The Hippie Movement

Developed as a youth group in the early 1960s, the hippie culture first started in the United States, but quickly spread around the world. While being inspired by alternate lifestyles, such as Fabians and Bohemians, this sub-culture was based around being one with nature, communal living, artistic experimentation, and even recreational drugs. Not involved in politics, the movement arose partly as an opposition against the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Having felt alienated from the materialistic middle-class society, they developed their own lifestyle, favoring their long hair, and flowy clothing. Most males grew beards, while women wore long ‘granny’ dresses, and both wearing sandals and beads. Wanting to fight against the white picket fence, mainstream american society, this group greatly used music to express how they felt about the things going on in the world around them. Inspired by the hippie culture, psychedelic rock had quickly took over the world. Artists such as The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, and so many more, became an international musical movement, changing society in more ways than one. Reaching it’s peak in 1967 and 1969, the Summer of Love, and Woodstock Rock Festival brought some of these bands into a life of fame.

Woodstock was a three day art and music festival, entitled as “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music,” held at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York. Featuring artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Janis Joplin, Richie Havens, Canned Heat, Joe Cocker, Ravi Shankar, Grateful Dead, this festival had a sum of thirty-two acts performing outdoors in front of 500,000 people, rain or shine. Highly regarded as a pivotal moment in music history, Rolling Stone magazine didn’t hesitate to list it in the article 50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll.

Declared a social phenomenon, the Summer of Love occurred at Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, had up to 100,000 people gathering. As the hippie culture got more and more awareness, the activities had become a defining part of the 1960s, making it so ordinary citizens began to question everything, and thinking a new way. Although hippies had done this in many other cities, San Francisco had remained the epicenter for the Hippie Revolution. Coming together for the free food, free drugs, free love, and ability to have sexual freedom, people from all around the world came to get the popularized hippie experience.

In the ‘60s, it was never unusual to be handed a random pill from a fellow hippie. Others would swallow it with the only thing said “You’ll dig it, it’s groovy,” trusting the person you received it from. Although this happened often, some of the most common drugs were marijuana, mescaline, and LSD. A group formed around an American novelist, Ken Kesey, known as the Merry Pranksters, were mainly remembered for their cross-country roadtrip in a school bus, yet also known for their acid tests. Members such as Ken Babbs, George Walker, Wavy Gravy, Stewart Brand, thought of the idea to make tie dyes while on the road, by putting oil based paints in a mud puddle and laying their shirts across it. Not caring how dirty it was, the members immediately put their shirts back on, hypnotized by the patterns on their clothing.

While traditional tie dying was known in other places, such as India, Japan, and Africa since as far back as the sixteenth century, Americans had turned it into something new. Created by a youth movement that advocated the sexual revolution, psychedelic rock, and protested the Vietnam war, hippies used this as a way to escape from the social image of the ‘50s, and express their free-spirited personalities. Tie dying is a process of dying a piece of clothing, or fabric, generally all one color with specific designs, but in the 1960s, it soon became a way to turn a regular white shirt into an abstract piece of art. As time went on, techniques advanced, and people were eventually able to make certain things such as spirals, stripes, smiley faces, hearts, and the peace sign.

Originally designed for the British nuclear disarmament movement in 1958, the artist had made it for a from Trafalgar Square, London, to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in England. The peace sign had been a combination of the semaphore signals for the letters “N” and “D,” standing for “nuclear disarmament.” The first documented peace sign to have been documented was in 1966 by an author describing one on the back of a young mans jacket, and would soon become the hype between this youth group. Hippies had started to display the words ‘peace’ and ‘love’ in alternative art they had made, along with psychedelic versions of the peace sign, using bright colors, and wavy lines. Worn on clothing, jewelry, and displayed by hands, people used this as a way to show their ideas of communalism, freedom, and personal growth, this symbol soon became the visual representation for the hippie movement.

Due to the boring conformist american lifestlye, youth had gotten tired of the ways they were raised, and developed what would later be known as the Hippie Revolution. Inspiring people to think a new way, this group peacefully changed the world over a span of a few years. Using music, art, fashion, and drugs, hippies had taken over what used to be the american dream, just by doing what they loved. They had created a new meaning to being american. Instead of being seen as straight edge capitalists, we had become the wild and crazy home of the hippies, and rock and roll.