Hippie Digest: Wavy Gravy at 77 – Hippie History – Ours is Yours – Home in Argentina – Charlie Watts Hippie Hater –
2013 April 6
tags: 1960s, Argentina, Charlie Watts, History of Hippies, L Douglas St. Ours, wavy gravy
by Citizen Journalist Exchange
A Brief History Of Hippies
In the mid 1960s, a never before seen counter-culture blossomed throughout the United States, inciting both the Flower Power movement as well as the general revulsion of more straight-laced, Ward Cleaver-esque Americans. No longer wanting to keep up with the Joneses or confine themselves to white picket-fenced corrals of repressive and Puritanical sexual norms, these fresh-faced masses would soon come to be known as Hippies.
Originally taken from ‘Hipster’, the term “hippie” was used to describe beatniks who found their technicolor heart in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco; children of the road who believed they should make love, not war. Their vocal opposition to the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War (1955-1975) and the increasingly rocky road to shared civil rights among all Americans led to this new, alternative form of activism. More…
Lib at Large: At 77, hippie icon Wavy Gravy looks back at a lifetime of doing good
AS HE APPROACHES his 77th birthday, counterculture icon Wavy Gravy has one fervent hope: To stick around long enough to emcee the 50th anniversary of Woodstock.
That will be in 2019, when he’ll be 84. “It’s not that long,” he insists. “It’s only seven years.”
At the original Woodstock, the mega 1969 rock festival that’s become a touchstone of the peace and love generation, he was still known as Hugh Romney, his given name, changing it to Wavy Gravy after B.B. King called him that at a music festival later that same year.
At Woodstock, the Hog Farm commune he co-founded handled security, calling themselves the Please Force (“will you please stand back from the stage,”
etc.) and ran a free kitchen, ladling hot food to legions of muddy, wet hippie kids.
Along with his warnings to stay away from the brown acid, he became famous for announcing from the stage: “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000,” a quote that reached a mass audience through the “Woodstock” movie, cementing his place in rock history. More…
Hippie Digest: Wavy Gravy at 77 Hippie History Ours is Yours Home in Argentina Charlie Watts Hippie Hater Sunshine, Happiness and Hippies: Home in Argentina
Oh, how things have changed. I’ve stepped into a universe of calm, healthy(ier) living, sun, friendship, relaxation, and comfort. With it, I’ve pretty much lost all inspiration to write – especially freelance stories. Throughout this adventure, my blog has served as a forum for me to vent and right now I don’t feel like venting, rather, bragging about how awesome Argentina is. I am blissful here and have (almost) nothing to complain about. My altitude sickness is gone, my stomach and head feel great, I haven’t been robbed and the bad weather exists only on my Facebook News Feed where people complain about the -40 degree celsius weather in Ottawa and Montreal.
While I greatly appreciated my time in Bolivia and will never forget it, I am so happy to be in a country where my greatest worry is what club to go to at night and if I had a good enough to stay up all night – people don’t go to the club until 2 am and don’t leave till 5 am earliest!
My money is running out, fast, but I’ll deal with that later. While in Bolivia, I could travel 14 hours for 100 Bolivianos ($14) for a semi-cama (reclinable seat with leg rest), in Argentina it costs me about 100 dollars or more! But, and this is a big but, the buses are UNREAL! My semi-cama from Salta to Cordoba featured a free beer, two meals and snacks, TV (all Spanish dubbed, but still), fresh blankets still in their plastic laundry package, extremely comfortable chairs and best of all…A BATHROOM! What a polar opposite this was to the miserable Bolivian buses that had no bathrooms, (probably) flea-ridden blankets (if they had any), seats that felt like there was a metal pole in your ass and blaring music while you tried to sleep. More…
Hippie Digest: Wavy Gravy at 77 Hippie History Ours is Yours Home in Argentina Charlie Watts Hippie Hater Rolling Stones Drummer Cites Hippies And “The Wind” As Reasons He Doesn’t Want To Play Glastonbury
Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts can barely contain his excitement contempt for the band’s upcoming performance at Glastonbury 2013, telling The Guardian in a recent interview that despite his bandmates’ enthusiasm he does not want to play festival:
“I don’t want to do it. Everyone else does. I don’t like playing outdoors, and I certainly don’t like festivals. I’ve always thought they’re nothing to do with playing … [but] when you’re a band … you do anything and everything.”
In fact, the 71-year-old Watts doesn’t particularly care for festivals in general nor, for that matter, the ‘hippies’ who frequent these savage outdoor gatherings, with foliage in their hair and no footwear, allowing their scent to be dictated by the amount of sweat caught in their armpit fur, wafting over the stage, overpowering even the stench of the festival latrines: More…
Hippie Digest: Wavy Gravy at 77 Hippie History Ours is Yours Home in Argentina Charlie Watts Hippie Hater Is the Music of the 1960s Really the Best Ever?
I had the good fortune to come of age during the richest musical epoch — well, ever. The Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Dylan, Janis Joplin, Zappa. I could go on and on. The ’60s witnessed an unparalleled burst of musical creativity, ranging from Cream to CCR to Hendrix and to Neil Young and Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell. There is simply no match — not before nor since — for this outpouring of enduring song. And what’s more, nobody really disputes this.
Okay, okay. I wrote all those superlatives in part to provoke a reaction. There are people who dispute this claim, and indeed some are among my own friends and family. They say that ’60s music just seems incomparable to me because I was a young man when I encountered it. If I keep going back to Leonard Cohen and The Doors even today, they say, it’s only because those melodies were seared into my neurons when I was youthful and impressionable.
It’s hard to prove, one way or the other. But my critics do have some psychological science on their side. My musical preferences could be part of what scientists call the “reminiscence bump” — a peak in personal memories, of all kinds, that consistently comes in late adolescence and early adulthood. That is, we all remember more detail, more clearly, from this stage of our development. Since music is so emotional and personal and memorable, doesn’t it make sense that it would peak the same way?
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