13. Who were (are) the hippies anyway?
13. What is a hippie? Back in 1995, I left school and went to India and, arriving in Goa, I found a culture of travellers and drop-outs who had been there, on and off, since the 60's. who called themselves freaks. We (I swiftly decided I wanted to join their ranks) called ourselves freaks rather than hippies. A freak was someone who had gone their own way and lived a life on their own terms, undefined by the culture from which they came. It was a badge of honour to be a freak and one we used to distinguish ourselves from the tourists who were beginning to outnumber us as development rapidly ate away at our counter-culture paradise. Every day I hung out with some of the older personalities at hidden-away cafes in the jungle and one of them, 8-Finger Eddie, was going strong at the age of 74, having arrived to Goa in 1965 and never left, straying no further than Nepal for regular visa runs. I wanted to know how it all got started and so one day asked him: 'Eddie, before the freaks and hippies, there were the Beatniks, right? 'Kerouac! Ginsberg!' he grinned. Right, so who were the cool people before the Beatniks?' 'Hipsters!' he told me, the memory of the jazz age lighting up his eyes. 'And before hipsters?' Eddie paused for a moment and shrugged. 'Black people!' he laughed. There's this story that when the Beatles first came to the US, a much feted cultural invasion, they were greeted by screaming crowds and a throng of reporters who asked them what they wanted to see in America. Muddy Waters, the Beatles said, referring to the legendary bluesman, one of many who had influenced their musical formation. Oh, where's that? The reporter replied. The Beatles weren't the first to revamp black music and bring it to the American mainstream - Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly had already done that - but they were the first to give them credit and that helped spark a renewed interest in the blues. But early black American culture hadn't just given groovier music to future generations, the tunes went hand in hand with more open attitudes towards sexuality and drugs. John Lennon never would have sung Why Don't We Just Do It in the Road? without having heard I Got My Mojo Working. And black jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong freely claimed that marijuana made them play better. Beatnik writers like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg used speed, opiates and psychedelics to open their minds to new realms of experience in the 50's, laying the groundwork for the following generation of Flower Children who would truly blow their minds open in the 60's. The music, the drugs, the new ideas marked the difference between the status quo and those who had decided to 'tune in, turn on and drop out.', as LSD guru, Timothy Leary had it. In fact, a whole new lexicon sprung up to define the new movement. You might 'turn someone on' by giving them their first joint. A person could be 'with it' or 'cool' if they 'dug' what was going on. All with a certain degree of pride as Bob Dylan had it in A Ballad of a Thin Man: 'You walk into the room With your pencil in your hand You see somebody naked And you, you say, "Who is that man?" You try so hard But you don't understand Just what you will say When you get home Because something is happening here But ya' don't know what it is Do you, Mister Jones?' But what took everyone so long? Why had everyone been so straight up until then? The rather prosaic answer is the economy, stupid. Until then, the kind of individual who took an interest in drugs, eastern religions or non-conventional sexuality was likely to an eccentric member of the upper classes with money behind them and the social licence to be a bit of a colourful character - an oddball, to be sure, but still welcome at dinner parties. The wisdom of the hippies was how happy we can be with so little. A guitar, a fire, some friends and you're set for a great evening. I once passed a bar of chocolate around 20 people at a fire on a hippie gathering. It went around twice, everyone so ecstatic to take tiny nibbles. But you can only realise that less is more if you have more to begin with. The generation of young Westerners who turned their back on the material dream of a house in the suburbs, a steady office job and mowing the grass on Sundays, never had to worry about there being food on the table or clothes that fit them. The hippies of the 60's had grown up with the relative affluence of the post-war economic boom of the 50's and had seen that having more stuff didn't make anyone any happier. So they were happy to wander the earth barefoot, singing ditties on ukuleles. As a character in the 60's classic comic, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers observed: 'As we all know, dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope!' And, crucially, if and when their hippie dreams went pop and they found themselves needing some dental work or a deposit for an apartment when babies came their way, many of them had the safety net of families who could bail them out. Or at the least they came from affluent countries where they could plug themselves back in the economic grid and get a job. Which goes to explain why hippies are very thin on the ground in poorer countries. There just isn't the surplus wealth to support someone sitting under a palm tree writing surrealist poetry. And it's also why, if you go to any alternative festival today, or a wooden guest house for travellers in the Indian Himalayas, you'll find very few people of working class origin. They don't usually want to sit around on the grass, covered in mud, or travel somewhere that's even more rundown and broken than the neighbourhoods they're from. People who grew up with very little, understandably tend to aspire to have more and live in comfort. As one New Age character on the cult comedy, Peep Show, observed: 'Guess I've just been very lucky. Money's an energy and lots of it has always flowed towards me. Particularly after my parents died.' But the counterculture of the 60's wasn't just rich kids having fun, it really was a social revolution that wrought massive changes in race relations, gender roles, civil liberties, gay rights and birthed the environmental movement. Consider: in the early 60's, in most Western countries there was no legal recognition of rape within marriage. There was little or no access to contraception. Racial segregation was a norm in the southern states of the US. Homosexuality was illegal in most Western countries. And DDT was devastating bird populations. But change rarely happens all at once. And there are backlashes and setbacks along the way. So for many of the dreamers who thought they were about to bring about a tie-dyed utopia with flowers in their hair and hallucinogens in their blood stream, the comedown was brutal. The world kept on turning on its inexorable course as Hunter Thompson reminded us in a rare lucid moment in his cult classic book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: '...a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.' During the Covid pandemic, when I wrote Science for Hippies, I was surprised a few commenters thought I was aiming it at the Boomer generation, as though hippies had only existed in the 6o's. But even in the last years of school, they guys in my social circle had long hair, we smoked dope, listened to Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. At the very first festival I went to, the Big Green Gathering, some wag had dug a pit in the earth and put up a sign declaring a crystal amnesty where everyone could hand in their healing stones without fear of recriminations. And since then I spent years of my life with the Rainbow Family in hippie gatherings lasting a cycle of the moon, dancing around the fire with people who thought peace and love could save the world. Perhaps the hippie movement per se has gone but as a lifestyle, a point of view on the world, an identity, it never really went away. What it did do was morph into the New Age movement with people celebrating vague pagan notions of rituals on the solstices and equinoxes, interest in Wicca and witchery, energy healing and other yoghourt-weaving, as we called it in England. And freaks going their own way meant breaking free from the shackles of social norms and expectations. As one wag had it, tradition is peer pressure from dead people. It also marked a huge shift towards individualism. The quest for enlightenment or self-realisation is a highly personal one, after all. One's own spiritual progress, one's own meditative state, one's own health. Hence no surprise when the New Age movement morphed into the solipsistic navel-gazing that characterises most of the self-help and wellness movement which now grosses several trillion dollars a year. When everyone is keeping gratitude journals, using essential oils and doing yoga in the mornings, counter-culture has gone mainstream. Perhaps it was all a lot more fun when hippies were a rare and revolutionary tribe who could delight in daring to let their freak flags fly. And what's in a word anyway? A friend of mine was travelling in South America in the 70's and, in a small town in Bolivia, had united with a band of dope-smoking, hitchhiking, juggling, dancing, barefoot, long-haired renegades and adventurers. An elderly gentleman in a suit passed by and sniffed scornfuYou can find more podcasts, stories and books from Tom Thumb on www.tomthumb.oegTom Thumb is is the author of:Hand to Mouth to IndiaTales of a Road JunkySomewhere Under the RainbowScience for HippiesAnd also the podcasts:Road Junky Travel StoriesStories of Tom Thumb
