But the hippies. I vaguely remember those days. I was born in the early 1960s so missed most of that scene. By the time I came of age, most of those hippies were becoming yuppies.
I do remember back in the 1970s a group of shiftless, smelly people that used to hang out by the convenience store with their dungaree jackets, smoking those funny cigarettes with their long hair and all those beads. My father used to tell me that these were hippies and that if I ever turned out like them, that he would beat me senseless and toss me out of the house.
It was always black and white with my father. No gray area. But I turned out okay.
Funny about your dad. I was little in the early 70s and on a family trip to San Francisco my father pulled me into a weird store with lots of prisms and rainbows and glass, with only the hippie types in there. Then he told me all the things sold in that store were for using drugs. I was stunned because in school we learned drugs were bad but this looked really fun. Ah well, I’m alive. :)
I was 8 in 1970 which is about where my memory of the outside world begins. By 1973 I was aware of what was going on around me, and I remember that the guys with long hair tended to be mean bastards.
Looking back, the 1967 Summer of Love rapidly disintegrated, and took a permanent dark turn in, an example being the "Let it Bleed" attitude of Altamont in 1969. The release of Black Sabbath's first album in late 1969 marked the perfect coda for the decade. There was a big dark shape swimming around under the boat, which even I as a little kid was aware of.