Unstoppable Moments

On Reflections, Rebellions & Relief

I write to you from a living room strewn with last night’s pizza crusts and empty corn chip packets, many Nerf guns and various other debris left behind by rampaging tween boys determined to see the New Year in, to taste the rare thrill of midnight. I’m also mildly hungover. I don’t even care. I just feel so joyous and relieved to have survived another year and another round of enforced celebrations that have rubbed me the wrong way as long as I can remember. There is some kind of inbuilt rebellion in me that dislikes being told what to do so much that come December 1st each year, I feel the crushing weight of impending unstoppable festivities like a black wave. I’m grateful to have now washed up on the shore of another fresh new year, full of possibilities and no societal pressures forcing me to have a great time.

I don’t begrudge anybody else having a ball, I love to see happy people. And I support, endorse and encourage everybody’s right to party, wherever, however and whenever they want.

Around this time 56 years ago, close to 2000 ‘teenyboppers’, runaways, flower children, movie brats and groovy ‘striplings’ and their adult supporters from the exploding counter culture youth scene gathered together peacefully in the Hollywood streets to face off against an equal number of uptight riot police, the culmination of a series of ever growing weekend demonstrations in protest of the 10pm juvenile curfew, that had seen the tie-dyed hippie and rock’n’roll kids spilling out onto the streets around Pandora’s Box Coffeehouse and the happening clubs on Sunset Strip, aggressively arrested and hauled down to the local cop shop to await pickup by their furious folks - 300 teens had been arrested in one night. The curfew was an attempt by local businesses in what was once a moneyed, elegant Mafia run club and restaurant scene to take back control of the streets now seething with these ‘loitering kids’ drawn together from all over Southern California to this one place where they believed they could just be free to be whoever they wanted to be and maybe catch a glimpse of their happening pop idols like Jim Morrison or Sonny & Cher, who were famously banned from appearing at the New Years Rose Bowl Parade after they showed their solidarity for the protests.

Sonny & Cher at the curfew protest 1966

Those troublemaking teens on the Sunset Strip 1966!

The scene eventually turned violent when police raided the coffeehouse one night after midnight - even though kids were legally allowed to be inside as the premises weren’t licensed - the curfew was just for kids on the streets. When upstanding representatives from the pop culture world such as the Beach Boys publicist and the head of the ACLU tried to calm the situation down, the police instead began throwing batons and blows around and chasing after the terrified escaping teens. Paul Jay Robbins, a member of the newly formed Community Action for Facts and Freedom Committee (CAFF) reported on the riot for the Los Angeles Free Press:

I saw a kid holding a sign in both hands jerk forward as though struck from behind. He fell into the path of the officers and four or five of them immediately began bludgeoning him with clubs held in one hand. I stood transfixed watching him as the officers continued beating him while he attempted to alternately protect himself and crawl forward. Finally he slumped against a wall as the officer continued to beat him. Before I was spun around and set reeling forward again, I saw him picked up, belly-down, by the officers and carried away. Later legal representatives of CAFF measured a trail of blood 75 yards long leading from this spot to the point where he was placed in a car. Where is he now?[2]

Bob Denver (Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island) witnessed police spitting on and abusing anyone in the line of fire and described the out of control police aggression as ‘Unbelievable…just unbelievable’. Actor Peter Fonda was swept up in the arrests, as was Sonny & Cher’s manager Brian Stone. Stephen Stills’s captured the turmoil and uprising in the air with the lyric that opens the Buffalo Springfield anthem ‘For What It’s Worth’ - ‘Stop, children, what’s that sound?’ - a reference to the sound-truck that would herald the nightly curfew. At the time, Buffalo Springfield were the house band at Whisky A Go Go. The song was released on Dec 23rd 1966.

Protestors outside Pandora’s Box November 1966

By New Year’s Eve, an emboldened LAPD were storming the gay bars in Silverlake, undercover cops bursting into action on the dancefloor of the newly opened (and still standing) Black Cat Tavern on Sunset just after midnight, while the band was still playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, brutally beating and arresting sixteen patrons, some for ‘lewd conduct’ - otherwise known as kissing - leaving those charged marked as a sex offenders for life.

In early 1967, a series of protests were organised, uniting all the targeted minorities, including hippies, kids, gays, Black and Latino people under the banner of PRIDE (Personal Rights in Defense and Education), under one cause - against ‘Blue Fascism’. A handbill framed on the wall of the current chic incarnation of the Black Cat Tavern reads ‘Crisis: Police Lawlessness Must Be Stopped!’. The landmark protest, attended by hundreds of orderly supporters, marked one of the first well attended organised demonstrations for gay rights in US history - Stonewall riots took place in 1969.

Sometimes looking to the past reframes the way we look at our current circumstances and is an important reminder of how lucky we are. As I reflect on the outrageous indignities and abuses suffered then and still being suffered around the world, by people just wanting the right to be free and gather together and express themselves, I can’t help but recognise my foolish curmudgeonliness at the idea of feeling pressured to celebrate, and to urge everyone to continue to always fight for our right to party.

Have one for me, wherever you are and may you head into the New Year full of fire and freedom x

Further reading:

https://historycooperative.org/journal/riot-nights-on-sunset-strip/

https://summerof.love/sunset-strip-counterculture-riots/

https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/before-stonewall/