The Bay Area, (lead by San Francisco and Ber-zer-keley), has been fertile soil for new–if sometimes wacky–ideas since the gold rush brought a zillion people from around the globe to our unsurpassed locale. Each brought his or her own rendition of culture, philosophies and fetishes. It’s been “anything goes” ever since.
Bill Graham and his legendary concerts, spotlighting local bands like the Airplane and Grateful Dead, has to be mentioned as a prime catalyst in the formation of the Counterculture Movement. He put the seeds in Miracle Grow.
The traffic must have been better when you lived in the Bay Area The song was written in LA, by the way.
Leary experimented with LSD when it was legal - but that was at Harvard. (And he experimented with it after it was illegal also.) Besides what others have said, I’m sure the relatively nice climate helped also. There were hippies in the East Village of NY, where the Fillmore East was, and some in Cambridge, but never the number in San Francisco.
Sorry, I thought Berkley was a suburb of LA. But as the distance between them is listed as 402 miles, I would consider that an 8-hour trip. But maybe you drive faster out in California.
According to this distance calculator, it’s 342 miles. At an average of 50 mph, that would be a bit over 6.5 hours. Yes, I suppose I do average a bit faster than that.
Of course, if you figure Interstates only, it would be much longer. I would drive, US Highway 101, a straight shot, one to the other.
The distance calculator has a bug. I put in my town and Santa Barbara, a trip I’ve made pretty often, and which is almost exactly 300 miles down 101. It gives 250.
You’d probably take I-5 to LA anyway. Maybe the calculator is as the crow flies?
If you took 101, it’d definitely take longer that 6.5 hours - there’s a lot of traffic thataway. 5 is faster…but boringer. 1 is by far the prettiest, but also the longest, route.
I always thought that the Hippie movement started in London out of the Revolver/Sgt.Pepper scene and the Beatles experimentation with L.S.D.,Hinduism and marijuana and only later moved to the U.S.
The Hippie thing had roots in various Bohemian enclaves–San Francisco, Los Angeles & New York City. And London, too. Which oversimplifies–let’s not forget the Beat-influenced poets of Liverpool…
Then, there was the media/“commercialized” aspect of the thing, itself. San Francisco columnist Herb Caen coined the word “Beatnik” to describe the boys with goatees & girls in black tights who’d read Kerouac. “Hippie” was originally a somewhat derogatory term first used to describe the youngers sibs of the Beatniks.
There was a lot of fol de rol back in the day. But some good music & writing remain. You’ve probably heard lots of the music. Among the writers, Michael McClure is a personal favorite–a late Beat poet & playwright who cut a darkly elegant swath through various Be-ins & Love-ins. And is still working today.
Vermont is where the “drop-out” hippies washed up. You know, the ones who wanted to goat farm and grow organic weed and live natural, while the toxic cities of the establishment crumbled. You needed a rural area to get back to the land, and Vermont was the place.
The other thing to remember is that such things have positive feedback loops. If you’re a hippie, and lots of hippies are moving to San Francisco or Vermont, you’re more likely to move there to, just because there will be lots of hippies there. So you could raise goats and grow organic weed in Alabama, but your neighbors are gonna harsh your mellow.
Good point. My gay ex-coworker told me that the US military used to discharge gays at SF, which meant it had a very high rate of them settling there. This could also add to the “whatever” attitude. The question is, is he right?
I have no idea how accurate the “Navy discharge” theory is, (it could be 100% true, for all I know), but Michener had one of the characters in his 1958 Hawaii recognize that he was gay in the early 50s and move from the islands to San Francisco to be near other homosexuals, so it was clearly recognized as a place where gay guys could go in the 1950s.
The song was written in LA, by the way.