Jeff Beck Quotes

When people talk about the '60s I never think that was me there. It was me and I was in it, but I was never enamoured with all that. It's supposed to be sex and drugs and rock and roll and I'm not really like that. I've never really seen the Rolling Stones as anything.

I read the Life magazine articles about free love and free dope in California. At age 20 I drove to Los Angeles.

Everybody was starting to grow long hair and wear pink suits and purple glasses and stuff and then, I suppose, some people thought we were crazy, but we weren't really crazy because we're all still here!

I'm not a flowerchild or anything like that... whatever it was.

I've always despised the hippies.

In the mid-'60s, I quit school and wandered across the country, hitchhiked back and forth a few times, and ended up in hippie times, in the street in Toronto, in Yorkville.

Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.

I grew up in a hippie commune so I have a real hippie part of me.

The Haight is just a place; the '60s was a spirit.

Certainly there's a huge appeal to the '60s, because it was such a big turning point to everyone. It was the era of change, the boiling point. People rebelled against things - the hippies, the feminists, the protesters. All these things just built up and boiled over. I think people can relate to that today.

I was a rebellious adolescent. It was the '60s. Everyone was rebellious. I hated high school.

Basically, I was a hippie and still am a flower child.

My parents are hippies, so I must have a bit of hippie in me.

Woodstock didn't define a generation because everyone showed up or those who did were a perfectly representative sample. It defined a generation because, for a few days, it bottled its peculiar zeitgeist.

I went from being a jock to a hippie. It was a very clear-cut decision. I had to be one or the other. I had to forsake that other aspect of myself. Or thought that I had to, which is regrettable. Quickly, I was back in the pine trees with the hippies, listening to my Jimi Hendrix and my Janis Joplin and turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.

We came out in the midst of the hippie hangover. All this mellow music.

When I was 13 and looking for my identity, I was obsessed with hippies.

We were wild-eyed hippies from the late '60s. We still had the exuberance of the mind-expanding '60s - that Tolkienesque, Zeppelin, androgynous, wood nymph, forest fairy kind of innocence. It sounds stupid now, but we felt we were changing the world with music.

There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square.

I really floated around in the '60s, because I felt comfortable with nothing.

That's what the whole Sixties Flower-Power thing was about: 'Go away, you bunch of boring people.

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

Of course, the '60s was a study in decadence. Everything just got worse and worse, and at the end of the '60s, everything was so horrible that people were killing each other.

If you were around in the '60s, you already know that music and art and love are a critical part of the revolution. This is how we fight.

I was never a hippy, per se.