97 Fun Facts About Hippie

'Hippie' is usually traced to which older slang word?

Hipster, 1940s jive for someone in the know, is the usual answer: San Francisco's newcomers were derided as junior-grade hipsters, though both words go back to 'hip'.

Which San Francisco district became the centre of hippie culture?

Haight-Ashbury offered big, run-down Victorian houses at low rents, so young bohemians drifted across town from North Beach and shared them communally.

Which singer wrote the song 'Woodstock' despite missing the festival to appear on a television talk show?

Joni Mitchell stayed in New York for The Dick Cavett Show on her manager's advice, watched the festival on a hotel television and wrote the song from her boyfriend Graham Nash's account.

Which earlier movement did the hippies inherit their tradition of cultural dissent from?

The Beat Generation handed on more than ideas: Neal Cassady, the model for the hero of On the Road, drove the Merry Pranksters' bus, and Allen Ginsberg became a regular at hippie and anti-war gatherings.

Which gathering in Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967, drew 20,000 to 30,000 hippies?

The Human Be-In, billed as 'A Gathering of the Tribes', put hippies on the national news as never before, and that coverage drew far bigger crowds to the city a few months later.

What name is given to the months of 1967 when up to 100,000 young people converged on San Francisco?

The Summer of Love got its name in advance: that spring local groups formed a Council for a Summer of Love to plan food, housing and clinics for the crowds they knew were coming.

Whose hit song urged listeners heading to San Francisco to wear flowers in their hair?

Scott McKenzie sang it, but John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas wrote the song, as publicity for a festival he was staging and to calm a host town nervous about the crowds.

Which June 1967 festival introduced the rock festival format to a wide audience?

Monterey International Pop saw Jimi Hendrix douse his guitar in lighter fluid and set it alight, and the film of the weekend helped make it the template for Woodstock two years later.

Which novelist led the Merry Pranksters on their bus trips?

Ken Kesey first took LSD as a volunteer in government-funded drug trials at a Menlo Park veterans' hospital, where night shifts as an aide also gave him One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

What was the name of the Merry Pranksters' famous school bus?

Furthur, a 1939 school bus bought for the trip in 1964, was wired for sound and filmed all the way to the New York World's Fair, with Neal Cassady at the wheel.

Which Tom Wolfe book chronicled the Merry Pranksters and their cross-country bus trip?

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was reported after the event: Wolfe first met the Pranksters' leader in a county jail in 1966, two years after the bus trip his book made famous.

Which band, first known as the Warlocks, was the house band at the Merry Pranksters' LSD parties?

The Grateful Dead played those parties as high as the dancers, stretching songs far beyond the three-minute single, and that is where their long improvised jams began.

Which 1969 road movie sends two bikers, played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, through a hippie commune?

Easy Rider had to build its commune on a Malibu hillside from photographs, because the real New Buffalo commune near Taos refused to let the crew film there.

Which chemist supplied much of the LSD behind the early San Francisco scene?

Owsley Stanley, known as Bear, made LSD so pure that the Oxford English Dictionary lists 'Owsley' as a word for it, and he spent the proceeds bankrolling a San Francisco band and mixing its sound.

Jefferson Airplane's 1967 hit about size-changing pills draws on which children's book?

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland gave 'White Rabbit' its imagery: Grace Slick wrote the song as a jab at parents who read children such stories and then wondered why they grew up to try drugs.

Which street-theatre group ran free stores and declared the 'death of the hippie' in 1967?

The Diggers cooked donated and salvaged food and served it free in the park every day; their mock funeral for 'Hippie' that October told would-be newcomers to stay home.

Avalon Ballroom promoter Chet Helms recruited which Texan to sing with Big Brother and the Holding Company?

Janis Joplin had hitchhiked from Texas to San Francisco with Helms in 1963; three years later he sent a friend to Austin to fetch her back as the band's lead singer.

Which 1966 Los Angeles clashes inspired Buffalo Springfield's 'For What It's Worth'?

The Sunset Strip curfew riots of November 1966, centred on the Pandora's Box club, prompted Stephen Stills to write Buffalo Springfield's 'For What It's Worth'; Peter Fonda was among those detained.

Which magazine's July 7, 1967 cover story was titled "The Hippies: The Philosophy of a Subculture"?

Time opened its cover story by setting the historian Arnold Toynbee, who called the hippies 'a red warning light for the American way of life', against a bishop who likened them to the early Christians.

Which Beatle walked through San Francisco's hippie district in 1967, was dismayed and gave up LSD?

George Harrison came away disenchanted by a district he found full of dropouts; he called the visit the turning point that put him off 'the whole drug cult' and LSD with it.

Which political offshoot, led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, nominated a pig for president in 1968?

The Yippies, who styled themselves the Youth International Party, put up a pig called Pigasus in Chicago; police seized the candidate at his own launch and arrested several of his backers.

Which Berkeley plot, planted in 1969, led Governor Reagan to send in the National Guard?

People's Park was cleared and fenced at dawn on May 15, 1969; in the 'Bloody Thursday' riot that followed, police gunfire killed a man watching from a rooftop, and troops held Berkeley for about two weeks.

Which commune, led by Wavy Gravy, provided security at Woodstock?

The Hog Farm learned from reporters at the airport that it was the security team too; Wavy Gravy named it the 'Please Force' and said its weapons would be cream pies and seltzer bottles.

Which December 1969 festival, billed as 'Woodstock West', was scarred by a fatal stabbing by a Hells Angel?

The Altamont Free Concert used Hells Angels as its security; one of them stabbed Meredith Hunter during the Rolling Stones' set and was acquitted after jurors saw film of Hunter drawing a revolver.

In Arlo Guthrie's 'Alice's Restaurant', which offence on his record makes the draft board turn him away?

Littering: the 18-minute song tells a mostly true story, in which Guthrie found the town tip closed on Thanksgiving 1965, added his load to a pile off a side road instead and saw the conviction counted against him at his army physical.

Which Beatles song was Britain's entry in Our World, the first live global TV link-up, in 1967?

All You Need Is Love went out live to an estimated 400 million viewers or more that night, which is why John Lennon kept its words simple enough for the whole world to follow.

Which German youth movement is regarded as a 'proto-hippie' precursor?

Der Wandervogel ('wandering bird') grew out of schoolboy hikes around a Berlin suburb in the 1890s and swapped city life for folk songs and camping, until the Nazi state abolished independent youth groups in the 1930s.

Which singer took 'Nature Boy', written by the long-haired Los Angeles nature mystic eden ahbez, to number one in 1948?

Nat King Cole came by the song only because ahbez, brushed off by the singer's manager backstage, left the tattered sheet music with his valet instead.

Which psychologist founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, declaring LSD its sacrament?

Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist dismissed in 1963, founded the League for Spiritual Discovery in 1966, hoping a freedom-of-religion defence would keep LSD legal for members; it failed.

Which Beatles song was inspired by the 1964 manual The Psychedelic Experience?

Tomorrow Never Knows began when John Lennon picked the book up in a London bookshop and carried its advice to switch off the mind and float downstream almost word for word into his opening line.

Stephen Gaskin's 'Monday Night Class' in San Francisco grew into which Tennessee commune?

The Farm was founded by about 300 people who had followed Gaskin across America in a caravan of painted school buses; its free midwifery service helped launch America's home-birth movement.

The beaches of which Indian state, among them Anjuna, drew crowds of travellers at the end of the Hippie trail?

Goa's Anjuna beach filled up after an American drifter known as Eight Finger Eddie settled there in 1966; he ran a soup kitchen for broke travellers and started the flea market where they bartered their belongings.

Freak Street, lined with legal hashish shops, was the hippie hangout of which Asian capital?

Kathmandu's Freak Street, properly Jhochhen Tole, lies just south of Durbar Square and took its nickname from the hippies who filled it, until Nepal outlawed the hashish trade in the 1970s.

The peace symbol adopted by hippies was drawn in 1958 and became the logo of which British organisation?

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's sign joins the semaphore signals for N and D; its designer, Gerald Holtom, said it was also a figure in despair, arms stretched out and down.

Which underground anthology did Robert Crumb launch in San Francisco in 1968?

Zap Comix went on sale from a baby carriage pushed along the pavement by Crumb's wife, and its fourth issue was explicit enough to end up in the courts as an obscenity case.

San Francisco's psychedelic poster artists, Wes Wilson above all, borrowed their lettering from which earlier art style?

Art Nouveau gave the posters their curves, and Wilson's melting letters came from a Viennese designer of that era, Alfred Roller, reworked so that passers-by had to stop and decode them.

American psychedelic light shows of the 1960s swirled coloured oils between clock glasses on which piece of classroom equipment?

An overhead projector threw the liquids' pulsing blobs across the stage as they moved; British and European shows got the effect a different way, with modified slide projectors.

Which musical about the hippie counterculture premiered off-Broadway in 1967?

Hair's nudity and its attacks on the Vietnam War took it to the Supreme Court twice; in 1975 the justices ruled that Chattanooga had been wrong to refuse the show a city theatre.

Which 1968 presidential candidate persuaded young supporters to shave and dress neatly?

Eugene McCarthy's student volunteers went 'Clean for Gene', shaving beards and smartening up to canvass New Hampshire; after his strong second place there, President Johnson pulled out of the race.

Which Australian town hosted the 1973 Aquarius Festival and the MardiGrass cannabis rally?

Nimbin was a fading farming village when students held the Aquarius Festival there; festival-goers pooled their money, bought farmland and stayed, and MardiGrass began in 1993 as a protest at years of drug raids.

Which festival, begun at a 1986 San Francisco beach party, grew into a Nevada desert city?

Burning Man began when Larry Harvey and Jerry James burned a wooden figure on San Francisco's Baker Beach in June 1986; from 1990 it moved to Nevada's Black Rock Desert as the temporary Black Rock City.

Which hippie-era publication did Steve Jobs call 'Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along'?

The Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand's guide to tools for communes and tinkerers, also gave Jobs his sign-off: he closed that 2005 Stanford speech with the farewell from its last issue, 'Stay hungry. Stay foolish.'

Dudeism, a mock-serious religion founded in 2005, takes its laid-back prophet from which Coen Brothers film?

The Big Lebowski's bathrobed slacker, played by Jeff Bridges, moved the journalist Oliver Benjamin to found the Church of the Latter-Day Dude, which ordains anyone who asks as a priest online.

Which novelist used the word 'hippies' in a 1961 Village Voice open letter to President Kennedy and Fidel Castro?

Norman Mailer, a co-founder of the paper, was scolding the new president days after the Bay of Pigs invasion failed, and told him he was 'beginning to act a little like all bad hippies'.

The Volkswagen van beloved of hippies was the company's 'Type 2'; which car was its Type 1?

The Beetle lent the van its rear-mounted engine; the bus could carry a crowd and was cheap to run and simple to fix, which is how it came by the nicknames 'hippie bus' and 'hippie van'.

What name was given to the Mexican hippies of the La Onda counterculture around 1970?

Jipitecas flocked to the Avándaro rock festival of September 1971, often called Mexico's Woodstock; the government answered by cracking down on La Onda and keeping its songs off the radio.

Phyllis and Ron Patterson's 1963 Los Angeles fundraiser launched which kind of costumed gathering, later a seasonal home for hippie craftspeople?

A Renaissance fair was at first just a class project in Phyllis Patterson's backyard; its first public weekend, a benefit for the radio station KPFK, drew about eight thousand people and it became a yearly event.

Which comic strip named its small feathered sidekick Woodstock in 1970, after the rock festival?

Peanuts creator Charles Schulz had drawn the bird since 1966 but left him nameless for four years, until Snoopy's little friend took the festival's name.

Which English music festival charged £1 at its first edition in 1970, with free milk included?

Glastonbury began as Michael Eavis's Pop, Blues & Folk Festival, drawing just 1,500 people, and the milk came from his own Somerset dairy farm.

Which tech company got its name after a co-founder came back from a working stay at an Oregon commune?

Apple was Steve Jobs's idea: he had been tending the orchard at the All One commune, and on his return he and Steve Wozniak settled on the fruit's name.

Which stand-up comedian was the original voice of Fillmore, the hippie Volkswagen bus in Pixar's Cars?

George Carlin had played a hippie weatherman on 1960s variety shows, and Fillmore's licence plate, 51237, is the comedian's birthday of May 12, 1937.

Which Beatles song did John Lennon trace to a nursery-school drawing by his son Julian, not to LSD?

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was Julian's own caption for a picture of his classmate Lucy Vodden, and Lennon insisted the initials everyone noticed were pure accident.

Which star lived in the town of Woodstock in 1969 but never played the festival named after it?

Bob Dylan never seriously negotiated to appear, and instead signed to play England's Isle of Wight Festival two weeks later, backed by the Band.

Which Tolkien hobbit became a 1960s counterculture hero, his name turning up on buttons and in graffiti?

Frodo caught on after the Ballantine paperback of The Lord of the Rings arrived in 1965 and put the books within reach of students.

Which Washington-area building did anti-war marchers vow to levitate with psychic energy in October 1967?

The Pentagon was supposed to rise, turn orange and vibrate, at which point the Vietnam War would end, a stunt activist Abbie Hoffman proposed to grab attention.

Which hippie-era novelty did Edward Craven Walker invent after seeing a homemade egg timer bubbling in a pub?

Lava lamp inventor Walker, a British entrepreneur, launched it in 1963 under the name Astro, and its slow-rising blobs became shorthand for psychedelia.

Which footwear brand did Margot Fraser bring to California in 1966, selling it through health stores?

Birkenstock sandals had cured Fraser's own foot pain at a Bavarian spa, but American shoe shops thought them too ugly to stock, so she tried health stores instead.

Which guitarist, the last act at Woodstock, played a solo version of the US national anthem on Monday morning?

Jimi Hendrix was the last act of the festival, and rain delays meant that he did not take the stage until 8:30 that morning.

Arnold Skolnick's poster for Woodstock shows a white bird perched on the neck of which instrument?

A guitar carries the bird, which Skolnick cut out of paper and modelled on a catbird. Although much money has been made from the design, he received a single royalty cheque of about $15.

Which future Hollywood director was one of the editors of the 1970 documentary Woodstock?

Martin Scorsese worked beside Thelma Schoonmaker, whose editing earned a rare Oscar nomination for a documentary, and the film itself won Best Documentary Feature.

Which Indian classical musician played Woodstock in August 1969 but said he disliked the venue?

Ravi Shankar, the sitar master, soon distanced himself from the hippie movement, saying it hurt him to see his music associated with drugs.

Which practice did the Beatles travel to Rishikesh, India, in 1968 to study under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi?

Transcendental Meditation suited their songwriting: the weeks at the Maharishi's ashram turned out to be the group's most productive period for writing songs.

Which movement, founded in New York in 1966 by Swami Prabhupada, won its early recruits among hippies?

Hare Krishna founder Prabhupada first aimed at the Western elite, then turned to the counterculture's drifting youth, hoping to lift them out of what he saw as an unclean way of life.

The overland Hippie trail to South Asia was shut in 1979 partly by a revolution in which country?

Iran's revolution brought in an anti-Western government in the same year that Soviet troops invaded neighbouring Afghanistan, closing the route to Western travellers.

Which travel guidebook publisher began with a 94-page booklet called Across Asia on the Cheap?

Lonely Planet was founded by Tony and Maureen Wheeler, who wrote that first guide at home after an overland trip across Europe and Asia in 1972; they later sold the firm to BBC Worldwide.

Hippies of the 1960s moved into the cliff caves above the beach at Matala on which Greek island?

Crete's cave-dwellers were eventually driven out by the church and Greece's military junta, and since 2011 Matala has honoured them with a beach festival each June.

Which fabric technique, related to Japanese shibori, became a late-1960s fad after rock stars took it up?

Tie-dye in the 1960s was mostly done with ordinary household dyes such as Rit, and the singer John Sebastian did his own dyeing.

Which teardrop pattern, named after a Scottish textile town, became a hallmark of 1960s psychedelic style?

Paisley is really a motif from Kashmir shawls that Scottish weavers copied on Jacquard looms, and the Beatles helped to bring it back into fashion.

Which trousers, first adopted by 19th-century sailors, became a staple of hippie fashion in the 1960s?

Bell-bottoms can save a life at sea: in survival training, sailors learn to take the trousers off in the water, knot the legs and inflate them as a float.

Which musky scent from a plant of the mint family surged in popularity with the hippies of the 1960s?

Patchouli comes from a bushy herb native to the islands of Southeast Asia, and both its oil and its incense boomed across the US and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s.

Which annual environmental observance was first held on April 22, 1970, as a nationwide campus teach-in?

Earth Day borrowed its format from the campus teach-ins on the Vietnam War, and Senator Gaylord Nelson hired a young activist, Denis Hayes, to coordinate it nationally.

Which environmental group grew out of a 1971 voyage from Vancouver to protest a US bomb test at Amchitka?

Greenpeace began as the Don't Make a Wave Committee, which chartered a ship, the Phyllis Cormack, with money raised at a benefit concert, only to be turned back by the US Coast Guard.

Which music magazine did Jann Wenner launch in San Francisco in 1967, with John Lennon on its first cover?

Rolling Stone pictured Lennon on that first cover in a soldier's helmet, in costume for the film How I Won the War, and the magazine then came out every two weeks.

Which future stadium band was a house act at London's psychedelic UFO Club from its opening night in 1966?

Pink Floyd played that first night in an Irish dancehall's basement on Tottenham Court Road, but soon outgrew the club as fame brought bigger venues and higher fees.

Which Copenhagen community began in 1971 when squatters occupied an abandoned military base?

Christiania was declared open that September by the journalist Jacob Ludvigsen, who had explored the empty barracks for his youth magazine and dubbed it a forbidden city.

Which Spanish island's famous club scene traces back to the hippies who met there in the 1960s and 1970s?

Ibiza drew hippies of many nationalities who met to talk and play music, and that free-spirited mood later carried over into the nightclubs of the so-called White Island.

In Bernie Boston's 1967 photo Flower Power, a protester slides which blooms into soldiers' rifle barrels?

Carnations made the picture, yet Boston's editor did not see its importance and buried it deep inside the paper. It gained recognition only after he entered it in photography competitions, and it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Which poet coined the phrase 'flower power' in 1965 to turn war protests into peaceful spectacles?

Allen Ginsberg urged marchers to hand out masses of flowers to police, press and politicians, partly to disarm the Hells Angels, who had threatened a Berkeley anti-war demonstration.

Which author's book about a mescaline experience, The Doors of Perception, gave Jim Morrison's band its name?

Aldous Huxley took the title from the poet William Blake, and wrote the book after swallowing four-tenths of a gram of the drug one morning in May 1953.

Which Stand by Me actor was named by his parents after a symbol in the novel Siddhartha?

River Phoenix took his middle name, Jude, from a Beatles song. In 1973 his family joined a religious cult and moved to Venezuela as missionaries.

Which bandleader mocked hippie culture on the 1968 album We're Only in It for the Money?

Frank Zappa's satire backfired in the nicest way: the album was embraced by the very hippies it ridiculed and climbed to number 30 on the Billboard album chart.

Artists at Drop City, a 1960s Colorado commune, built their homes from scrap car roofs in which shape?

Domes at Drop City followed the ideas of the architect Buckminster Fuller, and in 1967 the group won his Dymaxion award for what it had built.

Which event has been held on US National Forest land every July since a 1972 meeting in Colorado?

Rainbow Gathering crowds topped 20,000 at that first meeting, and the event runs with no official leaders, no spokespersons and no membership.

Which singer came from the Great Society to front Jefferson Airplane, scoring two top-ten hits in 1967?

Grace Slick brought 'Somebody to Love' with her: her brother-in-law Darby Slick had written it, and the Great Society's own 1966 single barely travelled beyond San Francisco.

Which Scottish singer topped the US chart in 1966 with 'Sunshine Superman', an early psychedelic pop hit?

Donovan made the charts and the police files that year: in June 1966 he became the first high-profile British pop star to be arrested for possession of cannabis.

Which German-born author's novels Siddhartha and Steppenwolf found a new audience among 1960s hippies?

Hermann Hesse died in 1962 with his books still little read in the United States; within a few years a rock band had named itself after one of his novels.

Which Swiss chemist first synthesised LSD in 1938 and felt its effects on a famous bicycle ride home?

Albert Hofmann lived to the age of 102, and April 19, the date of his 1943 ride, is now widely known as Bicycle Day.

Which model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road drove the Merry Pranksters' bus across America in 1964?

Neal Cassady died in 1968 beside a railroad track outside San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, after setting out on foot from a party on a cold, rainy night.

Which blues guitarist greeted Hugh Romney as 'Wavy Gravy' on a 1969 Texas festival stage, sealing the name?

B.B. King found Romney lying exhausted on the stage and stood him up beside his amplifier. Romney called the meeting a mystical event and has gone by the name ever since.

Which name did ex-Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert take in India before writing 1971's Be Here Now?

Ram Dass means 'servant of God', a name given to him in 1967 by his guru Neem Karoli Baba, and his book went on to popularise yoga and Eastern spirituality in the West.

Which California band topped the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1967 with 'Incense and Peppermints'?

Strawberry Alarm Clock's drummer once rigged gas jets to his wrists so that he seemed to play the bongos with his hands on fire, until the stunt became too dangerous.

Which Hollywood Hills neighbourhood became a 1960s counterculture hub, home to the Byrds and Jim Morrison?

Laurel Canyon had already housed one wave of stars: after the film industry arrived in 1910, silent-era names such as Clara Bow and Harry Houdini made their homes there.

Which folk singer opened Woodstock in 1969 and saw the performance catapult him to stardom?

Richie Havens performed as a trio with a second guitarist and a percussionist, and the film of the festival then carried him to a worldwide audience.

Which actress took the stage name Seagull in the 1970s and named her son Free?

Barbara Hershey chose the name in tribute to a gull killed during the making of one of her films, and once gave up half her salary to be billed under it.

In which 1960s sci-fi series do 'space hippies' hijack a starship to search for a paradise called Eden?

Star Trek's third-season episode The Way to Eden even stages a hippie concert in the Enterprise sick bay, a scene later ranked among the show's top twenty moments.

In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Cliff Booth visits which old film set, home to Manson's hippie followers?

Spahn Ranch was a real place with a nearly blind owner, and Booth himself was inspired by a real stuntman who worked on a film there while the Manson Family was in residence.

Which 1968 animated Beatles film pits the people of Pepperland against the music-hating Blue Meanies?

Yellow Submarine turns the four heroes into cartoons, and the real band shows up only for a live-action cameo in the final scene, filmed shortly before their trip to India.