Quotes About Counterculture

My guitarist husband, Mike, and writer me are the old-fashioned kind of bohemians. Not 'fro-haired hipsters gyrating in iPod ads, but the sort who, starting January 1 of every year, literally don't know where their next dime is coming from.

We drove it to the panhandle to listen to Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead in the first round of those Love-Ins the hippies had in the late 60's.

Ginsberg and those coffee houses with hungry-looking guitar players never did mean shit to me. They never took their drinking seriously.

In fact, the flashy, antiauthoritarian vaulters were suspiciously regarded, often with reason, by the coaches and their more loyal athletes as Thoreau-reading, dope-smoking, John Carlos–loving hippies.

What do you mean do I go around with narcotics signing petitions painting slop writing books full of dirty words with a beard?

I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.

There are no backwaters where things can breed—our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We've arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture.

George Harrison belongs in a daycare center for counterculture casualties, another of those children canceled not (so much?) by drugs this time but something perhaps far more insidious. His position seems to be I'm Pathetic, But I Believe in Krishna, which apparently absolves him from any position of leadership while enabling him to assume a totally preachy arrogance toward his audience which would be monumental chutzpah if it weren't coming from such a self-certified nebbish.

Rolling Stone, still a hippie newspaper in San Francisco, won for its stories on Altamont and Charles Manson

There were battles on many fronts: civil rights, sexual freedom, Vietnam, drugs. Even clothes, hair, and music were under attack by the Establishment. Unbelievable when you think about it—fucking haircuts.

HUNTER'S FIRST PIECE was "Freak Power in the Rockies: The Battle of Aspen.

Hunter was one of those "dropouts," raised in Louisville, Kentucky, who had arrived in the late sixties after writing gigs in Puerto Rico, Brazil, Big Sur, and San Francisco.

BURNING MAN WAS not on my radar. Taking drugs twenty-four hours a day with thousands of people in the windblown desert a hundred miles outside of Reno, Nevada, was not on my bucket list, more like my fuck-it list.

there've always been hippies of one kind or another. They just go under different names with each new generation. Bohemians, beatniks, dropouts, free spirits, freaks, whatever.

I've sold my records outta shopping carts on the street.

We had incense and rock'n'roll posters, and we sold records and rolling papers. People could just, like, hang out. We had a cool vibe going.

I like druggy downtown kids who spray paint walls and trains. I like their lack of training, their primitive technique. I think it hurts you, when you stay too long in school.

When the vast baby-boom generation exploded into adolescence in the 1960s, marketers exulted. Advertising consultants, always eager to coin a phrase, began happily explaining to corporations the difference between 'teenyboppers' and 'counterculture consumers.'

The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode.

When I was an art student in the early 60's before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist.

My parents were hippies. They met at an ashram, where they were studying how to be enlightened.

To be involved in the subculture of punk rock puts you in a minority.

Stay in drugs, don't do school.

Back in the day, I was definitely a child of alternative radio.