Angriest Hippies Ever
The other night, Bob Weir and RatDog performed at Boarding House Park, home of the Lowell Summer Music series. As expected, the place was packed (over-packed, really) with a crowd made up primarily of that group loosely defined as “hippies”. Now, I don’t know what happened to the romantic vision of hippies that once flourished in the youth of the baby boomer generation, but the last thing I experienced from this large crowd was peace and love.
There were more assholes amongst this tie-dyed crowd than ponytails (probably physically as well as figuratively). To start my tale of patchouli-scented woe, I’d forgotten that there was a RatDog concert, but this can be forgiven because it wasn’t on the original schedule available on the Lowell Summer Music Series’ website and was apparently a last-minute addition (they don’t often do Sunday night concerts). As soon as I walked out my front door a little after 9:00pm, I heard the music and remembered seeing a little ad for the show online. My curiosity piqued, I wandered up the road to my local bar and took a look up the road at Boarding House Park. The place was, as I mentioned earlier, packed to overflowing. The crowd had spilled out into the street, amongst a pile of beer cans, plastic cups and assorted other trash. I also noticed that the back patio of my local bar was packed to overflowing as well, which is extraordinarily unusual for a Sunday night.
Inside the bar, there was a good crowd for a Sunday night, and the owner, Mike (hey, I told you I’m a regular), had obviously been prepared as he had extra staff on-hand working the bar and the door. I was served quickly and got my Magic Hat #9 in a real glass, despite the judicious use of plastic for the rest of the crowd (being a regular has bonuses beyond a hardened liver). As I sat down, the crowd quickly thinned. This was not due to my stench, as might be expected, but rather to the fact that there had been a break in the show earlier and people were slowly making there way back for the last set. Eventually it was back to normal levels and I could order some food and chat with the bartender. But before too much longer, the show was over and the waves of crowd returned.
The first thing I noticed about all these so-called hippies was that, with only very rare exceptions, they were all drinking Bud or Bud Light bottles. Call me nutty, but since when did the hippie subculture embrace the Anheuser-Busch company and their rice beer? I thought big corporations and mass-produced products were “bad”? Needless to say, I was very confused. So when the bar inevitably filled up again, a middle-aged lady sat down next to me, with her small party of tie-dye-attired gentlemen gathered around, and took a look at the beer menu. I’m not normally a social kind of guy (try to imagine) and I tend to adhere to the philosophy that striking up conversation with strangers is akin to standing on the bar and screaming “PAY ATTENTION TO ME”, and truth be told I’d rather be left alone by everyone except the bartender. But these are hippies, I thought to myself, and it would be nice of me to suggest a good beer to this woman who, judging by her mumbling over brand names, is not a connoisseur of my favorite elixir. Perhaps, thought I, she would enjoy a Magic Hat #9? As anyone who has ever drank a Magic Hat can attest to, the beer is practically hippie-in-a-bottle. Hell, it’s brewed in Vermont and every bottle cap has a cutesy saying printed on it, some of which explicitly reference the Grateful Dead. And the beer’s pretty damn good, too (I’m a fan of “Hocus Pocus” in Summer). How much friendlier a suggestion can you make to a hippie than to offer them a local-to-New-England beer that’s brewed by members of her own subculture? So I said, “you should try a Magic Hat #9, it’s a great beer and has a hint of apricot”. She looked at me and immediately turned her back on me while mumbling “there’s way too much going on at once here”. I could assume she’s high and unable to process too many streams of information, but then the man next to her looks over her shoulder at me then, when he thinks I have no peripheral vision, looks to her and rolls his eyes while laughing. Nice. That’s what I get for ignoring my philosophy. You can’t even really get mad at these people, because they’re so soft and squishy that getting in their face is like kicking a guinea pig; there’s no real challenge there. She ordered a Bud bottle, just for the record. Stupid hippie.
So I brush that off my shoulder and focus instead on just listening to the conversation of all the various representatives of San Francisco’s heyday. In between ordering Bud bottles and playing obscure Blues songs on the jukebox (good for the owner for having obscure Blues songs on a jukebox in a sports bar), the conversation focuses mostly on the various Dead concerts of the past, the retro Galaga/Frogger/Ms. Pacman arcade game and the finer points of how toasted they are (this is from about 5 different conversations, mind you…it’s like listening to a hive mind at work). But there were some standouts:
1) The pony-tail-sporting hippie who had to be at least 45 who was begging this girl near him to tell him that his hairline wasn’t receding (it was almost halfway back on his head). He just couldn’t handle losing anymore hair. I’d expect that from an aging frat boy, but a hippie?
2) The guy who spent 10 minutes arguing with the bouncer at the front door about having to wear a t-shirt to get inside (you remember the saying: no shirts, no shoes, no business), then, once he remembered his shirt was wrapped around his belt and got in, immediately started flipping out on his friends at the bar who had apparently ditched him. I learned a valuable lesson that night: irresponsible people don’t give two shits about their friends and these people couldn’t have cared less that this obviously-tripping guy was left alone in downtown Lowell while they were at a bar. They just talked him down and played it off as though, and I shit you not, it’s the way of the cosmos.
3) The guy in a well-worn tie-dye who kept calling this girl he was with a whore and a lesbian, causing loud arguments. The third time she slapped him and they were kicked out, along with their whole crew.
My favorite part of this is that the really “hard-core” hippies probably woke up the next day spouting a lot of self-righteous rubbish about how much they love their fellow human, their planet and how they will only ever patronize the stores of the little guys. Meanwhile, they absolutely destroyed boarding house park (talk about generating a lot of trash, including tons of plastic and glass that certainly weren’t recycled by these folks), left dozens and dozens of people unconscious on the ground to be picked up by the park rangers (I’m betting that most of the unconscious ones didn’t go to the show alone, and we have the earlier example of the forgotten tripper) and certainly didn’t support any of the available microbrews as they were all busy swilling rice.
The highlight of the entire experience for me would be the aforementioned well-worn-tie-dye guy, the one who kept calling his girl a whore and lesbian, who was kicked out of the bar. He and his friends wandered up the street and, less about two blocks away, got into a fight with a random guy (I passed the scene coming back from an ATM run). Tie-dye guy argued about something with this random guy (I honestly don’t know what caused the fight, but I’d passed random guy on my way to the ATM and he was silent and unobtrusive) before grabbing him by the throat and throwing him to the ground. If the multiple people in his group hadn’t grabbed him and pulled him back, I’m sure it would have escalated. At least one of the girls with him was crying; I guess there’s a little sensitivity to be found in the hippie violence.
So I know I can’t judge all of hippiedom by this one rather large sample, but all I know is that if this group of hippies is representative of the whole then I would prefer never to have Lowell host another RatDog show. Hell, no jam bands of any kind! Nothing that would encourage anyone who owns a VW microbus to cruise the street after the show. Hell, these so-called environmentalists trashed the park; these so-called humanitarians treated locals like shit; these so-called lovers-of-peace were fighting in the streets; and these so-called supporters of the little guy caused all kinds of problems for local businesses (much of which I’m sure will be addressed at the next city council meeting as they review the fallout).
I guess my only answer is that you can’t allow a person’s membership to a particular subculture define them anymore than a haircut, limp or scar. These people certainly didn’t act like the romantic vision of hippies. Instead, they acted like people. They may have had similar uniforms, but really they were just a bunch of mixed nuts. They may be the angriest hippies I’ve ever encountered (and I’m happy to number members of the hippie subculture among my friends), but they were just like regular folks otherwise. And just like most other folks, I’d prefer they stay away from me.
