The summer of 1969 was the summer of Woodstock. While the festival was unfolding at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in upstate New York I was at the Jersey Shore on our family’s annual week long vacation. I was fascinated by it all.  Hundreds of thousands of young people converging in one place, grooving to the best bands of the time. It was an event for the ages. During the week of August 15-18 Woodstock dominated the news and was a welcome respite from the grim nightly body counts of the Vietnam War. I really wanted to be at Woodstock and pleaded with my mom to let me go. There was only one problem: in August of 1969 I was 12 years old. While I couldn’t physically be at the festival, I was there in spirit and that was the summer that I became a hippie.

To my conservative parents and others of their generation, the word ”hippie” had very negative connotations. Where they saw a ragtag confederation of dirty, drug taking, draft card burning bums, I saw beautiful and free young people with flowers in their hair who dared to dream of a better way to live. To a young boy on the cusp of coming of age, the allure of the hippies and everything they represented was powerful. 

Luckily at the shore that summer I had an ally in my cousin Patty. We were hippies together, much to the chagrin of our parents. In order to gain their approval, we assured our folks that we were “clean hippies”. We promised to take baths and brush our hair, however we did walk barefoot everywhere and wore colorful strands of “love beads” around our necks. Meanwhile I was engaged in a near constant battle with my mom over the length of my hair. Long hair in the summer of 1969 was a political statement and an outward show of solidarity with the hippies and mom was having none of it! However, I persisted and somehow managed a bit of a McCartney-esq coif with bangs sweeping across my eyebrows. My cousin wore her hair in the classic style of that era for girls: long, parted down the middle and falling past her shoulders.

Ten years later I ended up living in Northern California just a few miles south of San Francisco, the flashpoint from where the hippies and the counterculture as a whole sprung from. I’ve tried to live more of an alternative lifestyle and to hold the essence of the hippie ethic in my heart. Well, I can proudly say that I’m most definitely still a hippie. I never made it to Woodstock but I did manage to write and record this song, it’s called I Wanna Be A Hippie At Woodstock. You can give it a listen at the bottom of this story.