I agree that decade names do not quite to actual decades. And that the era has a different scope depending on your location.
Around here, I think we just got out of the nineties in, say, 2007.
Agree, I lived the first twelve years of my life in Toledo, Ohio. We moved two hours away to rural Indiana and the culture shock was huge. The sixties came to small town, farming community Indiana in about 1973.
This.
I was a teenager in the '90s, and to my mind there is a big divide between popular culture of the early 1990s and the late 1990s. I think of the '90s as being divided into two eras of roughly equal length, the Grunge Years and the Dot-com Bubble Years. The entire decade definitely was not a boom age, the US was experiencing an economic recession during the early 1990s. This may have contributed to the rather gloomy popular music of those years. There was recently a great series in the Onion AV Club about the rise and fall of 1990s rock music, and this didn’t even really get into the late decade rise boy band pop. I was never into hip hop and can’t speak to changes within that genre, but the '90s did see this style of music becoming increasingly popular with white audiences.
Mass adaptation of the Internet and digital technology also helped make the later part of the decade rather different from the earlier part. I personally was online by 1992, using both local BBSes and national services like Prodigy (anyone else remember Prodigy?), but at the time this was something only really geeky kids like me were into. By the end of the decade it seemed like practically everyone at least had an email account…and you could use them to email anyone who also had an email account! This was a big advance over the early '90s, when you were generally limited to only being able to email other people who were using the same service – if you had a Prodigy account, you couldn’t email a friend who only used CompuServe.
Hippies peak after the “Summer of Love.” After that hippie culture became “cool” and more mainstream, therefore it wasn’t “cool” anymore to be a hippie.
So what happened till 1973 were people adopting their culture. I agree the 60s culture ended with either the resignation of Mr Nixon or the Fall of Saigon
What people refer to as the “60s” began when the Beatles were on “Ed Sullivan” in early 1964, and ended with Watergate and Nixon’s resignation in 1974. What people think of as “hippies” actually grew out of the “beat” generation of the 50s, but really became commonplace around 1967, the “Summer of Love.” So I’d say the peak hippie years were roughly '67 through the early 70s.
I know. As I said, the roots of all that go back to the 50’s. Beatniks. Ginsberg, Kerouac etc.
I’ve seen some similar misconceptions regarding decades I did live through. I’ve seen some of those cultural type articles written by people who I presume must be very early 20’s and therefore children in the 90’s. And in one of the worst, they had the idea that the 90’s was ‘hammer pants’,big hair and lots of day-glo colors. They are obviously confusing the 90’s with the late 80’s.
He’s outlived three of them. 
I wonder if that amuses him.
Are you counting Paul as being dead?
Aren’t George, John, and Ringo dead?
Not unless Ringo died, like, today and I’ve missed hearing about it. A quick Google indicates that he’s still alive.
Oddly enough, I did hear a story on the radio just this morning about how a new book (Liverpool Blitzed by Neil Holmes) mentions that Ringo narrowly avoided being killed when the Nazis bombed his neighborhood, when he was just a baby.
He outlived half of them. 
I can’t watch Mad Men, because the early '60’s (like the 50’s who had a few working women) were not good to women. It was the late '60’s & early 70’s that changed the way things were. we were not unwashed hippies. the majority of us showered daily, tho a lot of us were hairy. & we never called ourselves hippies; we were Freaks (because we knew the establishment considered us as such, so we embraced it) [will continue after I’ve checked your question to remember what we’re talking about]
are you writing a dissertation? read On the Road, Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me, & Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas…& you got it
One of the problems is thinking the majority of people were hippies/ long haired Jesus freaks/ bra burning nympho’s.
While there were those, there were also a lot of ordinary people who maybe had one or two elements now associated with the times.
I can’t watch “That Seventies Show”. It just tries too hard to be 70’s with bean bags everywhere etc.
Bob Seger had hair longer than the Tahitian girl in the Breck’s commercial.
My in laws (and the parents of a lot of my friends) were “early adopters” - my mother and father in law used to sit around and play folk guitar with a guy who is now Bob Dylan. That would have been 1959-1960. A girlfriend’s mom went South to do Civil Rights work (voter registration) - around 1962 and raised her young kids on a commune in the late 1960s early 1970s.
My parents, on the other hand, lived fairly normal “1950s” style lives in the early 1960s - my mother and father think American Graffiti rings true for them - which it doesn’t ring true at all for my in-laws (who are actually older than my parents, but dropped into the beatnik scene). They married in 1966 and pretty much missed any of the “hippie sixties” as anything other than a fashion movement and an era of political change (i.e. they were observers whose wardrobe changed with the fashion).
I was born in 1966 and have vivid memories of funny looking people on street corners and my parents calling them hippies - it must have been around 1971.
Exactly. I went on a high school choir trip in 1967 to San Francisco and saw what my friends would start wearing in Illinois in 1970 and continue to wear for several years after that.
My older brother recalled when the Beach Boys were big hits with all of the surfer songs, a guy he knew built a rack and put a surfboard on the top of his car to impress the girls. You might think, “so, that sounds normal…”
The guy lived in a small town in Illinois. Needless to say, there weren’t a lot of places to go surf there.
The point is, fashions from both coasts often took awhile to get to the Midwest, with mixed results.
Blue Cheer c. 1968.
Blue Cheer is the epitome of the long haired, 60’s hard rock image and sound that I think the OP is talking about. One of the progenitors of metal. They were like a cartoon of themselves. I love this band.
Hey, you’re Starving Artist’s nephew!