1960s Fashion

1960s Part two

The 1960s

John Winston Ono Lennon is one of the most famous musical artists ever. He shot to fame as one of The Beatles. He co-wrote most of the band’s songs, the majority of which are now rock classics. He also helped shape the social revolution of the 1960s. His solo career further elevated him as a music legend. Lennon also achieved fame as a peace activist. Lennon was born in Liverpool in 1940. He was brought up by an aunt, who bought him a harmonica and taught him how to play the banjo. Lennon’s mother played him Elvis Presley records and he fell in love with Rock and Roll. He told his mother and aunt he would be a famous singer one day. Lennon met Paul McCartney in 1957 at a church hall concert. They became friends and began writing songs together. They formed a band called The Beatles. They became popular playing live at local clubs in Liverpool and Germany. Then they became the most successful and influential act in music history. Lennon famously said The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Lennon left The Beatles in 1970. That same year he released the ‘John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band’ album, which he  recorded with his Japanese wife Yoko Ono. His album ‘Imagine’ followed in 1971. The title song became an anthem for anti-war movements. More classic albums followed. On 8th December 1980, Lennon was shot and killed outside his New York apartment by a deranged fan. In the late 1950s, a flourishing culture of groups began to emerge, often out of the declining skiffle scene, in major urban centres in the UK like Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London. This was particularly true in Liverpool, where it has been estimated that there were around 350 different bands active, often playing ballrooms, concert halls and clubs. Beat bands were heavily influenced by American bands of the era, such as Buddy Holly and the Crickets (from which group The Beatles derived their name), as well as earlier British groups such as The Shadows. After the national success of the Beatles in Britain from 1962, a number of Liverpool performers were able to follow them into the charts, including Gerry & The Pacemakers, The Searchers, and Cilla Black. Among the most successful beat acts from Birmingham were The Spencer Davis Group and The Moody Blues. From London, the term Tottenham Sound was largely based around The Dave Clark Five, but other London bands that benefited from the beat boom of this era included the Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds. The first non-Liverpool, non-Brian Epstein-managed band to break through in the UK were Freddie and the Dreamers, who were based in Manchester  as were Herman's Hermits and The Hollies. The beat movement provided most of the bands responsible for the British invasion of the American pop charts in the period after 1964, and furnished the model for many important developments in pop and rock music. The counterculture revolution of the 1960s is one of the most significant steps in western cultural development of the 20th Century. From the very beginning trickle of its inception, to its height during the Vietnamese war, music was a big source of its driving force, contributing to the achievements that it helped to bring about, but also laying some of the foundations for its downfall. With a focal point around the United States and the United Kingdom, it's influence spread throughout western civilisation and beyond, but where it all began is hard to say. However, the most important ingredient in its development was the burgeoning distrust of the established order of things, and in particular the senators, congressmen and presidents that pulled the strings. The heightened tension of the cold war, the fear of the bomb, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, racial segregation and voting rights, the persecution of communists and the Cuban communist regime, police brutality, the Vietnamese war and the increased use of psychedelic drugs all coalesced in the 60s and early 70s to fuel the fire for the counterculture movement. Music was at the heart of it all, from the folk movement led by the likes of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Dave Van Ronk to the release of "Revolution 1" on the Beatles' White Album. The music gave the children of the counterculture revolution new sources of inspiration and a centre around which to base their dissatisfaction with the established order of play. In addition to the songs and bands that talked about protest in one way or another, there were also those that talked about freedom in general, pushing the rules of convention to their outer limits. The Velvet Undergrounds lyrics for example include references to transgender, homosexuality and drug use in a way that had never been seen before, while bands like the Beach Boys are cited as big proponents of peace, love and understanding. One of the biggest things to develop out of the counter culture of the 60s and early 70s is the large-scale music festival. Folk festivals were well established in the early sixties - Bob Dylan's electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Fold Festival has taken on near legendary status, for example - but it wasn't until the Monterey Pop Festival, which launched Jimi Hendrix to the big stage, the Isle of White Festivals and Woodstock that the idea really took off. The fact that this type of festival has become so widespread in recent years is a testament to the musical legacy of the 60s. The counterculture movement ground to a halt around '73 & '74 with the end of the Vietnamese War, Nixon's presidential resignation and the implosion, corruption and exploitation of the free love era. Whether it ended with the removal of things to protest for, the move away from psychedelic drugs as the hit of choice or the disenfranchisement with the excessive hedonism that typified the latter parts of the movement it's hard to say for sure, but the impact of everything that occurred during that period is still being felt today, including the music that helped to produce it and that it helped to produce. Civil rights became universal, new forms of expression became acceptable, wars were ended and music was made. By the end of 1962, the British rock scene had started with beat groups like The Beatles drawing on a wide range of American influences including soul music, rhythm and blues and surf music. Initially, they reinterpreted standard American tunes, playing for dancers doing the twist, for example. These groups eventually infused their original rock compositions with increasingly complex musical ideas and a distinctive sound. In mid-1962 The Rolling Stones started as one of a number of groups increasingly showing blues influence, along with bands like The Animals and The Yardbirds. During 1963, The Beatles and other beat groups, such as The Searchers and The Hollies, achieved great popularity and commercial success in Britain. British rock broke through to mainstream popularity in the United States in January 1964 with the success of the Beatles. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was the band's first #1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, starting the British Invasion of the American music charts. The song entered the chart on January 18, 1964 at #45 before it became the #1 single for 7 weeks and went on to last a total of 15 weeks in the chart. Their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show February 9 is considered a milestone in American pop culture. The broadcast drew an estimated 73 million viewers, at the time a record for an American television program. The Beatles went on to become the biggest selling rock band of all time and they were followed by numerous British bands. During the next two years, Chad & Jeremy, Peter and Gordon, The Animals, Manfred Mann, Petula Clark, Freddie and the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Herman's Hermits, The Rolling Stones, The Troggs, and Donovan would have one or more #1 singles. Other acts that were part of the invasion included The Kinks and The Dave Clark Five. British Invasion acts also dominated the music charts at home in the United Kingdom. The British Invasion helped internationalize the production of rock and roll, opening the door for subsequent British (and Irish) performers to achieve international success. In America it arguably spelled the end of instrumental surf music, vocal girl groups and (for a time) the teen idols, that had dominated the American charts in the late 1950s and 60s. It dented the careers of established R&B acts like Fats Domino and Chubby Checker and even temporarily derailed the chart success of surviving rock and roll acts, including Elvis. The British Invasion also played a major part in the rise of a distinct genre of rock music, and cemented the primacy of the rock group, based on guitars and drums and producing their own material as singer-songwriters. The 1960s remains one of the most contested decades in recent American history. Politicians and social commentators continue to squabble over its meaning and legacy. Advertisers repackage sixties images, music and words to sell products through the haze of nostalgia. A new generation of political activists employs the rhetoric, tactics and style of sixties movements to advance old and new causes. To some, the 1960s were a dream, to others a nightmare. Many look back fondly on the 1960s as a lost moment of opportunity and possibility, when a new and better America seemed possible. They see the sixties as worthy of imitation and emulation. Others view the decade as a terrible horror and a detour from the vaunted traditions of America’s past, responsible for the proliferation of a variety of contemporary social and political ills. They view the 1960s as a model to be avoided like the plague. Robert Zimmerman is one of the largest, if not the largest, influencers of music in the 1960’s and later decades. A few of his songs including “Blowing in the Wind”, and “The Times they are a-Changing”, became symbols of the Civil Rights, and anti war currents in the society. You might be wondering “didn’t Bob Dylan write those songs?” Indeed he did. Zimmerman began calling himself Bob Dylan around 1959. The free thinking serious nature of his music has roots in his background as his paternal grandparents migrated from Russia, and his maternal grandparents were Jewish. It goes without saying then that Dylan, being born in 1941 during the Holocaust, had a unique perspective on life which he gave to his folk music. Even though Dylan had anti war sentiments, it was probably WWII that helped shape his career and stardom. Before WWII, going to college was reserved for prestigious individuals and Bob Dylan had humble beginnings. The war however required the US to produce huge amounts of items to sustain the troops, which in turn is said to be responsible for pulling the US out of the Great Depression. The financial stability the war created tripled the amount of college enrollments between 1940 and 1949; a trend that was still growing when Dylan entered the University of Minnesota to study art. Dylan was influenced by other variables as well such as The Rolling Stones, and especially The Beatles. Originally Dylan began by singing and writing traditional folk songs; however, after hearing the Beatles song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” Dylan began incorporating electric instruments. Around this time also Dylan diverted from his usual protest songs to songs of a more personal nature in his album “Another Side to Bob Dylan”. Later that year, in 1964, Dylan met the Beatles in New York City and introduced them to cannabis on their first visit to the USA from the United Kingdom. The Beatles took the USA by storm and were extraordinarily famous. As the Beatles influenced Dylan, Dylan also influenced the Beatles. John Lennon of the Beatles was drawn to the lyrical importance of Dylan’s song. This began a shift toward a more narrative style of Beatles music beginning with the Album “Beatles for Sale” in 1964. They still maintained their rock and roll style which contrasted greatly against Dylan’s folk song music. Both artists assimilated various aspects of each other into their own style. The Rolling Stones was another Rock N Roll band from the UK which took the USA by storm, and like the Beatles first toured the USA in 1964. Unlike the Beatles however, they were fairly new and without a hit record (in the USA) and some say their first tour to the USA was a total disaster. However, they did walk away recording in Chicago their first song to reach UK’s #1 hit “It’s All Over Now”. Important to note about both of these bands from the UK is that they also might have been influenced by WWII. The UK took a much larger hit than did the USA with many of their cities having been bombed destroying much of its infrastructure. It’s conceivable then that both the USA and UK were experiencing similar culture currents that allowed the cross country interest in music. Last, but not least, of the musical artist ill mention is Jimi Hendrix who was born in Seattle Washington in 1942. He too must have been affected by the social currents developing in the USA and its possible he as an African American was influenced by the Civil Rights movement and personalities such as Rosa Parks and King and I would almost wonder if the opportunities that presented themselves to him resulted from their influence if it were not for the fact that he was a masterful electric guitar musician. He did for the electric guitar what John Cage did for the piano by exploring new sounds and astral sounding effects of feedback and distortion. Hendrix’s fame began in 1968 but was short lived as he died in 1970 due to drug related complications. Both Hendrix and the Rolling Stones new and inventive style of Rock N Role opened up all new darker styles of Rock such a grunge, heavy rock, and alternative rock which we have today. The freedom of these styles mirror the ever increasing desire for freedom of all things in our society and the elimination of the oppression the USA still harbored. It may be that not only did the currents in our society influence the music, but the music equally influenced our society. On January 14, 1967, the outdoor Human Be-In organized by Michael Bowen helped to popularize hippie culture across the United States, with 20,000 hippies gathering in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. On March 26, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick and 10,000 hippies came together in Manhattan for the Central Park Be-In on Easter Sunday. The Monterey Pop Festival from June 16 to June 18 introduced the rock music of the counterculture to a wide audience and marked the start of the "Summer of Love".  Scott McKenzie's rendition of John Phillips' song, "San Francisco", became a hit in the United States and Europe. The lyrics, "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair", inspired thousands of young people from all over the world to travel to San Francisco, sometimes wearing flowers in their hair and distributing flowers to passers-by, earning them the name, "Flower Children". Bands like the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), and Jefferson Airplane lived in the Haight. The 1960’s was a decade of profound social change. In this decade both the president John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were assassinated on the dates 1963 and 1968 respectively. The actions of both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. lead to a modern Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s that paved the way for African American liberties and the outlaw of racial discrimination. Unfortunately, Martin Luther King was also assassinated just months before Robert Kennedy. Also throughout the 1960’s America was involved in a very unpopular Vietnam War which lasted the entire decade, the cold war, and the very dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis. In the midst of all this social change and stress, music was being reshaped and reformed into exciting new styles. Chuck Berry’s hit “Rock and Roll Music” claimed it was the only music to dance to, and by 1958 Danny and the Juniors asserted that rock and roll was here to stay. They were right, and their proclamation has been repeated or echoed for nearly fifty years. “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay” became an anthem for Sha-Na-Na, and its sentiment echoes in Neil Young’s “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue).” The likes of The Beatles and The Beach Boys covered “Rock and Roll Music.” Peter, Paul, and Mary dug rock and roll music, Bob Seger liked old time rock and roll music, and the Arrows, Joan Jett, and Britney Spears all loved rock and roll and wanted another dime in the jukebox. Neil Young encouraged listeners to “keep on rockin’ in the free world.” Starship even went so far as claiming to have built a city on rock and roll. Exaggerated (and shallow) as that claim may be, it helps highlight an incontrovertible fact: since the days of Alan Freed, rock and roll has become a monolithic building block for American culture, not just in the cities but, as John Mellencamp clarifies in “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.,” in the small towns, too. Simply put: Rock and roll extends to all fields of American culture. We live in an age when every honky-tonk country band across the nation plays “Joy to the World,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” and “Old Time Rock and Roll”; Chet Atkins collaborates with Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler (Neck and Neck); country music—no, American music— icon Willie Nelson records tunes with Aerosmith, Kid Rock, Keith Richards, Joe Walsh, Eric Clapton, ZZ Top, and a host of others. Bob Seger, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan and other icons of the sixties rock explosion sell cars, clothes, lingerie, and movies. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young lead political protests and Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi have worked tirelessly to help heal the nation after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The Rolling Stones were like many other British acts of the 1960s as they were heavily influenced by American rock 'n' roll and R&B. They were at the leading edge of the so-called British Invasion of the mid-1960s, as the Stones and contemporaries such as the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Kinks, the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Who, Herman's Hermits and the Hollies all made at least a significant showing on the charts, both in America and at home in Britain. Out of all of those groups, the Beatles, in spite of breaking up in 1970, became and still remain the most successful act in music history in terms of sales and influence. The Rolling Stones became a constant presence that is still active today. In addition to their longevity, the Stones have had significant success on the charts in America, Britain, and around the world. There is little doubt that any act since the Beatles fails to meet the Beatles' standards, however there are few acts that meet the standards of the Stones either. For the most part, comparing the Beatles to the Stones is like comparing apples to oranges as they have different styles, with the Beatles being more influenced by early rock 'n' roll while the Stones were not only influenced by early rock 'n' roll but also by American Blues. As noted above, the Stones and their British contemporaries were indeed influenced by early American rock 'n' roll artists such as Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly the Everly Brothers and Jerry Lee Lewis, and therefore had a foundation deeply rooted in rock 'n' roll. Once again, what made the Stones stand out from the Beatles and all of their other contemporaries, save for maybe the Yardbirds, was the fact that they were also heavily influenced by American Blues and R&B artists such as Muddy Waters, Rev. Gary Davis, Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf and Arthur Alexander. A significant majority of the Stones' recordings from their first three years (1963-1965) showcased both their rock 'n' roll influences and their blues influences. As a matter of fact a great deal of their recordings from this period would be cover songs of the American Blues and R&B artists mentioned above. As the years went on however, the Stones added and incorporated more genres into their blues and rock 'n' roll foundation such as country, folk, baroque pop, psychedelia, adult contemporary, reggae, dub, new wave, punk and disco too name a few. It is this characteristic of the band which has made them very successful over the years as their ability to incorporate these other genres into their repertoire has enabled them to build upon their original foundation and consequently build an enormously successful career. Artists that influenced the Stones to incorporate news genres into their sound include George Jones, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Otis Redding. Hits and popular songs over the years such as "Ruby Tuesday," "Angie," "Wild Horses," 'Tumbling Dice," "Miss You," "Paint It Black," "Sympathy For The Devil," "Start Me Up" and "Honky Tonk Women" are all indicative of their musical diversity. "Ruby Tuesday" is baroque pop; "Angie" is a 70s-style adult contemporary ballad; "Miss You" is a disco-rock fusion; "Wild Horses" and "Honky Tonk Women" have a strong country influence; "Tumbling Dice" is inflicted with gospel and soul; "Paint It Black" is eastern-tinged psychedelia; "Sympathy For The Devil" has a tribal meets rock 'n' roll sound, while "Start Me Up," although sounding like a straight-forward rocker, is in fact a reggae based track. Even their biggest hit, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," is an example of the Stones building upon their foundation as it features a much harder edge than their early cover songs. As noted above, the Stones and their British contemporaries were indeed influenced by early American rock 'n' roll artists such as Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly the Everly Brothers and Jerry Lee Lewis, and therefore had a foundation deeply rooted in rock 'n' roll. Once again, what made the Stones stand out from the Beatles and all of their other contemporaries, save for maybe the Yardbirds, was the fact that they were also heavily influenced by American Blues and R&B artists such as Muddy Waters, Rev. Gary Davis, Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf and Arthur Alexander. A significant majority of the Stones' recordings from their first three years (1963-1965) showcased both their rock 'n' roll influences and their blues influences. As a matter of fact a great deal of their recordings from this period would be cover songs of the American Blues and R&B artists mentioned above. As the years went on however, the Stones added and incorporated more genres into their blues and rock 'n' roll foundation such as country, folk, baroque pop, psychedelia, adult contemporary, reggae, dub, new wave, punk and disco too name a few. It is this characteristic of the band which has made them very successful over the years as their ability to incorporate these other genres into their repertoire has enabled them to build upon their original foundation and consequently build an enormously successful career. Artists that influenced the Stones to incorporate news genres into their sound include George Jones, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Otis Redding. Hits and popular songs over the years such as "Ruby Tuesday," "Angie," "Wild Horses," 'Tumbling Dice," "Miss You," "Paint It Black," "Sympathy For The Devil," "Start Me Up" and "Honky Tonk Women" are all indicative of their musical diversity. "Ruby Tuesday" is baroque pop; "Angie" is a 70s-style adult contemporary ballad; "Miss You" is a disco-rock fusion; "Wild Horses" and "Honky Tonk Women" have a strong country influence; "Tumbling Dice" is inflicted with gospel and soul; "Paint It Black" is eastern-tinged psychedelia; "Sympathy For The Devil" has a tribal meets rock 'n' roll sound, while "Start Me Up," although sounding like a straight-forward rocker, is in fact a reggae based track. Even their biggest hit, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," is an example of the Stones building upon their foundation as it features a much harder edge than their early cover songs. The sound of the Stones would help lay the groundwork for a diverse array of rock artists which followed them such as Aerosmith, Guns N' Roses, The Doors, The Stooges, Thin Lizzy, Oasis, Blur, The Stone Roses, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Allman Brothers, Kiss, Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, T. Rex, The Ramones, AC/DC, Creedence Clearwater Revival, New York Dolls, Def Leppard, Foreigner, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Steve Earle, Neil Young, Elton John, The Sex Pistols, Bon Jovi and Pearl Jam--And that is just the first generation. One must consider the number of artists that the Stones-influenced artists have influenced themselves. The only thing that is as long-lasting as the Rolling Stones themselves is without a doubt the legacy they have left and will continue to leave even after the band calls it a day. When that day comes, it will be long after most of their British Invasion contemporaries have hung it up, most of them retiring back in the '60s and '70s. As rock music has changed, and even faltered over the years, the Rolling Stones remain one of the few constants as an excellent source of entertainment. From Jamaica, reggae music has swept the world. You can hear reggae played in clubs and bars from Senegal to Samoa. Reggae songs invoke racial injustice (Peter Tosh’s “Arise Black Man”), politics (Bunny Wailer on apartheid South Africa’s prime minister, “Botha the Mosquito”), the Rastafarian religion (the Melodians’ “Rivers of Babylon”), and romance (Jimmy Cliff’s “Higher and Deeper Love”). The lyrics range from bravado (Tosh’s “I’m the toughest, I’m the toughest”) to tenderness (Bob Marley’s “Three little birds pitch by my doorstep, singing sweet songs of melodies pure and true”). The Wailers, while not the first to record reggae, experimented with it early and pushed it the furthest. Starting out as a ska group, their talent initially was raw. “The Wailers weren’t singers until I taught them,” their mentor Joe Higgs recalled. “It took me years to teach Bob Marley what sound consciousness was about” (Barrow and Dalton, 2001, p. 40). All three of them—Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, along with Marley—had grown up in Trench Town, the “concrete jungle, where the living is harder” of the Marley song. In Trench Town, people “built shacks and huts out of cardboard and plywood and rusty old iron, and the place spread like a disease till now it’s teeming,” reports Thomas (1977, pp. 25-26). It was “a bombsite landscape of live garbage and boxwood and unlikely tropical greenery.” With lyrics like “Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!” and “Slave driver, the table is turned” the Wailers had a message that appealed to marginalized young Jamaicans just like themselves. According to Marley, “But it’s the rhythm now, that is reggae. Proud rhythm, man, that rhythm can’t end. It have a different touch” To meet the demand for the Jamaican sound, the sound-system owners started making recordings of their own. To begin with they intended the recordings to be played only in their own sound systems, but by the end of the 1950s they were pressing vinyl disks for sale to the public. The systems for distributing records, formerly haphazard, became better organized at this time (Bradley, op. cit., p. 209). Earlier, records had been sold as a sideline in barber shops and bars. By the mid-1960s, just before reggae’s arrival, many small specialist record shops had opened around the country. To meet the shops’ demands for records, entrepreneurs started distribution firms. As a result, record producers no longer needed to operate their own sound systems to create a demand for their product, but could simply sell their records via the new wholesalers and retailers. Around this time, also, the means of payment became more professional. In the early days, producers on occasion neglected to pay the musicians. The English-Jamaican entrepreneur Chris Blackwell and others cleaned things up. Blackwell “ran his affairs much more like a business and used to pay higher rates to artists and musicians,” according to the singer Jimmy Cliff (Bradley, 2000, pp. 104, 107). “That’s how people got to hear about Chris Blackwell. They’d say, ‘Go to the white man, him pay better money!’” Respect for intellectual property was not part of the reason for the music business’s growth: quite the contrary. Writing credits were casually assigned; a given song might at different times be credited to different writers. The rights to royalties were fuzzy. The ownership of the music was “a music publisher’s nightmare” The Liverpool of the 1960s was a vibrant place. Throughout the 20th century this migrant city experienced dramatic economic meltdown together with all of the associated problems of long term urban neglect. Yet, paradoxically, Liverpool’s unique demographics and cultural geography also guaranteed great prosperity for some, exemplified across the city and on the Wirral peninsular by an almost impervious bourgeoisie and its accompanying fortresses of fringe suburbia. From 1963-onward this ambiguous, ambivalent (in fact, downright confusing) scenario was supplemented by intense national (and then international) media scrutiny following the advent of ‘Merseybeat’. As the success of the Beatles and other local rock groups such as Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Swinging Blue Jeans and the Searchers intensified, so too did the glare of the media gaze, bringing national attention to a previously largely forgotten city - a positive development, one might suggest. There was, however, a downside to this renaissance. For example, by 1964, the Beatles, having already been lured away from the city, were followed by a posse of younger beat hopefuls. For most of these would-be pop stars, an encouraging light flickered only briefly and dimly in the afterglow of that first wave; soon, day jobs or unemployment called most of them back to Merseyside. It was a period of great creativity and indigenous pride, but one, also, of tremendous disappointments. Looking back, perhaps the one indisputable outcome of this adventure was a confirmation of shared separation and alienation. Certainly, complex social strategies to deal ironically with what appeared to be an increasingly ironic world were erected by many of Merseyside’s young people at that time. The residue of these strategies still permeates Liverpool’s renowned victim culture to this day. Liverpool’s dalliance with popular music forms did not begin and end with beat music, however. It had already occurred to broadcaster and documentary maker Daniel Farson in his work Beat City (broadcast ITV, 24th December 1963), that the ‘explosion’ of music-making in and around the Liverpool of the 1960s actually had some kind of pre (or ‘ur’) history. Notwithstanding some truly phony pronouncements in Beat City, Farson identified - to his credit - a thriving folk music scene. He focused in particular on the events at Gregson’s Well pub in Low Hill where the Spinners and Jacqui and Bridie held court. Both groups went on to enjoy international distinction as folk music interpreters par excellence (and we shall be featuring their work in volume two of this series), but, in truth, they represented only the tip of a folk music community that had evolved not only in Liverpool but in many other major cities across the UK throughout the post-WWII era. The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s, swiftly spreading to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. The early hippie ideology included the countercultural values of the Beat Generation. Some created their own social groups and communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as marijuana and LSD to explore alternative states of consciousness. In January 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco popularized hippie culture, leading to the legendary Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. Hippies in Mexico, known as jipitecas, formed La Onda Chicana and gathered at Avándaro, while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. In the United Kingdom, mobile "peace convoys" of New age travellers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge. In Australia hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival and the annual Cannabis Law Reform Rally or MardiGrass. In Chile, "Piedra Roja Festival" was held in 1970, and was the major hippie event in that country. Hippie fashions and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the widespread movement in the 1960s, many aspects of hippie culture have been assimilated by mainstream society. The religious and cultural diversity espoused by the hippies has gained widespread acceptance, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual concepts have reached a wide audience. The hippie legacy can be observed in contemporary culture in myriad forms — from health food, to music festivals, to contemporary sexual mores, and even to the cyberspace revolution.

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