HIPPIE MOVEMENT

Tahquitz Canyon, Palm Springs, California, 1969, sharing a joint

The peace symbol was developed in the UK as a logo for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and was embraced by U.S. anti-war protestors in the 1960s

I had come across a documentary regarding "hippies" in which i found to be a rather interesting topic to be observed upon..The hippie culture was popular in the 1960's - 1970's, in which there was a revolution of the generation. Why i considered this interesting because it reflects a revolution in which all the forbidden things that Allah has imposed us, were in fact bended to the point that their mantra at the time were ' drugs/sex twisted in a political agenda' to some extent.

This reflects that we humans are indeed fragile and in need of a rule that would tie us to a path that is straight..

In the early days of the hippie moveemnt, the drugs were still legal and they were still experimenting with it..LSD - a hallucinogenic , were at an uproar at the time..marijuana/heroin - were considered a norm ..

I just want to highlight that without any guidance, we can easily be led astray..
In this world, we need a divine truth, we need to seek out the right path, as there are many roads that we can choose..

Pray to Allah..Follow the guide that He has foretaken us..He has sent the beloved RAsulullah as to show us the righteous way..


FROM WIKIPEDIA:
The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the early 1960s and spread around the world. The word hippie derives from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. These people inherited the countercultural values of the Beat Generation, created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as cannabis 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. In Mexico, the 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, "Festival Piedra Roja" was held in 1970 (following Woodstock's success), 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 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.

Early hippies (1960–1966)

Escapin' through the lily fields
I came across an empty space
It trembled and exploded
Left a bus stop in its place
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land

- Grateful Dead, lyrics from "That's It for the Other One"^[25]

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), Wavy Gravy, Paul Krassner, 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 Furthur, 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".^[26]

During this period Cambridge, Massachusetts, Greenwich Village in New York City, and Berkeley, California, anchored the American folk music circuit. Berkeley's two coffee houses, the Cabale Creamery and the Jabberwock, sponsored performances by folk music artists in a beat setting.^[27] In April 1963, Chandler A. Laughlin III, co-founder of the Cabale Creamery,^[28] 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.^[29]

In the summer of 1965, Laughlin recruited much of the original talent that led to a unique amalgam of traditional folk music and the developing psychedelic rock scene.^[29] He and his cohorts created what became known as "The Red Dog Experience", featuring previously unknown musical acts — Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Charlatans, The Grateful Dead 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.^[30] 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.^[29] LSD manufacturer Owsley Stanley lived in Berkeley during 1965 and provided much of the LSD that became a seminal part of the "Red Dog Experience", the early evolution of psychedelic rock and budding hippie culture. At the Red Dog Saloon, The Charlatans were the first psychedelic rock band to play live (albeit unintentionally) loaded on LSD.^[31]

When they returned to San Francisco, Red Dog participants Luria Castell, Ellen Harman and Alton Kelley created a collective called "The Family Dog."^[29] Modeled on their Red Dog experiences, on October 16, 1965, the Family Dog hosted "A Tribute to Dr. Strange" at Longshoreman's Hall.^[32] 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.^[29] After the first three Family Dog events, a much larger psychedelic event occurred at San Francisco's Longshoreman's Hall. Called "The Trips Festival", it took place on January 21–January 23, 1966, and was organized by Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey, Owsley Stanley and others. Ten thousand people attended this sold-out event, with a thousand more turned away each night.^[33] 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.^[34]

It is nothing new. We have a private revolution going on. A revolution of individuality and diversity that can only be private. Upon becoming a group movement, such a revolution ends up with imitators rather than participants...It is essentially a striving for realization of one's relationship to life and other people... —Bob Stubbs, "Unicorn Philosophy"[35]

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 synonymous with the San Francisco ballroom experience.^[29][36] 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."^[29]

Some of the earliest San Francisco hippies were former students at San Francisco State College^[37] who became intrigued by the developing psychedelic hippie music scene.^[29] These students joined the bands they loved, living communally in the large, inexpensive Victorian apartments in the Haight-Ashbury.^[38] Young Americans around the country began moving to San Francisco, and by June 1966, around 15,000 hippies had moved into the Haight.^[39] The Charlatans, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead all moved to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during this period. Activity centered around the Diggers, a guerrilla street theatre group that combined spontaneous street theatre, anarchistic action, and art happenings in their agenda to create a "free city". By late 1966, the Diggers opened free stores which simply gave away their stock, provided free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organized free music concerts, and performed works of political art.^[40]

On October 6, 1966, the state of California declared LSD a controlled substance, which made the drug illegal.^[41] In response to the criminalization of psychedelics, San Francisco hippies staged a gathering in the Golden Gate Park panhandle, called the Love Pageant Rally,^[41] attracting an estimated 700–800 people.^[42] 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."^[43]