HIPPIE REDUX: #7: Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

Ken Kesey

This author of two acclaimed books, Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, took LSD in a CIA-funded study in 1959. Subsequently he and friends, named Merry Pranksters, travelled across the States in the first psychedelic bus, freaking out the locals, and gleefully disregarding common views of reality. Back in California, they held multimedia "acid tests", often including a new band later called the Grateful Dead. If Hippie had a father, it was Kesey. Wonderfully documented in the book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe.

HIPPIE REDUX: #6: Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

How Young We Were

Two of these guys are dead, a third is almost deaf, the fourth has viral meningitis, but The Who continue touring to sellout crowds 50 years later.

HIPPIE REDUX: #5: Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

Janis, Grace, and Monterey

The first large rock festival of all time was at Monterey in California. There were performances by established bands such as the Byrds, Country Joe and the Fish, Simon and Garfunkel and the Jefferson Aiplane. Grace Slick and Marty Balin of the Airplane showed their mastery of the ecstatic vocal duet, something few bands have done. Bands that played to large audiences for the first time were The Who, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring a 24 year old singer named Janis Joplin. Janis burned up the stage in an amazing performance full of honest emotion, I don't know how she could have been better. Perhaps one of the best filmed performances from the sixties. Check it out on youtube. Janis Joplin - Monterey Pop - Ball and Chain from the doc by DA Pennebaker

HIPPIE REDUX: #4: Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

The Psychedelic Poster

The Sixties were a tremendous time for music and the graphic arts. Perhaps less so for literature. The posters for San Francisco venues like the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom, full of colour, swirling forms, the whimsical or bizarre, and script that had to be deciphered, expressed in part the times. This poster, more reserved than many, and in a derivative art nouveau style, I like especially. (Well I own an original print and better still, went to the concert!)

HIPPIE REDUX: #3: Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

Hippie Family: Photo by Irving Penn.

It's almost impossible to realize today how radical long hair on men was in the Sixties. (No Western man had anything approaching long hair in the Fifties.) Today it's nothing, but back then to the "freaks" it was insanely cool and served as counter-culture identification. To the "straights" it looked effeminate and was cause for scorn and even occasional violence.

HIPPIE REDUX #2: Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

Country Joe and the Fish - Electric Music for the Mind and Body.

In 1967 this tripped out band, and first album, blew us away. We always cut up the hash on the back cover, and I still have the album, with the razor marks!!

HIPPIE REDUX #1: Why I'm glad I'm over 65!

Photo: Bob Siedemann

The Grateful Dead haunt the suburbs, 1967.