Hippie nation

At the end of the psychedelic wave, hippie culture moved from underground into the mainstream and deeply shaped mainstream culture after 1969.

In summer 1967 psychedelia became mainstream in the music market. We can take a few minutes to see how it spread from London and San Francisco subcultures. It also had some impact in Los Angeles and upstate New York on the East Coast. We want to study how a little-known music form walked into ordinary homes and became a lifestyle and cultural marker for young people nationwide.

First, festivals—especially those that drew huge crowds. The first major hippie rock festival may have been the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, co-organized by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and producer Lou Adler. They booked many guest bands. Most important, in some ways the festival made Jimi Hendrix—one of his most breakthrough national performances. Also Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Who, Janis Joplin, the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, the Animals; the Beach Boys turned it down. Even Otis Redding played—guitarist Steve Cropper often talks about how nervous they were arriving with small guitar amps in mohair suits while colorful hippies sat before huge Marshall stacks—but people generally say that show made Otis Redding’s name.

From June 1967 to Woodstock in August 1969 such festivals spread fast nationwide. Events like the Atlanta festival were built on that model. We find that large international rock festivals that gathered masses led the growth of hippie music and culture. If Monterey was the start, summer 1969’s Woodstock was the end of the hippie movement. That historic outdoor rock festival was mainly put on by Michael Lang. Woodstock’s guest list overlapped Monterey, but Santana and Crosby, Stills & Nash also debuted there, with Joe Cocker and Sly and the Family Stone. The festival was famous for almost no trouble. Imagine packing that many people in; think of what could go wrong. Such festivals naturally bring other problems—overdoses, fights—but you see the same at a hockey game, only drinking instead of overdosing. In short, those incidents were not that unusual.

Yet at the end of 1969 something ugly happened that closed the hippie years imperfectly: the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in December 1969. A free outdoor festival had long been a Rolling Stones wish, but they kept hitting walls finding a site. Finally they chose Altamont Speedway not far outside San Francisco. Michael Lang, who had run Woodstock, also helped organize. The Stones made headlines; they planned a film, Gimme Shelter, released in 1970.

To get the lighting they wanted they waited until sunset. Unfortunately they used Hells Angels for security—at least those Angels at that show were not the best choice for crowd control. Things got out of hand; someone was killed right in front of the stage, caught on camera clearly in front of Mick Jagger. A real tragedy and a real stain on the hippie movement; many successful festivals vanished after Altamont. But the important point about festivals is: when they took root in major cities nationwide, you could really feel young people mixing in hippie culture. It became a national wave and went mainstream—not only London or San Francisco; Britain had similar festivals, such as the Isle of Wight, worth remembering. At the same time music spread via FM. At first it was almost an accident of one FM founder, Tom Donahue, in 1967; then it spread nationwide until almost every big city had one or two FM rock stations, and people needed FM radios so cars could pick up the signal. Wherever radio went, music followed—considerable exposure. AM, once ruled by Beach Boys, Beatles, and Byrds songs, became a platform for cheap pop, almost teen-song level. FM moved toward rock and classic rock. Looking back at AM and FM in 1967–69, at least for the rock we discuss in this course, it followed the bands FM carried, while AM became commercial pop. Those shifts helped hippie culture break from psychedelic subculture into the mainstream market. At first psychedelic rock stood for the rebellious wave in London and San Francisco subcultures; later national exposure and musical spread made it everyday—so that by 1969–70 a kid in Indianapolis could walk into a mall and buy a tie-dye shirt like a San Francisco hippie’s, even with no experience of that subculture’s growth. One example among many of hippie culture moving from psychedelic subculture into mainstream pop culture. Late 1969 / early 1970 is usually seen as a turning point. We continue that story in Part Two of History of Rock. Musical forms that had fused in the 1960s would split into specialized styles as we enter the 1970s. If you remember the cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon—white light entering a prism and splitting into colors—that white light is like psychedelic music; what refracts out? Progressive rock, country rock, singer-songwriters, blues rock—all from psychedelia; that is roughly Part Two’s direction. Looking back at the psychedelic era we always talk subculture, mainstream, drugs, and the hunger for hallucination. The psychedelicizing of music, and how music and musicians used it to grow more ambitious—caring whether music would last, not only as a temporary means to sell albums. That ambition, that conceptual essence of the psychedelic years, began truly to define the 1970s and after—especially popular music.

Part One of the course is nearly over; we hope to see you again in Part Two of History of Rock.