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The counterculture was rooted in the social and political events of the 1950s. The Beat movement had emphasized freedom from materialism and the importance of personal experience. The civil rights movement introduced the idea of social and political protest, which stimulated the Vietnam antiwar movement. Both movements prompted many people to question traditional boundaries, whether restrictions on rights or cultural norms in dress or hairstyles. It also heightened distrust of authority, leading some in the counterculture to declare, "Don't trust anyone over 30."
Members of the counterculture valued youth, spontaneity, and freedom of expression. Also called hippies, these young people promoted peace, love, and freedom. They experimented with new styles of dress and music, freer attitudes toward sexual relationships, and the recreational use of drugs. Their values were so different from traditional ones that many social analysts described the resulting situation as a generation gap, in which there was a lack of understanding and communication between the older and younger generations.
By the 1960s, rock-and-roll had become a defining characteristic of the baby-boom generation. When the Beatles made a triumphant visit to the United States in 1964, more than 70 million Americans watched the English rock band perform on Ed Sullivan's television show. The Beatles also had an impact on folk musicians like Bob Dylan, whose protest songs highlighted the civil rights and peace movements. As radical musician John Sinclair put it, rock became "a weapon of cultural revolution," urging listeners to reject conventions and, in many cases, the political policies of the government. Even after the counterculture had declined in significance, rock music remained popular among baby-boomers as well as their children.
The art and literature of the 1960s and 1970s also displayed a rebellious side. Andy Warhol's realistic paintings of common items of American culture, such as Campbell soup cans, questioned satirically what was "real." In literature, the novels of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson blurred the lines between reporting and political activism.
In 1967, as many as 2,000 people flocked to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, a center of the counterculture. Hippies there experimented with drugs, wore unconventional clothing, and listened to rock music and speeches by political radicals like Timothy Leary, a one-time Harvard researcher. He preached that drugs could free the mind, and he encouraged American youths to "tune in," to drugs, and "drop out" of mainstream society. The hippies of San Francisco attracted a great deal of media attention, much of it critical of the lifestyles they advocated. Life in Haight-Ashbury did prove to have unwanted effects. As in other enclaves of hippie culture, it experienced high rates of drug abuse which led to increased crime.
By the end of the 1960s, many people, even those within the counterculture, had become disillusioned with some of its excesses. The utopian urge to discover more authentic way of living had an unfortunate underside. Drug addictions and deaths from overdoses rosee A number of rock musicians, most famously Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, died of drug overdoses while only in their twenties. The downward spiral continued in 1969 with a tragedy at a music festival sponsored in Altamont, California. While the Rolling Stones played, members of the Hells Angels, a motorcylce gang that had been hired to provide security, stabbed to death a black man who had approached the stage. The ugly violence contradicted the values of "peace and love" that many hippies embraced.
At the same time, the movement's values were becoming increasingly shallow and self-centered. When the counterculture fell apart, most hippies abandoned their social experiments and melted right back into the mainstream. Still, the seeds of protest they had sown would influence the growing "rights revolution."