Did Hippies Hurt or Help American Music?

[David L. Donald]

If anything the hippies brought country music and bluegrass
to the attention of a whole generation.

In the end the country music people continued to
reject them for philsophical reasons,
to this day it seems.

But the bluegrass people seem to have embraced them
and raised generations accepting them as just
more good pickers who love the music.

In the end bluegrass is where most of the hippies ended up.
They were in many ways trying to get back to their real roots,
and thought their parents generation had lost its way, post war.

Alison Krauss is winning regular Grammy's,
the latest with Robert Plant and T-Bone Burnett

Brother Where Art Thou meets Mother Maybelle
The Everly Brothers, Stephane Grapelli
and Led Zepelin.
And it WORKS!

Only a hippie would have thought that one up.

[Mike Winter]

Bump

[b0b]

Bump

Why??

[richard burton]

because it's there

[Mike Winter]

Sorry b0b -- must've had a brain fart...I was going back and forth in different other posts, and making dinner at the same time and for some reason I thought the last post on this was Chip Fossa's on March 17, and I wanted to keep it going.

[b0b]

Sorry b0b -- must've had a brain fart...

There's a lot of that going around, especially among us "old hippies".

[LJ Eiffert]

Man,I was feeling like an old hippie about a week ago,til this old 84 year old man hit me in the back and I straigten. I'm feeling real good now that I can look up. > Leo J.Eiffert,Jr.

[Mike Winter]

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD and thereby gave the psychedelic generation the pharmaceutical vehicle to turn on, tune in and drop out, has died. He was 102.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/ ... 6127.story

Hofmann was a talented synthetic chemist working in the Basel research center of Sandoz Laboratories -- now Novartis -- in the 1930s when he began studying the chemistry of ergot, the common name for a fungus that grows on rye, barley and certain other plants. Although ergot is poisonous, midwives had used a crude extract for centuries to induce labor in women.

On Friday afternoon, April 16, 1943, Hofmann had just completed synthesizing a new batch when, he subsequently wrote to his supervisor, "I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home, being affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with slight dizziness.

"At home, I lay down and sank into a not-unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours, this condition faded away."

What does this have to do with Hippies and music? Everything. LSD had an enormous effect on popular music during the 1960s.

http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/wo ... ect24a.htm

What a difference five years made, not only in looks, but in creative output:




"Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream..."