Rock ‘n’ roll was where the power was. It could be seen by anyone, and if you wanted to raise money for anything from the Vietnam Day bail to the Democratic Party, you ran a rock dance. —Ralph J. Gleason For every concert and happening at which I cavorted there was an...

The Trips Festival: First Large San Francisco Rock Gathering A new, exciting, subversive, dangerous purple haze of music and music-based culture was enveloping Berkeley and San Francisco. The earliest warning signals came to me from Laura Allan, a beautiful and...

A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension. —Oliver Wendell Holmes Starting at age fourteen I began to hear rumblings about an exotic substance called LSD. Everything about it sounded bizarre, tempting and scary. It could give you a...

CODE LANGUAGE Usually we were able to shut out parents and other Establishment types with our own secret language. As with bohemians and beatniks past, there was a code, a secret lingual handshake between those living in the alternative universe. Epithets hip, cool...

  Music reflected and taught about attitudes towards gender roles and romantic relationships. Animals were more than a band; in songs as in life girls were “chicks” and particularly sexy ones might be “foxes,” as in the Doors’ “Twentieth Century Fox.” Boys...

A lot of the rampant free expression really was free, as in no cost to you. A guiding principle of hippie life, at least at the start, was that you shared what you had. In the beginning, the Bay Area bands professed and lived those downright upright values. They were...

  By 1966, rock bands began playing in large public arenas, starting with Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco and then moving on to the Fillmore and Avalon Ballrooms and Winterland. Many believed that San Francisco Bay Area rock bands played “acid rock” as...

When the British invaded the USA for the second time with the Beatles leading the charge, they occupied my home in the form of a girl who embodied all the most desirable and fashionable things from across the ocean blue. The daughter of a war buddy of my father’s,...

“There was a feeling in the air that, if the world were going to change, Berkeley would either be the place to begin, the place that would do it, or something like that. There was an unspoken solidarity with all the college campuses all across the nation and around...

LIBERATING EDUCATION Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius. —William Blake March 25, 1962 Berkeley students were let out of school to attend the annual U.C. Berkeley Charter Day at the football stadium. President...