Hippie

• 1. Introduction

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  Hippie culture left its mark on nearly every corner of Western society, from the organic food stores on American main streets to the peace symbol printed on shirts worldwide. But the story of how a loose-knit youth movement became a global phenomenon begins in a specific place, at a specific moment: a San Francisco journalist named Michael Fallon, writing about a coffeehouse at 1927 Hayes Street in the Haight-Ashbury district, and reaching for a word to describe the new generation of young people who had gathered there.

  Fallon's the 5th of September 1965 article in the San Francisco Examiner, titled 'A New Paradise for Beatniks', used the term hippie to describe young people who had drifted in from North Beach, and the label stuck. It spread through the media, was embraced and resisted in equal measure, and by the summer of 1967 had attached itself to roughly 100,000 young Americans who flooded into San Francisco seeking something they could barely name.

  Who were these people? Where did their values come from? And how did a subculture that represented just under 0.2% of the U.S. population in 1968 shape the way the world dresses, listens to music, thinks about food, and understands personal freedom? These are the questions worth sitting with.

• 2. Roots Older Than Rock

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  A July 1967 Time magazine study traced the philosophical origins of hippie culture back centuries, naming influences as far-ranging as the sadhu of India, the ancient Greek cynic Diogenes of Sinope, and figures like Buddha, Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, and Henry David Thoreau.

  The first recognizable modern precursors appeared in Germany in the late 1890s. A youth movement called Der Wandervogel, meaning 'wandering bird', arose as a reaction against the organized social clubs of German society. Inspired by the works of Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hermann Hesse, Wandervogel drew thousands of young Germans who wanted folk music, hiking, creative dress, and a pagan, back-to-nature spirituality rather than formal club culture and the rush toward urbanization.

  German emigrants brought those values to the United States over the following decades. Some opened the first health food stores. Many settled in southern California, where a group called the 'Nature Boys' raised organic food in the California desert and lived by the same principles. In 1948, songwriter eden ahbez wrote a song called 'Nature Boy', performed by Nat King Cole, inspired by Robert Bootzin, known as Gypsy Boots, who had spent years promoting health-consciousness, yoga, and organic food across the country.

  Those threads connected directly to the Beat Generation of the late 1950s, whose writers passed countercultural values to the next generation. The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg crossed over from that earlier movement and became a fixture of both the hippie and anti-war movements. The linguistic ancestry runs just as deep: the word hip in the sense of 'aware, in the know' first appeared in a 1902 cartoon, and the term hipster was coined by Harry Gibson in 1944 before spreading through Harlem jazz slang. The hippie drew from all of this.

• 3. The Red Dog and the Rise

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  Chandler A. Laughlin III set something in motion in April 1963 when he helped organize an all-night Native American peyote ceremony in a rural setting for roughly fifty people. That gathering combined psychedelic experience with traditional spiritual values, and those same people went on to create a musical experiment that most music historians would barely recognize.

  In the summer of 1965, Laughlin brought together previously unknown acts at a completely refurbished old mining-town bar in Virginia City, Nevada, called the Red Dog Saloon. Bands including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and the Charlatans played in this intimate setting while LSD manufacturer Owsley Stanley, living in Berkeley that year, provided much of the LSD that became central to what participants called 'The Red Dog Experience'. The Charlatans were the first psychedelic rock band to play live loaded on LSD, and the boundary between performer and audience dissolved almost entirely.

  When Red Dog participants returned to San Francisco, they formed a collective called the Family Dog, and on the 16th of October 1965 they hosted a psychedelic rock performance and light show at Longshoreman's Hall attended by approximately one thousand people. That event was followed by the sold-out Trips Festival in January 1966, organized by Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey, Owsley Stanley and others. Ten thousand people attended, with a thousand more turned away each night, and on Saturday the 22nd six thousand people arrived to witness one of the first fully developed light shows of the era.

  By June 1966, around 15,000 hippies had moved into Haight-Ashbury. The Diggers, a guerrilla street theatre group, opened free stores, provided free food and drugs, gave away money, organized free concerts, and performed political art, all in pursuit of what they called a 'free city'.

• 4. The Summer and Its Wreckage

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  On the 14th of January 1967, between 20,000 and 30,000 hippies gathered in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In. Timothy Leary, who had founded the League for Spiritual Discovery the previous September, spoke to the crowd and coined the phrase 'Turn on, tune in, drop out'.

  Scott McKenzie's rendition of John Phillips' song 'San Francisco', with its instruction to wear flowers in your hair, became a hit in the United States and Europe that summer and inspired thousands of young people from across the world to travel to San Francisco. The Monterey Pop Festival in June and the KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival, also in June, introduced the counterculture's music to mass audiences for the first time. On the 7th of July 1967, Time magazine ran a cover story on hippie philosophy, publishing the code in full: '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.'

  Around 100,000 people traveled to San Francisco that summer. The media followed, and the Haight could not contain the weight. By the end of the summer, malnourishment, disease, drug addiction, and rising crime had made the neighborhood barely recognizable. The Diggers staged a parade declaring the 'death' of the hippie, and poet Susan 'Stormi' Chambless recounted that they buried an effigy in the Panhandle to mark the end of the era. Beatle George Harrison visited Haight-Ashbury that year and found it, in his view, a haven for dropouts, and it inspired him to give up LSD.

  In August 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, New York drew over 500,000 people. Four months later, the Altamont Free Concert in California drew 300,000, and the Hells Angels security detail stabbed and killed 18-year-old Meredith Hunter during the Rolling Stones' performance. For many, Altamont marked a harder kind of ending than any effigy could.

• 5. Belief, Spirit, and the High Priests

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  Timothy Miller, writing in his 1991 book 'Hippies and American Values', described the hippie ethos as essentially a religious movement whose goal was to move beyond the limitations of mainstream religious institutions. Scholars identified hippies as 'seekers of meaning and value' who were 'enormously hostile to the religious institutions of the dominant culture'.

  Buddhism and Hinduism resonated with many hippies precisely because they seemed less rule-bound and less burdened by the associations that Western Christianity carried. Some hippies embraced neo-paganism, especially Wicca. Others were drawn to the occult, with Aleister Crowley as a recurring reference point. The Beatles placed Crowley on the cover of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Jimmy Page, co-founder of Led Zeppelin, owned some of Crowley's clothing, manuscripts and ritual objects, and bought Boleskine House during the 1970s. In the Soviet Union, where the Western hippie scene was developing in parallel, a notable number of hippies turned toward the Orthodox Church, which had been largely suppressed since the Bolshevik Revolution.

  In San Francisco, one figure came to embody the role of the movement's own spiritual authority. San Francisco State University Professor Stephen Gaskin began a class in 1966 that eventually outgrew its lecture hall and attracted 1,500 followers for open discussions drawing on Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu teachings. In 1970 he founded a Tennessee community called The Farm, and described his religion as 'Hippie' for the rest of his life.

  Timothy Leary's Psychedelic Experience, a guide to altered states grounded in Tibetan Buddhist teaching, directly inspired John Lennon to write 'Tomorrow Never Knows' for the Beatles' album Revolver, tracing a line from Harvard psychology to the most influential rock band in the world.

• 6. What the Culture Kept

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  By 1968, hippie-influenced fashions were entering the mainstream across the United States and around the world. The necktie, unavoidable for men in professional settings during the 1950s and early 1960s, began its long decline. Bell-bottom pants, tie-dye, dashikis, peasant blouses, and circular John Lennon-style glasses all moved from the Haight to shopping strips everywhere.

  Authors Stewart Brand and John Markoff have argued that the anti-authoritarian ethos of hippie culture is one of the primary roots of the personal computer and the internet. Some of the small hippie health food stores of the 1960s and 1970s became large-scale profitable businesses as interest in natural foods and organic produce grew. The Diggers' name traced back to the original English Diggers of 1649-1650, led by Gerrard Winstanley, and the cooperative business enterprises they modeled went on to influence an entire strain of American economic life.

  In New York City, musicians and audiences from female, homosexual, Black, and Latino communities drew directly from hippie aesthetics: overpowering sound, free-form dancing, multi-colored pulsating lighting, colorful costumes. Psychedelic soul groups like the Chambers Brothers and Sly and the Family Stone influenced George Clinton, P-funk, and the Temptations. The earnestness of hippie culture informed proto-disco music, and disco in turn supported the 1970s LGBT movement.

  The Burning Man festival, which began as a San Francisco beach party in 1986 and moved to the Black Rock Desert northeast of Reno, Nevada, drew 36,500 participants in 2005 and more than 50,000 in 2011, a temporary city built on the spirit of those early San Francisco ballroom nights. The Grateful Dead toured almost without interruption from 1965 to 1995; Phish toured continuously from 1983 to 2004. The form refused to stop.