What’s the story with ‘Alice’s Restaurant? “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant–” goes the old, familiar chorus sung in homes on Thanksgiving every year. Folk singer Arlo Guthrie released ‘Alice’s Restaurant Massacree’ in 1967, and it has become a staple of Thanksgiving for many blues fans ever since— but how did this … Read More
As one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll bands of all time, Grateful Dead, who gained popularity in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s, quickly became synonymous with the hippie movement and demonstrated how the counterculture of the civil rights era drew inspiration from Black art, and challenged the segregationist norms of the era. … Read More
For the last 42 years, thousands of costumed weirdos have paraded through the bohemian capital of Greenwich Village, New York City – and that’s just what happens on Halloween. We talk a lot about San Francisco and the West Coast being the origin place for American counterculture and the hippie lifestyle because, well, it is, … Read More
Here at Little Hippie we’ve been on a mission to dive into the origin story and evolution of the hippie – where did this culture come from, what does it mean and what are the values of that we’re passing onto our little hippies? Persians, Greeks and Germans were at it way before anyone thought … Read More
It wasn’t until day the third day of Michael Fallon’s 1965 article series for the San Francisco Examiner that hippies made front page news. The story was printed below the fold, but was front page news none the less. The headline, Bohemia’s New Haven, was putting it lightly, considering what was to come. The diaspora of hippies from … Read More
Our series of public library microfiche discoveries continues with Michael Fallon’s San Francisco Examiner series on the hippies of Haight Ashbury. The Blue Unicorn is the central caffeinated meeting space of the hippies of Haight Ashbury, but is it a business or an art form? Fallon investigates; this piece was published on September 6, 1965 … Read More
We got curious about Dennis McNally’s reference in A Long Strange Trip, to a 1965 series of San Francisco Examiner articles by Michael Fallon. The articles are referenced in almost every major book about the era, as the first use of the word hippie in print – derived from the beatnik’s hipster – to describe the shifting culture of the … Read More
“Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley always claimed that they photocopied that book, they didn’t, they cut it out with a pen knife. So this is not that copy,” Grateful Dead Archivist Nicholas G. Meriwether told us, looking over a medieval era art book (right) on view at UC Santa Cruz, “but that’s the way they got … Read More