Were you one of dem goddamn Hippies?
Time to come clean (so to speak;)), and show us yer pics!
Q
Mmmm… Hippie meat!
Oh, wait. I misread that. I thought this was a recipe thread.
This is possibly (for me) the best thread I’ve found on the Dope so far. I see you just started it. Unfortunately for you it’s my turn on the 'puter so I’m gonna answer it…(really enjoyed the flash-back clip by the way)
We gathered in whatever designated areas were safe (least likely harassment.) And usually that was a main thorougho-fare (I know this isn’t right but it’s how we say it, as Appalachian-Americans, and don’t know how else to put it. My husband can’t spell and I had a stroke & don’t think I can find this in the dictionary. I’m so damaged. lol) or favorite public areas . (Why not hang out at the best places we could?)
I bet every town and city hsd it’s “weird” section…the gays, the blacks, the hippies. And for me and guanoLad; WE WERE NOT HIPPIES. WE WERE FREAKS. We really were. We called ourselves freaks because we knew we were different and embraced it. It was the media that deemed us hippies.
Anyway…we danced in the street if there were a lot of us. We danced out on the road, alone, in the rain, if we lived out on farms. We danced in the bathroom in front of the mirror if we were too young to join the throng…and by the time we got to Woodstock we were half a million strong.
It was a great time. Quite a party (if you didn’t mind pepper spray and being shunned socially.) (I could go on & on policitally but I won’t.)
A tee shirt that a old guy wore said: Yeah, I’m old. AND I heard all the good bands.
We did.
Oh, you mean today? I belong to a Group called …the Strip in the 70’s…(even tho I predate that.) We talk about past “events” (streakers, politcal protests, bands, good dope.) The usual musings of senior citizens.
South Street! South Street!
**
I never did the drug thing, but I think it got done for me a time or two. Dondra and I got married the first time in 1970, so we were still in the so-called “heyday” of all of that, and we dressed and hung out with the music and the protests and would go to 1oth and 14th streets in Atlanta on Sunday afternoons. Bought The Great Speckled Bird and read Pearl Cleage Lomax’s columns religiously! 
Sometimes we’d just go to friends’ houses and cook. Sometimes they smoked dope, sometimes not, but I have it on D’s authority that one evening I got very interested in Don’s (a friend) aquarium, and I kept trying to explain what I was seeing.
“No, Honey”, I said. You’re not getting it! You are not perceiving it. You have to appreciate the spectrum! Get with the Spectrum, Babe!"
For years therafter, our friends would ask me if I were with the spectrum.
Good times, good times!
Quasi
We didn’t refer to ourselves as “hippies.” Some of us were street people. Some were involved in different causes – protesting the war, women’s rights, legalizing marijuana, other civil rights. In the early Seventies in Nashville some of us hung out at Rap House. A lot hung out at Centenniel Park – until the police started arresting them for loitering! Goodness! What a crime! I think those loitering in the park won that battle legally. And they gathered on Love Circle. (Salute, Seamus!)
Fine song, but its use of the term “hippies” seems to refer to people who were hip in a different way from the mid-60’s and later hippies we know of today. It predated the hairstyles, fashions, anti-war protests, and other aspects of what is now known as hippie culture by a few years. Those hippies on South Street weren’t the type of hippies found in Haight-Ashbury.
The term was originally used by jazz musicians and that crowd to refer to young hangers-on and wannabes.
Interesting etymology for hippie here in Wikipedia. I was a little young to be in the midst of the ‘hippie’ movement of the 60’s, but I did make it to Miami to be a Yippie and/or Zippie at the 72 Republican Convention. At that time we were mostly calling ourselves ‘freaks’. In high school in the early 70s everybody was either a preppie, a freak, a greaser, a jock, or nobody (or a rah-rah if you were sports/athletics associated but not the players, like cheerleaders and team managers).
Where have all the hippies gone, long time ago . . .
. . . young girls picked them all. When will they ever learn?
Hey Gary. Yeah I knew that, but couldn’t find another song that featured the word “Hippie” sp prominently. Does anyone? Please link me, if so.
Thanks!
Q
My first thought upon seeing the thread title was a 21st-century verse for “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”…
Damn you!
Why, as a matter of fact, most of us are still here and following much the same lifestyle.
Here is a documentary “Back to the Garden”, which the filmmaker goes back to see what happened to all the folks he’d interviewed 20 years before.
http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/festival/play/6832
Over half of the members of the community I was a part of in the 70’s still lives within fifteen miles of the original place. Granted, one of them became a millionaire potato farmer, another a DARE officer of all things, (when this guy spoke of drugs, he was going from first hand experience) in the nearby community.
It’s a good documentary though and well worth the watch.
Count me among those who believe that the actual lyrics are “Where do all the hippest meet?” but that the Orlons winged it in the studio. Unable to verify, but I’m not the only one. And it’s the hippest street in town!