That's truer for America than it was for the UK and Europe. One of the things that shocked the Beatles when they came over to the States in early 1964 was how square all the young kids looked, compared with England. Or as John Lennon rather abrasively put it in 1970, "when we got here, you were all walking around in f****n' Bermuda shorts, with Boston crew cuts and stuff on your teeth. The chicks looked like f****n' 1940 horses."




While there's certainly a lot of truth in what you're saying here, Crimebuster, the thing you also have to remember is that Dick Clark's American Bandstand was a teenie-bopper's program and not really an avenue suited to showcasing the latest progressive sounds that were happening in 1967. The kids in that clip were still probably a few years too young to really grasp what the Beatles were doing with Sgt. Pepper or what was happening concurrently in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, for example. These are the same sort of kids who would've said that they preferred Herman's Hermits or The Monkees to the Beatles in 1967. Now, if you look at something like the The Dick Cavett Show in the late '60s, you'll see a much hipper and more mature audience than you would on American Bandstand. So, while it's true that not everybody was a hippie in the late '60s, it's wrong to think that it was a niche youth movement.

You're also absolutely spot on when you say that, once the media buzz around the so-called "Summer of Love" in San Francisco hit the prime time news, a lot of the kids in that clip would've suddenly been wearing flower power tops and love beads (although probably a fair few wouldn't have been). But, at the same time, just a casual glance at the pop charts in 1967 and the dominance of progressive or psychedelic records by the Doors, the Beatles, the Who, Cream, Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Association, Donovan, Jefferson Airplane etc, shows that the music, the fashion and the attitudes that those bands were putting forward was finding a BIG audience. A mostly college age audience though -- very different to the teenie-boppers that would follow a program like American Bandstand in the late '60s.

Of course, we should also remember that it was the Monkees, not Jefferson Airplane or somesuch, that were the biggest selling singles band of 1967, but that also underlines another paradigm shift: followers of the newer, progressive sounds were gravitating towards buying LPs, rather than singles, and coming to regard those LPs as major artistic statements, rather than throw-away pop discs.

That's certainly true. Especially since the hippie culture, and, prior to that, the folk music/coffee house culture, grew out of the beat generation movement (who would've been listening to the Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie type of jazz that you mention). But the beats and the slightly later collegiate folk music crowd were fairly small in comparison to the late '60s counterculture by the end of the decade, as I'm sure you remember. What the hippie counterculture really represented was an assimilation of the ideals of the beat generation and the politically conscious folk music crowd into the rock and pop mainstream.

As an aside, I always remember Allen Ginsberg saying that the media used to call him a beatnik up until one morning in 1967, when he was suddenly labeled a hippie.

Not to derail this thread that I love, but briefly, the reason the hippie subculture was so much larger than the beatnick culture , was due to 3 things

1-The effects of the growing "baby boom" with a larger amount of teenagers emerging in the mid 60s compared to the late 50s
2-The pervasiveness of TV and its growing ability to quickly spread news and trends into middle America
3-The growing effects of The Civil Rights and Anti-War movement were being anti establishment was increasingly acceptable and young people's lives were on the line

And of course, the rise of the birth control pill made free love seem to have less consequences. Romance comics of the day never mentioned the pill. Too bad

And the One Slave Bracelet, too, don't forget!

Then I need all of it.  Because I LOVE that art.
I'm assuming she did the drawn clothing fashion "ads", too, that are in some of the books you sent me?  I can post a scan if you need for reference?