Hippie heaven: the liberating legacy of those "hideous, spotty little teenagers".

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Book Review

Strolling through Haight-Ashbury in 1967, it was George Harrison--the quiet Beatle, for God's sake, and the one with the sitar!--who delivered one of the most caustic putdowns of hippies ever. "Somehow I expected them all to own their own little shops. I expected them to all be nice and clean and friendly and happy," said the future composer of "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)," sounding more like Spiro Agnew than Ravi Shankar for a moment. Rather than love children he could, well, love, Harrison encountered what he called "hideous, spotty little teenagers" who "were all terribly dirty and scruffy."

You'll find that anecdote, and many more like it, in Hippie, a spectacularly designed (by Grant Scott) coffee table book from Sterling Publishing that is every bit as captivating, colorful, and self-congratulatory as the social type it describes. "Call them freaks, the underground, the counterculture, flower children or hippies," writes Barry Miles in characteristic prose, they "transformed life in the West as we knew it, introducing a spirit of freedom, of hope, of happiness, of change and of revolution." As a way-late baby boomer (born in 1963) whose affinities run more to the Sex Pistols than to the Summer of Love, I hate to admit that he has a point. Certainly, personal identity was never the same after the flower children blossomed en masse during the '60s.

Miles focuses on the years 1965 to 1971, grokking the immense variety of hippies with an obsessive and encyclopedic attention to detail that has scarcely been seen in American letters since Ishmael's musings on sea creatures in Moby Dick. When's the last time, for instance, you thought about the Chocolate Watch Band, the underappreciated garage group that appeared in the instant anti-hippie 1967 camp classic Riot on Sunset Strip? Or pondered the origins of the phrase "the Love Generation" (a term coined by the San Francisco chief of police, who after listening to young merchants discourse on the benefits of drug use, remarked, "You're sort of the Love Generation, aren't you?")? Or recalled that Valerie Solanas, the leader (and only member) of the Society for Cutting Up Men who became famous for shooting Andy Warhol, was an ardent individualist? (In her SCUM manifesto, she lamented, "Traditionalists say the basic unit of 'society' is the family; 'hippies' say the tribe; no one says the...