord 
Buckley, Lenny Bruce, Shakespeare, Seth Morgan, Roky Erickson, Grace 
Slick, Walt Whitman, Abe Lincoln, Bob Dylan, the serpent of Paradise - all 
freak saints, though no freak in his wrong mind would want to be a saint.  
They leave that to the hippies.

Love,
Steve Silberman
*****************************************************
     SKELETON KEY: A DICTIONARY FOR DEADHEADS
       by David Shenk and Steve Silberman 
   * 400 pages of history, interviews, and magic *
     To order signed copies, call (800) 321-9578 
******************************************************
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