Based largely in Laurel Canyon, Southern California – the Nature Boys bear more than a passing resemblance to the hippies of the 1960s. They owe much to William Pester, the ‘Hermit of Palm Springs’ – a follower of Germany’s Lebensreform movement, and ‘Naturmenschen’ who settled into the American wilderness in 1916 – having fled from the German draft a decade earlier. There’s one group I came across that endlessly fascinated me, however. Diogenes tells Alexander ‘Hey man don’t block my sun!’ Lao Tzu rides for parts unknown on an ox. The Merrymount community of 17th century Quincy Massachusetts? There’s a similarity. St Marius, the stonemason who established the country of San Marino? Yeah, I’d argue he must have had a similar spirit. I can see that, but I’m putting in my rival claim for the hippies. Most messianic figures Lao Tzu, Mazdak, Siddhartha Gautama, Epicurus, Pythagoras… Jesus, all had something of the hippy about them.ĭiogenes? History on Fire’s Daniele Bolelli had him pegged as the first punk rocker. I had a bit of a look round, and it seemed to me, beyond the scene round the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City Nevada, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, or the Beatniks … well you can go back as far as you like and find people with a hippy vibe about them. (Note, yes I did one in the disastrous ‘series 0’ but that no longer exists).Īnyway a friend asked me, after I published the piece “If Altamont is kind of the end of the 60s as we imagine it – hippies and everything. I’ll save my thoughts on that – I will do a podcast episode on Altamont at some point. This was one of those pieces I get to do sometimes where I started off thinking I understood what went down – and came out the other side with a radically different view on the day. The show culminated with the killing of a young man named Meredith Hunter. In the early days of the blog I wrote a piece on the Altamont Free Concert, December 6th 1969, where basically anything which could go wrong did go wrong. Hey all I’m doing something a little different this episode.
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