Acclaimed rock photographer documents 35 years of ‘hippie chicks’ in music

By Quentin Young

Jam band musicians enjoy an intensity of loyalty that’s unique among music genres. Many of their biggest fans follow them not just song to song on record but city to city on tour, and the associated subculture penetrates deeper into fans’ lives than it does with fans of punk, hip hop or indie music. The Grateful Dead probably played more shows where engagements were proposed than any other band in history.

This special quality is at the heart of photographer Jay Blakesberg’s new coffee table book “Hippie Chick,” whose subtitle, in a nod to that trait, is “A Tale of Love, Devotion & Surrender.” The book’s visual subject is the female form of jam band fandom.

Blakesberg’s work often appears in top photographic venues, such as Rolling Stone, Guitar Player and Relix magazines. He’s the artist behind an iconic picture of Jerry Garcia peering at the viewer over his glasses. Blakesberg is not limited to the world of hippies and jambands — he has shot memorable photos of Soundgarden, Tom Waits, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and others — but it was the Grateful Dead that first inspired him to show up with a camera to concerts, and the shows and festivals inhabited by such jammers as Phish, moe. and The String Cheese Incident are where his camera has made its most detailed observations.

“Hippie Chick” draws from 35 years of these photographic expeditions.

Blakesberg is based in San Francisco, but he often finds himself working in Colorado, where there is a high incidence of jam band activity, not to mention the state’s dense population of hippie chicks. Many photos in “Hippie Chick” were captured at Colorado venues, including The Ogden Theatre in Denver, Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison and The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, where Colorado jammers Leftover Salmon were playing.

Blakesberg is scheduled to return to Colorado on Jan. 23 for a public appearance in Boulder. He’ll discuss his photographic career in what he described as an “engaging slideshow storytelling experience” that starts at noon at the Boulder Theater. Then local band The Drunken Hearts will take the stage for more than an hour while Blakesberg signs copies of “Hippie Chick.”

He notes that the event coincides with a two nights of local shows by moe., whose members Blakesberg counts as friends. Moe. will perform Jan. 22 at Boulder Theater and Jan. 23 at The Ogden.

The modern hippie — the flower power, make-love-not-war species that is inextricably tied to rock ‘n’ roll — was a successor to the beats of the 1950s. Blakesberg dates the type to 1965 and places its birth in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. While the hippie culture has evolved, it remains remarkably unchanged in important ways after five decades. Its bohemian, gypsy-ready fashions are stubbornly resistant to updates, and its core tastes in music are surprisingly steady (though Blakesberg says the boundaries of hippie tastes are exceptionally elastic and have come to embrace hip hop and EDM). Members of the Grateful Dead continue to draw audiences in the tens of thousands.

Blakesberg approaches hippie chicks as a group that warrants anthropological attention.

“We’re 50 years into this trip, so to speak, into this adventure, into this alternative counterculture that started with the hippies,” he said during a phone interview earlier this month. “It is valid to go out and actually study this tribe.”

He started making his own field observations in 1980, which means, as he put it, that he’s “been photographing the hippie movement for 35 of the 50 years that it existed.” One thing he has noticed is that, though every genre of music has women who love it, hippie chicks are in a class by themselves.

“These are people who will go and wait on line all day long so they can get a spot in front of the rail, and not only will they do that at one show they’ll do it at 10 shows on a tour,” he said. “These are people who are devoted enough to travel five hours by car to go and see a show and get up the next day and travel five hours again and go to another show and five hours again, and so on and so forth.”

He believes such devotion derives partly from the jam band practice of playing a different set every show and playing the same song differently every time. No two concerts are ever alike.

Hippie chicks seem capable of unusually strong musical connections at concerts, Blakesberg said. When they’re dancing, cell phones are put away, drinks are put down, and they enter a state of rapture.

“Those are people who are surrendering to the moment,” Blakesberg said. “In general, they’re completely engrossed and consumed in the music.”

The earliest photos in “Hippie Chick” include black and white shots taken at Dead shows. A striking difference between these and newer images is the appearance — by Blakesberg’s estimation 10-15 years ago — of the hula hoop, an increasingly popular hippie chick dance accessory.

“All of my old Deadhead photos, there are no hula hoopers,” Blakesberg said. “I don’t know when it came in, but it is a phenomenon and I love it, and I think it’s groovy and I think it’s artful, I think it’s a great dance move, it’s sexy. I love the whole hula hoop phenomenon and I love photographing it.”

Asked if he thought The String Cheese Incident, a nationally popular Colorado jam band that is sometimes represented by the silhouette of a hula hooper, had anything to do with the phenomenon, he said he didn’t know. But, he added, “It’s very possible.”

The book benefits from contributions supplied by two famous hippie chicks — Grace Slick provided a feisty foreword and Grace Potter an inspirational afterword. Working hippie chick Edith Johnson, who’s known on the tour circuit as Festival Girl, wrote the introduction and several essays for the book. But the vast majority of page space is devoted to Blakesberg’s photos.

“Hippie Chick” contains 445 images, and almost every one shows a woman enjoying a concert (always enjoying — there are no bad shows here), and, in many cases, this means she’s dancing hard.

The focus is exceptionally narrow. Blakesberg might have brought an anthropological spirit to the project, but the reader will learn virtually nothing about the tribe’s habitat, pre-show rituals, how members wind down, on-the-road travel experiences, the artists who inspire the women, or anything about how they spend their time when they’re not dancing or gazing adoringly toward the stage.

Since most of the subjects are young, and since hippie chicks continue to reflect the 1960s free-love principle in what they wear, or don’t wear, “Hippie Chick” sometimes feels uncomfortably like petrulli porn. But if Blakesberg’s intent was to capture his subjects in moments that by tribe standards represent the highest attainment, he has returned from the wilds with documentation that couldn’t be more thorough.

Blakesberg is a confirmed member of the guy faction of hippiedom. He saw his first Dead show at age 15 in 1977, which some fans of the band consider its peak, and within several years he had embraced the band and the lifestyle that came with following it.

“I was influenced by psychedelic drugs and the Grateful Dead and the community that surrounded it,” Blakesberg said. “I’m not afraid to say it: Two of the most important things in my life have been LSD and the Grateful Dead, because those have been certainly big catalysts and life-changing things for me in my experience in my trip, in terms of getting me from where I was as a 15-year-old kid to where I am now as a 54-year-old adult.”

At first, the family of deadheads he joined was relatively close-knit.

“When I was following the Grateful Dead in 1980 there was maybe 100 people that were on tour, traveling across country, going from show to show,” he said. Later in the decade, the family expanded immensely, especially after the song and MTV video for “Touch of Grey” came out in 1987. “And, boom, all of a sudden there was 5,000 people in a caravan going cross country following the Grateful Dead.”

The lifestyle came with serious costs for Blakesberg. When he was 20 he was arrested “with a bunch of LSD” and spent almost a year behind bars, he said. He plans to incorporate that and his other can’t-make-this-stuff-up experiences into a writing project he’s started working on.

“I’m just trying to put a bunch of stories together from when I was in high school and right after high school, you know, loosely based on my life,” Blakesberg said.

Such stories illustrate a point he tries to make during public appearances, such as the one he plans in Boulder. He encourages audiences to collect experiences, which is part of the essence of living as a hippie chick.

“It’s not just about birth, school, work, death,” he said. “There’s all this other stuff in between, but you’ve got to create those experiences for yourself, you’ve got to put yourself out there.

“People are super fascinating on this planet. You’ve got to meet them and talk to them, and so if you decide you want to go on a Phish tour or moe. tour or Dead tour or whatever it is, you’re going to have really, really super unique experiences. We are the sum of our experiences, and so unless you create those experiences for yourself, you’re going to end up having kind of a bland, boring life.

“And who wants that?”

Quentin Young: quentin@dailycamera.com and twitter.com/qpyoungnews