Original subtitles

1967, the summer of love.

People come here to love one another.

Sex, drugs, rock and roll.

I was the idea of total assault on

the culture.

By any means necessary.

But not all peace, love and understanding.

I'm not committed to non-violence in any

way.

We all thought that we were going to

get killed.

We never imagined living past 30.

The explosion that summer came from a mix

of naive idealism.

There was a rebellious group of kids in

the 1890s.

Mysticism, radical politics and chemistry.

I really did think that LSD was the

answer to the world's problems.

All bubbling to the surface on the west

coast of the United States.

This series explores the highs and lows of

that cultural revolution which would change the way

we live to this day.

Culture runs a lot deeper than politics.

There are millions and millions of people living

differently as a result of the counterculture.

Tomorrow, or just the end of time.

It's the time of the season.

When love runs high.

In this time, give it to me easy.

And let me try with pleasured hands to

take you in the sun.

This is the Golden Gate Park in San

Francisco.

It's the place where the hippie was born

on January the 14th, 1967.

San Francisco's underground newspaper put a call out

for all strands of what it called the

counterculture to gather here for a party like

no party in history.

A party that would change the world forever.

You could argue that the popular moment of

the hippie begins with the human being in

1967.

Come to the Golden Gate Park, it'll be

a gathering of the tribes.

That was the expression at the time.

And the tribes they were talking about were

the new left tribe doing politics to change

politics at Berkeley, and a kind of new

communalist, psychedelic tribe hunkered in San Francisco.

And it was simply meant to be literally

a gathering in which we could practice being

together.

I showed up for the gathering of the

tribes.

It was one of those things when you

saw that many people in the park at

the be-end that something definitely was going

on.

Turn on.

Out.

They called it the human be-end, and

it brought together for the first time all

the disparate tribes of what soon would be

called the hippies, eco-warriors mixed freely with

acid-trippers.

Very large turnout.

There was like 30,000 or 40,000

of what then became known as hippies.

And the idea that individuals would take LSD

in an open crowd setting and dance around

was just, you know, unheard of.

The radical left turned up as well.

We're going to march tonight for two reasons.

One, because the chances are...

That's the moment when Jerry Rubin, who had

been a Berkeley radical, realized that there were

more hippies than there were radicals, and Rubin

decided, Aha, that's where the action is, that's

where the numbers are, and out of that,

he and Abby Hoffman not long after create

the hippies.

Within a year, Jerry Rubin had formed the

hippie anarchist party, the Yippies.

Jerry spoke, but I don't think anybody listened

because nobody was really...

And nobody would have remembered anyway because they're

too stoned.

We were there, and we felt already what

was going to then become the summer of

love in 67 was this really interesting blend

of lifestyle preferences, you know, in their various

uniforms of whatever tribe they belonged to.

And that started to be that sort of,

you know, that ripple effect that went out

across the country when songs like If You're

Going to San Francisco drew like a magnet,

you know, drew all these other kids from

around the country.

If you're going to San Francisco Be sure

to wear some flowers in your hair The

Bee-In was the galvanising moment in the

birth of the hippie movement.

They called it the Gathering of the Tribes.

But who were these tribes, and what brought

them to the party that day?

The earliest, and perhaps strangest of the tribes,

was called the Nature Boys.

They wandered

very far, very far Over land and sea

The Nature Boys even had a hit song,

so popular that it earned its own early

form of music video.

The song was written about a wandering group

of back-to-nature devotees who had rejected

mainstream society.

They lived on a diet of raw vegetables,

fruits and nuts out in the Californian wilderness.

Its writer was Eden Abez, who became a

celebrity through a number of eccentric TV appearances.

The nation's number one song hit, Nature Boy.

His name is Eden Abez, and he's bringing

his bicycle onto our Gulf Oil stage right

now.

Nature Boy.

Dwight, Nature Boy is really the story of

my life.

I was born with a love for nature

and a desire to find God.

Finally, I came to look upon nature as

a great symphony and upon love as the

theme of that symphony.

They were kind of the original Nature Boys.

They were these organic, bearded, free-spirited guys,

and they tended to follow the weather and

the seasons and the crops.

So when it was hot in L.A.,

in the summer, they would go to Northern

California where it was cooler.

And then when it got too cold in

Northern California, they would come down to Palm

Springs and hang out in the caves near

Tokwitz Canyon.

And they sort of ate off the land,

and they lived off the land, and they

were truly these, like, free-spirited Nature Boys.

Astonishingly, the group's origins were in Germany.

Lieben's Reform, or Life Reform, was a back

-to-nature cult that had made its way

to California in the early 20th century.

Like the hippies 70 years later, it was

a revolt against industrialisation.

There was a rebellious group of kids that

were coming of age in the 1880s and

the 1890s in Germany, and they decided to

head for the wilderness, to head for nature.

There was as many as 50,000 of

these kids wandering around Germany, and if you're

wandering and you don't like the climate, just

keep wandering, you know, wander to America.

You've seen the pictures of Yosemite and the

Grand Canyon and the beaches in California.

They came here.

There was an entire flock of young people

there during World War I, formed a little

encampment up there in Palm Canyon.

It alerted some of the authorities in town.

They weren't sure why all these Germans were

converging up there, so they thought that maybe

they were spies or something for the German

military.

There was a lot of people that were

just really disenchanted, like right now too, there's

a lot of people that are very disenchanted

right now too, that we look at something

like that and they say, hey, I think

I want to join these people and I

want to be a part of what's going

on here.

This is Rudolf Valentino, the famous film star

who died right after this.

The visitation of the movie star Rudolf Valentino

was symptomatic of the exotic status the wandering

nomads had now gained.

They had become something of a weird tourist

attraction in the Californian desert.

Hollywood's courting of the nature boys encouraged one

of their number, Gypsy Boots, to bring his

clean-living ideals out of the wilderness, into

the heart of the city and open California's

first health food store in 1959.

Way before anyone was really even thinking about

things like this, my dad opened the Back

to Nature Health Hut, sort of multi-purpose

health food restaurant, cabaret.

A lot of celebrities showed up, Gloria Swanson,

very famous, Liberace, famous people came because it

was this crazy, weird little thing that was

serving carrot juice and organic rice and things

and meals and seaweed and nobody was doing

that.

When I look back at my dad's life,

it's very clear to me that he was

a guy way ahead of his time and

then the times sort of caught up.

What started with a few nomads eating berries

in the desert had found fertile ground.

The West Coast had always been a place

for dreamers and explorers.

San Francisco was the final frontier.

San Francisco was always intrigued by the exotic

and that went really back to gold rush

days.

There's a very good passage in Kenneth Rexroth's

memoir about arriving in San Francisco in the

1920s and being immediately struck by the easygoing

nature of the city and how it was

so much different than any other place he

had been in the United States.

San Francisco was different because it was just

the center of weirdness.

It was where you could go and live

however you wanted to and wear whatever clothes

you wanted and let your hair grow and

you weren't thinking about the workforce.

It just wasn't part of the consideration of

everyday life.

San Francisco was the breeding ground for a

world view based on personal growth and fulfilment

rather than personal gain.

The second tribe that made up the hippies

looked inward to the liberation of the self.

They were the truth-seekers.

If the naturists look back to Germany, the

truth-seekers were inspired by one of the

maddest, baddest Englishmen of the 20th century.

Alistair Crowley was an early prophet of Eastern

mysticism.

Crowley was one of the pioneers of introducing

yoga to the West and at the time

it was seen as rather devilish, very alien

and he used it in his own magical

Western rituals in the bedroom and elsewhere.

He was homosexual, he was bisexual, he was

promiscuous.

Crowley's sexual ideas and sexual politics underlays the

whole idea and the politics of free love.

By the 1920s, Alistair Crowley had earned the

title the world's most evil man.

He dedicated his life to Satan and the

devil and he just, he did it to

the hilt.

He just basically transgressed against every notion of

conventional behaviour or morality or ethics.

He put on magical rituals.

Lights, incense, drumming, violins, poetry.

There was a punch bowl passed around, it

was called the loving cup.

There was a mixture of fruit juices, drops

of opium and mescaline.

This is a line that runs directly through

all the beings and the happenings of 1967

in Haight.

And the essence of it became this catchphrase,

do without wilt, so be the whole of

the law.

And it's more or less a kind of

command to break all the rules, to go

beyond all the boundaries.

Crowley became a kind of icon.

He was picked up in the rock and

roll world.

In 1967, he appears on the cover of

Sgt Pepper and it's John Lennon, we think,

who put him there.

In an interview many years later, he said,

well, the whole point of the Beatles was

to do what you want, to take your

own responsibility.

That's why we put him on the cover.

But it was another Englishman on the Sgt

Pepper cover that would bring Crowley's mix of

the East and drugs to the west coast

of America.

The upper-class writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley.

Crowley and Huxley met in 1930 in Berlin.

Crowley in his diaries records fabulous dinners with

Huxley and it was said that he introduced

the writer to peyote, to mescaline.

By the early 50s, Huxley returned to this

idea of mescaline for opening up the inner

self to its true nature and then after

that he writes The Doors of Perception, his

most influential book.

For the truth-seeking tribes of the hippie

movement, Aldous Huxley was a guru and a

pioneer.

By the early 60s, Huxley was bringing these

ideas to a retreat 200 miles south of

San Francisco, which was to become the centre

for Eastern thought, meditation and self-exploration.

As people search for a safety valve in

a world that's become a pressure cooker, here

in the United States they've found one way.

At Esalen on the Pacific coast of California,

they're reaching for an odd kind of sanity

in an odder, madder world.

We started by inviting all our favourite authors

to Esalen on this property that my family

owned two miles of Big Sur coast.

Michael Murphy founded Esalen ten years ago, graduated

in psychology and philosophy and studied meditation in

India.

We wanted to open up a worldwide conversation

between these great minds and Arnold Twainby, the

most famous historian in the world, came and

lectured to tell us that the great event

of the century would be the coming of

Buddhism to the West.

But it was Huxley who propagated the idea

that psychotropic drugs could aid the individual to

achieve the goals of Eastern meditation.

There's an extraordinary tantric text between Shiva and

his divine consort Parvati, the goddess.

And the goddess asks him, what is the

secret of your kind of enlightened consciousness?

And he answers by giving her a list

of 118 exercises in consciousness which will help.

Aldous Huxley was lecturing around the United States

at that time on the human potential, human

potentialities.

A tremendous inspiration, but not simply from Eastern

philosophy, but from its marriage to an evolutionary

vision of human nature.

This mix of Eastern philosophy and journeys into

the unconscious made his book the Bible of

the hippie generation.

Jim Morrison of The Doors chose that name,

The Doors, because of Huxley's book.

And everyone around that time would have read

The Doors of Perception.

But rather than a serious academic study, the

hippies viewed Huxley's barely readable book as a

guide on how to get high.

And getting high got a whole lot quicker

when the hippies discovered a wonder drug called

LSD.

The alchemy from straight to hippie might start

the first time you swallow a sugar cube

impregnated with a drug.

Although welcomed by Huxley, LSD appeared to offer

the hippie truth-seekers the keys to The

Doors of Perception in an instant.

I felt.

I guess that would be my last time.

I just felt.

Everything was very emotional.

And I could see that I fitted in

with all the rest of what was going

on in the world.

The thing that happened is you got...

I'd studied mysticism, both Christian mysticism and other

people's mysticism, and all this Huxley and so

on when I was at Stanford in the

50s.

And LSD gives you what a lot of

people had to meditate for ten years in

order to have.

It's not enlightenment, but it is a mystical

experience.

MUSIC PLAYS LSD

was first manufactured by Albert Hoffman in Switzerland

in 1938.

It was the military who first experimented with

the new drug.

The CIA was on the search for a

Cold War weapon that could destroy the minds

of the enemy.

Receiving a small dose of LSD, they're confused.

That period of LSD was a dark period

because they wanted an incapacitating agent that didn't

kill you.

And so there was this belief that Russia

had these agents and therefore the United States

had to develop them.

And they would give it to unknowing subjects

and then just observe them.

Military hospitals were used as test sites.

One employee's wife became a subject.

Well, I think it's time for you to

have your lysergic acid.

Drink this down and we'll be back after

a while and see how you're doing.

I just couldn't.

I couldn't possibly tell you.

It's here.

Can't you feel it?

This whole room.

Everything is in colour and I can feel

the air.

I can see it.

I can see all the molecules.

I'm part of it.

I don't know how I can tell you.

Can't you see it?

Another such test subject was the writer Ken

Kesey, who had been a night nurse in

a mental hospital in San Francisco when the

CIA covertly got him to take the drug

and one flew over the cuckoo's nest was

the outcome.

I would have never written cuckoo's nest without

LSD.

I think a lot of that stuff that

was written by all of these guys would

never have happened.

If they'd have just stayed on the get

-up early in the morning and drank a

lot of coffee and do what you can.

LSD, which began in scientific experiments in the

1950s but by the late 50s was beginning

to spread beyond that and I suppose most

important in this was actually Aldous Huxley in

Los Angeles, who was turning on Cary Grant.

Cary Grant took over 100 trips of the

then-legal drug, later saying the effect was

startling.

In one LSD dream, I imagined myself as

a giant penis launching off from Earth like

a spaceship.

I think it would be extremely good for

almost anybody with fixed ideas and with a

great certainty about what's what to take this

thing and to realise that the world he

has constructed is by no means the only

world.

I was privileged to be given LSD by

Aldous and my sitter was Laura Huxley, his

wife.

So that was my first experience.

It was not my way in to expanded

consciousness.

Nevertheless, it gave me some sense of what

was going on and then this emerged as

one of the great door openers in the

culture around us.

MUSIC By

the mid-'60s, acid was raining down on the

youth of California.

Somebody gave me my first LSD at Berkeley

and that was a hugely life-altering experience.

I'd always been interested in whatever religion points

to, but I hadn't had a deep personal

experience of feeling connected to everything and having

whatever I thought of as my identity dissolve

and just be part of the pulse of

life.

For me, once I experienced that, there was

no going back.

I could never again buy into the notion

that I was separate.

Like mushrooms, right, they grow underground and they

pop up and what pops up looks like

it's separate, but it's not.

MUSIC San

Francisco was drawing people from all round the

world, including Newcastle.

There wasn't any really political or cultural reason

why I came to California and settled here.

It was because of health.

I was a chronic asthmatic and got magnetised.

I did a lot of dope.

I must have held the world record for

LSD.

The things that I saw under its influence,

I'll never forget.

I was sitting there with my drummer next

to me and he was real skinny and

he had a bit of a beard and

he was dressed in white.

And all of a sudden he became Jesus

Christ.

I mean, for real, it was like Jesus.

And I went so far inside myself that

I guess what happened is I started to

cry and the teardrops that were falling were

like slow motion and they were like bouncing

off my chest and then splashing all over

the carpet and the carpet, tiny little bits

would start to move and I would realise

that it was people and that I was

hovering over the earth with thousands of people

looking up going, Feed us!

Feed us!

Give us food!

I really did think that LSD was the

answer to the world's problems.

I was convinced that we could change the

way we thought, felt about things.

Not everyone in the 1960s thought LSD alone

was enough for a revolution.

The formation of the hippie movement's third tribe,

the Politicos, began on the university campus.

Vietnam, civil rights, the country was being torn

apart and the Berkeley campus of the University

of California in San Francisco's Bay Area was

at the epicentre.

Osher Neumann was a political activist in the

1960s and remains one to this day.

This mural, it was a monument in Berkeley

to that period of ferment and revolutionary enthusiasm.

So anti-Vietnam War teach-ins, the students

are coming out homogenised, turned into blockheads and

we have somebody burning his draft card, third

world strikes and the Black Panthers.

It seemed at the time as if the

system was collapsing.

So that really, I mean, encapsulates a lot

of the spirit that we need now.

This generation of young radical students, now known

as the New Left, found a political guru

based at the University of California.

My main topic, as you know, is liberation

from the affluent society...

Professor Herbert Marcuse rejected the repressive nature of

traditional Soviet communism.

In its place, he taught a Marxism that

placed a greater emphasis on personal liberty.

Because I believe that all dialectic is liberation,

liberation involving the mind and the body, liberation

involving the entire human existence.

Herbert was appealing primarily to young people.

He realised quite early, I think, that there

was a political value and importance in what

was going on around him, which was this

New Left, this young people and the Cultural

Revolution.

He did not believe that the traditional working

class necessarily was going to be the agent

of the revolution.

One looked for revolution in people in the

margins, in students.

That, of course, was very appealing to the

New Left and to the counterculture that was

at that point exploring all of these, you

know, non-monogamy and the breaking down of

sexual taboos and so on and so forth.

You know, when I went to college, women

were locked up at 10 o'clock at

night, every single night.

So there were many local issues about what

we were being taught, the truth about history,

the truth about Vietnam, and that were agitated

students on campus.

It was a way of opening up sexuality

that was good, that was, you know, against

the repression of the 50s or something, you

know, and all the traditional strictures of bourgeois

life.

Exactly.

Free love was complicated.

Yeah.

Especially for women.

By the mid-'60s, women's issues began to emerge

as the New Left thinking was taking over

student politics at Berkeley.

Students would gather at the nearby People's Park

which became a meeting point for every new

political grouping.

The thing that thrilled me most was there

were tables, like card tables, with every organisation

ever that was disseminating political information.

So you could, you know, pick up a

flyer from the anarchists and hear the socialists

talking, SDS and Du Bois Club and all

of the organisations, and I was just thrilled.

And not too long after I started there,

the police came on the campus and took

all the tables away and arrested some people.

The campus became the stage for a series

of student sit-ins and demonstrations.

Even riots.

Directly challenging university authorities, the police and the

state.

We felt revolutionary to the core.

We felt, you know, that the way that

white America saw us, we were their daughters

and sons, and we were saying no.

But along with the New Left, Berkeley was

also home to those experimenting with alternative lifestyles

and mind-expanding drugs.

By 1967, these two camps were completely interwoven.

Those forces of cultural upheaval of music and

drugs were reflected in people's politics and how

people wanted to think and live and what

kind of risks people wanted to take.

So, yeah, so my first experience with LSD

was eye-opening for us.

I think it influenced us deeply.

It all influenced all of us.

While the New Left in Berkeley operated in

acid-fuelled chaos, just across the bridge in

Oakland, hip young radicals who had come through

the ranks of the Black Freedom Movement formed

the Black Panther Party.

Like their white counterparts, they were into consciousness

expansion, but not through LSD.

So all this is like public housing projects.

This is all black people here, just about.

Today, Elaine Brown runs an urban farm just

round the corner from the old Black Panther

office in Oakland.

Her journey from a childhood of poverty in

a Philadelphia ghetto to leadership of the Black

Panther Party in California entailed a mind-altering

shift in consciousness.

Well, you know, I've always been black, but

I didn't always think of myself as black.

I grew up in a ghetto in North

Philadelphia and I went to public schools that

were outside of my immediate neighbourhood and that

were predominantly white, predominantly Jewish.

And so I had this other view of

life.

I wanted to be white, like so many

black people do, but they were not prepared

to make that confession.

And then I was asked to teach piano

to some children in a housing project in

Los Angeles, specifically Watts, which had just exploded

around me, which I didn't notice.

And when I got into the Jordan Downs

public housing project, chills came over me.

This was a throwback to my life as

a really black person, that one I had

been denying.

And when I walked into that room and

saw those little black girls who were like

6, 7, 8 years old, 9 years old,

looking at me as though I had some

kind of answer for their poverty and their

degradation, I couldn't hardly breathe because I knew

that I was not going to be able

to help them because I knew what they

needed because I was them and I didn't

want to be them, and I knew I

couldn't help them.

But I was totally transformed, and I left

the world of whiteness that I had been

living in, and I just walked into the

Panther office and surrendered my life to the

revolution as I saw it.

And I took that very seriously, and I

take it seriously today.

We say that we will do anything, anything

at all to gain our freedom, to gain

our liberation for our people, for black people,

for all the oppressed masses of people, and

we will do anything.

If you love the sun, it's where you

come from Then you had better dare to

seize the time Your time is now, oh,

seize the time Aloha!

The Black Panther Party was the embodiment of

the white establishment's nightmare, an armed black Marxist

-Leninist group out to overthrow the established order,

winning the hearts and minds of their young

white radical counterparts.

There was consciousness raising, of course, in the

black community.

Everything of importance in the 60s ultimately has

to do with race.

So in the black community, you get the

idea that you need to develop a liberated

identity, and artists in the black arts movement

do precisely that.

They invent a new identity.

Once that happens, you can see how youth

culture does the same thing.

Black people drop their slave names, hippies drop

their names and take names like Wildflower.

No, it's connected.

It motivated, it really cohered us as a

group.

In the Bay Area of San Francisco, the

pieces were now in place for a hippie

revolution.

The Black Panthers in Oakland, the radical students

in Berkeley, and Haight-Ashbury, the old bohemian

down-at-heel district of San Francisco was

being rejuvenated by this new generation.

It's a bohemian area.

Bohemianism is allied with the left, but it's

not the left.

The reason it's not the left is it's

cultural as much as it's political, and it's

individualistic rather than collectivist.

Without the bohemian culture, the left can be

very authoritarian, but without the left, the bohemian

culture can be chaotic and sort of empty

-headed.

And we'd meet older bohemians, and they'd tell

you about books, they'd tell you about conspiracy

theories, they'd tell you about all this wonderful

stuff that they were not telling you about

in school.

So to me, the trunk line was the

beatniks, who were my elders, and folk music,

also my elders, leading me out of suburban

realities into another world, which was the beginning

counterculture to me.

God, a baby depends on me I think

he has me pinned Cos his soles, he

can scatter my world Like a leaf in

the wind By 1967, the streets of The

Hague were a potpourri of health food shops,

truth-seekers and dreamers, folk music, long hair

and masses of LSD.

And I wonder Did the truth just pass

me by I first landed in San Francisco

Airport.

It was still beatnik.

The next time I came, all of a

sudden, the place was paisley.

It had changed entirely.

Did the truth pass me by Did it

just not see what was right before my

eyes It was an exodus from everywhere else.

In San Francisco, like it always has been,

it sort of functioned as the fulcrum, you

know, the turning point.

You know, it's like...

It either went right back home or someplace

else.

The ingredients of the hippie revolution had been

brewing for decades.

And now in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, the

ideals of the three tribes, the nature boys,

the truth-seekers and the politicos coalesced and

instantaneously ignited into one hippie revolution.

The time had now come to put the

new hippie world order into practice.

We are calling upon the forces of love,

not of hate.

We affirm life...

The young people in this country is against

war, being oppressed by police harassment and brutality.

We just want the freedom to be ourselves,

and that's for love, for experience, a positive

way of life.

The immediate energy from our muscles and...

Now, last night we had a big hassle

here about who is in charge of this

house.

We don't want a dictator.

Nobody's supposed to tell you what to do.

People have come here to love one another

and to be in love with each other.

At the centre of Haight-Ashbury, there were

a group of radical actors and activists called

the Diggers, taking their name from a 17th

-century English anarchist movement who had proposed a

society without private property.

There were the Diggers who gave away food.

Their motto was, steal from the rich, give

to the poor.

They were like the Robin Hoods of Haight

-Ashbury.

We created a free store where we gathered

up surplus and last year's goods and throwaways,

and everything was free.

We would ask the question, like, why get

a job?

Why become an employee so you can make

the money to become a consumer when we'll

give you the stuff and you can imagine

your own life?

It was a social experiment.

What would happen if you walked into a

store where everything was free?

What would you do?

How would you respond?

You know, some people stole.

This was a response.

One day, there was a woman in the

store when I was running it, and I

looked at her and I realised she was

stealing.

So I went up to her and I

said, Excuse me, you know, you can't really

steal in here.

And she got really indignant.

She said, I'm not stealing!

I said, No, I know you're not.

You can't steal in a free store.

Everything is free here.

You just take what you want.

You don't have to hide it.

She said, It's free?

I said, Yeah, it's free.

She said, Then get out of my face.

I said, Okay.

So I got out of her face.

Two days later, she came back with a

huge tray of day-old donuts, which she

put on the counter.

So this woman got a gift economy in

an instant.

It was advertised as a great youth rebellion,

but I think anybody who had any urge

for freedom and social change was attracted to

it.

When I moved to San Francisco, I'm living

right by the Haydashberry, which was the capital

of the Summer of Love.

I'm running the Agitprop Truck Theatre.

Oh, say can you see...

We rented pickup trucks, pull up to a

parking spot, produce our show that had stock

characters that everyone knew.

It was kind of like Punch and Judy.

Mr. Libero came by to plant a flower

and said...

The authority should regulate the noise.

We layer onto those different characters caricatures of

people in the society today.

We want to work!

If the police came, we just started up

the motor and drove off.

It led me to be producing anti-war

shows because by that time, we recognized that

there was a war in Vietnam and that

our country was playing a terrible role.

I remember Country Joe and the Fish, and

he had done the music for some of

my anti-war plays.

What are we fighting for?

Don't ask me, I don't give a damn

When they stop this Vietnam...

That made a lot of veterans happy and

military families happy and empowered a lot of

people.

I can only write it because I was

a military veteran.

There's no blaming soldiers for war in the

song.

It's kind of a work song, actually.

Whoopee, we're all going to die meant from

a soldier's point of view.

It's G.I. dark humor, and it talks

about imperialism and it talks about politicians and

the working class being exploited.

But it also, interestingly, blames parents for sending

their children off.

That was a controversial lyric, Be the first

one in your block To have your boy

come home in a box And you can

be the first ones in your block To

have your boy come home in a box

Last night your shadow fell Upon the bright,

lovely roof San Francisco was aflame with protest,

radical ideas and acid.

The American authorities were horrified and banned LSD.

This had little impact, as many budding chemists

began manufacturing it on a mass scale.

Most notably, Owsley Stanley, a Berkeley College dropout.

When I first met Owsley, he had a

girlfriend who had been a chemist, majoring in

chemistry at UC Berkeley, and when he met

her, he drew her in.

And then when he met me, he drew

me in.

So we were a bit of a team.

He set up the whole laboratory as if

it were a gift to the gods, and

as if the act he was doing was

a divine act.

And he played special music, and he had

us all wear uniforms.

We had to gown up and cover our

hands and cover our whole body and even

boots on our shoes and goggles, and there

were no lights on.

Everything was yellow light.

Owsley acid was very pure.

He had it tested by an organic chemist

at UC Berkeley because Owsley felt that if

you had very pure acid and you took

it in a conscious way with friends, that

you would have a transcendent experience.

Acid was the binding agent of the San

Francisco hippie scene, but it needed a soundtrack.

San Francisco's greatest LSD advocate, the writer Ken

Kesey, challenged the scene's house band, The Grateful

Dead, to come up with one.

Ken Kesey hired Jerry Garcia, who was known

as a folk singer, to come up with

the perfect kind of music that would go

with LSD, and Garcia tried classical music, didn't

work, tried jazz, didn't work, tried folk music,

didn't work, and then he discovered that a

certain type of rock music actually would do

this.

¶¶ We all brought something very, very different

to the table.

I was mainly into avant-garde electronic music.

I had already met Phil Esch and Jerry

Garcia.

Rock & roll music was new to them

as well, to Phil especially.

He was as much into the avant-garde

as I was, and Jerry Garcia was mainly

into Appalachian folk songs, and yet because of

the expansive nature of the scene, we reached

out towards one another and made it work,

and what works, works like gangbusters.

¶¶ Musically, they

formed this great bridge between folk music and

improvisational jazz.

They certainly benefited from having Jerry Garcia at

the head of the band because he just

represented the free and easy, acid-loving, jam

band life that a lot of their followers

could certainly rally behind.

¶¶ Now remember, there's another aspect here as

well, the audience.

¶¶ No matter how much you rehearse, when

you're there on stage, you're there live, and

the action is coming at you, and that's

where some of the greatest adventures occur.

Feedback, for instance.

¶¶ I remember one time at the Avalon

where there was a feedback note, I think

it was a high E, and I found

it on the keyboard, and when the feedback

note disappeared, I was still there, and then

I played a melody based on that, so

I was taking a melody out of the

feedback.

¶¶ Dead are the definition of a hippie

band.

Even as a way of life that has

endured into the 21st century.

¶ Gonna miss your baby ¶¶ The Grateful

Dead gave the hippies a sound to rally

round, and on the 16th of June, 1967,

they took part in a groundbreaking event that

would see the music transform the entire hippie

scene.

¶¶ Just 6 short months after their creation,

hippies were about to lose their innocence.

¶¶ 100 miles south of the city, in

the coastal town of Monterey, it was decided

to showcase the San Francisco acts by staging

3 days of music in the local sports

ground.

This concert was the triumph of the summer

of love, and with some of the biggest

pop acts of the day, like The Who

and Jimi Hendrix also performing, the whole world

joined the party.

¶¶ Monterey was getting respect from all over

the United States and from all over the

world, you know, so it was, in my

opinion, it was the first one, I don't

think there's ever been anything like that before,

and then, of course, Penny Baker's movie and

all that.

We got to see The Who, Jimi Hendrix.

Yikes!

And what transpired was not just a showcase

for San Francisco music, but the first modern

rock festival, Monterey Pop, and D.A. Penny

Baker's film ensured the festival's place in history.

¶¶ There were different contingencies there.

It was interesting because the English bands came,

we'd never seen them before, and the Bay

Area bands, so it was kind of like

a, well, the first rock festival really, wasn't

it?

That was the peak of it all, and

that was the one thing that ran well,

it was the one time that everybody was

in love with everybody else.

¶ No colors in my life, you know

they're turning brown ¶ ¶ I see people

walking by ¶ Dressed in their colorful clothes

¶ I see them strolling by ¶ My

happiness flows ¶ No more will my graceful...

¶ We got a respectable round of applause.

I was happy, I was happy to have

been a part of the event.

It was just marvelous.

Along with some of the world's biggest bands,

many of the top music executives were there

scouting for San Franciscan acts to sign.

¶ Sit down by my window ¶ Just

looking out at the rain...

¶ After Monterey, Janis Joplin's life would never

be the same again.

¶ Sit down by my window ¶ Just

looking out at the rain...

¶ The organizers were trying to showcase the

San Francisco sound, and so Janis Joplin really

became a superstar and got the record contract

with CBS Records as a result of her

performances, which are some of the best performances

of her entire career at the Monterey Pop

Festival.

Before that, nobody paid much attention to her.

It was like she was with this band

that wasn't always in tune.

One day everybody was kicking her ass, and

the next day they were kissing it.

Monterey was music and acid and business and

fun, and all aspects of the San Francisco

hippie revolution were represented there.

Even the original nature boy Gypsy Boots, the

pioneering proto-hippie from the 1950s, got the

gig as the festival's official gardener, while Owsley,

the underground chemist, arrived on site with a

batch of acid specially made for the event.

We made a batch for Monterey Pop Festival

in 1967, and I'd say we'd make 100

,000 hits.

That was the most we had ever made.

Well, I took this new psychedelic that Owsley

had invented called STP, so everything was like

a Monet painting to me, this blurred kind

of heightened pastels or something.

When we went on stage to play, I

was pretty high then.

When you see our excerpt of playing Section

43 in the film,