Two Classes of Hippies Emerge

Social change of the kind that occurred in the ‘60s, in particular the hippie phenomena, began in the middle and upper-middle classes. The working class, at least in the mid-sixties, still dressed and acted the way adolescents did in the ‘50s. For the working class, greased-back hair on boys and young men and leather jackets was the latest style.

The Greasers, as they were called, were the intolerants. They were the people who thought hippie boys looked like girls and liked to beat them up, throw rocks or bricks at them, scream epithets and just generally harass them. In the ‘80s, the working class caught up with the styles of the ‘60s and began to affect the hair styles and dress of the hippies in the ‘60s as the middle and upper-middle classes moved on to the business attire seen in movies starring Michael Douglas as a Wall Street broker. About the only people who look like hippies today in Boulder are the transients and street people.

Perhaps the sign of the end of the hippie era was when John Lennon appeared on an album cover with a shaved head. Maybe it was the Stones’ concert that turned deadly at Altamont, California or when the Manson Family killed Sharon Tate. The communes were destroyed by a new mobile and violent class of pseudo-hippie marked by a hedonistic lifestyle. Free love seemed to morph into rape, drug overdoses and bad trips.

Of course, there were the Up With People concerts and attempts to spread Christianity through the medium of rock and roll music. Conservative and religious groups staged record burnings and Richard Nixon concocted an enemies list of people, including John Lennon of the Beatles, and even tried to get Lennon deported. Then there was the bizarre meeting between Nixon and Elvis Presley where Presley was given a badge by the President.

We, as a nation, had gone from listening to Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit to the Reagan era, where drinking booze and being Republican came back into fashion, perhaps as a result of the end of the Draft and the war. Youth wanted to make money, not change the world. — S. Byron Gassaway

Karen

Karen moved to Boulder in 1967 to go to college. She majored in philosophy at CU and went to graduate school until 1982. She had originally come to Boulder after graduating from high school in Colorado Springs.

You majored in philosophy and that was a popular major in the ‘60s. Would you describe yourself as having been a flower child?

Yes, I was. I was a hippie in those days. I’m not a hippie now.

Was that part of the reason you came to Boulder?

Well, I suppose to some extent I came here to get an education, which was sort of the un-hippie thing to do. But most young people were hippies at that time. At least everyone I knew at that time. I had come from the Broadmore in Colorado Springs, and there were a lot of young people there. Most of them were fairly affluent and didn’t worry about too many things. If you had money and did what you liked, you might have been a hippie.

 

Did your parents pay for your education?

(They paid for) a good proportion of it. I went on for years in graduate school too, and I paid for that. But they paid for the initial period, until I graduated from college in about 1971, with a Bachelor’s degree at graduation.

Boulder was a small town – much smaller than it is now. I think it was being hit very quick by a change that was going on amongst young people, and hippies sort of represented that at that time. It was a conservative, but rather open community at the same time.

When I came here, I noticed that within a year or two after I had moved here to go to college, the hippie lifestyle was in full swing, all of a sudden, in the Boulder community. And the people were handling it fairly well.

I don’t think there were any hippies, hardly, that had lived here. They had all come from somewhere else. It became a place around which they congregated. So Boulder was small and was going through a lot of changes because of that influx of young people into town . . . more than the arrival of the students would normally bring. And it probably responded better than many communities had at that time.

Every university town has people who aren’t students who are attracted around the campus. What percentage of hippies were non-students?

Most of them. There were a lot of hip people in those days that I either lived with or hung out with. I was usually living with one or two people who were going to college. There weren’t that many that were going to college.

How much did IBM moving here impact Boulder? Do you remember that?

No, I don’t. I remember that IBM was here. I don’t remember when they moved here. It was very anti-phenomenal what happened with IBM. I don’t think I ever heard them mentioned. That was just another culture, so to speak. Cultures overlay each other – that was one of them. They were a corporate kind of culture . . . a lot of very straight kind of people whose values were certainly questioned. I had almost no contact with them or any knowledge (about them).

Did you read The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castenada at the time?

I read Castaneda’s books at that time. I wasn’t terribly impressed with them. I felt that they were part of the culture at the time. They were part of the phenomenon that was emerging. I wasn’t terribly impressed. I thought they were kind of loose-minded. I was into critical thought. I felt they were possibly even phony.

I mean, I liked anybody that extolled the virtues of peyote and various drugs, because at that time I believed that they were very important. But I was not very sold on Carlos Castaneda.

It seemed to be part of that era. It seemed everybody read the Hobbits.

Sure. Everybody read those various things. I was associated with and studied Buddhism very carefully. We studied Oriental thought. We studied Christian mysticism, but I would say we were kind of academic . . . sort of scholarly oriented. And I read the Castaneda books and so did people I knew, but they didn’t play a very large part of our personal mythologies.

You mentioned peyote. Why don’t we discuss that? During that era, drugs had such an impact on our culture.

Drugs were a big part of our lives during those days. We probably spent most of our energy around drugs. Peyote was very interesting. We, a group of us, brought back a Volkswagen bus filled to the windows with peyote buttons one year from the Rio Grande Valley on the Texas-Mexico border.

Peyote became a big part of our life for about a year, until we had sold or used up all that. We had a very large amount of it . . . maybe three or four hundred pounds of it. (It was) a tremendous amount. We were interested in drugs for spiritual experience. As the years passed, I noticed a strong cleavage developed in Boulder between people who were interested in drugs in what I considered to be a very serious way, as a sort of spiritual access, and people who had a more hedonistic orientation toward drugs, just kind of fun and partying. I was not in the latter group and the latter group became a more street-oriented kind of people that the former began to view, in time, as a different class of hippie. Not the real one, but the one that lacked the self-discipline or ability to do anything else. They would just hang out on the street.

So there began to be a bit of “classness” that went on there. There would occasionally be some overlap at one event or another, but there wasn’t a lot of fruitful commingling between those two kinds of hippies in Boulder.

For people who were interested in a spiritual experience, it was like an absolute Mecca, like no place else in the country . . . Not like Boston, not like L.A.. Boulder was authentic in a way that neither one of them were . . . possibly because of a smaller population. It was a smaller town (and) it was a much more focused affair. Increasingly, within a group of say 150 or 250 people, everybody knew each other and they knew what the meaning of each other’s lives were in some sense. The spiritual sense, that is.

Peyote was an interesting drug. Peyote has an awful lot of liabilities. I know a number of us go involved with a large group of people down in New Mexico in the Santa Fe – Taos area. We participated in certain Indian peyote ceremonies. But after a certain length of time you have to recognize that all that is anthropology, so to speak. You have a cultural background of your own that you do not escape.

It was like Jung said in the introduction to one of the Tibetan books that he wrote – it becomes really phony to practice yoga on Park Avenue because it’s just this little fragment of another culture that’s never going to be a part of your organic life in the long-term sense. Long-term being decade after decade. You’ll never find reinforcement in the cultural institutions. You can’t live outside of your mainstream culture for very long like that.

So we experimented with a lot of those various things, extremely extensively. I would say hundreds of Acid trips; fifty to a hundred peyote trips; always in a group. There were always six or seven of us together. You changed a partner or two here and there over the years, but overall, there was a strong continuity. And I came to view that as the center of meaning of Boulder and what was happening with the hippies here.

There were a lot of members of straight society: Robert McFarland. He’s a musician. And various people. One of the priests, I’ve forgotten his name right off hand. These people and I had a lot of interactions. We would take people off the street that were really out of touch and they would live in our houses for awhile. We would kind of engage in a psychedelic, hippie psychotherapy of some kind or another.

After awhile, we would recognize the kind of truths that are easy to recognize at an older age . . . that this person, nothing happened to him, they don’t have a problem. They’re just going to misuse drugs, so go ahead and let them misuse drugs. They’re not into in-depth exploration. But drugs were the central vehicle for spiritual exploration . . . Those years being until the late ‘70s – about a decade.

By then, the hippie phenomena was beginning to leave our culture because the culture, as a whole, was transferring to a different stage and it became kind of like a hippie pretending to be a Beatnik after the Beatnik era had passed. It’s gone. When history is gone – it’s gone.

In Boulder today, you can find many individuals who call themselves hippies, I’m sure. To an extent, they live an imitation of a time that is no longer here, and in another sense they participate in that time without the full impulse of that going on. It’s on a down swing. It’s replaced by other things — Yuppies and stuff like that. You can’t be a hippie in 1990. It was a different time in history. You couldn’t be a victim of the Great Depression in 1960.

Can you tell me about your experimentation with drugs in the ‘60s?

We progressively experimented with a lot of drugs. We had a lot of peyote experiences, but quickly learned by conjecture, possibly, that the reason peyote had been so instrumental in Indian cultures was because it was what they had. It was what they knew about. It was the best that was available. And it was quite profound.

But modern individuals, living in this century, didn’t need to waste their time with peyote where there were things like LSD and STP around. You didn’t have to get sick. You didn’t have to worry about so many things. You didn’t have to worry about strychnine poisoning. You could access a much purer psychedelic experience with a drug like STP, which would last like eighteen to thirty hours . . . and it would be a much more profound experience than peyote.

So, while we investigated the drugs like peyote and psilocybin mushrooms and so on, we rapidly moved on to the technological drugs that were available – STP and so on. Experiences for us would frequently, and I say us because so much of the experience during that decade was always an us experience and was rarely an individual sort of thing, I don’t think. There were no more than five or ten times that I took drugs alone. There was just no meaning to doing it alone.

Usually, we would get into the meditative structure. We use the Tibetan Book of the Dead quite a bit for psychedelic experiences. We’d all read it profusely, extensively, and it was an excellent model for the ego-loss that went on during a psychedelic experience. We would fast for two or three days before taking the drug, usually. We’d stay close together and have no contact with the outside world – or very, very minimal. We would exchange a lot of personal expectations and feelings about what this was going to be like.

Was this in the city?

It took place in various houses. We usually stayed pretty close to houses, although there were experiences in houses in the woods and we would eventually end up going outside. Set and setting being a very essential aspect of the psychedelic experience – as Timothy Leary outlined in his book The Psychedelic Experience, which was another useful manual for us. Then we would meditate together quite a bit during this preparatory period. And then we would finally take the drugs.

Frequently we would spend six or eight hours with nobody leaving the room, just meditating and engaging in various forms of telepathic experiences that were then available. Or just trans-physical experiences that are hard to categorize.

I was trained as a philosopher and got fairly analytical about it, and there were a couple of people I was with who had similar proclivities. The experiences for us were almost never hedonistic, although they were always ecstatic. We would take a model, like The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary or The Tibetan Book of the Dead and let that structure our experience during the whole time, because of the suggestive power of it. You’d go into an experience, (for example) going to a rock concert looking for fun, and that frame would tend to structure your whole experience during that time. The frame that you left before the drug started to affect you would be an all-determining influence during that time.

Most of our time was spent meditating, seeking deeper meditative experiences as were outlined in mostly Buddhist texts. There’s a lot of quick ego-loss at the beginning. When you don’t fight it, it goes quickly, a lot of egolessness awareness, and then dwelling within that awareness and experiencing the phenomenon that were associated with it naturally and not to attempt to impute phenomenon . . . To see the true phenomena itself without consciousness; without ego; without self; without thought (and) without intention, but in the Zen Buddhist sense of seeing one’s original mind, before you were born.

The hours would pass rapidly, (and) in some cases, days, if it was an STP-type drug. I suppose we would then learn a lot about spiritual dwelling and those kinds of values. They influence our non-drug-induced experience(s) for years after. In my case, it still influences my experience now. I’m 39. I was in my early twenties then – so it’s quite some time later.

Boulder acted as a catalytic community because it had an open-minded mindset to it that allowed it to happen. A lot of individuals went through profound self-investigative experiences in those days, and eventually set of values that carried them past that social label (of) hippie. The values carried them out of that as naturally as an arrow would carry itself out of a bow.

Were you familiar with the bar a few doors west of Tom’s Tavern called Shannon’s?

It was mixture of getting drunk and taking drugs. People had come to Boulder because they saw something they didn’t comprehend as an opportunity to be who they were, and they didn’t know that was what they were after. It had a spiritual power to it that people mythologized a lot during those days. It really had a strong surge of power and people would come from all over the country and would stratify themselves all about town from the street level to a more spiritual level. I don’t know, maybe that’s too presumptuous to talk about that. It was serious, active, exciting, and constantly stimulating to the people who were involved . . . meeting this person and talking to that person and what were their thoughts?

Everybody was growing all the time and you were growing faster than you could appreciate. And, of course, that’s exactly what you wanted. Drugs were merely a catalyst along that line. That’s not the case today, of course.

We were lucky to be alive then, because it is not reduplicatable. It was just one of those events that happens at a certain point in history because of a certain concatenation of energies that transcend everybody involved. Nobody had any control over it.

Copyright 2026   S. Byron Gassaway