Do You Believe In Magic?

by Dennis Green

Do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart

How the music can free her, whenever it starts

And it's magic, if the music is groovy

It makes you feel happy like an old-time movie

I'll tell you about the magic, and it'll free your soul

But it's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll

John Sebastian and his Lovin’ Spoonful posed this question in 1965, and for the moment, it was the only question that really mattered. “Do you believe in magic?” Didn’t matter whether it was the magic of the White Rabbit, or Black Magic or Magic Mushrooms.

But the penalties for mere possession in those days were ferocious. Ten years in California, and in a more enlightened state like Texas, twenty years of hard time. You had to have some real cojones to believe in magic, let alone use it.

But it marked the dividing line between those hard-headed realists who believed only in what they could perceive with their five senses, and those dreamy Tribals who believed in magic. In things merely felt and yet unseen. In dimensions of reality beyond time and space. And for many of us, the jumping off place was psychedelic drugs.

A handful of Morning Glory seeds. Pearly Gates and Heavenly Blue worked best. A little toke of tea. Suddenly watching the world collapse into two dimensions. A tiny purple tab. White light.

For several years there, I stopped drinking alcohol altogether, and the evening cocktail became a pipeful of hashish. I had a huge print of Guernica over my front window, and learned to see through Picasso’s eyes. I learned the sort of serious empathy it takes to think and feel the way other people do. It has served me well over the years.

The magic is still there, right at hand, but very few people feel it, or believe in it anymore. They are too busy being contentious, scoring points in arguments about politics and the meaning of contemporary events to consider the possibility that it is themselves they mourn for.

A few months after the Summer of Love and the Tribal Gatherings in L.A., Sebastian was busted for possession of pot, and got off the hook by setting up a friend of his for entrapment in a bust. Serious betrayal, but this is also exactly what the anti-marijuana laws are set up to do, to intimidate ordinary citizens who don’t conform, who get out of line. But soon, in all the underground newspapers of the day, the talk was all about “The Lovin’ Lidful” and Sebastian’s days were over.

The “Death of the Hippie” came soon after, toward the end of ’67, and then came 1968, that year of horror. The Dispersal of the Tribes — to Canada, to rural farms and communes, to Bangladesh — and one killing after another. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy. All leading to the police riots in Chicago around the Democratic convention.

And the election of Richard “Slippery Dick” Nixon. The rest is history too. And some few of us kept the faith, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that the magic is there, still there, always there, and wonderful indeed. In spite of Vietnam, in spite of Watergate, and the SLA and the shootout in L.A. In spite of everything since, we still believe in magic.

Do you believe like I believe Do you believe in magic

Do you believe like I believe Do you believe, believer

Do you believe like I believe Do you believe in magic

[Fade]

©2010 Dennis Green