It’s difficult to admit this—especially to the readers of High Times—but for most of my life, I flat-out hated the hippies. That’s curious, considering I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and, for a quarter of a century, have lived just three blocks from Golden Gate Park—ground zero for the very counterculture I went out of my way to avoid.
But my aversion to dancing bears and patchouli oil didn’t come out of nowhere. It was forged last century in a scene I can only imagine has played out in households across America over the past sixty years—when one member of the family starts wearing tie-dye, smoking weed, dropping acid, and then takes off to follow the Grateful Dead.
My Hippie Brother
As a teenager in the 1980s, I remember how painfully embarrassed I felt by my brother, who wore Birkenstocks and wooden beads, and looked like a mashup of Charles Manson, Jesus Christ, and a street poet carrying a tambourine. He danced around our high school with abandon, sharing messages of peace and love with everyone he met. I was mortified. But my brother was just being himself.
At the time, I was too young to grasp what I was witnessing. All that I could see was that my brother worshipped a band named after dead people—who seemingly all used drugs—and had images of skeletons wearing top hats plastered everywhere. None of it seemed the least bit fun or whimsical then. In fact, it scared the living daylights out of me.
That fear became real when my brother disappeared one day and couldn’t be found. Eventually, word arrived that he’d overdosed at a Dead show after ingesting an entire sheet of LSD, resulting in a full-blown …
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Author: LL St. John / High Times
