Haight Ashbury - The Epicentre of Hippie Counterculture

 

One Wall to Rule Them All

On the wall at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic is a mural, a sort of collage, cut ‘n pasted there by the hippies who hung out there between 1967 and 1969. It is old now, faded, marred with graffiti and other grime manifest over the last 60 years but it is still there  (and, coincidentally, at my place albeit ‘like new’)   and it has an interesting story to tell, one you won’t find anywhere else.

It was my task to recreate this mural for a TV show about serial killers – in this instance, Charles Manson. Working with very little reference, I set about making the enormous artwork in precisely the same manner as the hippies did back in 1967 – by using the free posters Bill Graham would deposit there.

Bill Graham & LSD

Bill Graham was the name on every poster which he used partly for promotion but principally to market direct to users of LSD. Bill’s formula was to host benefit events, which skirt a good deal of the bylaws, and so offered to hold benefit gigs for the clinic, where LSD and his market intersected.  The Summer of Love emerged amongst all this and the rest is history, but know that here, in this room, under this artwork, was the epicentre of Haight Ashbury and the principal role it played in the emergence of the hippie counterculture.

Bill Graham’s story you’ll find on Wikipedia, but that’s the ‘official’ story. The wealthy black man who owned the Fillmore auditorium had conservative values; Graham’s first few gigs, being benefits, made the cut but it was unlikely he would be fine with back-to-back shows from Friday noon to Monday noon, a for-profit venture which hinged on the supply of LSD and the engineering of the first large-scale counterculture in US history. Graham took the lease and then, mysteriously, the wealthy black guy was murdered! How unbelievably fortunate for Graham, and lucky too that he had the support of the LSD supply chain, which would naturally remove any hinderances to moving product in volume.

Graham gave out free posters at the gigs and naturally dropped off a stack of the things at the clinic, a marketing move. It served to attract an audience and also inform the supply chain of the sorts of numbers involved. A popular show would need a good 30,000 tabs of fresh blotter, or some 250 sheets be made available, and the clinic was the only place of central exchange.

The Clinic

The Clinic naturally didn’t describe itself as a LSD hub but as a social welfare place, something of a do-good rehab, a medical support service.  However, people like Manson, who was permanently high, hung out there pretty much because you got free acid and would meet a number of runaways, drawn to the legend of the district. He could conscript girls and have them do pretty much whatever he said; the acid was free, the concerts were free and there was no chance of getting in trouble with the law.

So the Clinic was the hub, no big whoop. Our posters on the wall tell us that Jan 1967 to Dec 1968 – those two years – were the height of the fad and the concerts outgrew the hall. Haight Ashbury became a magnet for every part-time criminal, chancer, vagrant and addict to descend in great numbers. The Clinic had to start to distance itself from the drug trade as the district started turning into slum, with all the unwanted attention this brings, so in 1969 the LSD transactions took place off premises. This marked the end of the poster series and the start of the whole thing winding down. The hippies trekked off to Woodstock and Haight Ashbury started cleaning up.

The Posters

These aren’t just any posters, they are works of art and core to the psychedelic movement in how it came to be defined. They epitomize, and illustrate, legendary artists in a unique age and gave young people a voice.