The Hippies

The Hippies were a counter-culture movement during the early 1940s and 1950s that sought to reject conventional American values and experiment with radical new lifestyles and skills. The Hippies were characterized by their embrace of the free love movement, their experimentation with psychedelic drugs and their opposition to the Vietnam war.

## Haight-Ashbury

The Haight-Ashbury was a significant landmark in the Hippies Movement of the '60s. Haight-Ashbury is a street intersection in San-Francisco where people relocated to think freely, experience hallucinogens, and protest the Vietnam War. It was [1]The Epicenter of the Hippie Movement.

## Furthur (Bus)

Furthur was a school bus converted by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to facilitate their trip from San Francisco, CA to New York to attend the publication party for Kesey's second novel Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964. The Pranksters planned to film their adventures during the cross country trip for a film project, but the footage and audio tapes of the trip were kept private until 2011's Magic Trip documentary.

Tom Wolfe used the Furthur footage and audio as a reference for his 1968 work of New Journalism The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

## Hippie Film

Hippie Film was a subgenre of film that reflected the ideals and beliefs of the Hippie counterculture. Common themes found in these types of film are the ideas of natural living, peace, anti-materialism, a quest for truth, love, and living a meaningful life. A few examples of Hippie Film include *Easy Rider*, *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas*, *Zabriskie Point*, and *Silent Running*.

Silent Running is a 1972 American Environmentalist/Sci-Fi film directed by Douglas Trumbull and stars Bruce Dern.

## Visual Art

Visual art was heavily influenced by the 60's counterculture. Materialism and the individual experience are two themes that are evident in this art.

### People

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was an American Pop artist from the 1950s to the 1980s and was one of the most significant figures of his time. His works focused on the commercialism of America post World War 2 as well as celebrity culture and the media. Early in his career Warhol had gained an international following and created a base of followers and celebrity friends. Andy Warhol was an icon in the Pop Art movement and created some of the most influential works within the time.

Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley, born on April 24, 1931, is an English artist known for being a leading figure of the Op art movement of the 1960s. Instead of depicting recognizable subject matter, Riley’s art is centered on the individual perception or viewing experience of onlookers.

## Hippie Literature

### The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique is a book written by Betty Friedan and published in 1963. The book is considered the start of second-wave feminism by presenting the catch in the perfect housewife fantasy of the ’50s. Friedan’s writing inspired women all over American to re-examine whether or not they were truly happy with their lives and their own personal fulfillment. They were encouraged to pursue a path out of choice, of expectations set on them. Before trying to make others happy, they realized that they needed to be happy with themselves first. [2]

### Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a novel written by Hunter S. Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. This novel was first serialized in the Rolling Stones. It deals with the implications of what he considers to be the failures of the 1960s counterculture movement. The novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is based on two trips Thompson took to Las Vegas, Nevada.

## Music of the Hippie Movement

The politics and culture of the hippie movement inspired some of the most influential musicians of all time. People became more experimental with music, so a lot of the songs at the time sounded mostly psychedelic, thus the Psychedelics were created. Music that no one had before was not the only kind that was created during the 60s and early 70s. The tensions in America that were created with the draft and the Vietnam War inspired many artists to write anthems for the people that felt mistreated by their country.

### The Beatles

The Beatles came to America through the British Invasion, which was a movement that happened in the mid-1960s where British bands became popular in the United States. Toward the beginning of the 1960s, they sounded like most boy bands of the time, light-hearted and mostly comprised of love songs. Once the Hippie Movement began, however, their style changed drastically. On May 26th, 1967, the Beatles released their eighth album titled, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. This album featured the Beatles in colorful military uniforms and every song on the album had a psychedelic theme. Some of these songs included, *With a Little Help From My Friends* and *Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds*, both of which are clear references to drugs, with the latter actually spelling out LSD. Most of the songs on the album have a psychedelic theme to them, with the vocals sounding like they are echoing from a distance and the lyrics having no meaning whatsoever.

While the Beatles mostly wrote psychedelic songs, John Lennon was inspired by artists like Bob Dylan, who were writing anti-Vietnam songs. John Lennon began writing songs individually that were more politically driven and had a clear, impactful meaning to them, unlike the songs that he had been writing with the Beatles.

### Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix is still seen today as one of the most influential guitarists of all time. No one before him had been more experimental with a guitar. His unconventional songs brought a new spin to rock and blues. His outlandish clothing, unusual guitar skills, and eccentric personality immediately made him one of the most popular musicians of the time. *Purple Haze* and *The Wind Cries Mary* are some of his most popular songs. *Purple Haze* shows off how unconventional his guitar playing was, while *The Wind Cries Mary* is much more similar to the style of his inspirations, which included Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. In the late-1960s, Jimi Hendrix was so popular that he was the headlining musician for the Woodstock Festival in 1969.

### Bob Dylan

Like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan serves as one of the most influential rock musicians. Although Bob Dylan did not like to put his genre into a box, he has inspired most rock, folk, and indie artists today. He is still one of the most important musicians of all time. Some of his most popular songs include *Blowin' in the Wind* and *The Times They Are a-Changin'*, which speak directly to the Vietnam War. They still serve as pivotal protest songs from the 60s. In 2016, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature.

## Psychedelics

The hippie movement promoted the use of psychedelic drugs for expanding one's consciousness and individual freedom. Notable scholars arose such as Ken Kesey, Terence McKenna, and Timothy Leary, who controversially tested LSD on his students. The famous works they produced, *One Flew Over the Cuckoo'*s *Nest,* *Food of the Gods, and The Psychedelic Experience* introduced the public to psychedelic substances and normalized it amongst the hippie community.

### Psychedelic Rock

Psychedelic rock is generally considered to have begun around the time the Beatles first started experimenting with marijuana and LSD. Not long after the Revolver was released, many others were following in the footsteps of the Beatles, experimenting with new sounds.

Soon came The Byrds, Grateful Dead, and not long after in 1968 - the Jimi Hendrix Experienced was released. It would be known as one of the most well-known albums to kickstart psychedelic rock. Even Bob Dylan was incorporated into the psychedelic rock movement due to his syntax and lyrical talent.

On the West Coast, there was arguably one of the best psychedelic rock bands to come from San Diego Big Brother and the Holding Company, which created one of the best psychedelic rock albums Cheap Thrills. Psychedelic rock is often characterized as being able to go from the most attached, earthbound feeling, to suddenly being in the skies and space.

#### The Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead was the leading band in the hippie era with a mass following that overtime became their own counterculture. Few bands could match the Grateful Dead's fluid interchanges, ecstatic mood swings, instinctive impact. They were the embodiment of hippie image. Jerry Garcia, the lead guitarist for the Grateful Dead, was the unofficial spokesperson for the band and an icon of the psychedelic rock movement.

### Harvard Psilocybin Project

The Harvard Psilocybin Project was a study conducted by a chain of experimenting in the psychology field, lead by Dr. Timothy Leary and his colleague Dr. Richard Alpert. The experiment started in 1960, after Leary and Alpert had a personal experience with the psychedelic in question. The study was designed and the idea behind it was to determine if a controlled use of the drug could facilitate the experience of profound religious states. The initial results on students was that 90% of the subjects had that experience. The study was shut down in 1962 because the  Harvard Center for Research in Personality raised some concerns about the safety of the experiments and the health of the subjects. Leary and Richard were fired from Harvard University almost a year after the termination of the study.

## Timothy Leary

Dr. Timothy Leary was a psychology professor at Harvard. He was one of the first to try psilocybin mushrooms in 1960. The experience that he had changed him so much that he and his Harvard colleague Richard Alpert started a study to test the effects of psychedelic drugs. Leary believed that host of mental illnesses could be helped, or even cured and profoundly changed by taking the psychedelic mushrooms. Dozens of complaints from parents, faculty, students, and others, however, led Harvard to fire Leary in 1963.

In 1964, Leary co-wrote a book about psychedelic drugs and founded the League for Spiritual Discovery. The League for Spiritual Discovery was a religion that “worshipped” LSD as a holy sacrament that must be kept legal for religious freedom. Leary lectured all over the US with a presentation that attempted to show the experience of using these sort of drugs. He came up with the phrase that came to be one of the main models of the LSD movement, "turn on, tune in, drop out," during a speech in San Francisco in 1967, before 30,000 hippies. He later stated in his biography that "'turn on' meant to go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment ... 'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you ... 'Drop out' meant self-reliance". However, he was disappointed that people thought he meant "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity"