The hippies were inspired by the Beats and had resided in and around the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the 1960s. The hippies, as with the Beats, criticized the bourgeois values with which they had been raised. “The standard thing is to feel in the gut that middle-class values are all wrong,” remarked one hippie of Haight-Ashbury. “It’s the system itself that’s all corrupt,” added another. “Capitalism, communism, whatever it is. They are phoney labels. There is no capitalism or communism. Only dictators telling people what to do.” The hippies, remarked Peter Cohan of the Haight, “are the fruit of the middle-class and they are telling the middle-class they don’t like what has been given them.”

The hippies, raised in an age of relative affluence, attacked the materialistic American culture that had been formed and embraced by their depression-bred parents. “I have no possessions,” remarked Joyce Ann Francisco of the San Francisco Oracle, the prominent psychedelic newspaper published by Ron Thehin in the Haight. “Money is beautiful only when it is flowing. When it piles up it’s a hangup.” The residents of the Haight, noticed historian Arnold Toynbee when he toured the district during the spring of 1967 “repudiated the affluent way of life in which making money is the object of life and work. They reject their parents’ way of life as uncompromisingly as Saint Francis rejected the rich cloth merchants’ way of life of his father in Assisi.”

A freewheeling attitude toward nudity, coupled with the use of the birth-control pill by more than six million women in 1966, a decade after its introduction to the general public, led to a rejection of sexual taboos. As early as 1965, Haights residents started the Sexual Freedom League to confront traditional standards concerning sex. “The 60s will be called the decade of the orgasmic preoccupation,” predicted Dr William Masters, the director of the Institute of Sex Research at Indiana University. “Young people are far more tolerant and permissive regarding sex.”

To distinguish themselves from, and many times to antagonize the middle-class American mainstream, male hippies generally wore their hair long. “As for bad vibrations emanating from my follicles, I say great,” wrote James Simon Kuren in the Strawberry Statement, “I want the cops to sneer and the old ladies to swear and the businessmen to worry.” By challenging authority, the hippies hoped to create an atmosphere that engendered freedom of individual expression. “We have a private revolution going on,” read a handbill distributed by the Blue Unicorn, coffeehouse in the Haight. “A revolution of individuality and diversity that can only be private.”

The hippies turned to mind-expanding drugs to enhance their individual potentials. In 1965, Haights residents organized the legalize marijuana movement (LEMER) which held meetings at the Blue Unicorn. Another drug, the hallucinogen LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), defined the hippie experience. Discovered in Switzerland in April 1943 and legal in the United States until October 6, 1966, ‘acid’ fragmented everyday perception into a multitude of melting shapes and vibrant colours. “The first thing that you notice is an incredible enhancement of sensory awareness,” related Timothy Leary, the ex-Harvard professor who edited the Psychedelic Review, organized the LSD-based League for Spiritual Discovery, and became the most visible popularize and high priest of acid. “Take the sense of sight. LSD vision is to normal vision as normal vision is to the picture of a badly tuned television set. Under LSD, it’s as though you have microscopes up to your eyes, in which you see jewel-like, radiant details of anything your eyes fall upon... The organ of the corti in your inner ear becomes a trembling membrane seething with tattoos of sound waves. The vibrations seem to penetrate deep inside you, swell and burst there... You not only hear but see music emerging from the speaker system like dancing particles.”

With their newfound consciousness, the hippies embraced the beliefs of the past, less technology-driven civilizations, real or imagined, to create a counterculture. Some followed the examples of the Beats by looking for salvation in the mysteries of the Orient. One San Francisco free spirit expounded that “society feeds us machines, technology, computers, and we answer with primitivism: the I Ching, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Buddhism, Taoism. The greatest truths lie in the ancient cultures. Modern civilization is out of balance with nature.” Many hippies adopted the teachings of Zen popularize Alan Watts, and some joined Hare Krishna when the International Society for Krishna Consciousness moved to the Haights and Allen Ginsberg declared that a Hare Krishna mantra “brings a state of ecstasy.”

The hippies cultivated personal appearances that reflected the elements of their counterculture. In 1966, Janis Joplin, lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, described Haights fashion in a letter to her family. “The girls are, of course, young and beautiful looking with long straight hair. The beatnik look is definitely in. Pants, sandals, caps of all kinds, far-out handmade jewelry, or loose-fitting dresses and sandals.” The singer observed about the colourful, acid-tinted male attire. “All their hair at least Beatle length. And very ultramod dress — boots, always boots, tight low pants in hounds tooth check, stripes, even polka dots! Very fancy shirts — prints, very loud, high collars. Tom Jones full sleeves. Fancy dots! Bob Dylan caps. Really too much.” This contributed to the doubling of Levi Strauss jeans from 1963 to 1966. The hippies had created a fashion that exemplified a counterculture influenced by the Beats, accessed by LSD, and based upon a loose-knit community of individuals that focused on self-expression.

By the mid-1960s, hundreds of newspapers were established to promulgate the counterculture ethos. In 1964, Art Kunkin started the Los Angeles Free Press, an underground newspaper. By 1967, when the Underground Press Syndicate (USP) was founded, five other major underground tabloids printed stories about the revolution. All the newspapers put together reached nearly one million readers.

A legion of rock bands, playing what became known as ‘acid rock’, stood in the vanguard of the movement for cultural change. The San Francisco Oracle defined rock music as a “regenerative and revolutionary art, offering us our first real hope for the future (indeed, for the present) since August 6, 1945.” “Rock and roll,” announced Rolling Stone, which had been established in 1967 by Berkeley dropout and budding journalist Jann Wenner and well-known music critic Ralph Gleason, “is more than just music. It is the energy center of the new culture and the young revolution.” The magazine concluded, “Rock and roll is the only way in which the vast but formless power of youth is structured.” “That was the point of rock ’n’ roll at the time, to become a new tribe, to bring America into a cleaner, purer realm of existence,” echoes Ray Manzarek of The Doors. In January 1966, handbills distributed to promote the Trips Festival hinted that “may be this is the rock revolution.” The hippies’ movement culminated in The Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in Bethel, New York, held from August 15 to August 17, 1969.

Debashish Bora