The summer of '67 was a moment that rewrote history.
Nature Boys, truth-seekers and politicos
converged on the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco
to forge a new way of being.
The hippie was born.
People in the Haight-Ashbury are seekers of a more meaningful
human experience.
MUSIC: Eight Miles High by The Byrds
Free love, free drugs and freethinking
were the mantras of these cultural revolutionaries.
And yet, no sooner had the party begun
than it started to unravel.
What started happening with the Summer of Love
was a lot of hard drugs started coming into the Haight-Ashbury,
and that changed things a lot.
The atrocities that have yet to surface from women's treatment
by the hippie movement are considerable.
The US government mobilised to stamp out the first signs of an uprising.
We were afraid. You know, those of us who are alive today can tell you
that we all thought that we were going to get killed.
We never imagined living past 30.
GUNSHOT
The hippie movement is like any other extreme action
on the part of people.
It'll die a natural death.
But the hippies would not be beaten.
We were gassed, but we were prepared to fight again.
The Summer of Love lasted just a few idyllic months,
and yet it launched the biggest cultural shift in living memory.
The revolution it unleashed not only changed the way
we think about ourselves, each other and our planet,
but shaped the world we live in today.
This programme contains very strong language.
MUSIC: Let's Go To San Francisco by The Flowerpot Men
June 1967, and San Francisco is on the brink of a hippie revolution.
Thousands of dreamers have come to look for an alternative way of life,
turning the city into the flower power capital of the world.
It was an incredibly exciting time.
Incredibly optimistic.
And we felt, as young people, very empowered.
People were inventing themselves
and inventing the way they wanted to live.
And there was a kind of implicit scale of revolution
which went from the guys that wore little mullets -
you know, their haircut looked normal from the front
but they had a little pigtail, so, on the weekends,
they could let it down and be hippies -
to guys who were, like, tattooing their faces.
There were head shops on Haight Street.
There was the psychedelic shop.
There was The Garden Of Earthly Delight.
It was a wonderful place and it was, in a way, self-sustaining.
We had established a tribe,
a community that took care of each other
and made money and distributed the money and made music.
It was paradise.
People in the Haight-Ashbury are practising
what people have spoken about for centuries
and it threatens to overthrow...
..the rest of the American establishment,
which is built upon motives of greed...
..anger, lust...
..and self-interest.
At the heart of the community were an anarchist troop of artists
and radicals called the Diggers, the Robin Hoods of Haight-Ashbury
who stole from the rich and gave to...
the beautiful people.
Their plan was to turn the Haight into a living experiment,
to create a money-free, self-sustaining anarchist community
with a collective conscience.
'A group of hippies called the Diggers
'provide free food to hungry hippies in Panhandle Park.
'Diggers are people who share, says their manifesto,
'and their aim is a society where everything is shared,
'everything free.'
Initially, the free food started by putting out
Digger stew.
It was stew and it was actually hot food
that was cooked in an apartment somewhere
and then brought out onto the street and fed to people.
And all we asked them to do was step through a frame, 6ft by 6ft,
painted yellow and it was called the Free Frame of Reference.
And when they stepped through it,
we gave them a little one-inch-by-one-inch frame
on a shoelace,
hung it around their neck and just invited them to look at the world
as if everything they saw was free.
Most of these people had just discovered social change.
They grew up in a soft, middle-class family or something,
and then, all of the sudden,
they found out there was injustice in the world.
"Oh, my God! Oh, my God! There's injustice. Social injustice.
"We've got to do something about it. I know, we'll give away...clothes.
"Free clothes! Yeah, that'll be great!"
You know? "And free food! That's what the people want."
They can have the free food
and, you know, if it's past its sell date,
who the fuck gives a shit, you know?
MUSIC: Happy Together by The Turtles
By the height of the Summer of Love,
half a million starry-eyed kids had defied their parents' wishes
and descended on the Haight.
Among them were two teenage runaways,
Tadg Galleran and Kat Castro.
Everybody... The place was just...
It was like 1,000 people on every block. I mean, the street was
completely lined with bodies. You remember. I do.
KAT LAUGHS I do! Everywhere.
And anything that you needed or wanted,
you would just ask around and somebody would give it to you.
Oh, yeah. It was a community. It was a community.
If there was food, if you needed money,
if you wanted something to drink, if you wanted a joint...
It was all over the place.
And everybody shared - that's what was really cool about it.
It was a community. That's what I call it.
It's when you share like... And that was a community.
It was a true community. It was like family. Yes. Yes.
And it was better... More like family
than the family I had at home.
Exactly. Cos when I came up here, I had just turned 16
and just put down my Barbie dolls a month before,
so, I mean, I was pretty, pretty sheltered.
They kept acid in their cupboard like vitamins.
They did. I said, you know, "Can I get a hit of acid?"
"Yeah. Help yourself, Kathy. They're on the shelf." Oh, really?
I opened the cupboard and there's a little bottle. Pop, pop, pop.
SHE LAUGHS Jeez. I know.
The Summer of Love wasn't actually a real thing.
It was a media creation.
It was describing the influx of teenagers to San Francisco...
..who had heard about, or read about,
the subculture in Haight-Ashbury and flocked there.
You can be yourself. You don't have to be what adults want you to be
and everything like that, you know. 'Well, what do you want to do here
'that your parents wouldn't want you to do?' Nothing! That's it.
'Exactly.' Nothing. I don't have to do anything.
Underaged children poured into the Haight-Ashbury totally unprepared.
No resources,
no way to feed themselves, no way to live.
Kids with no shoes, girls on the street,
14, 15-year-old kids.
What's the point in going around dirty?
Do these people bathe? 'Are they dirty?'
Yes. Half of them smell so bad, I don't want to stand next...
'Well I've never got that close to them.'
That was the one thing I hated about
the whole period and the whole movement
was girls with dirty feet
and the same odour.
They all put this, like... They thought it was perfume,
and it smelled like hay from a horse shed
with shit in it, you know. It was horrible!
MUSIC: Heroin by The Velvet Underground
Today, we went down to the city clinic
and we talked to the people down there about the venereal disease
that is spreading through Haight-Ashbury.
They would have bad LSD trips, drug overdoses.
They'd have gonorrhoea.
They'd come from the Midwest to California
thinking it was sunny California and they'd get pneumonia.
We were seeing 250 patients a day with no government support.
In fact, we asked the Health Department to,
you know, help us because we had this public health crisis.
There are a number of people in Haight-Ashbury who have this.
They have the syphilis, gonorrhoea and the clap,
and it has to be stopped because if isn't stopped now,
it's just going to spread.
And if it spreads, everyone here is going to catch it.
If you're boning some chick and she's got it,
you say, "Oh, that's cool," and you go get yourself fixed up,
in the meantime, she's giving it to somebody else.
Naive young kids living on the streets of Haight-Ashbury
became easy prey for adults who hadn't come for peace and love.
There were more and more unsavoury characters
that started to exploit the drug culture,
which had been primarily marijuana and LSD.
And now, all of a sudden,
amphetamines and other things were being hawked
and so, you know, a much rougher element -
more like organised crime -
came as time progressed in there
because there was a buck to be made, you know.
I started to notice that there were people on the street,
if you will, who seemed different.
They kind of looked like a lot of people looked,
but they were into different things.
They had no interest in social activism,
they had no interest in politics,
they had no interest in helping other people
for any reason whatsoever.
They had no spiritual centre. They had no ethical compass.
They were just there for the party and for the hard drugs.
It became a nightmare. It was a nightmare.
I mean, Charlie Manson was cruising the main strip
just looking for those stoned hippie eyes
on some little girl, you know.
And he'd just, like, get them under his wing
and give them more of the same
and eventually they were going on creepy crawls with him and his gang,
you know, out to kill people.
Charles Manson and his cult of teenage followers
would go on to murder seven people in a drug-fuelled frenzy.
I find that I have to stay out of people that I know that are getting stoned
because when I see them on it,
then I know that I want to get on it too, you know?
By August 1967, the Haight-Ashbury had turned into a human freak show.
The tourists coming into the Haight-Ashbury, for me,
was an indicator that this thing had turned the corner.
We became a destination - a tourist destination.
We'd hold up mirrors in front of the bus
so they could see themselves in the mirror instead of looking at us.
There was a blossoming of head shops and hippie stores.
You know, you'd go into stores and you could buy hippie clothing.
Right? You could buy beards and wigs and stuff
and go to Haight-Ashbury for the weekend.
My parents came here looking for me over the Fourth of July weekend.
By then, I was in Milwaukee getting my ear pierced,
but my parents dressed up like hippies.
So did my dad! My dad tried on bell-bottoms...
My mom had these, like, white, plastic go-go boots and a miniskirt.
And my father, who was, like, you know, portly,
got a Nehru jacket and a peace sign.
The media attention to the subculture
destroyed most of its meaning.
And the external symbols by which we used to recognise each other -
long hair on guys, long dresses on girls,
this language using the word hip or cool or groovy
or my pad or whatever -
all of those things were completely drained of meaning
and became kind of cartoon things
that were easier to make fun of than to emulate.
MUSIC: The Rain, The Park And Other Things by The Cowsills
In October, just four months into the Summer of Love,
the social experiment into an anarchist community
had run its course.
The Diggers staged a mock funeral in the Haight
to symbolise the death of hippie,
and to persuade the college kids and runaways to go back home.
The death of hippie was an event
basically to float this notion about hippie.
You know, that it was a bad idea, that it was a contrived,
conceptualised, now commercialised idea.
This was street theatre that was meant, hopefully,
to be evocative and provocative.
This eye-catching and dramatic performance
caught the attention of two politicos from the New Left.
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had emerged
out of the free speech and anti-war movements
to form a new political party called Yippies in December 1967.
To achieve their aims, they, too, staged spectacular stunts
designed to attract maximum media attention.
See, the dollar in American society
is a symbol of property,
and we believe that property is theft.
And one of the things we like to do is burn up the money.
It was the famous emergence of Abbie Hoffman
into the public stage in '67
when he and half a dozen friends went to the New York Stock Exchange
and scattered dollar bills
onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange,
and watched all of these millionaires scurrying
to pick up a dollar as sort of a comment on materialism.
The idea was that the system operated on a structure of logic,
and if you undercut that structure and subverted it,
the system could not function.
So, when Abbie Hoffman went to the New York Stock Exchange
and threw a barrage of dollar bills down from the visitor's gallery
onto the floor of the stock exchange,
it disrupted the proceedings.
And brokers actually tried to pick up the money.
They were serious anarchists, revolutionary anarchists.
'And now I introduce a presidential candidate, Pigasus!
'The Democratic Party is going to nominate a pig for president
'and a pig for vice president,
'and so we're nominating a pig for president.'
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Abbie and Jerry, they had to pick a pig to nominate for president.
Their candidate for president was a pig called Pigasus.
You know? Well, that's good theatre. I like theatre.
Theatre's really great. But they got in a fight over...
One of them wanted a good-looking pig,
and one of them wanted an ugly pig.
So, they really were not talking to each other that night, you know?
And I thought, "Wow, these guys are a little..."
HE HUMS
MUSIC: You Showed Me by The Turtles
'Political pigs, your days are numbered.
'We are the second American Revolution.
'We are winning. Yippie!'
With the support of hippie heavyweights
like Allen Ginsberg and John Lennon,
Abbie Hoffman was one of the most charismatic leaders
of the revolution, but not everyone fell for his impish charms.
Yippie was an anarchistic, you know, do-what-you-want.
And I must say, at first, I was taken by their style
because their style seemed insouciant and witty,
and was not rhetoric-filled.
But the hypocrisy of Yippie...
You know, the revolution is about free everything.
Free food and free drink. Well, that sounds good.
Free housing and free grass. OK.
And free women.
Many women, who were free, sexually, in the '60s,
that consent was too easy to come by,
and that there was this feeling
that they sort of had to go along with this.
Men, especially in the hippie counterculture,
especially in Haight-Ashbury, used - quote, unquote -
free love as an excuse
for violence against women.
Groping, raping - there was an awful lot of that
that was hidden at the time.
MUSIC: You Don't Own Me by Lesley Gore
The New Left and the hippie movement were led by white men.
Were led by men.
So, the women mostly rolled joints and made coffee.
And if you said no, it was like, "Why are you being so bitchy?
"Why are you being so counterrevolutionary?"
Everything was defined by guys as what was revolution or not.
So, I decided, "OK, well, I'll just learn to roll a..."
Nobody will want my joint, and I just...
They fell apart the minute you got hold of them,
and I was never asked to roll a joint again.
Robin Morgan formed a breakaway guerrilla theatre group
to give women an independent voice in the revolution.
WITCH stood for
Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell.
I mean, when we hexed the stock exchange of New York,
we announced it to the press.
We were going to go on such and such a morning
and hex the stock exchange.
And the stock exchange would not open,
and the doors did not open because,
at four o'clock in the morning the night before,
two of us, three of us, went and oozed Krazy Glue in the locks.
There's a picture over there of me and my supporters -
my women supporters -
all of us dressed as a version of WITCH,
because WITCH was an idea.
In a sense, it was like Yippie. Anyone could be a Yippie.
Right. Any woman could be a WITCH.
WITCH was actually very important.
I think it was, in terms of putting an alternate identity
for women out - for radical women - out in the world.
MUSIC: Respect by Aretha Franklin
As the hippies took on the American establishment,
America's corporations responded in kind
by buying into the one hippie commodity
they thought they could sell - the music.
Before the record companies came in,
you could just go to the Sons Of Champlin
or Big Brother And The Holding Company.
They were just the guys in the neighbourhood.
And they would hold these parties and we would celebrate ourselves.
It was quite wonderful.
But then the record companies came in
and they started giving out 100,000 advances.
And the musicians were ambivalent.
They were getting 100,000 as an advance,
which is about 700,000 today, maybe more.
And they were told, "You can do whatever you want.
"We're not going interfere.
"You have the studio. Do whatever you want."
So they took the deal.
And I don't think any of the groups
that were at all significant resisted.
When the record companies showed up, it was the end of that golden era
of three-day concerts and unity and that kind of feeling,
because the thing about being a recording artist is that
you become a personality along with it
because they're marketing you.
If it's Moby Grape, then you try to make them seem like
the American Beatles or the American Stones.
"The bad boys of San Francisco."
The bad girl of San Francisco, Janis Joplin,
was another artist to be signed up,
but she wasn't going to bow down before the man -
in this case, Columbia Records' overlord Goddard Lieberson.
There was a party in Goddard Lieberson's room.
So, Janis is there, and...
Oh, man. I don't know if I should tell this story. 'Go on!'
Well, she went into the bathroom, you know,
and found that he had all of these...
Like, a hairbrush and comb that had his initials on there,
G-O-D - God.
And she didn't like that.
She went in and piled them on floor, and then...
..and then came out and said, "Go and check what I did, dude."
You know, I walked in there she'd peed
on these toiletries of this guy.
And I thought, "Well, that's really a cool thing to do,
"but it's not something I wanted to see in particular.
"But that's cool. I mean, if you can get on...
"If you can not care enough about your career
"to do something like that to the head of Columbia Records,
"I'm right there with you."
MUSIC: Me and Bobby McGee by Janis Joplin
Big Brother And The Holding Company's
Cheap Thrills album with Janis, starring Janis,
became the first number-one album
to come out of the Bay Area in 1968.
So, that was a real change that someone could actually produce
a number-one album from the Bay Area.
No-one in Bay Area music had ever done anything like that before.
As San Francisco's musicians were enjoying commercial success,
by 1968, the revolutionary edge of the hippie music scene
had moved to Detroit with a band called the MC5.
We used to say that
the Summer of Love didn't make a stop in Detroit.
HE LAUGHS
I was underwhelmed by the West Coast music.
It didn't move me.
We would open for them.
If they were lame and they got up and started playing some lame...
..sunbeams-and-flower, folky crap,
we'd yell at them from the side of the stage,
"Hey, kick out the jams, motherfucker!"
RECORD SCRATCHES, MUSIC STOPS Kick out the jams, motherfucker!
MUSIC: Kick Out The Jams by MC5
The difference between MC5 and the other rock bands
is that they were openly political
at a time when most rock bands did not feel that it was wise.
We know that Lyndon Johnson, as president,
would call up owners of television or radio stations and tell them,
you know, "Make sure that that particular record isn't played."
But MC5 performed songs that were openly political,
and actually revolutionary in the words.
# Just trying to make it satisfactory
# Over and over
# But all these inclinations toward manic frustration
# I want my vaccination against castration
# Vietnam, what a sexy war
# Uncle Sam's a pimp, wants us to be whores
# I said no... #
The MC5 were closely connected
to the revolutionary White Panther Party,
the white counterparts of the Marxist Black Panthers.
The band would often carry rifles onto stage,
and their uncompromising political stance
was exactly the type of music needed to kick off the revolution.
We thought of ourselves as revolutionaries
because we wanted to use this music to change the society.
We wanted to overthrow the government with rock and roll.
HE CHUCKLES You know what I'm saying?
So, we threw ourselves at the wall, you know?
We had a government that was waging a war in our name
at home against black people,
which had been going on for quite some time -
a couple of hundred years -
and then another war abroad in Vietnam...
..waging a war against Vietnamese people.
So, we were saying, "No. Not in our name."
Young people had just reached a point where they said, "Enough."
The hypocrisy of the older generation
was not tolerable any more, and we weren't going to stand for it.
We were going to raise our voices,
we were going to raise our guitars, and at some points...
..some of us said, "We'll raise our rifles and our pistols."
That was the idea - total assault on the culture,
by any means necessary,
including rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.
That was our slogan.
MUSIC: Something In The Air by Thunderclap Newman
By the summer of '68, one year on from the Summer of Love,
word of revolution had spread across the world.
Wave after wave of student uprisings,
from Mexico to Tokyo, promised to sweep away the old order
and usher in a new age of freedom and equality.
In America, the Yippies made an alliance with the Black Panthers,
and arranged for the MC5 and a number of Californian bands
to play a free concert in Chicago in front of 15,000 hippies.
It would coincide with the Democratic National Convention
being held in the city at the same time,
and culminate in a huge, anti-Vietnam War demonstration.
They were going to have an alternative rock festival in Chicago
to counterbalance the Democrats' convention.
They would be the convention of death,
and we would be the convention of life,
and did we want to come and play?
And we said, "Of course."
We wanted to invite rock bands from all around the country,
like the Grateful Dead, Country Joe And The Fish,
the Motor City Five,
and we were going to have literary figures speak
and comedians and theatre people.
It was going to be a joyous occasion. It was.
"We're going to go there and we're going to do this.
"Man, it's going to be great, you know?
"What could possibly happen?"
What could happen?!
They'll beat the shit out of you and throw you in jail -
that's what can happen.
Actually, I think Country Joe came...
Country Joe was... ..and he was in an elevator,
and somebody punched him out or something? Right. Right.
And then... BOTH: He left.
We were the only band that showed up and played,
and from my experience,
when the band stops playing is when the riot starts.
Once the crowd doesn't have anything to focus on,
then the tension between them and the police explodes.
The Chicago police,
they were the most brutal police force in the country.
And they, you know,
took out their clubs and wailed away at people on camera.
And that made the demonstration an incredible success.
However, if you were in the middle of this, as I was,
you were in terrific danger.
Tear gas, if it does not knock you out, it deranges you.
So everybody was crazy from the tear gas
and mace and all of that, and I had...
You know, I had a T-shirt around my mouth and nose for the tear gas.
We WERE gassed. Oh, yeah.
We ran from that, and that gas was...
You know, you couldn't breathe.
Tears ran down your face and the gas stuck to our clothes,
it stuck to our eyes.
And we would come back the next day sort of...
But we were prepared to fight again.
Finally, they called out the National Guard. The troops arrived.
There are pictures of hippies putting flowers
in the rifle barrels of the troops who, you know,
understood perfectly what these kids were up to.
So, the troops actually saved us
from the most horrible possibilities,
and what happened then was the hippie movement lost its quietism
and began to become combative.
MUSIC: Street Fighting Man by The Rolling Stones
The Chicago riot was a huge turning point in the revolution.
Eight of the festival organisers,
including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin,
were tried and convicted for incitement to riot, and imprisoned.
The manager of the MC5, John Sinclair,
also got ten years for selling a single joint
to an undercover police officer.
But far from stopping the revolution in its tracks,
the New Left reorganised themselves into even more militant groups,
many of whom were prepared to fight fire with fire.
The most extreme of these were the Weather Underground.
There's no way to be committed to nonviolence
in the middle of the most violent society
that history's ever created.
I'm not committed to nonviolence in any way.
The United States was the greatest force against humanity
and justice and peace in the world
that we had to oppose it with every tool at our disposal,
and that it was...
That we were part of a global struggle.
In 1969, the Weather Underground declared war
on the government of the United States
and launched a bombing campaign to try and force political change.
Their terrorist actions were echoed
by other anarchist groups around the world,
including, in Britain, The Angry Brigade,
and the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany.
The Weather Underground had planted a bomb
inside the US Capitol Building and the Senate staircase.
Did quite a bit of damage to the building.
Perhaps most famously, they blew themselves up -
three of them - in a New York City townhouse
where they were trying to actually build bombs,
but something went awry with the dynamite,
and so they managed to destroy the entire building
and themselves, as well.
Comrades of ours were killed -
killed themselves in an explosion in New York that March,
and I disappeared along with a lot of other people.
Well, I was a fugitive for 11 years.
MUSIC: She's Not There by The Zombies
People took those "wanted" posters off Post Office walls
and put them in their windows and said, "Welcome here."
You know, we felt protected by a bigger scene.
Some hippies were only too happy to offer the Weather Underground
and other revolutionaries on the run safe haven in their houses.
The American government took the threat
of guerrilla groups so seriously
that President Nixon launched a national counterterrorism campaign
to try and stop them.
J Edgar Hoover developed a programme
to discredit American dissent.
It was called COINTELPRO,
and it targeted every opposition group
that was functioning in the country in those years -
the Black Panthers, the Yippies, the anti-war movement,
the civil rights movement -
anyone that opposed the Nixon administration's policies,
as benign as the group might be,
or as militant as the group might be.
And they sent in undercover operatives,
so you kind of didn't know who to trust.
MUSIC: Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones
One of the models for all would-be revolutionaries
were the Marxist-Leninist Black Panther Party.
Under the joint leadership of the charismatic Fred Hampton,
their armed struggle was seen as inspirational
by other guerrilla groups.
When it came to the Black Panther Party,
Hoover decided, and stated, in 1968,
that the Black Panther Party represented the greatest threat
to the internal security of the United States.
Now, what J Edgar Hoover said made us so dangerous
was that we were getting other people
to be aligned with this philosophy of revolutionary change.
The Black Panther Party not only had coalitions with white organisations,
starting with the Peace and Freedom Party,
which was mostly white...
SDS was a partner at one point with the Weather Underground.
At that point, everything was done to,
as Hoover said, disrupt,
discredit or destroy the Black Panther Party.
And in December of 1969,
with the murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago,
it was really horrible.
The people who felt the stomping most
were actually people of colour. That's right.
They assassinated Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in their sleep.
Right. A joint task force of the FBI and local police.
So, we took some losses, but not like that.
Right, exactly. I mean,
they said they were going to prevent the rise of a black messiah,
and that was...
And to destroy and neutralise - these are FBI terms -
destroy and neutralise the Panthers, destroy and neutralise the New Left.
I think that the reason that I was under so much surveillance
at the end was - and I know this from my files -
they were looking for Abbie, who was underground.
And so it had...
There's no question it had a chilling effect.
Those of us who are alive today can tell you that
we all thought that we were going to get killed.
We never imagined living past 30.
Or 25, in some cases!
And so...we were afraid.
People realised, if they went head-to-head with America,
they would be shot,
and we were not in such a hurry to start a revolution.
You could see what it would be.
When a student protester was shot dead
at a sit-in at the People's Park in Berkeley in 1969,
and 50 others were injured,
it was clear that the government wasn't going to back down.
This convinced many would-be revolutionaries
to abandon going head-to-head against the state.
I was under surveillance, and it became...
..uncomfortable to live
feeling as if somebody was listening to my life.
So, at a certain point, I felt...
..like going out of their reach.
Harriet Beinfield sought refuge in the Black Bear commune
in the remotest reaches of California.
Those who once dreamed of changing society
now opted to reject it and start afresh.
Between 1966 and 1973,
as many as a million Americans became involved in communal living,
many of them heading back to the land to do it,
as they said at the time -
moving to rural areas, buying a patch of land,
living with something between five and 50 friends.
MUSIC: The Cost Of Freedom by Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young
A sociologist handed out questionnaires
to 60,000 residents of rural communes,
and he asked a very interesting question.
"Have any of you been arrested for protesting
"in an anti-war movement or a civil rights protest?"
And half said that they had,
but the other half said they had not.
And then he said, "Since moving to the commune,
"have you been arrested?" And everyone said no.
The new communalist critique of society, in many ways,
was not perceived as a threat by the central state.
If they want to go live in Colorado, grow their hair long,
smoke dope, I mean, big deal, right?
That's rural Colorado - I don't really care.
Black Bear Ranch was really deep in the woods,
and many miles on old logging roads to get there.
When we arrived, there was one house.
There were 60 of us.
So we had to build shelters for ourselves
out of the materials that were there.
And you had, you know,
50 urban people who'd never lived in the wilderness before,
and every hour and a half,
they would run around the house beating frying pans and pots
to scare away the bears and the mountain lions.
MUSIC: Hole In My Shoe by Traffic
The communes had first been created
by the Nature Boy tribe of the hippies.
Here at Black Bear, they were determined to implement
the hippie experiment in alternative living,
based on ecological and communal values.
We shared our money, we shared our food,
we shared our bodies, we shared our children.
You know, we shared everything and we were trying to figure out...
..how far we could take that.
Black Bear was so distant
that strange ideas could spread like a virus through it.
So, for instance...
..a group of radical women took over one winter,
and they passed a law that
you could only sleep with the same woman twice
because, otherwise, you were encouraging coupling,
which was too bourgeois. So, for instance, that would...
When I had slept with all the women that I wanted to sleep with,
I would figure out a reason
to run back to the city and do a food run.
But one aspect of communal living
continuously threatened to undermine the experiment in a sharing society.
In the winter, 60 people slept in one space,
and the sort of habits of patriarchy meant that...
This is going to sound a little harsh.
That the men were predators and the women...
..were under sort of peer pressure to oblige.
I mean, women were literally hauling firewood at those communes
and being the property of six men and not using birth control
because the men didn't want them to and it was natural.
I mean, the atrocities that are yet to surface
from women's treatment by the rural hippie movement
are considerable.
MUSIC: Different Drum by Linda Rondstandt
Old patriarchal prejudices had plagued the hippie movement
since its earliest days.
Now women formed consciousness-raising groups,
where they could share their experiences of sexism
with other women.
I went to my first consciousness-raising group,
and I said, "I have to admit that I have sometimes,
"on occasion,
"like, more than once, faked an orgasm."
And every woman in the room said, "Oh, you, too?"
And I cannot tell you...
I can laugh about it today, but, my dear...
..my posture changed, you know?
I sat up in a different way. I...
I...
Such a weight was lifted from me,
and the "it's not just me" was huge.
And, of course, if it's not just you,
then what is it?
Robin Morgan finally broke her ties with the hippie movement
when she wrote a damning expose of sexism in the New Left
called Goodbye To All That,
urging other women to break away, as well.
"Goodbye forever, counterfeit left,
"counterfeit, male-dominated, cracked-glass-mirror reflection
"of the American nightmare.
"Women are the real left.
"We are rising with a fury
"older and potentially greater than any force in history."
She named all the names
of the men who ran all the different organisations,
and she pointed out some of their problems.
Quite clearly. Clearly. But I also didn't like it.
I mean, I was incredibly uncomfortable when it came out
and felt really defensive about it... Well...
..cos I knew it was right! Yeah, there you go.
It was another version of "You, too?"
It was the first time a woman had blown,
with leftist credentials,
known and respected by the guys, so she must be good,
who had just...boom!
We were surrounded by all kinds of liberation movements -
black liberation, Chicano liberation,
the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam -
all these various liberation movements
that we admired and emulated, but where were women?
And then, light bulb! Well, OK.
And that's where the phrase women's...
That's why we started out - before feminism,
we called it women's liberation because it was, in a sense...
We were inspired by all these various other liberation movements.
It was like a series of steps
that were an advancement in consciousness.
There's no question, at least for me,
that Goodbye To All That - the title of that piece -
was, as I said, germinal.
It was one in a series of steps that...
And, ultimately, at a certain point, I said,
"All right, I am, in fact, saying goodbye to all that."
MUSIC: Woodstock by Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young
Whilst women's liberation was a response
to the chauvinism of the hippie movement,
the message of peace, love and music
was reaching out to an even bigger audience.
In August 1969, plans were hatched
to stage a massive three-day concert outside New York.
When revellers broke through the fence,
it became the biggest free festival of all time,
symbolising all the hope and chaos of the hippie movement in one event,
as immortalised on film.
Woodstock was a very interesting experience.
When we were flying over it,
it looked like an encampment of the Macedonian army.
When you get, you know, 400,000, 500,000 people all together
and you're flying over them in a helicopter
and there's fires and rain and mud and music,
it was a fascinating experience.
Oh, Woodstock was great.
It was like Monterey, only bigger.
I mean, I watched lots of the show... The sing...
You know, the other acts.
I saw them perform, and they were great.
The music was great, the vibe was great, the audience was great.
HE PLAYS THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER
I mean, Hendrix was just so emblematic of the...
..emergence of the Woodstock Nation.
His presence at Woodstock summarised the lifestyle, the freedom,
the brash resistance to conformity,
status quo, the sexual threat,
you know, kind of a black sexual threat
and a countercultural sexual threat
that mainstream America saw embodied, you know, in Hendrix.
I saw him, I stayed,
and I was standing there in the mud when he played Star-Spangled Banner
and I thought, "Oh, fuck, this is like...
"This is an incredible musical moment,
"and he is the best guitar player that ever lived."
He shredded the national anthem. He shredded it!
I mean, he tore it to bits.
It was fucking mind-blowing!
It's still mind-blowing today.
The Star-Spangled Banner performance just seems to be the piece of music
that just spoke to the chaos, the zeitgeist
of the moment, you know, the most authoritatively,
the most disruptively. Very heraldic
of an apocalypse, in the sense of,
you know, something that removes the veil.
Jimi Hendrix's performance of Star-Spangled Banner
in the Woodstock film
both encapsulated the distorted, dystopian vision
of a nation caught up in a war it didn't believe in,
and, at the same time, was a requiem
for a political revolution that was not to be.
MUSIC: Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell
The confrontational attitude of the hippies
had given way to a new sense of reflection.
The political became personal,
and this found a voice in a new, laid-back sound
emerging from a community of inward-looking singer-songwriters.
And it came not out of San Francisco,
but the affluent, leafy canyons of LA.
It's all very close together, hodgepodge.
You know, little cabins and little windy streets,
and you literally walk out of your door
and walk over to Danny Hutton's house,
walk up to see The Turtles,
go down to see Joni Mitchell and Alice Cooper.
Laurel Canyon was a small area of beautiful countryside.
It's very close to the centre of Los Angeles,
but there, there was this collection of musicians and artists
that lived close to each other that would interact.
And that's what everyone was doing - it was what Jackson was doing,
it was what Joni was doing, some of the Eagles, you know,
and la-la-la-la-la.
It was a great time in Laurel Canyon in those days.
# Tears and fears and feeling proud
# To say "I love you" right out loud
# Dreams and schemes... #
Joni Mitchell was typical of a new generation
of Laurel Canyon artists
who took the peace-loving spirit of the hippies
and turned it into music that conquered the world.
Laurel Canyon is in the Hollywood Hills
and became a magnet for the hip, young gunslingers
of the LA film industry
who felt a natural affinity with the hippie movement.
There were also, of course, at the time,
the new young bucks of Hollywood,
like the producers of The Monkees, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider,
and they were indeed creating the new Hollywood film industry.
MUSIC: Born To Be Wild by Steppenwolf
With brilliant improvised direction by Dennis Hopper,
Easy Rider tells the story of two hippie drug dealers
on a road trip across the Midwest.
# Get your motor runnin'
# Head out on the highway... #
Easy Rider was a smash hit
at the box office and paved the way
for an explosion of new
Hollywood directors as antiestablishment
films flooded out of Tinseltown's dream machine.
MUSIC: Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin
The hippies were transforming American culture
with their music and their values.
Now the pioneering psychological experiments
of the truth-seeking hippie tribe promised the ultimate dream -
a revolution of the mind.
The mystical experiences that enough people had on LSD
led them to seek out other ways of looking at the world.
I read a statistic that you'd have to verify,
that the I Ching went from selling 1,000 copies a year
to 50,000 copies a year by the end of the '60s.
And there were all sorts of mystical texts and books
that entered the culture very, very quickly.
The centre of what would become known as the New Age movement
first established itself in 1962 in a former spa hotel
on the coast road outside San Francisco.
Here, at the Esalen Institute,
intellectual gurus of the hippie movement,
like Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary,
had used their experiments with LSD to create new models
of psychological and philosophical enquiry.
People were coming for a weekend
or for five days or for several months
to deepen your understanding of yourself and others.
How to become, you know, a better person.
How to try out new ways of being.
That's central to what Esalen's about.
It's not to withdraw from the world,
it's to help the world come to a greater birth,
to give rise to a greater life.
We were catalytic for the dispersion of these practices.
I mean, a lot of people said that, when we started,
there were about 20 yoga studios in America.
Now there are 20,000.
None of us had ever heard of the word mindfulness,
in the way it's used now, in 1962.
And we're actually experiencing right now,
I must say, Esalen, with a...
This is kind of like we're having a second beginning, a new beginning,
because we have so many young people now coming in.
And there is a kind of marriage afoot with Silicon Valley.
Our new executive director has sold an algorithm to Google,
and there's kind of a new marriage in the making.
MUSIC: New World Coming by Mama Cass Elliot
The hippie experiment to explore new ideas and consciousness
and human connection was first reimagined in Silicon Valley
by the pioneers of the Information Age.
And although the means they used were not chemical, like LSD,
but digital, like computer code,
the spirit of invention and adventure was pure hippie.
Silicon Valley required sort of this proto state
of hippiedom, a California mentality,
a California perspective
where you didn't ask permission - you just did it -
where there was a bias to the open and sharing
rather than to the proprietary,
where there was the expectation that you would try things
and do it yourself and the fact that,
when people get rich...
..what they do with their money is they invest into other crazy ideas.
Perhaps the most famous hippie
to turn their ideas and values into a business
was a Zen Buddhist LSD advocate who went on to become
one of the most successful computer magnates of all time.
Steve Jobs, who was very much a hippie
living in the Bay Area,
was involved in an early computer co-op project in Menlo Park
that was only six blocks from where Jerry Garcia was living.
And Jobs and others were interested in developing a personal computer
because, at the time, computers meant IBM and Honeywell
and other giant computer corporations.
And what the inventors of the PC - the personal computer -
had in mind was that they could put an IBM on everybody's desk
and that they could give everyone that power,
that they could take it away from IBM
and democratise it and, indeed, democratise it globally,
not just in the United States.
Computer designers, marketers, users begin to imagine the microcomputer
as a tool for personal transformation
in terms set by LSD, in terms set by the counterculture.
We begin to imagine the internet and network computers
as the kind of community
that communes were once supposed to be.
Communes didn't work out, but now, with interlinked computers,
we can make a world of interlinked minds,
just as we hoped once
to make a world of interlinked consciousnesses.
MUSIC: Teach Your Children by Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young
We are connected today in ways the hippies first imagined only on LSD.
The revolution of the mind that was unleashed
has given birth to the cyberspace generation.
The hippie vision of creating a global community
based around sharing and not profit
is now being acted out through Facebook and YouTube.
It has come about through a technological innovation,
a cognitive, not political, revolution.
It's probably fair to say that the counterculture lost
all the political arguments.
All of them. We didn't end racism.
We didn't end imperialism. We didn't end war.
We didn't end misogyny. We just lost them all.
But on a cultural front, we won every single one.
And there's no place you can't go today
where there's not an organic food movement,
a slow food movement, a women's movement,
an environmental movement,
alternative medical practices
like homoeopathy and naturopathy and acupuncture,
alternative spiritual practices like Tibetan Buddhism,
Vietnamese Buddhism, Hinduism.
So, culture runs a lot deeper than politics.
The things that the hippies stood for still apply.
Peace IS better than war.
Love IS better than hate. It really is.
And those ideals are still as strong today as they ever were.
I still believe it. I'm still a hippie, really.
There's the big thing, see? We won a fight.
Now we're allowed to grow marijuana legally.
Five big, bushy plants!
And the cops can come and look at them and they can walk away,
scratching their heads, saying, "How did we ever let this happen?"
I believe in hippie values -
inclusion rather than exclusion,
be kind rather than unkind.
"Remember your hippie days," Jerry Garcia used to say.
"Have more fun than anyone else!"
# Well, you can tear a plane
# In the falling rain
# I drive a Rolls-Royce
# Cos it's good for my voice
# But you won't fool the children of the revolution
# No, you won't fool the children of the revolution
# No, no, no
# Yeah! #