Resource Guide to the 1960s

Looking for the latest or greatest scholarship and thinking on the 1960s? Here's a sample of books, films, articles and exhibitions that CHS staff have been reading:

• Michael Kramer's The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture  (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2008)
• Greg Castillo's Hippie Modernism (Walker Art Center, 2015) Note: check out the essay on Places Journal
• David Bernstein's The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde (University of California Press, 2008)
• Andrew Kirk's Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (University Press of Kansas, 2007)
• Peter Richardson's No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead (St. Martin's Press, 2015)
• Walter Isaacson's The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 2015)
• Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Picador, 2008)
• Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, editors; West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
• John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Penguin, 2006)
• William Rorabaugh's American Hippies (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
• Bellevue Art Museum's exhibition Counter-Couture: Fashioning Identity in the American Counterculture (9/4/2015 - 1/10/2016)
• Walter Art Center's exhibition Hippie Modernism (10/24/2015 - 2/28/2016)
• Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place, a documentary film by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood
• The Life and Times of the Red Dog Saloon, a documentary film by Mary Works
• Trips Festival The Movie, a documentary film by Eric Christensen

The Trips Festival - 50 Year Celebration

On January 22, 2016 the California Historical Society celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the Trips Festival with an event at Obscura Digital featuring Trips Festival organizer Stewart Brand. At the event, Trips Festival participants, scholars, historians, artists, musicians and technologists, commemorated this landmark event that helped launch the San Francisco counterculture movement.

Grateful Dead scholars Peter Richardson, Dennis McNally and Nicholas Meriwether discussed the origins of the band 50 years to the day of their first major performance in San Francisco; Anthea M. Hartig, Ph.D. and Stewart Brand discussed the origins and impact of the Trips Festival; and the Dadaband performed hits from the Dead's early years.

Special thanks to: John and Lisa Pritzker Family Fund, Magnolia Brewery, the Magic Bus, and Obscura Digital.

From left, Nicholas Meriwether, Dennis McNally and Peter Richardson discuss the origins of the Grateful Dead at Obscura Digital on Friday, January 22, 2016 (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).

Video projection inside a geodesic dome created by Obscura Digital, Friday, January 22, 2016 (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).

Video projection on a billiards table created by Obscura Digital, Friday January 22, 2016 (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).\

From left, Nicholas Meriwether, Dennis McNally, Peter Richardson and Anthea Hartig, discuss the origins of the Grateful Dead at Obscura Digital on Friday, January 22, 2016 (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).

An interactive wall display at Obscura Digital, Friday, January 22, 2016 (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).

Setting the stage at Obscura Digital on January 22, 2016. (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).

The Trips Festival 50th Anniversary, January 22, 2016. (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).

Desmond Shea of Obscura Digital describes the creations on display during the Trips Festival 50th Anniversary Event at Obscura Digital on January 22, 2016 (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).

Steve LeSieur, President of the California Historical Society, welcomes guests to the 50th Anniversary of the Trips Festival event at Obscura Digital on January 22, 2016. (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).

Alexandra Hart shares her memories of the Trips Festival at the 50th Anniversary Event hosted by the California Historical Society at  Obscura Digital on January 22, 2016. (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).

Anthea Hartig and Stewart Brand watch as Alexandra Hart recalls her experience at the 1966 Trips Festival (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).

Stewart Brand and Anthea Hartig, Ph.D., discuss the significance and history of the Trips Festival during its 50th Anniversary event hosted by the California Historical Society at  Obscura Digital on January 22, 2016. (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).

The Dadaband performing hits by the Grateful Dead at the 50th Anniversary of the Trips Festival Event hosted by the California Historical Society at Obscura Digital on January 22, 2016 (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).

Stewart Brand climbs the geodesic dome at Obscura Digital (Adrian Mendoza for the California Historical Society).

The Trips Festival Explained

The Trips Festival was a transformative event that helped mark the beginning of the hippie counterculture movement in San Francisco. Organized by Stewart Brand, Ramon Sender, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and Bill Graham at the Longshoremen's Hall for January 21-23, 1966, the event brought together the city’s diverse underground arts scene, including rock music groups, experimental theater performers, dance companies, light show artists and film producers

Courtesy of http://rosamondpress.com/ 

Over 10,000 people, many taking LSD, attended the three-day event. Although the event included music, it was not billed as a concert per se. Rather, it was promoted as an immersive and participatory multi-media experience. Virtually the entire Bay Area’s avant-garde arts scene was involved, including the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Open Theater, the Dancer’s Workshop and the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Yet it was the performances by emerging rock music groups the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company which captured the attention of attendees. It was the first major performance by the Dead in San Francisco, and the combination of the band’s music, the hall’s sound system and the visually captivating light shows over the three days that created a format that would soon dominate the city’s music halls. Bill Graham took over the Fillmore Auditorium for good just two week later, and his first weekend was advertised as the “sights and sounds of the Trips Festival.” As Tom Wolfe says in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, “the Haight-Ashbury era began that weekend.” The world would never be the same.