tv The Sixties CNN August 31, 2014 2:00am-2:31am PDT
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♪ there are colonies of hippies springing up in most american cities. >> it's all related, the psychedelics, the war, the protesting. >> i'm planning on having a good time as long as i can. >> smoke pot with your kids, then you'll understand why the kids are happy. >> it's a giant love-in. >> people should be uninhibited in their sexual expression. >> you cannot ignore it, a change in morality. >> they're fascists. they don't like hippies. and they don't like the things we do. >> we do have to maintain law, order and decency on the streets. >> what we're thinking about is a peaceful planet. we're not thinking of anything
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america in the early '60s, it was a real good time of prosperity, but it was also kind of a stagnant time in terms of spiritual growth. things were kind of at a standstill. >> the baseline culture was materialism, and also the feeling that the culture itself didn't honor the human spirit and didn't honor creativity. >> the early 1950s, the nation recognized in its midst the social movement called b generation. ♪ a novel titled "on the road" became a best-seller. >> when kerouac's book came out, it became a revolution, defined a new generation of what being beat means, and it defined it as a spiritual revolution. that if we're living in an age of conformity, if everybody's trying to work for the corporation, that you're losing a sense of self.
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>> i was traveling west one time at the junction of the state line of colorado. i saw in the clouds huge and massed above the golden desert of even fall, the great image of god with four fingers pointed straight at me. come on, boy, go thou across the grown, go moan for man. go moan, go groan, go groan alone, go roll your bones alone. [ applause ] >> jack kerouac became like a godfather for counterculture. >> the village has a life and language all its own. if you dig it, you're hip. if you don't, man, you're square. coffey houses, the neighborhood bars of bohemia, where the strongest potion is coffee, and the coffee house poet is the speciality of the house. >> to find a place where the eyes can rest. >> beatniks, they had these coffeehouses they would go in and play chess and read poetry,
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and those same coffeehouses became kind of a proving ground for folk singers. >> all young kids were running out to buy guitars and banjos. ♪ >> folk music gives me a lot more than the popular music of our own time does. popular songs should be sung because we don't do anything about say the bomb, you know. the whole situation come to an end. >> there's got to be an alternative to whatever ways of life are offered to them, you know? i mean, democrat, republican. and i would like to offer some kind of alternative, somehow, you know? >> folk revival scene had a big part of politics. you can't get left politics out of woody guthrie or pete seeger. so the greenwich village movement was there to celebrate people's culture. >> if you like the music, you were really signing on for their ways of looking at the world, too. ♪ and then, eventually, one guy emerges as being special.
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♪ ♪ a bullet from the back of a bush took medgar evers' blood ♪ >> during that time in the '60s, as that cultural revolution was slowly bubbling and kids were starting to question authority, question what was happening in their country, they're looking for answers. >> bob dylan thought that folk music was poetry. he took beat energy and mixed it with folk culture, and it's more lyrical intensity than anybody's put to song before. ♪ and the negro's name is used, it is plain ♪ ♪ for the politician's gain as he rises to fame ♪ >> up until the time of bob dylan, there were the songwriters and there were the singers. dylan started writing his own music. >> he says, i am going to comment on the world, i'm going to comment on the nature of this human experience.
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bob dylan was sort of in this white-hot moment of saying more in the popular song than anyone ever had before. ♪ only a pawn in their game [ cheers and applause ] >> after the revolution of bob dylan, the music world moves west. ♪ got to go where you wanna go, do what you wanna do with whoever you wanna do ♪ >> royal canyon becomes the epicenter of the rock revolution. >> the music scene was not happening in new york anymore. it was now l.a. everybody moved to laurel canyon. >> actors, musicians, artists, and so it was a kind of whole community, very open. if you were driving over laurel canyon and you saw somebody hitchhiking, you'd just automatically pull over. hey, brother, get in, you know? where are you going? >> laurel canyon was an incredibly interesting place to live in those days.
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i lived on lookout mountain with joanie mitchell. crosby was close, stephen was close. >> now it was all these artists singing this truth, and their truth was this idyllic sense of freedom. >> there was a thriving community of kids that were discovering their new life and couldn't wait to play the new song they had written. >> it was a lot of freedom. there was a lot of drugs. this was a lot of beautiful women. there was a lot of good rock and roll being made. it was a fabulous time. ♪ when people ask me what i'm wearing, i tell them aveeno®. [ female announcer ] aveeno® daily moisturizing lotion has active naturals® oat with five vital nutrients. [ aniston ] because beautiful skin goes with everything. aveeno®. naturally beautiful results™. aveeno®. ♪ ♪
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these are students at a suburban high school in los angeles. they reflect the sudden sensuality and affluence which dominate life in southern california. the latest fad is the sunset strip. during the past year, it has become a playground for southern california's mobile, restless teenagers. it is the place to go. >> people would meet at clubs on the sunset strip and they would go to the trip or they would go to the whisky go go. it was a real happening. >> we changed from a culture of grown-ups that sort of looked down to on kids to kids leading. >> it is the creation of the teenager, and the revolution begins. ♪ ♪
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♪ i got a light on you, babe >> the los angeles county sheriff's office has begun foot patrol on the sunset strip to cope with the growing influx of youngsters. >> the notion of teenagers who had a culture of their own, that weren't listening to their parents' music, kind of opens up this giant space for rebellions large and small. >> at least 10% of the students have used and are using marijuana. also, probably a very significant thing is that acceptance is gaining steadily and the usage is really increasing very rapidly. >> in l.a., we were all kind of, you know, smoking god's herb, whereas up in san francisco, it seemed like they were experimenting more with mind expansion, you know? ♪ >> ken keasey took classes of
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writing at stanford university, and he writes the great novel "one flew over the cuckoo's nest," and this makes him a celebrity. >> while i was at stanford, i was given the opportunity to go to the stanford hospital and take part in the lsd experiments. >> keasey had volunteered to do tests for lsd, a government-sponsored test. >> lsd was isolated in a pharmaceutical company in switzerland. >> are you happy? >> yes. >> you have tears in your eyes. >> oh. >> is that a beautiful experience would you say? >> i would say yes. >> some people think it's when keasey discovers lsd that the counterculture in california is born, because more and more people then want to try to experience what keasey experienced, and he becomes a promoter of it.
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♪ >> keasey created a drug commune at la honda, which is an hour from san francisco. great artists love smashing traditions, and at his best, keasey was doing that. everybody would have this communal lsd trip together. tom wolf would write "the electric kool-aid acid test" about it. >> people were constantly slipping drugs into my food. i'd wonder what happened. they thought they were doing me a favor. >> they were having the world's fair in new york, so a bunch of us were going to do. but the bunch of us were too big to fit in his station wagon, so he bought this converted school bus. >> keasey, he was going to put the bus in dayglow, bright colors and then go with what he called unsettling america, blowing people's minds. >> the whole idea of blowing people's minds, you have to present something that is so different, there's a crack comes open where something new can come in.
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and the reaction to all these people was wonderful, because what it was in 1964, there was no other thing like this happening. >> it's part of a kind of cultural revolution going on, making the squares pay notice to this underground of america. ♪ >> when we got to new york city, which is the home of the beats, where kerouac lived, and picked him up, because we were in his presence, we were just acting as goofy as we could, playing music, putting on costumes, doing all kinds of acts and stuff like that. and then kerouac sat on the couch, we would get a big, tall budweiser. he was obviously not an enthusiastic guy. those beats, they had done their thing, you know? i are i really felt like the torch had been passed from those guys to the psychedelic generation.
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>> keasey was very messianic, and wathought he wanted to get many people to try lsd as they can. >> so we started renting halls. we called the thing the acid test. the band of course was known as the warlocks. as time went on, they changed their name to the grateful dead. ♪ st. stephen with a rose, in and out of the garden he goes ♪ ♪ country garden in the wind and the rain ♪ ♪ wherever he goes, the people all complain ♪ >> lsd was not an illegal drug. when keasey held these acid tests, as they were known, they'd have two vats. one was punch and one was punch with lsd. >> the acid tests were like a party. the scene is a lot of light shows and music and people dancing. when the dead were playing, it was a way to feel that acid in waves. and i looked down and i saw kids in front of me moving to the music. they looked up at me and i said,
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"yeah." ♪ >> the drug culture really took hold. and that's where artists, whether it was the grateful dead or jefferson airplane, were able to embrace it and put it in their music. >> the counterculture in california is born because more and more people want to try to experience what keasey experienced, and he kind of became the grand poobah of the carnival in san francisco in the 1960s. >> there's nothing a grown-up or sophisticated in taking an lsd trip at all. they're just being complete fools.
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cbs news, without any flowers in its hair, is in san francisco because this city has gained the reputation of being the hippie capital of the world. ♪ >> i got accepted in san francisco state and i found an apartment at haight and clayton street, right in the center of what would become the haight-ashbury. >> the psychedelic shop on haight street started about a year ago. it spreads the gospel based on brotherhood, love and lsd. >> for all the people out there hungry for meaningful spiritual life, that's why all these people are down here. that's why there's so much interest in the haight-ashbury. it offers hope.
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>> we lived right down the street from the psychedelic shop. people were growing their hair long, they were wearing beads, playing music on the street. it was just an incredible environment at that point, in the beginning. that's when it was just like one big, giant family. >> before you knew it, it was a congregating place for artists and the dividing line seemed to be the psychedelic experience. you couldn't understand the posters, you couldn't understand the fashions, you couldn't understand anything if you hadn't gotten high. >> the diggers group scrounges food and money to feed free those who arrive in panhandle park with a bowl and an appetite. diggers are people who share, says their manifesto, and their aim is a society where everything is shared, everything free. >> the diggers were one of the first groups into social consciousness about what was needed to take care of this huge group of people that were coming into the haight-ashbury. >> their free shop looks more like a playground at first
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sight. here they make sheets and clothes for other hippies, who can come and take what they want without paying anything for it. >> everything in the store was free -- tools, clothing, televisions. so we were inviting people to imagine a way of life that would please them, and then to make it real by doing it. >> what we're thinking about is a peaceful planet. we're not thinking about anything else. we're not thinking about any power, we're not thinking of any of those kinds of struggles. we're not thinking of revolution or war or any of that. that's not what we want. nobody wants to get hurt, nobody wants to hurt anybody. we would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life and think about moving the whole human race ahead a step or a few steps. >> we wanted to learn more about the real meaning of life, why are we here? certainly not to kill each other but here to celebrate life, to make music, to do art and love each other. >> these people are hippies. they represent a new form of
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social rebellion. it is hard to figure out what positive things they are in favor of. >> the reason we can no longer identify with the kinds of activities that the older generation are engaged in is because those activities are for us meaningless. they have led to a monstrous war in vietnam for example. >> we did want change from war, from rigid ideas of what the sexes ought to be doing. a change from black people ought to be here and white people ought to be here. no. why can't we try and make that work? >> the haight-ashbury community has created a council for a summer of love in san francisco. >> the council is calling for creative love happenings for every weekend throughout the summer. we ask all who come here to come here in love and we ask all who live here to greet all men with love.
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>> they at their best are trying for a kind of group sainthood, and saints running in groups are likely ludicrous. they depend on hallucination for their philosophy. this is not a new idea and it's never worked. >> it was sort of a divide of generations. a lot of mistrust. young people didn't trust old people. old people didn't understand young people. >> what's so offensive about long hair? >> it looks sloppy. [ laughter ] [ applause ] >> it doesn't differentiate the boys from the girls enough. >> we didn't call ourselves hippies. the hippies are a fabrication. they were an attempt to diminish young adults and infantalize us, and it certainly serves to exclude the people that were deeply thoughtful about the world, that were ready to dedicate their lives to making change and had questioned the paradigm of materialism.
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>> look around you. nothing works. the only thing a kid is presented with is when you grow up, you can join the army, go to war, get a gig as an engineer, become a vegetable, drive to work in your own car. your own, big, metal box. and it just looks absurd, people in their metal boxes like this going all over from job to job, frustrated, uptight. what joy is there in life? life should be -- life is and should be ecstasy. >> the counterculture had the arrogance to tell everybody else what they were doing is wrong. and nobody likes that. >> it's estimated that anywhere from 10,000 to 200,000 youngsters may pour into haight-ashbury this summer. many people are apprehensive. they feel that black power or other political activist groups may use haight street as a stage setting for riots. >> haight-ashbury cannot handle 100,000. of course, there isn't room.
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>> the tension between the government and the people began to be evident. >> nobody should let their young children come into san francisco unsupervised to become a part of a group such as that. >> they're fascists as far as i'm concerned, and they don't like hippies and they don't like the things we do and they try to harass us and bother us. >> in some ways, their revolutions are war between generations. the hippies' rallying cry is never trust anyone over 30. >> the war cry of the youth establishment is on full swing on about every front. >> about four policemen came in and said everybody get out, the store is closed. they wouldn't give a reason or identify under what premise they were doing this. when we asked them, they pushed people around. they pushed people physically out of the store. >> the mayor, this is very insidious, what he's up to. he wants to stop human growth. >> the hippie leaders say all will be well. flower power will prevail. they say it will be a summer of love, a great pilgrimage.
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