Angels & Hippies

In the 1960’s The Angels were brought into contact with a new group, the Hippies. Though these two groups were radically different in terms of their beliefs, society associated them together because of their non-conformist images. The hippies were known for their drug usage, parties, and resistance to authority and the Hell’s Angels were associated with those same things. So even though the anarchist, violent Hell’s Angels had a very different worldview than the communist, peaceful hippies, they were sometimes grouped together in an odd confederation which even the Angels believed in for a time.

The Hell’s Angels’ association with the hippies started in the mid-60’s when a group of Angels was invited to LSD enthusiast Ken Kesey’s remote property in La Honda, California. For a time, La Honda was like heaven for the Angels: a place where they could party and drink and do drugs any time they wanted without having to worry about the police kicking them out. However, the Angels were not entirely comfortable with the hippies they came into contact with there. The two groups were simply too different; they spoke different languages. This is perfectly exemplified by Allen Ginsburg’s speech to the Angels which consisted of a long free-verse poem about peace and cooperation against the oppressive government, and thus the war. Ginsburg’s words, however poetic, did not appeal to the Angels who weren’t exactly sure what to make of him.

Instead, the Angels turned on the Hippies over the issue of the Vietnam War. The Angels didn’t entirely understand the politics behind the war, but did understand that the Hippies were speaking out against a war. “The Angels… are rigidly anti-Communist. Their political views are limited to the same kind of retrograde patriotism that motivates…the American Nazi Party,”(237) Thompson writes. The Angels are essentially fascists. The effeminate free love philosophy of the Hippies was incompatible with the Angels’ fascist thoughts and the Angels soon became actively opposed to the Hippies, fighting student protestors in the street and even offered to be a kind of S.S. for Lyndon B. Johnson in his fight against the counterculture’s resistance to war. By the later part of the 1960’s, the Angels and Hippies were staunch enemies.