Elaine Mayes: Haight-Ashbury Portraits 1967-1968
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ต.ค. 2022
- Elaine Mayes was a young photographer living in San Francisco’s lively Haight-Ashbury District during the 1960s. She had photographed the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and, later that year, during the waning days of the Summer of Love, embarked on a set of portraits of youth culture in her neighborhood. By that time, the hippie movement had turned from euphoria to harder drugs, and the Haight had become less of a blissed-out haven for young people seeking a better way of life than a halfway house to runaway teens.
Mayes shifted from the photojournalistic approach she had applied to musicians and concert-goers in Monterey to making formal portraits of people she met on the street. Choosing casual and familiar settings, such as stoops, doorways, parks, and interiors, Mayes instructed her subjects to look into her square-format camera, to concentrate and be still: she made her exposures as they exhaled. Mayes’ familiarity with her subjects helped her to evade mediatized stereotypes of hippies as radically utopian and casually tragic, presenting instead an understated and unsentimental group portrait of the individual inventors of a fleeting cultural moment.
'Haight-Ashbury Portraits 1967-1968' is the first monograph on one of the decade’s most important bodies of work, presenting more than forty images from Mayes’ extensive series.
The book is available at www.damianibooks.com
Elaine, I married a man who was in love with you when I first met him in 1966--his name was Mark Ropers. He called you Pinky and he was still carrying a torch for you. We spent a lot of time at the Fillmore West. Lot of water under the bridge since then! All good wishes to you.
Hey there! I came across your comment and I just had to reach out and say hi. Your perspective really caught my attention and I would love to get to know you better. Would you be interested in chatting sometime? Looking forward to hearing back from you! 😊
@@franklinstephen3268 stop
I was a street person in Berkeley and San Francisco in the summer of '67. I was in college, but I hitched out there just to be part of it. Most of the time I slept outside, and was fed by various generous people. I never begged. It was an experiment--to see if I could live with no money. I could have called my parents, but I really was broke; I had no credit cards. By the end of the summer I realized that I was spending most of my time thinking about where I was going to get my next meal, so I went back to college. There was a whole network of street people; we told each other where there was food or a crash pad. I had no problems at all, and as I remember no one else did either. It was very peaceful, very little drama. Because I had no money I wasn't smoking pot, and I couldn't go to the concerts either. I went back about 30 years later, with a friend. I could point out all these outdoor spots near the Haight where I had slept, but it almost seemed like a previous incarnation. You wouldn't dream of doing that now.
Do you have lots of pics from then? This could be a great short film or doc. People are fascinated by this period in pop and social culture. Closest I got to experiencing hippy life was working Woodstock 94 for three days straight and sleeping under trailer trucks behind the food stands where I sold pizza to mollied out zombies. It was fun.
@@eddiegalon3714 I had no camera, just a very small backpack, a sleeping bag and a foam pad. Nowadays, I feel like I need a million things just to stay at a friend's place one state away.
Wonderful story ! THIS was the generation that LIVED ! 💙🌻🌻🌻🌻
And most of us are still alive
yes, by taking everything from next generations, by creating enormous debts.
They are human parasites.
Very interesting. I'm a genX-er, born in 1967 to a middle class family--not hippies--but when I was 20 I met and became very good friends with a 40-year-old ex-hippie, and we had great talks. I came away from that relationship understanding that the "Free Love" movement and the "Sexual Revolution" were not freeing for women so much as for men. Women still did all the "women's work," and, as Elaine points out here, were saddled with the responsibility for all that free love. I believe we are still dealing with the fallout from those times, and that feminism got hijacked in a big way by the so-called sexual revolution.
Hi Robin. Thanks for your curiosity and comment. I lived through those times and have a slightly different take on it. The 1960s were a fleeting moment of liberation for all young people, both guys and girls, from old cultural expectations for social roles and behavior. We all felt empowered to experiment with LIFE.
Almost all 'hippies' were, like you, from middle class families. It was exactly those middle-class expectations that were getting shattered, or at least tested. A huge amount of innocence and child-like belief in the goodness of people was involved. What should have been dangerous was in fact safe because the people drawn to the 1967 summer of love brought 1950s values of personal respect for others. As soon as people with less innocent motivations got drawn to the movement (as Elaine Mayes says, by press reports), it ended. Her realization came when her sleeping bag was stolen. The next year, it all came crashing down in a sea of drugs. By 1969 we had the Manson murders.
Although my Twitter profile says "Short-haired hippie grandpa", I am not. I'm actually from the earlier 'Beatnik' days (Jack Kerouac, On the Road). Memories of a slim, short-hair boy with an angelic voice (David Crosby, RIP) singing folk songs in 1959 at a new coffee house in Santa Barbara, the Somnambulist. Many of my friends did become hippies. I was a little old for that scene. In January 1967 I finally got out of college after a wild ride and wanted to move on to work.
Today many voices say that feminism got hijacked by the 'sexual revolution'. I'm not so sure. It was a time when many young women, often VERY young, felt empowered to experiment with life and art and friendships and sex in ways that had been forbidden for them. In ways that today ARE forbidden for them. The era produced a new world of strong, empowered women. By 1976 we had The Runaways, the all-girl band that San Francisco Chronicle writer Mick LaSalle says saved 1970s rock 'n' roll from commercialism through their brutally honest rebellious music. ("Down the street, I'm the girl next door. / I'm the fox you've been waiting for.") It was OK for girls who lived in the suburbs with two parents to be wild.
Yes, guys took advantage of many if not all of those women, including the Runaways. But I will tell you one truth. When they say The Summer of Love, it WAS love. Physical intimacy meant something. Young people had REAL relationships. Just listen to their music.
What do we have today? Hook-up culture. As early as middle school (I know, I have a 27 yo granddaughter), girls face pressure to steel themselves against feelings. Casual sex has replaced sex that means something. Society has so criminalized all relationships of young girls with older guys that they are effectively in social prisons much more draconian that those I grew up with in the 1950s (where, before the pill, sex in the eighth grade was a real thing). Today's feminists say they are protecting young girls. I see a society that is so terrified of sex for young people that it would rather put them in burqas and deny them discussions about healthy relationships. Perhaps the pill in middle school and open talk about boys' instincts would once again give young women the freedom that they enjoyed in the 1960s. It sure isn't here today.
@@slowtony2 I'm not sure how you interpreted my comment, but I am not talking about protecting young girls from having sex at an early age.
It would be great if girls got to develop on their own, without being shoved into a world of Disney princesses and Barbies and pornography. If they could be given the respect their young beings deserve and allowed to own their bodies instead of being groomed to compare themselves with the narrow band of acceptable femininity that the mainstream culture promotes.
I am a woman who is fairly normal looking, and most of my life I have felt that I am not deserving of sex and sexual pleasure because I do not measure up to the beauty standards of our culture. A lot went into that--being hounded by my older brother to play sex games when I was 13 years old, being bullied for years at school for having a flat chest, and yes, the incessant sexualization of women everywhere. It messes with the mind. It prevents normal development and perverts sexuality.
@@robincrowflies Robin, all I meant to do was to share my own positive experience from those years in a way that affirms women. Everything that you decry in your touching and honest response I also decry. Disney princesses, Barbies, Instagram face and body tunes, the ugliness of commercial porn -- all of it is commercial garbage.
I take great joy (and I hope you do too) in knowing that Rapunzel has saved herself. You are a striking and gentle woman who radiates personal warmth and class. In particular, your sense of style put together the perfect Carnaby Street vibe.
Not every man likes the big bosom big bottom thick lip caricature of a woman that seems to have become today's 'beauty' standard. First, that image is decidedly lower class. Second, if I Iike the woman inside, I like the body she comes in. Sometimes I think women put these burdens on each other. Certainly, young women today need to be saved from that pressure. Please take the opinion of an 80-year-old guy that when you next walk out your door, you can expect that all the RIGHT guys will be putty in your hands. You have the power to be as alluring or wild or mesmerizing as you choose to be.
I'm a total liberal, but I think your spot on. There were many negatives about the late sixties scene that were very detrimental to many many young people of that period, but that's probably true of many periods of excelerated social change which the late sixties were...kinda like what's happening now with all the social media "freedoms".
@@slowtony2 Thank you so much. I honestly was afraid to read this until now, but I'm so glad I did.
We all saw today back then, but we never imagined we live the here and now.
Thanks, Elaine!
Elaine, I have your book and it helped me immensely when I wrote/performed my solo show on Abigail Folger called Heiress,'69 😍
A very interesting story you weave. I didn't live in the Haight but did stay with a friend at USF over Christmas break, 1966. One afternoon we walked from Univ of San Francisco, crossed Golden Gate Park, and wandered the Haight. He alerted me to the people in the area, men had long hair and facial hair, but an atmosphere that was non-threatening. At that time, I only knew of men who dressed like the Beach Boys. I recall two observances: I stopped before a poster shop and wondered how such a store could sell enough posters to stay in business, no one I knew had posters; and, went into a record shop, where there were no windows and no lighting but a bare single red bulb above the entrance. The front counter personnel gave one a candle to use as illumination as you wandered the aisles looking for a record album. At that time, you could request a song or album to be played to aid in making your selection. People were sitting along the interior front wall, listening to the music being played, during my visit that music was the Rolling Stones. In 1971 I wanted to show my wife the Haight, but, of course, time had changed the area and the atmosphere. We saw bumper to bumper cars, and in the street, people selling the Berkeley Barb. Not the same quiet place I remembered.
I remember the Berkeley Barb and Country Joe and PEOPLES Park and Mario Savio. Free Speach Movement. Lol. Stokely Carmichael. Those were the days.
Does anyone remember The Red Vic (Victorian) Inn?? That was a happening place at that time from what I have heard..The Dead played in the lobby, and lots of musicians lived there in the upstairs rooms. It became a bed and breakfast where we stayed about 15 or so years ago. At 1665 Haight St. So much history there! ❤
saw many movies at the Red Vic -- good times!
I grew up on Stanyan and wandered Haight St in '67 - 7 years old at the time. I remember you had to walk in the street because the sidewalks were packed with people.
We moved from Stanyon in 1967. I was 5 at the time. It was crazy by then. I remember a lot of Hells Angels by then too. The relaxed feeling of the neighborhhod was gone. We had a school with a playground right across the street.
in early 1967 i found myself in a mexican drunk tank in which there were about 5 young american guys one of whom had a recent copy of life magazine which brought to my attention the haight ashbury phenomenon along with it's heavy psychedelic music scene so after my release from jail and deportation from mexico i thumbed my way up the coast where my last ride dropped me off at the blue house on oak street home of the budding band named mount rushmore and need i say one thing led to another...56 years later i'm still a hippy.
Great interview!
Loved this! Thank you❤
Thanks so much for sharing this video! I definitely want to check out more of her work!
Very cool, awesome interview
At 13, my mother flew me from Portland to visit my older hippie brother in '67. He lived in Bolinas, but we spent an afternoon driving around Haight on his Cushman.
I lived in Bolinas for a few years in the 80s. A lot of the former Haight actors were there at that time, but most were very tired out.
In the late 60's we would race to San Fran in groups of 2 from near Seattle. Slept in Golden Gate Park. Woke up one morning and they were setting up a free concert around me. Can't remember the band (memory is fading). The Hippies from around the Russian River eventually migrated to Oregon and Washington. The weed and the LSD were pure and strong. Everyone was your brother. The deli's were heaven!
the dells were good too
great memories and reminders! i remember the cobbled together outfits. bohemians. so much fun.
Couldn't help but look for me and my friends. Not there, but nice memory.
I opened a leather shop in 1968, on the 1500 block, called Last Homely House
James Jacobs would have been your competitor. He was there. He left after the riots.
Also: The Legal Front, buys from the East Village
Wow! Such a great interview! And the Gibbie Folger story? The hair on my arms stood up! I never knew she dated Jim Marshall ?! Cool stories…thx for sharing :)
Portraits in Breath, what a concept.
I wish more of this era ‘67 to ‘69 was photographed.
Oh wow. She was friends with Abigale Folger...heiress to the Folger's coffee estate and victim of the Manson family in the Tate/La Bianca murders.
I figured she'd mention that when she talked about the scene turning from good to bad
Oooh, I knew I'd heard that name and it was the coffee family. I was 19 when the Tate -La Bianca murders happened. It stopped everybody in their tracks.
The middle class experience. It was much broader, deeper. Still here 56 years, a poor street kid who made her way, and found community.
PS Working class of all races.
Great photos!! It was an interesting period in American social history. The scene had some very positive attributes as well as a dark underbelly. As a teenager I visited friends and relatives in SF and surrounding areas frequently during this time period and got a small taste of the hippie culture, and I was a big fan of some of the bands. However I was not fully immersed in the scene and never lived on the street. Frank Zappa wrote a funny satirical song about the scene called "Who Needs the Peace Corps" on the 1968 album "We're Only in it for the Money" by the Mothers of Invention. The lyrics from the uncensored version are posted below but I suggest hearing the actual song for full the effect.
"What's there to live for?
Who needs the Peace Corps?
Think I'll just drop out
I'll go to Frisco
Buy a wig and sleep on Owsley's floor
[Verse 2]
Walked past the wig store
Danced at the Fillmore
I'm completely stoned
I'm hippy and I'm trippy
I'm a gypsy on my own
I'll stay a week & get the crabs & take a bus back home
I'm really just a phony
But forgive me 'cause I'm stoned
[Chorus]
Every town must have a place
Where phony hippies meet
Psychedelic dungeons
Popping up on every street
Go to San Francisco
[Bridge]
How I love ya, how I love ya
How I love ya, how I love ya Frisco
How I love ya, how I love ya
How I love ya, how I love ya
Oh, my hair is getting good in the back
[Chorus]
Every town must have a place
Where phony hippies meet
Psychedelic dungeons
Popping up on every street
Go to San Francisco,
[Interlude]
First I'll buy some beads
And then perhaps a leather band to go around my head
Some feathers and bells
And a book of Indian lore
I will ask the Chamber Of Commerce
How to get to Haight Street
And smoke an awful lot of dope
I will wander around barefoot
I will have a psychedelic gleam in my eye at all times
I will love everyone
I will love the police as they kick the sh!t out of me on the street
I will sleep
I will, I will go to a house
That's, that's what I will do
I will go to a house
Where there's a rock and roll band
'Cause the groups all live together
And I will join a rock & roll band
I will be their road manager
And I will stay there with them
And I will get the crabs
But I won't care"
Iconic times. I caught the tail end of it about 10 yrs. later. There were still a few vestiges. It was a cultural revolution.
A very interesting person. I would love to spend some time talking and reminiscing with her about those days.
Sounds like she started her project after the "good year" ('66) and was just in time to honestly document the craziness the Haight became in '67-'69. My apology to her if that's not accurate.
Such a mixture (her commentary) of good and bad: she went to Monterey Festival in June '67 and even sat close in the press pit to get those great photos ... but if I heard right, she went with Abigail (Gibby) Folger, who if it's the same person, was butchered 2 years later on Cielo drive in Aug. '69 with Sharon Tate.
At any rate, I really enjoyed the interview, and I think she would be a great person to know and talk to, at least for me, as I was a musician at that time.
Thanks for the post and all the best to you, Elaine Mayes. I'm gonna' buy your book.
The scene down there affected this kid from Montana in a deep way. That cultural change swept the entire world, LSD might have had something to do with it. 😁
i remember the (grand piano) a little later in the 70" Elaine do you remenber ?
My older sister worked for a senator in Sacramento. The aides did things like pick up the senator's clothes at the cleaners and get their cars washed, etc. They weren't any part of politics. I almost become one, myself.
There was a photographer named Roland somebody who worked for Life magazine I believe, and he took a number of pictures that would be I think complimentary to her pictures;
Amazing that she clued into the breath ..in and out… that’s what we gave to the rest ..in and out…just breath baby breath …
It's amazing what can happen when you socially engineer a huge cultural time period.
dave mcgowan writes beautifully about this manufactured freee love era.
yup...it is understandably tough for these rose colored glasses wearers to fathom, but yes the CIA and military intelligence and the Tavistock Institute did a masterful job of destroying the underpinnings of Western civilization. Absolutely amazing...
My hero!
that Abigail Folger….?
Holy Smoke - I think it was "that Abigal Folger" Folger's Coffee was in SF and she was a heiress.
The one murdered at Terry Melcher’s former home on Cielo Dr. in LA.
Man. I live around the corner from the Haight and I wouldn't walk around with a camera now, it would be gone in a minute.
Does anyone know if the Greatful Dead house was opened up to hippies after they moved out? I spent the night in a house in Haight Ashbury and one of the guys told the house was either still owned or was owned by the Greatful Dead. That was in 1973. The house had no furniture except maybe a couple chairs. It was too long ago to remember exactly where the house was but I've seen recent pictures of the GD house and it looks like theirs but then almost all the houses around there look similar.
Backpacked to Frisco from Vegas ‘73 waited and got ripped off for pot on Height in a large home that seemed abandoned. Your comment jogged the memory ps. Trippy to think “Summer Of Love” will always be in history books
The Grateful Dead house was at 710 Ashbury Street if that helps ?
@@stevenhanson6057 Yes.. the house that I stayed was abandoned too. Just some hippies hanging around at the time. Might be the same house we're talking about.
@@stevenhanson6057 After 67 the scene on the Haight became increasingly ugly.
I lived in an apartment on the corner of Frederick and Ashbury in 1967.
no picture of her younger ?
th-cam.com/video/XuP0Bga6uaw/w-d-xo.html @2:15
Elaine your photo of Sweet Pam and commune is utterly beautiful !
PORTRAIT OF YOUTH (C)2006
PORTRAIT OF YOUTH REMASTERED ❤
H/A was a RUssian neighborhood prior to the Hippies!
Wow Abigail Folgers
I read about her , she seemed a very kind soul.
So sad how those young people lost their lives to Manson's evil cult.
So much hate and fear in the comments.
The antithesis of what that era represented.
I wonder what the old hippies think about San Francisco, now.
Was it one of Beetles or Stones who upon seeing the Haight hated it saying it was filled with lots of teen homeless runaways and drugs addicts
George Harrison pronounced it no longer cool.
Beetles???????
Cute Woman,.
The woman on the bottom left of the five people and carbon stairs is beautiful. She also seems to be “separate” from the rest of the group.
Could be Bob Browns group.
We don't agree to having adoption groups.
The Haight was a cool little scene until the summer of 67 when swarms of kids came from all over and ruined it. It's true, the press and Scott McKenzie's corny song was responsible.
Not entirely true. The thing was doomed from the start. Anyone with a brain should be able to have seen that. I knew the woman, the wife of Michael Bowen who did the story for Life Magazine about an acid trip. Ken Kesey is also responsible for attracting all the youth, as was Ginsburg and the rest. They wanted young bodies to ravage. The Beatniks at North Beach liked the young kids that came around earlier and named them "hippies." They tolerated them because a lot of them were cute young women. You can read that exact statement in Charles Perry's "The Haight-Ashbury - A History. But certainly, Beats and some of those hippies could be a special sort of snob. This is where the hipster snobbery came from.
Yes, my mother moved out there from Iowa in 61. She had me in 62. We moved away in 1967 when it got ugly. But. Even as a child I remember the feeling changing in that summer. My brother and I woke up one night on Stanyon street and thought we were all alone. My mother worked nights. It must have beed 1966 and our older brother was there but we didn't see him. We went down on our stoop as it was just getting to be dawn and were crying. A man came along and took us up to our room, read us stories after checking and showing us our older brother was indeed there, and tucked us back in bed! After 67 that was no longer possible.
Joni Mitchell said "We couldn't change the world................we couldn't even change ourselves." Lot's of caveman/woman baggage in our genome.
The entire 60s counterculture was socially engineered. Actually everything after WW2 in particular, when the tribe won the war they started and took control of the world more or less.
Great comment.
@@clovergrass9439YES!
@@clovergrass9439 So that is where you're coming from? What a piece of work your mind must be. The guy who invented LSD by accident wasn't Jewish, Timothy Leary wasn't Jewish, Captain Hubbard who spread LSD initially among the elite wasn't Jewish, Ken Kesey wasn't Jewish, Jack Kerouac wasn't Jewish, the majority of the CIA was Christians, the only Jews involved professors from Germany, Neo-Marxist, Frankfurt School people like Herbert Marcuse. He was born in 1898 and wasn't interested in LSD or partying. Some of the Chicago radicals were Jews, but they were not hippies. But why bother telling you anything? Charles Manson wasn't Jewish. You sound a bit like him.
Did you know my father Thomas Weir?
Mary P how cool was your comment .anyways i lived at 435 Ashbury St my sister had 1st flr old Victorian HUGE by my ubringing ( which was Aces) room after room fireplaces Record Records everywhere! Yeah i was at an Oakland Dead New Years run..awful experience.everything not on me stolen..friggin bad vibes just driving by before we parked . One group of nice people Cambodian gang bangers i surmised .wonderful marijuana.. also earthmanas giving out sugar cubes out of a cigar boxes ..many of themthis was 1980 so shit really hadnt come yet full bore..yeah haight was cool if the sun and wind were just right ..weird my chemical intake slowed down because u looked at transactions as spiritual..no really ..all good vibes and inquisition and LAUGHTER ..no the haight ..golden gate oark the panhandle were all dark and negative.5he photographer who was there 15 years before me though i did live with brother in Mill Valley..her photo of Rick Griffin was beautifull..i to have a connection to Jim Harrison the great jazz photographer..we helped out at a gallery which featured his great book around 86 i think ..big tadoo..i just love coming across beautiful talented warm human beings
Sorry ..James Marshall..i just rewound it and heard his name .talking ofgood vibes
Marone, what a scene,, and it still haunts us today. Visited by accident in the 1980s, and it seemed so tawdry and sad, but then it always was. The 60''s gestalt was just another social engineering con job. She says as much in this interview
She doesn't reveal much really, just her own limited point of view. It's really creepy to see someone your age dismiss a huge and consequential piece of social history. You can look down at anything if you want. But your generation has given us the present, which is far more of that and beyond. There was a sincere effort in the core of it, but there were too many leeches and users. I just have to wonder what type you would have been, or actually are now?
@@deaddocreallydeaddoc5244He is accurate and didnt dismiss anything. Individuals were sincrere but it was a created event overall.
It was socially engineered. Ed Bernays and his highly succesful social experiments showed so much potential.
@@clovergrass9439 No it was NOT. It was the result of a number of separate forces, cultural situations and visions, and events, along with some political inputs. For example, the CIA did begin to experiment with the effects of LSD in 1942 as the OSS as a possible interrogation tool, but soon found it useless for that. However, it survived because of the efforts of one man, a military officer named Captain Alfred Hubbard, who believed LSD could be used to affect the world's leadership positively. He kept LSD in the CIA program MK-ULTRA although many were against the idea. He actually traveled around introducing a surprising number of world leaders and others he considered important. But LSD was still legal and so Hollywood celebrities and other famous people got in on it. Meanwhile, the U.S. had a subculture of utopian communes since the early 19th century. Some were religious and some were socialist of some variety. All of them failed. But they influenced new ideas and groups. One of the 19th-century organizations of consequence was the Theosophical Society. They dealt with psychical spiritual ideas. One of their big influences was Madame Blavatsky, who has a bit separate history. This and other groups like it created the Spiritualism movement that influenced the culture of the Hippies a great deal. Meanwhile, others were becoming interested in LSD. MK-ULTRA became involved and ran a number of experiments that you could call social experiments because they were finite and planned and documented. They had a number of locations in cities where for example, they hired prostitutes to pick up a guy, take him to a room, and dose him. There was an agent observing through a two-way mirror. He would film and otherwise document the event. Other far worse things were also done but as actual experiments. The attitude, however, was that LSD was not to be allowed into the general population because they understood its dangers. Ken Kesey was a an aspiring writer from Oregon who was studying at Stanford University and got a job at a local Army hospital. He saw individuals dosed with LSD there. He began to steal doses and experiment. He decided that everyone should have access, not just a select elite. Meanwhile, Leary and Alpert were knowingly taking part in CIA-supported LSD research, but they went too far and were fired. Then, we have Beatniks who were on an entirely other track. They tended to believe that the system sucked and they would not take part. They preferred to live on the periphery and scorn others who took part in mainstream society. They liked jazz, alcohol, and amphetamines. as a rule. Jack Kerouac was one of the three "main" Beats, the other two being Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Borrough's "Naked Lunch"" is a summation of the Beat vision along with Kerouacs's "On the Road." The Beats migrated to SF's North Beach area because of cheap rents and SF's Laissez Faire attitude toward them. The Beats loved the message of the Neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse's "Eros and Civilization," because it was a justification for having sex with anyone and everyone as a revolutionary statement. They welcomed younger people because it brought young women to them. They looked down on them, however, as junior hipsters, who didn't really "get it" calling them "hippies." LSD was legal and once it became clear that it was being used en masse, the government, led by the CIA made it illegal and a felony to possess. So any claim that the Haight waa social experiment has no basis for the claim. it was a combination of many things as I wrote at the opening of this little essay. There is lot more to it, but these are the basics. The KGB, for example, loved it as they saw it as a great chance to encourage the demoralization of America (and the West) and it worked. (See - Yuri Bezmenov)
@@clovergrass9439 No it was NOT. It was the result of a number of separate forces, cultural situations and visions, and events, along with some political inputs. For example, the CIA did begin to experiment with the effects of LSD in 1942 as the OSS as a possible interrogation tool, but soon found it useless for that. However, it survived because of the efforts of one man, a military officer named Captain Alfred Hubbard, who believed LSD could be used to affect the world's leadership positively. He kept LSD in the CIA program MK-ULTRA although many were against the idea. He actually traveled around introducing a surprising number of world leaders and others he considered important. But LSD was still legal and so Hollywood celebrities and other famous people got in on it. Meanwhile, the U.S. had a subculture of utopian communes since the early 19th century. Some were religious and some were socialist of some variety. All of them failed. But they influenced new ideas and groups. One of the 19th-century organizations of consequence was the Theosophical Society. They dealt with psychical spiritual ideas. One of their big influences was Madame Blavatsky, who has a bit separate history. This and other groups like it created the Spiritualism movement that influenced the culture of the Hippies a great deal. Meanwhile, others were becoming interested in LSD. MK-ULTRA became involved and ran a number of experiments that you could call social experiments because they were finite and planned and documented. They had a number of locations in cities where for example, they hired prostitutes to pick up a guy, take him to a room, and dose him. There was an agent observing through a two-way mirror. He would film and otherwise document the event. Other far worse things were also done but as actual experiments. The attitude, however, was that LSD was not to be allowed into the general population because they understood its dangers. Ken Kesey was a an aspiring writer from Oregon who was studying at Stanford University and got a job at a local Army hospital. He saw individuals dosed with LSD there. He began to steal doses and experiment. He decided that everyone should have access, not just a select elite. Meanwhile, Leary and Alpert were knowingly taking part in CIA-supported LSD research, but they went too far and were fired. Then, we have Beatniks who were on an entirely other track. They tended to believe that the system sucked and they would not take part. They preferred to live on the periphery and scorn others who took part in mainstream society. They liked jazz, alcohol, and amphetamines. as a rule. Jack Kerouac was one of the three "main" Beats, the other two being Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Borrough's "Naked Lunch"" is a summation of the Beat vision along with Kerouacs's "On the Road." The Beats migrated to SF's North Beach area because of cheap rents and SF's Laissez Faire attitude toward them. The Beats loved the message of the Neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse's "Eros and Civilization," because it was a justification for having sex with anyone and everyone as a revolutionary statement. They welcomed younger people because it brought young women to them. They looked down on them, however, as junior hipsters, who didn't really "get it" calling them "hippies." LSD was legal and once it became clear that it was being used en masse, the government, led by the CIA made it illegal and a felony to possess. So any claim that the Haight waa social experiment has no basis for the claim. it was a combination of many things as I wrote at the opening of this little essay. There is lot more to it, but these are the basics. The KGB, for example, loved it as they saw it as a great chance to encourage the demoralization of America (and the West) and it worked. (See - Yuri Bezmenov)
'NO Insy-Outsy!'--Bill Graham's posted notice ..
She's right . haight Asbury
was a subjective thing more than anything else . sure there were lots of unusual behavior and creative outfits being worn but ultimately it was a shared experience brought on by acid and other psychedelics . i didn't try to change the world by activism or politics , demonstrating etc because i saw it as too big and powerful and dangerous . i became a teacher of meditation and helped people one person at a time to realize who and what they really are as that which is awake to itself . when that becomes one's new identity it doesn't matter what you 'do' , it only matters that you act naturally and this ageless state of consciousness that is always here in fullness will spill out onto someone that brushes up against you .
MY FRIEND RICK GRIFFIN
No such thing as a
"Press pass".
Company identification
🤺💐
8:55 He must have been a real nice guy to go out and pick up girls, and give them ACID then bring them back to his room. What a bastard you had for a friend!
That was common. Remember, this was the sexual revolution and the feminist revolution and the drug and rock and roll revolution.
When I was in my early 20's living in Santa Clara we went up to The Haight once in a while just to watch the Circus.
@@laurelaltman6138 Sure all that was common to stoners, but if you think it did the world any good, sorry.
No I didn't mean that at all. Just responding to another comment from someone who didn't live in that era. Those cultural movements were the death knell of western culture and we are reaping the results.
Elaine I lived on Market in Van Ness in 1969 Never went to the Haight I'm 7 minutes into your almost 12 minute video and I'm still waiting for the punchline because I don't get what you're trying to say about the hate and what was real and what was not of what the media was trying to portray and what it is you're trying to portray I hope by the time I get 11 minutes I'm going to have my aw-ha moment ... Because so far I'm not getting it and I'm going to take a shot that this video started as if somebody cut in on the middle of this interview and that's how this begins or this is like an inside joke or conversation that unless you're from the in crowd you're not going to get it and so far I don't I hope I'm wrong by the time I come to the end of this 11 minute and 47 second video!
2:26 Abigail Folger. Two years later she was butchered by the Manson family.
Let me speak to bret weir. Is he in? GET BRET WEIR I SAID!
yeah i'm the super from across the way!!!
Guy with hair blowing holding book is lopsided. Not only is he lopsided which is ok, but the entire thing is lopsided in the opposite direction. I've always seen “photographers” speak badly about amateur work like this, “Poor devil can't even frame the subject properly.”
I suppose it is nice having modern tools where one can simply rotate a picture to make it straight.
many Haight Ashbury girls used to hoe themselves at the Bohemian Grove when leaders and partiers were in town. It wasnt just the local Monte Rio "ladies" if you can call them that.
This girl was obviously never a Head. She didnt belong there
Loved her sympathy towards the single mamas! Natural female biology didn't benefit from all that free love crap! At birth, O brothers, where were you??
And now? No doubt most all persons featured in these photos are 21st century Cultural Marxist Democrats and Joe Biden voters. Just say'n...
Just saying what? I assure you the world is a much better place because of “PEACE AND LOVE”. That’s what Jesus would SAY!
Yep, the most violent and hateful promoters of peace and love that have ever been...
@@joejones9520 Creepy Biden and his followers are about as much "hippie" as Manson was!
What's with the political shit? This is an interesting interview with a woman who photographed and captured a segment of culture in 1960's America. Not much different than music
Your comment says more about you than the subject at hand.