Co-Founder CEO David Gordon reflects on the 60s.
Last month on a visit to Foster Farm Botanicals in Vermont, a dozen of us were chatting about where the industry was heading and I wondered, What happened to the spark of the 60s? Was there more purity of intent back then? While I’m not sure if there was more purity, there certainly was an intense focus on doing what was right, of standing up to what we perceived as wrong, as to how we might make a difference. The post-war years of growing affluence had already started a cultural shift to seeking something beyond financial security.
In looking back, I think of two paths that had emerged in the 60s: anger and love. The first, anger, fueled by deep-seated frustrations regarding police brutality, poverty, and racial inequality within black communities visible in the riots of the summer of 1967; as well as protests against the Vietnam War. The second, love, was visible in the exploration of eastern spirituality seen in the writings of Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, and the Beatles studying with Maharishi in India in 1968.
In my world in Canada and at my age, I was mostly unaware of the issues of poverty, race and the war. Yet the universal language of music was everywhere understood. As I came of age in the late 60s, two bands framed these conversations. The Beatles’ Let it Be and the Stones’ Let it Bleed. I looked at Let it Be a hundred times. My room was in the basement of my parent’s home. I had the old phonograph down there. My guess is that my dad had upgraded to a sound system. I don’t know if I had ever seen anything like Let it Be. The album was housed within a thin sturdy box which prominently featured a booklet. My 15 year old self just accepted it as what was next from the Beatles. Whatever they did was something that we all rode on. Creativity novelty evolution sophistication, album after album starting with Rubber Soul and Revolver. I didn’t own the Stones’ Let it Bleed. Rather I heard it over and over, dozens and dozens of time, over an extended weekend in the summer of 1969. Holed up in a Lake of the Woods cabin with seven high school friends. Marijuana, music, longing. The album Let it Bleed, and the band was one of our passions. One of the guys, called Bones, knew the work of guitar player Mick Jones. Most of us only new Jagger and Richards. Two girls, a few years older than us, showed up on motorcycles. We had passed them on the highway drive to the cottage. Hung out with us for a few days. In my memory I’m distant, floating over in the corner of one of the big family rooms.
The song Gimme Shelter from Let it Bleed captures the time;
Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don’t get some shelter
Ooh yeah I’m gonna fade away.
War, children It’s just a shot away …..
Rape, murder It’s just a shot away.
A year earlier, the Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil referenced the same narrative from an earlier time:
I was ‘round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain…
Stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Tsar and his ministers …
I shouted out ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’
When after all It was you and me …
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints …
Just call me Lucifer…
Contrast that with the title song of the Beatles’ Let it Be;
And when the broken-hearted people
Living in the world agree
There will be an answer
Let it be
For though they may be parted there is
Still a chance that they will see
There will be an answer
Let it be.
Add to that the Beatles’ experience with Maharishi celebrated in Across the Universe;
Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me …
Sounds of laughter shades of life are ringing
Through my open ears inciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns
And calls me on and on across the universe…
Is the spark still here?
I see it in corners here and there. I see it on farms in Oregon and Washington. I see it in the women’s cooperatives of Morocco and other African countries. I see it in the eyes of herbalists gathering in the villages of America. I see it in certain houses of distribution of organic goods. I see it in privately held companies of various sizes. I see it in the eyes of my colleagues, of our brokers, in retailers in indies and national chains. I don’t know if it’s more or less prominent. I don’t know if our actions will change the way of doing business, where business is a measure of financial output alone. What I do know is that there is no other choice but to follow that spark of purity. That in following that spark, that belief, that I feel pride in being human, in standing up for what I believe, of setting an example of what I want to be. That while the reality for financial outcome is perhaps less certain this way, that it is better to take this path than to opt for one guided by measures that place capital over human welfare.
