Peace, Love And All The Hippie Ethic Returns With A New Generation

In a time when reality is virtual, politics is spin-doctored, and happiness is a pill called Prozac, why wouldn’t it be hard to find what is true and genuine?

But 19-year-old Erin Mason believes she found it one day amid the artisans, musicians and mystics at a Renaissance fair, and so she wrote a poem about it, and now she’s reading it aloud at the Rock-N-Java coffeehouse near downtown Dallas.

“Real is good, and real is pure, and real is beautiful, and real is sexy, and real brings out the child in me, and real helps me sing, and real frees me out of these ugly locked-up black cages, and real … and real … and real … and real … and real quenches me.”

The crowd of poets and poetry fans erupts into appreciative applause. Erin smiles shyly, mouths a silent “thank you,” and yields the precarious, homemade soapbox to the next poet who has signed up for this evening.

Growing up in Mesquite, Texas, land of 12-packs and pickup trucks, Erin says she felt out of her element.

But since graduating from high school and going to acting school, she has been turned on to Renaissance fairs and poetry reading and drum circles. She has found a mellow, free-form community driven by its own youth, creativity and personal quest for truth, love and contentment.

If that description should sound familiar to the parents of Erin’s generation, it’s no wonder. Thirty years ago, millions of young Americans were moving in the same rhythm, turning a season into “the Summer of Love” and evolving into what came to be known as hippies.

That was then and this is now, and the world has changed dramatically in the past three decades. Yet the similarities between the Children of the ‘60s and these under-25 “grandchildren” are undeniable.

They look the same. (Male: long hair and maybe a beard, rock band or tie-dye T-shirts, and jewelry made of silver or macrame. Female: long hair and gauzy, loosely fitting “sack” dresses, silver or macrame jewelry, Birkenstocks or bare feet and a dab or two of patchouli oil.)

They eat the same tofu and trail mix. They burn the same incense.

They decorate their walls and skin with chicken-foot-in-a-circle peace signs.

They read Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey and Anais Nin. They watch “Easy Rider,” “Woodstock” and “The Graduate.” They listen to the ‘60s troika of the tragically dead: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison of the Doors.

If they’re into an illegal drug, it’s usually marijuana. If they’re into religion, it’s usually of the “great spirit in the sky” variety.

Yet despite all this resemblance, members of this new generation say they are far more a sequel to the ‘60s than a remake. As they emulate the styles of a 30-year-old counterculture, they believe they are pursuing their own contemporary identity and individuality.

“I can say, yeah, I’m a hippie,” says Todd Campbell, a 25-year-old long-haired musician who works at Whole Foods supermarket in Richardson, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. “Awhile back I’d be tired of sticking out in the crowd, but now I think, man, I don’t care what everyone else thinks. I don’t need a lot of acceptance to feel good about myself.”

The hippie ways have filtered into the consciousness of this new generation through a variety of sources.

For some, parents - either their own or those of their friends - participated in some aspect of the ‘60s counterculture. For others, a chance discovery or a recommendation of a book, movie or musical group has introduced them to the decade.

“My parents, I’m sure, had a lot to do with it,” says Katie Reese. An 18-year-old art student, she has been a regular for about a year at the weekly “psychedelic drum circle” near Southern Methodist University.

Every Wednesday night, scores of drummers gather at a bar to pound out a beat for two or three hours. Katie is among the participants who dance in the middle of the circle.

“My mom and I are kindred spirits, besides the regular mother-daughter way,” she says, explaining the roots of her neo-hippie leanings. “She was kind of a Dallas hippie. … She talks about it a lot.

“She wasn’t as wild as a lot of people. She didn’t cross the line where wild becomes destructive. She was sort of on the front side of wild.”

Katie remembers discovering the hippie culture while she was in middle school, and as with many others of her generation, she grieved that she missed out on all the coolness of the era.

“I used to idealize them a lot,” says Katie, who is starting her freshman year at New York University this fall. “I guess I was following the movies and magazine image.”

Her high school history classes, however, set her straight about the ‘60s - the decade for which the word “turbulent” seems to have been invented. She learned about the assassinations, the racial violence, the horror of Vietnam. Her longing, she says, faded quickly.

That tumultuous backdrop will forever separate the ‘60s hippies from any future generation they might inspire, says Alan Bisbort, co-author of the soon-to-be-released book, “Groovy, Man: Tripping Through the Psychedelic Years.”

Butting up against the unpopular war and outrageous civil rights abuses, he says, shaped the hippies into a potent social force.

But without such clear-cut rallying points, the neo-hippie culture is far less a movement than a lifestyle.

Or as J. “J-Bone Cro” Scott Sutton, a 29-year-old Plano, Texas, record-store owner, defines it: “It’s a groove. It’s a deep, deep groove.”

Sutton’s shop, Bone Daddy’s, caters to a regular hippie-esque clientele, offering not only the ‘60s classic rock but also an array of more contemporary experimental bands that have caught their ears: Phish, Leftover Salmon, Moe and Widespread Panic, among them.

Phish, made up of four Vermont musicians who have been playing together since the mid-‘80s, has turned into a bona fide ‘90s phenomenon, in large part because of an intensely loyal following of neo-hippies. As the Dead-heads did for the Grateful Dead, thousands of Phish disciples (yes, “Phish-heads”) travel like vagabonds from city to city during the band’s tours.

A passion for alternative music and for travel is common among both the ‘60s and the ‘90s versions of this lifestyle, says Bisbort, the author of “Groovy, Man.”

Listening to recorded music, he says, “is a very private and liberating experience. You go to your room, spend time with people you admire. You open new boundaries in the way you look at the world.”

Travel, too, can offer a similar sensation.

“I don’t want to be cliched about it,” Bisbort says, “but there’s something exciting about that moment when you say, ‘Yes, I can actually do this. I can go off on my own path and have my adventure.”’ But the lack of passion for yet another activity - political involvement - is where the new and the old waves part company, says Bisbort.

Granted, today’s hippies may talk of their concern for the rain forests or their disgust over Washington, but their hearts aren’t on fire over any set of social issues.

And without the politics, the author says, the lifestyle isn’t really anchored to any particular era.

“The hippie ethic, the psychedelic era - whatever you want to call it - is not something peculiar to the 1960s,” he says. “William Blake, Aldous Huxley, Henry Thoreau - they were all ‘hippies.’ It’s all the same idea - of quest, of spiritual seeking. It’s a rite of passage.”