"The Last Hippie"

In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital, a chronic care hospital in the Bronx where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients he would later write about in Awakenings. These patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, were survivors of the great pandemic of encephalitis lethargica, the "sleepy sickness" that swept the world from 1916 to 1927. Sacks treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, enabling them to come back to life. Working with the nurses and the music therapists at Beth Abraham, he also found that music could often be as powerful as any drug.

In 1977, also at Beth Abraham, Dr. Sacks met "Greg F.," the patient on whom the character of Gabriel Sawyer is based. Greg, a young man with devastating amnesia caused by a brain tumor, could remember almost no new events in his life, but his memory for music, particularly that of the 1960s, remained intact. Music could reach him as nothing else could. After almost fifteen years of working with Greg, Dr. Sacks arranged for Greg to meet drummer Mickey Hart and go to a Grateful Dead concert. Dr. Sacks wrote about Greg in his essay, "The Last Hippie," published in An Anthropologist on Mars (1995). Sacks has also written extensively about the powers of music in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. His most recent book, The Mind's Eye, was published in October 2010. More information is available at www.oliversacks.com.

Learn more about The Last Hippie and the Grateful Dead.

Excerpt From “The Last Hippie”
(An Anthropologist on Mars)

By Oliver Sacks

"Greg F. grew up in the 1950s in a comfortable Queens household, an attractive and rather gifted boy who seemed destined, like his father, for a professional career—perhaps a career in songwriting, for which he showed a precocious talent. But he grew restive, started questioning things, as a teenager in the late '60s; started to hate the conventional life of his parents and neighbors and the cynical, bellicose administration of the country. His need to rebel, but equally to find an ideal and a guide, to find a leader, crystallized in the Summer of Love, in 1967. He would go to the Village and listen to Allen Ginsberg declaiming all night; he loved rock music, especially acid rock, and, above all, the Grateful Dead. Increasingly he fell out with his parents and teachers; he was truculent with the one, secretive with the other. In 1968, a time when Timothy Leary was urging American youth to "tune in, turn on, and drop out," Greg grew his hair long and dropped out of school, where he had been a good student; he left home and went to live in the Village where he dropped acid and joined the East Village drug culture—searching, like others of his generation, for utopia, for inner freedom, and for "higher consciousness."
[Greg later joined the Hare Krishna and went to live in their temple in New Orleans, where his parents found him, very ill from a brain tumor, and brought him to a hospital in New York. I met him in 1977, shortly after his brain tumor was removed.)
Questioning him about current events and people, I found the depths of his disorientation and confusion. When I asked him who was the president, he said, "Lyndon," then, "the one who got shot." I prompted, "Jimmy . . . ," and then he said, "Jimi Hendrix," and when I roared with laughter, he said maybe a musical White House would be a good idea. A few more questions convinced me that Greg had virtually no memory of events much past 1970, certainly no coherent, chronological memory of them. He seemed to have been left, marooned, in the ’60s—his memory, his development, his inner life since then had come to a stop."