MUSIC: Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix
1967, the Summer of Love.
People have come here to love one another.
Sex, drugs, rock and roll.
That was the idea - total assault on the culture.
By any means necessary.
# Excuse me while I kiss the sky. #
But not all peace, love and understanding.
I'm not committed to non-violence in any way.
We all thought we were going to get killed. We never imagined living past 30.
The explosion that summer came from the mix of naive idealism...
There was a rebellious group of kids in the 1890s.
..mysticism, radical politics
and chemistry...
I really did think that LSD was the answer to the world's problems.
..all bubbling to the surface on the West Coast of the United States.
This series explores the highs and lows of that cultural revolution,
which would change the way we live to this day.
Culture runs a lot deeper than politics.
There are millions and millions of people living differently
as a result of the counter-culture.
# Is it tomorrow or just the end of time
# Help me
# Help me. #
MUSIC: Time Of The Season by The Zombies
# It's the time of the season
# When love runs high
# In this time Give it to me easy
# And let me try with pleasured hands
# To take you in the sun to... #
This is the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
It's the place where the hippy was born, on January 14th, 1967.
San Francisco's underground newspaper put a call-out
for all strands of what it called the counter-culture to gather here
for a party like no party in history -
a party that would change the world for ever.
You could argue that the popular moment of the hippy begins with the Human Be-In in 1967.
"Come to the Golden Gate Park, it'll be a gathering of the tribes" -
that was the expression of the time -
and the tribes they were talking about were the New Left tribe doing politics, to change politics
at Berkeley, and a kind of new communalist, psychedelic tribe hunkered in San Francisco,
and it was simply meant to be literally a gathering in which we could practise being together.
I showed up and the Gathering Of The Tribes, it was one of those things
when you saw that many people in the park at the Be-In,
something definitely was going on.
Turn on.
Tune in.
Drop out.
They called it the Human Be-In,
and it brought together for the first time
all the disparate tribes of what soon would be called the hippies.
Eco-warriors mixed freely with acid trippers.
Very large turnout.
There was, like, 30 or 40,000 of what then became known as hippies,
and the idea that individuals would take LSD
in an open crowd setting
and dance around was just...you know, unheard of.
The radical left turned up as well.
We're going to march tonight for two reasons.
One because...
That's the moment when Jerry Rubin, who had been a Berkeley radical,
realised that there were more hippies than there were radicals,
and Rubin decided, "A-ha! That's where the action is, that's where
"the numbers are," and out of that,
he and Abbie Hoffman not long after create the Yippies.
Within a year, Jerry Rubin had formed the hippy anarchist party,
the Yippies.
Jerry spoke, but I don't think anybody listened cos nobody was
really... Nobody would have remembered, cos they were stoned!
Nobody would've remembered!
We were there, and we felt already
what was going to then become the Summer of Love in '67
was this really interesting blend
of lifestyle preferences, you know, in their various uniforms of
whatever tribe they belonged to, and that started to be that sort of...
you know, that ripple effect that went out across the country
when songs like If You're Going To San Francisco drew like a magnet,
you know, drew all these other kids from around the country.
# If you're going to San Francisco
# Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair... #
The Be-In was the galvanising moment in the birth of the hippy movement.
They called it the Gathering Of The Tribes, but who were these tribes,
and what brought them to the party that day?
The earliest and perhaps strangest of the tribes was called the Nature Boys.
PIANO PLAYS
# There was a boy
# A very strange, enchanted boy
# They say he wandered very far Very far
# Over land and sea... #
The Nature Boys even had a hit song, so popular that it earned its own
early form of music video.
The song was written about a wandering group of back-to-nature
devotees, who had rejected mainstream society.
They lived on a diet of raw vegetables, fruits and nuts
out in the Californian wilderness.
Its writer was Eden Ahbez,
who became a celebrity through a number of eccentric TV appearances.
..the nation's number one song hit - Nature Boy.
His name is Eden Ahbez,
and he's bringing his bicycle onto our Gulf Oil stage right now.
APPLAUSE
How did you happen to write Nature Boy?
They were kind of the original nature boys.
They were these organic, bearded, free-spirited guys,
and they tended to follow the weather and the seasons
and the crops,
so when it was hot in LA, in the summer, they would go to
northern California, where it was cooler,
and then when it got too cold in California,
they would come down to Palm Springs and hang out in the caves near Tahquitz Canyon,
and they sort of ate off the land and they lived off the land
and they were truly these, like, free-spirited...nature boys.
Astonishingly, the group's origins were in Germany.
Lebensreform, or life reform,
was a back-to-nature cult that had made its way
to California in the early 20th century.
Like the hippies 70 years later,
it was a revolt against industrialisation.
There was a rebellious group of kids that were coming of age in the 1880s
and the 1890s in Germany,
and they decided to head for the wilderness, to head for nature.
There was as many as 50,000 of these kids wandering around Germany,
and you know, if you're wandering and you don't like the climate,
just keep wandering, you know, wander to America.
They'd seen the pictures of Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and the beaches in California - they came here.
There was an entire flock of young people there during World War I,
formed a little encampment up there in Palm Canyon. It alerted some of
the authorities in town, they weren't sure why all these Germans
were converging up there, so they thought that maybe they were spies
or something for the German military.
There was a lot of people that were just really disenchanted,
like right now, too - there's a lot of people that are very disenchanted now, too,
that would look at something like that and they'd say,
"Hey, I think I want to join these people and I want to be a part of what's going on here."
This is Rudolph Valentino, the famous film star, who died right after this.
The visitation of the movie star Rudolph Valentino was symptomatic of
the exotic status the wandering nomads had now gained.
They had become something of a weird tourist attraction in the Californian desert.
Hollywood's courting of the Nature Boys encouraged one of their number,
Gypsy Boots, to bring his clean-living ideals out of
the wilderness, into the heart of the city and open California's first health food store in 1959.
Way before anyone was really even thinking about things like this,
my dad opened the back-to-nature Health Hut,
a sort of multi-purpose health food, restaurant, cabaret...
A lot of celebrities showed up - Gloria Swanson, Liberace.
Famous people came because there was this crazy,
weird little thing that was serving carrot juice and organic rice
and things and meals and seaweed, and nobody was doing that.
When I look back at my dad's life,
it's very clear to me that he was a guy way ahead of his time,
and then the times sort of caught up.
What started as a few nomads eating berries in the desert had found
fertile ground. The West Coast had always been a place for dreamers
and explorers. San Francisco was the final frontier.
# On a warm San Franciscan night... #
San Francisco was always intrigued by the exotic, and that went really
back to Gold Rush days.
There's a very good passage in Kenneth Rexroth's memoir
about arriving in San Francisco in the 1920s and being
immediately struck by the easy-going nature of the city, and how it was
so much different than any other place he had been in the United States.
San Francisco was different because it was just a centre of weirdness.
It was where you could go and live however you wanted to and wear
whatever clothes you wanted, let your hair grow.
You weren't thinking about the workforce.
It just wasn't part of the consideration of everyday life, you know?
San Francisco was the breeding ground for a world view based on
personal growth and fulfilment rather than personal gain.
The second tribe that made up the hippies looked inward to liberation
of the self. They were the Truth Seekers. If the naturists looked
back to Germany, the Truth Seekers were inspired by one of the maddest,
baddest Englishmen of the 20th century.
Aleister Crowley was an early prophet of Eastern mysticism.
Crowley was one of the pioneers of introducing yoga to the West,
and at the time, it was seen as rather devilish,
very alien, and he used it in his own magical Western rituals in
the bedroom and elsewhere. I mean, he was homosexual, he was bisexual,
he was promiscuous. Crowley's sexual ideas and sexual politics underlays
the whole idea and the politics of free love.
# Mr Crowley
# What went on in your head? #
By the 1920s, Aleister Crowley had earned the title
The World's Most Evil Man.
He dedicated his life to Satan and the Devil,
and he did it to the hilt,
he just, er...basically transgressed against every notion of conventional
behaviour or morality or ethics.
He put on magical rituals.
Lights, incense, drumming, violins, poetry.
There was a punch bowl passed around,
it was called the loving cup,
it was a mixture of fruit juices, drops of opium and mescaline.
This is a line that runs directly through in all the Be-Ins
and happenings of 1967.
And the essence of it became this catchphrase:
And it's more or less a kind of command to break all the rules,
to go beyond all the boundaries.
Crowley became a kind of icon.
He was picked up, like, in the rock and roll world.
In 1967, he appears on the cover of Sergeant Pepper and it's
John Lennon, I think, who put him there, cos in an interview many years later,
he said, "Well, the whole point of the Beatles was to do what
"you want, to take your own responsibility - that's why we put him on the cover."
But it was another Englishman on the Sergeant Pepper cover that would
bring Crowley's mix of the East and drugs to the West Coast of America.
The upper-class writer and philosopher, Aldous Huxley.
Crowley and Huxley met in 1930 in Berlin.
Crowley in his diaries records fabulous dinners with Huxley
and it was said that he introduced the writer to peyote, to mescaline.
By the early '50s, Huxley returned to this idea of mescaline
for opening up the inner self to its true nature and then after that,
he writes The Doors Of Perception - it's his most influential book.
For the truth-seeking tribes of the hippy movement,
Aldous Huxley was a guru and a pioneer.
By the early '60s, Huxley was bringing these ideas to a retreat
200 miles south of San Francisco, which was to become the centre for
Eastern thought, meditation and self-exploration.
As people search for a safety valve in a world that's become a pressure
cooker, here in the United States, they've found one way.
At Esalen on the Pacific Coast of California,
they're reaching for an odd kind of sanity in an odder, madder world.
We started by inviting all our favourite authors to Esalen,
on this property that my family owned, two miles of Big Sur coast.
Michael Murphy founded Esalen ten years ago, graduated in psychology
and philosophy and studied meditation in India.
We wanted to open up a worldwide conversation, between these...
great minds, and Arnold Toynbee, the most famous historian in the world,
came and lectured to tell us that the great event of the century would
be the coming of Buddhism to the West.
# We are one in the infinite sun... #
But it was Huxley who propagated the idea that psychotropic drugs
could aid the individual to achieve the goals of Eastern meditation.
# Fly like an eagle. #
There's an extraordinary text between Shiva and his divine consort
Parvati, the goddess,
and the goddess asks him, "What is the secret of your kind of enlightened consciousness?"
And he answers by giving her a list
of 118 exercises in consciousness which will help.
Aldous Huxley was lecturing around the United States at that time
on the human potential, human potentiality. A tremendous
inspiration, but not simply from Eastern philosophy
but from its marriage to an evolutionary vision of human nature.
This mix of Eastern philosophy and journeys into the unconscious
made his book the Bible of the hippy generation.
Jim Morrison of The Doors chose that name, The Doors,
because of Huxley's book,
and everyone around that time would have read The Doors Of Perception.
But rather than a serious academic study, the hippies viewed Huxley's
barely readable book as a guide on how to get high...
..and getting high got a whole lot quicker when the hippies discovered a wonder drug called LSD.
The alchemy from straight to hippy might start the first time
you swallow a sugar cube impregnated with the drug.
Although welcomed by Huxley, LSD appeared to offer the hippy
truth seekers the keys to the doors of perception in an instant.
I felt... I guess that would be my last time, I just felt.
Everything was very emotional and I could see that I fitted in
with all the rest of what was going on in the world.
The thing that happened as you got... I'd studied mysticism,
both Christian mysticism and other people's mysticism,
and Aldous Huxley and so on when I was at Stanford University
in the '50s, and LSD gives you what a lot of people had to meditate for ten years in order to have.
It's not enlightenment, but it is a mystical experience.
# Overhead the albatross
# Hangs motionless upon the air
# And deep beneath the rolling waves
# In labyrinths of coral caves... #
LSD was first manufactured by Albert Hofmann in Switzerland in 1938.
It was the military who first experimented with the new drug.
The CIA was on the search for a Cold War weapon that could destroy the minds of the enemy.
Receiving a small dose of LSD, they're confused.
That period of LSD was a dark period, cos they wanted
an incapacitating agent that didn't kill you, and so there was this
belief that Russia had these agents and therefore the United States had
to develop them, and they would give it to unknowing subjects and then just observe 'em.
Military hospitals were used as test sites.
One employee's wife became a subject.
Well, I think it's time for you to have your lysergic acid.
Drink this down and we'll be back after a while and see how you're doing.
Well, I just couldn't... I couldn't possibly tell you. It's...
It's here. Can't you feel it?
This whole room is-is...
Everything is in colour and I can feel the air. I can see it.
I can see all the molecules.
I'm part of it. I'm... I don't even know how I can tell you.
Can't you see it?
Another such test subject was the writer Ken Kesey, who had been
a night nurse in a mental hospital in San Francisco when the CIA covertly got him to take the drug,
and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest was the outcome.
I would have never written Cuckoo's Nest without LSD.
I think a lot of that stuff that was written by all of these guys would never have happened
if they'd have just stayed on the get up early in the morning and drink a lot of coffee
and do what you can.
LSD, which began in scientific experiments in the 1950s but by
the late '50s was beginning to spread beyond that, and I suppose most important in this
was actually Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles, who was turning on Cary Grant.
Cary Grant took over 100 trips of the then-legal drug, later saying
the effect was startling. "In one LSD dream, I imagined myself as
"a giant penis, launching off from Earth like a spaceship."
I think it would be extremely good for almost anybody with fixed ideas,
with a great certainty about what's what to take this thing and to
realise that the world he has constructed is by no means the only world. There are these...
I was privileged to be given LSD by Aldous, and my sitter was Laura,
his wife, so that was my first experience.
It was not my way in to expanding consciousness.
Nevertheless, it gave me some sense
of what was going on, and then this emerged as one of the great
door openers in the culture around us.
MUSIC: Spirit In The Sky by Norman Greenbaum
# When I die and they lay me to rest
# Gonna go to the place that's the best
# When they lie me down to die
# Going up to the spirit in the sky
# Going up to the spirit... #
By the mid '60s, acid was raining down on the youth of California.
Somebody gave me my first LSD at Berkeley, and that was a hugely
life-altering experience.
I've always been interested in...whatever religion points to,
but I hadn't had a deep, personal experience
of feeling connected to everything,
and having whatever I thought of as my identity dissolve
and just be part of the pulse of life. For me, once I experienced
that, there was no going back. I could never again buy into the
notion that I was separate. Like mushrooms, right, they grow
underground and then they pop up and what pops up looks like it's separate, but it's not.
# There is a house in New Orleans... #
San Francisco was drawing people from all around the world, including Newcastle.
It wasn't any really political or cultural reason why I came to
California and settled here.
It was because of health. I was a chronic asthmatic, and got...
magnetised. I did a lot of dope.
I must've held the world record for LSD.
The things that I saw under its influence, I'll never forget.
I was sitting there with my drummer next to me, and he was real skinny
and he had a bit of a beard and he was dressed in white,
and all of a sudden he became Jesus Christ!
I mean, for real, it was like Jesus! And I went so far inside myself that
I guess what happened is I started to cry, and the teardrops that were
falling were, like, slow motion and they were bouncing off my chest
and splashing all over the carpet, and the carpet - tiny, little bits
would start to move and I would realise that it was people, and that
I was hovering over the Earth with thousands of people looking up,
going, "Feed us! Feed us! Give us food!"
I really did think that LSD was the answer to the world's problems.
I was convinced that we could change
the way we thought, felt about things.
Not everyone in the 1960s thought LSD alone was enough for a revolution.
# There's something happening here... #
The formation of the hippy movement's third tribe,
the Politicals, began on the university campus.
Vietnam. Civil rights. The country was being torn apart,
and the Berkeley campus of the University of California
in San Francisco's Bay Area was at the epicentre.
Osha Neumann was a political activist in the 1960s
and remains one to this day.
This mural, it was a monument in Berkeley, to that period of ferment
and revolutionary enthusiasm, so anti-Vietnam War teachings,
the students are coming out, marginalised,
turned into blockheads.
We have somebody burning his draft card, third world strikes
and the Black Panthers.
It seemed at the time that the system was collapsing.
So that really, I mean, encapsulates a lot of the spirit that we need now.
This generation of young radical students, now known as the New Left,
found a political guru based at the University of California.
My main topic, as you know, is liberation from the affluent...
Professor Herbert Marcuse rejected the repressive nature
of traditional Soviet Communism.
In its place, he taught a Marxism that placed a greater
emphasis on personal liberty.
..because I believe that all dialectic is liberation.
Liberation involving the mind and the body,
liberation involving the entire human existence.
Herbert was appealing primarily to young people. He realised
quite early, I think, that there was a political value and importance
in what was going on around, which was this New Left,
young people and this cultural revolution. He did not believe that
the traditional working class necessarily was going to be
the agent of the revolution. One looked for revolution in people
on the margins, in students.
That, of course, was very appealing to the New Left
and to the counter-culture that was at that point exploring all of
these, you know...on monogamy and the breaking down of sexual taboos
and so on and so forth.
When I went to college, women were locked up at ten o'clock
at night, every single night, you know,
so, there were many local issues about what we were being taught,
the truth about history, the truth about Vietnam,
and there were agitated students on campus.
It was a way of opening up sexuality that was good, that was, you know,
against the repression of the '50s or something, you know, and all the
traditional scriptures of bourgeois life. Right. Exactly.
Free love was complicated. Yeah.
Especially for women.
# People moving out People moving in
# Because of the colour of their skin... #
By the mid '60s, women's issues began to emerge as the New Left
thinking was taking over student politics at Berkeley.
Students would gather at the nearby People's Park, which became
a meeting point for every new political grouping.
# ..about love thy brother is the preacher... #
The thing that thrilled me most was there were tables, like card tables,
with every organisation ever that was disseminating political
information, so you could pick up a flyer from the anarchists and hear
the socialists talking and all the organisations and I was just thrilled, um...
and not too long after I started there, the police came on the campus
and took all the tables away and arrested some people.
The campus became a stage for a series of student sit-ins
and demonstrations, even riots.
MUSIC: All Along The Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix
Directly challenging the university authorities, the police and the state.
We felt revolutionary to the core. We felt, you know, that the way that
white America saw us, we were their daughters and sons,
and we were saying no.
But along with the New Left, Berkeley was also home to those
experimenting with alternative lifestyles and mind-expanding drugs.
By 1967, these two camps were completely interwoven.
Those forces of cultural upheaval, of music and drugs, were reflected
in people's politics and how people wanted to think and live, and what
kind of risks people wanted to take, so, yeah, so my first experience
with LSD was eye-opening, for us. I think it influenced us deeply.
It all influenced all of us.
# All along the watchtower... #
While the new left in Berkeley operated an acid-fuelled chaos,
just across the bridge in Oakland, hip young radicals who had come
through the ranks of the black freedom movement formed
the Black Panther Party. Like their white counterparts,
they were into consciousness expansion, but not through LSD.
# Just move on up
# Towards your destination... #
So, all this is, like, public housing projects.
This is all black people here, just about.
Today, Elaine Brown runs an urban farm just round the corner from
the old Black Panther office in Oakland.
Her journey from a childhood of poverty in a Philadelphia ghetto
to leadership of the Black Panther Party in California entailed
a mind-altering shift in consciousness.
Well, you know, I've always been black!
But I didn't always think of myself as black.
I grew up in a ghetto in north Philadelphia
and I went to public schools
that were outside of my immediate neighbourhood
and that were predominantly white, predominantly Jewish.
And so, I had this other view of life.
I wanted to be white,
like so many black people do, but they're not prepared to make
that confession.
And then, I was asked to teach piano to some children in an housing
project in Los Angeles, specifically, Watts,
which had just exploded around me, which I didn't notice.
And when I got into the Jordan Downs public housing project,
chills came over me. This was a throwback to my life
as a really black person, the one I had been denying.
And when I walked into that room and saw those little black girls
who were six, seven, eight, nine years old looking at me
as though I had some kind of answer for their poverty
and their degradation. I could hardly breathe,
because I knew that I was not going to be able to help them,
because I knew what they needed, because I was them.
And I didn't want to be them and knew I couldn't help them.
But I was totally transformed
and I left the world of whiteness that I had been living in
and I just walked into the Panther office and surrendered my life
to the revolution, as I saw it. And I took that very seriously.
And I take it seriously today.
We say we will do anything, anything at all,
to gain our freedom and our liberation for our people,
for black people and for all the oppressed African people
and we will do anything.
# If you love a son where you come from
# Then you had better dare to seize the time
# The time is now Oh, seize the time
# And do your part... #
The Black Panther party was the embodiment
of the white establishment's nightmare -
an armed black Marxist-Leninist group out to overthrow
the established order, winning the hearts and minds
of their young, white, radical counterparts.
There was consciousness-raising, of course, in the black community.
Everything of importance in the '60s ultimately has to do with race.
So, in the black community, you get the idea that you need
to develop a liberated identity
and artists in the black arts movement do precisely that.
They invent a new identity. Once that happens,
you can see how youth culture does the same thing.
Black people drop their slave names, hippies drop their names and take
names like Wildflower. You know, it's connected.
And it motivated.... It really cohered us as a group.
In the Bay area of San Francisco,
the pieces were now in place
for a hippy revolution.
The Black Panthers in Oakland, the radical students in Berkeley...
..and Haight-Ashbury, the old bohemian, down-at-heel district
of San Francisco was being rejuvenated by this new generation.
It's a Bohemian area.
Bohemianism is alive with the left, but it's not the left.
The reason it's not the left is it's cultural
as much as it's political,
and it's individualistic rather than collectivist.
And without the Bohemian culture, the left can be very authoritarian.
But without the left, Bohemian culture can be
chaotic and sort of empty-headed.
And we'd meet older Bohemians, and they'd tell you about books,
they'd tell you about conspiracy theories,
they'd tell you about all this wonderful stuff
that they were not telling you about in school.
So, to me, the trunk line was the beatniks, who were my elders,
and folk music, also my elders,
leading me out of suburban realities
into another world which was the beginning counter culture to me.
# Got a baby Depends on me
# I think he has me pinned
# Cos he knows he can scatter my world like a leaf in the wind. #
By 1967, the streets of the Haight were a potpourri
of health food shops, truth seekers and dreamers,
folk music, long hair and masses of LSD.
# And I wonder, did the truth just pass me by? #
When I first landed in San Francisco Airport, it was still beatnik.
The next time I came,
all of a sudden, the place was paisley.
It had changed entirely.
# ..just pass me by
# Did I just not see what was right before my eyes? #
It was an exodus from everywhere else.
In San Francisco, like it always has been,
it sort of functioned as the fulcrum.
You know, the turning point.
You know, it's like, whoosh, you either went right back home
or someplace else.
MUSIC: White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane
The ingredients of the hippy revolution
had been brewing for decades.
SHE BREATHES DEEPLY
And now, in Haight-Ashbury, in 1967,
the ideals of the three tribes -
the nature boys, the truth seekers, and the politicals -
coalesced and instantaneously ignited into one hippy revolution.
# One pill makes you larger... #
The time had now come to put the new hippy world order into practice.
We're calling upon the forces of love, not hate.
We affirm life, love, peace and self-discovery...
And the young people in this country is against war,
is being oppressed by police harassment and brutality.
# And if you go chasing rabbits... #
We just want the freedom to be ourself
and that's for love, for experience.
A positive way of life.
# Smoking caterpillar... #
For immediate energy from our muscles and...
GASPING: ..relaxation.
Now last night, we had a big hassle here
about who is in charge of this house.
We don't want a dictator. Nobody's supposed to tell you what to do.
People come here to love one another and to be in love with each other.
At the centre of Haight-Ashbury,
there were a group of radical actors and activists
called The Diggers, taking their name from
a 17th-century English Anarchist movement
who had proposed a society without private property.
There were The Diggers, who gave away food.
Their motto was, "Steal from the rich, give to the poor".
They were like the Robin Hoods of Haight-Ashbury.
We created a free store where we gathered up surplus
and last year's goods and throwaways, and everything was free.
We would ask the question, like...why get a job?
Why become an employee so you can make the money to become a consumer
when we'll give you the stuff and you can imagine your own life?
It was a social experiment.
What would happen if you walked into a store where everything was free?
What would you do? How would you respond? You know?
Some people stole. This was a response.
One day, there was a woman in the store when I was running it,
and I looked, and I realised she was stealing.
So I went up to her and I said,
"Excuse me, you know, you can't really steal in here."
And she got really indignant. She said, "I'm not stealing!"
I said "No, I know you're not. You can't steal in a free store.
"Everything is free here. You just take what you want."
"You don't have to hide it."
She said, "It's free?" I said, "Yeah, it's free."
She said, "Then, get out of my face."
I said, "OK." So I got out of her face.
Two days later, she came back with a huge tray of day-old doughnuts
which she put on the counter.
So this woman got a gift economy in an instant.
It was advertised as a great youth rebellion,
but I think anybody who had any urge for freedom and social change
was attracted to it.
When I moved to San Francisco, I'm living right by the Haight-Ashbury,
which was the capital of the summer of love,
I'm running the agit-prop truck theatre.
THEY SING NATIONAL ANTHEM OF THE USA
We rented pick-up trucks, pulled up to a parking spot,
produce our show, that had stock characters that everyone knew.
It was kind of like Punch and Judy.
Mr Liberal came by to plant a flower and said...
"The authorities should regulate the noise."
We'd layer onto those different characters
caricatures of people in the society today.
CROWD: We want the park!
If the police came, we just...
started up the motor and drove off.
It led me to be producing anti-war shows
because, by that time, we recognised that there was a war in Vietnam
and that our country was playing a terrible role.
I remember Country Joe And The Fish,
he had done the music for some of my anti-war plays.
# What are we fighting for?
# Don't ask me I don't give a damn
# Next stop is Vietnam... #
We made a lot of veterans happy and military families happy,
and it powered a lot of people.
# Whoopee, we're all gonna die... #
I can only write it because I was a military veteran.
There's no blaming soldiers for war in the song.
It's kind of a work song, actually -
"Whoopee, we're all gonna die"
meant from a soldier's point of view.
It's GI dark humour.
And it talks about imperialism, and it talks about politicians
and the working class being exploited.
But it also, interestingly, blames parents
for sending their children off.
That was a controversial lyric -
"Be the first one in your block
"to have your boy come home in a box."
# You can be the first ones in your block
# To have your boy come home in a box. #
# Last night your shadow fell upon my lonely room... #
San Francisco was aflame with protest, radical ideas and acid.
The American authorities were horrified and banned LSD.
This had little impact,
as many budding chemists began manufacturing it on a mass scale.
Most notably, Owsley Stanley, a Berkeley College dropout.
When I first met Owsley,
he had a girlfriend who had been a chemist.
A major in chemistry at UC Berkeley.
And when he met her, he drew her in,
and then, when he met me, he drew me in.
So we were a bit of a team.
He set up this whole laboratory
as if it were a gift to the gods
and as if the act he was doing was a divine act.
And he played special music.
And he had us all wear uniforms.
We had to gown up and cover our hands
and cover our whole body, and even boots on our shoes,
and goggles.
And there were no lights on. Everything was yellow light.
Owsley's acid was very pure.
He had it tested by an organic chemist at UC Berkeley
because Owsley felt that if you had very pure acid
and you took it in a conscious way with friends,
that you would have a transcendent experience.
Acid was the binding agent of the San Francisco hippy scene.
But it needed a soundtrack.
San Francisco's greatest LSD advocate, the writer Ken Kesey,
challenged the scene's house band, the Grateful Dead,
to come up with one.
# If only I knew what to find... #
Ken Kesey hired Jerry Garcia, who was known as a folk singer,
to come up with the perfect kind of music that would go with LSD.
And Garcia tried classical music - didn't work.
Tried Jazz - didn't work. Tried folk music - didn't work.
And then he discovered that a certain type of rock music
actually would do this.
# A friendly stranger calls my name
# He only wants me for his game... #
We all brought something very, very different to the table.
I was mainly into avant-garde electronic music.
I'd already met Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia.
Rock and roll music was new to them as well.
To Phil especially.
He was as much into the avant-garde as I was.
And Jerry Garcia was mainly into Appalachian folk songs.
And yet, because of the expansive nature of the scene,
we reached out towards one another and made it work.
And what worked worked like gangbusters.
# I know you, rider, gonna miss me when I'm gone... #
Musically, they formed this great bridge
between folk music and improvisational jazz.
They certainly benefited from having Jerry Garcia
at the head of the band, because he just...
represented the free and easy acid-loving jam band life
that a lot of their followers could certainly rally behind.
Now, remember, there's another aspect here as well - the audience.
No matter how much you rehearse, when you're there on stage,
you're there live, and the action is coming at you.
And that's where some of the greatest adventures occur.
Feedback, for instance.
I remember one time at the Avalon where there was a feedback note.
I think it was a high E.
And I found it on the keyboard,
and when the feedback note disappeared, I was still there,
and then I played a melody based on that.
So I was taking a melody out of the feedback.
Dead are the definition of a hippy band.
Even as a way of life that has endured into the 21st century.
# Gonna miss your baby... #
The Grateful Dead gave the hippies a sound to rally round.
And on 16th June 1967, they took part in a ground-breaking event
that would see the music transform the entire hippy scene.
Just six short months after their creation,
hippies were about to lose their innocence.
MUSIC: Stop by Mike Bloomfield
100 miles south of the city, in the coastal town of Monterey,
it was decided to showcase the San Francisco acts
by staging three days of music in the local sports ground.
This concert was the triumph of the summer of love,
and with some of the biggest pop acts of the day,
like The Who and Jimi Hendrix also performing,
the whole world joined the party.
Monterey was getting respect from
all over the United States, and from all over the world, you know.
So, in my opinion, it was the first one.
I don't think there's ever been anything like that before.
Then, of course, Pennebaker's movie and all that.
We got to see The Who, Jimi Hendrix...
Yikes!
And what transpired was not just a showcase for San Francisco music,
but the first modern rock festival, Monterey Pop.
And DA Pennebaker's film ensured the festival's place in history.
There were different contingencies there.
It was interesting because the English bands came.
We had never seen them before and the Bay Area bands,
so it was kind of like a...
Well, the first rock festival, really, wasn't it, you know?
That was the peak of it all and that was the one thing that ran well,
it was the one time that everybody was in love with everybody else.
# No colours in my life
# You know they're turning black
# I see people walking by
# Dressed in their colourful clothes
# I see them strolling by
# My happiness, it flows
# No more... #
We got a respectable round of applause.
I was happy.
I was happy to have been a part of the event. It was just...
..marvellous!
Along with some of the world's biggest bands, many of the top music
executives were there,
scouting for San Franciscan acts to sign.
# By my window
# Just looking out
# At the rain. #
After Monterey, Janis Joplin's life would never be the same again.
# Mm...oh!
# Sitting down by my window
# Just looking out
# At the rain. #
The organisers were trying to showcase the San Francisco sound
and so Janis Joplin really became
a superstar and got the record contract with CBS Records as
a result of her performances,
which are some of the best performances of her entire career,
at the Monterey Pop Festival.
SHE SINGS
Before that, nobody paid much attention to her, you know?
It was like she was with this band that wasn't always in tune.
One day, everybody was kicking her ass,
and the next day, they were kissing it.
SHE SINGS
Monterey was music and acid, and business and fun,
and all aspects of the San Francisco hippie revolution were
represented there.
Even the original nature boy, Gypsy Boots,
the pioneering proto-hippie from the 1950s, got the gig as the
festival's official gardener.
While Owsley, the underground chemist,
arrived on site with a batch of acid specially made for the event.
We made a batch for Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.
And I'd say we'd make 100,000 hits, that was the most we had ever made.
Well, I took this new psychedelic that Owsley had invented called
STP, so everything was like a Monet painting to me.
It was blurred, kind of heightened pastels or something.
When we went on stage to play, I was pretty high then.
When you see our excerpt, of playing section 43 in the film by
Pennebaker, you hear the bass going...
HE BELLOWS
HE CONTINUES BELLOWING
Which we'd never heard before.
That was the only time that kind of a sound had ever come out of
that bass during that composition.
# People try to put us down... #
That was the first time I had seen The Who.
I couldn't understand why they broke their instruments. That was...
wacky.
The Who smashed up their instruments,
kicked the drum kits over, bombs went off, smoke everywhere.
People were scared shitless, you know?
# Wild thing... #
When Jimi did it, he did virtually the same thing!
But it was so different.
It was like, you know, he...
gasoline on the guitar, lit it.
And then down on his knees, it was like it was a soul sacrifice.
In his long, groovy fingers
were dancing over the fire.
After Monterey, everybody now wanted to go to San Francisco,
the coolest city on the planet.
But in this moment of triumph, outside forces were already
mobilising to threaten the hippie idyll.
Commerce, in the shape of the record companies, was about to enter
the Haight-Ashbury potpourri
to challenge the hippie ideal of freedom.
The violence of Hendrix's performance captured in the
Monterey Pop film was emblematic of the turmoil
happening outside the concert gates that same month.
America's inner cities were burning, revolution was in the air,
and the anti-Vietnam war protests reached critical mass.
I will say directly, no, I will not go.
CROWD CHANTS
America's youth was declaring war.
In the next programme, we will see how the state fought back.
The Hippie Movement, like any other extreme action on the part of
people, it will die a natural death.
And how the dark forces that lay beneath the Summer of Love broke cover.
The atrocities that have yet to surface from women's
treatment by the rural Hippie Movement are considerable.
So, turn on, tune in and watch out.
# Wild thing
# You make my heart sing
# You make everything groovy
# Hey, wild thing
# Yeah! Wild thing
# Yay! Yeah, wild thing. #