The years I went to Norland Junior High School. One memory that stands out in my mind was in 9th grade graphic arts class with Charles Lee. Charles was a very quite guy, non-athletic and a loner. We were doing silk screening and Charles was making a bumper sticker that said “Save the Everglades”. No one had much consciousness about ecological concerns back than and we used to tease him and say, “Hey Charles – Save the Everglades” and laugh.
I one time asked him why he was so quite and he replied, “Silence is Golden” which we would all than tease him about also – “Hey Charles” “Yea” “Silence is Golden”, we say laughing. Why this stands out is that my close group of friends didn’t really tease others like this, and I in fact felt bad later for indulging in this kind of behavior, and in Charles’s case I often thought how far advanced he was to have the awareness he had (compared to us stupid immature kids) and wondered what ever became of him.
I always thought of him in my later high school years as someone who was ahead of his time, and had great respect for what he was doing so many years ahead of us late social conscious awareness bloomers. Although at the other end of the country a new movement was being born my friends and I had no idea and no awareness of the emerging counterculture that would soon, so powerfully influence our lives.
“Hippie” by Barry Miles–1965 – Hippies didn’t just pop up overnight, but 1965 was the first year in which a discernible youth movement began to emerge. Most of the key “psychedelic” rock bands formed this year. On the new developing Haight-Ashbury there were the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Charlatans and the Jefferson Airplane. On the Strip there were Love, the Byrds and the Doors. In New York the Fugs were just getting known and the Velvet Underground were getting together. This is the year that the use of LSD became widespread thanks to massive media coverage. Tim Leary went on the lecture circuit and his Millbrook mansion hosted hundreds of controlled LSD sessions. On the West Coast, thanks to underground chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III and Ken Kesey and the Pranksters, thousands of people took uncontrolled trips at the Trips Festivals and in the new psychedelic dancehalls. The drug was still legal, but the authorities were beginning to grow restless and talk of how to control it. Over in London the Beatles took their first LSD trip and smoked a lot of marijuana. Michael Hollingshead opened his world Psychedelic Centre and the Beat Generation poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso read at the Royal Albert Hall. This reading acted as a catalyst for underground activity in London, as people suddenly realized just how many like-minded people there were around. This was also the year that London began to blossom into colour with the opening of the Granny Takes a Trip and Hung On You clothes shops.
“Hippie” by Barry Miles–1966 – The summer of 1966 was the real “Summer of Love” - a phrase now copyrighted by Bill Graham Enterprises. When the year opened there were just a handful of underground papers: the New York East Village Other had just started, the LA Free Press was eighteen months old, the Berkeley Barb less than half a year old. By the end of the year there were more than a dozen papers published in cities all across the country-there was even one in London. These included the San Francisco Oracle, with its ground-breaking psychedelic graphics and rainbow printed pages. In New York, 1966 saw the rise of the Fugs, Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable with the Velvet Underground, and Bob Dylan retiring from public view after a motorcycle accident. It also saw the beginning of the Hare Krishna movement and the beginning of ST. Mark’s Place as the underground high street. In San Francisco the opening of the Psychedelic Shop at Haight and Ashbury gave birth to an era. This was the year the Merry Pranksters, Wavy Gravy and Neal Cassady held more Acid Tests, the year that saw the first Chet Helms Family Dog dances at the Avalon Ballroom and the development of Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium. Both dance halls used a new way of advertising, with psychedelic posters so bizarre that only a stoned person could decipher the squiggly, blobby lettering and the insider drug references. It was the year that the notorious underground chemist, Owsley Stanley III, became a millionaire and his main product, LSD, became illegal.