Note: Abbie Hoffman established himself as a mischievous dissident with a flair for the theatrical by such acts as tossing money (some of it fake) onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and leading an attempt to levitate the Pentagon. He was one of the Chicago Seven, whose convictions for crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention were overturned. A couple of weeks after the Convention, I interviewed Abbie for my college radio station.
I don’t expect Abbie Hoffman to have a listed telephone number, but he does.
“You want me to talk into a mike? Shit, I’m so fucking exhausted. They want me in Chicago; the FBI’s after me. All right, come over Monday and if I’m here, groovy, but I might be goin’ to Prague, so call first.”
By Monday, Abbie’s number is unlisted, so I head to the address in the phone book on St. Marks Place. I press the button marked “A. Hoffman” and am buzzed in. From the door at the end of the hall a confusion of curly hair sticks out. “Yeah, who is it?”
“I’m here for the interview.” Abbie Hoffman’s gaunt face looks pained as he waves me in to his apartment. He explains that he has a deadline on his book in three hours and really has no time now.
I tell him I took the bus down from Schenectady (true) and walked from Port Authority (not true, but it seems to strengthen my case), and he says all right, we’ll talk for a while. The apartment is cluttered with books and records; LBJ smiles from a dart board, with a dart sticking out of a Presidential nostril. Abbie’s wife, Anita, emerges briefly and reminds him about the deadline. Abbie shrugs, and Anita doesn’t look happy.
We begin talking about the origin of the Yippies, and at first his voice cruises in a monotone. It started after the march on the Pentagon in 1967, when Abbie, Paul Krassner, Jerry Rubin, and Ed Sanders realized that the next big thing to shoot for would be the Democratic Convention in Chicago. They wanted to create some kind of “mythical structure, theatrical scenarios” that would bring protestors to Chicago, and the trick was to do it without money or organization.
They realized that the concept of the hippie was a myth created by the mass media “to suppress, to codify, to explain what was happening.” If the mass media could create a myth, why not invent a counter-myth? They threw ideas at each other, changed the “H” to a “Y,” and pretty soon they had a "hallucination” to give to the mass media, who “played right along.”
Yippie was created with “excitement, tension, drama, but without saying anything at all.” Reporters started asking what the difference was between a hippie and a Yippie when in reality there are no Yippies: “Yippie!” is a slogan (which should be followed by an exclamation point); the group’s name is the Youth International Party. The founders felt that “brothers and sisters in the underground would know it was all a crock of shit” even as the media fell for it. Abbie opened an article for The Realist with “four reasons” for Yippie; the media picked up on the four reasons, which were actually “a bunch of baloney. That’s how I got through college just makin’ up outlines, gettin’ laid, and playing games. That fucking article is a piece of shit.”
On the second day of the Convention, Abbie was asked how many Yippies were in Chicago. Instead of "saying something like 4,233,” he replied that there were “four Yippies and four more coming on Wednesday,” because "if there are only four Yippies then these guys must be into some pretty heavy shit, and by getting four more they’re doubling their forces.”
He gets a cigarette and continues to talk while he lights up. The conversation flows more easily. Abbie says his thing is not political analysis. “A Yippie is someone who never asks what’s going on. He’s too busy doing it.” Responding to “criticism or applause is doing someone else’s thing.” Abbie gives me a one-sentence lecture on communication: “It doesn’t matter if this mike is even turned on. It’s me talking to you.”
We talk about the violence in Chicago and whether kids were manipulated by the organizers, who knew what was going to happen. “People know where it’s at. You know if you got long hair, it’s a fucking police state. You also know something else. You know what you’re doing is more valid than what the pigs are doing. And that’s why you go to Chicago, to show the world what the fuck’s going on. ‘The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.’ That was a beautiful thing. I never heard that before Chicago.”
We talk about the difference between the New Left and the Yippies. The Yippie thing is not to criticize. “Police are brutal, mass media distorts, America is racist. So what, everybody knows that. The left is a total bore in this country, and besides if they got in power they’d probably cut all our hair off anyway.” Abbie asks about my politics, but before I can answer he points to my Hush Puppies: “I can tell by your shoes you’re for McCarthy, and you wanna hang out with your friends in college.”
But in Chicago boundaries between groups were blurred. It was “a perfect mess; you couldn’t tell who was who. The human beings take on the machine and in the end the human beings have to win” because "the machine will show its true colors.” He points out that when the police weren’t clubbing heads in Chicago, 100 people got married in the Church of the Free Spirit and Allen Ginsberg gave a sunrise service, but screams make for better radio than “Om.”
Abbie Hoffman considers himself a revolutionary artist and a hustler. He got a kick out of being called a paranoid schizophrenic and says, “I ain’t paranoid, I know we’re gonna win.” As for defining “winning,” he’ll “figure that out later.”
While in Chicago, Abbie tried to become friends with his “tails in order to give them a conflict.” He was able to find out Hubert Humphreys’ credit card number, the telephone number of every head cop (he would call them and impersonate other cops, giving them orders), and he says he was the best pool hustler in Chicago. He talks about “getting through” to people, knowing their language”—he opened conversations with cab drivers by talking about Detroit pitcher Denny McClain’s 26th win.
The last thing Abbie tells me is, “I was always a rebel and I was never afraid to die and I never wanted to do anything for money.”
After the interview, I walk in my Hush Puppies to Port Authority and catch a bus back to Schenectady, where I hang out with my college friends and tell them all about my visit with Abbie.
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