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Hippies

Heyo

Veteran Member
I was born a decade too late ('62) to be part of the original movement. But then again, it took ten years to reach our little island and the neck of the wood where I went to Gymnasium (our version of high school) . I never really was part of the movement (or any other for that matter) but I was a rebel, I had (and have) long hair, was and am anti war, did drugs and listened and still listen to the music.
 

PureX

Veteran Member
This is the sanitized version. There were many war protesters and societal drop outs during the period who were by no means a 'Hippie". True hippies were a product of the music and drug scene of the late 60's.
You are clearly biased. Which seems odd to me after so many years. I was there. I was the generation immediately after the hippies, and yes, my generation was just about sex, drugs, and loud music. The idealism of the hippies was dead by the time I turned 13 in 1970. I had the long hair and ripped, faded jeans, but was by no means a "hippie". I was mostly just a punk kid entering a culture that was collapsing into decadence. A collapse that was indemnified and solidified by the Reagan republicans, disco, and cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. It wasn't the hippies, or even the drugs that destroyed American idealism, it was the neo-conservative backlash; the "greed is good" culture of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and corporate advertising.
 

ChristineM

"Be strong", I whispered to my coffee.
Premium Member
We play the 'old rock' and blues. It's pleasantly surprising that many of the young musicians we meet still want to hear and play these tunes. We like telling them that we were there when the stuff was new. It was a magic time.

Yeah, progressed backward to the blues, another of my favourite genre's
 

BSM1

What? Me worry?
Which was a product of which?


A total societal change; growing pains. The music, the technology, the changing mores and ethics, civil rights, the war, 'Mary Jane'; although these are lofty academic concepts, when they filtered down to the youth of the time everything we knew went to hell. Keep in mind that our grandparents still rode horses and buggies when they were our age, and our fathers all won WWII single handly. We were the step children of a death of one culture and the birth of where we are now. You and I can have deep, philosophical discussions on this subject, but most of the young people during that period just wanted to get high and get laid (most of the guys I knew went to the protests simply to pick up girls).
 

BSM1

What? Me worry?
You are clearly biased. Which seems odd to me after so many years. I was there. I was the generation immediately after the hippies, and yes, my generation was just about sex, drugs, and loud music. The idealism of the hippies was dead by the time I turned 13 in 1970. I had the long hair and ripped, faded jeans, but was by no means a "hippie". I was mostly just a punk kid entering a culture that was collapsing into decadence. A collapse that was indemnified and solidified by the Reagan republicans, disco, and cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. It wasn't the hippies, or even the drugs that destroyed American idealism, it was the neo-conservative backlash; the "greed is good" culture of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and corporate advertising.


Talk about biased! I was there when it started. I was 18 in 1968. You have no idea what it was like. After Woodstock, the Hippie movement died because it became accepted on a societal basis. The media had stopped looking at young, long haired people as oddities, and it was safer for these types to travel through Alabama. By 1970 we were already seeing the emergence of 'Yuppies', harder drug use, and 'disco' (God help us).
 

metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
@metis
Since you have Italian in-laws...they can confirm to you that throughout the 70s-80s Sicily culturally changed in a very very radical way and at an incredible speed...

Just think I could not understand my grandmother...at sll
Absolutely. When I was staying there in 2001, I went for a walk with my mother-in-law at one point, and she said that what it looked like was very different when she was younger-- much poorer that also had many other ramifications. .
 

metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
First of all, there are literally so many interesting things that so many of you wrote, and I truly wish I had the time to deal with them. There are no right or wrong comments on this since we each will tend to have different experiences and different takes on what we saw and heard.

Shortly, I'm going to give my take on this movement and also how it affected me.
 

metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
With your responses, one thing each of you well established is that we simply cannot stereotype hippies.

I've divided my experiences up into six categories, and my intent is to be as brief as I possibly can.

DRUGS
Ya, many got into them, some quite heavily, but some of us didn't. I tried weed three times but was not that impressed. OTOH, I saw some destroyed by drugs. Even today with medicines, I'm very much a minimalist.

MUSIC
This was BIG for us, but I never could get into acid-rock. Instead, I preferred folk songs. But my favorite group by far was the Moody Blues, which I still play regularly. However, my favorite concert ever was seeing Peter, Paul, & Mary back in the mid-60's.

CLOTHES
The pictures tell the story in that in general, but it did vary from person to person. My wife & I pretty much dressed the stereotype, but only to a point. She only rarely wore a bra: we both preferred very casual clothes; both of us had somewhat long hair (my wife's a redhead btw); and nudity in the house was not a problem for us until our kids got older (I was a "gym rat", being in gymnastics in high school and college, so being seen naked I was quite used to because I always showered at the gym).

FOOD
I very gradually shifted from a meat & potatoes diet that I had growing up to consuming much more of a plant-based diet when in my mid-20's and beyond. Even today, my wife craves more meat than I do. My favorite cuisine by far is Indian food (vegetarian), and my first exposure to that was at a restaurant called "Raja Rani" in Ann Arbor, Michigan, back in the mid-70's.

"MAKE LOVE...
This is another one that was quite variable with hippies but there was indeed plenty of it going on. With me, prior to marriage, I didn't believe in "going steady", so I almost had at least a couple of women that I was dating at any given point in time. I was not sexually aggressive, but a few women I dated certainly were, sometimes putting me in the awkward position of having to say no. My main interest was to make them "happy", but I usually stopped after that, not going beyond because I didn't want to get anyone pregnant (notice the word "usually" though :emojconfused:).

...NOT WAR"
Since I was the son of an Army officer, I started out being pro-war if I felt it was necessary. I even signed up for ROTC during my freshman year at college but had to drop it because of a schedule conflict. Good thing I did because a couple of years later after doing much studying for a paper I wrote in one of my classes I became staunchly anti the Vietnam "war". Several years later, when I thought I could get drafted, my wife and I planned on moving to Canada because there simply was no way I could go and kill Vietnamese, and I didn't qualify for conscientious-objection status. What I didn't realize then is that I could have been drafted but opt to not carry or shoot a gun. Fortunately, my number never was called.

Anyhow, I tried to be brief. :emojconfused:
 

PureX

Veteran Member
After Woodstock, the Hippie movement died because it became accepted on a societal basis.
It was never accepted on a societal basis. It was by definition a "counter-cultural" movement which means that it couldn't be a cultural status quo. What became acceptable were the trappings of the counter-culture: longer hair on men, weird cloths, spewing platitudes about personal freedom and expression, and of course, the music and the drugs.
The media had stopped looking at young, long haired people as oddities, and it was safer for these types to travel through Alabama. By 1970 we were already seeing the emergence of 'Yuppies', harder drug use, and 'disco' (God help us).
Yes, I agree, but it wasn't because everyone adopted the lifestyle or idealism of the hippies, it was because Wall Street and Madison Avenue discovered that the pretense of being part of the "counter-culture" was very salable. So a movement that was trying to get away from the Big American Greed Machine ended up being swallowed up and exploited by it. Resulting in the adulation of decadence: the exact opposite of what the beatniks, folkies and hippies had been seeking decades before.
 
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metis

aged ecumenical anthropologist
It was never accepted on a societal basis. It was by definition a "counter-cultural" movement which means that it couldn't be a cultural status quo. What became acceptable were the trappings of the counter-culture: longer hair on men, weird cloths, spewing platitudes about personal freedom and expression, and of course, the music and the drugs.
Yes, I agree, but it wasn't because everyone adopted the lifestyle or idealism of the hippies, it was because Wall Street and Madison Avenue discovered that the pretense of being part of the "counter-culture" was very salable. So a movement that was trying to get away from the Big American Greed Machine ended up being swallowed up by it. Resulting in the adulation of decadence: the exact opposite of what the beatniks, folkies and hippies had been seeking.
I hear ya, and you make some good points, but I honestly feel what did the movement in was all the negative publicity shown on the evening t.v. news, for example, of "drug-crazed sex-fiends" that really had no other commitment to the movement because these were outsiders attracted to free sex and drugs Part of San Francisco turned into basically a slum, and kids dying from overdoses was trumpeted all over the media. I ran across this a lot when I first started teaching in 1967, and it got worse over the following decade.

I almost joined SDS as a pacifist movement in 1966, but was warned that I could get blackballed trying to get a teaching job, so I didn't. Good thing I didn't because it got radicalized from the outside, with the very violent "Weathermen" pretty much taking over.

Anyhow, thanks so much for your contribution to understanding this very interesting piece of American history.
 

PureX

Veteran Member
Yet the postal service still works, otherwise, his do they play requests for aunt Ethels 99th birthday?
They don't. It's all scripted and produced like theater at some corporate headquarters fifteen states away. No one actually knows aunt Ethel because she doesn't exist. And then it's sent out to the thousands of stations all around the country that the corporation owns and operates, to be played as "local radio". And even if a live human sits at the mic, he/she has a play list that can't be deviated from.

Owning a radio station now days is like owning a car wash. You just maintain the equipment and collect the money.
 
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