I spent a good portion of last weekend streaming a six-part documentary series about the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia, and another about Cream’s Disraeli Gears album. This post is not about either, although I recommend them. Rather, this is about hair, and what it meant to have long, flowing, wavy locks back in the 1960s.
We’ve more than outgrown that consequential historical blip. We’ve been through the best and worst of what the era offered. We’ve evolved some essential customs, like the legalization of marijuana and the public acceptance of various orientations and identities, but we’ve devolved in other realms (illustrated by the recent election, for instance).
As I reflected on the past while watching these documentaries, I vividly recalled that what made the greatest impact on me back then was … hair. It was a statement of resistance, a symbol of belonging and a gesture of solidarity with many people who were assumed to belong in the same tribal universe. Long hair was my uniform of alienation.
It felt so good.
It also took guts to grow it out when I did, in 1965, and to let it flourish to its ultimate length (see below). My goal was to emulate and integrate into an alternative culture, for which hair was currency—and I succeeded.
Long hair has no coded meanings anymore. But I’m nostalgic for the past, when the longer the mane, the cooler the man.
