1.Prologue
In the previous entry of this series, I wrote about Beat Generation authors and how their literary movement led to the development of the hippie movement, and offered a brief overview of the music and movies that defined the hippie ethos.
The Beatniks/Beat Generation of the 50s was driven by forward-thinking cultural intellectuals in opposition to the establishment of the cultural elite; by the 60s, the movement had begun to evolve into a more wide-scale grassroots hippie movement.
On its surface, the hippie movement was driven by a shift in societal and cultural values and new waves of protest for social justice: the American civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War protestors, feminists, etc. Underneath the surface, the hippie movement was driven by drugs.
Over my next several columns, I will take an in-depth look at the psychedelic music made by musicians who sought to free their mind and expand their consciousness through drugs, and how they influenced music across genres for generations to follow. Through this process, I will also show how the culture and values of the hippie movement spread from California across the U.S., and to places as far as Europe and Japan. In the end my goal is to provide some insight into America’s long and continuing struggle with drugs.
In today’s column, I will begin by taking a more in-depth look at the psychedelic scene that developed in San Francisco.
2.“Love & Peace" and The Flower Children
The atmosphere of San Francisco in the 60s is best captured in Scott Mackenzie’s song “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)".
If you’re going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
“San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” became an anthem of love and peace for the hippies. Ironically, the song was written by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, one of the quintessential California bands of the era to come out of Los Angeles. The song was used to promote the Monterey Pop Festival, held in mid-June of 1967. (I will cover the Mamas and the Papas and the Monterey Pop Festival in more depth in my next column.) Monterey is a city located on California’s Central Coast region, which as the name implies, is located in the area between Northern California (where San Francisco is located) and Southern California (where Los Angeles is located). The lack of regard for geographical authenticity shows just how renowned San Francisco had become as the center of the movement not just across America but in Europe as well.
Flower symbolism was part and parcel of the hippie movement; the label “flower child” originated as a synonym for “hippie”. Narrowly defined, “flower child” refers specifically to the hippies that congregated in San Francisco in the latter 60s. For them, hippie values and principles were more than a fashion or fad—they wholeheartedly believed in the message they were peddling.
The flowery imagery was originally put forth by political activists like Allen Ginsberg (a Beat Generation poet whom I covered in my previous column), who advocated the giving of flowers to police, reporters, and politicians as a means of peaceful protest—the idea of wielding flowers instead of weapons. The hippies embraced the flower symbolism as representing their ideals of peace, love, and friendship. They literally wore flowers in their hair, dressed in vibrantly colored clothes, and were unabashedly optimistic and hopeful about the power of their movement.
High school and college students across America for whom these ideals resonated were drawn to San Francisco in the summer of 1967, which came to be called the Summer of Love. They congregated in the Haight-Ashbury district, where they lived on the streets or formed communes. These utopian communities were an attempt to break from traditional society—an American experiment on a scale never seen before.
3.Timothy Leary and “Turn on, tune in, drop out"
Before the Summer of Love, the hippies in San Francisco were a minority isolated from mainstream society. They began experimenting with LSD and other drugs(*) as a way to free themselves from the trappings of conventional society and attain a kind of spiritual enlightenment.
The hippies were encouraged to experiment with these types of drugs by none other than American psychologist and writer Timothy Leary. Leary conducted various experiments with LSD while he was a professor at Harvard University, and believed that the use of psychedelics could rewire and expand the brain for the better, imprinting a new personality upon the user. After he was fired from Harvard in 1963, he began touring and promoting the use of LSD around the country. At the Human Be-In, a hippie festival held in January 1967 that was a prelude to the Summer of Love, he told a group of 30,000 hippies to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out." (“Turn on" in this context means to go within and activate your neural equipment—and thus consciousness—through the use of drugs. “Tune in" means to be in harmony with the world around you by manifesting your new perspective through your lifestyle. “Drop out" means to detach oneself from conventional society and its various commitments, and live a life of self-reliance.)
By the end of summer 1967, an influx of violent heroin dealers and later the arrival of tourists wanting to see the hippies up close would spell the end of the Summer of Love. The flower children returned home, founding communes in rural areas and disseminating hippie culture and values across America.
*About drug types. Drugs can generally be divided into three categories: stimulants (aka “uppers"), depressants (aka “downers"), and hallucinogens (aka “psychedelics"). Uppers increase alertness and energy and make the user feel a sense of euphoria or a “high", and include amphetamines and other drugs like cocaine and MDMA. Recently a string of Japanese entertainers have been arrested for possessing these types of stimulants. In a wider sense, nicotine (tobacco) and caffeine also fall into this category. Downers reduce arousal or stimulation in various areas of the brain, causing effects such as sedation, muscle relaxation, and dissociation. Heroine is perhaps the most well known type of illegal substance that falls under this category. In a wider sense, alcohol is also considered a depressant. Psychedelics are drugs that trigger psychedelic experiences and cause an altered state of consciousness. Well known psychedelics include LSD, mescaline, and DMT. Cannabis can act as both a stimulant and a depressant depending on the type of weed and the user.
4.The San Francisco Psychedelic Rock Scene
These drug experiments developed in parallel with the musical genre of psychedelic rock. Psychedelic rock is a genre of rock that came to prominence in the late 60s as a style that seeks to recreate—or enhance—the kind of hallucinatory experiences brought about by psychedelics. Because LSD was referred to as “acid", psychedelic rock is also known as “acid rock".
Here I’d like to introduce three San Francisco bands that embodied the psychedelic sound and the ethos of the scene.
●Jefferson Airplane
Jefferson Airplane was one of the rock bands to come out of San Francisco that pioneered the psychedelic rock sound. It was the first of its contemporaries to achieve commercial success.
Surrealistic Pillow
Jefferson Airplane’s second studio album is its masterpiece, often considered the first album to truly capture the San Francisco psychedelic rock aesthetic. It took what was then a local sound and disseminated it to the rest of the country. The album is ranked 146th on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of “500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia also plays on the album, and is said to have been a “spiritual advisor".
●The Grateful Dead
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The Grateful Dead was a rock band formed in the San Francisco Bay Area. While it was not the kind of band to produce chart-topping hits, its trippy live performances were the stuff of legend—especially its long instrumental jams. Because its concerts were based more on improvisation than on a setlist, no two Grateful Dead concerts were the same, and devoted fans, known as “Deadheads", followed the band across the country. The band allowed fans to openly record its concerts for later enjoyment. The community of Deadheads that developed around the band and collected and traded recorded tapes was not unlike a hippie commune.
Live/Dead
The Grateful Dead’s first live album perfectly captures its legendary live sound, characterized by lengthy, winding improvisations. In 2003, the album was ranked 244th on Rolling Stone’s list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.
●Santana
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Santana is a rock group centered on Mexican-American guitarist Carlos Santana (1947-), known for fusing rock with jazz, Latin music, world music, and psychedelic music. To date he has won 10 Grammy Awards. In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Santana 20th on its list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".
The Best of Santana
This best-of disc compiles 16 hits spanning the first 30 years of Santana’s career.
Up until 1969, Santana was a local San Francisco band virtually unknown to the world at large, but its breakout performance at the Woodstock Festival would change that practically overnight. Carlos Santana has spoken in interviews about how Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia gave him mescaline a few hours before the band was scheduled to take the stage; Santana spent most of his performance on a wild trip, praying to a higher power to help him keep his guitar playing in time. By the time the band’s closer “Soul Sacrifice" came around, he had returned from his journey, and the legendary performance that followed could have only come from the fingers of someone who had become one with the universe.
5.Why the Flower Children Used Drugs
At this point I feel it is important to note one fact about the demographic of hippies and flower children in San Francisco.
Those that were referred to—or self-identified as—hippies and flower children were by and large from white middle and upper class families. Their parents had grown up during the Great Depression, and as adults had worked themselves to the bone for family and to obtain the kind of material comforts they lacked during their youth. The children, subsequently, came to despise the materialism, consumerism, and capitalist ideals that defined the households they grew up in, and ultimately rebelled against their parents’ values. To put it another way, they did not want to become “squares" like their parents. Becoming a “hip" flower child was a way to escape that fate. In that respect, the drugs that were ostensibly about expanding their consciousness were really about rejecting the reality in front of them.
Consequently, people like Jerry Garcia and Carlos Santana who had Hispanic roots (Garcia’s father was from Spain, and Santana is a Mexican-American) were not technically hippies or flower children—at least in the narrow sense. Yet as outsiders to a largely white American society, they found their community in the multiethnic city of San Francisco. For minority communities, perhaps drugs were a way to escape from the reality of poverty, discrimination, and adverse circumstances. By attaining enlightenment, they could leapfrog the traditional social/racial hierarchy.
It’s also worth noting that both the Grateful Dead and Santana employed flower symbolism in their work. The Grateful Dead’s second live album, released in 1971, features a skull with a crown of roses on the cover (the album is colloquially known as Skull & Roses). Santana released live albums with titles like Moonflower and Lotus.
The flower motif also evokes marijuana and other drugs derived from nature. In the past, shamans would use such medicines to put themselves or the members of their community in a state of trance, in order to induce spiritual experiences that would help heal physical and mental illnesses. For the hippies and people like Garcia and Santana, such drugs were not evil—they were medicines that they believed should not be illegal, remedies for a society afflicted by materialism and other types of spiritual poisoning.
In the next column in this series I will cover the psychedelic rock of Southern California, through which I intend to dig deeper into America’s drug problem.
