Saw Dark Star this weekend with a friend who takes concert photographs. Dark Star Orchestra is a down-home deadhead band that recreates various Grateful Dead set lists. And there was me…washed in a sea of dancing, flailing freakin hippies. I have never been fish bowled like that in my life!!! And believe it or not, that was after we had all been searched vigorously by the Lowell cops upon entrance. Not sure where hippies hide their weed..but sweet Lord, I hope it’s in their dreads.  

Nevertheless, I must say that the earthy crunchy subgroup is the complete opposite of my illustrious friends the hipsters. Mothers and daughters, hippie couples as old as trees, baby brat hippies who can’t hold their liquor or their boyfriends, and the wide-eyed folks in still creased tie-dyed t-shirts and bright-new dreadlocks that barely even smell like patchouli, all entangled together in a living, breathing, smokey mass. These  people have taken community to a whole new level. They are practically sharing underwear..if hippies were actually wearing any.

My only criticism is that I’m not sure drugs and major psychedelic lighting are a good combination. Five mins into the set..this giant hippy came crashing to the ground. His hands still twitching in some sort of spastic pantomime. “Dude, look…he’s still playing air guitar,” one hippie dude remarked appreciatively.  True, I think that it was more likely an epileptic convulsion. But, hey, the whole crowd picked the guy up and gave him hippie emergency medical treatment, which basically consisted of big pats on the back, sloppy hugs, a plastic glass of half drunk warm beer, and another hit of weed. Not sure if that procedure is in the American Red Cross manual, but the dude looked pretty happy a few minutes later.

Just a question..is there some sort of inherited hippy gene? because the vast majority of that crowd was freakishly skinny and tall..At 5′4, I was the shortest person in there. Maybe it true that you are what you eat?

I had a great time diddling away the hours before the show in a bar playing Cosmic Wimpout http://cosmicwimpout.com/heck.html. A very fun hippy dice game. Learned from my friend that hippies love to carry stuff to do in their pockets. Little games, simple puzzles, hacky sacks..etc.  Pure genius..but after looking at the info on the Internet, I wonder if the rules only made sense at the time.

Only sketchy moment was in the parking lot. A guy in a Ed Hardy hoodie and neck tattoo slinked out of the shadows and hissed to my friend and I, ‘Hey, you want to buy some candy?”

Holy crap..the clown from Stephen King’s “It” lives under a bridge in Lowell and shops at Ed Hardy!!!..which actually makes perfect sense.

Umm..hell no. I’d rather drink out of the shit brown Lowell River that teems with some sort of strange foam.

The guys in the old grey van bought some candy, though. And incidentally were still strung out in the parking lot when we left.  

All in all, it was a great time. And just what I needed to ring in the holidays. At one point I announced rather loudly that,”I fricken love the smell of Hippies!!” to which my friend replied that this was the first time in the spanse of history that sentence had been uttered. But it’s true..Hippies smell like Christmas to me. Which probably explains a lot….