Student Protest §
- The Baby Boomers who have been growing up with rock and roll are now in college!
- The early 1960’s was a period of expansion in colleges
- Postwar affluence & Baby Boom leads to increased college attendance in 1960s
- This generation hadn’t directly experienced Depression and War
- They grew up in consumer culture
- They questioned the world their parents created
- Cold War
- Social strictures
- Racism
- A number of students got together in Port Huron, Michigan to discuss becoming a student movement of their own
- 1962
- Port Huron Statement
- Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
- This is the overarching model for much of the student protest in 1960s
- Notes on Civil Rights, Nuclear Weapons, Free Speech on Campus, and later the War in Vietnam
- Fear of nuclear annihilations and World War III
- Opposition to corporate R&D on camps
- Opposition to ROTC
- Male participation was mandatory on many campuses
- 2 year commitment for all male students at Purdue, 1919-1964
- The protest gets big in Berkeley, California in Fall 1964
- In Loco Parentis - Free Speech
- College life strictly regimented and regulated
- Universities acted as the parent
- Limited rights on campus especially for women
- Dress codes, crufews
- Deans permission to marry
- Unhappiness a sign of maladjustment
- Essentially no free speech, political activism, etc.
- Challenges build by 1964
- Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Fall 1964
- Protests against university administration bans on political activism
- Bans came in response to student criticisms and Civil Rights activism
- Initial protestors punished, which leads to thousands more coming out in support
- Sit-ins, civil disobedience, followed by hundreds of arrests and injuries
- United ALL students, was more than just SDS. It was every type of student, every ideology, every belief
- Protest against War in Vietnam
- Became another very prevalent issue of protest in 1966-68
Origins of the Hippie Counter-culture §
The Beats §
- Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
- Beat poets/Beat writers of the 1950s
- Part of a literary movement known as “the beats” producing liberty infused, counter culture writings
- Do not abide by the greatest generations values, rail against the consumerist middle class society
- Push for a freer society
- Jack Kerouac, On The Road - a novel
- Ginsberg, Howl and other poems
- Very influential on what will become the Hippies in the 1960s
- City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco is where a lot of “the beats” will congregate
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti owned it
- San Francisco became the core of the beats scene, which will lead to it becoming a core of counter culture in the future
- Students wanna change the world and impose new values on the world. Hippies just wanna be themselves and be free and do what they want
- “The Happenings”, brought together a bunch of artists, poets, singers etc.
Psychedelics & Drugs §
- The counter culture group (becoming hippies) start to lean into drugs to draw out that freedom
- Acid & LSD was common
- Was designed as a therapeutic drug for helping PTSD for example
- Was NOT designed for recreation. BUT
- Dr. Timothy Leary popularized it as a recreational thing for people to enjoy
- Leary became a proponent of letting people use drugs to do what the beats wanted people to do, be yourself and be free and in the world
- Owsley Stanley, Ken Kesey
- Ken Kesey wrote “One flew over the cuckoos nest” novel
- Kesey became a central figure who used LSD
- Stanley was a west coast chemist responsible for distributing a LOT of the acid in America
- Kesey also in 1964 was part of The Merry Pranksters. Just a group of people traveling across the country in a psychedelically colored bus convincing people to be free. And definitely doing acid
- Acid/LSD was not illegal yet in the 1950s early 60s
- Moving into 1964/65, California and San Francisco specifically were becoming a center of LSD/Acid use and abuse recreationally
- “The Acid Test”
- sit in a warehouse on acid for the first time, with other people around you and try and find something new about the world
- music was important, hence the origin of psychadelic/acid rock
- acid rock kinda was the soundtrack of being high, emulating that and giving those feelings
Hippies §
- You know what hippies look like
- In late 60’s they flocked to Northern California
- Intensely inward looking quest for an alternative lifestyle
- VERY different from the student protesters earlier
- Didn’t care so much about changing the world and more about being themselves and free and in the moment
- Freedom of individual expression
- Embraced pre-industrial culture and tradition
- A lot of Indian mysticism and ideology and traditions integrated into hippie culture, but just in a wrong way or interpretation
- Embraced recreational drugs & sex
- LSD, Marijuana, Acid
- Sex ought to be allowed whenever, not restricted to marriage
- Anti-materialism
- Anti-consumerist
- Anti-conformist
- Anti-politics
- Don’t care about civil rights and those other issues, not in the world
- Pacifist
- War is a stain on the human experience, war bad. This led to them being against the Vietnam War as well
- Challenged authority, conventions, and norms more broadly, just in a more personal individualistic way
- Rejection of middle-class morality and culture
- “White and voluntarily poor”, Hunter S. Thompson
The Beatles 1965-66 §
- By 1966 we had two major forms of counter culture
- Hippies tryna get outside of the current America
- Students tryna change the current America
- Music was an important soundtrack of all this, both an inspiration and a reflection of it
- The Beatles became a classic counter cultural band of the 1965/66 time
- 1964 was the first US #1 of The Beatles
- They were the biggest rock and roll/pop band in the world at the time
- “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, The Beatles
- They were basically immature with the naive version of love
- Beatlemania!
- Top 5 singles ini US chart on April 4, 1964 (plus 11 others in top 100)
- 3 number 1 albums in 1964 (and 65, 66…)
- At times frightening and dangerous levels of pandemonium…
- Life has gotten wild for The Beatles, they can’t even go outside anymore
- The Beatles want to be more than just the pop band they were at the time. Similar to Bob Dylans transformation from folk to folk rock
- The Beatles met Dylan in middle of 1964, and were inspired by Dylans new type of songs
- They matured as a band
- George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, June 1966
- Harrison was the guitarist for The Beatles
- He became very interested in Indian culture and music
- Became friends with Ravi Shankar, Ravi played the sitar
- Sitar has a very different sound but looks like a guitar
- The interest in new sounds, new styles, and the introduction of some drugs perhaps, all culminated in the new songs of The Beatles
- New album Revolver in 1960s
- Love You To
- A VERY different sound of The Beatles
- The Rolling Stones also follow The Beatles with the similar type of music and change
- Paint It Black used Sitar
- Still a very different sound from the original sound
- Rubber Soul, The Beatles 1965
- Revolver, The Beatles 1966
- Both different albums and a lot more experimental and psychedelic
- Songs about deeper themes, social themes, personal themes
- Much less “lovey dovey” songs
- A lot inspired by Dylan
- The studio sound also started to become much different from the live performances
- The Beatles, Yesterday and Today
- The Beatles are getting tired of going on the road and having to play in stadiums
- By 1966 the stop touring, they can’t hear themselves even play anymore
- John Lennon made some interesting comments about The Beatles being more popular than Jesus RIGHT before their tour in the US
- The Americans weren’t too happy about that and started to protest against The Beatles
Psychedelic Rock §