To set the reader in the mood for a typical Friday night partying with friends, along with a little ditty that I happened to read on Facebook recently that we sang “way back in the day”, I want to have you think back and remember, or perhaps experience for the first time what it was like to be young and “free”, with little responsibility and even less material things. First of all , remember, we didn’t care about material things. It was part of the idea of being a hippie. We didn’t call ourselves “hippies” as a rule. But a lot of other people did. It wasn’t near as evil or mysterious as outsiders suspected. It was usually just a group of friends, sitting around in the sparsely furnished living room of a friends “pad” or house, enjoying a little pot and a lot of munchies , such as M n M’s, potato Chips, candy bars, soft drinks, beer, whatever we could get-whatever someone could afford and brought to share.
I am not advocating this lifestyle or condemning it, though as a mature adult, it seems rather trivial.
Some of the friends had jobs or went to school, some of the girl had babies. Most were in their late teens to mid twenties. The furnishings in the living room often consisted of thousand dollar stereo on which to play albums and 8 tracks which a lot of our money was spent on. The stereo was often sitting on a long board with cement blocks as legs. The house was filled with hand-me-down or throw-away type furniture. I don’t remember the houses being dirty or lacking in style. It was clean and the furniture well arranged. The door to other rooms often had strings of beads hanging from ceiling to floor. There were lava lamps and psychedelic posters on the walls.
The music was the best part of being with friends on a Friday night or any other nights. No one was forced to take drugs, and usually, the drug of choice was marijuana. The music we listened to consisted of my all-time favorite (still), Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith, J.J. Kale, old favorites from the Woodstock era, or any southern hard rock groups friends brought in to share with others. We turned the music up loud, sang along, pretended to play the guitar (some of really could, but not of the quality of the groups we listened to. It seems there always one person who put on a one man show of pretending to play the guitar, sing and dance around the room.
These were fleeting times, soon all of us would either rejoin the real world of college, jobs, family, or fall through the cracks that lead to more dangerous drugs and lifestyles. Still, I remember them fondly, and I imagine a lot of other people do too. I have seen a recurrence of a “hippie” like, earth lover types lately, and, to be honest it makes me smile. The new hippies may eat food that was (and is) strange to us who lived their youth in the 70’s, but they still decorate in a similar, though maybe more sophisticated manor, they still have beads on the doors, the pictures are more likely to be beautiful woodland scenes than psychedelic posters, the music more modern rock, hip-hop but still mingled with the favorites that have lasted the years.
Now, for those of you who have stayed with me this long-your reward-the song or “ditty”, if you will that has been sung by generations of hippies, just to get a laugh.
(Sung to the tune of “Row, Row, Row your boat” )
“Roll, roll, roll a joint, twist it at the end. Light it up, take a puff, share it with a friend!”
Peace and Blessings to the ‘hippies” of any age who may have smiled as they remembered….
beebeesworld 