Trips Festival
The Trips Festival, held in January 1966 in San Francisco, was a groundbreaking event that marked a confluence of alternative youth culture and psychedelic experiences. Organized by Stewart Brand and promoted by Bill Graham, the festival featured performances by iconic bands like the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company, alongside a diverse array of spectacles, including gymnastic displays and readings by notable poets. The atmosphere was lively and spontaneous, embodying the ethos of the growing counterculture movement.
Significantly, the festival not only popularized the use of LSD but also shifted the perception and commercial viability of rock music in the area. It paved the way for future rock festivals and elevated the status of local musicians, leading to a more structured music industry in San Francisco. The event garnered media attention, contributing to a newfound respectability for rock music in mainstream press. Overall, the Trips Festival can be seen as a cultural milestone that influenced the trajectory of music and youth culture in the late 1960s.
Subject Terms
Trips Festival
Date: January 21-23, 1966
The first concert and multimedia celebration open to the public. This music festival became closely identified with the hippie scene in 1960’s San Francisco.
Origins and History
In the mid-1960’s, a group of isolated activities coalesced to produce new entertainment activities for an alternative youth culture. Ken Kesey’s acid trips (events at which participants experimented with LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide) had been attracting attention; Chet Helms had been overseeing jam sessions of Big Brother and the Holding Company in the basement of a Victorian house on Page Street in San Francisco; and Bill Graham was coordinating a series of three concerts to raise money for the Mime Troupe, a group of street actors that he was managing. These elements all came together when, in January, 1966, Stewart Brand, a photographer and friend of some of Kesey’s associates, decided to celebrate the changing culture of San Francisco with a large event that would inaugurate a loose, free-form entertainment involving music, light shows, acrobatics, and the active participation of the audience. Graham organized the proceedings and secured the newly constructed Longshoremen’s Hall near Fisherman’s Wharf, which would accommodate three thousand people.
The Festival
For three nights, audiences danced to the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company and witnessed an array of spectacles. Gymnasts bounced about on a “stroboscopic trampoline”; Hell’s Angels oversaw a pinball machine; there were readings from the Beatles’ works and presentations by poets Allen Ginsberg and Marshall McLuhan; and members of Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, dressed in outlandish costumes, ran about the hall and performed as the Psychedelic Symphony. The activities were chaotic and largely impromptu, but the spirit was jovial, even ecstatic. Tom Wolfe described it as “an LSD experience without LSD.”
Impact
The event popularized LSD and the idea of taking hallucinogenic “trips” brought on by ingesting LSD and similar drugs. More important, the nature of popular music in San Francisco began to change. Rock bands up to this point did not join the local musicians union because their jam sessions and concerts did not generate much money, and the musicians did not take their commercial potential seriously but instead were motivated by the sheer pleasure of performing. When the musicians union discovered how successful the event had been, rock music became a significant business. Graham’s reputation as a rock promoter grew, and his fund-raising concerts at Fillmore auditorium quickly burgeoned into weekly concerts. When San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen mentioned the Trips Festival favorably, rock music suddenly gained a margin of respectability in the established press. Also, the festival was a precursor of larger rock festivals that would be held in the next few years.
Additional Information
Gene Anthony offers a detailed account of the festival and its origins in The Summer of Love: Haight-Ashbury at Its Highest; Wolfe places the incident in the context of Kesey’s adventures in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.