Not a sudden arrival
The counterculture did not appear in 1967. By the time it reached the front pages, it had been developing for roughly three years, in the San Francisco Bay Area and a few other places. The year’s importance lay in a change of scale and attention: what had been a regional scene became a national subject. This article covers the build-up from 1964 to the start of 1967.
1964: Berkeley and the Free Speech Movement
In the autumn of 1964, students at the University of California, Berkeley, protested a ban on political advocacy on a strip of campus where students had previously set up tables for civil rights groups. The protest became the Free Speech Movement, with Mario Savio as its best-known speaker. In early December, a sit-in at Sproul Hall ended with the arrest of hundreds of students.
The Free Speech Movement was political, not hippie, and it is often treated as part of the New Left origins. Its importance for the counterculture was that it showed students could challenge a major university and attract national attention, and that the Bay Area had an organised, energetic youth population.
1964 to 1966: Kesey, the Pranksters and the Acid Tests
The novelist Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), took part in early government-sponsored research on LSD and later gathered a group known as the Merry Pranksters. In the summer of 1964 they made a cross-country trip in a painted bus. Back in California, they held a series of parties known as Acid Tests, beginning in late 1965, with film, strobe lights, amplified music and LSD, which was then still legal. The Grateful Dead, then a new band, played at several of them.
In January 1966, the Trips Festival at Longshoremen’s Hall in San Francisco brought the Acid Test style to a larger audience. Promoters such as Bill Graham saw that a market existed, and ballrooms such as the Fillmore and the Avalon began regular rock dances with light shows and poster art. This established the venues and bands that later defined the San Francisco Sound.
1965 to 1966: The Haight
The Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco had several features that made it attractive: cheap, large Victorian houses, a location next to Golden Gate Park, proximity to San Francisco State College, and a tolerant local atmosphere. Artists, musicians and students moved in during 1965 and 1966.
In 1966, the Diggers, a group connected to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, began serving free food in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park and opening free stores, treating the Haight as a laboratory for an economy without money. The first issues of the San Francisco Oracle, an underground paper, appeared in September 1966. LSD was made illegal in California in October 1966, and gatherings were organised in protest. Even so, the neighbourhood remained a small community, not yet a tourist destination.
Elsewhere
San Francisco was not the only centre. New York’s East Village had its own mix of poets, filmmakers, and musicians, and Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip had clubs where young crowds clashed with local authorities in late 1966. In Britain, a London underground scene was forming around the UFO Club and the paper International Times, both active from late 1966. These developments were separate but linked by records, travel and the press.
Why 1967 brought national attention
Several things came together at the start of 1967.
- A large public event. The Human Be-In, in Golden Gate Park in January, drew a crowd reported in the tens of thousands and an unusual amount of press coverage.
- Music. A song associated with San Francisco became a hit in the spring, the Monterey International Pop Festival followed in June, and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band appeared at about the same time. Young listeners everywhere had a soundtrack for the scene.
- Media interest. National magazines and television programmes began to cover hippies, a process that peaked with the Time magazine feature of July. Coverage made the Haight famous, and the fame drew thousands of newcomers, including many who were underprepared for life there.
- The war. With troop numbers in Vietnam continuing to rise and the draft affecting more families, young people had political reasons to be drawn to a movement that questioned the status quo.
A scene that outgrew itself
The same attention that made 1967 a landmark also damaged what had come before. The Haight’s housing, food supplies and clinics could not meet the demand created by publicity, and early residents complained that the community they had built was being overrun and commercialised. By October, a group of residents had staged the Death of Hippie to mark what they saw as the end of the original scene. The origins of the movement are therefore best understood as an experiment that was small, local and fragile until 1967 made it famous.