The Diggers became the counterculture’s mad cap den mothers and fathers.
#PETER COYOTE VOICE FREE#
The Diggers distributed free food, set up a free medical clinic, opened a Free Store, and found free crash pads for hundreds of young hippies (as they were first labeled that year by the mainstream media). Coyote (he adopted the last name with the guidance of a Paiute-Shoshone shaman named Rolling Thunder) and the Diggers shunned private property and capitalist culture and ultimately became the de facto hosts to thousands of youth who streamed into Haight-Ashbury for 1967’s Summer of Love. I tracked him down because he is one of the most iconic, articulate members of his generation’s tribe, and he had written candidly about his adventurous life in two memoirs, Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle (Counterpoint 1998) and later The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education (Counterpoint 2015). I first met Coyote three years ago when I interviewed him for my book Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul. October 1967 was also a moment when our trusty narrator Peter Coyote (nee Cohon from Englewood, New Jersey by way of Haight-Ashbury and the Black Bear commune) was at the top of his counterculture game, as a bad-ass motorcycle-driving hippie who was one of the leaders of San Francisco’s legendary guerilla theater group, the Diggers. The peace movement, frustrated with years of being ignored, shifted in attitude and tone from protest to resistance.
#PETER COYOTE VOICE FULL#
The war at home had officially kicked off in full force. After Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and their band of Yippies tried to meditate the Pentagon into full “levitation,” and others clashed with police, the protest ended with an unprecedented 682 arrests.
“It was a sense of revolution,” Gelb pronounced. Les Gelb, who was working inside the Pentagon then tells viewers that his secretaries were scared of being attacked, even raped by the protesting peaceniks. Halfway through episode five of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s ten-part The Vietnam War documentary, the smooth, sonorous-voiced narrator Peter Coyote describes how 50,000 antiwar activists marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon 50 years ago on October 21 st, 1967.
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