You love to walk barefoot
In the United Kingdom in 1970, many gathered at the gigantic Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400,000 people. In later years, mobile “peace convoys” of New Age travelers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and elsewhere.
You love to love
On January 14, 1967, the outdoor Human Be-In in San Francisco popularized hippie culture across the United States, with 30,000 hippies gathering in Golden Gate Park. The Monterey Pop Festival from June 16 to June 18 introduced the rock music of the counterculture to a wide audience and marked the start of the “Summer of Love”.
In Australia, hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival and the annual Cannabis Law Reform Rally or MardiGrass. “Piedra Roja Festival”, a major hippie event in Chile, was held in 1970. Hippie and psychedelic culture influenced 1960s and early 1970s young culture in Iron Curtain countries in Eastern Europe (see Mánička).
Bands like the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), and Jefferson Airplane lived in the Haight. In 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and Monterey Pop Festivalpopularized hippie culture, leading to the Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. Hippies in Mexico, known as jipitecas, formed La Onda and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa.
The summer of 1988 became known as the Second Summer of Love. Although the music favored by this movement was modern electronic music, especially house music and acid house, one could often hear songs from the original hippie era in the chill out rooms at raves. Also, there was a trend towards psychedelic indie rock in the form of Shoegaze, Dream Pop, Madchester and Neo-Psychedelic bands like Jesus And Mary Chain, The Sundays, Spacemen 3, Loop, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets and Ride. This was effectively a parallel soundtrack to the rave scene that was rooted as much in 1960s psychedelic rock as it was in post-punk, though Madchester was more directly influenced by Acid House, funk and northern soul. Interestingly, many ravers were originally soul boys and football casuals, and football hooliganism declined after the Second Summer of Love.
Meaning Of Hippies And The Hippie Lifestyle
Along with the New Left and the Civil Rights Movement, the hippie movement was one of three dissenting groups of the 1960s counterculture. They used alternative arts, street theatre, folk music, and psychedelic rock as a part of their lifestyle and as a way of expressing their feelings, their protests and their vision of the world and life. Hippies opposed political and social orthodoxy, choosing a gentle and nondoctrinaire ideology that favored peace, love and personal freedom, expressed for example in The Beatles’ song “All You Need is Love”. Hippies perceived the dominant culture as a corrupt, monolithic entity that exercised undue power over their lives, calling this culture “The Establishment”, “Big Brother”, or “The Man”.
In the UK and Europe, the years 1987 to 1989 were marked by a large-scale revival of many characteristics of the hippie movement. This later movement, composed mostly of people aged 18 to 25, adopted much of the original hippie philosophy of love, peace and freedom.
Noting that they were “seekers of meaning and value”, scholars like Timothy Miller have described hippies as a new religious movement. Many of the bands performing at hippie festivals, and their derivatives, are called jam bands, since they play songs that contain long instrumentals similar to the original hippie bands of the 1960s. Psychedelic trance or “psytrance”, a type of techno music influenced by 1960s psychedelic rock and hippie culture is also popular among neo-hippies worldwide.
Scott McKenzie’s rendition of John Phillips’ song, “San Francisco”, became a hit in the United States and Europe. The lyrics, “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”, inspired thousands of young people from all over the world to travel to San Francisco, sometimes wearing flowers in their hair and distributing flowers to passersby, earning them the name, “Flower Children”. On January 14, 1967, the outdoor Human Be-In organized by Michael Bowen helped to popularize hippie culture across the United States, with 20,000 hippies gathering in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. On March 26, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick and 10,000 hippies came together in Manhattan for the Central Park Be-In on Easter Sunday.