1967: IT WASN’T ALL HIPPIE EVER AFTER
In Search Of The Lost Chord: 1967 And The Hippie Idea
It’s now half a century since the ‘summer of love’. But what was it, and how did it happen? In his book, which is part history, part memoir, Danny Goldberg describes the moment when ‘previously esoteric ideas burst briefly into the centre of mass culture’. It felt like a revolution. The ‘straights’ viewed the‘ freaks’ as‘ a red warning light for the American way of life’, as historian Arnold Toynbee put it. The Underground Press Syndicate, a network of counter-cultural publications, aimed to ‘warn the “civilised world” of its impending collapse’ and ‘prepare the American public for the wilderness’.
To borrow a phrase from LSD proselytiser and psychologist Timothy Leary, Goldberg turned on, tuned in – but rather than dropping
The hippie dream was born and then ... the energy balance changed’
out, he forged a successful career in the music industry, going on to work as publicist for Led Zeppelin and managing Nirvana.
Goldberg is sympathetic to hippie businessmen, and he is unrepentant about taking LSD, which gave him ‘permission to be happy’ in the shadow of war and nuclear annihilation.
The hippie dream was born when psychedelic rock, anti-Vietnam protest, the civil rights movement, sexual liberation and the spiritual quest for the meaning of life converged into ‘a trip that millions of people took together’.
And then, due to bad drugs, race riots, the assassinations in 1968 of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Nixon’s election and the mass influx of vulnerable young runaways to hippie mecca Haight-Ashbury, it vanished.
Or as Goldberg puts it in this authoritative account of a fascinating period, ‘the balance of energies changed’.