Easy Rider

My friend, Marty Lewis, spoke of the cheers prompted by the Kennedy assassination, the attitudes he lived with at a small Methodist college in Texas, 1963...

I had a similar experience in a little spec of a North Alabama town in 1969. Athens College had recruited hippies from the Northeast to enroll there two years prior in order to pay for the new dorms they had just finished building. If you had money and could fog a mirror, you were in. Mostly we stayed on campus, smoking pot and drinking beer smuggled in from the only “wet” county within driving distance, just over the border in Pulaski, Tennessee. Proud to be the birthplace of the KKK. Long hair was a call to arms for locals when we ventured out beyond the campus, so we mostly circled the wagons and stayed close. But when “Easy Rider” hit the musty old movie theater three blocks up from campus, so did many of us. Filling the first several rows, staring up at the big screen, ramped up on pot and horse tranquilizers, we owned that flick. Although we were used to the whistles from the crowd of good old boys behind us, taunts for guys who “looked more like girls”, the rift was never more clear than when a huge roar of applause shook the back of the room. Dennis Hopper got what he deserved. Shotgunned into oblivion, by a squirmy little redneck sporting an untreated tumor on his neck and a nasty grin. Pointing his double barrel out of the passenger window of his buddy’s 56 Ford pickup, he blew that particular easy rider off his chopper and into movie history. That blast was cathartic for the boys in the back, one orgasmic, celebratory exclamation point that sent a strong message. We knew that the shared sentiments uncovered in Woodstock, NY earlier in the year were still light years and a decade away from walking openly in the light of that little town.