Could you describe hippies in a few words or less?
This is for a research project. What comes to mind when you think about the 1960’s counter culture movement and hippies? Just throw out adjectives/short sentences/names/dates/incidents.
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54 Answers
Dirty, mostly, as I recall.
Let it Grow
Keep on Dancin’
Can I crash on your couch?
Are you going to the show?
Peace and Love, man.
Anti-establishment
Anti-War
Back to the Land
Vegetarian
Make Love – Not War
Artist – Commune
drugs, sex, rock n roll, peace, love, groovy, far out, out of sight, boss
Positive:
Activism.
Free Spirited.
Flower Child.
Music.
Liberal.
Anti-War.
Random:
Happy Faces and Multicolored Flowers
VW Buses
Long Hair
Communes
Negative:
Drugs
Free Love (good to some, bad to others)
Odor (patchouli particularly)
(we still have a bunch of hippies where I live in fact a very large percentage of the city I live in are “hippies”)
patchwork patchouli longhair vegan sandals friendly travellers
Patchouli lovin’ (incense), granola-ish..
Tie-dye, bell-bottoms, mini-skirts, unshaved legs for women, long straight hair parted in the middle, pony tails for men, huge afros, peace marches, no bras or public bra burning, public burning of draft cards, defiant use of American Flag as wardrobe.
From Homer the Vigilante:
@Herman’s antique shop
Homer: [stamps on the bomb until it falls with him on it] WHOO-HOO! WAAH-HA-HA-HOOO! YA-HO-HO-HO! [bomb explodes, back to reality] Take that, Maynard G. Krebs!
Herman: Hey! See the sign? [sign says “Do not ride the Bomb”]
Homer: Sorry.
“Tune in, turn on, drop out.”
Zig-Zags
beads & bare feet & granny glasses with colored lenses
“Don’t trust anyone over 30.”
“Let the sun shine, let the sun shine in.”
passing the joint to whoever’s next to you
knowing at a glance who your people were
color, psychedelic color, color everywhere
contact highs
“Come on, baby, light my fire”
God, it was fun. You had to be there.
@Jeruba: I was but unfortunately I had two very young children. I watched the Age of Aquarius from the sand box in Central Park. (The pervasive smell of pot in every movie theater in NYC after the lights went out.)
free love
commune
free your mind
drugs
sex
rock n’ roll
peace
wear a flower in your hair
The Haight (Haight-Ashbury)
anti-establishment
nature/natural
Age of Aquarius
Manson family
transcendentalism
tripping
enlightenment
Beatles
Janis Joplin
Woodstock
life
Hair
reject society
Ah, me, Gail. I came of age in the thick of it and was single and free, and it was glorious. You could walk through Cambridge Common (free concerts on Sunday afternoons) and just inhale and get high. There was nobody there who was over 30.
Some hippies were dirty, folks, but there are always dirty people. The people I knew loved being clean and sweet-smelling and wearing beautiful colors, the men as well as the women. There are lots of ways to be unconventional without compromising your hygiene.
Of course I’m romanticizing a bit. Wouldn’t you? There were plenty of problems and weirdnesses too. But I think it was the greatest time to be young.
The people with the long hair I used to see hitchhiking on the Victory on ramp to the 405 north.
@Jeruba Perfectly said, it was the greatest time to be young.
When I was little, my mother told me hippies were people who named their children after things in nature, so mostly I think of the actor Rainbow Sun Francks.
@KatawaGrey That makes me think of the Zappa children….who names their kid Moon Unit or Dweezil?
I had the name Sunshine Dawn picked out for my first child. Good thing I didn’t have her until 1980. She became Kerstin instead.
@Judi: And both are lovely names, but I imagine she gets teased a lot less as Kerstin.
@Jeruba; I moved from Cambridge to NYC in June 1965 – a little too early for the Cambridge happenings. But Joan Baez used to sit on the floor outside her dad’s office at the Harvard Observatory (where I was working) and play her guitar and sing. Her hair essentially covered her face, but that voice…
Like, whoa, man…far out
My cousin Sky (her real name was Susan)
Flowers in gun barrels in Berkeley
Indian block-printed cotton bedspreads
Taking baths in the rain with a bar of soap
Fleas
My hubby grew up in The bay area and graduated HS in 1968. He loves to tell the story of seeing Janis Joplin passed out drunk in Golden gate park. He also went to see almost all the shows at the Fairmont. He knows the secret meaning behind the line “Feed Your Head” in the song Go Ask Alice Lurve to the first person who gets it right.
@Judi ive always taken it in a psychedelic drug way.Dont know if thats the real reason or not though.
HInt:
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s “off with her head!”
Remember what the dormouse said;
“FEED YOUR HEAD”
There is another clue hidden in my first post about the song.
I imagine it means to eat the biscuit, grow to normal size and stomp on that nasty old queen. Then find your way out of the rabbit hole.
@fireside; Maybe, but it’s not the “secret” meaning.
@judi Is it the secret chord…?
is it talking about being black out drunk. logic and proportion are gone, talking backwards, (off with your hea not sure), and the dormouse was passed out all the time.
@uber; The doormouse has something to do with it, but it was probably a “You had to have been there” sort of thing.
Could you get drugs from the door guy at the Filmore?
i would have said about the dormouse in AIWL giving alice the potion and whatnot but the dormouse never actually said “feed your head”
Was “Feed Your Head” some sort of password?
I am going to give it to @breedmitch ; because without being there, and with my little clues he was pretty darn close. There was an old black man that handed out the playbills at the door of the Filmore. He would nod his head as he handed you the playbill and say “feed your head, feed your head.” He was at all the shows my husband went to (which was most of them) and said the same thing every time.
Left-wing ideals, a desire to break peacefully from the mainstream culture.
“turn on, tune in, drop out.”
“let it all hang out.”
“Make love not war.”
Peter Max
The Fillmores – East and West
“Chill out, man”
Calling cops the pigs
Bell-bottoms, tie-dyes
water buffalo sandals, Earth shoes
And perhaps, most important:
Protesting against the Vietnam War
@Jeruba You’re right. I stand corrected.
hippies dress like tarsan,walk like jane,smell like cheeta
“Harmony and understanding,
Sympathy and trust abounding.
No more falsehood or derision,
Golden living dreams of vision
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation…”
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