Albert Hofmann

Pink Floyd’s first public concert in London’s Gandalf's Garden store in Chelsea, London, late 1960s All Saints Church hall in Talbot Street, Notting Hill, 1966 customers needed to take care to keep their Trips Around the World balance when rummaging through the ex- travagant clothes. Barry Miles and John The psychedelically inspired youth movement Hopkins published the International Times. of the 1960s, which began in the USA and To inaugurate this first underground magazine, England, quickly spread to the European they gave a party at the legendary Roundhouse continent and soon thereafter around the in Chalk Farm on October 15, 1966, a world. In Holland, Amsterdam became a vacant locomotive hall, where Miles per- meeting place for international hippies with sonally handed out well-dosed sugar cubes its newly created cultural centers: The Melk- to the nearly two thousand visitors. weg in a former milk processing factory, The fourteen hour Technicolor Dream and the Paradiso in a former church, and as at Alexandra “Ally Pally” Palace on April the home of the Netherlands’ “oldest hippie,” 29, 1967 was the largest underground psy- Beat poet Simon Vinkenoog. chedelic event in London with nearly ten In West Germany, these years were marked thousand attending and comparable to the by the economic miracle of the 1950s, and Acid Test parties in the USA. All the bands increasing prosperity provided distraction that started their careers in the UFO Club from coming to terms with the Nazi past. played. Even Pink Floyd, who had played a Consequentially, the growing counterculture gig in Holland the previous evening, caught was increasingly politically motivated. The a ferry back to England and with their intro- antiauthoritarian opposition coalesced in duction to “Interstellar Overdrive,“ brought universities and found expression in a pow- the crowd out of their pleasant LSD-induced erful student movement. More light-hearted trance around three-thirty in the morning. but no less influential impulses came from “Then came the rebirth of energy, another the music scene. The Beatles began their day, and with the sun a burst of dancing career in Hamburg’s “Star Club.” In all the and enthusiasm.” (Miles 1997, 181) larger cities, young people flocked to rock

182 REVIEW COPY - NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION SYNERGETIC PRESS 1 3 /FUEL OF THE SIXTIES concerts in newly opened cellar clubs. The to one legend, live deep beneath the rock psychedelic music scene was extremely di- cliffs upon which stands the city of Bern. verse. Student and hippie communes caused Together with the musician Polo Hofer, they a stir as did artists with their Happenings. ran for a seat on the Bern city council in Several thousand Danish hippies founded 1971 and in 1979. At Golowin’s suggestion, the Freetown Christiania, an alternative they reintroduced Fasnacht (Carnival) to residential and working settlement Bern in 1979 after a gap of one hundred in Copenhagen in 1971. Based on self- and fifty years, because, as they remarked, regulation and democracy, it operates “the authorities in a city are only as good as independently of state authority. The motto their carnival is.”114 Although such achieve- of the nine hundred persons belonging to ments may seem inconsequential, it should the community today is: “Freedom, Love, not be overlooked that the tiny Alpine Harmony.” An essential principle country was no less psychedelic in Christiania is that drug con- in the 1960s than other Western sumption be done freely and countries. In any case, at the end self-responsibly. of 1971, Swiss authorities refused In Switzerland, the stories of to cooperate with a U.S. request folklorist Sergius Golowin con- to extradite Timothy Leary who cerning magical realism and “for- had fled after a minor marijuana bidden fairy tales” inspired a offense and spent nearly two years group of young, fanciful hippies. in Switzerland. This did not go un- They called themselves “Härdlütli” noticed by Albert Hofmann who as the “good folks” or nature expressed his satisfaction to Leary spirits are called who, according Gandalf's Garden magazine a few days later in a greeting card. cover, September 1968

Swiss airlines began offering a direct flight in 2010 from Zurich to San Francisco. The California city still is associated with freedom, love and flower children. To advertise the service, Swiss decorated an Airbus A-340 in the style of a VW bus of the hippie generation and used the song “If you’re going to San Francisco” in radio ads. The “Flower-Power Jet” flew for a year and a half and was also available as a model airplane.

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