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Death Of Hippie

Hippie met its ugly death

In Buena Vista Park;

Buried with the smack and meth

With candles in the dark;

Vietnam the only trip

That had the people in its grip.

* * *

Organized by the Diggers, residents of Haight-Ashbury marched through the streets in early October, 1967, carrying a coffin to symbolize the “Death of Hippie.” They carried it to Buena Vista Park, the oldest park in San Francisco. The park sits on a hill whose low end is bordered by Haight Street. The Diggers (a name taken from history) were a radical community action group of activists and street theater performers who operated in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. The protest was against the commercialization of the hippie movement, or the notion that it was a “movement” at all. The Diggers maintained “hippie” was a phenomenon created by the media. The residents wanted the media out of Haight-Ashbury.

* * *

At the time I was living in Mendocino and writing for The Illustrated Paper, a paper published there sporadically from a print shop in Fort Bragg. The editor’s wife, Hillie was a plate maker at the shop which cut the cost of printing way back. The editor, Walter, and I visited Haight-Ashbury several times to talk with the people who put together another underground paper called the Oracle which had offices above Haight Street. Walter was a good graphic artist and wanted to meet the art editor at the Oracle. The first time we went there, a guy was there to see another editor, waiting in the front office with me and Walter. We said hello but he wasn’t in the mood for talking. He wasn’t a hippie, looked straight. He was wearing a hat and sunglasses even though it was dark outside. When we got inside to see the art editor, Gabe Katz, we asked about the guy outside. Gabe told us he was some “nut job named Hunter Thompson who wants to write a book on the Hells Angels and he wants us to introduce him to the San Francisco Chapter”. I was later in a commune with Gabe but that’s another story.

In January of ’67 my wife and I came down from Mendocino in January to attend a festival called the Human Be-in in the panhandle at Golden Gate Park. It was a free event that went from noon until evening. It was organized in an attempt to get the Berkley radicals and the counter culture, represented by Haight-Ashbury, to work together. Speakers included Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Timothy Leary, the poet Gary Snyder, and Richard Alpert who later became Baba Ram Das. The comedian Dick Gregory also spoke. I think the Glide Memorial Church’s Cecil Williams was there, too. Rock bands included the Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead. The underground chemist, Owsley Stanley, provided free LSD called “White Lightning.”

It was a beautiful sunny day. What I took from the event was seeing the San Francisco Chapter of the Hells Angels run some poor bastard through a gauntlet of fists and boots and nobody did anything about it. Probably the right thing to do at the time. Wikipedia, with apparently no irony intended, says that the Angels were kept busy returning lost kids to their parents. The Hells Angels had adopted Haight-Ashbury and “protected” it like they did the Grateful Dead.. They also sold a lot of crank in the Haight. The Human Be-in was a prelude to the Summer of Love and the Death of Hippie capped it off.

* * *

As punk rock music started losing momentum and branching into different factions a lot of the original political stances dissolved as well. Hard-core, Post hard-core, peace punk (stayed very political), crust, Grind-core, pop-punk, skate punk, etc. Lots of different sounding music, but most bands would cite punk rock as their roots or inspiration. There were also regional divisions in look, sound, and style. In the Pacific Northwest a bunch of bands started playing heavier, darker tunes with roots in the 60s and 70s hard rock as well as punk. Before it really blew-up in popularity, magazines were starting to take notice and dubbed this “Seattle” style. One of these bands, Nirvana, got huge, so the media was falling all over itself to come up with a better moniker than “Seattle style.” They came up with GRUNGE. Not that big a deal really. Then grunge bands were popping up all over, adopting the media's portrayal — unshaven, longish hair, flannel shirts. The “look” became more important than music, and I kept hearing about GRUNGE until that poor junkie Cobain ate a shotgun. I could go on and on about this, but this is what I was thinking about after my Rhyme Alert. Postscript. I wish I could somehow thank the Mainstream Media for romanticizing heroin, I lost a few friends that might never have gone near that nasty shit.

* * *

“And all the hippies moved to Albion and lived…” said the Boonville editor.

4 Comments

  1. skippy May 1, 2012

    Nice read, thank you. After reading this piece, I wanted to look more into Owsley. I found a great article written about him in the Rolling Stone. What an interesting cat he was. This led to that, from here to there, and the reads and memories and the moment in time took me happily for a good hour or two reminiscing away and surfing down the paths of Memory Lane .

    Looking back, those 60s and early 70s, they were good times… and then we moved on and onto other things, I suppose. Yeah, I lived in a commune, too, the happiest time of my life. Everything a young man could possibly want. Then we grew up and traded it all in for a life of toil and responsibility, a house and a car and the kids and central plumbing and 401Ks, the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom, they tell me.

    Sigh.

  2. “Bear” Owsley met his end in a car wreck in Australia, where he had survived throat cancer and ironically, he had relocated because of survival concerns- global warming for one.

  3. Douglas Coulter January 2, 2022

    I escaped from Napa State Mental hospital in 1968 at age 14
    Walked the RR tracks to Frisco 52 miles away. The Haight was ugly then. Summer of love gave way to summer of junk.

    What would you think if I bent all your spoons just to cook up some smack for my need
    Lend me some cash and I won’t pay you back cause I have a rich habit to feed
    Still I get by when I rip off my friends
    I can get high when I rip off my friends
    I wonder why I don’t have any friends

    Douglas Wayne Coulter
    I lost more friends to junk than Vietnam, I watched two communes melt down from takers overwhelming workers. Free sex, free drugs?
    Nothing in the universe is free.

  4. AR December 14, 2023

    I dont think Hippie had to die — I think it was the women who killed it.

    In every space Ive been in — any time women have a large voice or say, things get worse. Worse because things get more disorganized, slower to resolve, more dramatic – less action. Men want results. Women want to talk about it. Men will kick a problem out. Women will think “its mean to kick the taker out.” Seems to apply to society as well — the more feminine a society becomes, the worse it feels. The less order and structure there is -and the hippies more than anyone needed that structure, structure isnt bad, hierarchy isnt bad, when its based on legitimate skill, knowledge, and ability. But “IT FEELS BAD” — so says femininity — IT FEELS BAD AND HURTS FEELINGS. So we dont do it …and we slowly let everything ROT from inside because we have no more STANDARDS — even hippies had standards — but TOLERANCE was a weapon. Tolerance, Kindness, and BEING NICE = collapse and chaos. Takers have to be kicked out. Yes, its mean. But we needed that order. We needed rules to live a new way — we needed order to our new revolutionary thought. Instead we got a lot of FEELINGS and because of that, we forewent doing the RIGHT thing in exchange for doing the NICE thing…

    Good =/= Nice. And that was the Hippie’s problem. They let women run the show, feelings run the show, and it collapsed. Dreadfully so. BUT!! The good news is that New Age Hippies (or w/e you want to call us) have learned from the OG Hippie’s mistakes — we call your mistakes out, we see what you did wrong — we see you involved the wrong people, bad people, lazy people, soft and weak people — and it ruined you.

    So thank you for your example. We’ll be sure to steer clear.

    Our commune very much has a hippie vibe — BUT ALSO — we have order, we have rules, and weak, softness has no room here. Everything is objective. You met the standard box, or you didnt and you get kicked out.

    And frankly I’m sure you and some readers will take exception to what I wrote and say how wrong and blind and hateful and bla bla bla I am — AND YET — Hippie is dead, that much is known. Who killed Hippie, well, we’ll just have to have our own opinions on the issue, but I think if someone is honest with themselves, they will fully admit what Im saying is true. That isnt to say, to be clear, that women ARE a problem or bad or w/e. I love women lol. Its just to say that when a movement, or organization, or group, or culture, or society lets women into a leading role ..it stagnates and dies, problems arent dealt with, and bad people arent handled quickly “because its mean and hurts feelings.” Yea, well it killed Hippie. So clearly Im not 100% wrong.

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