Hippies biography

On Broadway see entry under s—Film and Theater in volume 1 , the musical Hair see entry under s—Film and Theater in volume 4 opened in to celebrate the hippie lifestyle with music, dance, and a show-stopping scene in which the entire cast stood naked onstage. Toklas to Easy Rider The hippie culture gradually faded, as did the era that inspired it.

But hippie images and references continued to appear. The Grateful Dead —95 still had a dedicated following that included many aging hippies, until the band broke up following the death of Jerry Garcia — In the s and s, the TV sitcom Dharma and Greg could always get an easy laugh with a reference to Dharma's "hippie parents. Los Angeles : General Publishing Group, Hippies on the Web.

Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, Stern, Jane, and Michael Stern. Sixties People. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, A number of middle-class young people growing up in the late s felt that they did not fit into accepted society. Not only did their futures seem planned out for them, with office jobs for the men and motherhood and housework for the women, but those futures also seemed boring and suffocating.

In addition, there was an expanding war in Vietnam , and young men were being drafted into the army. By the late s young people who wanted peace and personal freedom began to gather together to express their views. In October over fifty thousand hippies gathered in Washington, D. Department of Defense, with their collective mind power.

Hippies bonded around their antiwar feelings, but they also broke away from the restrictions of society by practicing "free love" or casual sex, and using drugs, especially marijuana and the hallucinatory drug LSD, both for fun and to open their minds to new ways of seeing the world. Hippies, or freaks, as they often called themselves, also connected around the music of the time, a mixture of protest folk and rock.

The Woodstock Festival and Concert was an important event in hippie culture. Planned for an audience of ,, the rock festival in up-state New York attracted , fans and was a celebration of love, peace, and music. Hippie style included long, flowing hair for both men and women, and often beards for men. Since hippies rejected the modern American mainstream, ethnic clothes were popular, as were old-fashioned styles.

Both men and women commonly wore headbands, floppy hats, flowing scarves, and beads with blue jeans or bell-bottoms and tie-dyed T-shirts. Rebelling against corporate culture meant making clothes or buying cheaply at thrift shops and military surplus stores, so clothes were often ragged and patched or embroidered. Flowered clothing and embroidery were popular, and flowers became an important hippie symbol because hippies revered and felt connected to nature.

Though the hippies grew older and styles changed, people continued to feel nostalgic about hippie style and values. The s and s saw occasional revivals of hippie fashions and music, if not hippie values. On 5 September , in an article in the San Francisco Examiner about the new "Bohemian" scene developing in the Haight-Ashbury district, Michael Fallon labeled its members "hippies.

Although initially treated as a harmless curiosity by the media, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, spoke for many Americans when he defined a hippie as someone who "dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah. Lee, Martin A. At this festival, , hippies and music fans heard some of the most famous singers and groups of the time.

The people there also did things like nude swimming, mud-sliding, rain-dancing and mass tribal chants. They did this to show their freedom to the world. Late that year, a murderer named Charles Manson who posed as a hippie killed several people. Because some people blamed hippies for this, the term began to fall a little out of fashion in , even if the fashions themselves did not.

A new type of hard rock called heavy metal was developing out of one style of hippie music. A band called Led Zeppelin took the number one spot for most popular band of the year in , which had been held by the Beatles for eight years. Also that year, when students at Kent State University in Ohio were protesting Nixon's spread of bombing to Laos , the National Guard shot at them, and four were killed.

This had a chilling effect on the hippies and the whole country, but the peace movement continued. In , the draft was ended, and the war ended soon after that. US public attention turned to the Watergate scandal. This included consumerism. The hippie-style clothing worn was often hand-me-downs bought at flea markets, yard sales, or second-hand shops.

This was a purposeful effort to avoid buying from major brand-name stores and contributing to mainstream consumerist habits. Most of the counterculture movement youths were children of the middle and upper-middle class. They opposed everything that the previous decades were all about: wartime support, materialism, and work. Not everyone involved in the counterculture movement was involved in the hippie movement.

The two merged together because of matching perspectives. Hippie stuck as a derogatory identifier of rebellious youths participating in counterculture. It later manifested in a much lighter sense. It is generally no longer viewed as an insult to the modern-day hippie. There were a few different types of hippies , including visionaries, freaks and heads, and plastic hippies.

Some groups fit the general description of a hippie but were more politically active and involved in protests.

Hippies biography

Yippies stemmed from the Youth International Party. Diggers and Yippies were viewed as radical leftists who were anti-war socialism supporters with anarchist-like points of view. Visionary hippies closely resembled the intellectual beatniks of the previous decades. They were the original hippies with anti-conventional values that rejected the ways of the generation before them.

The freaks and heads were the hippies who sought freedom through spiritual connections using hallucinogenic drugs , such as lysergic acid diethylamide LSD. Plastic hippies took on the classic hippie fashion, dabbled in drug use, and enjoyed the atmosphere the hippie movement brought. Hippies were the baby boomer generation. There was a This created a vast, rebellious generation that became the main focus for two decades.

However, the number of youths spread across the nation allowed the counterculture movement to expand exponentially. The hippie subculture also known as the flower people began its development as a teenager and youth movement in the United States from the mids to early s and then developed around the world. Its origins may be traced to European social movements in the 19th and early 20th century such as Bohemians , with influence from Eastern religion and spirituality.

It is directly influenced and inspired by the Beat Generation , and American involvement in the Vietnam War. The hippie movement has found historical precedents as far back as the Mazdakist movement in Persia , whose leader the Persian reformer Mazdak, advocated communal living, the sharing of resources, vegetarianism , and free love.

In the late s and early s, the German Lebensreform movement emphasized the goodness of nature; the harms to society, people, and nature caused by industrialization; the importance of the whole person, body and mind; and the goodness of "the old ways". In contrast to these formal clubs, Wandervogel emphasized amateur music and singing, creative dress, and communal outings involving hiking and camping.

During the first several decades of the 20th century, these beliefs were introduced to the United States as Germans settled around the country , some opening the first health food stores. For example, Santa Barbara 's first health food store was opened in by Hermann Sexauer , who was born in Teningen , Germany on 4 March and died in December ; he left Germany in , arrived in New York, ended up in California and lived a pacifist , raw vegan , non-conformist lifestyle.

In turn, young Americans adopted the beliefs and practices of the new immigrants. One group, called the Nature Boys, who included William Pester , took to the California desert, raised organic food, and espoused a back-to-nature lifestyle. The Beat Generation , especially those associated with the San Francisco Renaissance , gradually gave way to the s era counterculture , accompanied by a shift in terminology from "beatnik" to " freak " and "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 s protest movements as an "excuse for spitefulness". Both Leary and Ginsberg were introduced to LSD by Michael Hollingshead in the early s, and both became instrumental in popularizing psychedelic substances to the hippie movement.

Ginsberg was also at the infamous Democratic National 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, hippies became known for displaying their individuality.

Written in , it was published April 28, , two days before its author was killed in a motorcycle crash. The Merry Pranksters were a group who originally formed around American novelist Ken Kesey , considered one of the most prominent figures in the psychedelic movement, and sometimes lived communally at his homes in California and Oregon.

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters are remembered chiefly for the sociological significance of a lengthy roadtrip they took in , traveling across the United States in a psychedelically painted school bus enigmatically labeled Further , and for the "Acid Tests". Kesey believed that psychedelics were best used as a tool for transforming society as a whole, and believed that if a sufficient percentage of the population had the psychedelic experience then revolutionary social and political changes would occur.

Therefore, they made LSD available to anyone interested in partaking - most famously through the "electric kool-aid" made available at a series of "Acid Tests"; musical and multi-media events where participants were given "acid", the street name for LSD. The tests were held at various venues in California, and were sometimes advertised with colorful crayoned signs asking "Can you pass the acid test?

The young psychedelic music band the Grateful Dead supplied the music during these events. In April , Chandler A. Laughlin III established a kind of tribal, family identity among approximately 50 people who attended a traditional, all-night peyote ceremony which combined a psychedelic experience with traditional Native American spiritual values.

During the summer of , Laughlin recruited much of the original talent that led to a unique amalgam of traditional folk music and the developing psychedelic rock scene. There was no clear delineation between "performers" and "audience" and the music, psychedelic experimentation, unique sense of personal style, and Bill Ham's first primitive light shows combined to create a new sense of community.

Although there were many diverse groups and elements protesting the US military involvement in Vietnam as it began to escalate, many of the protesters, rightly or wrongly, came to be associated with aspects of the "hippie" movement in the popular view. A number of them had been highly active in the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the s, traveling across the country to take part in sit-ins and marches against segregation in the South.

The first draft card burnings took place May 12, , in New York City. Others followed, including more draft-card burnings in May at the University of California, Berkeley which had already seen a precedent to the subsequent social turmoil, in form of the Free Speech Movement , and a coffin was marched to the Berkeley draft board. In later years, the Viet Cong flag of the "enemy" was even adopted as a symbol by more radical anti-war protesters.

However, the core "hippie" philosophy remained staunchly aloof to politics, and politicians, throughout this time. As sociologist Lewis Yablonsky noted in in his "Psychedelic Creed", "A true hippie believer would not get 'hung-up' with heavy game playing, the new left, war protests or civil rights battles. He simply would strengthen his own perceptions of honesty and truth.

The new "hippie" values, e. Another signal of the rising movement was the sudden appearance of an underground hippie press in several U. Liberation News Service — located in Washington, D. Strange " at Longshoreman's Hall. Two other events followed before year's end, one at California Hall and one at the Matrix. Ten thousand people attended this sold-out event, with a thousand more turned away each night.

These and other venues provided settings where participants could partake in the full psychedelic music experience. Bill Ham perfected his liquid light projection shows which, combined with film projection, and became synonymous with the San Francisco ballroom experience. When San Francisco's Fox Theater went out of business, hippies bought up its costume stock, reveling in the freedom to dress up for weekly musical performances at their favorite ballrooms.

Gleason put it, "They danced all night long, orgiastic, spontaneous and completely free form. Some of the early 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 left school after they started taking psychedelic drugs.

On October 6, , the state of California made LSD a controlled substance, making the drug illegal. According to Cohen, those 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. One frequently encountered theme was Asian spirituality, and Zen, dharma, "nirvana", karma and yoga were "buzzwords" of the counterculture.

For most this infatuation with Asia was somewhat superficial, limited to their wearing colourful and inexpensive clothing from India and burning Indian made incense. An audience of nearly 3, gathered at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, filling the hall to its capacity for a fundraising effort for the first Hare Krishna center on the West Coast of the United States.

Poet Allen Ginsberg led the singing of the Hare Krishna mantra onstage along with the founder acarya of the Krishna Consciousness movement, A. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Strobe lights and a psychedelic liquid light show along with pictures of Krishna and the words of the Hare Krishna mantra were projected onto the walls of the venue. It is nothing new.

We have a private revolution going on. A revolution of individuality and diversity that can only be private. Upon becoming a group movement, such a revolution ends up with imitators rather than participants It is essentially a striving for realization of one's relationship to life and other people Hippie action in the Haight centered on 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".

By late , 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. Celebrating both that and the end of the Summer of Love the Death of Hippie event was intended to signal to the rest of the country that it was over in San Francisco and that people needed to bring the revolution to their own locales from now on.

In late September , many of the shops in the district began to display a stack of 4x5 cards on their counters proclaiming "Funeral Notice for Hippie". An organization known as the Haight Ashbury Switchboard actively supported the Digger's funeral concept. A funeral procession went from the park down Haight St and ended in the Panhandle with supporters carrying a trinket filled casket.

It was emblematic of the fate of the hippie movement in San Francisco. These were subsequently replaced by a more cynical and exploitative crowd. Los Angeles also had a vibrant hippie scene during the mids. The Venice coffeehouses and beat culture sustained the hippies, giving birth to bands like The Doors. West Hollywood became the quintessential L.

One of the first "Love Ins" took place in Elysian Park and spread from there. 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 room mansion at Millbrook, New York , with a communal group of about 25 to 30 people in residence until they were shut down in 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 s underground, people from around the world came to stay and work on the construction projects. Inspired by the architectural ideas of Buckminster Fuller and Steve Baer , residents constructed geodesic domes and zonahedra to house themselves, using geometric panels made from the metal of automobile roofs and other inexpensive materials.

In the group, consisting of 10 core people and many contributors, won Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion award for their constructions. 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, 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. Regarding this period of history, the July 7, , 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. It is estimated that around , people traveled to San Francisco in the summer of The media was right behind them, casting a spotlight on the Haight-Ashbury district and popularizing the "hippie" label.

With this increased attention, hippies found support for their ideals of love and peace but were also criticized for their anti-work, pro-drug, and permissive ethos.