What are the Best Hippie Songs?

In 1967, the world got acquainted with bands like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, The Doors and albums like Are You Experienced? and Sgt. Pepper’s. It was a pivotal year for hippie counterculture, with the Monterey Pop Festival officially starting the Summer of Love where 100,000 people converged on the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco. These so-called “flower children” were drawn to a social experiment that promised communal living, free love and lots of drugs. The eventual onset of hunger, overcrowding and crime ensured the summer ended with the arrival of autumn, as nature intended.

Like the Saturn rockets that launched the Apollo spacecrafts to the moon, the events of 1967 launched the hippie subculture from its underground hipster origins to mainstream culture. Not surprisingly, this period saw experimentation in popular music that often sewed together themes of social justice, spiritual awareness as well as paranoia and political protest. Movies chronicling this period, such as Easy Rider, Forrest Gump and Apocalypse Now, interweave nostalgic soundtracks that help keep hippie music a never-ending part of popular consciousness and consumption.

Here for your perusal are my five picks for the most enduring hippie songs:

Almost Cut My Hair – Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (1970)

“I’m not giving in an inch to fear,” David Crosby sings in this unusual rebel song that equates getting a haircut with selling out to the man. Recorded live in the studio you can hear the angst in his voice, as if shedding his locks is a metaphor for everything that is wrong with the world. At any cost, he wants the world to know where he stands, and that’s why he’s going to let his “freak flag fly.”

If 6 Was 9 – The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1967)

And speaking of “freak flags,” Jimi Hendrix may have been the first to put that particular expression into a song (and it may be most likely the above CSNY song is referring to Jimi’s dismissive “I don’t care if the hippies cut off all their hair.”) Mixing psychedelic blues with sonic experiments in the studio, “If 6 Was 9″ is one of Jimi’s great anthems of individualism. While those who visited Easy Rider hippie communes may have embraced the song as one of their own, it doesn’t sound anymore sympathetic to hippies than it does to the businessman who “can’t dress like me.”

Somebody To Love – Jefferson Airplane (1967)

“When the truth is found to be lies/And the joy within you dies” are the opening lines of “Somebody to Love,” showing this to be a song about alienation and despair. This was the first big hit for Jefferson Airplane and it helped introduce San Francisco’s music and happenings to a wider audience. As Dan Lasley says in Playing Along “Somebody to Love” is the perfect song for beginners because “it is high-energy, has powerful chords, and be adjusted to almost any vocalist who is willing to user her power. But the last best reason is that no one would ever play it “˜just like the album.'” In fact, it’s a great song to use to learn to construct your own guitar solos, as done in this lesson.

For What It’s Worth – Buffalo Springfield (1967)

“There’s something happening here,” is the opening line to Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” a haunting and psychedelic political song. Stephen Stills wanted to write a song about young soldiers going to fight in Southeast Asia but wound up writing about the police breaking up a crowd that had turned up to mourn the closing of their favorite bar. The song’s title doesn’t appear anywhere in the lyrics but the message still makes it through. Something is always amiss when lines are being drawn, yet “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.”

Truckin’ – Grateful Dead (1970)

It’s no wonder that “Truckin'” has wound up as one to the Grateful Dead’s lasting anthems. It tells the band’s own story in song – the story of young men touring America and getting into trouble along the way. As well as being one of their most often played live songs, it gave rise to the line “what a long strange trip it’s been,” something most hippies could relate to.

There are plenty more memorable songs from this era that I could have listed. Consider this a jumping off point, what are your nominations for best hippie song?