Original subtitles

♪ (rock 'n' roll music plays) ♪

Reporter: There are colonies of hippies

springing up in most American cities.

Unidentified Male: It's all related

the psychedelics and the war, the protesting.

Janis Joplin: I'm planning on having

a good time as long as I can.

Unidentified Male: Smoke pot with your kids

and then you'll understand why the kids are happier.

Reporter: There's a giant love-in.

Unidentified Female: People should be uninhibited

in their sexual expression.

Unidentified Male: You cannot ignore

a change in morality.

Unidentified Male: They're fascists.

They don't like hippies and they don't like things we do.

Police officer: We do have to maintain law,

order and decency on the streets.

Jerry Garcia: What we're thinking about

is a peaceful planet. We're not thinking about anything else.

Unidentified Male: They are trying to do

what no one else has ever done before,

find a new way for humanity.

♪ (theme music) ♪

Ken Babbs: America in the early sixties,

it was a real good time of prosperity

but it was also kind of a stagnant time

in terms of spiritual growth.

Things were, kind of, at a standstill.

Peter Coyote: The baseline culture was materialism

and also the feeling that the culture itself

didn't honor the human spirit

and didn't honor creativity.

(applause) (piano plays)

In the early 1950s,

the nation recognized in its midst

a social movement called 'Beat Generation'.

On the Road became a bestseller.

Douglas Brinkley: When Kerouac's book comes out

it became a revolution,

defined a new generation of what being 'Beat' means.

And it defined it as a spiritual revolution.

But if we're living in an age of conformity,

if everybody is trying to work for the corporation

then you're losing a sense of self.

(reading) "I was traveling West one time

at the junction of the state line of Colorado...

I saw in the clouds huge and massed

above the fearing golden desert of even fall,

the Great Image of God

with his forefinger pointed straight at me.

'Come on, boy, go thou across the ground.

Go moan for man.

Go moan, go groan.

Go groan alone. Go roll your bones alone."

(applause)

Jack Kerouac became like a godfather

for the counterculture.

Reporter: The village has a life

and language all its own.

If you dig it, you're hip.

If you don't, man, you're square.

Coffee houses,

the neighborhood bars of Bohemia

where the strongest potion is coffee.

And the coffee house poet

is the specialty of the house.

Kerouac (reading): "To find a place where the eyes can rest."

Henry Diltz: Beatniks.

They have these coffee houses

they would go in and play chess and read poetry

and those same coffee houses

became, kind of, a proving ground

for folk singers.

And all the young kids were running out

to buy guitars and banjos.

Unidentified Male: Folk music, it gives me a lot more

than the popular music of our own time does.

My outlook is that

topical songs should be sung because

we don't anything about, say, the bomb, you know,

the whole situation comes to an end.

Joan Baez: There's got to be an alternative to

whatever ways in life are offered to them, you know.

I mean Democrat, Republican.

And I would like to offer some kind of alternative

somehow, you know.

Brinkley: The folk revival scene had a

big part on politics. You can't get left politics

out of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger.

And so the Greenwich Village Movement

was there to celebrate people's culture.

If you liked the music you really were signing for

their ways of looking at the world, too.

And then eventually

one guy emerges as being special.

♪ (plays 'Only A Pawn In Their Game') ♪

♪ A bullet from ♪ the back of a bush

♪ Took Medgar Evers' blood ♪

Joel Peresman: During that time in the sixties,

as that cultural revolution was slowly bubbling

and kids were starting to question authority,

question what was happening in their country.

They were looking for answers.

Brinkley: Bob Dylan thought that folk music was poetry.

He took beat energy and mixed it with folk culture

and it's more lyrical intensity

than anybody's put to song before.

♪ And the Negro's name is used It is plain ♪

♪ For the politician's gain As he rises to fame ♪

Diltz: Up until the time of Bob Dylan

there were the songwriters and there were the singers.

Dylan started writing his own music.

David Wild: He says, "I'm going to

comment on the world.

I'm going to comment on the nature

of this human experience."

Bob Dylan was in this, sort of,

white hot moment of saying more

in the popular song than anyone ever had before.

♪ Only a pawn in that game ♪

(applause)

Wild: After the revolution of Bob Dylan,

the music world moves West.

♪ ('Go Where You Wanna Go' by The Mamas and Papas plays) ♪

Wild: Laurel Canyon becomes

the epicenter of the rock revolution.

Michelle Phillips: The music scene

was not happening in New York anymore.

It was now LA.

Everybody moved to Laurel Canyon.

Diltz: Actors, musicians, artists,

and so it was, kind of, a whole community, very open.

If you're driving over Laurel Canyon

and you saw somebody hitchhiking,

you would just automatically pullover,

"Hey, brother, get in," you know, "Where you going?"

Graham Nash: Laurel Canyon was an incredibly

interesting place to live in those days.

I lived on Lookout Mountain with Joni Mitchell.

Crosby was close, Steven was close.

Wild: Now, it was all these artists

who were singing the truth.

And their truth was this idyllic,

sort of, sense of freedom.

There was a thriving community of kids

that were discovering their new life

and couldn't wait to play you

the new song that they had written.

Nash: There was a lot of freedom.

There was a lot of drugs.

There was a lot of beautiful women.

There was a lot of good rock and roll being made.

It was a fabulous time.

♪ (rock 'n' roll music plays) ♪

Reporter: These are students

at a suburban high school in Los Angeles.

They reflect the sun, the sensuality and affluence

which dominate life in Southern California.

The latest fad is the Sunset Strip.

During the past year, it has become a playground

for Southern California's mobile, restless teenagers.

place to go.

Phillips: People would meet down at clubs

on the Sunset Strip and they would go to the 'Trip'

or they would go to the 'Whiskey A Go Go'.

It was a real happening.

Wild: We changed from the culture of grownups

that sort of looked down on kids

to kids leading.

Connelly: It is the creation of the teenager.

And the revolution begins.

♪ (rock 'n' roll music plays) ♪

News Reporter: The Los Angeles

County Sheriff's Office has begun foot patrol

on the Sunset Strip to cope

with the growing influx of youngsters.

John Heilemann: The notion of teenagers

who had a culture of their own,

that weren't listening to their parent's music,

kind of, opens up this giant space for

rebellions, large and small.

Police officer: At least ten percent of the students

have used and are using marijuana.

And also a very-- Probably a very significant thing is

that acceptance is gaining steadily and

the usage is really

increasing very, very rapidly.

Diltz: In LA, we were all kind of, you know,

smoking God's herb.

Whereas up in San Francisco, it seemed like

they were experimenting more

with mind expansion, you know?

Brinkley: Ken Kesey took classes

of writing at Stanford University

and he writes the great novel

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.

And this makes Kesey a celebrity.

While at Stanford, I was given the opportunity

to go to the Stanford Hospital

and take part in the LSD experiments.

Brinkley: Kesey had volunteered to do

tests for LSD. A government sponsored test.

Unidentified Male: LSD was isolated

by Stoll and Hofmann in

Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company of Basel, Switzerland.

Unidentified Male: Do you feel happy?

Yes.

Well you must be because you have tears in your eyes.

(sighs)

Is that a beautiful experience, would you say?

I would say yes.

Some people think it's when Kesey

discovers LSD

that the counter culture in California is born

because more and more people

then want to try experience what Kesey experienced

and he becomes a promoter of it.

Kesey created a drug commune at La Honda

which is an hour from San Francisco.

Great artists love smashing traditions

and at his best Kesey was doing that.

Everybody would have this communal LSD trip together.

Tom Wolfe would write

The Electric Kool-Aid about it.

People were constantly slipping drugs into my food.

The number of times that I would get up,

"I don't know what the hell happened to me!"

They thought they were doing me a favor.

Babbs: They're having the World's Fair

in New York, so bunch of us were going to go.

But the bunch of us were too big to fit

in his station wagon, so he bought this

converted school bus.

Brinkley: Kesey, he was going to

paint the bus in day glow bright colors

and then go what he called "unsettling America,

blowing people's minds".

Babbs: The whole idea of blowing peoples' minds

was that you have to present something to them

that is so different, there's a crack comes open

where something new can come in.

And the reaction of all these people is wonderful

because what it was, in 1964 there was

no other thing like this happening.

Brinkley: It's part of a kind of

cultural revolution going on making the squares

pay notice to this underground of America.

Babbs: When we got New York City

which is the home of the 'Beats'

where Kerouac lived, and picked him up,

because we were in his presence

we were just acting as goofy as we could,

playing music, putting on costumes,

doing all kinds of acts and stuff like that.

And then Kerouac sat on the couch

drinking a big tall Budweiser.

He was obviously not an enthusiastic guy.

Those Beats, they had done their thing,

you know, I really felt like the torch had been passed

from those guys to the psychedelic generation.

Brinkley: Kesey, in many ways, was very messianic

and he started feeling that acid

would allow you to see a larger truth.

And they started saying

let's get as many people to try LSD as you can.

Babbs: And so we started renting halls.

We called the thing the Acid Test.

And the band of course, was known as the Warlocks.

As time went on

they changed their name to the Grateful Dead.

♪ St. Stephen with a rose ♪

♪ In and out of the garden he goes ♪

♪ Country garden in the wind and the rain ♪

♪ Wherever he goes the people all complain ♪

Wolfe: LSD was not an illegal drug.

When Kesey held these Acid Tests

as they were known, they'd have two vats.

One was punch and one was punch with LSD.

Lisa Law: The Acid Test was like a party.

The scene is a lot of light shows

and music and people dancing.

And when the Dead were playing

it was a way to feel that acid in waves.

And I looked down and I saw

kids in front of me moving to the music.

They looked up at me and I said...

"Yeah!"

♪ (rock 'n' roll music plays) ♪

Peresman: The drug culture really took hold

and that's where artists,

whether it was Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane,

were able to embrace it and put it in their music.

Brinkley: The counter culture in California is born

because more and more people then want to try

to experience what Kesey experienced.

And he became a kind of 'Grand Pubaah'

of the carnival of San Francisco in the sixties.

There's nothing grown up

or sophisticated in taking an LSD trip at all.

They are just being complete fools.

CBS News, without any flowers in its hair,

is in San Francisco

because this city has gained the reputation

of being the hippie capital of the world.

I got accepted in San Francisco State

and I found an apartment at Haight and Clayton Street

right in the center of

what would become the Haight Ashbury.

Reporter: The psychedelic shop

on Haight Street, started just over year ago,

it spreads the gospel of a dreamy new utopia

based on brotherhood and love and LSD.

To all of people out there that are confused and hungry

for some kind spiritual meaning in life.

That's why all these people are down here.

That's why there is so much interest in Haight Ashbury

because it offers some kind of hope.

We moved up and lived right down the street

from the psychedelic shop.

People were growing their hair long,

they were wearing beads, playing music on the street.

It was just an incredible environment

at that point at the beginning.

That's when it was just like one big, giant family.

Coyote: Before you knew it,

it was a congregating place for artists.

And the dividing line

seemed to be the psychedelic experience.

You couldn't understand the posters,

you couldn't understand the fashions,

you couldn't understand anything

if you hadn't gotten high.

Reporter: The Diggers group scrounges food and money

to feed free those who arrive

in Panhandle Park with a bowl and an appetite.

"Diggers are people who share," says the manifesto

and their aim is a society

where everything is shared, everything free.

Law: The Diggers were one of the first groups

that were into social consciousness

about what was needed to take care of this

huge group of people

that were coming in to the Haight Ashbury.

Reporter: Their free shop looks more

like a playground at first sight.

Here they make treats and clothes

for other hippies who can come and take

what they want without paying anything for it.

Coyote: Everything in the store was free,

tools, clothing, televisions

and so we were inviting people

to imagine a way of life that would please them

and then, to make it real by doing it.

What we're thinking about is a peaceful planet.

We're not thinking about anything else.

We're not thinking about any kind of power.

We're not thinking about any of those kind of struggles.

We're not thinking about revolution or war

or any of that.

That's not what we want. Nobody wants to get hurt.

Nobody wants to hurt anybody.

We would all like to be able to live

an uncluttered life.

A simple life, a good life, you know,

and, like, think about moving the whole human race

ahead a step. Or a few steps.

Diltz: We wanted to learn more about

the real meaning of life.

Why are we here?

Certainly, not to kill each other

but here to celebrate life to make music and do art

and love each other.

Reporter: These people are hippies.

They represent a new form of social rebellion.

It is hard to figure out

what positive things they are in favor of.

Jay Thelin: The reason we can no longer

identify with the kinds of activities

that the older generation are engaged in,

is because those activities are, for us, meaningless.

They have lead to a monstrous war

in Vietnam, for example.

Grace Slick: We did want change from war,

from rigid ideas of what

the sexes ought to be doing.

A change from black people ought to be here

and white people ought to be here.

No! Why can we try and make that work?

The Haight Ashbury community has created the council

for a Summer of Love in San Francisco.

Unidentified Male: The council is calling for

creative love happenings

for every weekend throughout the summer.

We ask all who come here to come here in love.

And we ask all who live here,

to greet all men with love.

They, at their best, are trying for a kind of group sainthood.

And saints running in groups are likely to be ludicrous.

They depend on hallucination for their philosophy.

This is not a new idea. And it has never worked.

Brinkley: There was sort of a divide of generations,

a lot of mistrust.

Young people didn't trust old people.

Old people didn't understand young people.

Man in audience: What's so offensive about long hair?

It looks sloppy.

(laughter) (applause)

It doesn't differentiate the boys from the girls enough.

Coyote: We didn't ourselves hippies.

The hippies are a fabrication.

They were an attempt to diminish

young adults and infantilize us.

And it certainly serves to exclude the people

that were deeply thoughtful about the world,

that were ready to dedicate their lives

to making change and question

the paradigm of materialism.

Look around you, nothing works.

The only thing... the kids are presented with

when they grow up, you know,

you can join the army, you can go to war.

You can get a gig working as an engineer,

become a vegetable and drive to work in your own car,

your own big metal box, you know, it just...

It looks absurd.

You know, people in their metal boxes,

like, just going all over from job to job,

frustrated, uptight...

What joy is there in life?

Life should be-- Life is and should be...

ecstasy.

Brinkley: The counter culture had the arrogance to tell

everybody else what they were doing is wrong.

And nobody likes that.

Aline Saarinen: It's estimated that anywhere

from ten to 200,000 youngsters

may pour in to Haight Ashbury this summer.

Many people are apprehensive,

they feel that Black Power,

or other political activist groups,

may use Haight Street as a stage setting for riots.

Haight Ashbury cannot handle

a 100,000 because there isn't room.

Coyote: The tension between

the government and the people

began to be evident.

Thomas Cahill: Nobody should let their young children

come into San Francisco unsupervised

to become a part of a group such as that.

They're fascists as far as I'm concerned.

And they don't like hippies

and they don't like the things we do

and they try to harass us, bother us...

Reporter: In some way, their revolution

is a war between generations.

The hippies rallying cry is, "Never trust anyone over 30."

The war of youth culture against

the establishment is in full swing on every front.

About four policeman and a plainclothesman

came in and said, "Everybody get out,

everybody get out. The store is closed."

They wouldn't give a reason, they wouldn't identify,

you know, under what premise they were doing this.

When we ask them they started

pushing people around. They pushed people

physically out of the store.

The Mayor is...

This is, really, very insidious what he's up to.

He wants to stop human growth.

Reporter: The hippie leaders say

all will be well. Flower-power will prevail.

They say it will be a summer of love.

The great pilgrimage.

Hopefully, they'll be right.

If it's necessary to bring in National Guard,

I'll bring in National Guard.

I'll use whatever force is necessary.

Reporter: We now seem to be witnessing,

in this country and elsewhere,

an intense preoccupation

with the pursuit of pleasure.

Call it hedonism, call it self-gratification,

call it what you will.

You cannot avoid noticing it.

You may not like it, you may not accept it,

but you cannot ignore it. A change in morality.

♪ Eight miles high ♪

♪ And when you touch down ♪

♪ You'll find that ♪

Turn on, tune in, drop out.

I spent some time in New York

and I spent some time in London

and I'm here to tell you it's happening all over.

Todd Gitlin: In any large city,

there were other Haight Ashbury's,

which people could point to.

See we're on the map.

We're big and we're far more interesting

than what you all have to offer.

♪ ('Eight Miles High' by Byrds plays) ♪

Interviewer: How do you answer

the questions of parents who are concerned about

the use of LSD and marijuana for their children?

Timothy Leary: These are young people

who are hungering for older people,

for their parents to listen to them.

These youngsters want to share with their parents

the grandeur and the glory that they are encountering

and perhaps, eventually, when you're spiritually ready,

you'll turn on with your children

if you think that's the right thing to do.

Law: Monterey Pop,

it was the absolute ultimate love-in.

♪ Sittin' down by my window ♪

♪ Just looking out at the rain ♪

The best festival that I've played

pretty much ever is Monterey Pop festival.

♪ Looking out at the rain ♪

D. A. Pennebaker: Monterey hit like lightning.

Popular music was changing

and had become something different,

and there was a whole new generation of people

that wanted to march with it.

It said, "Get on board. We're leaving town."

♪ Here you've gone today ♪

♪ And I want to love you ♪

♪ I want to love you for so long ♪

♪ Oh, yeah ♪

Phillips: You realize this is Janis Joplin

before she was known.

Before she'd ever done her first album.

Before she'd ever done her first single.

♪ Lookin' out at the rain ♪

♪ Somethin' came along ♪

It's just music at its freshest.

It's music that is just being born

and the audience is like.

♪ And I say whoa, whoa ♪

♪ Honey, this can't be ♪

♪ And I say ♪

(screams melody)

(cheering)

♪ Once in a while ♪

♪ Oh, baby, tell me why love ♪

♪ Honey, why love is like ♪

♪Why it's like a ball and ♪

♪ and a chain ♪

(cheering and applause)

Law: Everything was love and peace and music and

the policeman who was in charge

brought flowers out to his men and he said,

"Don't bust anybody."

Monterey was that hippie dream come true.

Gitlin: Culture was changing, the hippie movement,

it was swaying the mainstream.

Carlton Cordell: This is where the youngsters come

to buy their clothes and not just the youngsters,

it's the young adults and the men who are 40, 50

and even 60 years old.

Reporter: In the States, pot is going middle class

and spreading like prohibition liquor.

As more and more citizens get zonked out of their minds,

the drug cult enters

the bloodstream of American life.

Like it or not, we're living in the 'stoned' age.

At its best, the counter culture

came in with hard punches to the mainstream culture.

Jefferson Poland: People have already

changed their minds about contraception,

abortion, premarital sex.

Michelle Ashford: The 1960s were,

absolutely, a sexual revolution.

Because of the pill, women could take

charge of their own bodies. They could be sexual.

They didn't have to get pregnant.

Everything sort of coalesced as, sort of, the perfect storm

of societal forces coming together.

Here, if you love somebody and people here love everybody,

if you want to make love to somebody then you should.

There's no reason why you shouldn't.

Diltz: Free love was all well and good

and there was a lot of accidental sex.

But we didn't look at it as hedonism.

People were just so open to each other

and life was beautiful, you know,

and people weren't judgmental.

Brinkley: The mainstream young people

were telling their parents, "You've been prohibiting my

sexual freedom and the puritan work ethic is bunk."

It was clear the rules were changing.

And the rules were really that there were no rules.

The topic tonight is the hippies.

Buckley: We have with us Mr. Jack Kerouac over here

who is said to have started the whole

Beat Generation business.

Jack Kerouac never wanted to be a prophet.

He wanted to be a great American writer.

But fame destroys people in America.

To what extent do you believe

that the Beat Generation is related...

to the hippies?

What do they have in common?

Was this an evolution from one to another?

Just the older ones.

-Buckley: Yeah. -I'm 46 years old.

These kids are 18.

The Beat Generation was a generation of the attitude

and pleasure in life and tenderness.

I believe in order and piety.

Brinkley: Here's the progenitor, really

of the counter culture kind of disowning

his own babies and try to

make sense of a decade, the sixties,

that he didn't feel parry to.

Apparently some kind of Dionysian movement

and which I did not intend.

This was pure at my heart.

So...

All sorts of people have been writing

various articles about the hippies.

Usually about the hippies as if they were animals,

something to look at.

Thus we've gotten hundreds,

and literally thousands, of people coming up to

Haight Ashbury to watch people.

It makes Haight Ashbury

a terribly unpleasant place to be in.

Law: The news got out about the Haight Ashbury.

It became overrun.

Tour guide: We're now entering

what is known as the largest hippie colony

in the world.

Fountainhead of the hippie subculture.

The nickname is 'Hashburys', and marijuana, of course,

and LSD is being used.

Wild: Literally people made the trip

to San Francisco to be a part of something.

But by the time they got there, that trip was over.

Reporter: This is the latest stage

in the evolution of the hippie movement.

The hippies are trying to get away.

So they go out to a cabin in the countryside

and start a commune.

Here, they can get away from the tourists

and the reporters who badger them in San Francisco.

Babbs: Communes had started and this was really

what the hippie movement was all about.

An idea of sharing everything,

clothes and food and everything,

people could just help themselves, you know.

Coyote: We lived communally

because it was the cheapest way to live.

A lot of people began to

clarify and simplify their lives.

Reporter: What will follow

this dispersal of the hippie movement

to the countryside is hard to predict.

They may be, as they say

coming here to build the foundations

for a new society in this nation.

Or they may be coming like the woolly mammoth,

to find their own extinction.

♪ ('Down Where the Woodbine Twineth' plays) ♪

I was working for the New York Times in the Catskills,

and it was just a couple of us going up there.

As we went north of the city,

we began to run into traffic jams.

I found a cop, I said, "What the hell is going on?"

He says, "I don't know.

There are thousands of people here

and they're all going to some farm."

And it was, of course, Woodstock.

Wild: I think Woodstock was an opportunity

for people to realize they weren't alone.

A lot people, who in their hometown,

or in their family felt isolated,

realized they weren't.

Reporter: The towns people, quite frankly,

were terrified at the prospect of the hippie arrival.

(cheering)

Law: The word got out.

Everybody and their brother

came from all over the country.

Reporter: First, the sudden rain,

then the thirst and hunger

from the shortage of water and food,

just for the opportunity to spend

a few days in the country

getting stoned on their drugs

and grooving on the music.

Law: We got together and had a little pow-wow about

what are we going to do to feed these people.

We went in to New York to buy 1,500 pounds bulgur wheat,

1,500 pounds of rolled oats,

a 130,000 paper plates, 130,000 Dixie cups

and I believe we served 200,000 people.

Gitlin: By now, there are tens of millions of people

who feel themselves to be

an irresistible river of change.

And you get something incandescent.

♪ Freedom, freedom, freedom ♪

♪ Freedom, freedom, freedom Freedom ♪

♪ ('Freedom' continues) ♪

Diltz: We'd have love-ins in LA on the weekends,

where everybody gets dressed up

and goes to the park and brings an instrument,

but to see hundreds of thousands of people

like a meeting of all the tribes

from all over the country.

Boy! We didn't know there were so many of us

that felt the same.

(song draws to a close) (cheering)

We must be in heaven, man!

A rock music festival

that drew hundreds of thousands of young people

to a dairy farm in White Lake, New York

over the weekend, came to an end today.

Frank Reynolds: Admittedly, there was marijuana

as well as music at the rock festival

but there was also no rioting.

What did not happen at that dairy farm is

possibly more significant than what did happen.

Reporter: These long-haired,

mostly white kids in their blue jeans and sandals

were no wide-eyed anarchists looking for trouble.

They remained polite.

Reporter 2: Residents and resorts

freely emptied their cupboards for the kids.

Merchants were stunned by their politeness.

John Laurence: And while such a spectacle

may never happen again,

it has recorded the growing proportions of this

youthful culture in the mind of adult America.

Questlove: Whenever you see a phenomenon,

especially if you're living in it at the time

you tend to think that's the arrival.

This is the dawning and the start of something new.

Unfortunately, Woodstock just marked the end of it.

Is this going to be Woodstock West?

Well, it's going to be San Francisco.

Nash: Woodstock was followed by Altamont,

you know, only a few months later

and there couldn't have been two more different concerts.

-Announcer: Jefferson Airplane! -(cheering)

Slick: We had had the Hells Angels

be security at a number of

free in the park concerts that we had done

and they were fine. They were funny.

They were doing what they were supposed to do.

So, we suggested using Hells Angels.

♪ But that's the other side of this life I've been leading ♪

What happened was a lot of speed and alcohol.

That's a deadly combination for bikers.

Marty said the F-word to one of the Hell Angels.

While we were on stage,

the Hells Angel knocks him down.

That was just the beginning.

Paul Kantner: I'd like to mention that

the Hells Angels just smashed Marty Balin

in the face and knocked him out for a bit.

I'd like to thank you for that.

Unidentified Male: You're talking to me?

Kantner: I'm not talking to you.

I'm talking to the people that

hit my lead singer in the head.

You're talking to my people.

Well, let me tell you what's happening. You--

Unidentified Female: No.

♪ One pill makes you larger ♪

♪ And one pill makes you small ♪

♪ And the ones that mother gives you ♪

♪ Don't do anything at all ♪

That's what the story is here?

Bummer!

Really, man, that's scary.

-Who is doing all the beating? -Hells Angels.

Hells Angels are beating up musicians?

Marty got beat up.

♪ Go ask Alice ♪

♪ I think she'll know ♪

♪ When logic ♪

Slick: When we left,

it was dark and the Rolling Stones were on

and we were on a helicopter.

Paul Kantner looked down, he said,

"Wow, looks like somebody is getting killed down there."

Well, he was right, they were.

(shouting)

♪ Remember what the dormouse said ♪

♪ Feed your head ♪

♪ Feed your head ♪

In California, five members of a so-called religious cult

including Charles Manson, the guru or high priest,

have been indicted in the murder of

Sharon Tate and six others.

Reporter: All the elements are present

for one of the most sensational murder trials

in American history.

Seven people brutally murdered

in the glare of Hollywood publicity.

The involvement of a mystical hippie clan

which despised the straight, affluent society,

young girls supposedly under the spell of a bearded Svengali

who allegedly masterminded the seven murders.

-Morning. -Hi.

Sun is shining this morning.

It is, yeah.

Vincent Bugliosi: Charles Manson

clearly masqueraded behind the common image of

being a hippie, goes up to the Haight Ashbury district,

surrounds himself with a young bunch of followers.

Their lifestyle was sex orgies and LSD trips.

Eventually he gets them to commit mass murder for him.

Reporter: With blood the killer had

scrawled on the refrigerator door

the words "Death to pigs".

Bugliosi: You see, prior to these murders

no one associated hippies with violence and murder.

People would pick up a hitchhiking hippie.

There was no big deal.

But after the Manson murders,

you saw a hippie with long hair hitchhiking

and the image of Manson

would enter the driver's mind and they'd drive right by.

Brinkley: By the time of Charles Manson

and watching Altamont and seeing what happened there,

it symbolizes the drained idealism

of the spiritual quest of the Beats and early hippies.

Reporter: Today the magic is gone.

Aimless and disorganized,

the hippies have fallen prey to their own free spirit.

Free love, free drugs and too much free publicity

have gradually corrupted them.

Interviewer: Has something happened

to Haight Ashbury since last year?

We hear it's not the same place.

Unidentified Female: Well, no, it isn't.

The love-ins brought more and more people

and then people who are really just bums,

they were trying to get into a good thing.

You know, free food, free everything.

And so they all just came yeah, you know,

and a lot of really rotten people.

And so now you've really got a bad thing.

I mean it used to be you could

set your stuff down beside the road

and nobody would touch it.

And now it got so you couldn't even put

your things inside of a building.

Somebody would come along and take everything you had.

Joe: Well, one day I woke up very hungry

and, you know, very dirty and tired and disgusted.

So I decided to, you know, get a job

and settle down, to get serious.

Reporter: Joe's job is making jewelry.

He's been taking a six month course to learn how.

Joe: It's hard to be getting up

at eight every morning and doing all these changes.

Reporter: Joe bought the suit, uncomfortable though it looked.

Will he be equally uncomfortable

in his new life?

There have been generation gaps before

but today's is probably the widest yet.

Can the Joe's of America bridge the gap and conform

without society making concessions in return?

Coyote: I'd say there was a common element

in the counter culture of people trying to invent

a new world.

But people mature,

their point of view gets more nuanced.

The costs start to come due.

Children come into the world.

Wild: That idea of sex, drugs and rock and roll,

it's a youth dream, and youth dies.

Brinkley: Yet our mainstream culture

took what it needed from the hippies.

Wild: The actual movement of the sixties

was the movement towards something more authentic.

Law: In the sixties, we thought of other people

as part of our own family.

We were into caring for society as a whole.

Babbs: This is what the revolution is all about,

mercy is better than justice.

The carrot is better than the stick

and the most important lesson is

be kind, be kind.

Coyote: To me every day was a high watermark.

We played music all day long.

We worked. We did not have jobs.

It was the most carefree period of my life.

Dylan has this great line in an early song

He says, "I wish, I wish, I wish in vain

That we could sit simply in that room again

A thousand dollars at the drop of hat

I'd give it all gladly

if our lives could be like that."

♪ (theme music) ♪