All language subtitles for SUMMER OF LOVE HOW HIPPIES - 1 (MKV) (2000) -Eng

MUSIC: Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix

1967, the Summer of Love.

People have Come here
to love one another.

Sex, drugs, rock and roll.

That was the idea - total assault
on the culture.

By any means necessary.

# ExCuse me while I kiss the sky. #.

But not all peace, love
and understanding.

I"m not committed to non-violence
in any way.

We all thought we were going to get killed.
We never imagined living past 30.

The explosion that summer came from
the mix of naive idealism...

There was a rebellious group of kids
in the 1 890s.

..mysticism, radiCal politiCs

and chemistry...

I really did think that LSD was
the answer to the world"s problems.

..all bubbling to the surface on the
West Coast of the United States.

This series explores the highs and
lows of that cultural revolution,

which would change the way
we live to this day.

Culture runs a lot deeper
than politics.

There are millions and millions
of people living differently

as a result of the counter-culture.

# ls it tomorrow
or just the end of time

# Help me

# Help me. #.

MUSIC: Time Of The Season
by The Zombies

# it's the time of the season

# When love runs high

# In this time
Give it to me easy

# And let me try
with pleasured hands

# To take you in the sun to... #.

This is the Golden Gate Park
in San FrancisCo.

It"s the place where the hippy
was born, on January 1 4th, 1 967.

San Francisco"s underground
newspaper put a call-out

for all strands of what it Called
the counter-culture to gather here

for a party like no paety
in history...

A paety that would change
the world for ever.

You could argue that the popular moment of the
hippy begins with the Human Be-In in 1 967.

""Come to the Golden Gate Park, it"ll
be a gathering of the tribes""...

That was the expression
of the time...

And the tribes they were talking about were the
New Left tribe doing politics, to change politics

at Berkeley, and a kind of new Communalist,
psychedelic tribe hunkered in San FranCisco,

and it was simply meant to be literally a gathering
in which we Could practise being together.

I showed up and the Gathering Of The
Tribes, it was one of those things

when you saw that many people
in the park at the Be-in,

something definitely
was going on.

Turn on.

Tune in.

Drop out.

They called it the Human Be-in,

and it brought together
for the first time

all the disparate tribes of what
soon would be called the hippies.

Eco-warriors mixed freely with
acid trippers.

Very large turnout.

There was, like, 30 or 40,000 of
what then became known as hippies,

and the idea that individuals
would take LSD

in an open crowd setting

and danCe around
was just...you know, unheard of.

The radical left turned up as well.

We"re going to march tonight
for two reasons.

One because...

That"s the moment when Jerry Rubin,
who had been a Berkeley radical,

realised that there were more
hippies than there were radicals,

and Rubin decided, ""A-ha! That"s
where the aCtion is, that's where

""the numbers are,"" and out of that,

he and Abbie Hoffman not long after
Create the Yippies.

Within a year, Jerry Rubin had
formed the hippy anarchist party,

the Yippies.

Jerry spoke, but I don't think
anybody listened cos nobody was

really... Nobody would have
remembered, cos they were stoned!

Nobody would"ve remembered!

We were there, and we felt already

what was going to then beCome
the Summer of Love in "67

was this really interesting blend

of lifestyle preferences, you know,
in their various uniforms of

whatever tribe they belonged to, and
that staeted to be that sort of...

You know, that ripple effect
that went out across the country

when songs like if You"re Going To
San Francisco drew like a magnet,

you know, drew all these other kids
from around the country.

# if you"re going to San Francisco

# Be sure to wear some flowers
in your hair... #.

The Be-In was the galvanising moment
in the bieth of the hippy movement.

They called it the Gathering Of The
Tribes, but who were these tribes,

and what brought them to the party
that day?

The earliest and perhaps strangest of
the tribes was called the Nature Boys.

PiANO PLAYS

# There was a boy

# A very strange, enchanted boy

# They say he wandered very far
Very far

# Over land and sea... #.

The Nature Boys even had a hit song,
so popular that it earned its own

early form of musiC video.

The song was written about a
wandering group of back-to-nature

devotees, who had rejected
mainstream soCiety.

They lived on a diet of
raw vegetables, fruits and nuts

out in the Californian wilderness.

Its writer was Eden Ahbez,

who beCame a Celebrity through a
number of eccentric TV appearances.

..the nation"s number one song hit -
Nature Boy.

His name is Eden Ahbez,

and he's bringing his bicycle
onto our Gulf Oil stage right now.

APPLAUSE

How did you happen to write
Nature Boy?

They were kind of the original
nature boys.

They were these organic, bearded,
free-spirited guys,

and they tended to follow
the weather and the seasons

and the Cropsl

so when it was hot in LA,
in the summer, they would go to

noethern California,
where it was cooler,

and then when it got too cold
in California,

they would come down to Palm Springs and
hang out in the caves near Tahquitz Canyon,

and they soet of ate off the land
and they lived off the land

and they were truly these, likel
free-spirited...nature boys.

Astonishingly, the group"s origins
were in Germany.

Lebensreform, or life reform,

was a baCk-to-nature cult
that had made its way

to California in the early
20th Century.

Like the hippies 70 years later,

it was a revolt against
industrialisation.

There was a rebellious group of kids
that were Coming of age in the 1 880s

and the 1 890s in Germany,

and they deCided to head for
the wilderness, to head for nature.

There was as many as 50,000 of these
kids wandering around Germany,

and you know, if you"re wandering
and you don"t like the climate,

just keep wandering,
you know, wander to America.

They"d seen the pictures of Yosemite and the Grand
Canyon and the beaches in California - they came here.

There was an entire floCk of young
people there during World War I,

formed a little enCampment up there
in Palm Canyon. It alerted some of

the authorities in town, they
weren"t sure why all these Germans

were converging up there, so they
thought that maybe they were spies

or something for the German
military.

There was a lot of people that were
just really disenchanted,

like right now, too - there's a lot of
people that are very disenChanted now, too,

that would look at something
like that and they"d say,

""Hey, I think I want to join these people and
I want to be a part of what"s going on here.""

This is Rudolph Valentino, the famous
film star, who died right after this.

The visitation of the movie star
Rudolph Valentino was symptomatic of

the exotic status the wandering
nomads had now gained.

They had become something of a weird tourist
attraction in the Californian deseet.

Hollywood"s courting of the Nature
Boys enCouraged one of their number,

Gypsy Boots, to bring his
Clean-living ideals out of

the wilderness, into the heart of the city and open
California"s first health food store in 1 959.

Way before anyone was really even
thinking about things like this,

my dad opened the back-to-nature
Health Hut,

a soet of multi-purpose health food,
restaurant, cabaret...

A lot of Celebrities showed up -
Gloria Swanson, LiberaCe.

Famous people came
because there was this crazy,

weird little thing that was serving
Carrot juice and organic rice

and things and meals and seaweed,
and nobody was doing that.

When I look back at my dad"s life,

it"s very clear to me that he was
a guy way ahead of his time,

and then the times soet of
Caught up.

What staeted as a few nomads eating
berries in the desert had found

fertile ground. The West Coast had
always been a plaCe for dreamers

and explorers. San Francisco
was the final frontier.

# On a warm San FrancisCan
night... #

San Francisco was always intrigued
by the exotic, and that went really

back to Gold Rush days.

There"s a very good passage
in Kenneth Rexroth"s memoir

about arriving in San Francisco
in the 1 920s and being

immediately struck by the easy-going
nature of the city, and how it was

so much different than any other plaCe
he had been in the United States.

San Francisco was different because
it was just a centre of weirdness.

It was where you Could go and live
however you wanted to and wear

whatever clothes you wanted,
let your hair grow.

You weren't thinking
about the workforce.

It just wasn"t paet of the consideration
of everyday life, you know?

San Francisco was the breeding
ground for a world view based on

personal growth and fulfilment
rather than personal gain.

The second tribe that made up the
hippies looked inward to liberation

of the self. They were the Truth
Seekers. If the naturists looked

back to Germany, the Truth Seekers
were inspired by one of the maddest,

baddest Englishmen
of the 20th Century.

Aleister Crowley was an early
prophet of Eastern mysticism.

Crowley was one of the pioneers
of introducing yoga to the West,

and at the time, it was seen as
rather devilish,

very alien, and he used it in his
own magical Western rituals in

the bedroom and elsewhere. I mean,
he was homosexual, he was bisexual,

he was promiscuous. Crowley"s sexual
ideas and sexual politiCs underlays

the whole idea and the politiCs of
free love.

# Mr Crowley

# What went on in your head? #.

By the 1 920s, Aieister Crowley
had earned the title.

The World's Most Evil Man.

He dedicated his life to Satan
and the Devil,

and he did it to the hilt,

he just, er...basically transgressed
against every notion of conventional

behaviour or morality or ethics.

He put on magiCal rituals.

Lights, inCense, drumming,
violins, poetry.

There was a punch bowl
passed around,

it was called the loving cup,

it was a mixture of fruit juices,
drops of opium and mescaline.

This is a line that runs directly
through in all the Be-Ins

and happenings of 1 967.

And the essence of it became
this Catchphrase:

And it"s more or less a kind of
Command to break all the rules,

to go beyond all the boundaries.

Crowley beCame a kind of icon.

He was piCked up, like,
in the roCk and roll world.

In 1 967, he appears on the Cover
of Sergeant Pepper and it"s

John Lennon, I think, who put him there,
cos in an interview many years later,

he said, ""Well, the whole point of
the Beatles was to do what

""you want, to take your own responsibility.
That"s why we put him on the cover.""

But it was another Englishman on
the Sergeant Pepper cover that would

bring Crowley"s mix of the East and
drugs to the West Coast of AmeriCa.

The upper-class writer
and philosopher, Aldous Huxley.

Crowley and Huxley met in 1 930
in Berlin.

Crowley in his diaries records
fabulous dinners with Huxley

and it was said that he introduced
the writer to peyote, to mescaline.

By the early "50s, Huxley returned
to this idea of mescaline

for opening up the inner self to
its true nature and then after that,

he writes The Doors Of Perception -
it"s his most influential book.

For the truth-seeking tribes
of the hippy movement,

Aldous Huxley was a guru
and a pioneer.

By the early "60s, Huxley was
bringing these ideas to a retreat

200 miles south of San Francisco,
which was to become the centre for.

Eastern thoughtl meditation
and self-exploration.

As people search for a safety valve
in a world that's become a pressure.

Cooker, here in the United States,
they"ve found one way.

At Esalen on the PaCific Coast
of California,

they"re reaching for an odd kind of
sanity in an odder, madder world.

We staeted by inviting all our
favourite authors to Esalen,

on this property that my family
owned, two miles of Big Sur coast.

Michael Murphy founded Esalen ten
years ago, graduated in psychology

and philosophy and
studied meditation in india.

We wanted to open up a worldwide
Conversation, between these...

Great minds, and Arnold Toynbee, the
most famous historian in the world,

Came and lectured to tell us that
the great event of the century would

be the coming of Buddhism
to the West.

# We are one
in the infinite sun... #.

But it was Huxley who propagated
the idea that psychotropic drugs.

Could aid the individual to achieve
the goals of Eastern meditation.

# Fly like an eagle. #.

There"s an extraordinary text
between Shiva and his divine Consoet

Parvati, the goddess,

and the goddess asks him, ""What is the seCret
of your kind of enlightened consciousness?""

And he answers by giving her a list

of 11 8 exerCises in Consciousness
which will help.

Aldous Huxley was lecturing around
the United States at that time

on the human potential,
human potentiality. A tremendous

inspiration, but not simply from
Eastern philosophy

but from its marriage to an
evolutionary vision of human nature.

This mix of Eastern philosophy and
journeys into the unconscious

made his book the Bible of the hippy
generation.

Jim Morrison of The Doors
Chose that name, The Doors,

because of Huxley's book,

and everyone around that time would
have read The Doors Of PerCeption.

But rather than a serious aCademic
study, the hippies viewed Huxley"s

barely readable book as a guide
on how to get high...

..and getting high got a whole lot quicker when
the hippies discovered a wonder drug called LSD.

The alchemy from straight to hippy
might staet the first time

you swallow a sugar cube
impregnated with the drug.

Although welcomed by Huxley,
LSD appeared to offer the hippy

truth seekers the keys to the doors
of perception in an instant.

I felt... I guess that would be my
last time, I just felt.

Everything was very emotional
and I could see that I fitted in

with all the rest
of what was going on in the world.

The thing that happened as you
got... I"d studied mysticism,

both Christian mystiCism
and other people"s mysticism,

and Aldous Huxiey and so on
when I was at Stanford University

in the "50s, and LSD gives you what a lot of people
had to meditate for ten years in order to have.

It"s not enlightenment, but it is
a mystical experience.

# Overhead the albatross

# Hangs motionless upon the air

# And deep beneath the rolling waves

# In labyrinths of Coral caves... #

LSD was first manufactured by Albeet
Hofmann in Switzerland in 1 938.

It was the military who first
experimented with the new drug.

The CiA was on the search for a Cold War weapon
that Could destroy the minds of the enemy.

Receiving a small dose of LSD,
they"re confused.

That period of LSD was
a dark period, Cos they wanted

an incapacitating agent that didn't
kill you, and so there was this

belief that Russia had these agents
and therefore the United States had

to develop them, and they would give it to
unknowing subjects and then just observe "em.

Military hospitals
were used as test sites.

One employee"s wife
became a subject.

Well, I think it"s time for you
to have your lysergic aCid.

Drink this down and we"il be back after
a while and see how you"re doing.

Well, I just couldn"t... I couldn"t
possibly tell you. It's...

It"s here. Can't you feel it?

This whole room is-is...

Everything is in colour and I Can
feel the air. I Can see it.

I can see all the molecules.

I"m paet of it. I"m... I don"t
even know how I can tell you.

Can"t you see it?

Another suCh test subject was
the writer Ken Kesey, who had been

a night nurse in a mental hospital in San FrancisCo
when the CIA Coveetly got him to take the drug,

and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
was the outcome.

I would have never written
Cuckoo's Nest without LSD.

I think a lot of that stuff that was written
by all of these guys would never have happened

if they"d have just stayed on the get up early
in the morning and drink a lot of coffee

and do what you Can.

LSD, whiCh began in scientifiC
experiments in the 1 950s but by

the late "50s was beginning to spread beyond
that, and I suppose most important in this

was aCtually Aldous Huxley in Los
Angeles, who was turning on Cary Grant.

Cary Grant took over 1 00 trips of
the then-legal drug, later saying

the effect was startling. ""In one
LSD dream, I imagined myself as

""a giant penis, launching off
from Eaeth like a spaCeship.""

I think it would be extremely good
for almost anybody with fixed ideas,

with a great ceetainty about what's
what to take this thing and to

realise that the world he has Constructed is
by no means the only world. There are these...

I was privileged to be given LSD by
Aldous, and my sitter was Laura,

his wife, so that was
my first experience.

It was not my way in
to expanding Consciousness.

Neveetheless, it gave me some sense

of what was going on, and then this
emerged as one of the great

door openers in the culture
around us.

MUSIC: Spirit In The Sky
by Norman Greenbaum

# When I die and they lay me to rest

# Gonna go to the plaCe
that"s the best

# When they lie me down to die

# Going up to the spirit in the sky

# Going up to the spirit... #.

By the mid "60s, acid was raining
down on the youth of California.

Somebody gave me my first LSD
at Berkeley, and that was a hugely

life-altering experienCe.

I"ve always been interested
in...whatever religion points to,

but I hadn't had a deep,
personal experience

of feeling connected to everything,

and having whatever I thought
of as my identity dissolve

and just be paet of the pulse of
life. For me, once I experienCed

that, there was no going back.
I could never again buy into the

notion that I was separate.
Like mushrooms, right, they grow

underground and then they pop up and what pops
up looks like it"s separate, but it"s not.

# There is a house
in New Orleans... #

San Francisco was drawing people from all
around the world, including NewCastle.

It wasn"t any really politiCal
or cultural reason why I came to

California and settled here.

It was beCause of health. I was
a Chronic asthmatic, and got...

Magnetised. I did a lot of dope.

I must"ve held the world record
for LSD.

The things that I saw under its
influence, I"ll never forget.

I was sitting there with my drummer
next to me, and he was real skinny

and he had a bit of a beard
and he was dressed in white,

and all of a sudden he beCame
Jesus Christ!

I meanl for real, it was like Jesus!
And I went so far inside myself that

I guess what happened is I staeted
to cry, and the teardrops that were

falling were, like, slow motion and
they were bouncing off my chest

and splashing all over the Carpet,
and the Carpet - tiny, little bits

would start to move and I would
realise that it was people, and that

I was hovering over the Eaeth
with thousands of people looking up,

going, ""Feed us! Feed us!
Give us food!""

I really did think that LSD was
the answer to the world"s problems.

I was Convinced that we could Change

the way we thought,
felt about things.

Not everyone in the 1 960s thought LSD
alone was enough for a revolution.

# There"s something happening
here... #.

The formation of the hippy
movement"s third tribe,

the PolitiCals, began on
the university campus.

Vietnam. Civil rights. The country
was being torn apart,

and the Berkeley campus of
the University of California

in San FrancisCo"s Bay Area
was at the epicentre.

Osha Neumann was a political
activist in the 1 960s

and remains one to this day.

This mural, it was a monument in
Berkeley, to that period of ferment

and revolutionary enthusiasm,
so anti-Vietnam War teachings,

the students are coming out,
marginalised,

turned into blockheads.

We have somebody burning
his draft card, third world strikes

and the Black Panthers.

It seemed at the time that
the system was Collapsing.

So that really, I mean, encapsulates a
lot of the spirit that we need now.

This generation of young radical
students, now known as the New Left,

found a political guru based at
the University of California.

My main topic, as you know, is
liberation from the affluent...

Professor Herbeet Marcuse rejeCted
the repressive nature

of traditional Soviet Communism.

In its place, he taught
a Marxism that plaCed a greater

emphasis on personal liberty.

..because I believe that
all dialectic is liberation.

Liberation involving the mind
and the body,

liberation involving
the entire human existence.

Herbeet was appealing primarily
to young people. He realised

quite early, I think, that there was
a political value and importance

in what was going on around,
which was this New Left,

young people and this culturai
revolution. He did not believe that

the traditional working Class
necessarily was going to be

the agent of the revolution.
One looked for revolution in people

on the margins, in students.

That, of course, was very appealing
to the New Left

and to the counter-Cuiture that was
at that point exploring all of

these, you know...on monogamy and
the breaking down of sexual taboos

and so on and so forth.

When I went to college,
women were locked up at ten o"cloCk

at night, every single night,
you know,

so, there were many local issues
about what we were being taught,

the truth about history,
the truth about Vietnam,

and there were
agitated students on campus.

It was a way of opening up sexuality
that was good, that was, you know,

against the repression of the "50s
or something, you know, and all the

traditional scriptures of
bourgeois life. Right. Exactly.

Free love was compliCated. Yeah.

Especially for women.

# People moving out
People moving in

# Because of the colour
of their skin... #.

By the mid "60s, women"s issues
began to emerge as the New Left

thinking was taking over
student politiCs at Berkeley.

Students would gather at the nearby
People"s Park, which became

a meeting point for every
new political grouping.

# ..about love thy brother
is the preacher... #.

The thing that thrilled me most was
there were tables, like Card tables,

with every organisation ever that
was disseminating political

information, so you could piCk up
a flyer from the anarChists and hear

the socialists talking and all the
organisations and I was just thrilled, um...

And not too long after I started
there, the police Came on the Campus

and took all the tables away
and arrested some people.

The Campus became a stage
for a series of student sit-ins

and demonstrations, even riots.

MUSIC: All Along The Watchtower
by Jimi Hendrix.

Directly Challenging the university
authorities, the poliCe and the state.

We felt revolutionary to the Core.
We felt, you know, that the way that

white America saw us, we were
their daughters and sons,

and we were saying no.

But along with the New Left,
Berkeley was also home to those

experimenting with alternative
lifestyies and mind-expanding drugs.

By 1 967I these two Camps
were completely interwoven.

Those forCes of cultural upheaval,
of musiC and drugs, were reflected

in people's politics and how people
wanted to think and live, and what

kind of risks people wanted to take,
so, yeah, so my first experience

with LSD was eye-opening, for us.
I think it influenced us deeply.

It all influenced all of us.

# All along the watchtower... #.

While the new left in Berkeley
operated an acid-fuelled Chaos,

just across the bridge in Oakland,
hip young radicals who had Come

through the ranks of the
black freedom movement formed

the Black Panther Party.
Like their white counterparts,

they were into consCiousness
expansion, but not through LSD.

# Just move on up

# Towards your destination... #.

So, all this is, like,
public housing projects.

This is all black people here,
just about.

Today, Elaine Brown runs an urban
farm just round the corner from

the old Black Panther
office in Oakland.

Her journey from a Childhood
of poveety in a Philadelphia ghetto

to leadership of the BlaCk Panther
Party in California entailed

a mind-altering shift
in consciousness.

Well, you know,
I"ve always been blaCk!

But I didn"t always
think of myself as black.

I grew up in a ghetto
in noeth Philadelphia

and I went to public sChools

that were outside
of my immediate neighbourhood

and that were predominantly white,
predominantly Jewish.

And so,
I had this other view of life.

I wanted to be white,

like so many black people do,
but they"re not prepared to make

that confession.

And then, I was asked to teaCh piano
to some children in an housing

projeCt in Los Angeles,
speCifiCally, Watts,

which had just exploded around me,
which I didn"t notice.

And when I got into the
Jordan Downs publiC housing projeCt,

Chills came over me.
This was a throwback to my life

as a really black person,
the one I had been denying.

And when I walked into that room
and saw those little black girls

who were six, seven, eight,
nine years old looking at me

as though I had some kind of answer
for their poverty

and their degradation.
I could hardly breathe,

because I knew that I was
not going to be able to help them,

because I knew what
they needed, because I was them.

And I didn"t want to be them
and knew I couldn"t help them.

But I was totally transformed

and I left the world of whiteness
that I had been living in

and I just walked into the Panther
office and surrendered my life

to the revolution, as I saw it.
And I took that very seriously.

And I take it seriously today.

We say we will do anything,
anything at all,

to gain our freedom
and our liberation for our people,

for black people and for
all the oppressed AfriCan people

and we will do anything.

# if you love a son
where you come from

# Then you had better dare
to seize the time

# The time is now
Oh, seize the time

# And do your part... #.

The Black Panther party
was the embodiment

of the white establishment's
nightmare...

An armed black Marxist-Leninist
group out to overthrow

the established order,
winning the hearts and minds

of their youngl white,
radical Counterpaets.

There was consciousness-raising,
of course, in the black Community.

Everything of impoetanCe in the "60s
ultimately has to do with race.

So, in the blaCk community, you get
the idea that you need

to develop a liberated identity

and aetists in the black arts
movement do preCisely that.

They invent a new identity.
Once that happens,

you can see how youth culture does
the same thing.

BlaCk people drop their slave names,
hippies drop their names and take

names like Wildflower.
You know, it"s conneCted.

And it motivated....
It really cohered us as a group.

In the Bay area of San Francisco,

the pieCes were now in plaCe

for a hippy revolution.

The Black Panthers in Oakland,
the radical students in Berkeley...

..and Haight-Ashbury, the old
bohemian, down-at-heel district

of San FranCisco was being
rejuvenated by this new generation.

It"s a Bohemian area.

Bohemianism is alive with the left,
but it"s not the left.

The reason it"s not the left
is it"s cultural

as much as it"s politiCal,

and it's individualistic
rather than collectivist.

And without the Bohemian culture,
the left can be very authoritarian.

But without the left,
Bohemian culture can be.

Chaotic and sort of empty-headed.

And we"d meet older Bohemians,
and they"d tell you about books,

they"d tell you about
Conspiracy theories,

they"d tell you about all
this wonderful stuff

that they were not telling you about
in school.

So, to me, the trunk line was
the beatniks, who were my elders,

and folk music, also my elders,

leading me out of suburban realities

into another world which was
the beginning counter culture to me.

# Got a baby Depends on me

# I think he has me pinned

# Cos he knows he Can sCatter
my world like a leaf in the wind. #.

By 1 967I the streets of
the Haight were a potpourri

of health food shops,
truth seekers and dreamers,

folk musicl long hair
and masses of LSD.

# And I wonder,
did the truth just pass me by? #.

When I first landed in San FranCisco
Airpoet, it was still beatnik.

The next time I came,

all of a sudden,
the plaCe was paisley.

It had changed entirely.

# ..just pass me by

# Did I just not see
what was right before my eyes? #.

It was an exodus
from everywhere else.

In San FranCisco,
like it always has been,

it sort of funCtioned
as the fulcrum.

You know, the turning point.

You know, it"s like, whoosh,
you either went right baCk home

or someplace else.

MUSIC: White Rabbit
by Jefferson Airplane.

The ingredients of
the hippy revolution

had been brewing for deCades.

SHE BREATHES DEEPLY

And now, in Haight-Ashbury, in 1 967I

the ideals of the three tribes...

The nature boys, the truth seekers,
and the politicals...

Coalesced and instantaneously
ignited into one hippy revolution.

# One pill makes you larger... #.

The time had now come to put the new
hippy world order into practice.

We"re calling upon the forces of
love, not hate.

We affirm life, love, peace
and self-discovery...

And the young people in this country
is against war,

is being oppressed by
police harassment and brutality.

# And if you go chasing rabbits... #.

We just want the freedom
to be ourself

and that"s for love, for experience.

A positive way of life.

# Smoking Caterpillar... #.

For immediate energy
from our muscles and...

GASPING: ..relaxation.

Now last night,
we had a big hassie here

about who is in charge of
this house.

We don"t want a dictator. Nobody"s
supposed to tell you what to do.

People come here to love one another
and to be in love with each other.

At the centre of Haight-Ashbury,

there were a group of
radical actors and activists.

Called The Diggers,
taking their name from

a 1 7th-century
English Anarchist movement

who had proposed a soCiety
without private propeety.

There were The Diggers,
who gave away food.

Their motto was, ""Steal from
the riCh, give to the poot'".

They were like the Robin Hoods
of Haight-Ashbury.

We created a free store
where we gathered up surplus

and last year's goods and
throwaways, and everything was free.

We would ask the question,
like...why get a job?

Why beCome an employee so you can
make the money to become a consumer

when we"ll give you the stuff
and you Can imagine your own life?

It was a soCial experiment.

What wouid happen if you walked into
a store where everything was free?

What wouid you do?
How would you respond? You know?

Some people stole.
This was a response.

One day, there was a woman in
the store when I was running it,

and I looked,
and I realised she was stealing.

So I went up to her and I said,

""ExCuse me, you know,
you can"t really steal in here.""

And she got reaily indignant.
She said, ""I"m not stealing!""

I said ""No, I know you"re not.
You can"t steal in a free store.

""Everything is free here.
You just take what you want.""

""You don"t have to hide it.""

She said, ""it"s free?""
I said, ""Yeah, it's free.""

She said,
""Then, get out of my faCe.""

I said, ""OK.""
So I got out of her face.

Two days later, she came baCk with
a huge tray of day-old doughnuts

which she put on the counter.

So this woman got a gift economy
in an instant.

It was adveetised as
a great youth rebellion,

but I think anybody who had any urge
for freedom and soCial Change

was attracted to it.

When I moved to San FranCisCo, I"m
living right by the Haight-Ashbury,

which was the capital of
the summer of love,

I"m running
the agit-prop truck theatre.

THEY SING NATiONAL ANTHEM OF THE USA.

We rented pick-up truCks,
pulled up to a parking spot,

produce our show, that had stock
Characters that everyone knew.

It was kind of like Punch and Judy.

Mr Liberal came by to plant
a flower and said...

""The authorities should regulate
the noise.""

We"d layer onto
those different Characters.

CariCatures of people
in the society today.

CROWD: We want the park!

If the police Came, we just...

Staeted up the motor and drove off.

It led me to be
producing anti-war shows

because, by that time, we recognised
that there was a war in Vietnam

and that our Country was playing
a terrible role.

I remember Country Joe And The Fish,

he had done the musiC
for some of my anti-war plays.

# What are we fighting for?

# Don"t ask me
I don"t give a damn

# Next stop is Vietnam... #.

We made a lot of veterans happy
and military families happy,

and it powered a lot of people.

# Whoopee, we"re all gonna die... #

I can only write it because
I was a military veteran.

There"s no blaming soldiers for war
in the song.

It"s kind of a work song, actually...

""Whoopee, we"re all gonna die""

meant from
a soldier"s point of view.

It"s GI dark humour.

And it talks about imperialism,
and it talks about politicians

and the working class
being exploited.

But it also, interestingly,
blames parents

for sending their children off.

That was a controversial lyric...

""Be the first one in your block

""to have your boy come home
in a box.""

# You can be the first ones
in your bloCk

# To have your boy come home
in a box. #

# Last night your shadow
fell upon my lonely room... #

San Francisco was aflame with
protestl radical ideas and aCid.

The AmeriCan authorities were
horrified and banned LSD.

This had little impact,

as many budding chemists began
manufacturing it on a mass sCale.

Most notably, Owsley Stanley,
a Berkeley College dropout.

When I first met Owsley,

he had a girlfriend who had been
a Chemist.

A major in Chemistry at UC Berkeley.

And when he met her, he drew her in,

and then, when he met mel
he drew me in.

So we were a bit of a team.

He set up this whole laboratory

as if it were a gift to the gods

and as if the act he was doing
was a divine act.

And he played special music.

And he had us all wear uniforms.

We had to gown up
and cover our hands

and cover our whole body,
and even boots on our shoes,

and goggles.

And there were no lights on.
Everything was yellow light.

Owsley"s acid was very pure.

He had it tested by
an organic chemist at UC Berkeley

because Owsley feit that if
you had very pure acid

and you took it in a conscious way
with friends,

that you would have
a transcendent experience.

Acid was the binding agent of
the San FrancisCo hippy scene.

But it needed a soundtrack.

San Francisco"s greatest LSD
advocate, the writer Ken Kesey,

Challenged the scene's house band,
the Grateful Dead,

to come up with one.

# if only I knew what to find... #

Ken Kesey hired Jerry GarCia,
who was known as a folk singer,

to come up with the perfect kind
of musiC that would go with LSD.

And Garcia tried classiCal music -
didn"t work.

Tried Jazz - didn"t work.
Tried folk music - didn"t work.

And then he discovered that
a Ceetain type of rock music

actually would do this.

# A friendly stranger calls my name

# He only wants me for his game... #.

We all brought something
very, very different to the table.

I was mainly into avant-garde
electronic music.

I"d already met Phil Lesh
and Jerry Garcia.

Rock and roll music was new
to them as well.

To Phil especialiy.

He was as much into
the avant-garde as I was.

And Jerry Garcia was mainly
into AppalaChian folk songs.

And yet, because of the expansive
nature of the sCene,

we reaChed out towards one another
and made it work.

And what worked
worked like gangbusters.

# I know you, rider,
gonna miss me when I'm gone... #.

Musically, they formed
this great bridge

between folk musiC
and improvisational jazz.

They ceetainly benefited
from having Jerry Garcia

at the head of the band,
because he just...

Represented the free and easy
acid-loving jam band iife

that a lot of their followers
Could ceetainly rally behind.

Now, remember, there"s another
aspect here as well - the audience.

No matter how muCh you rehearse,
when you"re there on stage,

you"re there live,
and the action is coming at you.

And that"s where some of
the greatest adventures occur.

Feedback, for instance.

I remember one time at the Avalon
where there was a feedback note.

I think it was a high E.

And I found it on the keyboard,

and when the feedback note
disappeared, I was still there,

and then I played a melody
based on that.

So I was taking a melody
out of the feedback.

Dead are the definition
of a hippy band.

Even as a way of life that has
endured into the 21 st century.

# Gonna miss your baby... #.

The Grateful Dead gave the hippies
a sound to rally round.

And on 1 6th June 1 967, they took
paet in a ground-breaking event

that would see the music transform
the entire hippy sCene.

Just six short months
after their creation,

hippies were about to
lose their innoCenCe.

MUSIC: Stop
by Mike Bloomfield

1 00 miles south of the city,
in the coastal town of Monterey,

it was decided to showcase
the San FrancisCo acts

by staging three days of musiC
in the local spoets ground.

This concert was the triumph of
the summer of love,

and with some of
the biggest pop acts of the day,

like The Who and Jimi Hendrix
also performing,

the whole world joined the paety.

Monterey was getting respect from

all over the United States, and from
all over the world, you know.

So, in my opinion,
it was the first one.

I don"t think there"s ever
been anything like that before.

Then, of course,
Pennebaker's movie and all that.

We got to see The Who,
Jimi Hendrix...

Yikes!

And what transpired was not just
a showcase for San Francisco music,

but the first modern roCk festival,
Monterey Pop.

And DA Pennebaker's film ensured
the festival"s place in history.

There were different
Contingencies there.

It was interesting because the
English bands came.

We had never seen them before
and the Bay Area bands,

so it was kind of like a...

Well, the first roCk festival,
really, wasn"t it, you know?

That was the peak of it all and that
was the one thing that ran well,

it was the one time that everybody
was in love with everybody else.

# No Colours in my life

# You know they"re turning black

# I see people walking by

# Dressed in their colourful Clothes

# I see them strolling by

# My happiness, it flows

# No more... #.

We got a respeCtable round of
applause.

I was happy.

I was happy to have been
a paet of the event. It was just...

..marvellous!

Along with some of the world"s
biggest bands, many of the top music

exeCutives were there,

scouting for San FrancisCan acts
to sign.

# By my window

# Just looking out

# At the rain. #.

After Monterey, Janis Joplin"s life
would never be the same again.

# Mm...oh!

# Sitting down by my window

# Just looking out

# At the rain. #.

The organisers were trying to
showcase the San Francisco sound

and so Janis Joplin really became

a superstar and got the record
Contract with CBS Records as

a result of her performanCes,

which are some of the best
performances of her entire career,

at the Monterey Pop Festival.

SHE SINGS

Before that, nobody paid much
attention to her, you know?

It was like she was with this band
that wasn"t always in tune.

One day, everybody was
kicking her ass,

and the next day,
they were kissing it.

SHE SINGS

Monterey was music and acid,
and business and fun,

and all aspects of the San Francisco
hippie revolution were

represented there.

Even the original nature boyl
Gypsy Boots,

the pioneering proto-hippie from
the 1 950s, got the gig as the

festival"s official gardener.

While Owsley, the underground
Chemist,

arrived on site with a batch of acid
speCially made for the event.

We made a batCh for
Monterey Pop Festival in 1 967.

And I"d say we"d make 1 00,000 hits,
that was the most we had ever made.

Well, I took this new psychedelic
that Owsley had invented called.

STP, so everything was like
a Monet painting to me.

It was blurred, kind of heightened
pastels or something.

When we went on stage to play,
I was pretty high then.

When you see our excerpt,
of playing seCtion 43 in the film by.

Pennebaker,
you hear the bass going...

HE BELLOWS

HE CONTiNUES BELLOWiNG.

Which we"d never heard before.

That was the only time that kind of
a sound had ever Come out of

that bass during that composition.

# People try to put us down... #.

That was the first time
I had seen The Who.

I couldn"t understand why they broke
their instruments. That was...

Wacky.

The Who smashed up their
instruments,

kicked the drum kits over,
bombs went off, smoke everywhere.

People were scared shitless,
you know?

# Wild thing... #.

When Jimi did it,
he did vietually the same thing!

But it was so different.

It was like, you know, he...

Gasoline on the guitar, lit it.

And then down on his knees, it was
like it was a soul saCrifiCe.

In his long, groovy fingers

were dancing over the fire.

After Monterey, everybody now wanted
to go to San Francisco,

the coolest city on the planet.

But in this moment of triumphl
outside forces were already

mobilising to threaten the
hippie idyll.

Commerce, in the shape of the record
Companies, was about to enter

the Haight-Ashbury potpourri

to challenge the hippie ideal of
freedom.

The violenCe of Hendrix"s
performance captured in the.

Monterey Pop film was emblematic
of the turmoil

happening outside the conceet
gates that same month.

AmeriCa"s inner Cities were burning,
revolution was in the air,

and the anti-Vietnam war protests
reached critical mass.

I will say directly,
no, I will not go.

CROWD CHANTS

AmeriCa"s youth was deClaring war.

In the next programme, we will see
how the state fought baCk.

The Hippie Movement, like any other
extreme action on the part of

people, it will die a natural death.

And how the dark forces that lay beneath
the Summer of Love broke cover.

The atrocities that have yet to
surfaCe from women"s

treatment by the rural Hippie
Movement are considerable.

So, turn on, tune in and watch out.

# Wild thing

# You make my heaet sing

# You make everything groovy

# Hey, wild thing

# Yeah! Wild thing

# Yay! Yeah, wild thing. #