Here is where we went wrong! The Adam 12 guys defend Hippies!

It's like looking in the mirror!

When even the Adam 12 cops go soft you know it was the beginning of the end.

RIP John Prine

I used to listen to him a lot when I was in college.

Recently I have been playing him on my Alexa.

Rip John. You did good son.

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Not the Kingston Trio's best recording, I admit (and I'm a fan). But, it was the first recorded version of "Get Together"-- that great '60's anthem. The song sprang not from hippie times but rather from that special egg shell-fragile time period of American music between the death of Buddy Holly and the onslaught of the British: 1960-63.

Chet Powers (Dino Valenti) wrote the song in 1963 but he never got famous for it. The Youngbloods immortalized it for him:

Link in case the video doesn't play

Lyrics after the jump.

No Hippie Punching In The Comments, Please!

Dogfish Head Brewing is issuing a special 50th Anniversary commemorative label for their "American Beauty" beer. The Grateful Dead are celebrating 50 years together this summer. The beer is brewed using almond honey granola and hops. The beer haz 9% ABV which is enough to whack a polyp. The new label is supposed to look like this:

Link to original

I've always liked the iconography associated with the band, along with some of their music. I've only seen them twice though--not enough to qualify as a Deadhead. The Dead (the ones who aren't dead-dead) have been together 50 years, since the halcyon days of the San Francisco hippie scene.

According to the late Hunter S. Thompson, 1965 was the best year to be a hippie:

The best year to be a hippie was 1965, but then there was not much to write about, because not much was happening in public and most of what was happening in private was illegal. The real year of the hippie was 1966, despite the lack of publicity, which in 1967 gave way to a nationwide avalanche in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and even the Aspen Illustrated News, which did a special issue on hippies in August of 1967 and made a record sale of all but 6 copies of a 3,500-copy press run. But 1967 was not really a good year to be a hippie. It was a good year for salesmen and exhibitionists who called themselves hippies and gave colorful interviews for the benefit of the mass media, but serious hippies, with nothing to sell, found that they had little to gain and a lot to lose by becoming public figures. Many were harassed and arrested for no other reason than their sudden identification with a so-called cult of sex and drugs. The publicity rumble, which seemed like a joke at first, turned into a menacing landslide. So quite a few people who might have been called the original hippies in 1965 had dropped out of sight by the time hippies became a national fad in 1967.  Link

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Despite the snide lyrical digs towards British bands at that time (1966), these guys were pure American Yankees from Provincetown, Mass.

Mitt Romney was pranking fellow students around that time over hairdos too. Imagine that: Mitt Romney and guys from P-town sharing sentiments.

Hippies Punching Upwards

[Posted as a retort to Glenn Reynolds' disparaging post on hippies, posted here]

Hunter S. Thompson writing about hippies in 1968, well before he got really weird:

The British historian Arnold Toynbee, at the age of 78, toured San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and wrote his impressions for the London Observer. 'The leaders of the Establishment,' he said, 'will be making the mistake of their lives if they discount and ignore the revolt of the hippies and many of the hippies' non hippie contemporaries on the grounds that these are either disgraceful wastrels or traitors, or else just silly kids who are sowing their wild oats.'

Toynbee never really endorsed the hippies; he explained his affinity in the longer focus of history. If the human race is to survive, he said, the ethical, moral, and social habits of the world must change: The emphasis must switch from nationalism to mankind. And Toynbee saw in the hippies a hopeful resurgence of the basic humanitarian values that were beginning to seem to him and other long-range thinkers like a tragically lost cause in the war-poisoned atmosphere of the 1960's. He was not quite sure what the hippies really stood for, but since they were against the same things he was against (war, violence, and dehumanized profiteering), he was naturally on their side, and vice versa.

--Hunter S. Thompson, The Hippies (1968)

More of Thompson's thoughts on the optimal timing of being a hippy from the same essay are here.

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Dino Valenti of the Quicksilver Messenger Service wrote the song, but The Youngbloods made it famous in 1967.

I like the '60's era celebrity footage equally cut with "normal" people footage. I think I spied Sixty Grit with Carol_Herman.

Speaking of hippies, did you know that this summer marks the 50th anniversary of Ken Kesey's 1964 west-to-east Merry Pranksters road trip?