The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties

Hey now! I have a new book coming out May 13^th on Da Capo – available at all your better independent bookstores (I hope!). It’s called The Last Great Dream / How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties. Check it out!

Release Date: 5/13/2025
Pre-order the Book Now!

A Treasure Hunt

In 2016, Anthea Hartig of the California Historical Society (CHS) invited me to curate a photo exhibit celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the Summer of Love – every museum in the Bay Area was planning something. I pointed out that the real Summer of Love was the Fall of 1966 (pre-Be-In, pre media onslaught), but I was more than happy to do it. Every picture tells a story and it became a very fun treasure hunt.

About a month in, I suddenly realized – I miss the obvious quite frequently – that it was an ideal topic for a book. In fact, it rounded off my entire lifetime of studying bohemia in America since (mostly) WWII. I began with my bio of Jack Kerouac, Desolate Angel, and then moved on to my bio of the Grateful Dead, A Long Strange Trip. Then I went back and studied the relationship of white people and Black music from the 1850s to the 1960s…

Volume four would be the social context of hippie, its roots and sources. To me, the most surprising thing is that no one has really looked at where hippie came from, although god knows there have been enough books about the era.

Bohemia Beats

FWIW, I think my interest in bohemia came from the fact that I was in the boondocks of Maine and then upstate NY when all this interesting stuff was going on, and I pretty much missed it. So I’ve been scrambling to catch up on all that ever since.

The photo treasure hunt was a kick. For CHS, I started with the Beats, and found a couple of North Beach photographers, Harry Redl and Jerry Burchard, who had captured wonderful images of the Beats (Redl) and then lesser-known painters and figures around the California School of Fine Arts (in 1961 it became the SF Art Institute). One of those artists was a guy named Wally Hedrick, who taught classes on the weekends, and one of his students was a 16-year-old Mission kid named Jerry Garcia. One day, Jerry and his buddy asked Wally about the Beats, who were current hot news (this is 1958). Wally told them that they were Beat, and that they should go down to City Lights Bookstore and get the current best-seller, On the Road. It became Garcia’s bible, and he followed the bohemian code for the rest of his life. That connection really sums up the whole book.

Hippy Alternatives

Except that it’s also encyclopedic, so that I bring in Los Angeles modern artists, Greenwich Village poets and social activists, skiffle music, the Beatles, and lots more about the social changes in London. And rock ‘n’ roll, folk, civil rights, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement…and why the Haight was a cheap neighborhood ready for inhabitants who wanted to live on the fringes.

Let me just add that I think The Last Great Dream tracks something important because the social issues of the Haight-Ashbury, from an interest in the environment to organic food to yoga to the gentle male hippie archetype that led to a radical reorientation of gender all the way to transgender issues in 2025 – are still completely relevant.

The sixties never ended. The Haight didn’t lead to political change, but it sure did change the way people lived on a day-to-day basis. And in this truly weird year of 2025…it’s good to remember that there have always been alternatives.