Original subtitles

The summer of 67 was a moment that

rewrote history.

Nature boys, truth seekers and politicals 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.

Free love, free drugs and free thinking 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 U.S. government mobilized to stamp out

the first signs of an uprising.

We were afraid.

And 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.

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.

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 8th 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, so

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 the 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, six feet by six

feet, 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, they just discovered social

change.

They grew up in a soft, middle-class

family or something, and then all of a

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're going to have the free food, and

if it's past its sell date, who gives

a fuck?

By the height of the Summer of Love,

half a million starry-eyed kids had defied

their parents' wishes and descended on the hate.

Among them were two teenage runaways, Taj Galleran

and Cat Castro.

The place was just...

There was, like, 1,000 people on every

block.

I mean, the street was completely lined with

body, remember?

I do.

I do.

And, uh...

Everywhere.

Anything that you needed or wanted, you would

just ask around and somebody would give it

to you.

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 to join.

It was all over the place and everybody

shared.

It was a community.

That's what I call it.

That was a community.

It was a true community.

It was like family.

And it was better, more like family, than

the family I had at home.

Exactly.

When I came up here, I'd just turned

16 and just put down my Barbie dolls

the month before.

So, I mean, I was pretty sheltered.

They kept acid in their cupboard, like vitamins.

They did.

The day of that big V-In, I

said, you know, can I get a kit

of acid?

Yeah, help yourself, Cathy.

In the shelf, I opened the cupboard, and

there was a little bottle.

Pop, pop, pop.

I hopped in the park.

I was rich.

I know.

Summer Bluff 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.

What do you want to do here that

your parents wouldn't want you to do back

home?

Nothing.

That's it.

Exactly.

Nothing.

I don't have to do anything.

Underage 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 there.

Well, I 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 odor.

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.

Today we went down to the city clinic

and we talked to the people down there

about the vernal disease that is spreading through

Haight-Ashbury.

They would have Ballard OSD trips, drug overdoses.

They'd have gonorrhea.

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 to have the syphilis, gonorrhea

and a clap.

And it has to be stopped because if

it isn't stopped now, it's just going to

spread.

And if it spreads, everyone here is going

to catch it.

If you're blowing some chick and she's got

it, it weighs you out, well, that's cool,

and you go get yourself fixed up, in

the meantime, she's giving 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 unsavory 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 a long organized crime, came as

time progressed in there because it was about

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 look, 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 center.

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 Munson was cruising the main

strip just looking for those stoned heavy 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 Munson 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

at Haight-Ashbury for the weekend.

My parents came here looking for me over

the 4th 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 to lock the bottom door.

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 recognize each other, long

hair on guys, long dresses on girls, language

using the word hip or cool or groovy

or, like, 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.

SONG PLAYS 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 to,

hopefully, to be evocative and provocative.

SONG PLAYS This eye-catching and dramatic performance

caught the attention of two politicos from the

New Left.

Abbie Hoffman and Gerry Rubin had emerged out

of the free speech and anti-war movements

to form a new political party called the

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 a 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 visitors 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, Pegasus.

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.

Abbie and Jerry, they had to pick a

pig to nominate for president.

Their candidate for president was a pig called

Pegasus.

Well, that's good theater.

I like theater.

Theater'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...

Do-do-do-do-do-do.

Political pigs, your days are numbered.

We are the second American revolution.

We are winning.

Yippee!

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.

Yippee was 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 Yippee, 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.

Roping, raping, there was an awful lot of

that that was hidden at the time.

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 counter-revolutionary?

Everything was defined by guys as what was

revolutionary.

So I decided, OK, well, I'll just learn

to roll a...

Nobody will want my joint.

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.

Which stood for Women's Internationalist 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 morning and hex the Stock Exchange,

and the Stock Exchange would not open it.

And the doors did not open because at

4 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 yippee.

Anyone could be a yippee, 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.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find

out what it means to me R-E

-S-P-E-C-T, take F-T

-C-T 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 Champlain or

Big Brother and the holding company, and they

were just the guys in the neighborhood, 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 to 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 3

-day concerts and unity and that kind of

feeling, because the thing about being a record

or 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 these, like

a hairbrush and comb that had his initials

on it, G-O-D, God.

And she didn't like that.

She went in and piled him on the

floor and then came out and said, Go

on, check what I did, dude.

You know, I walked in there, and she

peed on these toiletries of this guy's, 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.

Busted flat in Bain-Rouge, waiting for a

train...

Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills

album starring Janis became the first No.

1 album to come out of the Bay

Area in 1968, so that was a real

change that someone could actually produce a No.

1 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.

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!

Kick out the jams, motherfucker!

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.

I'm a citizen of this country I don't

know what I'm doing For a nation, for

a nation For a nation, for a nation

Against fascination Vietnam War Sixty-one Uncle Sam's

office 150 Hall 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 revolutionary because we

wanted to use this music to change the

society.

We wanted to overthrow the government with rock

and roll.

You know what I'm saying?

So we threw ourselves at the wall.

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 white people.

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 anymore, 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 point, some of us said we'll raise

our rifles and our pistols.

It was the idea of total assault on

the culture by any means necessary, including rock

and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.

That was our slogan.

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 Phi,

and we were going to have literary figures

speak and comedians and theater 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, and what could possibly happen?

What could happen?

Beat the shit out of you and throw

you in jail.

That's what could happen.

Actually, I think Country Joe came, and he

was in an elevator, and somebody punched him

out or something.

And then 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.

We were 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's pictures of hippies putting flowers in the

rifle barrels of the troops, which, 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.

♪♪ ♪♪ New white

street revolutionary.

We take bus on the head.

♪♪ The Chicago riot was a huge turning

point in the revolution.

Eight of the festival organizers, 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 reorganized 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 U.S. Capitol building in the Senate

staircase, did quite a bit of damage to

the building.

Perhaps most famously, they blew themselves up, three

of them, in the New York City townhouse,

where they were trying to actually build bombs,

but something went awry with the dynamite, 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.

♪♪ People took those wanted posters off post

office walls and put them in their windows

and said, You know, we felt protected by

a bigger seat.

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 program 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.

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 organizations, 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 1969, with the murder of

Fred Hampton in Chicago, it was really horrible.

The people who felt the stomping most were

actually people of color.

That's right.

They assassinated Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in

their sleep, a joint task force of the

FBI and local police.

We took some losses, but not like that.

Right, exactly.

They said they were going to prevent the

rise of a black messiah and to destroy

and neutralize.

These are FBI terms.

Destroy and neutralize the Panthers, destroy and neutralize

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, that

they were looking for Abby, 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 realized 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 Binefield 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 5 and 50

friends.

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.

Lay your body...

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.

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, if 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.

Old patriarchal prejudices had plagued the hippie movement

since its earliest days.

Now women form 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 crack-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 organizations and she

pointed out some of their problems.

Quite 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, because 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 lightbulb, well, okay, 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, but 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.

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.

Well, I came upon a child of God

He was walking along the road 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.

And, you know, when you get, you know,

400, 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.

But Woodstock was great.

It was like Monterey, only bigger.

I mean, I watched lots of the show,

the scene, 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.

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

to mainstream America.

It's all 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, he tore it to bits.

It was fucking mind-blowing.

It's still mind-blowing today.

That 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 a sense,

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.

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,

of 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 was very close to the center 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's what Jackson was doing, it's what Joni

was doing, some of the Eagles, you know,

la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.

It was a great time in Laurel Canyon

in those days.

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 Rafferty and Bert

Schneider, and they were indeed creating the new

Hollywood film industry.

MUSIC With brilliant improvised direction by Dennis Hopper,

Easy Rider tells the story of two hippie

drug dealers on a road trip across the

Midwest.

Easy Rider was a smash hit at the

box office and paved the way for an

explosion of new Hollywood directors as anti-establishment

films flooded out of Tinseltown's dream machine.

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 inquiry.

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.

We're actually experiencing right now, I must say,

Esalen, 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 a kind of a

new marriage in the making.

The hippie experiment to explore new ideas in

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 magnets

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.

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

democratize it, and indeed democratize 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.

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 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 homeopathy 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.

And there's the big thing.

See, we won the 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 with a

scratch on their heads.

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.

I'm a

hippie.