Best "Hippy" song of all time (in your opinion)

[spiral]

dr john and the night trippers - gris gris

[Machinesworking]

ya...see...that's the thing, it's a blanket term. meaning long hairs who sing songs paint pictures and do drugs. but then there is the whole documented hippy movement in the USA...

As far as musicians, Janis Joplin by far is the closest to my personal experience growing up in SF, and southern Oregon growing green stuff hippies like etc. My parents and their friends were most like her. Most of the "hippies" the media portrayed were not anything like my parents and their friends.

So yeah my parents were hippies, I was born behind Haight Ashberry in 1966, and we moved to a commune in the state of Oregon in the seventies, log cabins with outhouses and no electricity, the whole deal. Now, I can't stand 99% of the hippies I meet, it's all just a style, and formated code of behavior that has nothing to do with the people I grew up around.
Being a hippy meant taking chances and living outside of normal society at that point, now there is a market share and target products for the "lifestyle". It's dead like punk, just a fashion statement and not any real rebellion.

[Tone Deft]

It's dead like punk, just a fashion statement and not any real rebellion.

how about a punk version of a hippy tune

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aur8Miwq9Rc <-- UK Subs - She's Not There by the Zombies


KK - nice Zombies link, Time Of the Season, there's a great sample in the first few measures.


the hippy movement is interesting from an anthropolgy point of view, the Monterey Jazz Festival movie with Hendrix et al is a great snapshot of the music scene. white boys playing blues (mike bloomfield!), fusing it with jazz, and the popular stuff like hendrix, the who, janis, blues legends. that was in '68, '69 was the peak, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joplin and others lived in the Haight neighborhood in SF, acid was new, there was communal living, cheap drugs, free food, free love. by '70 so many people heard about it SF was overrun, the feds got involved, drugs ran their course, the party was over. the ideas are still around, but it had to be a weird time. the beats were more interesting.

a monologue near the close of fear and loathing captures the decline of the hippies well:

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

[mr.adl]

Classic:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=gIQz6YcFgQ4

[Big V]

Richie Havens - Freedom

Peace!

[hoffman2k]

Jeffersons Airplane - Don't you want somebody to love

Jim Carrey Version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZBZJygPglQ

[slatepipe]

hmmm...hippy tunes that i'd go for :

carole king - tapestry
the soundtrack album to midnight cowboy
mungo jerry - in the summertime
+1 for dead can dance, nearly all of their stuff
bongwater, everything by them
spirit in the sky - norman greenbaum


on the wedding thing, i managed to get my mrs to let me play spiral honey by merzbow in the registry office while we were making our vows. the woman who was marrying us stopped halfway through and said "what IS this?". i think she thought the stereo was broken.

[Benoski]

if you feel - jefferson airplane

but almost everything from the 60's is hippie anyway

[overdub]

Mountain : For Yasgur's farm

[Ruklaw]

Small Faces - Itchycoo Park
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fofNPJ8RGdQ

[1pauper1]

i was 14 years old and my dad caught me and two of my friends
hitch-hiking down route 81 [my younger brother ratted us out] so
we didn't make it to woodstock, which was the defining event of the
"peace and love,anti-war,pro drugs,anti-racism hippy gen-ERA-tion "
In My (not so humble) Opinion, anything by crosby,stills,nash and young
collectively or individually,especially neil young, sums up the flavor of my generation.because they did everything from
folkrock to grunge. especially neil young.they could play as good
as anybody,the lyrics had meaning and their singing had better harmony than the
beatles.

"by the time we got to woodstock,we were half a million strong........
......we are stardust,we are golden "

[Angstrom]

the song 'Woodstock' was of course written by Joni Mitchell .. after her manager prevented her from going to the festival and made her appear on the Dick Cavett TV show instead. I think that gives it a certain charm - it's about the idealised festival, rather than the real one.

[ethios4]

Grateful Dead - "Ripple"
#1

[ScholarlyGent]

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young- "Ohio"... bitch

[Machinesworking]

by '70 so many people heard about it SF was overrun, the feds got involved, drugs ran their course, the party was over. the ideas are still around, but it had to be a weird time. the beats were more interesting.

The beats were more fashion oriented on some levels and more intellectual, but the blending between the two was pretty fluid. My dad started out beatnick, and ended up hippy, it was a natural progression. We left SF in about 70, basically because my parents felt the hard drug scene that took over didn't make a good environment for raising a family.

a monologue near the close of fear and loathing captures the decline of the hippies well:

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

Don;t get me wrong, I like Hunter S. thompson, but I don't think he's a great example of a fluid analytical mind capable of making logical and healthy evaluations of his generation. I read that quote, and think more about how well it relates to his own personal demons, and his eventual suicide.
The central illusion that the hippy generation lived under that caused their failure was that they actually thought that hedonism was some sort of vehicle for social change, that taking drugs and partying would lead to social change. The average conservative had plenty of fuel for his/her disgust in what was offered. The fact remains that some of the most popular spokespeople in the music scene overdosed and painted that image of the "alternative" to being a square etc.
Not unlike in total opposite terms how a good percentage of the straight edge movement in the punk scene substituted aggressive violence for drugs and alienated the average person who might otherwise think they were on to something interesting.