The Trips Festival Movie (dir. Eric Christensen, 2007)
By Jonah Raskin
I FIRST HEARD about the Trips Festival from my gregarious pal Zach Stewart, a San Francisco architect, who talked about it as though it was some kind of holy grail. But I didn’t really know and understand what it was all about until I watched Eric Christensen’s brilliant and bodacious 63-minute documentary about it which was screened at the Counterculture Museum on Haight Street at the end of last month.
Peter Coyote provides the narration. Christensen, a long time TV producer, looked and sounded much older than his youthful self, when, as a high school senior, he attended the festival in the winter of 1966. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the three-day event, which took place at the San Francisco Longshoremen’s Hall, and one that preceded the Human Be-In of January ‘67 and the Summer of Love, also ‘67.
The Trips Festival might be considered the first ever major hippie event, though the word ‘hippie’ had not yet been attached in a significant way to the young men and women who flocked to San Francisco with flowers in their hair, as legend would have it. More often than not, the kids at the Trips Festival thought of themselves as ‘freaks’. They came together to have a look at one another, drop acid, which was not yet illegal, listen to Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, and watch the light show that was one of the first of its kind. They danced until they dropped.
In the documentary, Chet Helms (1942-2005) – who founded and managed Big Brother and the Holding Company – calls the Trips Festival ‘organized chaos’. On screen it looks that way. Christensen interviewed Helms shortly before he died. ‘Very few people who are in the film are alive today,’ Christensen told the audience at the museum. ‘It was good timing on my part.’ He added, ‘I made the film for young people.’
At the museum, most of the audience members were white guys like me in their 70s and 80s, though some young people attended the screening, including Cisco and Laeli who posed with the filmmaker, and who told me they were ‘anarchist intellectuals’. They’re cool kids and I’m sad I didn’t get to hang with them longer than I did and talk about anarchism, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll
With the Beat Museum in North Beach closed for retrofitting, the Counterculture Museum is, for the time being, the main San Francisco venue for Beat and hippie retrospectives. A show on the Diggers who operated in the Haight in the late Sixties – feeding the freaks and staging a hippie funeral – is up next. The hippies were, in the eyes of Diggers like Emmett Grogan, a phenomenon created by the mass media. He and the Digger crew wanted no part of it. So they declared the ‘Death of Hippie’ and carried a coffin through the streets.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, painter, publisher and bookstore proprietor, is a lone dissenting voice in the film. ‘I was totally straight,’ he says. He adds that ‘the Beats were cave men hippies’, that they were anti-war and anti-materialist and that unlike the hippies they were not about having fun. ‘Today more than ever before the world needs the Beats,’ he says.
Roland Jacopetti, a jazz pianist, radio personality and the author of Rescued Buildings, explains that the audience members at the Trips Festival were also the performers. Stewart Brand, now 87-years-old, and the co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue, observes that the people at the Trips Festival, wanted to ‘reinvent civilization’. These days Brand is the president of the non-profit Long Now Foundation.
Live rock entrepreneur Bill Graham, wanted the festival to run on time. He handled the sale of tickets, made the event a commercial success and, for his efforts ,was denounced as ‘a capitalist pig’, much to his annoyance.
After the Trips Festival, and after the Summer of Love, waves of hippies flocked to Lou Gottlieb’s ‘Morning Star’ commune in rural Sonoma County where they could smoke weed, play music loud and presumably enjoy sex under the sun, until the cops raided and made arrests. They were not meant for the mean streets of San Francisco nor were they meant for the rolling hills and redwood forests of northern California.
On camera, musicologist Gottleib offers the opinion that hippies were the ‘first wave of the technologically unemployable, and that in the future society of abundance computers will be doing all the work.’
Carolyn Garcia, Jerry’s ex-wife, known as ‘Mountain Girl’, is among the most down-to-earth individuals who Christensen interviewed for the film. ‘I wanted to be part of the trippy scene,’ she says. ‘I could handle the weirdness.’ Ken Kesey’s daughter, Sunshine, says, ‘If I had children I don’t know if I’d expose them to what I was exposed to.’
Allen Cohen, the founder and editor at the San Francisco Oracle – probably the most psychedelic of the underground newspapers in the US – calls the Trips Festival ‘a renaissance that will take hundreds of years to be realized’. Six decades later that renaissance is still a work-in-progress.
Looking back at himself at the time of Festival, Christensen remembers, ‘I was an emerging hippie. I wore long hair.’ He also inherited radical politics. His mother worked as a secretary for labor organizer Harry Bridges and his father enlisted workers in trade unions.
Over the years Christensen worked on the film little by little. A big breakthrough came in 2007 when he visited Merry Prankster and pioneering sound engineer Ken Babbs in Springfield, Oregon and interviewed Sunshine, Mountain Girl and Babbs himself. ‘My film has a life of its own,’ Christensen tells me. ‘The media loves anniversaries and the 60th is a big one for the Trips Festival.’
date: 2026-02-13 12:28:00
Keep reading