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So What Is Freedom Like In The Psychedelic Club Sixties Hippie And Beatnik Free Grass Or Scream Free
So What Is Freedom Like In The Psychedelic Sixties Club Hippie & Beatnik Free Grass Or Scream 1969 Psychedelic Musi Flower Power 1965 Thru 1969 Era. In the psychedelic 1960s, freedom was experienced asa multifaceted liberation both internal and external often intertwined with the use of psychedelic substances and a radical reimagining of societal norms. This era's music and culture celebrated a break from conventional structures, embracing a philosophy of peace, love, creativity, and communal living.The concept of freedom was not merely political but deeply personal and existential, manifesting in the idea of "deterritorialization," where individual identity dissolved into a collective experience.
This freedom was also expressed through artistic experimentation and technological innovation. Bands like the Pink Floyd pushed the boundaries of studio production, interlacing live concert recordings with studio tracks to create a sonic representation of infinite, improvisational music, reflecting the idea that their songs were "mirrors of infinity".Similarly, the psychedelic soundscape of the time characterized by swirling guitars, ethereal vocals, and surreal lyrics mirrored the altered states of consciousness induced by drugs like LSD.
Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist and the CIA’s top drug expert, played a key role in the program and was instrumental in bringing LSD to the United States, purchasing the world’s entire supply of the drug in 1953 for $240,000.
Tracks such as The United States Of America 1968 Cloud Song evoked a dreamlike, celestial quality, with guitar solos that "sailed for distant horizons," symbolizing a journey beyond the mundane.The imagery of floating, as in the phrase "floating free as a bird," became a recurring motif, representing a desire to escape the constraints of reality and experience a boundless, almost divine freedom.
They call us "The Elderly"
We were born in the 40-50-60’s.
We grew up in the 50-60-70's.
We studied in the 60-70-80's.
We were dating in the 70-80-90's.
We got married and discovered the world in the 70-80-90's.
We venture into the 80-90’s.
We stabilize in the 2000’s.
We got wiser in the 2010’s.
And we are going firmly through and beyond 2020.
Turns out we've lived through EIGHT different decades...
TWO different centuries...
TWO different millennia...
We have gone from the telephone with an operator for long–distance calls to video calls to anywhere in the world.
We have gone from slides to YouTube, from vinyl records to online music, from handwritten letters to email and Whats App.
From live matches on the radio, to black and white TV, colour TV and then to 3D HD TV.
We went to the Video store and now we watch Netflix.
We got to know the first computers, punch cards, floppy disks and now we have gigabytes and megabytes on our smartphones.
We wore shorts throughout our childhood and then long trousers, Oxfords, flares, shell suits & blue jeans.
We dodged infantile paralysis, meningitis, polio, tuberculosis, swine flu and now COVID-19.
We rode skates, tricycles, bicycles, mopeds, petrol or diesel cars and now we drive hybrids or electric.
Yes, we've been through a lot but what a great life we've had!
They could describe us as "exennials," people who were born in that world of the fifties, who had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood.
We've kind of "Seen-It-All"!
Our generation has literally lived through and witnessed more than any other in every dimension of life.
It is our generation that has literally adapted to "CHANGE."
A big round of applause to all the members of a very special generation, which will be UNIQUE!
–Author unknown
The Ode To The Counter Culture!
In the haze of the 1960s, a light shone bright,
A beacon of peace, love, and righteous fight.
We danced to a rhythm, unseen and bold,
Against the machine, our spirits unsold.
In the embrace of the Acid Test, we found,
Depths of our minds, where true selves abound.
Visions of unity, in colors so wild,
Like dreams from the heart of a liberated child.
The establishment's chains, they sought to bind,
Sending us to fight a war, unjustly aligned.
But we stood firm, our voices a roar,
Against the silence they tried to implore.
In the tapestry of white America, we wove,
Threads of civil rights, with hearts to prove.
Women, Gays, Animals, we sang their plight,
For equality and justice, in the dawning light.
The environment, sacred, we vowed to defend,
Sustainable dreams, where resources blend.
Together in communes, with love as our creed,
Planting the seeds of a peaceful deed.
LSD, our guide on the vision quest,
Opening doors to the soul's true nest.
In the euphoria of the cosmic trance,
We glimpsed a world where all could dance.
Oh, counter culture, with your virtuous ways,
You offered a haven in tumultuous days.
Your spirit lives on, in hearts that strive,
For a world where peace and love can thrive.
So here's to the Hippies, the dreamers of yore,
Who dared to imagine and seek something more.
In the annals of time, your legacy stands,
A testament to unity, across all lands.
We Love Old U.S.A. And British 1960's Psychedelic-Acid Rock-Heavy Metal Music And Old Hippie And Beatnik Movie - https://rumble.com/playlists/FNpcDiUtxZM?e9s=src_v1_cbl%2Csrc_v1_ucp_pl
We Welcome You To Your Own Mind To A Mesmerizing Psychedelic Epic Psychedelic Odyssey Innovative Spirit And Artistic Vision. Acid Rock Archives. We Are 8 Retired British-Chinese's Women From Hong Kong, China And Now We Are True U.S.A. Citizen Today In 2026. Yes We Love Are Rumble Channel In 2026 What If Everything You Were Taught Was A Lie? We Love Old U.S.A. And British 1960's Psychedelic-Acid Rock-Heavy Metal Music And Old Hippie And Beatnik Movie. With Help From A True Hippie Music Story. We Love The Outdoors And Nature And Wild Flowers And We Cool Off In The Summer Time And We Like Swimming Naked In A 1,200+ Gallons Old Fire Truck And Love A Good Bonfire At Night Too. P.S. We Are Straight Women Only... That Mean's (One Man To One Woman Period) We Sleep Together 2 Or 3 Person's To A Bed And We Have A Old 1960 108 In. Red Velvet Round Bed For Us To Sleep In With 6 feet Long By 4 Feet Wide Mirrors Above Are Head And One Swing Bed With Psychedelic Lights Around Too. Its So Cool To Be A Real Hippie's Today. So Yes We Do Not Have Any Photo's Of Us On Line For Are Safety In This Day And Ages 2026.
Cultural History Of U.S.A. Government MK-Ultra LSD Mind-Control Research Program: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.
LSD played an important part in the 1960s counterculture movement. As use spread from research projects at universities to the street, LSD was credited with expanding the minds of young people who were disillusioned with the status quo. A number of LSD pioneers helped spread the news and encourage acid experimentation.
Dr. Timothy Leary was a psychology professor at Harvard when he first tried psilocybin mushrooms in 1960. He was so changed by the experience that he and his Harvard colleague Richard Alpert founded a study to test the effects of psychedelic drugs. Leary believed that they could treat a host of mental illnesses and profoundly change those who took them. Complaints from parents and others, however, led Harvard to fire Leary in 1963.
In 1964, Leary co-authored a book about psychedelic drugs and, the following year, he founded the League for Spiritual Discovery. This was a religion that claimed LSD as a holy sacrament that must be kept legal for religious freedom. Leary toured the country with a presentation that attempted to demonstrate the experience of tripping. He spoke the phrase that came to exemplify the LSD movement, "turn on, tune in, drop out," during a 1967 speech in San Francisco before 30,000 hippies. Leary later stated in his biography that "'turn on' meant to go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment [...] 'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you [...] 'Drop out' meant self-reliance" He was disappointed that people thought he meant "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity" [source: Leary].
Ken Kesey was an author whose first experience with LSD came when he volunteered in 1959 to take part in a CIA study of the effects of psychedelic drugs. He and his friends, known as The Merry Pranksters, traveled across the country, while on acid, in a school bus called "Furthur" as a social experiment. Their adventures were documented by author Tom Wolfe in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."
While Leary originally advocated a more serious, controlled use of LSD, Kesey was an "acid populist" who believed that if enough people used it, society as a whole could be transformed. In 1965, he began holding psychedelic parties advertised with signs that read "Can you pass the acid test?" Kesey believed that the acid tests expanded consciousness and started a revolution.
Owsley Stanley was a self-taught chemist who helped to make LSD popular and accessible in the influential Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. While a student at the University of California at Berkley, Stanley tried LSD but was frustrated with the wide differences in quality and purity. He set up his own lab to make pure, high-quality LSD, which became known as "Owsley LSD" or simply "Owsley." It became the standard by which other LSD was measured after Sandoz stopped making the drug and it became illegal. He often distributed it freely, and it has been estimated that Stanley made half a kilo of LSD, enough for 10 million 50-microgram trips, in his lifetime. He also created an LSD synthesis that was 99 percent pure called White Lightning, as well as another psychedelic drug, STP.
Stanley also became friends with the band the Grateful Dead (who performed at Kesey's acid tests) and worked as their sound engineer. He not only heavily influenced the band's sound, but also designed their Lightning Bolt Skull logo and was the inspiration for the Dancing Bears logo because of his nickname, "The Bear."
MK-ULTRA was a covert and illegal mind-control research program conducted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1953 to 19671, primarily during the Cold War era.
The program aimed to develop methods for controlling human behavior, including the creation of a "truth serum" and techniques for brainwashing and psychological torture.
A central component of the program was the use of psychoactive drugs, particularly lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), which the CIA sought to exploit for interrogation and mind control purposes.
Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist and the CIA’s top drug expert, played a key role in the program and was instrumental in bringing LSD to the United States, purchasing the world’s entire supply of the drug in 1953 for $240,000.
He then distributed LSD to hospitals, clinics, prisons, and other institutions under the guise of legitimate research, often without the subjects’ knowledge or consent.
The program involved a wide range of unethical and inhumane methods, including the administration of high doses of LSD, electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, and other forms of psychological and physical abuse.
Ten Of Thousands of unwitting individuals were subjected to these experiments, including prisoners, mental patients, drug addicts, and even U.S. and Canadian citizens.
Notably, Whitey Bulger, who later became a notorious organized crime boss, participated in an experiment at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary where he was given LSD almost daily for 15 months, resulting in severe hallucinations, paranoia, and violent feelings.
In another experiment, seven African American inmates in Lexington, Kentucky, were given triple doses of LSD every day for 77 days to study the effects of overdose.
Despite its extensive scope encompassing over 150 subprojects and involving at least 80 institutions, 44 universities, and 185 researchers the program ultimately failed to achieve its goal of reliable mind control.
By the early 1960s, CIA leadership, including Allen Dulles and Sidney Gottlieb, concluded that mind control was unattainable.
The program was officially wound down in 1969 and succeeded by MK-SEARCH in 1971, a less aggressive follow-up initiative.
To prevent public outrage and potential prosecution, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of most MK-ULTRA records in 1973, severely hampering later investigations.
The existence of MK-ULTRA was revealed in the 1970s through congressional investigations, notably the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission, which uncovered the program’s extensive abuses.
A Freedom of Information Act request in 1977 led to the declassification of approximately 20,000 documents related to the program.
The program has been widely condemned as a gross violation of human rights and an example of unchecked government power.
Ironically, the CIA’s efforts to control minds with LSD inadvertently contributed to the rise of the 1960s counterculture, as the drug spread through academic and artistic circles, influencing figures like Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, and members of the Grateful Dead.
Modern scientific research has since explored LSD’s potential therapeutic effects, such as promoting social behavior through mTORC1 activation in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, though these findings are unrelated to the CIA’s original objectives.
Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist and the CIA’s top drug expert, played a central role in the agency’s MK-ULTRA program, which aimed to develop techniques for mind control.
He was instrumental in bringing LSD to the United States, arranging for the CIA to purchase the entire world supply of the drug in 1953 for $240,000.
This acquisition allowed the CIA to conduct extensive experiments with LSD on unwitting subjects, including prisoners, mental patients, and individuals in hospitals and clinics, often without their knowledge or consent.
Gottlieb’s efforts were driven by the belief that LSD could be a key to mind control, although the program ultimately failed to achieve its goal.
The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'.
During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.
MK-ULTRA, which operated from the 1950s until the early '60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, calls the operation the "most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control."
Some of Gottlieb's experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, Kinzer says, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD, according to Kinzer's research.
"Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process," Kinzer says. "First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. We didn't get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one."
Kinzer notes that the top-secret nature of Gottlieb's work makes it impossible to measure the human cost of his experiments. "We don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed," he says.
Ultimately, Gottlieb concluded that mind control was not possible. After MK-ULTRA shut down, he went on to lead a CIA program that created poisons and high-tech gadgets for spies to use.
Kinzer writes about Gottlieb and MK-ULTRA in his new book, Poisoner in Chief.
On how the CIA brought LSD to America
As part of the search for drugs that would allow people to control the human mind, CIA scientists became aware of the existence of LSD, and this became an obsession for the early directors of MK-ULTRA. Actually, the MK-ULTRA director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture.
In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. He brought this to the United States, and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them, through bogus foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control.
Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. They told their friends about it. Who were those people? Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA by MK-ULTRA, by Sidney Gottlieb. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. Allen Ginsberg, the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb. Although, of course, he never knew that name.
So the CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly, and actually it's a tremendous irony that the drug that the CIA hoped would be its key to controlling humanity actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was dedicated to destroying everything that the CIA held dear and defended.
On how MK-ULTRA experimented on prisoners, including crime boss Whitey Bulger
Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. He later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long-term reactions to LSD was. Essentially, could we make a person lose his mind by feeding him LSD every day over such a long period?
Bulger wrote afterward about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. He thought he was going insane. He wrote, "I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me." And towards the end of his life, Bulger came to realize the truth of what had happened to him, and he actually told his friends that he was going to find that doctor in Atlanta who was the head of that experiment program in the penitentiary and go kill him.
On the CIA hiring Nazi doctors and Japanese torturers to learn methods. The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps.
The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.
For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them.
Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. Nazi doctors came to America to Fort Detrick in Maryland, which was the center of this project, to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took for people to die from sarin.
On the more extreme experiments Gottlieb conducted overseas
Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and the Philippines, which were largely under American control in the period of the early '50s, and therefore Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements in these places. ...
CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or were otherwise what they called "expendable." They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of, not just drug potions, but other techniques, like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation — all the meantime bombarding them with questions, trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. And that made Gottlieb, although in some ways a very compassionate person, certainly the most prolific torturer of his generation.
On how these experiments were unsupervised. This guy [Sidney Gottlieb] had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal yet nobody looked over his shoulder.
[Gottlieb] operated almost completely without supervision. He had sort of a checkoff from his titular boss and from his real boss, Richard Helms, and from the CIA director, Allen Dulles. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. This guy had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal — yet nobody looked over his shoulder. He never had to file serious reports to anybody. I think the mentality must have been [that] this project is so important — mind control, if it can be mastered, is the key to global world power.
On how Gottlieb destroyed evidence about his experiments when he left the CIA
The end of Gottlieb's career came in [1973], when his patron, Richard Helms, who was then director of the CIA, was removed by [President Richard] Nixon. Once Helms was gone, it was just a matter of time until Gottlieb would be gone, and most important was that Helms was really the only person at the CIA who had an idea of what Gottlieb had been doing. So as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MK-ULTRA. Gottlieb actually drove out to the CIA records center and ordered the archives to destroy boxes full of MK-ULTRA records. ... However, it turns out that there were some [records] found in other places; there was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remain. So there is enough out there to reconstruct some of what he did, but his effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early '70s was quite successful.
The Summer of Love 1967 was a social phenomenon that occurred in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, where as many as 100,000 young people, mostly wearing hippie fashions, converged. The term "Summer of Love" originated with the formation of the Council for the Summer of Love, composed of the Family Dog hippie commune, The Straight Theatre, The Diggers, The San Francisco Oracle, and approximately 25 other people, who sought to alleviate some of the problems anticipated from the influx of young people expected during the summer. The Summer of Love encompassed the hippie music, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war, and free-love scene throughout the West Coast of the United States, and as far away as New York City. New forms of rock 'n' roll pulsed through the airwaves, psychedelic drugs were plentiful, and free love was embraced. The Summer of Love was a blast of glamour, ecstasy, and Utopianism that divided American culture into a Before and After unparalleled since World War II. The Summer of Love was billed as the Summer of Love, and its creators did not employ a single publicist or craft More broadly, the Summer of Love encompassed the hippie music, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war, and free-love scene throughout the West Coast of the United States, and as far away as New York City.
Hippies, sometimes called flower children, were an eclectic group. Many were suspicious of the government, rejected consumerist values, and generally opposed the Vietnam War. A few were interested in politics; others were concerned more with art (music, painting, poetry in particular) or spiritual and meditative practices. While the Summer of Love is often regarded as a significant cultural event, its actual significance to ordinary young people of the time, particularly in Britain, has been disputed.
The Summer of Love Wasn’t All Peace and Hippies Articles in the underground press capture what’s missing from our romanticized memory of that fateful season. The year 1967 was designated the “Summer of Love” when somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 youth flooded 25 blocks in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Beforehand, the neighborhood was home to a small community of “hip” residents interested in art, music, theatre, and literature. Afterward, it was known worldwide as the center of countercultural activities. For many, the Summer of Love calls to mind an ambitious attempt at cultural revolution when America’s youth championed values like peace, love, and freedom of expression.
The Role of Mass Media
For many in the counterculture, the Summer of Love was an accident precipitated by the widespread consumption of music, television, and magazines. Songs, programs, and articles began documenting the activities of the countercultural community in the Haight-Ashbury district with the advent of the Human Be-In. According to Chet Helms, after the Human Be-In, a relatively small group of counterculturally minded people in the Haight issued an invitation for young people to come to San Francisco. They formed a council that they called the “Council of the Summer of Love” and attempted to organize summer activities in Golden Gate Park.
Articles on the “new” hippie lifestyle appeared in magazines like the New Yorker, and the hit song “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” cemented the idea that something was going to happen in San Francisco in the summer of 1967. By most accounts, the arrival of so many young people was more an accident of popular culture than the result of any planning performed by the council.
As the Summer of Love progressed, it became increasingly clear to many committed participants in the community that the Summer of Love, and the idea of a “hippie,” was being defined by the media more than anything else. Many in the counterculture became deeply suspicious and then hostile toward what they considered “the media,” by which they meant photographers, magazine and daily newspaper reporters, and documentarians. Columnist Joan Didion recalls being labeled a “media poisoner” by countercultural leaders who were part of a group known as the Diggers.
Movie PsychOut 1968 Psychedelic Music in the Flower Power 1965 Thru 1969 Era
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The Electric Prunes - Mass in F Minor - Om is the Primordial Sound of the Universe
Om is the seed of transcendental sound, and it is through transcendental sound one can transform the mind and the senses. By chanting Om, the mind becomes aligned with the breath, which enables a person to get into an elevated state of consciousness called samadhi. So Rock Mass in F Minor is this Transcendental Sound of your Real Mind.
Samadhi is the highest state of mental concentration that people can achieve while still bound to the body and which unites them with the highest reality.
LP-Side A-1. Kyrie Eleison (David Axelrod) - 2. Gloria (David Axelrod) - 3. Credo (David Axelrod)
LP-Side B-1. Sanctus (David Axelrod) - 2. Benedictus (David Axelrod) - 3. Agnus Dei (David Axelrod)
Flower Power Full LP In the Garden of Eden or In the Garden of Life by Iron Butterfly
This is a story about “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”, a truly classic song, and the folklore around the mysterious meaning of the song. Simply put the words “In A Gadda Da Vida” were intended to be “In the Garden of Eden” however the true translation of “Vida” is “Life” putting the mistaken translation to “In the Garden of Life”. That is an important distinction that will accompany this story about the song’s true meaning. The In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida album has been certified multi-platinum, reportedly selling more than 30 million copies total. (Iron Butterfly was, in fact, the first-ever group to receive an RIAA platinum album award.) With its endless, droning minor-key riff and mumbled vocals, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" is arguably the most notorious song of the acid rock era. According to legend, the group was so stoned when they recorded the track that they could neither pronounce the title "In the Garden of Eden" or end the track, so it rambles on for a full 17 minutes, which to some listeners sounds like eternity. But that's the essence of its appeal -- it's the epitome of heavy psychedelic excess, encapsulating the most indulgent tendencies of the era. Iron Butterfly never matched the warped excesses of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," either on their debut album of the same name or the rest of their catalog, yet they occasionally made some enjoyable fuzz guitar-driven psychedelia that works as a period piece. The five tracks that share space with their magnum opus on In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida qualify as good artifacts, and the entire record still stands as the group's definitive album, especially since this is the only place the full-length title track is available.
Suddenly That Summer
It was billed as “the Summer of Love,” a blast of glamour, ecstasy, and Utopianism that drew some 75,000 young people to the San Francisco streets in 1967. Who were the true movers behind the Haight-Ashbury happening that turned America on to a whole new age?
In a 25-square-block area of San Francisco, in the summer of 1967, an ecstatic, Dionysian mini-world sprang up like a mushroom, dividing American culture into a Before and After unparalleled since World War II. If you were between 15 and 30 that year, it was almost impossible to resist the lure of that transcendent, peer-driven season of glamour, ecstasy, and Utopianism. It was billed as the Summer of Love, and its creators did not employ a single publicist or craft a media plan. Yet the phenomenon washed over America like a tidal wave, erasing the last dregs of the martini-sipping Mad Men era and ushering in a series of liberations and awakenings that irreversibly changed our way of life.
The Summer of Love also thrust a new kind of music—acid rock—across the airwaves, nearly put barbers out of business, traded clothes for costumes, turned psychedelic drugs into sacred door keys, and revived the outdoor gatherings of the Messianic Age, making everyone an acolyte and a priest. It turned sex with strangers into a mode of generosity, made “uptight” an epithet on a par with “racist,” refashioned the notion of earnest Peace Corps idealism into a bacchanalian rhapsody, and set that favorite American adjective, “free,” on a fresh altar.
“It was this magical moment … this liberation movement, a time of sharing that was very special,” with “a lot of trust going around,” says Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, who had a baby with Ken Kesey, the man who helped kick off that season, and who then married Jerry Garcia, the man who epitomized its fruition. “The Summer of Love became the template: the Arab Spring is related to the Summer of Love; Occupy Wall Street is related to the Summer of Love,” says Joe McDonald, the creator and lead singer of Country Joe and the Fish and a boyfriend of one of that summer’s two queens, Janis Joplin. “And it became the new status quo,” he continues. “The Aquarian Age! They all want sex. They all want to have fun. Everyone wants hope. We opened the door, and everybody went through it, and everything changed after that. Sir Edward Cook, the biographer of Florence Nightingale, said that when the success of an idea of past generations is ingrained in the public and taken for granted the source is forgotten.” Well, here is that source, according to the people who lived it.
Certain places, for unknowable reasons, become socio-cultural petri dishes, and between 1960 and 1964 the area of Northern California extending from San Francisco to Palo Alto was one of them.
San Francisco’s official bohemia was North Beach, where the Beats hung out at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore, and where espresso was sipped, jazz was worshipped, and hipsters did not dance. North Beach was not unique, however; it had strong counterparts, for example, in New York’s Greenwich Village, L.A.’s Venice Beach and Sunset Strip, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What was unique was happening across town, where a group of young artists, musicians, and San Francisco State College students became besotted with the city’s past. “There was a huge romanticism around the idea of the Barbary Coast, about San Francisco as a lawless, vigilante, late-19th-century town,” says Rock Scully, one of those who rented cheap Victorian houses in a run-down neighborhood called Haight-Ashbury. They dressed, he says, “in old, stiff-collared shirts with pins, and riding coats and long jackets.”
“Old-timey” became the shibboleth. Guys wore their hair long under Western-style hats, and young people decorated their apartments in old-fashioned castoffs. Scully recalls, “Michael Ferguson [an S.F. State art student] was wearing and living Victoriana in 1963”—a year before the Beatles came to America, and before costuming-as-rebellion existed in England. They were not aping the British. “We were Americans!,” insists musician Michael Wilhelm. Architecture student George Hunter was yet another in the crowd, and then there were the artists Wes Wilson and Alton Kelley, the latter an émigré from New England who frequently wore a top hat. “Kelley wanted to be freeze-dried and set on his Victorian couch behind glass,” says his friend Luria Castell (now Luria Dickson), a politically active S.F. State student and the daughter of a waitress. Castell and her friends wore long velvet gowns and lace-up boots—a far cry from the Beatnik outfits of the early 60s.
Chet Helms, a University of Texas at Austin dropout who had hitchhiked to San Francisco, also joined the group and dressed old-timey. He had come to San Francisco with a friend, a nice, middle-class girl who had been a member of her high school’s Slide Rule Club and who had also left the university, hoping to become a singer. Her name was Janis Joplin.
Helms, Castell, Scully, Kelley, and a few others lived semi-communally. “We were purists,” says Castell, “snooty” about their left-wing politics and esoteric aesthetic. All their houses had dogs, so they called themselves the Family Dog. As for Wilhelm, Hunter, Ferguson, and their friends Dan Hicks and Richie Olsen, they took up instruments that most of them could barely play and formed the Charlatans, which became the first San Francisco band of the era. Wes Wilson, distinct for keeping his hair short, became the eventual scene’s first poster artist, creating a style that would be epoch-defining.
Soon they came to share something else: LSD. It had been more than a decade since Sandoz Laboratories made the first batches of lysergic acid diethylamide, the high-octane synthetic version of two natural consciousness-altering compounds, psilocybin and mescaline, when, in 1961, the Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary had his life-changing experience with psilocybin mushrooms, in Mexico. Leary, a charismatic womanizer, and Richard Alpert, a colleague at Harvard and a closeted bisexual, would invite friends and a few grad students to drop acid with them off campus, and they endeavored to apply scholarly methodology to the sense-enhancing, cosmic-love-stimulating, and sometimes psychosis-abetting properties of LSD.
While Leary and Alpert were raising consciousness in their way on the East Coast, Ken Kesey, a young Oregonian, was doing it on the peninsula south of San Francisco far more outrageously—by buying a school bus, painting it in jubilant graffiti, and driving around in it, stoned, with a group he called the Merry Pranksters. In 1959, Kesey had been a volunteer in a C.I.A.-sponsored LSD experiment at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park. His 1962 novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was the result of his work there. In 1963 he assembled the Pranksters, including Stewart Brand, later famous as the author of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac’s best friend and the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road.
At the same time, the Peninsula was incubating a music scene. In 1962 a young guitarist named Jorma Kaukonen, the son of a State Department official from Washington, D.C., went to a hootenanny (a sing-along folk event) and met another young guitarist, a music teacher who had been named after the composer Jerome Kern. Open-faced with wild hair, Jerry Garcia led a jug band, and Kaukonen recalls him as “absolutely the big dog on the scene: he had a huge following, was very outgoing and articulate. People gravitated to him.”
The same weekend Kaukonen met Garcia, he says, he met Janis Joplin, “who was in her folky stage.” Later, after amphetamine addiction made her return to Texas to straighten out, “she would be R&B Janis, peerless as Bessie Smith and Memphis Minnie,” Kaukonen recalls. But that night she was singing her Texas heart out on folk classics.
Two years later, a flirtatious Neal Cassady picked up Carolyn Adams near her cabin in the hills above Palo Alto, and they drove to Kesey’s house. Adams, who came from a good Poughkeepsie family and had been kicked out of a private high school, would soon be known as Mountain Girl because she lived in the woods and rode a motorcycle. “I was frolicking about,” she says. That night, she recalls, “I saw the bus and fell in love.” She found Kesey to be “this Promethean figure, [who] saw psychedelics as a gift to mankind.”
Carolyn Adams became a Prankster, and she and Kesey, who was married, became lovers. Their group soon initiated the Acid Tests, “happenings around the Bay Area,” she says, where “we were creating a safe place for people to get high.” They’d put a “low dose” of acid “in a big picnic cooler or garbage can, something that would hold 10 or 12 gallons,” often diluted in “Kool-Aid or a big bucket of water.... It was a voyage,” she says, adding, “At a ‘graduation,’ [we] gave out diplomas to people who passed the test. Ken was wearing the silver lamé space suit I made for him.”
These were parties without alcohol. The drug engendered a hyper-reflective state of mind and languid, sensual body movement, both very new at the time. Even the usually gimlet-eyed Tom Wolfe, whose The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was a dispatch from that front, recently admitted having “felt like I had been in on something very spiritual” during his “all-night sessions with Kesey and the Pranksters.”
Carolyn Adams and Jerry Garcia became a couple in the late 60s, had two daughters, and married in 1981. (They divorced in 1993.) Today she says of Garcia when they met, “He was brilliant. He read omnivorously. He was obsessed with music I think he had synesthesia, which is the professional word for when you [hear a sound and it causes you to] see color and sculpture.”
Soon Jerry Garcia ditched his jug band and formed the Warlocks, made up of young men who had mostly never left Northern California—Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and Bill Kreutzmann. The Warlocks became the Acid Tests’ resident band, and Rock Scully became the Warlocks’ manager. Scully and Garcia were brought together by Owsley Stanley, a young Berkeley chemist who was said to make the purest acid on earth. The scion of a prominent Kentucky political family, Owsley, as he was always called—as was his product—was a true believer. He once said, about the first time he took acid, “I walked outside and the cars were kissing the parking meters.”
Responding to a high whistle audible only to hidden soulmates, seekers in their 20s started moving to San Francisco. A random slew came from Brooklyn, including a schoolteacher turned poet named Allen Cohen, who eventually started The San Francisco Oracle, the newspaper that would define the new Zeitgeist, and two artists, Dave Getz and Victor Moscoso, both lured by the suddenly popular San Francisco Art Institute, which Jerry Garcia had briefly attended. Getz would become a drummer for Big Brother and the Holding Company (all the new acid bands had wildly esoteric names), and Moscoso would turn out to be one of the scene’s poster artists. Heading for the Bay Area “was like a calling; it was very strong,” says Stanley Mouse, a shy, rebellious painter of hot rods from Detroit. As he was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, a friend with him asked, “How long you staying?” Mouse answered, “Forever.”
The Family Dog and the Charlatans spent the summer of 1965 in Virginia City, Nevada, an old mining town. The Charlatans played in the Red Dog Saloon, which was run by hipsters like them, who romanticized the days of the Gold Rush. Their acid-dosed friends moved and swayed to their music in improvised, communal, free-form dancing. Dancing to pop music until this time mostly meant doing prescribed steps, in male-female pairs, to three-minute Top 40 hits, which, whether they were very bad (“Wooly Bully”), very good (“[I Can’t Get No] Satisfaction”), or sublime (“My Girl”), still had a danceable arc. But the combination of this fantasy venue and the riffy, amateur music stoked abandon and in-group narcissism. And so psychedelic dancing, which would become the new dancing, was launched in an old-timey saloon, where one of the country’s first light shows threw liquid globs of color on the walls. Once they were back in San Francisco, the Family Dog couldn’t wait to replicate the experience. As Luria Castell Dickson says, “With LSD, we experienced what it took Tibetan monks 20 years to obtain, yet we got there in 20 minutes.”
On October 16, 1965, the Family Dog rented the Longshoremen’s Hall, near Fisherman’s Wharf, for the first of their bacchanals. “About 400 or 500 people showed up—it was such a revelation,” Alton Kelley recalled a few years before his death, in 2008. “Everybody was walking around with their mouths open, going, ‘Where did all these freaks come from? I thought my friends were the only guys around!’ ” People were dressed in “kind of crazy Edwardian clothes,” says Stanley Mouse. But they were “also, now, getting more ecstatically dressed,” says composer Ramon Sender, who’d witnessed the scene grow more rapturous since the Acid Test he had participated in. The Family Dog then had more parties, each with a sly wink of a name. Victor Moscoso remembers seeing a poster, made by Kelley and Mouse, for “A Tribute to Ming the Merciless.” Moscoso says, “I thought, like Bob Dylan, Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” Moscoso did know, though. They all knew.
In January 1966, the Pranksters held the Trips Festival, also at the Longshoremen’s Hall. Stewart Brand set up a tepee. Ramon Sender provided synthesizer music. LSD was in the ice cream that time, and it was not one but “three nights of craziness,” Carolyn Garcia remembers. “That’s the first time any of us met Bill Graham,” she says. Graham was the manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a radical theater organization. Rescued, as a child, from the Nazis, Graham had later earned a Bronze Star in the Korean War. Watching this new scene, says Carolyn Garcia, “Graham decided that he could take everything he saw here and make a fortune.”
From then on, two shuttered San Francisco halls—the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium—sprang to life as venues for the ongoing music and dance parties. Chet Helms ran the Avalon; Bill Graham ran the Fillmore. A growing group of bands—Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Sopwith Camel—played both halls. The clothes on the dancers got so wild it was like “seven different centuries thrown together in one room,” an insider noted. “They were only ‘costumes’ to the straight people,” says Rock Scully. Richard Alpert, who had traveled to India that year and had been renamed Ram Dass, visited and announced that the acid sybaritism in San Francisco trumped anything on the East Coast.
The parties were advertised by posters on every lamppost and coffeehouse wall in the Bay Area. The artists included Mouse, Kelley, and Moscoso—who all say they felt like Toulouse-Lautrec in 1890s Montmartre—but Wes Wilson was the pioneer. He’d seen a gallery brochure for the Austrian Art Deco painter Alfred Roller and was taken by Roller’s Viennese Secessionist typeface—thick, with heavy horizontals, lighter verticals, and rounded serif edges. Wilson filled every inch of his posters with the boxy typeface and sensuous illustrations. Moscoso says, “Wes freed us! It clicked: Reverse everything I have ever learned! A poster should transmit its message quickly and simply? No! Our posters were taking as long as they could to be read, and were hanging up the viewer!” All four (and the late Rick Griffin) churned out flyers for the Fillmore and Avalon that people had to work to comprehend. “You’d see crowds standing there, grooving on them,” Mouse recalls.
The star band called itself Jefferson Airplane. Jorma Kaukonen and his D.C. friend Jack Casady joined folksinger Marty Balin, local boy Paul Kantner, and Spencer Dryden, a nephew of Charlie Chaplin’s, and labeled their sound “fo-jazz,” for folk-jazz. Signe Anderson, the wife of one of the Pranksters, was the Airplane’s female vocalist.
Anderson was a folksinger, as most of the girls on the scene were. But the lead singer of another group, the Great Society, was notably different. Grace Slick “was not a Beatnik girl,” says Kaukonen. “She washed her hair every day.” The self-assured beauty with the thick black hair, piercing blue eyes, and fiercely enunciated alto had an air of high society about her. Slick had attended Finch, the now defunct college for debutantes in New York City, and had, at 20, married the son of friends of her parents’ in a lavish wedding in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. But she and her crowd were soon into smoking grass. As she says, “Forget that Leave It to Beaver shit—I wanted Paris in the 20s.” She was modeling $20,000 couture gowns at I. Magnin when she walked into the Matrix club—of which Marty Balin was part owner—one night and heard Jefferson Airplane. “I said to myself, This looks better than what I’m doing. Modeling was a pain in the ass.” But the blasé attitude masked real talent. “Grace had one of the great voices of all time,” says Kaukonen. Casady adds, “Very few women back then walked to the edge of the stage like a guy and sang right into the eyes of the audience.”
One night, listening to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain when she was stoned, Slick thought of the sly drug references in Alice in Wonderland and composed, of all things, a bolero. She took the song to Jefferson Airplane when she replaced Signe Anderson. Called “White Rabbit,” it began, “One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small,” and it would become the anthem of the coming summer.
Needy Janis Joplin was the opposite of cool Grace Slick. Chet Helms lured Joplin back to the Bay Area in 1966 to audition for Big Brother and the Holding Company. “Janis was not attractive—she had bad skin and was wearing funky sandals and cutoffs,” Dave Getz recalls. But her singing, he continues, “knocked us out, instantaneously.” Getz perceived what audiences would love about Joplin: “Janis was one of the most vulnerable people I have ever met. She’d been voted Ugliest Man on Campus—not even Ugliest Woman!—by a bunch of fraternity boys, and that had really hurt.” She was a drinker, not a psychedelics user, though “there was really no place she wouldn’t go; she was gonna knock on every door.” Her bisexuality and her roiling emotions could be excruciating for her. One night she bolted out of a club because, as she wailed to Getz when he ran after her, “that black chick in there—she turns me on too much.” She soon became involved with Joe McDonald, from whose perspective (his parents were Communists) she was a “politically naïve, intelligent, hardworking” girl. She was always primed for rejection. “One day she went running down Haight Street, crying, ‘Joe stood me up!’ ” when he was only late, according to her eventual lover Peggy Caserta.
Joplin’s creative epiphany occurred after a friend of Getz’s gave her acid for the first time—slipping it into her cold duck—and they went to the Fillmore to hear Otis Redding. “Janis told me she invented the ‘buh-buh-buh-ba-by … ’ after seeing him,” says Joe McDonald. “She wanted to be Otis Redding.” Grace Slick salutes her 1967 co-queen (who died of a drug overdose in 1970), her soul sister in prodigious “swearing and drinking,” by saying, “She had the balls to do her thing by herself. A white girl from Texas, singing the blues? What gumption, what spirit! I don’t think I had that fearlessness.” Slick sadly regrets, “I was so Episcopalian that when I saw a certain sadness in Janis’s eyes I felt it was none of my business.” If she could turn back the clock, she says, she would have tried to help her.
Victor Moscoso says that 1966 was “when it worked. You’d walk down Haight and nod to another longhair and it meant something.” Rock Scully adds, “We painted our houses bright colors. We swept the streets.” The Grateful Dead all crammed into a house at 710 Ashbury; so did Carolyn Garcia, with Sunshine, her baby daughter with Kesey. Barely 20, Carolyn cooked every meal for that “boisterous, wonderful” band, and she saw how “competitive to a fault” Jerry was. “He would rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, and with these intricate fingerings—always wanting to excel, to be the best” at the acid-fueled improvisations he now played, which he described as “something like ordered chaos.” (Garcia died of heart failure in 1995.)
Kelley and Mouse made their posters at 715 Ashbury, across the street; Janis Joplin was down the block, often calling out to the others from her window. The poet Allen Cohen and his live-in girlfriend, Laurie, hosted “soirées for everyone who was anything on the scene,” says Laurie Sarlat Coe today. “Drugs were a sacrament. Everything was spiritual. Everyone read The Tibetan Book of the Dead.” The brothers Ron and Jay Thelin opened what was likely the country’s first head shop, the Psychedelic Shop, devoted so much more to peace than profit that they wound up giving everything away.
It was an extraordinary moment in history. The Vietnam War was raging, anti-war protests were surging, civil rights had morphed into Black Power, the Beatles and Bob Dylan were voicing a cultural revolution on FM airwaves. Second-tier Haights were soon popping up in every American city. In New York’s East Village, James Rado and Gerome Ragni were writing the musical that would limn the era: Hair. The somewhat startled media were using the word “youth” for the postwar baby-boomers, whose demographic bulge they’d just discovered, and whose females had reached maturity just as the Pill had become available. Newsweeklies added “youth beats.” Youth was leading the way.
This hubristic brio was rich soil for the Diggers. Taking their name in part from a group of 17th-century English anarchists, they aimed to “invent a new culture from scratch,” says Peter Coyote, who was born Cohon, the son of a New York investment banker. “I was interested in two things: overthrowing the government and fucking. They went together seamlessly.” He and the actor-director Peter Berg helped lead the San Francisco Mime Troupe: “doing street theater, touring the country, getting arrested, and pulling in girls like mad.”
In late September 1966, a Haight coalition that included the Oracle staff wrote letters to the city fathers about an October “love-pageant rally” for which they were seeking a permit. Then, after that gathering (which protested LSD’s becoming illegal), on January 12, 1967, a similar collection of activists issued a press release for a “Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In” to be held two days later. “[A] new nation has grown inside the robot flesh of the old,” it began. It ended, “Hang your fear at the door and join the future. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see.”
The Human Be-In drew about 20,000 people to Golden Gate Park. Costumes, music, incense, and marijuana abounded. (“There was so much dope rising in the air,” Rock Scully recalls, “Jerry and I thought we’d walked into a geodesic dome.”) Allen Ginsberg was on hand, leading a massive om chant. Timothy Leary, then 46, premiered his mantra, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” A consequential witness was the *Chronicle’*s revered jazz critic, Ralph J. Gleason. “No drunks,” a stunned Gleason wrote in his column. The event was “an affirmation, not a protest … a promise of good, not evil This is truly something new.” He described it as “an asking for a new dimension to peace … for the reality of love and a great Nest for all humans.”
As news of the Be-In trickled out, media coverage increased. In early spring, a group of Haight insiders held a homespun version of a press conference, welcoming the youth of America to San Francisco to experience the magic for themselves, as soon as school let out. The Diggers braced to house and feed the hordes. And hordes there would be, given the seductive name coined for the beckoning season. The proposed gathering would be called “the Summer of Love.”
Monterey Pop Festival 1967 San Francisco's Real Summer of Love-Not Antifa/BLM
On June 17-19 in 1967, the city was the venue of the three day Monterey Pop Festival. All the proceeds went to charity when all the artists (over 30 appeared), agreed to perform free, and the “Summer of Love” was born. Monterey became the template for future music festivals, notably the Woodstock Festival two years later.
“Be happy, be free, wear flowers, bring bells,” read the advertisements which summoned the young people of California to a three-day party. The flower children, the wacky clothes, the ready availability of sex and drugs – it is hard to think it all took place 40 years ago.
The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by Jimi Hendrix (who at this time had become a star in the UK but not yet in his native U.S.), and The Who, as well as the first major public performances of Janis Joplin (Columbia Records signed Big Brother and The Holding Company on the basis of their performance at Monterey). It was also the first major performance by Otis Redding in front of a predominantly white audience, who performed a sensational set, recorded for posterity in the film of the event, Monterey Pop.
The festival was planned in seven weeks by promoter Lou Adler, John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas, producer Alan Pariser, and publicist Derek Taylor. The festival board included Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson.
Monterey was the concert that propelled The Who into the American mainstream. At the end of their frenetic performance of “My Generation”, the audience was stunned as guitarist Pete Townshend began smashing his guitar, amid smoke bombs and explosions. Frightened roadies rushed onstage to scurry expensive microphones to safety.
Rolling Stone Brian Jones who was seen milling around with his German girlfriend, Nico, introduced Jimi Hendrix to the crowd. Few people even knew who he was when he arrived on stage in a ruffled orange shirt and crotch-strangling red trousers. The guitarist played a blinding set which ended with an unpredictable version of “Wild Thing“, which he capped by kneeling over his guitar, pouring lighter fluid over it, setting it aflame, and then smashing it.
Other major acts who appeared included: The Byrds, Grateful Dead, Simon and Garfunkel, The Steve Miller Band, Canned Heat, The Mamas And The Papas, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Booker T. & the M.G.s, Buffalo Springfield and The Electric Flag. Tickets cost $3.50–6.50 (£2–3.80) for the three days.
John Phillips, of The Mamas and The Papas, as one of the organizers, got it together enough to write ‘If You’re Going To San Francisco’ (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair) specifically to promote the festival, the song becoming a hit for Scott McKenzie. The song ‘Monterey’, by Eric Burdon and the Animals, (who played on the first day of the festival) was written about their experience, and mentions several other bands/individuals who were there. It was released in November, 1967 (five months later.)
The Monterey Pop Festival embodied the themes of San Francisco as a focal point for the counterculture and is generally regarded as one of the beginnings of the “Summer of Love” featuring bands that would shape the history of rock and affect popular culture from that day forward.
An estimated 200,000 attended over the three days. Within 24 hours of the festival emptying, the local mayor drafted a resolution outlawing any gathering of more than 2,000 people on the field where the Summer of Love had flowered. I wonder if those who live there now, (there is a golf course on the spot and the hillside is covered with million-dollar condominiums), know the story of what happened at the birth of The Summer of Love.
Director D. A. Pennebaker filmed the event, creating the movie Monterey Pop. The Grateful Dead refused to be filmed. (Their hardcore-hippie integrity would eventually help make them America’s most venerated and enduring rock group.) Big Brother refused, too, but Joplin’s delivery of “Ball and Chain” was such a showstopper that when she heard that it hadn’t been captured on film she was devastated. Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager, talked Janis into persuading her group to be filmed. Adler had them perform a second time. The camera was only on Joplin, and a star was born. Thus the precious egalitarianism of the Haight bubble was pierced by the real world. Even Jerry Garcia had pedestrian ego issues. He and his band were, according to his wife, Carolyn, chagrined that, “after Otis Redding put on the show of a lifetime, they did not play a great show. Jerry was scowling horribly.... They felt like nobody even noticed them.”
That October, the Diggers and the Thelin brothers led a “Death of the Hippie” march, complete with coffin, down Haight Street. Then everyone moved away, the musicians and artists to Marin County, the Diggers to a series of communes stretching up to the Oregon border. The lessons of that summer—from the cautionary (you can’t build a social movement on drugs) to the positive (love and liberation should be core principles of life)—are still with us. Joe McDonald sums it up: “We discovered there was a 10 on the knob. Everybody else was saying, ‘Don’t turn it up to 10! It will blow up!’ ”
Well, the people who created the Summer of Love dared to turn the knob up to 10, and, miraculously—in that long-ago ecstatic and prosperous time—it did not blow up.
Koyaanisqatsi Is A Hopi Prophecy Total Disintegration Pink Floyd Atom Heart Mother
Prophecy Hopi Indians Warned America For Year And Yet Nobody Listens ? It warn us that we are entering a dangerous period in our lives, as governments have abrogated native title and the time of plenty is coming to an end. Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi prophecy that marks the total disintegration of the life of harmony and balance. According to Hopi Dictionary: Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni, koyaanisqatsi is defined as “life” or “chaotic” life. In Lockdown Revisiting Koyaanisqatsi Revisiting Koyaanisqatsi in Lockdown explores this mythological destruction. Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi Prophecy It is an apocalyptic vision that warns us that if we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster. Near the Day of Purification, cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky and a container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky which could burn the land and boil the oceans.
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida or In the Garden of Eden Recorded Live Rare by Iron Butterfly - https://rumble.com/v2jnepo-in-a-gadda-da-vida-or-in-the-garden-of-eden-recorded-live-rare-by-iron-butt.html
The following will walk you through the 17-minute-long song and provide the sync up to the story in a beat-by-beat fashion. Since the majority of this song is an instrumental, much of the story is told through the music (verse the lyrics). Not many bands put out 17+ minute songs, so there had to be a greater motive to their madness! Open your minds and enjoy.
The song can be played using the YouTube link below and the below commentary will take you step-by-step through the story and call out events at different time intervals during the song.
IN-GADDA-DA-VIDA MEANING TO YOU
Music is a feeling. It exults emotions and links those emotions to our memories. Music can take you back to another time and bring out all kinds of feelings. Songs certainly mean different things to different people. The folklore around In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, whether true or not, brings me back to my youth. As I am now a dad, I hope my kids look back on their youth and can tie songs to fun memories we have had. Hopefully my kids’ memories won’t be about a song reenacting a person being buried alive, but I guess it is what got me here!
We would love to hear your take on this and any other musical folklore you would like to share in the comments. If you are looking to get your young kids into music that you like and they are not ready for Iron Butterfly yet, read our article about kids and the Beatles. Happy listening!
Originally published in 1968, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida is the best known album by Psychedelic Rock group Iron Butterfly. The first album to ever go platinum, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida is one of those albums nearly every every aging hippie either has, or used to have. For most of these people though, it probably hasn't been played in decades. Heavy on the distortion guitar and the electric organ, this album would be right at home in an old van with large amounts of ceremonial substances.
We at this channel would like to add this quote for everyone to open your own mind this year: Your body diet is not only what you eat. It is also what you watch, what you listen to, what you read, the people you hang out with and the things you subject your mind, body and soul too. Always be mindful of the things you put into your body emotionally, spiritually and physically. Thank You Everyone Who Watch Our 1078+ Video's To Help Other In 2026.
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