History of the hippie movement/temp

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The David Roca's History Project:History of the hippie movement is the history of Hippies.

History of the movement in the US

Antecedents

The foundation of the hippie movement in the United States finds historical precedent as far back as the counterculture of the Ancient Greeks, espoused by philosophers like Diogenes of Sinope and the Cynics. Hippies were also influenced by the ideas of Jesus Christ, Hillel the Elder, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Krishna, Henry David Thoreau, Madame Blavatsky, Gandhi, and others. [Ed. (Jul 7, 1967). The Hippies. " [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,899555-1,00.html Time] ".]

In the 1890s, a European back-to-nature movement began, inspired by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, Hermann Hesse, and Eduard Baltzer. Thousands of young Germans rejected the rapid trend toward urbanization and attempted to return to the natural, pagan, and spiritual life of their ancestors. ["Hippie Roots and the Perennial Subculture," by Gordon Kennedy and Kody Ryan, http://www.hippy.com/php/article-243.html, retrieved 12 March 2007 ]

During the first several decades of the twentieth century, these beliefs were introduced to the United States as Germans settled around the country, some opening the first health food stores. Many moved to Southern California where they could practice an alternative lifestyle in a warm climate. In turn, young Americans adopted the beliefs and practices of the new immigrants. One group, called the "Nature Boys", took to the California desert, raised organic food, and espoused a back-to-nature lifestyle. Eden Ahbez, a member of this group, wrote a hit song called "Nature Boy", which was recorded in 1947 by Nat King Cole, popularizing the homegrown back-to-nature movement to mainstream America. Eventually, a few of these Nature Boys, including the famous Gypsy Boots, made their way to Northern California in 1967, just in time for the Summer of Love in San Francisco. [The psychedelic posters that announced concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium and other San Francisco venues were heavily influenced by the artist Fidus, one of the original German "hippies". For more about the influence of the Germans on America's hippies, see Gordon Kennedy and Kody Ryan's article, [http://www.hippy.com/php/article-243.html Hippie Roots & The Perennial Subculture] .]

Another influence was the Jamaican Rastafari movement who, while openly espousing Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia as God, also wore long hair (called dreadlocks), smoked cannabis as a sacrament, rejected the establishment (which they called Babylon) and espoused a back-to-nature and back-to-their-African-roots philosophy. Due to large scale immigration from Jamaica to the UK during the 1950s, this movement influenced the developing UK hippie movement, with contacts often formed when young whites would buy cannabis from black communities.

Beat generation

In the US the Beat Generation gradually gave way to the Sixties counterculture, accompanied by a shift in high terminology from "beatnik" to "hippie." Many of the original Beats remained active participants, notably Allen Ginsberg, who became a fixture of the anti-war movement. On the other hand, Jack Kerouac broke with Ginsberg and criticized the 60s protest movements as "new excuses for spitefulness". Through a variety of popular media, including television shows such as "the Many Loves of Dobie Gillis", the beat image became somewhat commercialized, and also a large influence on members of the new counterculture. Bob Dylan became close friends with Allen Ginsberg, and Ginsberg became close friends with Timothy Leary, helping him distribute LSD.

In 1963, Ginsberg was living in San Francisco with Neal Cassady and Charles Plymell at 1403 Gough St. (Charles Plymell later helped publish the first issue of R. Crumb's Zap Comix a few years later, then moved to Ginsberg's commune in Cherry Valley, NY in the early 1970s). Around that time, Ginsberg connected with Ken Kesey who was participating in CIA sponsored LSD trials while a student at Stanford. Neal Cassady was the bus driver for Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and he attempted to recruit Kerouac into their group, but Kerouac angrily rejected their invitation and accused them of attempting to destroy the American culture he celebrated.

According to Ed Sanders the change in the public label from "beatnik" to "hippie" occurred after the 1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, where Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure led the crowd in chanting "Om". Ginsberg was also at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and was friends with Abbie Hoffman and other members of the Chicago Seven. Stylistic differences between beatniks, marked by somber colors, dark shades, and goatees, gave way to colorful psychedelic clothing and long hair worn by hippies. While the beats were known for "playing it cool" and keeping a low profile, the hippies became known for "being cool", and displaying their individuality. Although the beats tended to be essentially apolitical, the hippies became active in the civil rights and anti-war movements.

1960–1966

Berkeley, California and The Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada

During the early 1960s Cambridge, Massachusetts, Greenwich Village in New York City and Berkeley, California anchored the American folk music circuit. Berkeley's two coffee houses, the Cabale Creamery and the Jabberwock, sponsored performances by folk music artists in a beat setting.

The Jabberwock was located at 2901 Telegraph Avenue at Russell (near Ashby) and was owned and run by Bill "Jolly Blue" Ehlert who bought it from Mary Randall, Belle Stauber, John Stauber on March 23, 1965. It was on the site of a former jazz club called Tsubo’s, where the Montgomery brothers had been the house band (Wes Montgomery having recorded his album Full House there on July 25, 1962). Berkeley jazz station KJAZ-FM was housed in the same building in the early days. At some unknown point between 1962 and 1963, the name was changed from Tsubo’s to The Jabberwock.

The Jabberwock initially followed the same booking policy as The Cabale Creamery where a typical month had mostly blues and folk, with some jug and bluegrass mixed in. Whilst the Jabberwock had a monthly entertainment calendar published as a handbill, the handbills and the posters themselves did not become ‘collectible’ until later, when the club started booking rock bands, such as Country Joe and the Fish, as well as folk groups.

While the list of performers at the Jabberwock were generally less well known han those playing the Fillmore at the same time, or even Greenwich Village, the years when the Jabberwock was the primary club venue in Berkeley serve as a useful primer for how music evolved from folk to rock, and in many ways subsequently returned in the form of singer-songwriters. In San Francisco, the presence of the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1966 provided a venue that paid real money (by the standards of the time) for musicians to perform, and San Francisco folk music disappeared in a puff of green smoke. In the South Bay, many folk musicians with no chance of getting by financially in San Jose and Palo Alto coffeehouses were drawn to the San Francisco scene and joined rock bands as well (Jorma Kaukonen, University of Santa Clara class of ’64 and Jefferson Airplane, and Jerry Garcia, Menlo Park High School and the Grateful Dead, are among the most prominent).

The joke was that whichever members did not have a gig or a date were in the band for the night, and ready to spring into action instantly - hence the name. The band in particular played on nights when no one else was booked, so that locals coming in for a cup of coffee had something to listen to.

The Instant Action Jug Band has passed into legend since some of its members became Country Joe and The Fish, accounting for that group’s willingness to play The Jabberwock even when they were a regular act at the Fillmore Auditorium and Avalon Ballroom over the bay in San Francisco.Both Joe McDonald and Barry Melton lived in Mrs Sherrill's apartment house (on Russell Street behind the Jabberwock) and played the 'Wock regularly before they became well known. Two other residents were Bruce Barthol and Paul Armstrong, soon to join Joe and Barry, together with David Cohen and John Francis Gunning in the fledgling Country Joe and the Fish. Joe, David, Bruce and drummer Chicken Hirsh are still in business today and have toured throughout the North America and the UK during 2004 and 2005 as the Country Joe Band. Barry has continued to play music during the course of his legal career.Another Berkeley group, The Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band, was also formed out of the casual membership of The Instant Action Jug Band. Much later, The Cleanliness and Godliness Skiffle Band produced a couple of albums, one the infamous Masked Marauders, that included Gary “Chicken” Hirsch of Country Joe and the Fish, on drums.

1966 was probably the peak of The Jabberwock, although it was still largely a folk club at this time. While electric psychedelic bands were forming in San Francisco, Berkeley and elsewhere at this time, acoustic performers playing folk, blues and bluegrass were still the standard entertainment in college towns. Many of these same performers, peculiarly influenced by strange smelling smoke, would turn up in rock bands in the next few years.

At 1:45 am on June 4, 1966, twenty year old aspiring musician and photographer Jef Jaisun walked in to The Jabberwock for the first time, Perry Lederman was playing. Jaisun would go on to work for Max Scheer's Berkeley Barb and later become immortal in the Bay Area for producing the much-played and fondly remembered record Friendly Neighborhood Narco Agent. This record, independently released as an EP by Jaisun in 1969, was later picked up Dr Demento, and the song reached an audience outside the Bay Area. Click here for the hilarious and unbelievable story of this song. Jef recalls "The entire package was patterned after Country Joe's Rag Baby EPs, right down to using Sierra Sound as the recording studio. I figured if it worked for him, well... not to mention that people in the Bay Area, and Berkeley in particular, had become accustomed to that type of EP packaging, thanks mostly to Joe. Several other folkies released similar EPs about the same time". [http://www.chickenonaunicycle.com/Jabberwock%20History.htm, retrieved 15 January 2007 ]

Starting in 1960, Chandler A. Laughlin III helped the Cabale Creamery, and he recruited the original talent that led to a unique amalgam of traditional folk music and the developing psychedelic rock scene. "Rockin' At the Red Dog: The Dawn of Psychedelic Rock," Mary Works Covington, 2005.]

In April 1963, Laughlin established a kind of tribal, family identity among approximately fifty people who attended a traditional, all-night Native American peyote ceremony in a rural setting. This ceremony combined a psychedelic experience with traditional Native American spiritual values; these people went on to sponsor a unique genre of musical expression and performance at the Red Dog Saloon in the isolated old-time mining town of Virginia City, Nevada.

Starting in June 1965, Laughlin and his cohorts created what became known as "The Red Dog Experience" featuring previously unknown musical acts-- Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Charlatans, The Grateful Dead and others -- who played in the completely refurbished, intimate setting of Virginia City's Red Dog Saloon. There was no clear delineation between "performers" and "audience" in "The Red Dog Experience," during which music, psychedelic experimentation, a unique sense of personal style and the first primitive light shows combined to create a new sense of community. [http://www.billhamlights.com/, retrieved 15 January 2007 ] George Hunter of the Charlatans and Laughlin himself were true "proto-hippies," with their long hair, boots and outrageous clothing of distinctly American (and Native American) heritage. [http://thinkexist.com/quotes/chandler_laughlin/, retrieved 16 January 2007 ]

LSD manufacturer Owsley Stanley lived in Berkeley during 1965 and provided much of the LSD that became a seminal part of the "Red Dog Experience," the early evolution of psychedelic rock and budding hippie culture. At the Red Dog Saloon, The Charlatans were the first psychedelic rock band to play live (albeit unintentionally) loaded on LSD.

Psychedelic Rock in San Francisco, 1965–66

The Red Dog Experience

When the summer of 1965 ended, participants in "The Red Dog Experience" returned to San Francisco and spread their new sense of community with the creation of the Family Dog by Luria Castell, Ellen Harman and Alton Kelley. [http://www.gotarevolution.com/longshoremans.htm, retrieved 15 January 2007 ] On October 16, 1965 the Family Dog hosted San Francisco's first psychedelic rock performance, dance and light show at Longshoreman's Hall, modeled on their experiences at the Red Dog Saloon. Two other events followed before year's end, one at California Hall and one at the Matrix.

Trips Festival

After the first three Family Dog events, a much larger psychedelic event occurred at San Francisco's Longshoreman's Hall. Called "The Trips Festival," it took place on January 21–23, 1966 and was organized by Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey, Owsley Stanley and others. Ten thousand people attended this sold-out event, with a thousand more turned away each night. [Tamony, 1981, p.98] The big night, Saturday, January 22, saw the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company on stage, and 6,000 people arrived to imbibe punch spiked with LSD and witness one of the first fully-developed light shows of the era. [http://www.pranksterweb.org/trips.htm, retrieved 18 December 2006 ]

Fillmore Auditorium and Avalon Ballroom

By February 1966, the San Francisco psychedelic music scene was poised to come into full flower. The Family Dog became Family Dog Productions under organizer Chet Helms, promoting happenings at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium in initial cooperation with Bill Graham. The Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore Auditorium and other venues provided settings where participants could partake of the full psychedelic music experience. Bill Ham, who had pioneered the original Red Dog light shows, perfected his art of liquid light projection, which combined light shows and film projection and became synonymous with the San Francisco ballroom experience. [http://www.billhamlights.com/, retrieved 15 January 2007 ] [http://portalmarket.com/billham.html, retrieved 15 January 2007 ]

The sense of style and costume that began at the Red Dog Saloon flourished when San Francisco's Fox Theater went out of business and hippies bought up its costume stock, reveling in the freedom to dress up for weekly musical performances at their favorite ballrooms. As San Francisco Chronicle music columnist Ralph Gleason put it, "They danced all night long, orgiastic, spontaneous and completely free form."

Haight-Ashbury

The Charlatans, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead all moved to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during this period.

Some of the earliest San Francisco hippies were former students at San Francisco State College (later renamed San Francisco State University) who were intrigued by the developing psychedelic hippie music scene and "dropped out" after they started taking psychedelic drugs. These students joined the bands they loved and began living communally in the large, inexpensive Victorian apartments in the Haight. [Perry, 2005, pp. 5-7. SFSC students rented cheap, Edwardian-Victorians in the Haight.]

Young Americans around the country began moving to San Francisco, and by June 1966, around 15,000 hippies had moved into the Haight.Tompkins, 2001, Vol. 7]

Diggers

Hippie action in the Haight centered around the Diggers, a guerrilla street theatre group that combined spontaneous street theatre, anarchistic action, and art happenings in their agenda to create a "free city." The Diggers grew from two radical traditions thriving in the area during the mid-1960s: the bohemian/underground art/theater scene, and the new left/civil rights/peace movement. Fact|date=February 2007

By late 1966, the Diggers opened stores which simply gave away their stock; provided free food, medical care, transport and temporary housing; they also organized free music concerts and works of political art.

Love Pageant Rally

On October 6 1966, the San Francisco hippies staged a gathering in the Golden Gate Park panhandle, called "The Love Pageant Rally." As explained by Allan Cohen, co-founder of the San Francisco Oracle, the purpose of the rally was two-fold — to draw attention to the fact that LSD had just been made illegal, and to demonstrate that people who used LSD were not criminals, nor were they mentally ill. Rather, people who took LSD were mostly idealistic people who wanted to learn more about themselves and their place in the universe, and they used LSD as an aid to meditation and to creative, artistic expression. Thousands of hits of LSD were distributed free at the rally, and the Grateful Dead played; its huge success drew many more curious seekers to the Haight-Ashbury district.

Los Angeles

Los Angeles also had a vibrant hippie scene during the mid-1960s. The Venice coffeehouses and beat culture sustained the hippies, giving birth to bands like The Doors. Sunset Strip became the quintessential L.A. hippie gathering area, with its seminal rock clubs Whisky-a-Go-Go and the Troubadour. The Strip was the location of the protest described in Buffalo Springfield's early 1966 hippie anthem, "For What It's Worth."

Millbrook

Before the Summer of Love, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert formed the International Foundation for Internal Freedom in Newton, Massachusetts, inhabiting two houses but later moving to a 64-room mansion at Millbrook, New York, with a communal group of about 25–30 people in residence until they were shutdown in 1967.Miller, Timothy. (Dec. 11, 2004). [http://www.thefarm.org/museum/californiacommunes.html California Communes in Historical Context] . Keynote address at "The Commune: Histories, Legacies, and Prospects in Northern California". Hippie Museum.]

Drop City

In 1965, four art students and filmmakers, Gene Bernofsky, JoAnn Bernofsky, Richard Kallweit and Clark Richert, moved to a seven acre tract of land near Trinidad, Colorado. Their intention was to create a live-in work of Drop Art, continuing an art concept they had developed earlier, and informed by "happenings."

As Drop City gained notoriety in the 1960s underground, people from around the world came to stay and work on the construction projects. Inspired by the architectural ideas of Buckminister Fuller and Steve Baer, residents constructed domes and zonahedra to house themselves, using geometric panels made from the metal of automobile roofs and other inexpensive materials. In 1967 the group, consisting of 10 core people and many contributors, won Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion award for their constructions.

The community quickly grew in reputation and size, accelerated by media attention, including news reports on national television networks. Several other communities were formed in the region. With the Summer of Love and the explosion of the hippie movement, large numbers poured into Drop City. Overwhelmed, the original occupants left. Drop City continued for several more years, then was finally abandoned.

1967–1969

ummer of Love

On January 14, 1967, the outdoor Human Be-In in San Francisco popularized hippie culture across the United States, with 20,000 hippies gathering in Golden Gate Park. The Monterey Pop Festival from June 16-18 introduced the rock music of the counterculture to a wide audience and marked the start of the "Summer of Love." [Dudley, 2000, p. 254] Scott McKenzie's rendition of John Phillips' song, "San Francisco," became a hit in the United States and Europe. The lyrics, "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair", inspired thousands of young people from all over the world to travel to San Francisco (75,000-100,000 by police estimates), sometimes wearing flowers in their hair and distributing flowers to passersby, earning them the name, "Flower Children."

Bands like the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), and Jefferson Airplane continued to live in the Haight, but by the end of the summer, the incessant media coverage led the Diggers to declare the "death" of the hippie with a parade. According to the late poet Stormi Chambless, the hippies buried an effigy of a hippie in the Panhandle to demonstrate the end of his/her reign.

Regarding this period of history, the July 7, 1967, "TIME" magazine featured a cover story entitled, "The Hippies: The Philosophy of a Subculture." The article described the guidelines of the hippie code: "Do your own thing, wherever you have to do it and whenever you want. Drop out. Leave society as you have known 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, fun."cited in Marty, 1997, p. 125]

While the Haight was the undisputed epicenter of a growing hippie culture, college campuses and cities throughout the United States and as far away as Sweden boasted a vibrant counterculture, including New York's East Village, Chicago's Old Town, Boston, Detroit, Lawrence, KS and Paris.Fact|date=February 2007

New Communalism

When the Summer of Love finally ended, thousands of hippies left San Francisco, a large minority of them heading back to the land, creating the largest number of intentional communities in the history of the United States. Those hippies formed alternative, egalitarian communes in northern California, Colorado, New Mexico, Tennessee, Canada, etc. [Turner, 2006, pp. 32-39. Turner cites Timothy Miller's 1999 book, "The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond".]

The Farm

In 1967, Stephen Gaskin began to develop a philosophy of hippie perspectives at San Francisco State College, where Gaskin taught English, creative writing, and General Semantics. Gaskin's "Monday Night Class" became a broad, open discussion group involving up to 1500 students and other participants from the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1970, Gaskin and his wife, Ina May Gaskin, invited by mid-western preachers to explain "what was happening" to their "Mr and Mrs Jones" congregations, led a caravan of 60 buses, vans and trucks on a cross country speaking tour. Along the way, they checked out various places that might be suitable for settlement. By the time they got back to San Francisco, they realized that they had become a "thing", and decided to return to Summertown, Tennessee, where they bought convert|1700|acre|km2 and created an intentional community called "The Farm.” The Farm became a widely respected, spiritually-based hippie community that is still in existence, although it is now more a hip village of 300 than a commune of 1200. [Bates, Albert. (1995). [http://www.thefarm.org/lifestyle/albertbates/akbp3.html J. Edgar Hoover and The Farm] . " [http://www.thefarm.org/ The Farm] ". Retrieved on 2006-10-06.]

People's Park

In April 1969, the building of People's Park in Berkeley, California received international attention. The University of California, Berkeley had demolished all the buildings on a convert|2.8|acre|m2|sing=on parcel near campus, intending to use the land to build playing fields and a parking lot. After a long delay, during which the site became a dangerous eyesore, thousands of ordinary Berkeley citizens, merchants, students, and hippies took matters into their own hands, planting trees, shrubs, flowers and grass to convert the land into a park. A major confrontation ensued on May 15, 1969, and Governor Ronald Reagan ordered a two-week occupation of the city of Berkeley by the United States National Guard. Flower power came into its own during this occupation as hippies engaged in acts of civil disobedience to plant flowers in empty lots all over Berkeley under the slogan "Let A Thousand Parks Bloom."

Woodstock

In August 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Festival took place in Bethel, New York, which, for many, exemplified the best of hippie counterculture. Over 500,000 people arrived to hear the most notable musicians and bands of the era, among them Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix. Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm provided security and attended to practical needs, and the hippie ideals of love and human fellowship seemed to have gained real-world expression.

Altamont

In December 1969, a similar event took place in Altamont, California, about 30 miles (45 km) east of San Francisco. Initially billed as "Woodstock West," its official name was The Altamont Free Concert. About 300,000 people gathered to hear The Rolling Stones; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Jefferson Airplane and other bands. The Hells Angels provided security that proved far less beneficent than the security provided at the Woodstock event: 18-year-old Meredith Hunter was stabbed and killed while drawing a gun in front of the stage during The Rolling Stones performance, and four accidental deaths occurred. There were also four births at the concert.

1970–1973

:"Whoever marries the zeitgeist will be a widower soon." – August Everding

By 1970, the 1960s zeitgeist that had spawned hippie culture seemed to be on the wane.Bugliosi, 1994, pp. 638-640. Bugliosi describes the popular view that the Manson case "sounded the death knell for hippies and all they symbolically represented," citing Joan Didion, Diane Sawyer, and "Time". Bugliosi admits that although the Manson murders "may have hastened" the end of the hippie era, the era was already in decline.] The events at Altamont shocked many Americans, including those who had strongly identified with hippie culture. Another shock came in the form of the Tate and LaBianca murders committed in August 1969 by Charles Manson and his "family" of followers.

Charles Manson

Charles Manson was a hard-core, institutionalized criminal who had been released from prison just in time for San Francisco's Summer of Love. With his long hair and the ability to charm a crowd with his guitar playing, his singing, and his rhetoric, Manson exhibited many of the outward manifestations of hippie identity. Yet Manson hardly exemplified the hippie ideals of peace, love, compassion and human fellowship; through twisted logic and psychological manipulation, he inspired his followers to commit murder.

Manson's highly publicized 1970 trial and subsequent conviction in January 1971 irrevocably tarnished the hippie image in the eyes of the American public. Other factors--for instance, the proliferation of hard drugs and their associated dependency--also contributed to the decline.

Mainstream

By the early 1970s much of hippie style had been integrated into mainstream American society; hippie music and fashion had become mainstream —large rock concerts that originated with the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, and the 1968 Isle of Wight Festival became the norm; mustaches, beards and longer hair abounded; colorful, multi-ethnic clothing dominated the fashion world.

In the mid-seventies, the media lost interest in the hippie counterculture as it went out of fashion. The Vietnam War came to an end, and hippies became targets for ridicule with the advent of punk rock and disco.

Outside the United States, hippie culture has remained visible as a counter cultural movement, especially in Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Australia. Fact|date=February 2007

History of the movement worldwide

1976–1981

Nambassa

Between 1976 and 1981, hippie music festivals were held on large farms around Waihi and Waikino in New Zealand- Aotearoa. Named "Nambassa", the festivals focused on peace, love, and a balanced lifestyle, featuring workshops and displays advocating alternative lifestyles, clean and sustainable energy, and unadulterated foods.

Nambassa is also the tribal name of a trust that has championed sustainable ideas and demonstrated practical counterculture and alternative lifestyle methods since the early 1970s.

References