Feelin' Groovy & Jesus Christ Superstar

“Fueled by Flower Power” Watercolor & Ink © 2023 Linnie Aikens Lindsay

The Songs, “Feelin’ Groovy,” “Peace Train,”“Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” and "Jesus Christ Superstar" are the songs that sum up these years for me.  I was lucky enough to have been raised during the years when Woodstock rocked and thrummed through our culture and the spirit of flower power wove itself like daisy garlands through the era. Starting late, perhaps two years after the “Summer of Love” during 1967-75, we found our family style as hippies.  I say style, not identity, for we dressed as hippies, wore our hair long and natural with thin headbands around our foreheads, and clad ourselves in fringed vests, bell-bottoms held up by macramé belts, striped tunics and big hoop earrings.  Yes, mom wore the requisite rose-colored round glasses and did the iconic 60’s ritual burning of the bra ceremony in the backyard.  Dad also wore a head band that was then associated with the hippie culture of the ‘60’s, early ‘70’s., not the Hispanic “cholo” culture that came later in Southern California. 

They were primed for it I guess, as rebellious offspring of the wealthy establishment.  The hippie movement was a safe place in which to hide out.  Still, I doubt very much that they took their identity from this movement.  In hindsight, I think Mom, the more creative one, may have wanted to do so, but she would never have ventured out too far from under Dad’s direction. She'd grown up in the 40's and 50's after all. I think Dad was faking it, to tell you the truth, for you can’t make me believe that he truly embraced much at all of the philosophy of pacifism and a spirit of sensitivity for others, at least not at that point in history. Now maybe, but not then.  For whatever reason, he chose to play the part.  Dad claimed that he just wore his long hair to hide his red neck. We fully believed that. Mom, though?  Mom fairly luxuriated in it!   She blossomed amidst all the flower power.  Perhaps a truer statement was that we were frauds.  Of course, as kids we had no clue about any of the underlying currents and motives of either the movement nor our parents.  We just adapted as we usually did.  We thought this whole “freaky” experience was great fun anyway, and boy did I love all the color, so we weren’t going to rock that boat.

“Psychedelic”  3ft x 3 ft Oil on Canvas © BJ Keith. This was just an experimental painting of Mom’s but it hung in my art classroom for almost a decade, inspiring many young artists.

            We bought a VW bug, into which we crammed all six of us, and Mom helped us girls spread the love by putting “groovy” flower stickers all over it in neon pink, orange, green and blue.  We added other stickers too; rainbow peace signs and smiley faces stamped on bright yellow circles. I had to laugh, because 50 years later, in a digital world, we now called them emoticons or emojis! They can thank the 60’s and the unsung creator hero, Harvey Ball, for that! With time, the love also spread over the dashboard in dried blue cornstarch flowers and purple strawflowers.   Meanwhile, Dad spent his evenings reading The Idiot’s Guide to VW Maintenance, and he was fond of saying that VW’s had to be the easiest cars to work on that were ever made.  He worked on it a lot. 

            During this time, we all became Christians.  I say we all, because in our house, whatever Dad did, we all did.   It had its perks we thought.  Dad was a LOT nicer.  Mom seemed happier.  If that’s what Christianity did, we were all for it.  For me, however, it really was much more. 

            Like anything Dad did, he did it all the way.  Christianity was no different.  We started going to church every week, Bible Studies, Church picnics and retreats.  He went to seminars by Bill Gothard and Billy Graham, read books by C.S. Lewis and Dietrich Bonheoffer.  Hal Lindsey, and his book, The Late, Great Planet Earth was all the rage at the time, but Dad wasn’t into things like that.  He would tell us that the future would take care of itself and that we had to worry about what we were doing right now. 

Mom followed suit in her own way.  She picked up the guitar again.  When we were very little, still living in Frog Town, near the sides of the LA River, on the fringes of Silverlake, she used to play and sing us to sleep every night while dad was at electrician night school.    For a while, she’d taken some lessons in classical guitar and flamenco.  Oh how I had loved listening to her finger picking.  I missed it.  With the hippie movement, a renaissance had struck our home.  Suddenly, it was like she’d found her voice again.  Every day was filled with sounds of her guitar and singing.  Bob Dylan and John Stewart were her favorites, but Carole King, Judy Collins, Peter Paul and Mary, CCR, Simon & Garfunklel, and of course, the Beatles, often blared through the hi-fi that grandpa had hand-built into the Honduran mahogany alcove in the hallway.   In the mornings, we’d listen to the radio mystery show, “The Shadow” on KPPC and Dr. Demento in the afternoons and dance the funky chicken in our large, open living room. In the afternoons, this same mom, who'd been a debutante from Los Feliz, endeavored to raise us with the ettiquette and manners of which she'd been taught. Yes, debutante training from my hippie mom! In the evenings we would play ‘steam roller’ and roll from one end of the very long living room to the dining room, laughing and giggling.  These were my favorite years with my mother. 

‘Charm School 101” …or…“Etiquette Training: Hippie Mom Debutante Pays it Forward”. 10”x8” Watercolor   © 2025 Linnie Aikens Lindsay   

During the early to mid-70’s Dad had become increasingly concerned with the “drug situation of young people these days,” so he decided to become the director of the high school group at church.  Our church, however, was still a little wary of a man with long hair and a beard.  It was a rather conservative Presbyterian church, the first church in Silverlake, designed by a mid-century architect, Richard Neutra.  A little wary of this guy with long hair and a beard, the Elders had deliberated, but given the drug use epidemic among the youth at that time, they decided to give dad a try.   Right away, the high school kids related to him.  They not only listened to him, a major feat, given the times, but they looked up to him.  In a time when parents were throwing up their hands in despair, he was able to communicate with them.  He became someone who looked like them, thus validating their existence in their eyes.  Now to us girls, who’d previously been raised with a dad with a “crew cut” and the Leave it to Beaver expectations of family, this was a shock.  We thought this was better than watching any movie.

I can’t recall a single night for years that we didn’t have a strung-out, doped-up high schooler, “swacked”, and sleeping it off on our living room sofa.  No one even answered the doorbell any more, because the freaks just came right in anyway.  Yes, ‘freak’ became one of our favorite words. Luckily, we didn’t get our mouths washed out with soap for this, because the older kids called themselves freaks, and were always saying things like “don’t freak out, man,” and “that was freaky and far out.” We kids eventually started picking up the lingo and kept telling our parents that all these people in the house all the time were real bummers, but no one even listened to us.  What a drag. Mom would just keep playing her guitar and singing quietly, “…like a bridge over troubled waters, …”

“On the Road Again”  Towing a high schooler’s hippie van back from the North Coast.   Watercolor & Ink   © 2025 Linnie Aikens Lindsay

For many of those kids, we were a second family for them, one who loved them and seemed to understand them when their own families raged unrelentingly at their clothes, their choices, their music, and for a few, we were the only home they had.  We girls even grew to love many of them and look up to them as big brothers and sisters.   I remember that one high school guy gave me his book called The Book of Dreams, about some guy named Sal Paradise, who traveled around a lot and talked to three-headed cats in Mexico.   Oh man, we wanted to visit Mexico something awful after that!  My sisters and I would read little parts of it in the other room, while our parents were busy “counseling.” We’d snort and roll our eyes in exaggerated and titillating disgust as we’d quote it back and forth to one another.   We figured we could be writers too because we could come up with just as freaky dreams. Funny, how I still remember that book.  The 60’s and 70’s were a trippy time, and you didn’t even have to smoke pot to experience that.

While we had formal weekly Bible studies at our house, where Mom would play her guitar and lead singing and Dad led sharing and study, we almost always had one or two of them at our house seeking refuge, guidance or help to get out of one mistake or another.  I can’t count the number of times we had to drive up the coast, often all the way to San Francisco, Petaluma, or Eureka, and tow one of their V.W. hippie vans back to L.A.   A few times we had visited Haight Ashbury to find them. Now, in the 70’s that was a trippy place, we thought as kids.  Silverlake held nothing on that town!  No matter what the problem, my parents helped them.  It seemed God used Dad and Mom in a mighty way during those years, bringing the message of love and hope to each of these young people. 

Growing up, barely blocks outside of Hollywood, I never stopped to think that this culture was unusual compared to the rest of the United States, nor that Christianity looked any differently in other parts of the country.  Not until I was an adult did I realize that the whole hippie culture was concentrated primarily in the big cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.  With my other youth group from Hollywood Presbyterian Church, we’d stand on the corners of Sunset Blvd. and pass out tracts.  We were a bunch of naïve young teenagers timidly offering “The Four Spiritual Laws” in cartoon booklet format to passerbys.  We did this while the bald-headed Hari Krishnas stood on the opposite corner, chanting, and singing in a foreign language to drums and tambourines as they did slow, interpretive dances in their orange robes.  I was always distracted watching them and filled with wonder as I considered the picture they made.  So much more interesting than us in our Ditto™ bell bottom jeans, angel tops and Famolare™ platform shoes! To be perfectly honest, I was downright terrified that anyone would actually take a tract from my hand, or worse, ask me a question about it!  Who thought up that idea to take kids to peddle Christian Doctrine on street corners anyway? 

Abstract: “Hare Krishnas Dancing in the Rain” Reflection from a teenager peddling the  4 Spiritual Laws on Sunset Blvd. (Like their own sunset through the rain.)   Inspired by a photo on krishna.com Mixed Media. 2025  © Linnie Aikens Lindsay

Those ventures in Hollywood also included excursions with my parents and their friends down Sunset Blvd., shopping in Head Shops and being totally confused as to why they didn’t have a single wig in sight.  I reasoned that these must be really ritzy head shops and you had to order a wig to fit the measurements of your head, sort of like how we always had to get our feet measured for those ugly oxford shoes we had to wear to school when I was younger.  Thank goodness I grew up!  Anyway, for me, I wasn’t sure if I wanted a sassy flip like Agent 99 on Get Smart or a really wild afro wig like Link on the Mod Squad. My imagination always had a way of running way out of control. 

I look back and smilingly grimace at my parents’ ministry style, but then I remember the era.  They were different times then.  All the previous rules and norms seemed placed on hold. 

One summer we went and stayed with a number of them in a commune in a Santa Barbara mansion up in the hills of what I would later come to know as Montecito.  In fact, that was when I would also discover that this very mansion was once the off-campus woman’s dormitory of a Christian college—the very same Christian college that I would end up attending eight years later!  If that didn’t conjure an alternate reality in my mind! Whoa!  Anyway, during that early 1970’s stay at the hippie commune, we would all go down to Shark’s Beach, hidden about halfway between Montecito and Summerland beaches. We had to walk under the freeway on a small trail banked in fennel plants, to get from our car to the beach access.  To this day, every time I smell fennel, black licorice, or anise, these memories come to mind.  I will never forget my first time there.  We were walking down the beach when suddenly I was shocked into immobility to see a naked man walking by, as if there was nothing wrong with that! He even smiled at me. Ew! A few more yards brought women also into view, and I remember being surprised to discover for the first time that boobies came in all different shapes and sizes.

“Sharks Beach”   Nude Beach in Summerland, CA 1972  Watercolor & Ink © 2022 Linnie Aikens Lindsay

“Mom!” I had breathed in loudly whispered astonishment, “Nobody has any clothes on!” I learned to walk looking down for shells after that.   I remember the exact instant—the exact moment when it suddenly dawned on me.  I stopped dead in my tracks.  Were we going to a NUDE beach?!  I’d heard of them of course.  I had read every one of Grandma's National Geographic Magazines shelved in the book alcove.  Actually, what I used

to do was open a National Geographic inside a hardbound Life book so no one would know what I was really reading.  I was curious after all.  But stripping naked myself?  No way!  Terribly modest, I lay face down, burying myself in the sand, staying there the whole time until we could leave.  This was the only blight on my favorite time of my childhood.  I still thought of it every single time I drove past Summerland during the 42 years I later lived there.

Suffice it to say, my folks were controversial in our church, and the conservative membership didn’t even know a fraction of it!  (We won't mention all the skinny-dipping in many of their pools in Los Feliz after Bible Study at ours!) Still, there was no denying even to me that my parents LOVED those kids.  They accepted them where they were at rather than hailing fire and brimstone down upon them for their “sinful ways”.  They saw them through an era, filled with drugs and confusion, and helped them not only make it through alive, but find some purpose and connection to a God that loved them unconditionally.  Many of them turned to God during those years when schoolmates were overdosing from drugs. 

It is not for me to judge methods now, nor hearts for that matter. Nevertheless, despite my judgy, self-righteous perspective at the time, I must acknowledge the very real possibility that God chose to use my parents in ways that reached kids in danger who no one else could reach at that time.  Right or wrong in terms of society’s rules, or even God’s intent, one can’t deny how God used them, in the end, for good and to His glory in many cases. 

I also learned a lot of other valuable skills from those high schoolers about things to avoid, as well what happens to kids when parents don’t listen to them and don’t love their children unconditionally, and I vowed at age 12 never to alienate my own kids that way.  It was an incidental education for which I still thank God and my parents to this day. 

Through those years, I watched, and I listened.  Some of those people wouldn’t be alive today but for how God used my folks to love and care for them.  Meanwhile, I learned about things that my peers had no contact with, much less concept of.  I also subconsciously learned the basics about forgiveness, love and redemption from those years.  I learned, only recently, and thus in hindsight, another valuable lesson in how God might choose to use even people we don’t understand and experiences we don’t agree with to do great things in the world, no matter what mistakes they (or us) may make along the way.  Despite us, perhaps.  As long as our hearts are focused on loving Him, He can somehow turn our warped interpretations of truth around to spread His love. How often He has brought that home to me!  It’s not about us.  It’s about God.

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Note: All artwork, stories and observations posted within should be credited to the author, Linnie Aikens Lindsay (unless cited in the post). Permission is required for any use of my words or artwork. Taken from my work, "My Life As Wallpaper Art".