these configurations will be saved for each time you visit this page using this browser
, 1969]]
The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s, swiftly spreading to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. The early hippie ideology included the countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Some created their own social groups and communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as marijuana and LSD to explore alternative states of consciousness.
In January 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco popularized hippie culture, leading to the legendary Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. Hippies in Mexico, known as jipitecas, formed La Onda Chicana and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. In the United Kingdom, mobile "peace convoys" of New age travellers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge. In Australia hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival and the annual Cannabis Law Reform Rally or MardiGrass. In Chile, "Piedra Roja Festival" was held in 1970, and was the major hippie event in that country.
Hippie fashions and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the widespread movement in the 1960s, many aspects of hippie culture have been assimilated by mainstream society. The religious and cultural diversity espoused by the hippies has gained widespread acceptance, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual concepts have reached a wide audience. The hippie legacy can be observed in contemporary culture in myriad forms — from health food, to music festivals, to contemporary sexual mores, and even to the cyberspace revolution.
Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, the principal American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, argues that the terms hipster and hippie derive from the word hip, whose origins are unknown. The term hipster was coined by Harry Gibson in 1940. Although the word hippie made isolated appearances during the early 1960s, the first clearly contemporary use of the term appeared in print on September 5, 1965, in the article, "A New Haven for Beatniks", by San Francisco journalist Michael Fallon. In that article, Fallon wrote about the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse, using the term hippie to refer to the new generation of beatniks who had moved from North Beach into the Haight-Ashbury district. --> New York Times editor and usage writer Theodore M. Bernstein said the paper changed the spelling from hippy to hippie to avoid the ambiguous description of clothing as hippy fashions.
Like Wandervogel, the hippie movement in the United States began as a youth movement. Composed mostly of white teenagers and young adults between the ages of 15 and 25 years old, hippies inherited a tradition of cultural dissent from bohemians and beatniks of the Beat Generation in the late 1950s. extending as far as the United Kingdom and Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, and Brazil. The hippie ethos influenced The Beatles and others in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe, and they in turn influenced their American counterparts. Hippie culture spread worldwide through a fusion of rock music, folk, blues, and psychedelic rock; it also found expression in literature, the dramatic arts, fashion, and the visual arts, including film, posters advertising rock concerts, and album covers. Self-described hippies had become a significant minority by 1968, representing just under 0.2% of the U.S. population before declining in the mid-1970s. championed sexual liberation, were often vegetarian and eco-friendly, promoted the use of psychedelic drugs which they felt expanded one's consciousness, and created intentional communities or communes. They used alternative arts, street theatre, folk music, and psychedelic rock as a part of their lifestyle and as a way of expressing their feelings, their protests and their vision of the world and life. Hippies opposed political and social orthodoxy, choosing a gentle and nondoctrinaire ideology that favored peace, love and personal freedom, expressed for example in The Beatles' song "All You Need is Love". Hippies perceived the dominant culture as a corrupt, monolithic entity that exercised undue power over their lives, calling this culture "The Establishment", "Big Brother", or "The Man". Noting that they were "seekers of meaning and value", scholars like Timothy Miller have described hippies as a new religious movement.
During the early 1960s novelist Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters lived communally in California. Members included Beat Generation hero Neal Cassady, Ken Babbs, Carolyn Adams (aka Mountain Girl), Stewart Brand, Del Close, Paul Foster, George Walker, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt and others. Their early escapades were documented in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. With Cassady at the wheel of a school bus named Further, the Merry Pranksters traveled across the United States to celebrate the publication of Kesey's novel Sometimes a Great Notion and to visit the 1964 World's Fair in New York City. The Merry Pranksters were known for using marijuana, amphetamines, and LSD, and during their journey they "turned on" many people to these drugs. The Merry Pranksters filmed and audiotaped their bus trips, creating an immersive multimedia experience that would later be presented to the public in the form of festivals and concerts. Grateful Dead wrote a song about the Merry Pranksters' bus trips called "That's It For The Other One". In April 1963, Chandler A. Laughlin III, co-founder of the Cabale Creamery, 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. He and his cohorts created what became known as "The Red Dog Experience", featuring previously unknown musical acts — Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfly, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Charlatans, 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 Bill Ham's first primitive light shows combined to create a new sense of community. Laughlin and George Hunter of the Charlatans were true "proto-hippies", with their long hair, boots and outrageous clothing of nineteenth-century American (and Native American) heritage.
When they returned to San Francisco, Red Dog participants Luria Castell, Ellen Harman and Alton Kelley created a collective called "The Family Dog." Attended by approximately 1,000 of the Bay Area's original "hippies", this was San Francisco's first psychedelic rock performance, costumed dance and light show, featuring Jefferson Airplane, The Great Society and The Marbles. Two other events followed before year's end, one at California Hall and one at the Matrix. On Saturday January 22, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company came on stage, and 6,000 people arrived to imbibe punch spiked with LSD and to witness one of the first fully developed light shows of the era.
By February 1966, 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 with the San Francisco ballroom experience. 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 J. Gleason put it, "They danced all night long, orgiastic, spontaneous and completely free form." who became intrigued by the developing psychedelic hippie music scene. Young Americans around the country began moving to San Francisco, and by June 1966, around 15,000 hippies had moved into the Haight.
On October 6, 1966, the state of California declared LSD a controlled substance, which made the drug illegal. In response to the criminalization of psychedelics, 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 twofold: 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. The Grateful Dead played, and some sources claim that LSD was consumed at the rally. According to Cohen, those who took LSD "were not guilty of using illegal substances...We were celebrating transcendental consciousness, the beauty of the universe, the beauty of being."
In June 1967, Herb Caen was approached by "a distinguished magazine" On 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 100,000 people traveled to San Francisco in the summer of 1967. 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.
By the end of the summer, the Haight-Ashbury scene had deteriorated. The incessant media coverage led the Diggers to declare the "death" of the hippie with a parade. According to the late poet Susan 'Stormi' Chambless, the hippies buried an effigy of a hippie in the Panhandle to demonstrate the end of his/her reign. Haight-Ashbury could not accommodate the influx of crowds (mostly naive youngsters) with no place to live. Many took to living on the street, panhandling and drug-dealing. There were problems with malnourishment, disease, and drug addiction. Crime and violence skyrocketed. By the end of 1967, many of the hippies and musicians who initiated the Summer of Love had moved on. Misgivings about the hippie culture, particularly with regard to drug abuse and lenient morality, fueled the moral panics of the late 1960s.
The Yippies, who were seen as an offshoot of the hippie movements parodying as a political party, came to national attention during their celebration of the 1968 spring equinox, when some 3,000 of them took over Grand Central Station in New York — eventually resulting in 61 arrests. The Yippies, especially their leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, became notorious for their theatrics, such as trying to levitate the Pentagon at the October 1967 war protest, and such slogans as "Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball!" Their stated intention to protest the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, including nominating their own candidate, "Lyndon Pigasus Pig" (an actual pig), was also widely publicized in the media at this time.
in Russia]] 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 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, when Governor Ronald Reagan ordered the park destroyed, which led to 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".
In August 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair took place in Bethel, New York, which for many, exemplified the best of hippie counterculture. Over 500,000 people arrived to hear some of 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, Carlos Santana, 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.
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 benevolent than the security provided at the Woodstock event: 18-year-old Meredith Hunter was stabbed and killed during The Rolling Stones' performance.
Much of hippie style had been integrated into mainstream American society by the early 1970s. Large rock concerts that originated with the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival and the 1968 Isle of Wight Festival became the norm, evolving into stadium rock in the process. In the mid-1970s, with the end of the draft and the Vietnam War, a renewal of patriotic sentiment associated with the approach of the United States Bicentennial and the emergence of punk in London and New York, the mainstream media lost interest in the hippie counterculture. Acid rock gave way to prog rock, heavy metal, disco, and punk rock.
Starting in the late 1960s, hippies began to come under attack by working-class skinheads. Hippies were also vilified and sometimes attacked by punks, revivalist mods, greasers, football casuals, Teddy boys and members of other youth subcultures of the 1970s and 1980s. The countercultural movement was also under covert assault by J. Edgar Hoover's infamous "Counter Intelligence Program" (COINTELPRO), but in some countries it was other youth groups that were a threat. Hippie ideals had a marked influence on anarcho-punk and some post-punk youth subcultures, especially during the Second Summer of Love.
While many hippies made a long-term commitment to the lifestyle, some people argue that hippies "sold out" during the 1980s and became part of the materialist, consumer culture. Although not as visible as it once was, hippie culture has never died out completely: hippies and neo-hippies can still be found on college campuses, on communes, and at gatherings and festivals. Many embrace the hippie values of peace, love, and community, and hippies may still be found in bohemian enclaves around the world.
At the same time, many thoughtful hippies distanced themselves from the very idea that the way a person dresses could be a reliable signal of who he was, especially after outright criminals, like Charles Manson, began to adopt superficial hippie characteristics, and also after plainclothes policemen started to "dress like hippies" in order to divide and conquer legitimate members of the counter-culture. Frank Zappa admonished his audience that "we all wear a uniform": the San Francisco clown/hippie Wavy Gravy said in 1987 that he could still see fellow-feeling in the eyes of Market Street businessman who'd dressed conventionally to survive.
bus decorated with hand-painting ]] As in the beat movement preceding them, and the punk movement that followed soon after, hippie symbols and iconography were purposely borrowed from either "low" or "primitive" cultures, with hippie fashion reflecting a disorderly, often vagrant style. As with other adolescent, white middle-class movements, deviant behavior of the hippies involved challenging the prevailing gender differences of their time: both men and women in the hippie movement wore jeans and maintained long hair, and both genders wore sandals or went barefoot. while women wore little or no makeup, with many going braless. Hippies often chose brightly colored clothing and wore unusual styles, such as bell-bottom pants, vests, tie-dyed garments, dashikis, peasant blouses, and long, full skirts; non-Western inspired clothing with Native American, Asian, Indian, African and Latin American motifs were also popular. Much of hippie clothing was self-made in defiance of corporate culture, and hippies often purchased their clothes from flea markets and second-hand shops. This way of life is still seen among the Rainbow Family groups, new age travellers and New Zealand's housetruckers. A derivative of this free-flow style of travel were hippie trucks and buses, hand-crafted mobile houses built on truck or bus chassis to facilitate a nomadic lifestyle as documented in the 1974 book Roll Your Own Some of these mobile gypsy houses were quite elaborate with beds, toilets, showers and cooking facilities.
On the West Coast, a unique lifestyle developed around the Renaissance Faires that Phyllis and Ron Patterson first organized in 1963.
During the summer and fall months, entire families traveled together in their trucks and buses, parked at Renaissance Pleasure Faire sites in Southern and Northern California, worked their crafts during the week, and donned Elizabethan costume for weekend performances and to attend booths where handmade goods were sold to the public.
The sheer number of young people living at the time made for unprecedented travel opportunities to special happenings. The peak experience of this type was the Woodstock Festival near Bethel, New York, from August 15 to 18, 1969, which drew over 500,000 people.
One travel experience, undertaken by hundreds of thousands of hippies between 1969 and 1971, was the Hippie trail overland route to India. Carrying little or no luggage, and with small amounts of cash, almost all followed the same route, hitch-hiking across Europe to Athens and on to Istanbul, then by train through central Turkey via Erzurum, continuing by bus into Iran, via Tabriz and Tehran to Mashhad, across the Afghan border into Herat, through southern Afghanistan via Kandahar to Kabul, over the Khyber Pass into Pakistan, via Rawalpindi and Lahore to the Indian frontier. Once in India, hippies went to many different destinations but gathered in large numbers on the beaches of Goa, or crossed the border into Nepal to spend months in Kathmandu. In Kathmandu, most of the hippies hung out in tranquil surrounding of a place called Freak Street (Nepal Bhasa: Jhoo Chhen) which still exists near Kathmandu Durbar Square.
In addition to non-violent political demonstrations, hippie opposition to the Vietnam War included organizing political action groups to oppose the war, refusal to serve in the military and conducting "teach-ins" on college campuses that covered Vietnamese history and the larger political context of the war.
Scott McKenzie's 1967 rendition of John Phillips' song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)", which helped inspire the hippie Summer of Love, became a homecoming song for all Vietnam veterans arriving in San Francisco from 1967 on. McKenzie has dedicated every American performance of "San Francisco" to Vietnam veterans, and he sang at the 2002 20th anniversary of the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Hippie political expression often took the form of "dropping out" of society to implement the changes they sought. Politically motivated movements aided by hippies include the back to the land movement of the 1960s, cooperative business enterprises, alternative energy, the free press movement, and organic farming.
The political ideals of the hippies influenced other movements, such as anarcho-punk, rave culture, green politics, stoner culture and the new age movement. Penny Rimbaud of the English anarcho-punk band Crass said in interviews, and in an essay called The Last Of The Hippies, that Crass was formed in memory of his friend, Wally Hope. Rimbaud also said that Crass were heavily involved with the hippie movement throughout the 1960s and Seventies, with Dial House being established in 1967. Many punks were often critical of Crass for their involvement in the hippie movement. Like Crass, Jello Biafra was influenced by the hippie movement and cited the yippies as a key influence on his political activism and thinking, though he did write songs critical of hippies.
Category:1960s fashion * Category:Counterculture Category:California culture Category:Oregon culture Category:Washington (U.S. state) culture Category:Culture of the Pacific Northwest Category:Free love advocates
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
![At the Rainbow World Gathering 2004 in Costa Rica. By the 1970s, the 1960s zeitgeist that had spawned hippie culture seemed to be on the wane.[54][55] The events at Altamont Free Concert[56] shocked many Americans,[57] including those who had strongly identified with hippie culture.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110103222826im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/7c/4c/3b8aa630802af0bb99a771a069db_grande.jpg "At the Rainbow World Gathering 2004 in Costa Rica. By the 1970s, the 1960s zeitgeist that had spawned hippie culture seemed to be on the wane.[54][55] The events at Altamont Free Concert[56] shocked many Americans,[57] including those who had strongly identified with hippie culture.")
![Tie-dye is a process of resist dyeing textiles or clothing which is made from knit or woven fabric, usually cotton; typically using bright colors. It is a modern version of traditional dyeing methods used in many cultures throughout the world.[1]](http://web.archive.org./web/20110103222826im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/62/f9/bbc6ae8b8687998b793976e18c2f_grande.jpg "Tie-dye is a process of resist dyeing textiles or clothing which is made from knit or woven fabric, usually cotton; typically using bright colors. It is a modern version of traditional dyeing methods used in many cultures throughout the world.[1]")
![Definitions vary, but the boundaries are roughly defined as east of the Bowery from 14th Street down to Houston Street.[1] Looking south from 6th Street down Second Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares through the East Village](http://web.archive.org./web/20110103222826im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/45/ba/02455709379c621d8121f57bbff8_grande.jpg "Definitions vary, but the boundaries are roughly defined as east of the Bowery from 14th Street down to Houston Street.[1] Looking south from 6th Street down Second Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares through the East Village")
![At the Rainbow World Gathering 2004 in Costa Rica. By the 1970s, the 1960s zeitgeist that had spawned hippie culture seemed to be on the wane.[54][55] The events at Altamont Free Concert[56] shocked many Americans,[57] including those who had strongly identified with hippie culture.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110103222826im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/7c/4c/3b8aa630802af0bb99a771a069db_thumb.jpg "At the Rainbow World Gathering 2004 in Costa Rica. By the 1970s, the 1960s zeitgeist that had spawned hippie culture seemed to be on the wane.[54][55] The events at Altamont Free Concert[56] shocked many Americans,[57] including those who had strongly identified with hippie culture.")
![Tie-dye is a process of resist dyeing textiles or clothing which is made from knit or woven fabric, usually cotton; typically using bright colors. It is a modern version of traditional dyeing methods used in many cultures throughout the world.[1]](http://web.archive.org./web/20110103222826im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/62/f9/bbc6ae8b8687998b793976e18c2f_thumb.jpg "Tie-dye is a process of resist dyeing textiles or clothing which is made from knit or woven fabric, usually cotton; typically using bright colors. It is a modern version of traditional dyeing methods used in many cultures throughout the world.[1]")
![Definitions vary, but the boundaries are roughly defined as east of the Bowery from 14th Street down to Houston Street.[1] Looking south from 6th Street down Second Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares through the East Village](http://web.archive.org./web/20110103222826im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/45/ba/02455709379c621d8121f57bbff8_thumb.jpg "Definitions vary, but the boundaries are roughly defined as east of the Bowery from 14th Street down to Houston Street.[1] Looking south from 6th Street down Second Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares through the East Village")
