Dating for hippies

Meet Free-Spirited Singles at Dating for Hippies

Despite what mainstream America might think and say, the hippie counterculture is still very much alive and well in the U. S. and around the world. Nowadays, not all hippies wear tie dye shirts and Birkenstocks, but you can bet that they ARE still bemoaning big government, expanding their minds, and raising hell peacefully whenever and wherever it's needed. And, like just about everyone else in the world, they're also looking for love. Lucky for them, and ergo you, Dating for Hippies is here to help make that task a little easier than it should be.

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It's easy and free to become a member. Simply sign up and create your personal profile. Before you know it, you'll be connecting with like-minded hippies who live and love peacefully. Find someone who lives near you and make plans to get together at the local coffee shop or co-op. We'll help you connect with locals (as well as those farther away) who enjoy expanding their minds by reading about and practicing various philosophies and religions, using drugs not just to get high but as a means to expand their minds, fighting to change what they feel is wrong, and spreading the belief that peace and love can still conquer all. Don't let them go it alone; join them today at Dating for Hippies and keep on practicing what you preach.

Disclaimer: 100% Free basic membership allows you to browse the site, view profiles, send flirts and modify your profile. Charges will accrue if you purchase a premium membership which is offered upon completion of your profile. This site is billed by 24-7help. net 800-425-9886

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hippie

hippie , also spelled hippy. member, during the 1960s and 1970s, of a countercultural movement that rejected the mores of mainstream American life. The movement originated on college campuses in the United States, although it spread to other countries, including Canada and Britain. The name derived from “hip,” a term applied to the Beats of the 1950s, such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who were generally considered to be the precursors of hippies. Although the movement arose in part as opposition to U. S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1955–75), hippies were often not directly engaged in politics, as opposed to their activist counterparts known as “Yippies” (Youth International Party).

5 Facts About Woodstock The Hippies Don't Want You to Know

By Kristi Harrison September 13, 2009 3,951,345 Views

Forty years ago, half a million people gathered for three days of peace, love and letting their private parts flap all over the hashish-covered mud at a place called Woodstock.

This event exists as mythology for most of our readers, who only know it from a series of photographs and wistful documentaries. So let's take a moment to set a few things straight.

#5. Woodstock Was Conceived as a Hippie-Exploiting Cash Grab

If there's one thing hippies hate, it's war. If there are two things hippies hate, they are war and doing things for profit. If we move the discussion up to three things, they would be war, money and 1980s Latin sensations Menudo, but we don't have time to get into that.

If only there was time.

Knowing that money and the pursuit of it is flower child kryptonite, you may be shocked to learn that the concert that defined the 60s owed its origins to some squares looking to make a buck. And not a buck for Tibet, either. In March of 1968, drugstore heir, John Roberts, and Yale Law grad, Joel Rosenman, placed the following ad in the non-hippiest publications of all time: the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times :

Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions.

Since this was before the internet was invented, nobody read the ad with a heavy emphasis on the words "men," "interesting" and "propositions" saving the men from the sort of gay escort service spam that will likely flood the comment section of this article. Instead, Roberts and Rosenman were contacted by Capitol Records exec, Artie Kornfeld, and hippie concert promoter, Michael Lang, with the idea of a starting a music studio in Woodstock, New York. When that idea didn't pan out, the suits struck gold with the notion of a three day art and music festival. Pre-sold tickets would go for $18 (that's $105 in today's money, folks) and latecomers would have to shell out $24 at the gate.

Actual photo of the first planning session.

Despite how that plan eventually worked out (hint: it didn't) the original goal was to make a gigantic buttload of cash off of young, middle-class music lovers. Forming the company Woodstock Ventures, the four got to work at putting together a line-up that would draw enough human cattle to make the men a tidy profit.

They thought they could get 250,000 hippies to show up. At the equivalent of a hundred bucks a ticket, it made for an interesting business opportunity that even a non-man-pimp had to waggle his eyebrows at.

#4. The Promoters Lied to Make it Happen

Once the three squares and a little hippie agreed that a three day music fest was the way to get paid, the hunt was on to find a suitable locale. But there was a problem: No one wanted thousands of unwashed, doped up counter-culture ruffians on their property.

Gross.

So the fat cats started making promises. Wacky promises, like that "there would only be 50,000 concert goers" and "they totally knew what they were doing."

In the spring of 1969, Woodstock Ventures leased Mills Industrial Park in Wallkill, New York as the proposed site for the festival. Upon realizing that a place named "Wallkill" was better suited for a three day death metal concert, the people of the town up and passed a "no hippie concerts here" law exactly one month before the festival was supposed to take place.

The official reason for the ban was that town officials had a stinking suspicion that Lang and company hadn't planned their porta-potties properly for the prospective 50,000 people. Undaunted, the fab four kept looking. They were approached by Elliott Tiber from Bethel, New York with the offer of using his 15 acres for the concert. "Too small," they said. So Mr. Tiber put them in touch with one Max Yasgur, a dairy farmer with 600 acres in Bethel. Yasgur agreed to meet with the promoters with the understanding he would be leasing his land for $75,000, once more, for an audience of about 50,000 .

That 50,000 number is important. For one, over 150,000 tickets had sold by this point. For two, the promoters had run radio and newspaper ads across the country inviting people to their little hootenanny. They actually expected 250,000 to show up. For three, 250,000 times two came.

#3. Woodstock's Performers Were ALL About the Benjamins

But just because it was a bunch of money-grubbing promoters behind the scenes, doesn't change the fact that it was all about changing the world with music, man! After all, guys like the Grateful Dead and Hendrix weren't up there to get paid! Well, now that you mention it.

Several acts, THE WHOse names we won't mention (until a few paragraphs down) refused to take the stage without seeing a flatbed full of cash first.

Woodstock promoters had scrambled to sign big acts through the spring of 1969. Without big names in the line-up, other big names wouldn't bother signing on. They were in a musical pickle, which could also be called a melodious catch-22. Or maybe a harmonic bind. We could do this all day.

This is also a musical pickle.

Their first big break came when Creedence Clearwater Revival signed on for a whopping $10,000 or $11,500, depending on who you ask, in April of 1969. With a total talent budget of $180,000, Michael Lang set a cap of $15,000 for each performer, big or small. This was fine for the likes of Richie Havens, Joan Baez and Janis Freakin' Joplin. Not for Jimi Hendrix, though.

Hendrix wasn't going for that lowball malarkey after scoring $150,000 for a single concert earlier in the summer. Lang ultimately signed Jimi with the promise of a $26,000 payday, twice what any other act was getting. But when the other money-grubbers (Jefferson Airplane) complained, Lang explained that Jimi was actually doing two sets during the festival (SPOILER ALERT: He wasn't. Hendrix's contract stipulated that he closed every show he performed at. Ever.).

And all those lyrics about peace, love and free nachos for all? BALDERDASH. The three biggest acts of the second night (Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead and The Who) informed Lang and co. at the 11th hour that performing wasn't in the cards until bitches got paid. The Grateful Dead. Seriously. These Pigpen looking, peace spouting, commune dwelling, anti-capitalists wouldn't touch their instruments until cash was in hand:

Mo' Money, mo' problems.

And remember, there were 500,000 hungry, sweaty, dehydrated, mud-caked would-be rioters in the audience. Not keeping the music going could have induced a Lord of the Flies breakdown in civilization out there. So Woodstock Ventures emptied their pockets and discovered their pooled resources amounted to $1.25, three LSD tabs, an orange rind and Grace Slick's fake phone number.

The panicky promoters begged a local banker to put up the money, based on the fact that Richie Rich Roberts had a $1,000,000 trust fund he could use as collateral. Mr. Banker said, "Cool," and proceeded to get in his car and drive to the bank, which would have been hella easy since this is what the roads looked like up to 10 miles away from the concert:

Yet somehow, he did. Mr. Banker made it to the bank, counted cash on hand, kindly accepted Robert's personal check for "50 or 100 thousand dollars." Only that kept the "three days of peace, love and music" from grinding to a silent halt as the bands went on strike, mid-concert.

The novels of Richard Brautigan are being republished for a new generation. Jarvis Cocker explains why he's such a big fan

Whenever I'm in a bookshop, I go to the "B" section and compulsively scan the shelves murmuring "Bradbury… Bronte… Burroughs…' I am, of course, looking for the name Richard Brautigan. I seldom find it. It's a nervous habit that dates back to the time when all his writing was out of print and the only places to find his novels and poetry were second-hand booksellers and charity shops. A battered Picador edition of one of his works was a real find and a cause for celebration in the shared house I was living in at the time. My friend Steve had brought a Brautigan book home and started the fixation. It was The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 and we all waited patiently for our turn to read it. After that we were hooked.

I had heard of Brautigan before but had him filed under "hippy writer" in my long list of unfounded prejudices. The blurbs on the book jackets didn't help: the one for The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (my second Brautigan, a hardback, ex-library copy discovered at a jumble sale in Camberwell) reads "Magic Child, a15-year-old Indian girl, wanders into the wrong whorehouse looking for the right men to kill the monster that lives in the ice caves under the basement of Miss Hawkline's yellow house."

It sounded wacky, zany – something that dope-smoking students would be into, OK for the Sixties when everyone was high but unacceptable in the grim Eighties of Thatcher's Britain. I was very wrong. The beauty of Brautigan's writing is its dryness – the way absurd or fantastical events are described in a completely deadpan manner. The subject matter might be a little unusual but it is always presented precisely and economically. He's the Sixties' Hemingway.

The day Sombrero Fallout entered my life still shines in my memory. I found it along with a copy of Dreaming of Babylon in a Sue Ryder shop just off Sloane Square – halcyon days. We were now in the early Nineties. I had found out a little more about Brautigan in the interim: that his star had waned in the Seventies and that he'd ended up killing himself in 1984 when no one was buying his books any more. Sombrero Fallout was from his "later period" – when things were starting to get a bit chilly. You can sense that from the book: a writer is trying to get a story started but becomes obsessed with searching his apartment for one of his Japanese ex-lover's hairs instead. The aborted story is thrown in the bin, where it writes itself while the writer works himself up into a jealous rage over whom his ex-girlfriend might be sleeping with. The bits we have been shown read like self-parody, but left to its own devices the abandoned story develops into an action-packed blockbuster. "Look," Brautigan seems to be saying, "the writing gets on better without my interference."

Meanwhile, the imagination that seems to have deserted him – as far as his writing is concerned – proceeds to torture him with images of his ex-lover's supposed infidelities. (She is, in fact, sleeping alone at home with her cat.) Sombrero Fallout is about an imagination in crisis. It is a "what am I doing with my life?" book. It is full of doubt and self-loathing – and it is also incredibly funny. Yes, I am talking about that dread phrase laugh-out-loud funny. Brautigan describes himself as a "humorist without a sense of humour" but somehow the fact that he's not laughing at his own jokes just makes them funnier for us. I don't want to spoil your impending enjoyment by quoting examples but look out for the stuff about the ghost – it's a killer.

When I was invited on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in 2005, I chose Sombrero Fallout as the only book I was allowed to take along with me (the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare are provided as standard). A 187-page novel with very short chapters and lots of blank spaces, which can be read in a single sitting, may seem a strange choice, but I would probably stick with my decision if asked again today. It is Brautigan's best book – precisely because of the way it allows glimpses of the writer in all his doubt and anxiety and then mixes them with moments of high comedy. It is simultaneously his silliest and most profound piece of work.

I imagine that the worst thing about being on a desert island is thinking about everything you're missing out on, the whole world continuing without you. Sombrero Fallout – a treatise on the pitfalls of the imagination, on the ridiculous situations you can sometimes think yourself into – might be a very useful antidote to have around in your hour of need. To remind you that it's all in your head: the good and the bad. And, most of all, to remind you to laugh.

'Sombrero Fallout', 'Trout Fishing in America', 'A Confederate of General Sur' and 'Revenge of the Lawn' by Richard Brautigan with introductions by Jarvis Cocker, Neil Gaiman, Frank Black and Sarah Hall are published by Canongate tomorrow

Vanished! Unexplained Disappearances

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In 1975, a man named Jackson Wright was driving with his wife from New Jersey to New York City. This required them to travel through the Lincoln Tunnel. According to Wright, who was driving, once through the tunnel he pulled the car over to wipe the windshield of condensation. His wife Martha volunteered to clean off the back window so they could more readily resume their trip. When Wright turned around, his wife was gone. He neither heard nor saw anything unusual take place, and a subsequent investigation could find no evidence of foul play. Martha Wright had just disappeared.

THE MYSTERIOUS CLOUD

Three soldiers claimed to be witnesses to the bizarre disappearance of an entire battalion in 1915. They finally came forward with the strange story 50 years after the infamous Gallipoli campaign of WWI. The three members of a New Zealand field company said they watched from a clear vantage point as a battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment marched up a hillside in Suvla Bay, Turkey. The hill was shrouded in a low-lying cloud that the English soldiers marched straight into without hesitation.

They never came out. After the last of the battalion had entered the cloud. it slowly lifted off the hillside to join other clouds in the sky. When the war was over, figuring the battalion had been captured and held prisoner, the British government demanded that Turkey return them. The Turks insisted, however, that it had neither captured not made contact with these English soldiers.

THE STONEHENGE DISAPPEARANCES

The mysterious standing stones of Stonehenge in England was the site of an amazing disappearance in August, 1971. At this time Stonehenge was not yet protected from the public, and on this particular night, a group of "hippies" decided to pitch tents in the center of the circle and spend the night. They built a campfire, lit several joints of pot and sat around smoking and signing. Their campout was abruptly interrupted at about 2 a. m. by a severe thunder storm that quickly blew in over Salisbury Plain.

Bright bolts of lightning crashed down on the area, striking area trees and even the standing stones themselves. Two witnesses, a farmer and a policeman, said that the stones of the ancient monument lit up with an eerie blue light that was so intense that they had to avert their eyes. They heard screams from the campers and the two witnesses rushed to the scene expecting to find injured -- or even dead -- campers. To their surprise, they found no one. All that remained within the circle of stones were several smoldering tent pegs and the drowned remains of a campfire. The hippies themselves were gone without a trace.

What happens when a 20-year-old constructs his personality completely out of reading Tom Robbins novels?

Illustration by Liana Finck

Tom Robbins is not into critics. He’s made this clear in his novels, and he reiterates it several times in his new “not-a-memoir”-but-come-on-it’s-totally-a-memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie . A few pages in, and he’s already telling a story comparing critics to a bully in his Appalachian childhood who punched Robbins in the face, shattered his glasses, and somehow wound up with a shard of glass in his own eye. “Take heed, ye foul-spirited critics,” Robbins warns. “Scurrilous attacks have been known to backfire”

But lots of people lead long and interesting lives. Two hundred pages into the book, Robbins finally gets to the things that make people care: his novels. Robbins’ books are built around very specific theses about how the world works—they rail about how the government or church or dominant culture will be telling us one thing, but reality lies in a different direction. He’s one of those writers who just clicks, and clicks hard, with some people. And those people are often high school or college kids figuring out how the world works and where they fit into it. Such as, not that long ago, me. If the hallucinatory and conversational Tibetan Peach Pie stands as a summation of Tom Robbins’ work, it’s natural that reading it made me start reflecting: What had been the effect, over the years, of putting all of this stuff in my head?

Growing up in pre-Internet rural Nebraska, I had to take my cultural inputs where I could find them. I was in high school, consuming a reading diet of Tom Clancy and Stephen King, when an older friend lent me a copy of Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All . For a 16-year-old from the sticks, it was mind-blowing. Why had no one told me that books like this existed? The main character was an abstract artist who had unusual (by teenage rural Nebraskan standards) sex! There were informative digressions about the history of the Middle East and the matriarchal religions that got screwed over by Christianity! There was a crazy, evil preacher and all kinds of end-times prophecy action! Several of the main characters were talking inanimate objects!

In a town so buttoned up that MTV was deemed too hot for the local cable feed, this was heady, dangerous stuff. I was hooked, and spent the next few years reading and rereading the Robbins canon, incorporating pretty much every word he put down into the version of myself that I presented to the world through my 20s.

“Wake up, sheeple!” isn’t quite accurate; the Robbins hero is generally trying to wake up (and bone) one particular sheeple, and the masses are on their own.

So what are Tom Robbins novels like? For the most part, they’re very consistent. There’s a primary character who has the potential to be very cool but buys into society’s BS and, as a result, is just a little too square and uptight. There’s a sardonic, experienced, enlightened figure who’ll go through some series of adventures with the first character, slowly delivering enlightenment along the way (often via sex). There’s some psychedelic MacGuffin that everyone’s chasing—examples include a flock of whooping cranes. a jade enema nozzle. a (talking) conch shell. and a lost prophecy of the Virgin of Fatima. There will be info dumps about religions, science, and the nature of reality. Someone will drop acid or eat mushrooms. There will be witty prose and wild similes. And there will be boning—frequent, frequent boning.

Build a personality out of these bricks, then, and you’ll get a very specific kind of guy. In my case, my Robbins phase left me very passionate about making and appreciating art. It left me suspicious of consumer society, skeptical of authority (particularly governmental authority), and completely uninterested in participating in any organized religion. Other Robbins fans I’ve known through the years fell very much along the same lines.

These aren’t bad traits to have; I feel like they served me well, and continue to, even if I’ve toned down the intensity on most of them. There’s a bit from Skinny Legs where a character boils the artistic process down to simply thinking of something that you wish existed but doesn’t, and making it happen; this philosophy motivates me in one way or another pretty much every day. But, unfortunately, that’s not all you pick up from mainlining Robbins at a young age.

Imagine this: You’re a nerdy high school kid who doesn’t date much. You read Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas and observe the hero running around calling women things like “pussy sugar”—and the women always dig it. You devour Another Roadside Attraction , where a character proclaims, “The only meat in the world sweeter, hotter, and pinker than Amanda's twat is Carolina barbecue.” How highly evolved are your notions of gender relations going to be? And exactly how smooth are you going to be when you get to college and start dating?

The painful process of learning that women in the real world don’t want to be called “pussy sugar” is, in the end, not the biggest issue with Robbins’ books. That problem solves itself after a couple of dates. There’s a related but larger problem, one that runs a lot deeper and is much more devastating to realize applies to you: Buying too much of Robbins’ program can make you a smug jerk.

Photo courtesy Jeff Corwin

For me, the first break with wholesale adoration of Robbins came during a mid-20s reread of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas . Specifically, a scene where the hero, Larry Diamond (he of the “pussy sugar” endearment), uses a complicated metaphor involving turds and pepperonis in paper bags to illuminate that the homeless are responsible for their own plight. That jarred me; self-assured libertarian victim-blaming didn’t sound like part of a creative hippie program that I wanted to be part of. It sounded like that other formative writer for early-twentysomethings, Ayn Rand.

From there, I started noticing a lot of weird similarities between Robbins’ oeuvre and Rand’s: Both writers use their novels to push a philosophical program, putting their ideas into the mouths of viewpoint characters who go around outarguing unbelieving fools. Both engender a sense that the reader, by choosing to read this book, is one of the enlightened elect in a sea of idiots. I began to recognize that I was modeling this behavior myself; if friends were discussing events in the Middle East, it was just a matter of time before I’d shut down the conversation by parroting some of Robbins’ factually dubious history of Palestine from Skinny Legs and All.

I had the inside scoop, knew the secret history, and—I realized—was pretty damned smug about it. And once I recognized it in myself, I was horrified to see just how much self-congratulation permeates Robbins’ work.

Years later, it’s easy to see in Tibetan Peach Pie. Take the moment when he digresses from a vivid description of his first acid trip to throw down some scientifically shaky truth that could come straight from one of his heroes’ monologues: