If You Had The Chance To Go Back To 1969 At The Age Of 19 Would You?

An Alien-Human Hybrid would certainly address the issue of race, but with everyone reading each other’s minds we’d still be at each other’s throats


Hotwater

 

yeah my dad went on a trip to the US back in the vietnam days he always talks about how unsettling it was because there was no other guys around that were his age...i think they even cut the trip short on account of that


id like to be 19 yesterday...think i was 20 when i screwed my back major so 19 would be a good place to go back to

to be 19 in 1969 id have to vote no thanks

 

Now Haight Ashbury is like a shopping mall with dope dealers. You get robbed by gutter punks in Tie Dyed t-shirts selling over priced bunk weed to tourists so they can go back to Kansas and tell people that they "Bought weed from a hippie in the Haight".

C/S,
Rev J

 

From interviews I've read with Bob Weir across the street from 710 Ashbury was the Hells Angels club house, even in '67 pimps were getting 16 year old hippie chicks strung out on dope and turning them out. Shit dude Manson was also hanging out on the scene at that time. From a sociological perspective what had happened was a lot of bands and communes started out in the Haight due to cheap rent. When the area became "Hip" and the bands, artists etc. got popular the people who wanted to be hip moved in and raised the rent. Same thing happened in Greenwich Village, South Beach in Miami, Beacon Hill in Boston etc.

C/S,
Rev J

 

Yeah Gas, It would be horrible to go back. It was all shitty. I thought about signing up of the Marine Corp. Almost. Years latter after I lost my college deferment I looked into the Air Force. As I said, looked. Somewhere around 72 I was sent an order to report. Drafted. I ignored it and just kept playing and smokin' Three months latter I was sent a letter that read, please disregard the previous notice. I can only guess that by that late in the war that the F.B.I. must have had a back log of Hundreds of thousands of people too chase down. What would you imagine?

By the way there were lots of guys who jumped right out there and enlisted. The vast majority of the military. At the highest only about 10% or less were drafted. some who were drafted hid out in the inner cities, others went to Canada, some surfing in Mexico, Some to the Caribbean, and I met one guy who lived in Amsterdam for 6 years. He told me that almost a third of Amsterdam at one point was Americans. Can you spell Hashish?

Yeah, guys. There's Hell and there's Heaven. Me? I'd go in search of the better one. I didn't join the Marines and I ran off to where the party was going on. As fast as I could. Chicks, Rock, Scene, Party, Smoke and L.


But you'd go for the Sandoz and the Owsley. LOL It wasn't over rated, at all. And if you looked for and went to the right places which where not hard to find, then 1969 wasn't over rated in the least. I did Orange Sunshine, Purple Haze, Had a bunch of window pane at one point or White Lightening, and did Blue barrels or Blue Cheer. I also saw a five inch tall glass lab bottle, the kind with the glass stoppers, full of nice clear liquid before it got dosed out into thousand. You could get a contact high just being near it. Wish you were Here.

Let me fill you in on the Viet-nam War by the way. In the 60s young women got the Pill. Young women got freedom. Young women got their own dorm rooms or apartments and there very own beds. Young women were looking for adventure and romance. Young women were looking for guys. And then again around 5% or more of the men were in the military and stationed somewhere away. There was a shortage of dudes, and longhairs where the cool ones to be chased after. What was a girl to do? Oh Gee.

What could go wrong? You caught the Clap!!!!!! Oh my! So, you got a shot and seven days worth of pills, and you had to abstain from sex for seven days. Other stuff, same thing. Was no A.I.D.s and new stuff. Bugs? Curable.

Yeah there was a lot of negative stuff in 1969. In the Spring of 70 I went up to Berkeley and marched in a protest march. When the riots started I left. You chose things in life. Most of the other protesters left too, by-the-way. Choice.

I chose the positive things. I avoided the negative things. Most people do. I also didn't get on a jet and join the revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Russians killed people there. Choice.

Have a Good Life, Everybody.

 

Back then if you passed put people would help you, now they take a cell phone video of you.

 

Well, they didn't have cellphones back then

But seriously it seems unfair to put it like people wouldn't screw you over when you're on drugs back then and they would often do now because if I see a person go down at a festival I mostly see people, both friends and strangers, aid them instead of grabbing their camera. I bet people took pics of wasted people back then too occasionally.

 

Being 19 in 1969 - in the UK = a totally different kettle of fish
= The time of change - A World of Black and White now turning into Colour, Revolution Change with Youthful Strength of/with Spirit to strive for Freedom - Yep - I'd take that

 

Thank you for this. Made me smile.

On a side note hope everyone is having a beautiful day. I enjoy reading everyone's view on this,

 

By 1969 I had been home from Vietnam (USMC infantry) for more than a year. I started turning on as soon as I got home, but 1969 was about the time I met up with serious acid-heads and there was an unlimited supply and started tripping almost like a way of life – life was an acid test and we were all eliminating aspects of our lives/ourselves that wouldn’t pass the acid test. All of my friends believed we could make the world a better place – I personally felt called by psychedelic experience to create a more beautiful reality. And at the same time, through my wife, we were also hanging out with child protective service workers, leftists, artists and the like.

We were going to change the world – and we did. There's plenty left to do LOL.

Because of the magic and the endless possibilities, 1969 would be a fine time to experience again. BUT, there was the paranoia. Smoking cannabis got plenty of people into prison and at the very least, created all sorts of legal hassles.

Lots of good things happening these days – stellar cannabis and psychedelics, environmental consciousness, marriage equality, hospice care, trance culture, and the list goes on and on. Today is a very far out time. But I’d love to do it all over again with my wife.

“Easy to romanticize…” Only because in the history of the world, there has never been another time like the 60s - of relatively peaceful social, cultural, artistic, and consciousness changes on a massive scale in a breathtakingly short time. Really, it was just a few years. The Human Be-In wasn’t until 1967!!!

 

I would go to woodstock! I think maybe i would live in san francisco i would have been a painter or a poet.

I'm not shure. Thinking about my big love for shopping maybe i would run a store

 

ahah,Suzi..in 1969 i was 23 years old...and started travelling..first to Amsterdam,Italy,ex Joegoslavia..
in 1971 i did a big trip in Scandinavia..worked on my girlfriends farm in Hallingdal(Al)==vennine budeia...
and hitchhiked up till Honningsvag and Kirkeness in North Norway..
after that I travelled around until 1976....did twice overland route to India..and a big West Africa trip..
Norge=utmerket land...kjempe fint,ikke sant?

 

i was born in 48, so in 69 i really was 21. would i want to go back and re-live that decade? no. i don't believe i would. i don't believe there was any year or decade in my life that was so much more wonderful then any other that i would want to do that at all. i mean every year and every day had its highs and its lows, but i wouldn't want to live any of them twice. maybe as a different person in a different place. that might be ok.

there are things i would have liked to have seen different. there were things that were already gone that i would have liked to have seen still there, and other things that weren't there yet i would have liked to have seen already there overlapping at the same time. but what was there as i actually remember it, the good and the bad of what there was and how there was? no.

i would love to live in a time that never was, with the sacramento northern interurban and the nevada county narrow gauge still running, and everyone having commodore 64s and amigas and the internet. and not having to have a car to not have to live in a city, and 80 percent of the population a real middle class, or better yet a middle earth and findhorn without having to be about money at all.

free sex might be ok if nobody got pregnant, but all the mind altering substances, i could give a shit less about any of that. actually free affection would be better then sex, or maybe both, and everybody looking like they were young teens but smarter then anyone or anyone human ever lives long enough to be. the kind of hippie architecture, that would be good. all sorts of strange shapes and colors. that's what i would like. and little trains and solar power, and no coal or oil or corporations usurping consent of the governed.

i can dream better then what there was, i can illustrate better then what there was, and that's where i'd like to go. not what was then, or any then in my own lifetime. some other lifetime i don't know. that would depend on where.

 

Yes i would. I'm female so easier answer. This world has gotten worse and worse with technology.

 

oh yes...I was 20 in 1966...If i could turn back the clock...
I would take some ladies and chicks from this forum nowadays along with me..and live the life sex,drugs and rockn'roll..
i got my favorites on this forum..they know i would pick them to be with me back in the 60's era..
I'm not naming any names or nicknames...but they all know...I would LOVE to be with them in a 60's spirit,mood and music..and sex as well(oh)
would be BIG fun and joy..sure...unfortunate...I am not able to turn the clock back...

Tiger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2exp2EjSVbY

 

Easier answer why?
I don't get it.
What does it have to do with you being female?

 

Yes please explain!

It seems to me that the time period we are talking about going back to was the very earliest days of the "Womens Movement". It wasn't near the level of equality that we have today (I'm not saying there is total equality yet. We do have a ways to go but it is closer than it was in the 60's).

I remember watching an interview with Dennis Hopper that was on the bonus features to "Easy Rider". He was talking about scouting Communes to film and said that he found most of them to consisted of one or two men with control issues surrounded by women who were overworked and expected to be baby machines.

Then like I said earlier I remember reading interviews with Bob Weir talking about how 16 year old flower children were being pimped out on Haight Street because they were an easy mark. "Hey Baby it's free love! we need to eat and a place to stay."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7TCCT8WHJE

That wasn't from some anti hippie episode of "Dragnet".

C/S,
Rev J

 

I assume she means because the likelihood of her gets shipped off to 'Nam and coming home in a baggie would be far, far less than a man's.