(Credits: Bent Rej)
Sat 7 February 2026 2:00, UK
When we think of the music which was made in the 1960s and ‘70s, we think of the psychedelic offerings by bands like The Beatles, we think of hippies, we think of peace, and we think of love.
For a lot of people, this was a reality. The summer of love took bloom, and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band topped the charts. The air was filled with colour, Woodstock was around the corner, and a lot of the musical landscape was flooded with minds who genuinely thought a well-placed harmony would lead to world peace.
Of course, a lot of artists got on board with the movement, but then you have plenty of others who, despite being considered an intrinsic part of it, despised all things hippy. The Who are a great example. The band headlined Woodstock and delivered one of the most memorable sets at the iconic festival, and yet they hated it and the people there so much that they wrote a song about it – ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’.
“All those hippies wandering about thinking the world was going to be different from that day,” said Townshend when discussing the track, “As a cynical English arsehole I walked through it all and felt like spitting on the lot of them, and shaking them and trying to make them realise that nothing had changed and nothing was going to change.”
It’s ironic that a band who championed such a huge part of the hippy movement actively despised it. The same can be said for Frank Zappa, as when he released his psychedelic offering in the ‘60s, We’re Only In It for the Money, it became the go-to record for hippies around the globe. They truly thought that the avant-garde mastermind had tapped into something, but a lot of what he was saying on the album was ironic.
There were a lot of things about the hippy movement that Zappa hated. One of them was the glorification of drug use, as the Mother of Invention was famously teetotal and didn’t dabble any further than the occasional cigarette. He hated the way that hippies lived, how loose their morals were and the fact that a lot of them smelt bad. If you think I’m pulling all of this out of thin air, then listen to his track from the album ‘Who Needs the Peace Corps’, where the lyrics clearly poke fun at the hippy movement.
Here, he says, “I’m hippy and I’m trippy / I’m a gypsy on my own / I’ll stay a week and get the crabs / And take a bus back home.”
This wasn’t the only line from the song which gave listeners insight into how Zappa felt, as the voice-over from the song’s very own hippy at the end of the track also makes his feelings evident. “I will ask the Chamber of Commerce how to get to Haight Street, and smoke an awful lot of dope,” he says, “I will wander around barefoot. I will have a psychedelic gleam in my eye at all times.”
Despite the fact that the album poked fun at hippies and their lifestyles, a lot of them still listened to it, as they had a good enough sense of humour that they could appreciate some of the ridiculousness that Zappa had highlighted, and not to mention, this was released during a period where psychedelic music was well and truly on the rise, and Zappa delivered an example of excellence within the genre.
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