Turn on, Tune in, Drop out

Here's a piece I wrote for the college magazine a couple months back about the hippie movement. Just thought I'd post it here. Enjoy!

The hippie movement of the 60’s was one of the most significant counterculture revolutions in the history of mankind, and played a huge part in shaping the modern society with its lofty ideals. It originated as a consequence of the general feeling of resentment of the youth in the United States towards the Vietnam War and the cold war with the erstwhile USSR during the Eisenhower era. It was also fuelled by a glaring urgency felt by the masses to spread love instead of hatred in the world. The word hippie derives from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks, which was a media stereotype for people who liked to indulge heavily in poetry, philosophy and psychedelic substances. The pioneers of this movement were writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg along with jazz musicians like Miles Davis, John Coltrane and others.

The post-WW2 "baby boom" resulted in an abnormally large number of affluent yet estranged teenagers in the early 60’s, as likely participants in a rethinking of the structure of the American society on all levels. This craving to bring about a change, fuelled by decisive social events around the time, served as the intellectual catalyst for the birth of the counterculture. It was also greatly powered by the consumption of mind-altering substances among the youth, which resulted in an explosion of creative and non-traditional thought. The basic objective of this movement was to address key social inadequacies, which included the constitutional civil rights illegalities; racial discrimination, and lack of voting rights among the blacks. Students on university campuses fought for their right to exercise their freedom of speech and assembly, the highlight of which was the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964. Anti-war propaganda was one of the foremost agendas of the hippie movement and a number of protests and rallies were made. However, the bulk of the vociferations fell on deaf ears and the hippie movement slowly became anti-establishment, which was a central fabric for the future of the revolution.

The hippie movement was very closely tied with music and drew heavily from the musical influences of the time. The initial beatnik influences of jazz musicians gave way to the mould of folk music greats such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Hitherto unexplored musical styles were evolving, such as the psychedelic rock music, heavily influenced by the drug culture. “The Red Dog Experience” in 1965 was a musical show organised by Charles Laughlin and it introduced budding psychedelic rock bands such as Jefferson Airplane, The Charlatans, Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead, who went on to become acts to be celebrated worldwide, and became very closely associated with the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene. Overseas psychedelic band Pink Floyd and New York based The Velvet Underground also contributed heavily to the trend of the counterculture.
The later (post-1965) period was the golden era of the hippie movement as hippies from all over America gathered in San Francisco to create a “free state”. By late 1966, the Diggers, a street theatre group, had opened free stores in Haight-Ashbury which gave away their stock free of cost, and also provided free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organized free music concerts, and performed works of political art. Thousands of youth migrated to Haight-Ashbury during this human be-in movement, including many runaway teenagers, portrayed most wonderfully in the song Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. The undisputed crown of the movement was the Monterey pop festival of 1967 which was the first musical experience of its kind, attended by roughly 20,000 people and it featured artists like The Who, Jimi Hendrix and Pandit Ravi Shankar, who gave a four hour performance on the sitar which left the audience awestruck. It also set the stage for future events such as the Woodstock festival in 1969, one of the greatest musical concerts of the past century.

The hippie movement came to an abrupt end at The Altamont Music Festival in San Francisco in 1970 when the security group, Hells Angels caused the death of a teenage girl even as the Rolling Stones played Sympathy for the Devil on stage. This event sent the whole movement into an ugly downward spiral and by 1972, the whole purpose of the movement was lost and the entire populace of hippies was brought harshly back to reality. Even though the hippie movement is but a distant memory now, the idea left behind by the movement, to break free of social restrictions, live as one with no prejudices or hatred and find new meaning in life, is as germane today as it was then.