In the previous chapter, we saw how some Hippies abandoned the idea that the revolution should be carried out in the realms of the mind, and went over to play in the political field. We saw also how this shift made them devolve into adopting Marxist thought, and from there into violence and terrorism.

It should however be reiterated that most of the people discussed in the previous chapter were not Hippies, and did not emerge from the spirit of rock’n’roll, even if they idolized the rock star and saw them as their role models. Most Hippies stayed true to the idea of revolution of the mind, and kept on seeking enlightenment through drugs, music and mysticism.

But here, too, things were devolving fast. The possibility that a trip could be bad has always been known. It featured in some early psychedelic records as well. In the Beatles track ‘She Said, She Said’, John Lennon tells us what happens when your preparation for the trip is bad. The inspiration came from a time when actor Peter Fonda came by to visit him.

Lennon just dropped acid, getting ready for a groovy trip, but Fonda just had to tell him about a near death experience he had during surgery. This was not what Lennon needed to hear as his mind was getting into the psychedelic twirl, and he told Peter to go to hell, but it was too late. The result was this record, which has an important insight about the nature of hallucinogenic drugs: while they can generate a joyful experience, making you feel like you are at the heart of your existence, so can they generate a terrifying experience, making you feel like you don’t exist at all, making you lose your sense of self.

And the more the sixties neared their end, the more the euphoric feeling of happy existence got replaced with the existential dread that Lennon expresses here. At the end of 1967, with the sunlight beams of the Summer of Love still dancing in the background, Lennon once again provided a different type of psychedelic experience.

In ‘I am the Walrus’, Lennon takes the stance of someone who knows best, and mocks all those who can’t understand him. We’ve met this attitude in Beatles records before, but here it is being deconstructed. At the same time that he mocks others, it seems that his own consciousness is falling apart, alternating wildly like a radio needle that is out of control, hearing voices, and once again imagining itself to be dead.

Instead of the confident man we met in ‘Rain’, here it feels like we are dealing with a schizophrenic. In the beginning of 68, the Beatles travelled to Rishikesh, in India, and stayed there for a month as guests of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who taught them his technique of transcendental meditation.

They also wrote many songs there, which ended up on the double white album that they released at the end of that year. Meditation, said Lennon at the time, is a way to get what the psychedelic drugs give you, while avoiding the dangers of the drugs. But Lennon was disappointed and disillusioned by what he experienced in Rishikesh, and some of the white album tracks give expression to this feeling.

‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’ is a satirical song about an American who was there with them, learning from the Maharishi, but in the middle he took a break to go hunting tigers in the jungle, and then came back to continue his studies of a philosophy that preaches non-violence towards any living being.

‘Dear Prudence’ was inspired by one of the women in the group, who suffered a panic attack after meditation, and it took them hours to persuade her to get out of her room. But Lennon reserved the most venomous song for the Maharishi himself, after he heard a rumor that he sexually assaulted the actress Mia Farrow, who was there with them.

Lennon wrote a song that incriminated the Maharishi and accused him of being a fraud, but to avoid legal issues he changed the lyrics, and made it a song about a movie starlet who fools the world into falling in love with her. Luckily so, because the rumor was probably false. But the track ‘Sexy Sadie’ preserves the feeling of bitter disillusionment, and can be heard as a representative of the late sixties spirit.

The white album, officially called simply ‘The Beatles’, also contains Lennon’s parting shot from psychedelia. ‘Glass Onion’ references some of the Beatles psychedelic era records, emphasizes the sense of confusion and detachment from reality expressed in them, and throws them all into a psychedelic cauldron to make something even more confusing.

In the previous records, the confusion was just a side-effect, and the prevailing feeling was that of self-confidence, but here Lennon reinterprets them, and asserts that it was all an illusion. Psychedelia didn’t make reality more transparent, but rather into a glass onion, something that looks clear and transparent, but is actually multilayered and curvilinear.

This is the only track on the album where you still hear the psychedelic sound. Most other tracks provided by Lennon convey a feeling of loneliness and depression. Following the descent from the peaks of the Summer of Love into the hate drenched reality of 1968, and after meditation did not live up to its promises, Lennon feels lost.

In this mental state, drugs were no longer the way to get from an ordinary existence to a joyful existence, but to escape a depressing experience into oblivion. For that, other drugs are more suitable, but also demand a higher price. By 1969, Lennon was addicted to heroin, like many others in the counter-culture.

Many lost their lives as a result, but Lennon managed to gather himself in time and kick the habit, doing it cold turkey. The hell that he went through in order to do it, a hell that many went through at the time, was immortalized in this record. Heroin is a drug for people who experience life as suffering and want to escape it.

It makes you forget all your worries and sorrows, neutralizes all urges and ambitions. This is not what the Hippies were after, and heroin was a drug that they ideologically rejected. But there was one rock band at the time which made heroin and other hard drugs part of its art, and gave us a window into this world.

The songs that Lou Reed wrote for the Velvet Underground were filled with characters that hated their existence and wanted out, and the band turned every song into a little theatre play that dramatized the escape. Some of these records were about drugs. “I have made a big decision”, announces the junky in this record, “I’m gonna try to nullify my life.

” The temptation to turn to nothing, to dissolve into the euphoria of the drug, is what we hear in this classic track. The Hippies were perturbed by the Velvet Underground’s music. At the basis of their way of life was a strong conviction in the power of the human soul, a confidence that the drugs will purify it only from what is unessential, and will leave the essential core.

The Velvet Underground’s music suggested that there is no pure core, that the only thing awaiting at the end of the road is complete self-annihilation, and enslavement to the drug. This is not what the Hippies wanted to hear, and since they were now the dominant force in the rock world, the Velvet Underground was marginalized, remaining underground for the next decade, but constantly undermining Hippie optimism.

But there were also many Hippies who lost themselves to hard drugs, either because they wanted to escape the harsh reality of the late sixties, or because they took the sex-drugs-rock’n’roll ideology too far. The belief that the dominant culture is evil and only wants to prevent us from having fun, along with the belief that drugs are the road to salvation, led many youngsters to the thought that the warnings about heroin are just a fabrication.

From there, the road to hell was open. That’s not to say that only heroin is bad, and only heroin had a destructive effect. The hallucinogenic drugs did a lot of damage as well. Let’s let the Pink Floyd tell us about it. The record ‘Astronomy Domine’ is another psychedelic space trip, under the guidance of our captain, Syd Barrett.

When the record starts we are already in the spaceship, travelling among the planets, and a voice over the communication system is informing us of our location. But rather than helping us, the voice only disorients us – actually, there are two voices here, each providing different information, and together they form an unintelligible mix.

When the singing begins, we encounter the familiar themes of floating and acquiring a different view of reality, but it sounds more scared than euphoric. Nevertheless, there is a sense of progress, as we are gradually getting further away from Earth, going through Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, but then we retreat back to Titan, a Jupiter moon, and are frightened of the stars.

Then again, Oberon, Miranda and Titania, mentioned as the Uranus moons we pass by, are also Shakespearean characters, from two plays that exist between reality and fantasy. In both plays, there is a scene in which people fall under a spell, either from a potion or from beguiling music, which makes them not see reality as it is and leads them to unwelcomed results.

Smack in the middle of the Summer of Love, then, the Floyd already warn us that the psychedelic trip, which is supposed to show us the truth, might be just an illusion. The spaceship then goes into warp speed, growing increasingly out of control. The voice over the com system returns, once again spewing urgent but meaningless information.

When the singing resumes it sounds more like a series of onomatopoeic explosions, with words that express paranoia. Finally, the music slows down, and it seems like we are landing back in reality, but we are still trapped in the mental state we’ve put ourselves into, and who knows if we can ever escape it.

Barrett was the central figure of the British psychedelic scene, and did everything to be worthy of his crown. That meant that he remained switched on at all hours of the day, ingesting copious amounts of LSD pills. In chapter 7 we witnessed the switch he made from a stylish Mod into a disheveled Hippie, who cares only about what’s inside the mind.

But soon enough, the drugs ate his brain to an extent that there wasn’t much left inside. The handsome and talented young man became a total wreck, and his eyes, which always sparkled with an impish twinkle, became black holes in the sky, as Pink Floyd would sing years later. In the record ‘Vegetable Man’, Barrett comes full circle and once again sings about his external look, and he claims that his stinking rags are an expression of what’s left of his soul.

Actually, they are all that’s left of him. He became a soulless creature, a vegetable man. No less disturbing is this record, in which it sounds like Barrett’s personal hell is screaming in our ears in a variety of scary voices. These two amazing records were so perturbing that Pink Floyd decided not to release them, and they saw light only years later.

Barrett made a modest contribution to the band’s second album, but in the beginning of 1968 it was obvious that he was gone, and he was cut from the band. In the next few years his condition went from bad to worse, and he retreated into a shadow world. He tried to develop a solo career, and released several albums full of weird tracks, sung in a bent way that never remained faithful to any tempo.

Eventually he went back to his hometown and lived with his family as a welfare case. He never regained full sanity. While Barrett was sinking slowly, several other heroes of the psychedelic era fell in a more dramatic fashion. We’ve mentioned Brian Jones, the man who founded the Rolling Stones, and also the man who pulled it towards psychedelia, until his drug addiction got him kicked out of the band.

Jones tried to rehabilitate, but in July 69 he was found floating dead in his swimming pool, a death that remains shrouded in mystery to this day. A year later, three blows landed one after the other. In September of 1970, Jimi Hendrix took a large dose of sedatives, threw up in his sleep and choked to death on his own vomit.

Less than a month later, following a period of self-destruction, Janis Joplin was found dead in her hotel room, of a mixture of alcohol and heroin. And in July 71, bloated from alcohol and drugs, Jim Morrison went the same way. This is where the way of life of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll ended up.

Nothing manifests the shattering of the Hippie dream better than the four great rock festival movies of the late sixties. First, the Monterey Pop Festival of June 67, which was, as we recall, the first rock’n’roll festival in history, the first time when musicians from all over the world gathered to celebrate the new generation of popular music.

The beginning of the movie shows us that apart from that, it was a regular entertainment show, in which the audience paid for admittance and sat in rows of chairs, while the police was running things – back then there wasn’t yet talk of the counter-culture, of an alternative way to run a show.

At least not anywhere outside of Haight-Ashbury. But once we are done with this procedural stuff, the movie takes us into a magical place, a historic joy capsule that transpires in our ears and in our eyes. We hear folk-rock, acid-rock, British rhythm ‘n blues, soul, jazz, and classical Indian music, all coming together to create a new musical kaleidoscope, around which a new culture is being formed.

We see all the festival patrons still dressed in the dapper Mod style of the mid-sixties, but already affected by the psychedelic rainbow colors, with everyone trying to add something original of their own. Throughout the movie we see people smiling and having a good time, and when the music begins, we see them melt with pleasure with the lovely harmonies of the Mamas and the Papas and Simon & Garfunkel, sent to ecstatic heights with the mighty soul of Otis Redding, staring agape at the breakthrough performances of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, and going into trance with the enchanting sitar sounds of Ravi Shankar.

You can even see the artists themselves mingle with the crowd, and enjoying the performances of their peers. I don’t know of any documentary that has the same feeling. Two years later, in August 69, came the Woodstock festival. This wasn’t in the warm Sun of California, but in the rain and mud of New York, but that did not deter hundreds of thousands of youngsters from flocking to the place, to take part in a three day festival of sound.

Unlike Monterey, which was organized by a professional producer, here the organizers were young Hippies, and when they realized that the attendance is much larger than the number of tickets, they decided to go all out and announced that the admittance is free. The financial loss was massive, but it was worth it for the experience.

The counter-culture got mobilized to help make it work, and the Hippie communes provided food and other services. Here is where the Woodstock myth was born, the myth of a utopian society in which hundreds of thousands of young people can coexist in fraternity and cooperation, and live on constant high from listening to great music.

The movie shows it very well, shows a society in which everyone contributes to the whole. “We’re all feeding each other! We must be in Heaven, man!” exults one of the speakers on stage. But when the cameras pan out a little, the illusion is revealed. The festival attendants may have felt that they are making it on their own without the authorities, but the authorities were actually involved all the way, and if it wasn’t for the massive help that they provided in food, sanitation and healthcare, the event might have been a large scale disaster.

Musically, we see that rock music now became the sea that all musical rivers meet in. All of the sixties musical styles are represented, but they all now express themselves through the flexible sound of electric guitars. There is still a feeling that the rock nation is united and all styles are in dialogue with each other and feed each other, and there’s also still a lot of Hippie idealism.

The music is fantastic, but the bad vibrations of the last year and a half can already be felt. Here’s Jimi Hendrix performing the Star Spangled Banner, incorporating air raids, anguished screams and funeral music, and perfectly capturing the ambivalent feelings that the American youth had towards their country at the time.

But the myth of Woodstock as a symbol for a new utopian world, for getting ourselves back to the garden, as Joni Mitchell sang, took hold, and became an ideal that every other rock festival would be judged by. The Rolling Stones, who didn’t perform at Woodstock, wanted to be part of that myth as well.

A few months later they started a tour of the States, and announced that they will end it with a free concert in San Francisco. The ambition was to organize a concert based entirely on the means of the counter-culture, with no dependence on the authorities. The movie shows them trying to arrange the concert, which turned out to be a much harder undertaking than they thought.

Once again, the counter-culture mobilized to help, and the local acid-rock bands confirmed their participation, but they still needed to find a place big enough and willing to host the event, not an easy endeavor when you can’t offer the possibility of financial gain. Finally they rented a race track in Altamont, which wasn’t exactly suited for a rock concert, and for security the hired the Hell’s Angels, the biker gang that was considered, as we recall, part of the counter-culture.

We mentioned that the Angels enjoyed taking part in the Hippie love-ins and partake in all the sex and drugs, so they generally behaved themselves, a fact that enabled the counter-culture to ignore their violent side. But hiring them to be in charge of security was asking for trouble, and trouble didn’t fail to arrive.

The movie is called ‘Gimme Shelter’, and it begins with the same sights we’ve seen in the Monterey and Woodstock movies: multitudes of youngsters, dressed in freaky outfits, flocking to Altamont, expecting an unforgettable night. But when the music begins, so do the troubles. As the Jefferson Airplane are playing, the crowd starts to get rowdy, as usual in rock concerts.

Professional security guards would show tolerance, but the Hell’s Angels handle it the only way they knew: with brutal force. The crowd, in large parts tripping on hard drugs, reciprocates in kind, and the situation escalates. Once the Stones take the stage, playing their wild satanic music, all hell breaks loose.

Jagger stops the music several times and tries to put things back in order, reciting the Hippie slogans about peace and love that by then already sounded corny, but his words fall on deaf ears – once the music starts again, so does the violence. Things come to a head when a young man, standing just meters away from the stage, draws a gun and aims it at the Angels, and they immediately pounce on him and stab him to death.

Many other youngsters came out battered and bruised from the event, which, as we recall, was supposed to “create a microcosmic society which sets example to the rest of America as to how one can behave in nice gatherings”. This happened in December 1969, in the same month that the Manson Family took the headlines, and the combined effect of Manson and Altamont terminally destroyed the Hippie pretensions to present an alternative world of peace and love.

Britain had its own rock festival, an annual summer event held since 1968 in the Isle of Wight, organized by a company run by three young brothers. The brothers were driven by a true passion for the music and the values of the youth culture, and in the first couple of years it was a modest event, but after Woodstock, they were inspired to try to arrange a similar event for the British youth.

For the 1970 event, they announced that this time the festival will be a large scale gathering, lasting five days, and serving as a role model for a self-sustaining society. They fenced a large area in the island, booked more than fifty artists, and with much love and care they managed to overcome the complicated logistical problems.

And the youth did indeed show up en masse, coming from Britain, America and Europe, in numbers that were estimated to surpass even Woodstock. But this youth was also driven by the myth of Woodstock, and many refused to cough up the nominal sum that they were asked to pay for a ticket, which was particularly ridiculous considering the amount of money they had to pay to get to the event.

Maintaining the ideal of a free festival was more important to them than compensating the organizers, and not let them go broke. Instead, they stood outside and started banging on the fence, demanding free admittance. The movie shows how the slogans of the counter-culture, that were supposed to represent enlightened values, are twisted and used to justify the most selfish and barbaric behavior.

The artists try to sing above the ruckus, but the bad vibrations spread to every corner of the venue, and affect them as well. Several of them look sullied from too many drugs, and no one is willing to give up part of their pay to help the organizers. There is still a lot of good music, but we already see the rock nation splintering into many styles – heavy metal, progressive rock, fusion, singer-songwriter, country-rock and more – with not much uniting them.

Eventually, the organizers decide to open the gates and let everyone enter for free, and one of them announces it from the stage and speaks in the utopian rhetoric taken from Woodstock, but there are tears in his eyes. Only three years have gone by since Monterey, but that spirit was dead. But the most symbolic thing that happened in 1970 was the collapse of the band that epitomized the sixties, the band that was the heart of youth culture.

In 1968 this heart began to break, because the bundle called the Beatles could no longer contain the personality differences between its four members, and every one of them began to pull in his own direction, and work on projects outside the band. After they completed the white album, they tried to find a way to renew the fun, and thought that maybe it’s time to get back to some live playing.

Their next project, called ‘Let it Be’, was supposed to be based on recordings that will make no use of studio technology, to recapture the spontaneous feeling of their early days. They also hired a film crew to document the process, and the resulting movie shows that there were indeed moments of fun, but also moments when the tensions bubbled up to the surface.

To end it, they decided to try to do a live performance, something they haven’t done in more than two years, and they ascended to the roof of the studio to throw a surprise concert. And so, on the 30th of January, 1969, the Beatles gave what turned out to be their last performance. It was a brilliant idea, which did bring back the spontaneous thrill of their music, and the movie shows the crowds slowly gathering, looking at the wonder happening above their heads.

But after half an hour, the police stop the concert, for disturbing the public order. A glum ending to the performing career of the greatest band of all. The final song in the performance also reflects the changing mood. ‘Get Back’ was written in response to growing xenophobic emotions in Britain, following the arrival of waves of immigrants.

The dream of a new world that will overcome the racism of the past crashed against the rocks of reality, and Paul McCartney wrote the song from the point of view of a person demanding from the immigrants to get back to where they came from, to satirize such people. But the Beatles were afraid that the irony will be lost on the public, and the lyrics were changed to something rather prosaic.

True, this self-censorship characterized the Beatles from the start, but in the early years it made their records more sophisticated, with their hidden meanings smiling behind the innocent mask. In 1969, the ugly events transpiring around them meant that the subjects of their songs were so harsh that in order to maintain innocence, they had to emasculate their records to the point of banality.

The original spirit of the band could no longer exist in the reality of the time. The next Beatles project was the album Abbey Road, for which they once again closed themselves in the studio. But not together. Most of the parts were recorded by every member on his own, and later put together. They are hardly a band here, but four individuals with not much connecting between them.

The only track that somewhat preserves the feeling of togetherness is ‘Because’, with its vocal harmonies. The lyrics are full of puns which turn natural phenomena into feelings, once again creating a sense of unity between Man and nature. But the atmosphere is melancholy – the melody is actually Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata played backwards, and the effect is just as sad.

The last verse – “because the sky is blue, it makes me cry” – pretty much sums up the mood. The music of the Beatles represents pure unadulterated joy, the happiness of everyday life when you’re having fun in your existence. But the late sixties were no fun, and gave them no happy things to sing about.

Without this joy to hold them together, the inner tensions and frictions within the band surfaced. From a group that was once four lads united against the world, they became separate individuals who conversed with each other through lawyers. Once this happened, things just went uglier and uglier. And, as it was throughout the decade, what happened to the Beatles was reflective of the culture around them.

The counter-culture was falling apart, losing the joy of life and sense of purpose that held it together. It used to be about liberation, about expanding your horizons, about achieving harmony, about creating a better world. The entire Hippie identity was constructed around these ambitions. But now, these ambitions lay in tatters, and the identity was in a lost state.

Without this inner core, most of it didn’t make sense anymore. And for the Beatles to remain true to themselves, this left only one viable option. On the last day of 1970, after a bitter fallout, they announced that they are disbanding. The dream was over.

Source Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rpn0iE0Bik

✌️ The Counterculture: When the Kids Took Over

If you ask anyone what the 1960s were all about, you’ll hear a lot about peace, love, rock and roll, protests, long hair, and maybe a Volkswagen van or two. But under all of that paisley and patchouli was something deeper: a full-blown counterculture movement—a youth-led rebellion that challenged everything from politics to fashion to the meaning of life itself.

The counterculture wasn’t just about dropping out. It was about tuning in… to something different.

🌍 What Was the Counterculture?

The “counterculture” of the 1960s was a generation-wide shift in attitudes—a pushback against the buttoned-up values of 1950s America. While their parents were building ranch homes and working 9-to-5s, the kids were growing their hair, questioning the government, and asking, “What’s it all for?”

From music to art to protest marches, the counterculture stood up and said:

“No thanks. We’ll make our own rules.”

This cultural wave wasn’t neat and tidy—it was sprawling, messy, joyful, angry, colorful, and chaotic. But it shaped the world we live in today.

🎶 The Soundtrack of a Revolution

The counterculture had its own sound, and it came from the radio, coffeehouses, and outdoor festivals:

• Bob Dylan told us the times were a-changin’
• The Beatles evolved from mop tops to mystics
• Joan Baez brought folk music to the front lines
• Jimi Hendrix played the national anthem like a protest anthem
• Country Joe McDonald asked, “Whoopee! We’re all gonna die?”

🎧 Watch: Country Joe & The Fish – “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” (Woodstock)

Music wasn’t just entertainment—it was activism, and it gave voice to the discontent simmering in the youth of America.

✊ Political and Social Rebellion

The counterculture wasn’t just about music festivals and fringe vests. It was fueled by major social movements:

• The Civil Rights Movement challenged segregation and systemic racism
• The Antiwar Movement protested the Vietnam War and the draft
• The Women’s Liberation Movement began asking big questions about equality
• The Gay Rights Movement saw its first major uprising at Stonewall in 1969

Young people weren’t just listening. They were marching, organizing, and demanding change.

🧠 Expanding Consciousness

You can’t talk counterculture without talking expanded minds. Psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms were seen by many as tools for breaking through the illusions of society.

Timothy Leary became a cultural guru with his famous phrase:

“Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

But it wasn’t just about getting high—it was about questioning reality itself, diving into Eastern religions, meditation, astrology, and alternative lifestyles. Suddenly, suburbia looked a little dull.

👗 The Look of the Revolution

If you couldn’t hear the counterculture, you could see it coming from a mile away.

• 🌼 Tie-dye and fringe jackets
• ☮️ Peace signs and love beads
• 👖 Bell-bottom jeans and patched denim
• 🌸 Flower crowns and granny dresses

Fashion became a protest. Neat haircuts and collared shirts? That was “the man.” Long hair and barefoot? That was freedom.

🏕️ Communes, Coffeehouses, and Campus Sit-ins

The counterculture wasn’t just about rejecting the old—it was about building something new:

• Communes popped up across the country, with young people farming, living collectively, and raising chickens (poorly)
• Coffeehouses became cultural hubs for poetry readings, folk music, and political talk
• Colleges became hotbeds of activism, where students staged sit-ins and teach-ins

This wasn’t just talk. It was action. The movement moved.

🧨 The Pushback and the Legacy

By the early 1970s, the counterculture began to fade. The Vietnam War dragged on, and many idealists became disillusioned. The Altamont Free Concert turned violent. Drugs took a heavy toll. And some former hippies traded their love beads for briefcases.

But even as it faded, the counterculture had changed America:

• It reshaped music, politics, and personal freedom
• It led to environmental movements, human rights advances, and more open conversations about race, gender, and sexuality
• It made questioning authority a permanent part of youth culture

☮️ Final Thoughts

The counterculture wasn’t perfect, and it didn’t fix everything. But it shook the foundations. It asked questions no one dared ask before. And for one amazing stretch of time, it felt like peace, love, and music really might change the world.

And maybe, just maybe, they did.

☀️ The Summer of Love and the Psychedelic Explosion

If the 1960s were a rollercoaster, then 1967 was the free-fall drop—a moment of electric, colorful chaos and euphoric counterculture. That was the Summer of Love, a season where music, art, and rebellion collided in a swirling, tie-dye spectacle of idealism and experimentation.

And at the heart of it all? Psychedelia—not just a style, but a state of mind.

🌸 What Was the Summer of Love?

It wasn’t an official event. There were no invitations or start times. But by the summer of 1967, nearly 100,000 young people poured into San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. They came from all over the country, drawn by rumors of peace, love, and a new way of life.

They brought guitars, dreams, and a firm belief that love—not war—was the answer.

The media coined the term “Summer of Love,” and while the name stuck, the experience was anything but lighthearted. Yes, there were flowers in your hair (thank you, John Phillips), but there was also protest, psychedelic drugs, and an explosion of cultural energy that would forever change music, fashion, art, and attitudes.

🎶 The Soundtrack of a Generation

The Summer of Love was fueled by a new psychedelic sound. Guitars shimmered with reverb, lyrics stretched into cosmic territory, and bands aimed to expand minds, not just sell records.

Here’s who was on the turntable:

• The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band dropped in June ’67 and changed everything
• The Grateful Dead – local Haight-Ashbury heroes who played free shows in Golden Gate Park
• Jefferson Airplane – “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” became instant anthems
• Jimi Hendrix – set guitars and imaginations ablaze at the Monterey Pop Festival
• The Doors – with lyrics that hinted at darker dimensions: “Break on Through”

🎥 Watch: Jefferson Airplane – “White Rabbit” (1967)

Music festivals became tribal gatherings. The Monterey Pop Festival (June 1967) was the spiritual kickoff, introducing Jimi Hendrix to American audiences and launching Janis Joplin’s career with Big Brother and the Holding Company.

🎨 Psychedelia Takes Over

The visuals were just as wild as the sound.

Psychedelic art burst from the walls of San Francisco’s concert venues, record shops, and head shops. Posters by Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, and Rick Griffin looked like acid trips on paper—melting letters, pulsating patterns, and colors that vibrated like guitar feedback.

Even fashion joined in the fun. Tie-dye shirts, paisley prints, love beads, fringe jackets, and granny glasses became the unofficial uniform. There were no rules—just wear what made you feel free.

💊 The Drug Scene

Let’s be honest—psychedelia had help.

Drugs like LSD and marijuana were part of the experiment. Influenced by writers like Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception) and Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary (“Turn on, tune in, drop out”), young people turned to psychedelics to unlock new ways of seeing and thinking.

The good news? It fueled some unforgettable music and mind-blowing art.

The bad news? It also led to addiction, burnout, and a darker undercurrent that turned the Summer of Love’s utopia into something messier by the time fall rolled around.

🌍 The Message

The Summer of Love wasn’t just about music and flower crowns. It was a philosophical statement: a rejection of consumerism, materialism, racism, war, and authority.

This generation wasn’t waiting for permission to live differently. They created their own society—one that embraced peace, art, community, and spiritual growth.

And sure, maybe it was a little naïve. But for one bright, unforgettable summer, it felt possible.

🌅 After the Summer

By the end of 1967, the Haight-Ashbury scene had changed. Overcrowding, drug abuse, and media exploitation soured the vibe. The movement drifted from San Francisco, but its ripples continued for decades.

• The hippie ethos spread to college campuses and communes
• Psychedelic music evolved into prog rock, jam bands, and ambient electronic
• The fashion and aesthetics still influence everything from festival culture to album covers

✌️ Final Thoughts

The Summer of Love and the rise of psychedelia marked a turning point—a moment when an entire generation said, “Let’s try something different.”

They weren’t perfect. But they dared to dream.

And whether you were there or just vibing to a Jefferson Airplane record years later, you can still feel it: the beat, the colors, the freedom, and the unshakable belief that love might just change the world.

Here’s a YouTube video that does a great job explaining the start of the beatniks.  The author shows his philosophical roots in his screen name “Zarathustra’s Serpent”.

This is a story that has never been told. There are so many books about the sixties, and so many things that have been written about this period. And still, despite reading anything I could find on the subject, I have yet to encounter any attempt to show how it all makes sense when put together, any effort to fully document the spiritual journey that the protagonists of the story went through.

This series will endeavor to fill the gap, to tell the full story of psychedelic music, and the culture that emerged around it. To me, this is the focal point of the sixties, the thing around which most else revolves. The series will tell the story of how it emerged, what it was all about, how it fell apart, and what happened in the aftermath.

And through that, we are pretty much going to tell the story of pop culture and pop music in the second half of the twentieth century. So, open your minds, and let me take you on this magical journey out of the past. Now before we begin to talk about psychedelia, we must understand where it came from.

And you can’t understand psychedelia if you don’t first of all start by talking about Beat. Our story begins at the end of the 1930s. This is the period known as the swing era, the period in which the big bands took over the pop world. So big band swing became the new mainstream, and when this happens to a pop style, the original fans of the style always feel a split.

Suddenly, there are many artists out there who pretend to be part of the style, but the music they produce lacks the inner essence of it. The fans then make a distinction between music that they perceive as “real”, and music they perceive as a fake imitation. What swing fans called “real” swing was a rhythmic style, in which the entire band would create an enormous forward drive, compelling your body to break out in an ecstatic dance.

And the soloists, carried on the wings of this propulsion, would then improvise solos that would lift your spirit to the heavens. But among the general public, that didn’t get the essence of swing, the most popular records did not have that quality. They had formal similarities to swing, using the same instruments and melodies, but rather than being ruled by the swing feeling, the players would play in the traditional European way of following notes; or sometimes they would try to imitate the fervor of the “real” swing bands, but since they lacked the inner essence of it, the outcome was crass and tasteless.

Among swing fans and musicians, the prevailing feeling was that the music industry robbed their music and neutered it. In the beginning of the forties, a number of black musicians assembled in Harlem, and started to look for a new way. The way they saw it, the white industry robbed the blacks of Swing and of all the other black-made authentic jazz forms, so they needed to dive deeper into the logic of jazz and distill its essence.

Grouping in small bands of five or six members, they would begin playing a familiar pop song, but then ditch the melody in favor of improvisation, and set sail into the unknown. Leaving only the chord structure of the original song, the soloists would play with breathtaking speed and create a completely new tune.

Every time someone else would take the lead and the other musicians would follow, and then another soloist would take his ideas and develop them in his way, and the other band members would react to that. Thus, a kind of collective consciousness was formed, which would produce an original musical piece.

This music could no longer be experiences in the traditional way of listening to the melody. To enjoy it, you had to get into the music, to feel yourself regenerated at that moment along with it. This new style was termed bop, or bebop. Bebop created a space in which black consciousness could develop freely, without meddling from the white establishment, and the seeds that were sown in it would grow rebellious generations of African-Americans for decades to come.

But there were also some white people who connected to bebop, whites whose soul was welded in the furnace of jazz and could therefore understand the new musical experience. One of them was a young man named Jack Kerouac, who aspired to be a novelist and find a new form of literary expression. Kerouac, who lived near Harlem, had the chance to experience bebop in the years of its formation, and found in it a source of inspiration.

He regarded the bebop musicians as spiritual guides, artists who are paving a new spiritual way, and he wanted to bring their spirit into literature, to write in the way that they played. But Kerouac could not find the way to do so, at least not until 1944, the year he met two people with which he could form his own jam session.

William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg were also young bohemians who were looking for another way, and the three realized that they have a spiritual connection, and decided that they represent the birth of a new consciousness. In their view, Western civilization became a heartless technocracy, an industrial-militaristic-capitalistic society, which subjugates the humane side of Man and enslaves it to the rational side, and therefore its logic is a cold and inhumane logic driven only by utilitarian motives.

Man thus became an unhappy creature, and to regain his happiness, we must liberate the human spirit from the shackles of this technocracy. Their goal was to find the way to freedom, and liberate humanity. William Burroughs, the elder of the bunch, became the mentor. Burroughs was born to a wealthy family and could have led a comfortable life, but instead he decided to dedicate his life to liberation from social conventions and lies, and find the truth about reality.

How can this be done? One way, believed Burroughs, was to drop out of conformed society, to live outside of the conventional mind. So he abandoned his bourgeois existence, and moved to the sphere populated by criminals, junkies, prostitutes and tramps. Another way is through the use of mind-altering drugs, and Burroughs tried every known substance and every possible drug cocktail to see what they can teach him about his mind.

He soon became a junky, but for him, it was all part of the purgatory you have to go through to see existence for what it is. In his dealings with underworld people, Burroughs learned the slang of their world, and in it he found the term which he used to signify the state of existence that he was after.

The word ‘Beat’, in this slang, meant a state of losing everything and lying in the gutter. It meant that you were beaten by life, but for Burroughs, being “beat” signified exactly what he wanted: to lose all the baggage that conformed society instilled in him, and become free. Burroughs imparted this idea to his new friends, and for Kerouac, who was a Catholic, the word ‘Beat’ immediately connected to the concept of Beatitude, and thus took on a meaning of holy blessedness.

And so, the term ‘Beat’ came to signify a state in which you beat your old identity and demolish it, and in this way become liberated from the lies that society implanted in you, and become pure and real. The word would become the center of the new consciousness, and the three friends would eventually call themselves The Beat Generation.

The existence that Kerouac espoused was based on the ideal of the bebop musicians: a purely spontaneous existence, in which you recreate your life in each and every moment, instead of following preexisting patterns. When a jazz instrumentalist gets carried on the wings of the music, it takes over him, and the musical ideas spring from his subconscious without thought.

Thought comes a little bit later, when he develops these ideas further, but they are initialized in a spontaneous way. This is how Kerouac wanted to live, and he intended to then record his existence autobiographically in print, and thus create literary bop. But his nature was that of an intellectual and a novelist, a man whose existence is mired in preexistent patterns, and hence he was in a bind: to experience the existence he wanted, and thus to create the literature he imagined, he had to first give up on his identity as a novelist, and so actually give up on his dream.

The only way out of the bind was to find spiritual guides who will drag him along with them. Ginsberg and Burroughs took him part of the way, but to get to where he wanted, he needed a different kind of guide. And fortunately, he met him shortly after. Neal Cassady was a truly unique individual. A hyperactive young man who couldn’t rest for one moment, and was driven by an insatiable lust to swallow as much life as he could, Cassady was always in motion, always talking, always randomly bringing up new ideas and taking his line of thought to strange places, always looking for new adventures, always hunting for new sexual conquests.

He seemed to be living on a different level from most people, a level that is more intense. He was the essence of the spontaneous existence that Kerouac championed, a perfect model to follow. He also loved stealing cars and going out on long trips along the long roads of America, and he dragged Kerouac along with him.

Between the years 1947 and 1951, Cassady and Kerouac crisscrossed America from top to bottom and from side to side, never staying in one place for more than a few weeks, living from temporary jobs, going to jazz performances whenever they had the chance, and experiencing all sorts of adventures. At the end of this period, Kerouac sat down to write a book that would document their travels.

This was one of the components of Kerouac’s new literary style: real life experiences precede the writing. Just like a bebop musician creates the music on the spot and doesn’t read it from the paper, so should the novelist first live the story, and only later write it down. Unlike writers of fiction who make up their stories, Kerouac’s books were always autobiographical.

There were novelists who preceded him in that, such as Marcel Proust who was one of his influences, but what exemplified Kerouac was that his writing style was also inspired by bop. To write the book, he bought a big roll of paper and stuck it in his typewriter so he wouldn’t need to stop and change pages, and over the course of a few weeks, so goes the legend, he poured everything on paper in the order that the words came into his mind, never stopping to think and never rewriting.

There are places in the book where you can see Kerouac riding an inspirational wave, and producing a long sentence in which the flowing stream of words flourishes and creates a kind of literary jazz. Here’s one of the segments that best represent his rhythmic and spontaneous style of writing, telling about the time when he introduced Allen Ginsberg to Neal Cassady, and how the two immediately clicked: They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “awww!” We learn a few interesting things from this paragraph.

First, the belief that the only true existence is a burning existence. In philosophy, this worldview is identified with the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who claimed that fire is the foundation of all existence, and that there is nothing stable in existence, but everything is in flow. According to the worldview presented here by Kerouac, life that is lived on the basis of steady and established principles distances you from the real existence, and to be real you must burn in the fire of an existence that is regenerating at every moment.

Secondly, we are introduced to the idealization of madness, to the belief that mad people are people who burn, people who experience a more genuine existence than the people who are called “normative” and “sane” by society. Third, we see that Kerouac feels that he himself is not a burning man, but a writer shackled by words, and hence existing always a step behind real existence.

All he can do is follow the real people, try to capture them in his writing, in a hope that in this way his art will get as close as possible to portraying real existence. The central character of the novel, therefore, is Cassady, and the book tries to capture his flame. The book is called On the Road, and it was meant to represent the new consciousness.

But Kerouac couldn’t find anyone who would publish it. The other hero of the segment is Allen Ginsberg, who is also described as a burning madman. But Ginsberg, unlike Cassady, also had a normative side, that wanted to become part of society and be a respected academic and poet. Following an incident in which his involvement with Burroughs’ criminal friends got him in trouble with the law, Ginsberg decided to “go straight”, and committed himself to a psychiatric ward, to the very thing that symbolized everything Beat consciousness was against.

The psychiatric ward, in the 1950s, was a notorious manifestation of the technocratic society. Since the prevailing belief in those years was that rational thought can decipher everything in the world, the human mind was also perceived as something that can be completely outlined in mathematical means, and science, therefore, was seen as being able to understand and cure any mental illness.

Psychiatrists were regarded as almost all-knowing, and anyone who suffered from a mental problem, which in the fifties was a code word for anyone who deviated from the social norms, was sent to them to get fixed, in techniques such as electric shocks to the brain, or, in more severe cases, lobotomy.

Ginsberg willfully submitted himself to this institute, but it was there, in the belly of the beast, that he found his mentor, the man who helped him discover his artistic path. His name was Carl Solomon, and he too committed himself, but not because he wanted to become normative. Solomon was marked in early age as a very gifted person, but he believed he will never be able to realize his full potential as long as his rational side controls him.

Hence, he started acting like a madman, and when he was brought before the psychiatrists, he demanded to be lobotomized, believing this will finally free his spirit from the rational side of his mind. But the doctors did not oblige, and instead kept him in the ward and tried different methods. But in that, they put him just in the right place to influence the great poet of Beat, and consequently the course of history.

Ginsberg realized that Solomon is another manifestation of Beat consciousness, a man who aspires to liberate the irrational side of the human spirit, and thus a model that can direct him. Inspired by Solomon, he gave up on his plan to conform to society’s norms, and instead left the ward and moved to San Francisco, the capital state of non-conformity, to become part of the poet community in the place.

On October 7th, 1955, the poet Kenneth Rexroth organized a poetry reading in San Francisco, providing a stage for new poets to present their work before the local bohemia. Young poets such as Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder got up to read their poems, presenting a new sensibility that combined ecological consciousness, Zen Buddhist influences and other things.

But the show was stolen by Allen Ginsberg, whose poem Howl dazzled its listeners. The three part poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon, but stylistically it is inspired by Kerouac, and it articulates the philosophy of Beat. The first part opens with the assertion that he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, and proceeds with a flowing, rhythmic and mesmerizing portrayal of everything that the owners if these minds did to themselves in the past decade, going through self-beating, hobo life, drug abuse, sexual perversion, crime, bop ecstasy, intentional insanity, electric shocks, mystical quests and more, and describing it as a desperate and heroic search for salvation.

The second part opens with the question what made them be like this, and replies: Moloch! Moloch, the old god, is used here to symbolize the industrial-capitalist-militarist system, and the poem describes how it controls our minds, crushes our spirit and twists our consciousness. The third part poses the model of Carl Solomon, as the man who found the way to take us to the other side and save our spirit.

The song is tremendously powerful, but again, the words themselves are not the entire story, but also the way in which the song was performed. Egged on by Kerouac who was sitting in the crowd, Ginsberg entered a seemingly trance state, melting into the flow of his words and washing over the crowd with wave after wave.

His electric performance so exhilarated the poet community that many of them decided to adopt Beat as the center of their art. The new consciousness was beginning to spread. So, let’s summarize Beat consciousness: the aspiration of the Beat generation was to liberate the spiritual side of Man, which they claimed is being repressed by a society ruled by a cold technocratic rationality.

This society constructs our minds and determines our identity, and to be free we must first of all smash everything that this society instilled in us. There are several ways to do so, such as vagrant life, which prevents you from being attached to one place; lawless life, outside of established society; exposure to electric shocks to the brain; and of course mind altering drugs.

In that way you become free, and being free means letting your subconscious spontaneously guide you, employing rational thought only as an aid. When everyone operates like that, they let their unique inner self express itself, and then they feed each other with ideas, just like in a bebop jam session.

This is the ideal that the San Francisco Beat community aspired to, and they would sit in coffee shops, smoke cannabis, listen to poets read their poetry to a jazz backup, and embroil themselves in philosophical contemplations of existence. By 1957, their influence was beginning to be felt. Kerouac’s book finally got published, and became a hit with the youngsters, a book that defined a generation.

Another thing that happened that year was a first newspaper article on the Beat scene of San Francisco, whose author decided to name its members Beatniks, basing it on the new Soviet satellite Sputnik, since he claimed that they were both equally far out. As a result of this fame, the scene was joined by many other youngsters, who lacked the inner understanding of Beat, but just imitated the way of life of sitting in coffee shops and rolling joints.

A typical Beatnik look emerged, kind of a hybrid of the looks of European Existentialist and African-American bebop artists: shoulder length hair, goatee, shabby clothing. In conformed society, “Beatnik” became a synonym for anyone who didn’t want to fit in the system, and they were seen as bums who are only into sex and drugs.

Those who did have inner understanding of Beat felt that the original spirit of the community died, and they dispersed all over the country and started to look for new paths. And on that, in the coming episodes.

Source Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7gJGMeTz2Q