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1960’s Hippy Era Icon, Peter Fonda passed away from respiratory failure caused by lung cancer at his home in Los Angeles on August 16, 2019.
Peter Henry Fonda (February 23, 1940 – August 16, 2019) was an American actor, director, and screenwriter. He was the son of Henry Fonda, younger brother of Jane Fonda, and father of Bridget Fonda. He was a part of the counterculture of the 1960s.
Fonda was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Easy Rider (1969), and the Academy Award for Best Actor for Ulee's Gold (1997). For the latter, he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama. Fonda also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film for The Passion of Ayn Rand (1999).
Written by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Fonda
The actor was a 60s icon but was also among the first in that era to tackle a bitterly divided America
Add today, high up the list of those iconic images of the 1960s, that of Peter Fonda in floral shirt and outrageous sideburns, riding free on his Harley, to a soundtrack of Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild.
John Kay’s growl was a battle hymn for those “looking for adventure” along the open road down which Wyatt, Billy and George (Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson) unleashed themselves. And they, Fonda above all, represented the quintessence of that era – its creative tumult, idealism, loss and self-absorption – on screen.
Easy Rider was the 35mm celluloid Woodstock; it was the reckless hippy gypsies’ manifesto of endless asphalt ribbon. Of course it has dated, the fact that the road trip was funded by smuggling cocaine from Mexico has lost its romance, as has the whole – in retrospect grotesque – glorification of drugs. On the other hand,
Fonda’s film was the first to portray LSD as a horror show. Either way, people my age watched Fonda on the edge of our seats, wanting to be him; to feel that liberation through wind and speed across America’s boundless space, to be by that camp fire. But we didn’t want to be attacked by club-wielding rednecks, we didn’t want the bad trip, and certainly didn’t want to be gunned down on a lonely road.
In this way, Fonda was the cautionary tale in all that summer of peace and love. He took the 1960s dream out of the comfort zone, away from Haight Ashbury, Sunset Boulevard and Greenwich Village, out into real America – where it twisted into nightmare. While the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds (who recorded The Ballad of Easy Rider) proclaimed the new liberation within the mind and on the streets, Fonda tested it to the limit, and his character Wyatt paid the price with his life.
This was Fonda’s message, and genius: whether he foresaw it or not, he presented in his most famous film not a dawning of the age of Aquarius, but a bitterly riven America.
Feel familiar? Though my generation watched Fonda’s open-road strike for freedom drop-jawed, we now behold the vindication of his darker vision. As I write this, the descendants of those thugs who battered George, then shot Wyatt and Billy to death converge on Portland, Oregon, for a far-right rally where they can spit their same murderous hate in a bastion of liberal tolerance – what they perceive as Fonda-land, on the west coast.
At a deeper level, Fonda’s hitting the open road was more than geographical and even cultural. It was existential: like Jack Kerouac, even Albert Camus, Fonda encouraged, inspired and – in another way – was responsible for that sense of self-imposed “un-belonging” that has propelled my life (for what that is worth) and, more importantly, some of the best writing and music of my generation.
A sense of exile in the land where you were born; a sense of identity that only feels at home when it is nowhere, or at least in between one place and another.
Fonda practised this in his real life: he often said that motorcycles were his “only focus”; he loved sailing. Fonda’s candid memoir Don’t Tell Dad is a litany of confrontations with authority, in which he usually comes out on top – but their telling oozes a certain sorrow, albeit magnificent.
Taken from article Written by Ed Vulliamy
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/18/peter-fonda-appreciation-easy-rider-hippy-dream
Wow, this article is hauntingly familiar to many of our stories here in markethive. Many of us were around during that era, and others not too far behind it. The mission for many here is the battle against bureaucracy, corporate and government control and the search for true financial freedom and sovereignty. sort of along the same theme is Easy Rider. thank you Peter Fonda and God bless you wherever you are.
Written By
Kevin Jacobson
