Hippie Music : What It Is
The implication of the word “hippie” was originally, like many slang terms, derogatory. In the Jazz confines of some place like New York City it was applied to wanna-bes, those neophytes who tried a little too hard to make the scene. If you want to get literal, think of the diminutive of hip, someone who’s only slightly hip.
The contemporary marker for a “hippie” is more or less true to the sense of the word as used in the sixties (say, 1964 to 1969), which would be a pothead garbed in colorful attire (tie-die, for instance) leaning towards “new age” with a fondness for “jam bands”. But of course, that’s also a stereotype.
The bottom line complication being that by 1966/7 the term “hippie” was an over-generalized, mediated term, tossed about in a wide variety of circumstances, and now that so much time has passed (Woodstock was 53 years ago) anyone who didn’t live through the height of 1960’s hippiedom might be surprised to learn that, in certain quarters of the USA, (regardless of the peace-loving stereotype) it was actually dangerous for a man/boy to let his “freak flag fly”, to have shoulder length hair that alerted the enemy — “the straights”, neighborhood toughs or the power elite.
That is to say, there were hippies and then, there was no such thing as a hippie, as some of the people who were harassed for having shoulder-length hair in 1967, might be sympathetic to, yet distance themselves from, “hippies”. For instance, my oldest brother, who had longish hair by 1965, couldn’t stand The Grateful Dead, modelling himself on The Rolling Stones (who weren’t hippies). One memorable incident in my life sees us all (minus the parents) on the way to see “Casino Royale” (the 1967 version!) in Boston, Massachusetts when a construction-worker type aggressively confronted my brother and his longish hair.
On the other hand, my brother did listen to, and loved, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, whose “freak flag fly” was referenced above. That song, written and sung by David Crosby is aptly titled “Almost Cut My Hair” (from the the Déjà Vu album), a quintessential “hippie” song that would make the quintessential non-hippie cringe, someone like Lou Reed or next-year’s punk rocker. Crosby also cited long hair on Crosby, Stills and Nash’s first album, in his song, “Long Time Gone”: “But don’t no don’t now try to get yourself elected/ If you do you had better cut your hair / Cause it appears to be a long”.
The Grateful Dead (the jam band par excellence) and David Crosby (a fucking hippie), emerged at the height of the mediated term, “hippie”, situating themselves on the west coast of the U.S.A., the so-called hippie epicenter, media-hyped to such a degree that young Americans flocked west, particularly to San Francisco, until 1967’s “Summer of Love” trailed off into a demographic disaster area.
In Charles Perry’s excellent book, The Haight-Ashbury: A History, which encompasses the key 1960s counterculture years in San Francisco, his on-the-ground informants state that it was well over by 1965, as the countercultural impetus which began with the Beatniks (in the 1950s) had reached the tipping point. The San Francisco-based Diggers, an exciting anarchic experiment that disrupted the accepted norms of capitalism (such as establishing a “free store”, where, yes, everything was free), symbolically acknowledged this state of affairs by holding a mock funeral (complete with a coffin) for a nameless hippie in October of 1967 — that would be, in the fall months directly after the so-called “Summer of Love”.
Given all these components and disparate points of view, some of the west coast musicians might have hooked themselves to the hippie bandwagon while actually embodying the ethos to greater or lesser degrees. The band that truly stands out, in terms of ethos or lifestyle, is The Grateful Dead, who lived communally (at least at the start), had a great influence on the bands and musicians that surrounded them, but who never hit the Top Ten and thus maintained a non-commercial or non-mainstream credence by way of relentless touring. They also paid their countercultural dues by offering their pro-bono services to a variety of political benefits in San Francisco (including ones for the Black Panthers) as well as the legendary “Trips Festival” (or “Acid Test”).
The flipside to The Grateful Dead’s grassroots approach (a “double A side”, fantasy 45rpm) would be Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)” which made it to #4 on the US charts and (paradoxically) to #1 in the UK, while The Grateful Dead’s eponymously titled first album only made it to #73 on the charts (a respectable enough slot) and which (not surprisingly) elicited no hit single. Both were released in 1967. The irony being that while “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)” is all things “hippie” lyrically speaking, it sure doesn’t sound like it. It’s “pop music”. It’s cheesy. It’s a mainstream hit.
The confluence here is that The Grateful Dead and Scott McKenzie (as well as John Phillips, of the Mamas and Papas, who co-wrote “San Francisco etcetera”) all came up out of the folk music scenes of New York City and beyond, music we would later classify as Americana, that amorphous songbook that posited the genuine as opposed to the pop, a reaction to the post-Elvis corporate watering-down of Rock and Roll, a “folk” songbook that included Old English or Appalachian back-porch strum-a-longs, Blues via Leadbelly and Country via the Carter Family. What would jump start and push all that in a different direction, and electrify many of these acoustic folk musical types is (again ironically) that pop juggernaut called The Beatles, who themselves were working off of African-American Rock and Roll and R&B.
Putting aside The Beatles (who most definitely had their own hippie leanings) we can then posit “Hippie Music” as Folk musical stylings (or inclinations) + electricity (your whammy bars, distortion pedals and such) + that other key component — drugs, or more precisely psychotropic drugs, which (for the most part) = cannabis and LSD. This was the counterculture aka “hippies” as a sincere concept or point of view as opposed to a costume that you could put on (on the weekend) and take off (during the week).
It’s more than likely that Scott McKenzie (and certainly John Phillips) smoked a few joints, but this was The Grateful Dead’s deliberate and uncompromising profile. Take a look at the Mamas and Papas on the Ed Sullivan Show, singing their own pop version of hippie-dom (though far more palatable, to my ears, than McKenzie’s pop pablum) and then tell me they (The Mamas and Papas) weren’t blasted, and I don’t mean by way of whiskey; the definitive distinction being, in this case, that The Grateful Dead were never going to be invited on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Regardless, in all cases there was a bottom line: to create a viable and remunerative musical career, hit song or no hit song. The Grateful Dead might not have made it onto the Ed Sullivan Show but many of their west coast contemporaries did — The Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Byrds, and The Doors, exactly the people and bands that had a smash hit. And while all of the above were surely listened to by “hippies” (whoever they were), seeing as I’m acting as the self-anointed arbiter of “hippie music”, I am obliged to eliminate two of those timely hit-makers from the category — The Doors and Janis Joplin, while keeping in mind that all of them (at one time or another) had druggy names and/or songs, well-indicating their countercultural cache.
The Byrds, who would surely evolve beyond hippie-dom, had one David Crosby as a member at the pivotal moment that saw the band have two (2) smash hits that epitomized the folk-rock aspects of “hippie music”: “Turn, Turn, Turn” by Pete Seeger, and “Mr. Tambourine Man” by Bob Dylan (a version that perhaps pushed Dylan towards the electric). But it’s The Byrds’ “Eight-Miles High” that puts the “hippie” in “hippie music”. Released in 1966 and subject to a radio ban (due to its explicit yet ambiguous lyric) the song still managed to reach #14 on the Billboard charts. It’s cited as the first “psychedelic” rock song, whose provenance not only includes the afore-mentioned folk music, but also the eclectic and savvy influences of John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar; surely a heady brew.
While Janis Joplin started off in a San Francisco band with a druggy name: Big Brother and the Holding Company, one thinks of her as ultimately headed in the direction of blue-eyed soul or red-hot mama rather than psychedelic shouter. Likewise, The Doors, also of the druggy moniker, have more of a dark L.A./Rimbaud via Kurt Weil edge rather than the peace-loving hippie vibe, not to mention that both Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin were lushes as opposed to potheads. This is not to say that Grace Slick of The Jefferson Airplane didn’t have her own issues with alcohol, but any band that lists Jerry Garcia as “spiritual adviser” (as noted on the Surrealistic Pillow album’s credits, as well as the album being titled by Garcia) has got to be hippie.
Given my arbitrary and/or subjective decisions about what constitutes “hippie music”, let me, given the historical distance and stereotypical hype, try to define what a “hippie” (back then) actually looked like. That is, beyond some dude flashing the peace sign with a joint in his mouth. In that case, “counterculture” or “anti-establishment” are the key terms, embodying not only an alternative but a creative opposition, most assuredly of the younger generation that found themselves fed up with their elder’s stewardship of all things political and environmental. “Hippie” became a lifestyle that eschewed the accepted values of the nuclear family, careerism and an unquestioned fidelity to the powers-that-be (the nation or the boss/bureaucrat). To greater or lesser degrees, this meant an acceptance of “free love” (having more than one partner or an open relationship instead of a locked marriage), the use of psychotropic drugs as a form or “mind expansion” (as opposed to getting “blotto”), and a distrust of, or opposition to, the military-industrial complex (the war in Vietnam) and America’s ingrained and legally-sanctioned racial inequality.
But when people like Abbie Hoffman, already a committed left-wing activist, turned “freak”, grew his hair long, and formed the Yippies, his actions stood for a schism between the established (old school) left wing brand of politics and the younger generation of free-thinking, non-aligned firebrands, who not only advocated for civil rights and an end to the war (any war) but also for “free love” and the legalization of marijuana; all that aberrant behaviour, as well as demonstrating an abiding affection for all things Rock and Roll.
But was Hoffman a “hippie”? The truest of true “hippies”, might be those who completely dropped out and eschewed politics altogether (to Hoffman’s disdain), moving “back to the land”, living communally and engaging in self-sustenance to such a degree that the only available music would be the non-electric, acoustic variety (back to Folk Music!).
There is no purity here (as indeed, no movement is ever “pure”) as back-to-the-land communes came and went, or gave refuge to political refugees, or constituted hardcore ideologies and power dynamics. “Hippie” was then, most fundamentally, an opening up in the possible lifestyles of the younger generation of the 1960s, who were reacting to the dour, complacent 1950s; an opening up that ironically depended on America’s relative affluence (you could “drop out” and still live relatively comfortably) and of course, that be-all-end-all of American privileges, having white skin as your basic pass. “Hippie Music”, then, constitutes all these inclinations and contradictions. “Hippie” bands might espouse left-wing politics and alternative lifestyles while still trying to break into the mainstream, and in some cases, hitting the big time.
But let’s stop for a minute and take a look at, for example, two Bay Area “hippie” bands, performing at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, which in my estimation symbolizes the cultural high point and implicit hopefulness of that era, rather than the over-burdened confines of Woodstock (two years later).
Now those are some hippies! Country Joe and the Fish, and Quicksilver Messenger Service also demonstrating the distinct sonic qualities of Bay Area “hippie music”: the interpolated Blues references, the warbly, distorted high-note guitar leads and the droning, raga organ lines.
I’m not the only one out there (on here) parsing what “hippie music” is or isn’t or might be, so, by example, here’s my absurdist list with embedded links for your listening pleasure (yes, let’s get to the music). I make a line-break between certain bands and musicians to indicate that something different is going to happen, and indeed one or another song might not, strictly speaking, belong on this list. You’re welcome to argue about it . . . that’s one thing that music fandom/consumerism/obsessiveness is good for.
The Grateful Dead: This is the song from their first album that Phil Lesh mentions below the album’s picture (above). “Viola Lee Blues” typifies the Dead’s sound in Garcia’s two-note lead-guitar “bridge”, as well as how the band winds out the song, by way of a slow build-up to a-tonal chaos and back again. Practically interminable! The Great Society: This was Grace Slick’s band before she joined The Jefferson Airplane. A tripped-out version of the “girl group” classic, “Sally Go Round the Roses”. The Jefferson Airplane: Slick had composed/co-composed and performed two of Jefferson Airplane’s smash hits while in The Great Society: “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit”, “White Rabbit” being an extraordinary hit song in that it has no chorus. Country Joe and the Fish: (see the linked song above) While still of the Bay Area (like these other bands), but specifically Berkeley rather than San Francisco, led Country Joe to assert that this engendered a regional/localized bias against the Fish. The band is most famous for the anti-Vietnam war sing-a-long “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die”. Quicksilver Messenger Service: (see the linked song above) One of the integral San Francisco bands of the 1960s, influential amongst fans and fellow musicians, they signed to a major label but never managed to have a hit single. Moby Grape: Moby Grape has a kind of a cult status due to Skip Spence’s drug and mental health break-down and his post-Grape solo album, “Oar”, gaining contemporaneous renown. He was also the drummer for The Jefferson Airplane on their first album, before Grace Slick showed up, and though dismissed from that band, his song “My Best Friend” is included on Surrealistic Pillow. All five members of Moby Grape contributed song writing and lead vocals on their debut album. “Naked If I Want To” (by Jerry Miller), is beautifully harmonized, leaning towards Folk-Country rather than psychedelic, but the lyrics act as a kind of a “hippie” manifesto. Buffalo Springfield: Buffalo Springfield was Stephen Stills and Neil Young’s band before Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (who have been linked to above). An L.A., rather than a Bay Area thing, they are included in this section as they all interacted and jammed with, and worked off of the Bay Area musicians. Stills’ song “For What It’s Worth” is cited here, and though it’s not “psychedelic”, it embodies some of the 1960s youth culture ethos, as Stills was inspired to write the song after the infamous Sunset Strip protests and riots that came about after “the straights” and the police tried to enforce a 10pm curfew on club-going Rock and Rollers who were regularly blocking traffic.
The Strawberry Alarm Clock: Yes, I’ll make a line break for this one, as I can’t help but thinking “fake hippie” when I look at the video for “Incense and Peppermint”. It also provokes me to consider that maybe my category “Hippie Music” should be “Psychedelic Music”. Record companies in the mid to late 60s were scrambling to sign either one, but “psychedelic” has more to do with the sound rather than the ethos. If I’m harsh in labelling Strawberry Alarm Clock “fake hippies”, the band was, for example, featured in the Dick Clark produced/Roger Corman AIP-distributed hippie-exploitation film Psyche-Out, that sees Jack Nicholson don a fake ponytail and lead a fake Rock band. After all is said and done, the film is amusing in its pop-kitschy-ness. So, I could add that “Incense and Peppermint” is a good slice of psychedelic-pop-kitsch.
Jimi Hendrix: Was Jimi a hippie? He surely enjoyed his paisley shirts and headbands, talked about UFOs and other cosmically-oriented topics and, for sure, allowed psychotropics to influence his already well-advanced R&B/Rock and Roll guitar playing. But, lord-be-praised, Jimi was something else altogether, a genius even, and we are all sad to be denied his continuing presence so we could witness what the hell he would have gotten himself up to nowadays. “Third Stone from the Sun” from The Experience’s first album, stands in for all of Hendrix’s psychedelic sonic innovation, which not only included his guitar work but his use of the studio as a musical instrument.
The Mothers of Invention: Continuing on from Jimi’s avant-gardism (as-it-were), there was a strand of psychedelia that was all about experimentation, to expanding the sonic as well as the psychic boundaries. Frank Zappa is a prime example of this trend, but he was also known for disparaging hippies, most especially casual drug use (though cigarettes would kill him) but, for sure, he was a “freak” and named the album that the linked song comes from (below), Freak Out!. Also, The Jefferson Airplane wanted Zappa (a circumstance that didn’t come about) to produce their totally non-commercial experimental follow-up to Surrealistic Pillow — After Bathing at Baxter’s. “Who Are the Brain Police” from Freak Out! is again, regardless of Zappa’s sentiments, a kind of hippie manifesto if countercultural jeremiad. The United States of America: The United States of America came out of the early 1960s avant-garde confines of New York City. One of the founding members, Joseph Byrd, was a composer involved in the Fluxus movement that included people like John Cage and Yoko Ono. They launched their attempted underground/mainstream/Rock and Roll/performance art crossover in 1967 in Los Angeles. “Hard Coming Love” is a good example of their hybrid attempts in its use of electronic instrumentation combined with Dorothy Moskowitz’s more conventional vocals, vocals which bear a clear resemblance to Grace Slick. The Fugs: Like Zappa (but so unlike Zappa) The Fugs (formed in 1964) weren’t exactly hippies, but most definitely freaks, and I don’t think they would mind or care what you called them because they were definitively going to fuck with your take on music as well as society. Group members Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg were those kind of hardcore New York City beatniks, underground iconoclasts and poets that, in effect, jump started the whole hippie thing. Putting aside whether they were hippies or not, is this even music? It’s a kind of performance art that bears a resemblance to Punk Rock. The Fugs also made an unbelievable go at the mainstream, signing with Atlantic Records (though never releasing an album) and touring with name-brand Rock bands. They did, however, achieve their ends by catching the attention of the F.B.I. whose clandestine surveillance labelled then “the most vulgar thing the human mind could possibly conceive”. Here’s “I Couldn’t Get High” which shows them (in a pre-song interview) to be our Dada champions.
The Monkees: The Monkees? And directly after The Fugs, no less. Talk about “fake hippies”, or more to the point, a Beatles knock-off. But these dudes were hanging with the best of them. See Micky Dolenz at Monterey Pop strutting a full-on native-American headdress, or Peter Tork hanging around nude in L.A.’s musical hotbed, Laurel Canyon. Let alone that Stephen Stills tried out for the part but was rejected because of his crooked teeth. Here’s their psychedelia, “Porpoise Song” which comes from their full-length movie, Head, said to be deliberately weird and disjunctive (as well as a financial dud) in order to scuttle their teeny-bopper following.
The Beatles: Speaking of The Monkees. My fundamental thesis being that hardcore “hippie music” came from, and originated in, the west coast of the U.S.A., specifically San Francisco. But as has been indicated, The Beatles were a major influence. One might first consider, as far as psychedelia, Sgt. Peppers in general, and “Lucy in the Skies with Diamonds” in particular. But it was The Beatles’ Revolver album that had many US hippie-inclined musicians perking up their ears and thinking, “Something has *happened* to The Beatles”. Here’s the super-experimental (for a top-forty band) “Tomorrow Never Knows” from Revolver, which has John Lennon referencing Timothy Leary’s uber-referential-text The Tibetan Book of the Dead, while also keeping in mind that that is also where The Grateful Dead dug up their name. Donovan: Poor Donovan was dissed by Dylan (in the Dylan film, Don’t Look Back) but Bob Dylan wasn’t a hippie (in my estimation) and the one-name hit-maker, Donovan, was going to make his own psychedelic way with a few key songs. “Mellow Yellow” was (at the time) purported to concern the rumor that the insides of banana skins, when dried and smoked, could get you high. A legal high! Whatever, the song is groovy. Tell me what it’s really about. Pink Floyd: Now we’re hitting a different tangent altogether. We’ve moved across the pond, but Pink Floyd, like the USA west coast bands, incorporated light shows (strobe and liquid gels) into its 67’ live performances, as well as taking its share of LSD, with founding member Syd Barrett achieving his own cult status through his idiosyncratic solo projects as well as being a possible “acid burn-out”. Pink Floyd would go on to become a long running post-1960s franchise with its own dedicated audience, something like The Grateful Dead, but here’s “Interstellar Overdrive” from their debut album, which distinguishes them from the Dead in its harder, more insidious long-form brand of psychedelia.
Led Zeppelin: Please note the line break in this British psychedelia/hippie music mini-survey, as something is definitely indicated through the inclusion (and finale) of Led Zeppelin. Something different begins to happen which derives from late 1960’s “acid rock” linage, but which moves us into the 1970s. This is sometimes (or definitively) labelled “Heavy Metal”, a style first broached by San Francisco bands like Blue Cheer as well as someone like Jimi Hendrix. “Dancing Days”, which to these ears has a deep hippie vibe, appeared on Zeppelin’s 1973 album Houses of the Holy, and (get this) the song was inspired by an Indian tune Jimmy Page and Robert Plant heard when travelling through Bombay.
