'Joe Bob's America' part 1

Hey, man, can you groove on this?

Remember black lights and bennies and Lord Buckley at the Suzie Q?

Acid rock and rocks of acid? (First acid rock concert? Anybody? Red Dog Saloon, a bar in Virginia City, Nevada, that invented the psychedelic light show.)

Or the time when a phone phreak could take a whistle toy out of a box of Cap'n Crunch and blow it into the pay phone and make all the free long distance calls you wanted.

It's deep. It's heavy. Are you down with it?

I'm talkin' 'bout the sixties, man. We're gonna let it all hang down, flip the Acapulco Gold ash onto the flares of our bell bottoms, and drop some Alice B. Toklas brownies into the oven. Put on some Joan Baez while you're it, because she IS the first cosmic hippie chick. It's all about ch'i, baby.

It's not just the sixties, of course, it's the HIPPIE sixties--and seventies, too, because the encounter groups continued even after Nam closed down, with everybody doing their own thing in their own place and time. Attica! Attica!

Excuse me, but I can't help it. I've been reading "The Hippie Dictionary" (Ten Speed Press, $19.95, 670 pp.), which you can bet your bippy is a total gas that blew my mind. It's the creation of John Bassett McCleary, a photographer and self- described "aging hippie" who lives in Monterey, California, where he spent eight painstaking years documenting the phraseology and enthusiasms of the generation everyone either loves or hates.

He's a good hippie, too. He doesn't obey any rules. So it's not exactly a dictionary and not exactly an encyclopedia (although the subtitle is "A Cultural Encyclopedia of the 1960s and 1970s") and he's even invented his own term for it: "Phraseicon." Fifty per cent of the entries are not words or topics but phrases like "trip out," "tune in" or "turned on" as well as biographical entries (Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary) and cultural events. (Remember the Human Be-In Gathering of the Tribes? McCleary does. It was at the polo fields in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967.)

McCleary is obviously a true believer, so the book has all the humor and wacked-out philosophy of the era but also deals with its dark side. At one point he interjects how much he agonized over whether to include Charles Manson or not, because Manson is a part of the hippie experience he wishes had never happened, but he goes ahead and does the Manson entry in the interest of being an exhaustive reference work.