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An Era of Hippies


Ah, the late 1960’s, a time of cultural change within the world. It was a challenging time period for everyone that was alive, and no one would ever be the same nor think the same ever again. It’s funny, after doing some research on the subject, there were prior movements similar to the movement in the late 1960’s, as early as Ancient Greece with philosophers Diogenes and Cynics, in the late 1800’s in Germany the Der Wandervogel movement, and more notably the Beat Generation in the 1950’s. However, unlike the movements prior, the Hippie Generation had an impact on the world so huge that it shook all world ideals and changed everything. Some people don’t really know how the Hippie Movement started, nor when it exactly started, but when people think of hippies, they immediately think San Francisco, which was the birthplace of the movement. The Hippie Generation started in the early 1960’s in the San Francisco area, mostly of people from the Beat Generation, which San Francisco was the main area for that scene, college students looking for change, and folk artists of the day. One man that helped give the movement a big boast was author Ken Kesey, whom back in the 1950’s was part of a civilian test the US government was doing on effects of LSD, which at the time was legal and only used for government purposes, mostly for experimenting on getting confessions from someone and mind control. Also, another man by the name of Timothy Leary, who was a Harvard Psychology professor that got a hold of the drug and began using it in his classes, and began to freely distribute the LSD in sugar cubes throughout the campus. These two men would meet later on, but each one of them started a movement on both coasts of the United States. Kesey, while riding on the success of his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, formed a traveling group of bohemians, beatniks, and folkies called The Merry Pranksters, which traveled around the country, hosting parties that people would call Freak Outs, where there was a small admission fee to get in, and while in the party there was free cool aid with LSD in it, marijuana, and any other drugs at hand. There would be a bad playing during the Freak Out, along with a small light show to enhance the effects of the drug use. These Freak Outs were created due to Ken Kesey’s belief that the drugs they were promoting were good, and it would help people get free from their very conformed lifestyle that was created from the 1950’s. It would be a small smash around the country, but it would gain a huge momentum when they came to San Francisco. Already a place for the Beat Generation, which lived around the North Beach area of the city, the Merry Pranksters set up shop in the Haight-Ashbury community located in the southern part of San Francisco. There, they encountered some young people, whom would form bands that would create a centerpiece to the Psychedelic Movement to come. Some of those bands in that area were Moby Grape, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and The Warlocks, whom later changed their name to The Grateful Dead. In San Francisco, the Merry Pranksters found their biggest crowd, and by the end of 1965, would put their Freak Out parties into auditoriums, concert venues, and selling out every show. Some notable first psychedelic shows to be put on in San Francisco during 1965 were The Charlatans show at the Red Dog Saloon, which the band became the first to perform while loaded on LSD, and an event hosted by a collective of musicians called The Family Dog, called A Tribute to Dr. Strange, played at Longshoreman’s Hall. There, a crowd of over a thousand people showed to witness the very first psychedelic concert in San Francisco, equipped with a light show and the bands dressed in costumes. Before the end of 1965, there would be two more events done under the name A Tribute to Dr. Strange, one at California Hall and the other at The Matrix. In the next year of 1966, the performances were bigger along with the crowds. In only a few months after the first performance of A Tribute to Dr. Strange, another event was held called The Trips Festival, which lasted for three days in January. Each day there was a crowd of ten thousand people, with about a thousand people turned away every night, and one night when The Grateful Dead performed, the band brought in a huge bowl full of punch spiked with LSD for the audience. After the success of The Trips Festival, it came to the promoters that the shows need to be in larger venues. The Family Dog Collective was changed to Family Dog Productions under the organzier Chet Helms, and now began to promote shows in large venues like The Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium in initial cooperation with Bill Graham. These, along with other venues, provided the settings for participants to partake the full psychedelic rock experience. Bill Ham, who pioneered the first light shows the previous, was able to perfect his art of liquid light production, which combined light shows and film projection that would become synonymous with the San Francisco ballroom experience. With the Fox Theater in San Francisco going out of business, the hippies bought up their costume stock that resulted in the freedom to dress up for weekly performances at the venues. One San Francisco columnist described the show’s participants, “They danced all night long, orgiastic, spontaneous, and completely free form.” By mid 1966, Haight-Ashbury homed fifteen thousand hippies, much of them college students going to San Francisco State University, and the rest from all over the country. To maintain a particular order within the community, a group of volunteers called The Diggers was created to provide medical attention, free food, supplies, drugs, and money for the community. Also, they helped organize free concerts and art showings. As the scene in San Francisco grew, so did the drug consumption of the hippies, and along with the violence of the use of LSD that resulted in accidents or even death to it’s users. Then, on October 6, 1966, the state of California declared LSD a controlled substance, which made the use and possession illegal. In retaliation of the criminalization of the drug, the hippies in San Francisco gathered at The Golden Gate Panhandle to demonstrate that LSD users were not criminals nor mentally ill. The gathering would be known as the Love Pageant Rally, and there was crowd of between seven to eight hundred people, and almost all at once each took a hit of LSD. The Grateful Dead were at the rally to perform for the crowd. When the government thought they had the scene under control by making LSD illegal, they were in for another surprise in the next couple months. Not only the Love Pageant Rally showed that hippies were not going to go quietly, it would be in January of 1967 that showed the hippie generation was here to stay. The Human Be In, a event held in Golden Gate Park, would bring media attention from all over the country. Originally intending for a crowd of about three thousand people, there would end up being twenty thousand people showing up. Every San Francisco band would be performing, along with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg being one of the speakers at the event. The event was on all major television channels across the nation and the world, and would result in an East Coast version called the Central Park Be In in Manhattan in March. The Hippie Generation was in popular culture, but this meant more problems for the community. Haight-Ashbury was already over-crowded with people a year earlier, and in the Summer of Love, an estimated one hundred thousand kids left wherever they came from and traveled to San Francisco. Psychedelic music was on the radio all the time, like Scott McKenzie’s song San Francisco, which was popular in both the US and in Europe. And when new people were coming into San Francisco, so did the media. In that summer, Time magazine conducted an article about the movement, describing the hippie code, “Do your own thing, wherever you have to do it and whenever you want. Drop out. Leave society as you know it. Leave it utterly. Blow the mind of every straight person you can reach. Turn them on, if not to drugs, then to beauty, love, honesty, and fun.” As the media supported the hippies beliefs on love and peace, they criticized their anti-work ethic, drug use, and permissive ethos. This resulted in moral panics throughout the late 1960’s by many conservative groups. However, as the media attention of the movement was all over the place in San Francisco, The Diggers declared the “death” of the hippie on the one year anniversary of the illegalization of LSD. A ceremony was held at the Golden Gate Panhandle, with members of The Diggers being pallbearers carrying a casket that was to be the soul of the hippie, now dead, and to be buried. However, the hippie generation was still going on strong throughout the country, and it was get even stronger throughout the first half of 1968. As the war in Vietnam grew heavier with Tet Offensive early in 1968, hippies began involving themselves in anti-war demonstrations. Also, with the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations in April of that year, it seemed as though there was war going on in the streets of the United States. There would be constant barrages with the police and with hippies, and it would draw to it’s height with the Democratic Convention held in Chicago of that year. The protests at the convention were organized by mostly yippies, which were a political sub-group of hippies, and the protests would result in hundreds of people injured, including the same amount arrested, along with it organizers. It became apparent to people that hippies were becoming more of a violent group of people as oppose to a peaceful group. Along with the crime rate going up in San Francisco due to a migration of kids to the city, and with minority groups fighting with them in neighboring communities, a lot of hippies began leaving to the countryside to be close to nature and would form communes. Each commune would be set up with different goals and meanings, but the basis was peace and love. Almost all communes practiced sharing one’s partner with one another, and a symbol of unity. This “Back to the Land” movement was practiced by the more, true hippies as oppose to the trendsetter hippies. As 1968 drew to a close and into 1969, violence was still in cities with protests on the war. However, 1969 would have the first group of soldiers returning home from the war. Then, in August of 1969, the hippie movement would enjoy it’s peak with a music festival in upstate New York called Woodstock. Over five hundred thousand people showed up to see three days of music. Bands on the bill were The Who, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Although the promoters were heavily undersupplied for the event, with lack of medical teams and lack of security, Woodstock would end of being three days of peace and harmony. There was not one arrest made by local authorities, no one was killed, and only one person had to go to the hospital due to drug use. It proved that everyone could really live in peace, if it was only for just three days. However, the nirvana of Woodstock would be short lived, as in the same month of Woodstock, the murders of Sharon Tate, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca by a group of hippies under the leadership of Charles Manson, whom lived in Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. The media portrayed that hippies could also be killers and psychos as well after that incident. Then, at the end of the year, The Rolling Stones announced they were going to perform a free concert outside of San Francisco at the Altamont Speedway. Originally called The Altamont Free Concert, it was billed as Woodstock West, and over three hundred thousand people showed to see the concert. Unlike Woodstock, though, it ended in disaster and not so peacefully. The Rolling Stones hired a motorcycle gang called The Hells Angels to provide security. With their payment mostly being with booze and drugs, the Hells Angels were renown to hating hippies and ended up picking fights with the crowds during band sets. Jefferson Airplane was playing there, and when the lead singer tried to stop a Hells Angel from beating up a kid, another Hells Angel came and hit him on the head with bat, thus ending their set. But as The Rolling Stones started playing, the fighting seemed to have gotten even harsher, as during the set a young lady was stabbed too death by a Hells Angel. Altamont would prove to be the end of the hippie generation, as how violence began to follow around the movement. After the 1960’s, there would still be protests on the war, in 1970 the Kent State shooting brought even more close to the conflict. Most hippies would begin to return to where they originally came from or go back doing what they have done before, with the exception of some still living in communes. The Era of Hippies would, however, have a lasting mark on society. After the 1960’s, civil rights among minority groups would expand, as would religious and cultural diversity. Earth Day was made in 1970 as a result of the Back to the Land movement made by hippies. A couple hippies from Berkeley, CA by the names of Steve Waznek and Steve Jobs would create the first personal computer after years of messing around with electronics in 1976. Large scale music festivals would become the norm in touring for bands. Long hair, beards, and mustaches became more acceptable and commonplace. Psychedelic music would branch off into different musical genres, and even would be revived by newer bands. In fact, even the Internet I am using to type this blog could be traced back to the idealism from the hippies.
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