How did the hippie period end?

oldstinkyhippie · Jun 1, 2013

have to say Hippies , as a generality and group have come and gone but never really gone away. I guess it would depend on your definition of a hippie. Hippie names and clothing seem to be back as a fad but the political activism we saw in the 1960s seems to be here to stay. activism , generally is a result of social and political problems. these days the country is experiencing countless crises. from the economy to the decline in the "nuclear family" the one positive that has arisen has been huge surge in political involvement and awareness. weither you agree or disagree with the current administration its inception , for good or bad has motivated "change".... lol might not be what the president promised but if nothing else good has come from the last 5 years its been people are getting involved. in my eyes , that will make the country a better place.

peace yall!! )

Jason

Check out my Groovy Hippie Site Here

Voyage · Jun 1, 2013

newo said:

As I said, Altamont was one of the reasons hippies became disillusioned but not the only reason.
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As for Woodstock, as great an event as it was, the financial backers lost a fortune on it, so naturally they were reluctant to try anything on a similar scale. And Altamont reinforced that reluctance.
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And to say that is like saying the 60's only consisted of festivals.
Also don't forget, Altamont was officially the Altamont FREE concert.
As I understand it money was never what made Woodstock before, during or afterwards. It was a vibe. A time, season.
Woodstock wasn't what it was because of a few promoters or money. Those guys had done several big events (miami pop festival ) Woodstock was supposed to be a medium sized, profitable event, it only became free (and a freeforall) when 100 times as many people started showing up.
fwiw: http://upstatelive.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/barefoot-in-babylon-woodstock-43-years-ago-remembered/

And the spirit that I see in hindsight is what made it happen.
Same as the spirit at Altamount. disclaimer, I was 6yrs old.

Looking back, I see a 'shift' between Woodstock and Altamount, is all I'm saying. Not about festivals, or any one thing. Sorry to burn you guys out on my hero but here it is again.
Take what you like, leave the rest. :sunny:
(from wiki)

The "wave speech" is an important passage at the end of the eighth chapter that captures the hippie zeitgeist and its end.
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“ Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket… booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change)... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that…
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
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Thompson often cited this passage during interviews, choosing it when asked to read aloud from the novel.
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Piney · Jun 1, 2013

Remembering when John Lennon cut his hair and pronounced: its Over

and lots of people shorn their love-locks as The Punk Revolution was spawned in NYC in the early '70's The Punks were Greasers.

The Oil shock of '73 was an economic shock and jobs were no longer so easy to find and people started to straighten up in response.

Remembering the Concerts of Woodstock, NY and Altamount, Ca. closed out The 60's; and the deaths of those rock-stars at this time. it changed the cultural climate. The early rock -stars seemingly retired to self meditate ( medicate) or to unhealthy behaviors that tamped down inspiration.

Remembering my first draft card and then the ending of The Draft in "73/74, ending an issue that had coalesced The Hippies.

old tiger · Jun 2, 2013

@littleQueenie...
bullshit..hippies wil NEVER die...it's an attitude...a state of mind...
an inner feeling...allright...lots of things have changed since the 60's..
I agree with what some folks said on this thread..but..i disagree..
with the fact..that hippies will EVER die...that's a wrong statement..
somebody said..don't remember who?
that if one said..I'm a hippie...that's a boaster..
Yes....i agree with that dude..:2thumbsup:
one sees a true hippie=eye to eye..a talk/a bong/a positive experience/
then..we can say...you're hippie at heart:love:

Voyage · Jun 2, 2013

old tiger said:

..but..i disagree..
with the fact..that hippies will EVER die...that's a wrong statement..
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no one is saying hippies will die

sunfighter said:

This is an excellent post!

I would add to it by mentioning that right at the time of Altamont and Manson and the overdoses, there was a cover article in Look magazine, a very popular publication of its time, that stated that LSD caused birth defects. Altho it was later discredited, it was widely believed. Also there was Art Linkletter's claim that his daughter got high on LSD and walked out a window to her death. This was a major bummer to the counterculture.
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As is yours

granny_longerhair said:

Very true. Social and political movements have run in cycles throughout history. The United States in particular has been in the conservative side of the cycle for the past decade or two, but this too will pass. As newo says, there have been hippie movements before. They were called by different names, and they had different goals and credos, but they were hippies nonetheless.
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:2thumbsup:

Kinda feel like writing this morning, i can share a few ideas behind why i have such reverence for that quote of Thompsons.

Ya Granny, right on. I sometimes feel like people have an impression that "hippies" were an isolated sub group, with no history or future outside of that time period of ~ 65-75 but as you noted, they didn't just pop up overnight like a fad.
Check out this gem i found right here at Hip, courtesy of Skip !

According to Webster’s dictionary (2003) a "hippie" or "hippy" is: "a young person of the 1960’s who rejected established social mores, advocated spontaneity, free expression of love and the expansion of consciousness, often wore long hair and unconventional clothes, and used psychedelic drugs".

This mass-media definition of the 1960’s dropouts has eclipsed all pre-1960’s uses of the actual word such as that mentioned by Malcolm X in his famous autobiography. As a 17 year-old hustler living in Harlem in 1939 Malcolm noticed, "A few of the white men around Harlem, younger ones whom we called "hippies", acted more Negro than Negroes. This particular one talked more "hip" than we did. He would have fought anyone who suggested he felt any race difference".

This echoes the familiar sentiments of Jack Kerouac from "On The Road" (1955): "I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night".
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http://www.hippy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=243

Voyage · Jun 2, 2013

As Guer said, it's not like hippies disappeared, because hippies were never properly defined as

That image is a stereotype of just one period in a long history of alternative seekers. Todays hippies are everywhere because of the 60's tho... they are our teachers, parents, social workers, politicians. We just don't call Russ Feingold a hippy cause he doesn't fit that madison avenue stereotype, even though he is clearly an "aware" guy...

The word hip in the sense of "aware, in the know" is first attested in a 1902 cartoon by Tad Dorgan,[8] and first appeared in print in a 1904 novel by George Vere Hobart, Jim Hickey, A Story of the One-Night Stands, where an African American character uses the slang phrase "Are you hip?".
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie

He is a recipient of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, and cosponsored the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (McCain–Feingold Act), a major piece of campaign finance reform legislation. He was the only Senator to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act during the first vote on the legislation.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Feingold

Voyage · Jun 2, 2013

Note the mention of mass-media below. This, IMHO doesn't get near the recognition it deserves as an important component in the folklore of hippies.

The History They Didn't Teach You in School--an occasional series. August 15-17, 1969 Woodstock Music Festival
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On the weekend of August 15, 16 and 17, 1969, over 500,000 people from all over the U.S. traveled to Woodstock, in upstate New York, for what would become the most famous music festival ever. Woodstock was a stridently antiwar spectacles, but its message was diluted by the media. Rather than focus on the political statements made, mainstream cultural commentators talked about hippies, long hair, and nudity. The movement, as it were, had lost its teeth amid a co-optive and homogenizing media culture that ignored real politics and substituted image and sensationalism.

Woodstock featured some of the more memorable acts of the Rock & Roll era––Richie Havens, Joan Baez, John Sebastian, Arlo Guthrie, Santana, Mountain, Canned Heat, CCR, Janis Joplin, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Joe Cocker, Grandpa Simpson's favorite band that day––Sha Na Na, The Band, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, CSNY, and Country Joe and the Fish and Jimi Hendrix, who offered his memorable version of the Star-Spangled Banner.

Woodstock signalled the merger and ambivalence of the counterculture and protest. The festival was billed as "three days of peace and love," in contrast to the war and hatred in Vietnam. Festival organizers pointed out that anyone buying a ticket was contributing to a united front against the Vietnam War. Scores of acts played and made antiwar speeches, with Country Joe exhorting the crowd that "if you want to stop this fucking war, you'll have to sing louder than that." "Movement leaders" and other activists took their turns at the mike and "some of the young men destroyed their draft cards in protest of the Vietnam War." Yet, the media images and memory of Woodstock focus on the celebrative aspects of it: the rain, the music, nudity, drugs, free love.

Obviously, the counterculture's political message was too dangerous and had to be sanitized and softened for the American public. Like the New Left, the counterculture developed a critique and alternative to the society in which they were raised. Where the political youth joined SDS or took over campus buildings, the cultural opposition dressed differently and dropped acid. Often, the two movements converged. Many hippies were indeed political and counterculture behavior was endemic in the antiwar movement. But often, the New Left saw hippies as apolitical, and hippies saw the political youth as bureaucratic and uptight.

In the end, though, the challenge they both posed to American society was resisted, or channeled into acceptable avenues, co-opted and commodified so that the images of protest and resistance became ways for Madison Avenue to sell products.
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http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/htdtiswoodstock.html

I like this site:

“Two things come to my mind when I think of this revolution… one is that the solidarity must be visible at all times. The other, that the movement is not made up of only disaffected youth, but a spectrum of disaffected people of all ages, personal backgrounds and histories. That’s one of the reasons the hippie movement went into remission. It was devoured by the mass media, caricaturized, and co-opted by Madison Avenue and the retailers. It made it almost impossible to shake off the handles of “dirty fuckin’ hippie” on one end and “ditzy, stoned, flower child” on the other. “Pinko, commie, pervert?”… Well, them’s real fighting words… if only we weren’t such peaceniks! We still fight the stigmas today, but soon they’ll understand.

“I don’t want you to fall into the same traps. That’s why it’s so important that you don’t get yourselves stigmatized as a youth movement. That’s why your media committees need to understand the importance of capturing the true diversity of the occupiers.”
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http://www.worldwidehippies.com/2011/12/07/occupy-aarp/

Voyage · Jun 2, 2013

I never intended to suggest that Altamont, or any other single event ended what most people call the 'hippy era'. Taken as a whole, it feels to me that 1969 was the end of the sixties literally and figuratively.
Leading up to Aug 1969 and Woodstock on the groovy side of the equation we had:
Millbrook
The human rights struggle (women, minorities, under-privledged activism)
The Summer of Love and the Human Be-Ins.
Peoples park, where the people came together and took back vacant and abandoned land from the government and turned it into a park.
Yippies.
Resurrection City.
The Red Dog Saloon.

The list goes on. Beautiful groups and subgroups of people were fighting against the myriad injustices of society. Not that bad events never happened...

Just before that crossroads of human history, 1969 we also had

A good 2-3 years of highly sensationalized, often entirely fabricated propaganda fed to the world through the media. The tone of reporting and media content went from the back pages of publications in the human interest, oddities sections, to serious cover stories with semi-honest reports of promising new developments in mental health, to stories of mayhem, collapse of society, Manson, Linkletters daughter, the Hells Angels.
Hunter himself admitted why he first embedded with the Angels to write the book that put him on the public radar:

“California, Labor Day weekend...early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Fricso, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur...The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway,
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Sensationalism ALWAYS sells.
Remember this photo? Life magazine 1947

The small riot came to national prominence through media coverage of the event. However, the articles that were written about the riot were greatly exaggerated and sensationalized the actual events.
Firstly, shortly after the Fourth of July weekend, two articles were published in the San Francisco Chronicle. With titles "Havoc in Hollister" and "Hollister's Bad Time", they both described the event as "pandemonium" and "terrorism". While the articles did not actually lie about the events that occurred, the perspectives of the articles were both negative toward the motorcyclists involved. The Chronicle article did little to cause panic for citizens in the California area as there was other major news occurring at the same time, including local labor strikes. Yet, the press reports of the Hollister riot did expand past California with an article published in the July 21, 1947 issue of Life Magazine. Life Magazine was a major American publication and this brought the riot to national prominence. The article was published in the section of Life that relied heavily on graphic images and sparse explanatory text. This was shown as the article included only a nearly full-page photo, a small 115-word insert of text at the bottom of the page and the headline, "Cyclist's Holiday: He and Friends Terrorize Town."
The large photo, taken by Barney Peterson of the San Francisco Chronicle, shows a drunken man, sitting atop a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, holding a beer bottle in each hand and surrounded by many other empty, broken bottles. The man was later identified as Eddie Davenport, a member of the Tulare Riders motorcycle club.
However, the reliability of the striking photo has been debated, as many sources say that it was staged. The photograph was taken by Barney Petersen of the San Francisco Chronicle. The Chronicle did not run any images of the event. Many eyewitnesses argue that the image was staged. For example, Gus Deserpa is the man that can be seen in the background of the photograph. When he was interviewed after the Hollister riot, he said, "I saw two guys scraping all these bottles together, that had been lying in the street. Then they positioned a motorcycle in the middle of the pile. After a while this drunk guy comes staggering out of the bar, and they got him to sit on the motorcycle, and started to take his picture."
Barney Peterson's colleague at the Chronicle, photographer Jerry Telfer, said it was implausible that Peterson would have faked the photos. Telfer said, "Barney was not the type to fake a picture. Barney was the kind of fellow who had a very keen sense of ethics, pictorial ethics as well as word ethics."
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollister_riot

The reporting of that event did more to cement the image of the "outlaw biker" more than anything else... from that day on most reporting on bikers and outlaws was skewed in that direction.
It's a great illustration of what I feel happened at the end of the sixties.

Voyage · Jun 2, 2013

Fresh in everyones mind in Dec 1969, the last days of "the sixties"...

LSD was such a "public menace" that it had been illegalized after being vilified for a few years in the press.
Hells Angels.
Martin Luther King.
The 1968 democratic national convention in Chicago

August 28, 1968 came to be known as the day a “police riot” took place. The title of “police riot” came out of the Walker Report, which amassed a great deal of information and eyewitness accounts to determine what happened in Chicago.
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The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence appointed Walker to head the Chicago Study Team that investigated the violent clashes between police and protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In December, the team issued its report, Rights in Conflict, better known as the "Walker Report". The Report became highly controversial, and its author well-known. The report stated that while protesters had deliberately harassed and provoked police, the police had responded with indiscriminate violence against protesters and bystanders, which he described as a "police riot". The Report charged that many police had committed criminal acts, and condemned the failure to prosecute or even discipline those police.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Report#Early_life_and_career

Then, we had Altamont. We forget that even after Woodstock, the festival was officially called The Altamont Free Concert.
But then...

In December 1969, a similar event took place in Altamont, California, about 30 miles (45 km) east of San Francisco. Initially billed as "Woodstock West," its official name was The Altamont Free Concert. About 300,000 people gathered to hear The Rolling Stones; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Jefferson Airplane and other bands. The Hells Angels provided security that proved far less beneficent than the security provided at the Woodstock event: 18-year-old Meredith Hunter was stabbed and killed while drawing a gun in front of the stage during The Rolling Stones performance, and four accidental deaths occurred. There were also four births at the concert.
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Even if you were moderately hip, how do you think people responded to that news?

Voyage · Jun 2, 2013

Then its 1970... over the next several years...
The war got worse and worse in every way conceivable.
The Beatles split.
Kent State.
Jerry Rubin and the Chicago Seven, and the whole Helter Skelter trail that consumed the media more than OJ Simpson EVER did.

Don't forget the reporting of the time...
Put yourself in the shoes of "Average Joe American".

On December 1, 1969, acting on the information from these sources, LAPD announced warrants for the arrest of Watson, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian in the Tate case; the suspects' involvement in the LaBianca murders was noted. Manson and Atkins, already in custody, were not mentioned; the connection between the LaBianca case and Van Houten, who was also among those arrested near Death Valley, had not yet been recognized.
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In mid-December, when the Los Angeles Times published a crime account based on information Susan Atkins had given her attorney, Weiss' father made several phone calls which finally prompted LAPD to locate the gun in its evidence file and connect it with the murders via ballistics tests. Acting on that same newspaper account, a local ABC television crew quickly located and recovered the bloody clothing discarded by the Tate killers. The knives discarded en route from the Tate residence were never recovered, despite a search by some of the same crewmen and, months later still, by LAPD. A knife found behind the cushion of a chair in the Tate living room was apparently that of Susan Atkins, who lost her knife in the course of the attack.
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The trial began June 15, 1970.
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Who remembers this shit?

In October 1951,
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He was 17 years old...

on a psychiatrist's recommendation, Manson was transferred to Natural Bridge Honor Camp, a minimum security institution. Less than a month before a scheduled February 1952 parole hearing, he "took a razor blade and held it against another boy's throat while Manson sodomized him." Manson was transferred to the Federal Reformatory, Petersburg, Virginia, where he was considered "dangerous." In September 1952, a number of other serious disciplinary offenses resulted in his transfer to the Federal Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio, a more secure institution. About a month after the transfer, he became almost a model resident. Good work habits and a rise in his educational level from the lower fourth to the upper seventh grade won him a May 1954 parole.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Manson

That's pretty much unknown, but everybody knows that Manson was crazed on LSD, right?
You see where that goes...

BTW, ring a modern bell at all? Sounds just like all the recent stories we do remember, the authorities knowing all about how messed up someone is... and doing little to nothing. Same shit with the psychos in the earlier shootings this year.

The "hippie" movement can be seen through Malcolm X definition of hip. From the Nature Boys to the Beats to "The Hippies" of the sixties... people cut from that cloth now rave, burn, occupy.

So the next time someone comes along and talks about hippies as if they all "died" in 1970, maybe we can share more with them more than just peace signs and The Warlocks and tye-dye.

I like to remind people that the U.S. government created Ken Keysey and the Merry Pranksters, Harvard and the ivy league/psychiatric community created Timothy Leary. :gossip:

Voyage · Jun 2, 2013

thanks for listening, hope someone enjoys it and by all means comment and critique, as i also hope i've relayed good information.

and now without further ado...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqfW6bw4ZP8"]SHA NA NA LIVE 1969-1989 P.5 - YouTube

wannabe free angus73 · Jun 28, 2013

I don't think hippies are born,its a choice made by those who want the freedom to decide there own path,even when everyone tells you your crazy.

Michael Starless · Jun 30, 2013

There was no official end it was just people became more lazy and selfish

Melanie_86 · Jun 30, 2013

it ended because they grew up Lol... my parents were both a part of that scene, even tho my dad was in the Navy at the time. When he was off duty he was all flairs and Jimmy Hendrix music.......... Sha Na Na! Awesome!!!!!!!!!! At the hop is one of my all time fav songs

hotwater · Jan 13, 2019

The War in Vietnam ended, President Nixon resigned from office, the counterculture had its share of setbacks, and bell-bottoms became
Flair, became straight, once again,….the end of an era......

jimandjan · Jan 14, 2019

Four Dead in Ohio

Aerianne · Jan 14, 2019

newo said: ↑

The younger crowd that came along in the 70s was less sharing and more selfish. What's the point in sharing your stuff with everyone if they're not sharing back? Hippies were replaced by stoners. Idealism was replaced by realism or cynicism.
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Being born in 1960 and graduating high school in 1978, I'd say this statement is inaccurate.

I do think it had alot to do with the change in music. Kids attitudes and lifestyles change with whatever music is popular at the time.

I mean...Disco came about. Need I say more?

lion1978 · Jan 14, 2019

It didn't it just went undercover

deleted · Jan 14, 2019

I'minmyunderwear · Jan 14, 2019

LittleQueenie said: ↑

How did the hippie period end?
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menopause.

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