Psychedelic Rock and the Budding Hippie Culture

Merry Pranksters for their acid tests. Through them he also met the Grateful Dead in 1966 and began supporting them both financially and as a sound man.” “His LSD product became a part of the “Red Dog Experience”, the early evolution of psychedelic rock and the budding hippie culture. “

In October of 1965, many Red Dog participants returned to their native San Francisco, where they created a new collective called “The Family Dog”. founder and manager of Big Brother and the Holding Company, Chester Helms (father of San Francisco’s 1967, Summer of Love) was a music promoter and a counter culture figure in San Francisco during its hippie period in the mid to late Sixties. Helms had recruited Janis Joplin as its lead singer. He was a producer

and organizer, helping to stage free concerts and other cultural events at Golden Gate Park, the backdrop of San Francisco's Summer of Love in 1967, as well as at other venues, including the Avalon Ballroom. In February of the 1966, he formed ties with The Family Dog, which was a commune of hippies living at 2125 Pine Street who would throw open parties and wild events. In February 1966, Helms founded Family Dog Productions to begin promoting concerts at The Fillmore Auditorium along with his partner Bill Graham. Helms was able to secure the permits necessary to host events at the Avalon Ballroom, an old dance hall at 1268 Sutter Street, on the corner of Sutter and Van Ness. These places became the staple of 1966, where they would put on psychedelic musical experiences with light shows combined with colorful film projections. Those who attended would even wear outlandish outfits to these events. His band, Big Brother and the Holding Company debuted there in June 1966. Within a year, Helms popularity took off. He would get them the appearance that made them famous, the Monterey Pop Festival, where Albert Grossman spotted Joplin and offered her a contract.
By the summer of 1966, the hippies moved into San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, this area already consisted of the beatniks, writers, artists and musicians so they we already accepted.

Approximately, fifteen thousand hippies occupied this section of the town, including the psychedelic bands The Charlatans, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother, and the Holding Company. The Diggers attempted to create a subculture independent of the monetary economy because they were scorned by consumer society. The Diggers took the name from the original English Diggers who had promulgated a vision of society free from private property, and all forms of buying and selling. Pete Coyote was the founder of the Diggers and active in Haight-Ashbury during the mid-60’s, he was a director with the San Francisco Mime Troupe and was a key figure during San Francisco’s counterculture. The San Francisco Mime Troupe is a theater that uses a mix of political satire and original music. They used to preform free shows in various parks in San Francisco Bay area and around California. Coyote, along with Emmett Grogan and Peter Berg, they created provocative "theater" events designed to heighten awareness of problems associated with the notion of private property, consumerism, and identification with one's work. They fed nearly 600 people a day for "free", asking only that people pass through a six-foot by six-foot square known as The Free Frame of Reference.” They continued to carry the belief that

everything should be free, exchanged or simply given away. They rejected social norms and they were seeking new experiences, these young people of the counterculture openly embraced the use of drugs and engaged in an open more liberated sexual experiences with both different sex and same sex men and women. They were also one of the legendary groups in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, one of the worldwide epicenters of the Sixties Counterculture, which fundamentally changed American and world culture. The San Francisco Diggers evolved out of two Radical traditions that thrived in the SF Bay Area in the mid-1960s: the bohemian/underground art/theater scene, and the New Left/civil rights/peace movement.
“The Diggers combined street theater, anarchist direct action, and art happenings in their social agenda of creating a Free City.” Their most famous activities revolved around distributing Free Food every day in the Park, and distributing "surplus energy" at a series of Free Stores (where everything was free for the taking.) The Diggers, as actors, created a series of street events that marked the evolution of the hippie phenomenon from a homegrown face-to-face community to the mass-media circus that splashed its face across the world's front pages and TV screens: The Death of Money Parade, Intersection Game, Invisible Circus and Death of Hippie/Birth of Free. “The Diggers, devoted to street theater, direct action, and distributing free food, were in the thick of the legendary Summer of Love, and soon Grogan is struggling with the naive narcissism of the hippies, the marketing of revolution as a brand, dogmatic radicals, and false prophets like “tripster”, Timothy Leary.”
Tim Leary was a psychologist, philosopher, a novelist and a defender of individual rights.

Leary being most remembered for being the man who brought psychedelic drugs into American culture, but he thought of himself as a philosopher more than anything else did. He was an undisputed leader of the psychedelic movement. “Leary, while he was lecturing at Harvard University, was the most prominent pro-LSD researcher. “Leary claimed that using LSD with the right dosage, “set” (what one brings to the experience), and setting, preferably with the guidance of professionals, could alter behavior in dramatic and beneficial ways and open people’s eyes to ideas and visions that were not possible without tripping on LSD.” Leary also experimented on himself, as well as, Harvard students, which the University was not pleased and was fired.” Leary would be a main contributor of LSD to many who attend The Human Be-In or the Gathering of the Tribes in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967, which was considered the prelude to the Summer of Love in

Haight-Ashbury.
“This classic handbill that was designed by Rick Griffin was one of three handbills made for this event, (see below) it advertised the "Pow Wow of the Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In". The festival held on Saturday January 14, 1967, just two weeks before the famous East-West concert, at the Polo Grounds in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. The handbill artist used single words to drop hints about who would be at the festival. On the right