Hippies are mentioned and a group of young people with long hair, flowers on their heads, tie-dye floral shirts, and jeans or flared pants appear in front of them.
They pursue "love and peace", advocate romance, and freedom, rebellion, and uninhibited have become synonymous with them.
Today, we go back to the America of the '60s and listen to the songs that hippies revere.
1963
Blowing in wind
-Bob Dylan
In the early 1960s, the United States was shrouded in an atmosphere of tension. The continuation of the Vietnam War, the outbreak of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, and one uneasy incident after another have made the young people in the United States increasingly negative.
Although their material needs were met, they gradually lost hope in life in the face of that turbulent era. Confusion, emptiness, and a sense of powerlessness to life make them choose to provoke a revolt – they march through the streets and actively propagate anti-war ideas.
American folk singer Bob Dylan expressed some anti-war ideas in the lyrics of "Blowing in the Wind" released in 1963. The young people who were preaching love and peace seemed to have found sustenance and regarded the song as an anti-war hymn.
How many times must the cannon balls fly
How many times the shells will pass through the sky
Before they're forever banned
in order to be banned forever
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind
My friend, the answer, flutters in the wind
The answer is blowing in the wind
The answer flutters in the wind
In 1961, 20-year-old Bob Dylan came to Greenwich Village from his hometown of Minnesota, where Dylan began his legendary life. And the story of the hippies also begins with this small village.
The name "hippie" first came from Greenwich Village, where young counterculturals called themselves "hips."
The word "hippies" we now call Hippeies in English was written by Herb Kane, a reporter for the San Francisco Times in 1965, to describe these young people who opposed tradition, opposed war, and pursued freedom and peace. The term "hippie" has since officially entered the media world and has been widely disseminated.
I Want to Hold Your Hand
-The Beatles
Meanwhile, in 1963, Britain, on the other side of the Atlantic, was experiencing "Beatle mania," which caught the attention of young Americans. On February 7, 1964, the Beatles came to the United States, and two days later they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Overnight, 73 million viewers in the United States knew about them, and the "Beatles Mania" began to sweep the United States, and their "I Want to Hold Your Hand" dominated the Singles Chart in the United States for a month and a half.
On February 7, 1964, the Beatles had just arrived in the United States
A large number of British bands represented by the Beatles quickly became popular in the United States, and they changed the history of popular music and rock and roll in the United States, influencing countless young Americans. This "British invasion" also affected Bob Dylan.
Bob Dylan & John Lennon
At the Newport Music Festival in May 1965, Bob Dylan was the first to use an electric guitar instead of an acoustic guitar to play. However, the people standing under the stage did not buy it, and they booed and angrily scolded him as a traitor to the folk song.
Nevertheless, Bob Dylan "plugged in" folk songs, colliding folk with rock, and in the summer of 1965, a new musical genre was born, folk rock.
Also influenced by the Beatles was the Jefferson Airplane band founded in 1965. They initially played some Beatles and folk rock songs at the club, but they were widely known for their later releases of psychedelic rock songs.
Jefferson Airplane
In the mid-60s, hippies gradually went to extremes, and they became keen to seek new thrills – drug use, which even became fashionable for young people in the 60s. With the rise of the hippie movement and LSD hallucinogens, it directly led to the emergence of psychedelic rock.
1967
White Rabbit
-Jefferson Airplane
In 1967, Jefferson Airplane released their second album, Surrealistic Pillow, and their most important album. On this album that pioneered psychedelic rock in San Francisco, White Rabbit is a classic of psychedelic rock songs.
One pill makes you larger
A single pill can swell you into a giant
And one pill makes you small
A single pill can also make you shrink like an ant
Although the entire lyrics borrow from Alice in Wonderland, it is not difficult to see that the "pill" in the first two lyrics is a metaphor for drugs.
In just a few years, from folk to folk rock to psychedelic rock, the evolution of these three musical genres is inseparable from hippies.
The story of the hippies is finally told in 1967. This was the year in which the hippie cultural movement reached its peak and the golden age of rock 'n' roll.
1967 was a year that even I, who was very uninterested in history, wanted to travel back in time. Because that summer was a "Summer of Love" with flowers, romantic purity, idealism and freedom.
San Francisco
(Be Sure to Wear Flowers In Your Hair)
-Scott McKenzie
If you’re going to San Francisco
If you're going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
Don't forget to wear a few flowers on your head
You’re gonna meet some gentle people
You will meet many gentle people
In May 1967, Scott McKenzie reinterpreted a song by The Mamas & the Papas lead singer John Phillips, and the song "San Francisco (Don't Forget to Bring Flowers)" kicked off the "Summer of Love", with more and more hippies traveling to San Francisco to live a communal life, and San Francisco became a utopia full of ideals and flowers for young hippies.
"Summer of Love" is the slogan "Love", and hippies, with the slogan "Make Love, Not War", wear flowers on their heads and flock to the streets in an attempt to soften the hard and cold traditional ideas with flowers.
Flower Power
We saw a group of young people who looked forward to peace and freedom, and their eyes were full of vision of an ideal society.
The song "San Francisco" was originally used by John Phillips to promote the Monterrey Pop Festival in June.
June 1967 Poster of the Monterrey Pop Festival
By June, Monterrey, 119 miles from San Francisco, had attracted nearly 100,000 hippies.
100,000 hippies spontaneously rushed to the ideal holy place in their hearts.
But the Monterrey festival wasn't the pinnacle of freedom for hippies, as it was two years later at the Woodstock Festival.
Writer Maurice Dixstein wrote in his book The Gates of Eden, a description of American culture in the 60s: "There was only one time when music saved the world, and that was Woodstock. ”
It was a rock festival of unprecedented scale, and in the middle of the summer of 1969, more than 450,000 people flocked to the small town of Bethel in New York.
Before the show started, because there were too many cars coming and causing traffic jams, they chose to get out of the car and walk over. The hippies who laughed along the way didn't realize they were about to participate in one of the most important music festivals in the history of rock and roll.
What seems inconceivable now is that this grand music festival was actually organized by a few young people. They planned to hold a three-day music festival on August 15-18, and the organizers predicted that 50,000 people would come, but they did not expect more than 450,000 people to come, and because of the enthusiasm, the festival lasted until the morning of the fourth day.
1969
We Shall Overcome
-Joan Baez
Legendary folk queen Joan Baez's performance of "We Shall Overcome" at the Woodstock Festival resonated with tens of thousands of viewers.
We shall overcome
We will triumph
we shall overcome
we shall overcome someday
One day we will triumph
Oh, deep in my heart I do believe
Oh, deep down in my heart, I believe
That we shall overcome someday
The festival's themes were "Peace, Anti-War, Fraternity, Equality," all of which hippies aspired to achieve in American society.
Guitar god Jimi Hendrix's song "Hey Joe" brought this unprecedented rock and roll spree to a perfect end.
Although the festival was described by later generations as "depraved", "unbearable", and even "eroded" because of drug abuse, because of drugging, because of promiscuity, in the eyes of hippies, they were nothing more than attending a grand gathering of pure beauty and self-enjoyment.
There is a documentary about this legendary rock festival, "Woodstock (Woodstock Festival 1969)", which can be seen if you are interested. In addition, Ang Lee's "Making Woodstock" also tells the story of the festival.
After this legendary music festival that can no longer be copied, the hippies at the peak gradually turned from prosperity to decline and slowly disappeared from the public eye.
Today, the word "hippies" is so far away that we can't experience that crazy and complicated 60s, can't participate in those bloody music festivals, can't communicate with the hippies of the time.
We can only feel them as much as possible from the history they left behind, the musical works left by that era, and feel the real and emotional hippies.