The Trip Le 3 Drop
The first wave of designs from our Trip Le 3 drop has just hit out store. We hope you love our Trip Le 3 Skate Tees as much as we do.
Inspired by the LSD and Hippy Revolution of the Sixties.
Listen to our Spotify Playlist - Trip Le 3
Our Trip Le 3 range is inspired by a rare moment in time, where certain factors, people and music connected together and formed a revolutionary moment in time.
After the Beatnik generation, America's largest youth movement started to take roots. The counterculture revolution, fuelled by their hatred of the Vietnam War and despair at President Nixen's exploded into the world.
The ideas behind the movement are not unique, from European Bohemians to the concept of community living and Easter religious concepts on spirituality. A direct reaction to their rejection from mainstream America. But the moment in time, just as Leary and others advocated LSD, was what made it unique. Coupled with a musical movement and anti war protests and the Peace / Hippy movement had begun.
LSD - Where did it come from?
Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann first synthesised LSD in 1938 from lysergic acid, he discovered its effects on humans in 1943 by accidentally ingesting some. It was used in psychiatry by Humphry Osmond on thousands of patients as well as by the US Government as a method interrogation as part of the Edgewood Arsenal Human Experiment.
In the early sixties and before, the drug was not even classified and was advocated by movie stars like Cary Grant. Timothy Leary's experiments helped push it into more mainstream use. By the mid sixties things had got out of control (depending on your perscpective) and LSD was made into a schedule 1 substance and due to fears of moral corruption. Once the drug was illegal there was no stopping it's popularity. By the time the seventies hit, it was everywhere.
Important Cultural Events
The SDS End the War in Vietnam March - April 17th 1965
The largest peace protest at that time, drawing 15,000 to 20,000 people .
Trips Festival - January 21st - 23rd 1966
Organised by Ramon Sender, Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand the 10,000 strong turned away 1000 people each night. The Grateful dead played on a new sound system which distorted in the Longshoreman's Hall. Everyone drank spiked punch and watched one of the earliest drug enhancing light and sound experiences of it's time.
The Summer of Love in San Francisco. - July 14th, 1967
The epi-centre of the Hippy Movement was San Fran. In the Summer of 67 there was a mass migration of like minded hippies and beatniks moved to the Haight-Ashbury district and the Golden Gate Park. It has been described as the biggest mass migration of young people in the history of America.
Woodstock Festival - Aug 15th, 1969
500,000 people gather for the festival that changed everything. It was arguabbly the beginning of the end. It was all down hil from here into the commercialism of and watering down of the LSD and Hippy Movement which occured in the seventies.
Moratorium to end the war - 15th November, 1969, Washington
The follow up to the 15th October Moratorium, The Washington DC, attracted over 500,000 demonstrators. It is considered to be the largest ever protest in Washington in response to new reports of atrocities in Vietnam. Activists, Revolutionaries and Musicians, talked and sang and there were some small tear gas incidents with the Police.
Significant Hippy, LSD and Sixties Books
Timothy Leary - High Priest
The revisionary Harvard professor takes us on his own personal journey of discovery as he experiments with Mushrooms and then LSD. The book is written with multiple story lines, letters and quotes all intermingled with each other. A fascinating insight into the mind of one of the originators of the LSD movement in America. His Harvard sanctioned (well initially anyway) experiments with acid and Mexican mushrooms were crucial in the cultural explosion of the late sixties.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest - Ken Kesey
The book itself is so big, you don'd need me to remind you of it. But the back story and what followed is what really makes it so important. Kesey after being part of Government LSD experiments and working in a psyciatric hospital (which inspored the book) became a central figure in the movement. His mutlit coloured bus and Merry Pranksters are the topic of our next book.
The Electric Kool-Aid Test - Tom Wolfe
This book is arguably one of the best examples of New Journalism. Tom Wolfe dives onboard the bus with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they journey across America with a head full of acid and bus full of madness.
Our range features some organic and ironic Tie-Dye T-Shirts as well as a full collection of Tees featuring our hourglass logo with iconic counter culture and pop culture images inside.