Part One

Hippie. Nobody seems to have much of a good word to say about 'hippie'. The term often comes prefaced by a descriptive adjective. Dirty hippie. Filthy hippie. Lazy hippie. Bloody hippie. Those of a literary bent have been known to string together a number of these adjectives for greater effect. Thus we get filthy lazy hippie; dirty bloody hippie; bloody lazy hippie. Creativity is a marvellous thing.

Other 'youth movements', so-called, have their supporters. Punks and skinheads are lauded as energetic rebellion against the established order. BBC will run serious programmes analysing the rise of punk: its rise as a force of the working class youth, its legacy, etc. In the case of hippie: nothing.

Hippie is more or less universally despised. Even sections of today's 'truth culture' rail against hippies, blaming them for indulging in a debilitating philosophy of universal love and passive acceptance, rather than taking up arms in the fight for social change in the field of politics, protests, demonstrations, and the rest. Hippie, the scum of the earth.

During the time when hippies were apparently running amok, I never met a single self-respecting alternative or countercultural person who called themselves a hippie. They would take it as an insult. In his excellent book 'Storming Heaven', Jay Stevens describes how the term was first popularly coined by journalist Michael Fallon, writing for the San Francisco Examiner in September 1965 (chapter 22). It was a contraction from Norman Mailer's 'hipster', coming with a diminutive connotation. Never trust a name given to you by another party - especially if that other party is mainstream media....

The Gandalf's Garden people were, by popular definition, hippies. I still recall, vividly, the first time I set sight upon real, live human beings approximating to the media description of hippie. It was, I guess, the summer of 1967, and the family was returning home from holidays in the Welsh mountains. We were passing a country park or similar in Northamptonshire, where a rock music festival was packing up. There, distinct and unmistakeable, a couple were loading their camping belongings into the back of a car. Colourful, paisley-patterned, flowing clothes; long flowing hair: absolutely novel in my experience of human beings to date.

I was fourteen years old at the time. While maybe not quite so mind-shattering as the young Jim Morrison's apocalyptic backseat experience ('Indians on dawn's highway scattered bleeding/ Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind'), still my glimpse of hippie life out the rear of the family car made a deep impression. Being different - living different - was possible. It could be done. You could do it. You just had to.

Part Two

The counterculture of 'Communes' magazine and Trentishoe Free Festival was the absolute pits as far as the mainstream version of reality was concerned. The youth culture - or youth cultures - of the recent past had arrived with their own share of disgust and aversion from the powers-that-pretended-to-be. Male youth came with long hair and flowery shirts; females had sex at the drop of a hat; the whole being accompanied by enormous quantities of illegal and dangerous drugs. 

Yet despite the holier-than-thou disapproval and tut-tutting, all this provided rich pickings for what was then termed 'the Establishment'. An enormous commercial spin-off evolved in fashion and design, film, music, and elsewhere. As usual, a substantial band of parasitic vampires were waiting in the wings, ready to suck the blood from any suggestion of money or success that was around. In general, mainstream 'culture' is invariably adept at hijacking anything with true value to humanity, deflating original motivations and substituting its own deathly version of life.

By 1970 the 'alternative' had the life sucked out of it by these vampires of fame and fortune. What remained was truly bereft of commercial value. Its male denizens slouched around in old, worn-out jeans and cheap tie-dye shirts (or naked from the waist up during the summer months). The female version, meanwhile, wandered through life spacily, in long skirts and dresses, with equally long hair pulling down wan-looking faces into expressions ever-more pale and sickly.

Part Three

While the so-called psychedelic sixties boasted a galaxy of colourful rock superstars, the new counterculture of the 1970s had ....... Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies. Both were pretty bad. Especially the Pink Fairies.

I had spent an entire winter cooped up in a cold student room listening to Hawkwind's 'In Search of Space', trying to convince myself that it was great, and that I really liked it. I mean, you should like Hawkwind, shouldn't you? It was mission impossible; or at least mission failed miserably.

The Pink Fairies, meanwhile, were not exactly subtle in style. They could proudly claim to be the only rock group whose concert I needed to leave halfway through, because the 'music' was so loud and grating that it induced considerable ear pain. I feared permanent hearing loss.

I suppose that we also had Quintessence. The polar opposite of Pink Fairies, Quintessence were soft, wafty, 'spiritual'. Undoubtedly a bunch of lovely people, who appealed to those from the 'I don't do drugs any more, I'm into meditation' crowd. But there were many problems with Quintessence. First up, there was an 'all religions are one' undercurrent to their chanting and evocation of the holy spirits. "Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Guaranga/ Drown me deep in the sea of your love............." they intoned in one of their better-known and irritably catchy ditties. Er, hold on a minute. Moses? Are you sure about that? Sea of love? Check out this dude, his life, his edicts. You might want to reconsider.

There is also a confusion and conflation of 'spiritual' (individual, unique, the taste of freedom) with 'religion' (herd mentality, group consciousness, liable to manipulation and mind control) in Quintessence. Fatal.

'We are the light': this seemed to be the essence, quintessentially. This disavowal of darkness, of one side of existence, paved the way for New Age airy-fairy-ness in the years to come. It was also the mentality which, several decades down the line, was perverted and hijacked into all manner of political correctness, where everything is one, everything is the same, and if you disagree your life won't be worth living.

The early 1970s witnessed an extraordinary mushrooming of musical inventiveness, electric creativity at its best, astonishing and impossible to replicate today. Mahavishnu Orchestra, Can, Yes, among others. Part of a wider alternative, maybe; but we didn't get them at the free festivals. 

Part Four

All this - the absence of fame and prestige, the lack of fringe benefits, the non-existence of anything that the mainstream vampires could profitably harvest - was an extremely good thing. The cold, astringent, sometimes tacky waters of these years threw up and out anything or anybody in it for purpose that was not true, sincere, real. Living on brown rice in a draughty commune earned you few brownie points in 1972 Britain.

And, unlike its 1960s counterpart, this collective effort to create a more authentic and loving way of living had no great leaders, no wonderworking heroes. No Ginsbergs, Lennons, or Learys; no Kesey, Mcluhan, or anyone else. This was the whole point. You are the revolution - nobody's going to do it for you. Get over it.

'History is the lives of great people' no longer did the trick, other than considering us all in our individual splendour and greatness. Pyramids of power, hierarchies of control were out the window. "We're not doing that stuff: it's crap. We can do things in a better way." Thus came the semi-conscious whisper from those long hairs and long dresses of the early 1970s. And so it was.

Postscript

So if we weren't hippies, who were we? In the language of the early 1970s alternative scene, things boiled down to a remarkable simplicity. The world we inhabited was divided right down the middle into two groups, and two groups only: freaks and straights. 

Some people preferred to use the word 'head' to 'freak', and you could hear people exclaim things like "He's a real head", a term of admiration and endearment. For myself, I always used 'freak', since it wasn't just, or mainly, the 'head' that was involved, but every cell of your entire being. It was far more than a 'head trip'.

Remarkably, the distinction seemed to work, in a rough and ready way. While all the old divisions - working class, middle class etc - appeared redundant, almost everybody could be fitted into this simple categorisation. You signed up for life on the hamster wheel: the conventional round of job, mortgage, pension, watch tele, drop dead, and that's it - or you didn't. You would get the occasional pretender, but they were easily spotted and weeded out. While at grammar school, I had a friend who boasted to me that he was a 'weekend hippie'. Bad move, Pete (that was his name). You're in or you're out. It was a friendship clearly heading for the exit door.

Resources

'Albion Dreaming' by Andy Roberts, mentioned in the previous 'life story' post, remains an excellent record. Also his more recent, and less expensive, 'Acid Drops'. Another book which goes into the hippie and not-a-hippie phenomenon extensively is 'Storming Heaven' by Jay Stevens. Its narrative is based in the USA, but it's a great read for anybody wishing to delve into the unfashionable elements of recent western history.

You do personal research into Quintessence and the Pink Fairies at your peril.....   

Images: Windsor Free Festival 1973. Pinterest: Gabriel Alexander

               Quintessence. Progarchives.com