At one point in the story, for example, there is a caterpillar who tells Alice that eating from one side of the mushroom will make her taller and, from the other side, will make her shorter. Alice eats from the mushroom and partakes of other substances during her adventures, meeting lots of interesting characters along the way. The inspiration for “White Rabbit” and its lyrics came in part from a famous work of literature, Alice’s Adventures in Wonder-land, written by Lewis Carroll in 1865, and its sequel of 1871, Through the Looking-Glass. Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA).

The Origins of Scientific Research on Psychedelics

The Rolling Stones ventured into the scene with the less successful Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), while such groups as the Byrds created a more commercial version of raw psychedelia. While the ’60s brought about positive social change, it was also a time of great turmoil. The Vietnam War cast a long shadow over the decade, dividing nations and leaving a trail of destruction. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and President John F. Kennedy sent shockwaves through society, shattering the dreams of a generation. The music of the era, fueled by this dichotomy, reflected both the hope and the darkness of the times.

In recent years, she has joined forces with Area Arts of Santa Rosa, California to help market her work, and she had her first exhibition in 2000. In 2006, the popularity of her “Alice in Wonderland” works led to a partnership with Dark Horse Comics, Inc. that resulted in the release of stationery and journals with the “Wonderland” motif. She has also done some album art as well as portraits of Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Pete Townsend, Sting, and other musicians. Slick’s career with the Jefferson Airplane continued through the 1970s and 1980s, as the group changed its name twice – to Jefferson Starship and then Starship – and also went through several changes in personnel and musical style (Slick also left for a time between June 1978 and January 1981).

Psychedelic era

• Billboard magazine reported in November 1970 that “MGM Records president Mike Curb has dropped 18 acts who, in his opinion, promote and exploit hard drugs through music.” At the time, Curb was reportedly alarmed by the drug-related deaths of several rock stars.
• In fact, Slick would revel in her anti-authority role with the Jefferson Airplane, made larger by the group’s rising fame.
• Other people joined together and lived in communes, self-supporting rural communities that sometimes had spiritual components.
• In 1965, Grace and Jerry also formed a rock band named the Great Society (a play on Lyndon Johnson’s social program of the same name), which performed for a time in San Francisco’s North Beach area.
• In Britain psychedelic pioneers created music that was steeped in whimsy and surrealism, less aggressive and minimalist than their American counterparts.
• In his remarks to the broadcasters, Nixon assured them he had no intention of telling them what songs to play or not play, or how to program their broadcasts, but he would “appreciate” their cooperation on the matter of songs that promoted drugs.

That these young people chose to drop out from lives in which they had clear advantages was a sign to many that perhaps something really was wrong with the system. In terms of a specific personal example, social activist and musician Linda McCartney is known for publicly remarked that she considered marijuana “pretty lightweight” while finding harder drugs to be “disgusting”. She ended up being arrested in Barbados in 1984 for possession of marijuana, the same charge for which her husband had been arrested in Los Angeles nine years previous.

• The music of the era, fueled by this dichotomy, reflected both the hope and the darkness of the times.
• Although some histories use the term counterculture to refer only to the hippies, the counterculture included several distinct groups that criticized developments in American society and advocated for social change in the late 1950s and through the 1960s.
• The music could be played on the radio because the references to drug use were always coded in obscure language.
• The hippie belief that if enough people join hands and sing about love, perhaps they can change the world, entered history as a quaint expression of a strangely frivolous, difficult to define, and yet in some ways appealing social movement.
• With a visionary imagination that later tragically collapsed into schizophrenia, Syd Barrett, lead singer and composer of early Pink Floyd, enthusiastically pursued the acid rock ethics of musical exploration and experimentation on his band’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967).

The Pop History Dig

For example, bell-bottom pants and long hair on men have gone in and out of style over the years. The hippie belief that if enough people join hands and sing about love, perhaps they can change the world, entered history as a quaint expression of a strangely frivolous, difficult to define, and yet in some ways appealing social movement. The first real signs of an emerging hippie culture came in 1963, when a young writer named Ken Kesey (1935–2001) took the profits earned from the sales of his first book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and bought a log house in the rural town of La Honda, on the outskirts of San Francisco. In the late 1950s, Kesey and his friends, many of them college students at nearby Stanford University, had taken part in experiments at a local hospital that treatedmental illness. They regularly took hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and peyote, which caused hallucinations or vivid mental images unconnected to reality.

Researchers like Leary weren’t just publishing papers — they were hosting counterculture gatherings, rubbing elbows with musicians like The Grateful Dead, and fueling the perception of psychedelics as a recreational free-for-all. Haight-Ashbury became the colorful, outrageous symbol for a growing hippie movement. It was undoubtedly the national center of psychedelic activity, but there were outposts of hippie culture thriving elsewhere in the country, in New York’s East Village neighborhood, in big northern cities like Chicago, Boston, and Detroit, and on college campuses across the nation. Most recently in 2020, the “White Rabbit” song has been used as part of the central theme, with related background imagery, in a Celebrity Cruises TV advertisement, titled “Wonder Awaits,” produced by a London ad agency. As the ad runs, with the Grace Slick version playing, an Alice-like character wanders through some psychedelic-like scenes featuring the cruise line’s various on-board amenities.

Ethan Hawke: My Life in 10 Roles

When people in the early 2000s think about the 1960s, they might think first about the “hippies.” Along with the civil rights movement, antiwar protests, and the Beatles, hippies were one of the most distinctive features of a very colorful decade. Their distinctive appearance (bell-bottomed pants, brightly colored shirts, and long loose hair on both men and women), their drug use, and their psychedelic music provided powerful reminders of their rejection of the style and values of their parents. Yet the hippies were important for more than just their lifestyle and fashion choices. As members of a thriving and diverse counterculture, they expressed the deep dissatisfaction many other people felt with American culture in the 1960s. This chapter explores the meaning of the hippies’ peculiar brand of cultural dissent. The hippies were the third broad group of dissenters to mainstream American values, though they were also sometimes called the “underground.” Like the New Left and the rights-based dissenters, hippies were deeply critical of the society that their parents accepted.

It was seen as prevalent because it allowed artists to maximize their creative potential and create new production strategies. They used these psychedelics just like other artists at the time, to proctor new ways of production and to enhance their creativity. Cocaine didn’t truly become widespread until the 70s but within Jazz culture, it can be considered the birth of Cocaine use. These Jazz musicians used Cocaine as a boost so they can play for as long as they can as well as a creativity enhancement. Bands like the Beetles who made use of psychedelics influenced teens of that time as well. Because these artists were so popular, teens began wanting to mimic them and a part of that imitation was the use of drugs.

By the end of the 1960s, many thought the risk of being arrested and put in prison, as some hippies were, outweighed the thrill of using the illegal drug. One of the biggest promoters of the drug was Dr. Timothy Leary (1920–1996), who as a professor of psychology at Harvard University introduced the drug to many of his students and later popularized its use. Many users claimed that once a person takes LSD, the person can never go 1960s Music and Drugs back to seeing the world like a drug-free person or “straight” person sees it.

Over two nights they murdered seven people, including well-known actress Sharon Tate and coffee magnate Abigail Folger. Sam Cooke’s Mysterious DeathThe unresolved circumstances surrounding Sam Cooke’s death continue to spark speculation and intrigue. Conflicting accounts and suspicious injuries fuel alternative theories, leaving doubts despite the official ruling of justifiable homicide. Cooke’s tragic end remains a haunting reminder of the complexities of fame and the shadows that lurk behind the glitz and glamour of the music industry. “John Roszak Interviews Grace Slick” (for Evening Edition, KQED-PBS-TV), March 1980 (KQED 16mm film outtakes featuring scenes of John Roszak interviewing singer and songwriter Grace Slick).

The Beats dropped out of regular society, dressed in jeans and black leather, smoked marijuana though it was illegal, and listened to jazz. In fact, it was the Beats who popularized the word “hip” as a description for something interestingly different, new, and “cool.” The Beats themselves adopted many of their traits from the black jazz subculture. Rejected from mainstream society because of their race, black musicians had for years been dressing differently and rejecting white culture. Beatniks and black jazz musicians were thus seen as cultural rebels by young people coming of age in the early 1960s. In late 1969, a hippie cult leader named Charles Manson (1934–), who lured hippies to his ranch with promises of free love and drugs, masterminded a string of murders in the foothills of Los Angeles. Mainstream Americans who had once looked on these counterculturalmovements as fairly benign began to see in them a real threat to the social order.

(More) Years of Shudder: What’s Next for the Scariest Brand in the Indie Film Business?

In its place they offered vague promises of “peace” and “love.” If taken seriously, such goals were far more revolutionary than the changes being sought by antiwar activists or civil rights demonstrators. Even their most openly political actions—such as nominating a pig for president in 1968, a stunt performed by the Yippies, a loosely organized hippie political party—were meant more asjokes than as serious political statements. In Britain psychedelic pioneers created music that was steeped in whimsy and surrealism, less aggressive and minimalist than their American counterparts.

But this is also an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of previous generations as we reopen the floodgates of psychedelic research and therapy today. This punning headline refers to the trip taken from New York to Washington by a group of staffers from the underground paper the East Village Other to testify at Congressional Hearings on regulating LSD, which was not yet banned federally. Some of what the Nixon Administration was advocating in terms screening songs for drug messaging appears to have resulted in broadcasters and program managers pulling music off the air and/or preventing it from airing. Slick’s delivery of lines like these proved forceful and riveting, distinguishing her as one of the era’s lead female voices.