Music Music | #音乐特写RS Feature
By Chen Caiwei
Many years later, when people think of love, they still think of the sunny summer of 1967 in San Francisco. Nearly 100,000 young people dressed in bright, flowing tie-dye costumes, beaded and flowered, and wearing shawls poured into California's abandoned neighborhoods to find and construct a beautiful possibility outside the mainstream.
The summer came to be known as the Hippie Revolution, but one of its more common and affectionate names in popular minds was "Summer of Love."
It is a grand event that represents the pinnacle of hippie culture and a master of practice on freedom, ideals and liberation to the fullest extent. "Summer of Love became a model," said Joe McDonald, one of the central figures in the campaign, "we opened the door, everybody walked in, and everything was different." ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="01" > the hippies are coming</h1>
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
In the middle of the last century, the end of World War II abruptly separated the past from the future — a booming economy spawned an emerging model middle class, while the lingering Cold War erupted in Vietnam and paranoia and fear spread in politics.
Ted Streshinsky/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
It's a bizarre time, with sophisticated space technology dragging humanity outward, parents still maintaining a mainstream decent lifestyle, and young people — under the influence of rock and roll, Beat poetry, exotic cultures and hallucinogenic drugs — who are on the opposite side of mainstream society; and San Francisco is becoming the center of this countercultural movement.
Bohemian, acid, nature, mysticism, wildflowers, left-wing ideas... Fragments of hippie culture are being gathered piece by piece, setting off a hidden and powerful shock. Under the call of Scott McKenzie's hit song "San Francisco (Don't Forget to Bring Flowers)," "hippies" across the country moved to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury area.
Steve Eason / Hulton Archive / Getty Images
Wearing flowers on their heads, with slogans of "Love and Peace" and "Make Love Don't Fight", with a pure and pervasive desire for the good that has been reinforced by drugs, they issued a powerful declaration of "love" in the oppressive and divided American society of the time.
In June of that year, Newsweek magazine announced the grandeur of this cultural utopia with the headline "Here Comes the Hippies." In July of that year, Time magazine featured "Hippie: A Philosophy of a Subculture" as its cover story, summarizing for the first time the hippie spirit under the mainstream gaze: follow your heart and do what you want, whenever and wherever you want to; change the hearts of everyone you meet; open your heart—if not by drugs, then by beauty, love, honesty, and pleasure. “
In order to change the physique, hippies want to create a new society, a rich spiritual world. They reject traditional thinking: whether Western-centric, production-oriented, or teleological. They did come, along California's mountain roads, to this summer of love.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="02" > a revolution, a claim</h1>
image captionFestival-goers and hippies took over the grounds，GETTY IMAGES
Hippies are undoubtedly a culture, a grand event, but also a revolution and an advocacy. In the name of love, in the spirit of anti-war and peace, and in the context of rock and roll, young people stand on the opposite side of mainstream culture and shout loudly.
Bob Dylan, the spokesman of the baby boomer generation, is the spiritual originator of hippie and rock 'n' roll, both intellectually and musically. Dylan's music is fresh and easy to understand, catchy, but at the same time rich in intent and depth in interpretation.
"How many times would it take for a cannonball to fly across the sky to be banned forever?" "How long do people have to live before they are allowed to be free?" Bob Dylan asked in his famous song "The Answer Is In the Wind," which quickly became a hymn of the civil rights movement in the '60s.
rolling Stone第1131期， 2011年. Photo by: Jerry Schatzberg ©Rolling Stone
As an American singer who was popular for anti-war folk songs, Dylan was never limited by public expectations and social stereotypes. In 1965, Dylan bucked expectations and began using an electric guitar, starting a new career as a "rock folk". The godfather of music and thought nourished young hippies and rock 'n' roll in every way, turning this noisy and commercial form of music into a colorful and rich form.
The "Beat Generation" literature and the attention of contemporaneous folk songs to social issues, insights and reflections on human nature broadened the subject matter of rock and roll and deepened the idea of rock and roll—the best of them were Not only Bob Dylan, who wrote lyrics like poetry, but also Leonard Cohen, one of the peaks of musical thought in the last century.
Speaking of the musicians who were most influenced by Dylan, it is necessary to mention the Sgt. Pepper Club Band (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" is taking the Beatles to new heights. If hippie nation is a utopia, the Beatles song "All You Need is Love" is the "national anthem" without compromise.
The song, which begins with a brisk wind and march rhythm, is catchy and gradually accelerates as the song reaches its climax. The simple lyrics of "You only need to love, you only need to love" are like a murmured nightmare and a passionate slogan, sublimated in their own repetition.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="03" > golden age</h1>
Today, many Chinese translators still refer to the Beatles as "The Beatles" based on harmonics —both a joke about the impressions of the four musicians and a summary of the overall impression of hippies. Indeed, it's hard to say whether the hippie culture that originated in the United States influenced the Beatles, or whether the Beatles from the other side of the Atlantic influenced the United States more.
Hippies questioned popular values and beliefs in society, as did the Beatles; hippies preached peace, love, ecology, civil rights, gay rights, and freedom, as did the Beatles. This coincidence made the Beatles naturally have a huge echo with the hippie culture of the United States, and also made the Beatles move from the British boys who performed bubble gum music to the more mature and complex rock, airborne as the superstars of the hippie country.
Rolling Stone第415期， 1984. ©Rolling Stone
To this day, many Beatles songs still sound untouched. Their songs are rich in themes, although there are "Help", "Nowhere Man", "I'm Down" and other works that are exclusive to confused young people, but the dominant theme is still love- love, self-love, a kind of fraternity with detachment, love for community, and the pure joy of love itself.
The free and rebellious hippie culture in the United States has brought a fresh wind to the silent British music scene, and at the same time, the "British Invasion" in the music scene in 1965 marked the blossoming of all aspects of British rock in the United States, and rock music entered its own unstoppable climax with hippie culture.
Rolling Stone第66期， 1970. Photo by: Jim Marshall ©Rolling Stone
That year, Bob Dylan began plugging in, folk songs began to fade, psychedelics became popular, Jefferson Airplanes became an army, and The Grateful Dead began to perform officially. Just as Bob Dylan and others initially found their folk belonging in cafes in Greenwich Village, New York, rock artists of different styles celebrated their own grand festivals at the California music festival, colliding with brilliant sparks.
This is the golden age of hippies, the golden age of all young people whose hearts are full of love. Of course, rock 'n' roll is no exception, for listeners, and even more so for musicians. "1967 seemed like a golden year," Beatles member Paul McCartney later recalled. "It always seemed like the sun was shining, and we were wearing weird clothes and weird sunglasses. Maybe it's a little too easy to call it the Summer of Love, but it's a golden summer. ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="04" > sunlight behind dark clouds</h1>
1967 was the golden age of hippie and rock 'n' roll, but when the colorful fragments of hippie culture were celebrated like never before, commercial participation and mainstream gaze began to quietly change things, and the trajectory of reality had quietly pointed in the direction of capitalism, commercial operations, and popular tastes— everything that the hippies themselves had to fight.
The originality and sincerity of "Summer of Love" may slowly fade, but the rebellious spirit, love and peace ideas, and rock stars it creates continue to draw on the nutrients of the peak of hippie culture and continue to grow in a more institutionalized way. Mass rallies such as the Monterrey Festival created a popular performance, and demonstrations outside the Democratic National Convention in '68 clearly touched the authorities with hippie "anti-war" claims.
On August 9, 1969, actress Sharon Tate and 4 others were killed in their home for news.
At the same time, the specter of anarchism in hippie culture began to emerge from time to time: without any institutional regulation, the chaotic, anti-intellectual, and even violent factors of the hippie community surfaced after several violent incidents. In 1969, Hollywood actress Sharon Tate, a hippie-style actress, was brutally murdered in Los Angeles, committed by the hippie group Manson Family. At a time when countercultural and mainstream culture tensions were raging and the "Chicago Seven" faced the trial of the authorities, the woodstock Festival, the last carnival of hippie culture, exploded in 1979 as if there was no tomorrow.
"Only once did music save the world, and that was Woodstock," Morris Dickstein said in his book Gates of Eden, a book about American culture in the sixties, that has been widely quoted by later media and critics.
Woodstock，Photo by：Baron Wolman ©Baron Wolman
Hosted by a few inexperienced but whimsical young men, the rally, held on a 2.4-square-kilometer ranch in Bethel, New York, quickly evolved from a hastily planned business event into a hippie celebration without thresholds. On this occasional rainy weekend, 32 performances attracted 400,000 visitors. In the first few days of the festival, the mainstream media blindly emphasized the dark side of hippie culture and the problems caused by the festival———— "traffic jams at the hippie festival" and "hippie is stuck in a vast ocean of mud", the headline of the New York Daily News wrote.
However, Woodstock did not disappoint, and the hippie young people did not fall.
In this festival known for its amazing community atmosphere, participants seem to have reached a secret consensus, and the spirit of "Summer of Love" seems to be revived. After all, as Rolling Stone once commented, San Francisco's secret has never been a dance, a light show, a poster, or a dance step, but an idea that everyone wants to create a community.
Chaos, embarrassment, madness, and even erosion may be Woodstock, but those who have experienced it have never stopped remembering Woodstock's amazing camaraderie, mutual trust, and beauty for the rest of their lives. In his 2013 memoir, Off My Rocker, former show organizer Kenny Weissberg devotes an entire chapter to the life-changing event. "Many later experts believed that much of an exaggeration was about the beauty of the community atmosphere during woodstock, but that was not true at all," Weisberg wrote.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="05" > will the world be better off?</h1>
Will the world be a better place? Like all rebellious and idealistic young men, the hippies asked questions eagerly and answered them with the most naïve and sincere belief. For them, love is both an end and a means, all possible and the only possible.
Along with the song "We Shall Overcome," sung by legendary folk singer Joan Baez, all the participants sang together in response to the injustices of the times and merged into the theme song of the civil rights movement. "We're going to get over it, and we're going to get over it all one day. Deep in my heart, I believe we will one day overcome all this. ”
No matter how unforgettable the witnesses of this protracted carnival may be, the spirit of peace, love, and anti-materialism represented by Woodstock is rapidly being replaced by the consumerism and materialism that have grown wildly throughout society. But because of this, this weekend of tens of thousands of young people living side by side in near-harsh material conditions seems even more incredible. "Woodstock has succeeded in making people realize that the only limitations in my life come from myself," Says Westberg.
John Rodgers/Redferns/Getty Images
Once disheveled young people with disheveled hair, wearing Turkish robes, and full of discontent in their hearts entered the capitalist system that had been avoided, and the unruly "hippies" and "xenophiles" grew into the young elite "yuppies", but a part of the hearts of a generation has forever remained in the heavy rain of September 15 in Woodstock. There, young people never grow old, idealism shines brightly.
But the hippies of the year grew up. It's hard to say whether they've waited for a better era or won a better one, but there's no doubt that they've become more responsible and more open to their opinions. John Lennon and his wife, musician Yoko Ono staged the famous "Peace in Bed" for 7 days, she and Lennon did not get out of bed, stayed in bed to be interviewed and photographed by major media, and promoted a distinct anti-war concept. Gratitude Death member Jerry Garcia actively participated in charity in the 1980s, using his influence to focus on the rainforest and homeless people.
Live Aid: The stage at Wembley Stadium (Image: Rex)
In 1985, to help alleviate the famine in Ethiopia, another music event that affected history took place – the famous "Live Aid". The popular melodies of the times have been different, but the scene where 150,000 people in Britain and the United States gathered for love still reminds people of woodstock's grandeur, the original spirit of hippies, and the reason why rock is rock.
When the prelude to the electric guitar sounds, the spirit of "Summer of Love" and Woodstock is also revived with the rhythm of four or four beats. From Queen to Michael Jackson, the gorgeous line-up and unprecedented scale of the show are even better than Woodstock. On top of the mother of hippies, rock 'n' roll triumphed over and surpassed itself.
"We are the world, we are the champions. We are making a decision. The Vietnam War was over, the Berlin Wall was about to fall, and "love" and music related to it were sung all the way from small love to humanitarian fraternity. "We Are the World" is the most gorgeous and moving special creation at this concert. The spirit of rebellion receded, hippies, Western society and music grew together in an intertwined relationship, and despite the pains of the past, love never faded in the spirit of the times.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The "hippie revolution" is a relic of half a century ago. After 2020, which is full of uncertainty, looking back at the hippie spirit of that year may have a special meaning. Biographer Sir Edward Cook once said, "When the successful ideas of past generations are ingrained in the public and taken for granted, their origins are forgotten." ”
In an age when young people are torn apart like never before and can no longer passionately express their passion for good values, the pure and fierce love of hippies still has meaning – equal love across races and genders; peaceful love against the violence of war; community love that desires change and builds communities... Rock and roll, which grew with hippie culture and exploded after its demise, is definitely the most vivid and vivid testimony of this glorious era.
As Grace Slick, the lead singer of the Jefferson spaceship, said years later, Summer of Love is like a magical treasure. "In its most basic sense, art reminds us of who we want to be and how to get there. This is the way art changes the world. The same goes for the Summer of Love: it's a reminder of what possibilities we have, and the future we're trying to build. ”