Actor Peter Fonda made a well-timed exit from the stage of life on Aug. 16 at the age of 79. Best known for his starring role in the 1969 movie Easy Rider, Fonda died 50 years after the release of that groundbreaking film.
Fonda and co-star Dennis Hopper, who also directed the film, played two motorcycle-riding hippies on a cross-country road odyssey across America “between the shining seas.” A promotional line for the movie said that the two “went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere.” Instead, the divided and angry America of 1969 found them at the searing climax of the film.
Easy Rider captured the spirit of the late 1960s, when white American hippies were often turned away from motels and restaurants in a nation that called itself the land of the free, just as black Americans had long been denied food and lodging in that same nation. The movie’s soundtrack—featuring songs by Steppenwolf, The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix and more—was a perfect counterpoint to the tenor of the times, when war raged in Vietnam as generations of Americans clashed here at home.
Jack Nicholson stole the show in Easy Rider in a supporting role as George, the hard-drinking liberal lawyer who joined Fonda and Hopper on their road trip across the American underbelly. His thoughts about freedom in Easy Rider became classic movie lines that still are relevant today, half a century after he spoke them in the film. “It’s real hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace,” he mused by the light of a campfire. “They’re gonna talk to you about individual freedom, but when they see a free individual it scares them.”
Then, as now, the America of 1969 often was a scared and angry nation that still had signs of hope and healing. When I first saw Easy Rider at the Capri Theatre in Atlanta in 1969, America was angered over the Vietnam War but elated over the Apollo 11 moon landing that summer. Massive musical gatherings like the Atlanta International Pop Festival were harbingers of the iconic Woodstock festival that brought tens of thousands of young people to rural New York 50 years ago. In July 1969, a free concert by the Grateful Dead, San Francisco’s seminal rock band, packed Atlanta’s Piedmont Park during a peaceful summer afternoon. Just two months later, that same urban park was a scene of violence as police using clubs and tear gas clashed with hippies hurling rocks, bottles and epithets during what came to be known as the Piedmont Park riot. In my mind’s eye, I can still see young people running from the park as the smoke from tear gas wreathed the park’s concert pavilion. It looked like a Civil War scene, and in a way it was, as “the establishment” and “the counterculture” were in conflict in Atlanta and across America.
Easy Rider was a controversial film that held a mirror up to the face of America. It angered some and was ignored by others at the time, but it earned its accolades. Life magazine called it “a lyric, tragic song of the road.” Film critic Rex Reed gushed that the movie was “a bold, courageous statement of life seldom matched in motion pictures.” The film garnered an award and an ovation at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Made on a shoestring budget, Easy Rider became a compelling and influential film classic that is a time capsule of the America of 1969 that still inspires and entertains viewers today.
Fonda made many films, but Easy Rider is his enduring look at the soul of America then that has lessons for us now. The words Nicholson spoke in the movie still apply today: “This used to be a hell of a good country. I can’t understand what’s going on with it.”
Like what you just read? Support Flagpole by making a donation today. Every dollar you give helps fund our ongoing mission to provide Athens with quality, independent journalism.
