#beatniks woodstock 70s

[zotilus]

Crazy and Mystical eyes pattern by ZoTiLuS I fell in love with this repeatable pattern of eyes looking at you! psychedelic, creepy, I don't really know, in any case we can't miss it, whether it's on cushions, duvets, bed sheets, t-shirts, leggings I had a blast…. everything is available on https:// www.etsy.com/shop/ZoTiLuS Thank you for your attention, kind regards, ladies Open your third eye

[plotsandplansarchive]

TV show idea: Decades

"Decades" or "Time & Place"

An anthological series feat stories from different decades, showcasing the music, fashion, culture and attitude of that era set anywhere in the USA. // Anthological series where the place and time are a character. // Anthological series that takes a glimpse at the lives of different Americans across the continent throughout time. // Soundtrack-centric

1. 50's

2. 60's

3. 70's

4. 80's

5. 90's

6. 2000's

7. 40's

8. Christmas in __'s ___

9. Thanskgiving in __'s ___

10. Halloween in __'s ___

11. San Francisco

12. NYC***

13. Hamptons

14. Los Angeles

15. Miami

16. Hawaii

17. New Orleans

18. Hollywood

19. Martha's Vineyard

20. Southern Antebellum era

21. Nashville music scene

22. Woodstock

23. Stonewall

24. Las Vegas

25. Portland, Oregon hipster scene

26. Americana aesthetic

27. Country (American Pie- Don McLean)

28. Pacific Northwest

29. Beatnik 50's

30. East Village Bohemia

31. Hip Hop NY & CA

32. Beverly Hills

33. Coachella

34. Mafia 1940's

35. Great Depression

36. Roaring 20's

37. Early 00's rnb NYC

38. NYC on NYE hotel rooftop bar

39. Groupie Rock scene of the 70's

40. 70's NYC Underground art and music scene (Andy Warhol's Factory scene)

41. 60's cocktail glamour cabaret/club scene

42. 50's Suburbia

43. Late 80's to Early 90's NYC Club Kid scene

44. 90's Seattle/Northwest Grunge scene 45. Haight-Ashbury - birthplace of 60's counterculture

46. Early 00's underground rave scene

47. 90's Hiphop NYC Bronx scene

48. 90's Hiphop LA scene

49. 80's Romcom story (w/ Air Supply and other cheesy 80's slow rock)

Soundtrack:

1. House of the Rising Sun

2. Pigs (Three Different Ones) 3. I'm Scared

4. Silent All These Years

5. Bobby Brown Goes Down

6. Lover, You Should've Come Over

7. Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2

8. Waiting for the Man

9. I Miss You - mid 2000's

[mycosylivingroom]

I tried to find information of the baby boomer subcultures

cound’t find much but I know that you had sub cultures like the hippies, thats the only thing that comes to mind. I think that the hippies are pretty cool, I loved the message they spread trough the late 60s and 70s

a article from wikipedia

A hippie, also spelled hippy,[1] especially in UK English,[2] was a member of the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world.[3] The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks[4] who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularise use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.[5][6]

The origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain. By the 1940s, both had become part of African American jive slang and meant "sophisticated; currently fashionable; fully up-to-date".[7][8][9] The Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies inherited the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and many used drugs such as marijuana and LSD to explore altered states of consciousness.[10][11]

In 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and Monterey Pop Festival[12] popularized hippie culture, leading to the 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 and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. In the United Kingdom in 1970, many gathered at the gigantic third Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400,000 people.[13] In later years, mobile "peace convoys" of New Age travellers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and elsewhere. In Australia, hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival and the annual Cannabis Law Reform Rally or MardiGrass. "Piedra Roja Festival", a major hippie event in Chile, was held in 1970.[14] Hippie and psychedelic culture influenced 1960s and early 1970s youth culture in Iron Curtain countries in Eastern Europe (see Mánička).[15]

Hippie fashion and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, mainstream society has assimilated many aspects of hippie culture. The religious and cultural diversity the hippies espoused has gained widespread acceptance, and their pop versions of Eastern philosophy and Asian spiritual concepts have reached a larger group.

[thatawkwardnerdytomboy]

Scooby-Doo Live-Action TV Series

So I randomly had an idea for a live-action TV series for Scooby Doo when I saw a picture of Scooby Doo at my girlfriend’s house.  It would be a nitty-gritty realistic horror and supernatural drama. Basically Riverdale meets Stranger Things. 

The Setting

The setting would be in upstate New York (because I’m personally somewhat familiar with a few upstate towns) in the 70′s. The town would still be named Coolsville, which was reportedly named after Calvin Coolidge by it’s Republican founder. The town became mired in political corruption following the Great Depression and lot of business owners went into debt trying to keep their struggling industries afloat. In order to keep business rivals out of the town while they were trying to rebuild, business owners would concoct ghost stories and make people believe that a lot of their older abandoned properties were haunted. It seemed to become exacerbated by the influx of liberals and young beatniks moving into the town after attending Woodstock. The political atmosphere of the town changed and the ghost stories only became more wild and realistic.   The Characters

Fred Jones:

Fred is a handsome and popular football quarterback who has all the girls at school swooning after him except for, for a while, the girl he’s truly interested in. His friends and family see him going on to play football in college, but ever since he witnessed a new player to the team going through intense hazing by the other players, his life changed. He told the coach what happened but the coach did nothing about it. After not being able to stand it anymore, Fred got into a physical altercation with the boys who were hazing their new player and was kicked off the team. Fred befriended the player, a scrawny guy with shaggy brown hair named Norville Rogers. His parents, his father particularly, was very angry and disappointed about this. Fred decided that when graduated from school, he wanted to become a police officer while all of his friends were talking about being drafted into the military to go fight in Vietnam War. However, while attending a Vietnam War protest, he saw police brutality against the protestors and decided that the police could be just as thuggish as the football players he knew and decided not to become a cop. He knew he wasn’t going to apply to college the following year seeing as though his grades were mediocre and he lost his chances with football. Not having any other options, his father reluctantly hired him to work at his record store until he graduates and figures out what he wants to do with his life. When his record store became successful enough to open a second store, his father decided to buy a new property. He was told by the owner that the store went out of business because it was haunted. Fred’s father didn’t believe it until he decided to check out the property and was scared off by a glowing white entity moaning and yelling for him to get out. Fred decided that this was suspicious and decided to investigate with the help of Norville and his dog... Norville “Shaggy” Rogers

Norville, nicknamed “Shaggy” by his stoner friends is the son of a Tuskegee Airman and his mother who is a nutritionist. They recently moved to Coolsville where he found a difficult time fitting in. He’s one of the only bi-racial students in his entire school. He doesn’t have many friends but often spends time with the beatniks getting high in the back of his van that a relative gifted to him after he got his license. His voracious appetite while high leads him to eat obscene amounts of food in one sitting, though because of his sky-high metabolism, he never gains weight. When his father noticed his lack of real friends, he pushed him into getting into sports and he joined the football team. However, he was attacked as part of a “hazing ritual” for the new players. When Fred watched him getting hazed, he protected him, becoming his first friend. They got high together when Fred was kicked off the team and needed to relieve stress. Shaggy often invited his Great Dane Scooby into the van with them and often, they would get so high that they swore that they heard him speaking to them. Shaggy left the football team to join track and gymnastics which suited his athleticism better and the his teammates treated him better as well. Ever since Shaggy was in middle school, he swore off of eating meat and became a vegetarian. Since he grew up with Scooby being his best friend, he could never see himself eating an animal, though while stoned, he often eats meat ("nah, man, I’m like, a vegetarian...never touch meat” he says while scarfing down a giant turkey leg and a cheese-burger at the same time). Shaggy almost never goes anywhere in town without Scooby because of the rumors that many parts of the town are haunted but when Fred told him about his suspicions about just how haunted the town really is could be false, he agreed to help him solve the case of the so-called haunted store.

Daphne Blake 

Daphne Blake is also another pretty and popular student at Coolsville High. Her father, a judge and lawyer mother rake in a combined 6 figure salary and are the wealthiest family in town, making even more money than the mayor. Unlike the Daphne from the earlier cartoon, Daphne realizes that she doesn’t want to wind up like some of the girls in her town who are abducted on their way to school after her own abduction scare and decides to take up martial arts lessons with a private instructor. She often spends a lot of time alone when she’s at home because of her parents’ busy careers dealing with their town’s still, corrupt politicians and business owners. Daphne is very observant of her surroundings and pays a lot of attention to detail, which contributes to her love of fashion and her looks. She became a writer for the school’s newspaper, the Coolsville Grapevine. However, this doesn’t help her in school since she mostly stares at Fred while they’re in class together, having fell in love with him after hearing about him standing up for Shaggy. When she began failing science because of this, her parents demanded that she get a tutor. Daphne also noticed that her classmate Velma Dinkley seemed to get the best grades in science and decided to ask her to tutor her. Velma agrees on the condition that she ask her friends to stop talking about her behind her back which Daphne wasn’t aware of. When Daphne confronted her friends about it, an altercation ensues, prompting Daphne to leave them behind and befriend Velma. One night while Velma was staying over for dinner, Daphne’s father told them that he was residing over a case of a real-estate owner being involved in a scandal where he was telling ghost stories about an abandoned store-front he recently purchased that happened to have a fortune of money and other valuables in a vault in the basement and that he was keeping it off the market until he could hire someone to break into the vault. Two teenagers who attend their school named Fred and Shaggy helped break the case and they were considered town heroes. Daphne and Velma took an immediate interest in the boys after this and decided that they wanted to join them. Daphne wants to become a journalist someday.

Velma Dinkley

Velma is an honor student at Coolsville. She’s considered to have a genius level IQ. In my version, Velma is of Vietnamese descent and was adopted by the Dinkley family who adopted her from Vietnam amidst the Red Scare. Her parents are McCarthyists. Despite this, they have always pushed Velma at succeeding at everything she does to become successful in the future and achieve the American dream. They placed her in Karate and the Girl Scouts as a child to teach her survival skills and how to take care of herself. Velma became a black-belt at a very young age and despite her short stature is a very strong fighter. Her strength is also mental as she is also a chess master and a straight-A student. While attending Coolsville high, Velma was both admired and envied by other over-achievers at her school. She developed a jaded nature about her after her only real friend at the school was abducted by what the authorities claim was a monster from the nearby swamp. Ever since, she’s been obsessed with trying to figure out who’s really behind all the abductions in town and has spent all her free time reading mystery novels, law books and books about supernatural beings. Her obsession became so serious that she started asking classmates to help her form a search team to go find her friend, helping the town post fliers for the missing girls but they all refused. One day, she suffered from an emotional breakdown during class when the police reported to the school that some of the kidnapped girls were turning up dead. She overheard Daphne’s friends talking about her behind her back one day in the library, claiming that they hope that Velma gets abducted next. Velma noticed that Daphne often hangs out with these girls so when Daphne asked Velma to tutor her she tells her that she has to tell her friends to stop talking about her, which Daphne agrees is the right thing to do. When Velma agrees to tutor her, they spend a lot of time together and start to form a bond. They soon become close friends. Like most teens in their town, Velma takes a job in town to save up to move elsewhere and attend college and gets a job at a library. When Daphne invites her over for dinner, Daphne’s father talks to them about a scandal going on in the real-estate industry in their town. When he tells her that their schoolmates helped solve the mystery, Velma begins thinking about enlisting Fred and Shaggy’s help with finding her friend.  Scooby-Doo

Scooby is going to be played by a real Great Dane with occasional CG animated other features to perform what the actual dog cannot. As a puppy, he was abandoned by his owners at a dog boarding house in Coolsville when his owners were scared off by another ghost/monster haunting. Shaggy’s family adopted him when he was taken to a shelter and was given to him as a Christmas gift as a child. Him and Shaggy grew up together and have been inseparable since. Shaggy often sneaks Scooby with him to school and keeps him in his van which he parks on campus while he’s in class. Shaggy will sneak out to the van to feed him cafeteria food during lunch and sometimes sit and eat with him. When Shaggy and Fred get high together, they claim that they can hear Scooby speaking to them in deep voice with a speech impediment. And as expressive as Scooby is, when he eventually meets Daphne and Velma, they are often able to understand what Scooby is trying to tell them when he barks and makes gestures. Sometimes Shaggy has to translate to them what he is saying. Even though Scooby is such a large and intimidating dog, he is often afraid of even the smallest things, including mice. However, whenever Shaggy feeds him his favorite brand of dog treats which Shaggy calls “Scooby Snacks,” he becomes fearless and more confident. Whenever Scooby barks, there will be a voice-over of him communicating with the teens that often, Fred, Daphne and Velma are unable to understand but after a while, they are able to understand him. 

The Plot/Pilot

The pilot opens up with with Fred’s father having a conversation with his business partner in their record shop about how the influx of hippies and yuppie liberals to Coolsville has been making his business take off like a rocket. Fred’s business partner makes a small complaint about how a lot of their teenage customers often come in high to which Fred’s father replies “high enough to pay retail prices.” Fred comes walking into the shop and tells his dad that he’s going to school and that he needs to borrow the car. Fred’s father tells him that he’s planning on buying a second car that day and that when he does, their old Camero is his. Fred thanks his father before he tells him “good luck at football today, son! Bet you can’t wait until your driving yourself to college on your football scholarship.” Fred agrees and leaves. Throughout the show, you’ll see posters of missing girls on lamp-posts and at the school and on a news stand outside of the store, there’s a paper with a headline reading “Swamp Monster Abducting Young Girls.”

When Fred arrives at school, he sees a new kid (Shaggy) getting out of a truck. His parents, a black man in a military uniform and white woman embrace him. He complains to them “man, did you guys like, have to drop me off? I’m 16 now. Granddad didn’t gimme the van for nothing. I can like, drive myself to school?” To which his mother replies “We know, honey, we just wanted to drop you off for your first day. We’re in a new town and we just wanted to make sure that you got to school in one piece.” His father says “this town isn’t exactly the safest either. I don’t know how long I’m going to be stationed here but I just want to make sure you’re safe son. I’ll pick you up later and you can drive to school tomorrow. Clear?” Shaggy replied “crystal.” His parents get back in the car. “Good luck at football tryouts today! I hope you’re able to make some real friends at this school and not those hippies you’ve been hanging out with all summer.” As they pull away from the curb, he catches a glimpse of Fred staring at him before he enters the building.  While Fred is at his locker, he looks across from the lockers and sees Daphne getting books from her locker surrounded by all her friends feeding her the latest gossip. Daphne looks back at him, to Fred’s surprise but she doesn’t return any discernible expressions. 

Fred goes to first period (the school year is already underway) and when everyone is seated, he asks the class if they’d like to volunteer to present their projects. The class is silent. Velma is the first person to volunteer. She presents her project, which is about the history of the town’s corruption and about how all the ghost and monster stories made up by politicians and businessmen are part of a conspiracy to keep foreigners out. Her teacher tells her that she’s biased and lying to which she states statistics that show how the racial and political demographics of the town remained the same until the economy experienced a boom and showed him newspaper articles about how a lot of factory owners in their towns concocted stories about their town being haunted and how it deterred new people from settling in the town. When he looks at her assignment, he realizes that she’s right but doesn’t apologize. Embarrassed, he merely thanks her and she takes her seat. The class begins murmuring about her being a bitch and a know-it-all. Some of them whisper about her being crazy for not believing in ghosts and monsters in the midsts of the swamp monster abducting girls.  Fred overhears people denigrating her and decides to present next. He gives a presentation about how Japanese internment camps were wrong and his conservative teacher and classmates scoff at him. When class was over, Velma tells him that she enjoyed his presentation and Fred returns to sentiment. 

At football practice, Fred is in the locker-room suiting up when Shaggy walks in. The coach approaches Shaggy and tells him that he was impressed with the video footage of his game at his other school and says that after try-outs, if he’s able to work well with the team, he has a spot open on the team for him. Shaggy nods and thanks him. The try-outs begin once the team is suited and the coach has given them the run-down for the day. Out of all the boys trying out for the team, Shaggy is by far the fastest and most agile out of everyone. A lot of the boys are really impressed. Some of them, however, are jealous and worried that he’ll outshine them. When the try-outs were over, the boys on the team congratulated him on his performance, telling him that the coach was going to choose him for sure. Shaggy thanked him and as he was about to leave the locker room, one of the boys stopped him. “Y’know, we have this thing that we do with all the new players on the team. It’s like, an initiation. Now we know that you haven’t officially made the cut yet but we wanted to give you a pre-celebration party.” Shaggy is confused by this. The boy socks him hard in the stomach and he bowls over in pain. “Every bruise you get, is a point of respect for you, bro. And a free can of beer at my place this weekend.” As he leaves, the other boys on the team hit him and push him against the lockers. Fred watches this and stared worriedly at Shaggy. Shaggy looked back at him and glowers. “Why don’t you like, take a photo, man. It’ll last longer.” He asks before leaving. 

That night when Fred went home and sat down to eat dinner with his father, his father asked him how practice went and he told him about the try-outs and that they had a new kid try out for the team. He spoke about how fast he was. His father said he hoped that he wouldn’t replace Fred as quarterback but Fred assured him that they wouldn’t do that. His father told him that he was curious about watching this new kid play at their next game and asked for a description of him. Fred told him that he was part black and white and that he had dark hair and eyes. Fred’s father replied “oh yeah, they can run pretty fast. Like that Jesse Owens fella.” Fred asked him what he meant by that and his father said “negroes. They run pretty damn fast. I mean it must run in their blood.” Fred told his father “y’know dad, you really shouldn’t refer to him and all other blacks as ‘them.’ He’s his own person.” His father replies “I know. I’m not trying to be prejudiced, I’m just saying, a lot of them--I mean, he and other people like him can just run really fast, that’s all I’m saying.” Fred responds “And I’m just saying it’s the 70′s not the 50′s, dad. People have their own identities. You can’t just go around grouping everyone together like that. Isn’t that why you started your own business? So you wouldn’t have to go work in some factory like grandpa and all your friends did? So you could be your own man?” His father nodded. “Yes, but we also don’t have the same financial security as we did when I was your age so I had to make changes.” “Exactly,” Fred said “and we have to make changes to benefit other people around us and it starts with how we think.” His father laughed at him. “You been hanging out with those hippies and liberals, haven’t you?”

The next couple of days later, the list for who made the team was posted. Fred checked it out and saw Shaggy’s name on it. (He had heard him being referred to his real name by the coach.) He was glad that he made the team but he was worried about what the other boys would do to him. When he went to practice that day, he noticed that the other players on the team wouldn’t defend him against the opposing side and the coach blamed it on him, telling him that he needed to show the speed that he showed before. When practice was over, the same boys in the locker-room who hit him the other day officially invited him to their party, handing him directions to the location. After they gave him the note, their ring leader said “more respect to you, bro” and they all took turns punching him. As they were leaving, the ringleader remarked that he would probably be getting an entire keg of beer to himself at that rate. Fred asked him if he was ok and told him that he needed to tell the coach what they were doing. Shaggy brushed it off and said that his father wants him to make friends with these assholes and that he’s never fit in anywhere he’s gone. He told him that it’ll probably end after the party. 

That weekend, Shaggy took his van to the location. His parents were excited that he was already being invited to a party and that he was already fitting in. However, when he pulled up to the address, he thought it was a mistake because it was an old creepy abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. He got out in walked in, only to be approached by a group of people in white sheets. “Zoinks! What the hell is goin’ on, man??” He yelled before he was about to bolt out of the door. But the figures grabbed him and started beating him up. 

That following Monday, he showed up to school bruised and in bandages. He wasn’t able to participate during practice but the coach wanted him to sit on the bench. He confronted the boys in the locker room after one of them remarked “fun party, right?” He threatened to tell the coach but they told him he didn’t have proof and that he wasn’t going to believe a half-breed negro over them. Shaggy cursed at them and they started beating him up. Fred ran in and began fighting the boys off, punching one in the eye, shoving another into the locker and low-blowing another. When the coach came in and saw what he had done, he kicked him off the team and he was suspended from school for a few days. When he returned, it seemed as though word got around of what he did. He went to his locker as usual and saw Daphne across from him again. Her friends, again were surrounding her but this time, they said something to her and pointed at Fred. Daphne smiled back at him this time and Fred returned the smile. As they walked away, her friends commented that they wish they had a boy like him to protect them since some girls have gone missing in their town. During lunch, Fred decided to eat outside in the parking lot, not being able to stand his newfound attention. While he was there, he saw Shaggy walking across the way with a big pile of food on his tray. When they saw each other, Shaggy walked over to him. “Hey, man. I just like, wanna say thank you for helping me out. I know I wasn’t the nicest to you but like, I’m new and I guess I didn’t know who to trust. But now I know, man; you’re a good dude.” Fred nodded. “No worries. That initiation shit is bull, dude. They just like picking on people who don’t share their fucked up mentalities or people who don’t look like them. But yeah, if you ever need anything, you can come to me.” Shaggy smiled at him. “Thanks, man. I left the team, by the way. Track and gymnastics are more my scene. And more importantly, the people on the team are like, far out. Hey, you wanna like, come in my van? I got a friend I want you to meet. Her name is...Mary Jane, if you like, catch my drift.” They walked over to his van and stepped inside. There was shag carpeting on the floor, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix posters and a large great dane who sat up immediately when he saw the food. Fred, confused, asks “you named that dog Mary Jane? Isn’t that a boy dog?” Shaggy laughs. “Nah, man. That’s my dog. His name is Scooby Doo.”  So that is all I have for now. Eventually, Fred’s father buys a new car and starts looking into buying that second store and is told by the real-estate owner that it’s haunted and Fred and Shaggy investigate. And when Velma and Daphne heard that they were able to solve the case, they asked to join them to solve the case of the Swamp Monster. They also eventually start their own investigation crew called Mystery Inc, give Shaggy’s van a new paint job and name Scooby their mascot. 

[7-4-8-7]

The Hippie Movement

Hippies were an eclectic group. Many were suspicious of the government and rejected consumerist values. “Peace and Love” was their message. The war in Vietnam, the first to be televised, represented everything they despised about the older generation.

Image: Los Angeles, Some 6,000 youths attend a love-in at a park. UPI photo. February 5, 1968

Unlike political revolutionaries, the hippies attempted no seizure of power. Rather, they asked for the freedom to “do their thing”, that is, to create their own social system. They assumed, implicitly, that what they created would be so joyous, so dazzling, so “groovy” that the “straight” would abandon their own “uptight” life for it. They inverted traditional values, rather than making “good” use of their time, they “wasted” it; rather than striving for upward mobility, they lived in voluntary poverty. 

On the personal level, the rejection of the conventional social system involved following the dictate of Timothy Leary to “Turn on, tune in, drop out”, hoped to change society by dropping out of it.  They had a vision of people grooving together, and they attempted to remove those things which posed barriers, property, prejudice, and preconceptions about what is moral and immoral. The hippies assumed that voluntarism (every man doing his thing) was compatible with satisfying the essential group and individual needs and with the maintenance of a social system in which there was an absence of power differentials and invidious distinctions based on, for example, wealth, sex, or race. 

Image: Precursor to the hippie era, beatniks share everything - including beds - with others of their kind. December 30, 1966

Hippies did their own thing but a key part of the hip vision was the generational community. Communalism was present from the earliest days of the counterculture. Several communes founded in the 1950s showed early earmarks of a new, countercultural communal style, but the first commune that could be called full-blown hip was Drop City, founded in 1965 outside Trinidad, Colorado. Originally established as an artists’ community, the 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 Buckminster Fuller and Steve Baer, residents constructed geodesic domes to house themselves, using geometric panels made with automobile tops. It became a prominent landmark in the hip communal scene and lasted through the heyday of the counterculture until its demise in 1973. 

Images: Drop City

Sex was an embraced natural biological phenomenon which should be neither denied or repressed. Sexual freedom revolution marked a shift in thinking about sexuality along with a growing acceptance of premarital sex, birth control, public nudity and gay liberation.

Image: Hibiscus dancing with baby around the popular spot in Golden Gate Park known to many as Hippie Hill, San Francisco, 1969. Photographed by Robert Altman

San Francisco gained the reputation of being the hippie capital of the world. The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when 100,000 people, mostly young sporting hippie fashions of dress and behavior, converged in San Francisco’s neighborhood Haight-Ashbury. Although hippies also gathered in many other places in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, San Francisco was at that time the most publicized location for hippie fashions.

Image: Graffiti at the intersection of Haight and Belvedere Streets in 1968.

Dope

Nothing else was so characteristic of the counterculture as dope. The overwhelming majority of hippies used it, and those who didn’t, approved its use by others.

The use of the term “dope” instead of “drugs” is deliberate. To the hippies, it served to draw a line between substances perceived to be good and those deemed bad. Dope was good; drugs, on the other hand, included both good and bad. Psychedelics were good; speed and downers were bad. Substances that were perceived as expanding consciousness were good; things which made the user dumb were bad. 

Image: Dope Scene big Business in the Haight. Hippie Hill [Golden Gate Park] turn on. Times-Post Service October 31, 1967

The hippies believed that dope itself had altered the consciousness of millions of individuals in fundamental ways and that that alteration was inevitably a major force in the establishment of the new culture. The goodness of dope was underscored by its medical potential. When hippies began to use dope, some medical researchers were already convinced that it was useful for the treatment of some mental disorders and, in the case of LSD, treatment of alcoholism. 

LSD was the most important drug of the actual San Francisco Hippie scene. LSD was mostly used in psychological therapies until in the early sixties, a Harvard teacher called Timothy Leary made it popular among his friends and students. Because of the personal experiences with these drugs Leary and his many outstanding colleagues, Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts believed that these were the mechanisms that could bring peace to not only the nation but the world. They contend that the trip leaves them with a capacity to experience reality with greater intensity and greater subtlety even when not high. 

Image: A drug den behind a store front on Haight Street in 1967.

The belief that dope had religious potential was widespread. Hippies took over a big part of the religions of the Far East. They did not adopt a special one, but a mixture of religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. Due to the importance of peaceful living and exploring one’s own mind, they were absolutely ideal for the young people in search for the “real truth”. Dope taking to gain spiritual insights is widespread among the priests of Hinduism so the experiences made by them could be easily compared to those of the LSD-taking flower children. Impressed by the massive psychological effects of the psychedelic, hallucinogenic drugs, they searched for a meaning of these new experiences. Another point that explains the success of those religions among the Hippies is that they were completely new in the USA – only minorities from other countries had practiced them before. The abolition of Christianity by a big number of young people was also a sign of rebellion.

Image: Goa [India] The new choice for hippies. Gemini News Services Sunday Punch June 21, 1987

Music

A key countercultural claim for dope was that it was a great wellspring of creative ideas and action. Writers, musicians, and graphic artists saw dope as inspiring. Much of that creativity was believed to come directly from the dope high but perhaps, even more, was attributed to dope’s carryover effect, the sense that insights gained while high positively influenced later activities. Dope’s impact on music was realized through its influence on composers and musicians, but just as important was its influence on listeners, who of course determine what will survive in the marketplace. Listening to music high wasn’t the same as listening to the same music “straight”.

Image: Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane during a songwriting session, 1967.

The Rock and Roll of the decade before started to merge into a more international, eclectic variant known as Rock. In the early-1960s, Psychedelic Rock, Blues Rock, and Folk Rock were a completely new sound, unheard before. The songs were often written and performed under influence of psychedelics, electrical guitars were the most important instruments. Underground theorists frequent assert that Rock was revolutionary, although there was no consensus about what that meant. For some, it meant that rock could be used by political revolutionaries but the larger revolutionary role of rock lay outside specifically political arenas. It lay in the purported ability of rock to expose the sham of Western culture and to change the life orientation, political and otherwise, of its listeners. 

Image: The Grateful Dead's last free concert on Haight Street, 1968.

Image: Jimi Hendrix at the Pandlehandle in 1967.

Rock festivals took an existing phenomenon to a new level of intensity. Festival participants repeatedly emphasized an overwhelming sense of community that provided an impulse for continuing communal experimentation. The definitive festival in this regard was Woodstock, which was held in 1969. Reports on Woodstock in the underground press repeatedly stressed the feeling of unity: “Everyone needed other people’s help, and everyone was ready to share what he had as many ways as it could be split up. Everyone could feel the good vibrations.” The music itself was believed to feed the communal impulse. Over 500,000 people arrived to hear the most notable musicians and bands of the era, among them Richie Havens, The Grateful Dead, 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.

Video: Jimi Hendrix - Live at Woodstock: An Inside Look

Images: Woodstock by Baron Wolman

References

Braunstein, P.; Doyle, M., 2002. Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s. Psychology Press. Blauvelt, A., 2015. Hippie Modernism. Aesthetic Radicalism and the Counterculture. Goffman, K.;  Joy, D., 2007. Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. Random House Publishing Group. Howard, J., n.d. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: The Flowering of the Hippie Movement. Sage Publications, Inc. . Miller, T., 2012. The Hippies and American Values. Univ. of Tennessee Press.