13. What is a hippie? Back in 1995, I left school and went to India and, arriving in Goa, I found a culture of travellers and drop-outs who had been there, on and off, since the 60's. who called themselves freaks. We (I swiftly decided I wanted to join their ranks) called ourselves freaks rather than hippies. A freak was someone who had gone their own way and lived a life on their own terms, undefined by the culture from which they came. It was a badge of honour to be a freak and one we used to distinguish ourselves from the tourists who were beginning to outnumber us as development rapidly ate away at our counter-culture paradise. Every day I hung out with some of the older personalities at hidden-away cafes in the jungle and one of them, 8-Finger Eddie, was going strong at the age of 74, having arrived to Goa in 1965 and never left, straying no further than Nepal for regular visa runs. I wanted to know how it all got started and so one day asked him: 'Eddie, before the freaks and hippies, there were the Beatniks, right? 'Kerouac! Ginsberg!' he grinned. Right, so who were the cool people before the Beatniks?' 'Hipsters!' he told me, the memory of the jazz age lighting up his eyes. 'And before hipsters?' Eddie paused for a moment and shrugged. 'Black people!' he laughed. There's this story that when the Beatles first came to the US, a much feted cultural invasion, they were greeted by screaming crowds and a throng of reporters who asked them what they wanted to see in America. Muddy Waters, the Beatles said, referring to the legendary bluesman, one of many who had influenced their musical formation. Oh, where's that? The reporter replied. The Beatles weren't the first to revamp black music and bring it to the American mainstream - Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly had already done that - but they were the first to give them credit and that helped spark a renewed interest in the blues. But early black American culture hadn't just given groovier music to future generations, the tunes went hand in hand with more open attitudes towards sexuality and drugs. John Lennon never would have sung Why Don't We Just Do It in the Road? without having heard I Got My Mojo Working. And black jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong freely claimed that marijuana made them play better. Beatnik writers like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg used speed, opiates and psychedelics to open their minds to new realms of experience in the 50's, laying the groundwork for the following generation of Flower Children who would truly blow their minds open in the 60's. The music, the drugs, the new ideas marked the difference between the status quo and those who had decided to 'tune in, turn on and drop out.', as LSD guru, Timothy Leary had it. In fact, a whole new lexicon sprung up to define the new movement. You might 'turn someone on' by giving them their first joint. A person could be 'with it' or 'cool' if they 'dug' what was going on. All with a certain degree of pride as Bob Dylan had it in A Ballad of a Thin Man: 'You walk into the room With your pencil in your hand You see somebody naked And you, you say, "Who is that man?" You try so hard But you don't understand Just what you will say When you get home Because something is happening here But ya' don't know what it is Do you, Mister Jones?' But what took everyone so long? Why had everyone been so straight up until then? The rather prosaic answer is the economy, stupid. Until then, the kind of individual who took an interest in drugs, eastern religions or non-conventional sexuality was likely to an eccentric member of the upper classes with money behind them and the social licence to be a bit of a colourful character - an oddball, to be sure, but still welcome at dinner parties. The wisdom of the hippies was how happy we can be with so little. A guitar, a fire, some friends and you're set for a great evening. I once passed a bar of chocolate around 20 people at a fire on a hippie gathering. It went around twice, everyone so ecstatic to take tiny nibbles. But you can only realise that less is more if you have more to begin with. The generation of young Westerners who turned their back on the material dream of a house in the suburbs, a steady office job and mowing the grass on Sundays, never had to worry about there being food on the table or clothes that fit them. The hippies of the 60's had grown up with the relative affluence of the post-war economic boom of the 50's and had seen that having more stuff didn't make anyone any happier. So they were happy to wander the earth barefoot, singing ditties on ukuleles. As a character in the 60's classic comic, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers observed: 'As we all know, dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope!' And, crucially, if and when their hippie dreams went pop and they found themselves needing some dental work or a deposit for an apartment when babies ...
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