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Beatniks: The hippie forefathers

Broadcast Date: Feb. 17, 1963

Think "beatniks," and what comes to mind? Black berets. Jazz. Jarring jagged lines of poetic chaos. A delight in madness. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Jack Kerouac. Allen Ginsberg. William S. Burroughs. On the Road. Howl. Naked Lunch.
In the 1950s and early '60s, Toronto has its own beatnik scene, centred on the two-block-long Gerrard Street Village. Here, the CBC films Canada's first "Happening" at the Bohemian Embassy, featuring beat poetry, jazz Hamlet and Dada-esque eruptions of art.

Beatniks: The hippie forefathers

• The Beats were the counterculture of the 1950s. They were devoted to jazz, art, literature and poetry. They revelled in madness, the downtrodden, the underbelly, booze and anti-commercialism. In part, they were a reaction to the hopelessness of the Depression, McCarthyism and the Korean War.
• The hippies, with their message of peace, love, and flower power, wouldn't burst on the scene until 1967; the next counterculture wave and the so-called "children of the Beats."

• The bridge between beatnik and hippie was built by people like Ken Kesey and Bob Dylan. Both knew the Beats; Dylan is part beat poet himself. His folk ballads and protest songs grabbed the public's attention; his electric guitar rock infuriated and inspired. Popular music was revolutionized.
• The drug scene was revolutionized too — by the likes of Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary.

• Like Allen Ginsberg, Kesey underwent government-sponsored LSD tests. Unlike Allen Ginsberg, he then spread the word about acid across the United States in a psychedelic-painted 1939 International Harvester School Bus. In 1965, he and his group of self-styled Merry Pranksters started conducting Acid Tests — wild parties with LSD, blacklights, strobes, fluorescent paint and psychedelic liquid overhead projectors. The youth of America started turning on and freaking out to a whole new happening.

• Gerrard Street Village, Toronto's little bohemia and artist ghetto, was near Gerrard and Bay Streets.
• The beat scene rose to media attention in 1959, but the movement officially began on Oct. 7, 1955. At the "Six Gallery" poetry reading in San Francisco, Allen Ginsberg recited his poem Howl publicly for the first time.

• Author Michael Kirby defined a Happening as "a piece of art that does not focus on an object, but on an event. The artist begins with a plan of action in which the public is brought into an active relationship with the art event. The action does not take place in the closed environment of a gallery but rather in various public places of a city, where the artist breaks in suddenly with his performance."

• The first Happening in the United States took place in New York's Greenwich Village in October 1959. Artist Allan Kaprow held "18 Happenings in 6 Parts" at the Reuben Gallery.
• Visitors were issued tickets that directed them to specific seats in three rooms, at particular times, with strictly choreographed movements. The rooms were separated by clear plastic walls. Visitors were treated to experiences which included a girl squeezing oranges, an artist lighting matches and painting, and an orchestra of toy instruments.

• Although this clip refers to the event shown as Canada's first Happening, this fact is debatable. According to the book The 60s in Canada by Denise Leclerc and Pierre Dessureault, "Toronto's first happening is said to have taken place in 1959 in the studio of Dennis Burton, whose fellow participants were Gordon Rayner, Graham Coughtry and CBC writer Murray Jessell."

Beatniks: The hippie forefathers

Medium: Television

Program: Close-Up

Broadcast Date: Feb. 17, 1963

Guest(s): Don Cullen

Host: J. Frank Willis

Duration: 3:49

Last updated:
June 28, 2005