That time hippies came to Pointe Coupee Parish - 1971 Festival of Life

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Life Celebration: A Report From the Front



Rolling Stone

McCrea, La.—On the last two mornings of the Celebration of Life Festival, a tractor pulling two flatbed trailers would come around and six hired hands would jump off to collect endless piles of rotting watermelon rinds, empty wine bottles, discarded clothing and other assorted garbage. The Master of Ceremonies — known only as “Happy” — called it the “ecology truck.”

The festival began Thursday night — three and one-half days late — with Yogi Bahjan taking the stage, chanting, and saying: “God bless you. Let us meditate for one minute for peace and brotherhood.”

“frick you. Let’s boogie,” responded a member of the crowd.

The next evening, before the entertainment started, a festival worker ODed backstage and crumpled to the floor as “Sister Morphine” was being played over the P.A. system to allay an impatient audience.

It was that kind of a festival

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The final site, Cypress Point Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, about 50 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, consisted of 700 barren acres and damn few cypresses. After the sun rose, it was impossible to sleep because of the heat — at least 90 degrees each day — unless you were completely wasted, and each morning renewed a personal battle for survival.

First came the search for a water truck that still had water in it. That usually took an hour or two. There never were any of the promised showers, so that meant a 30-minute walk to the brown, and swift, waters of the Atchafalaya River for a dip. (Less courageous bathers chose to wallow in the muddy banks.) Next you had to scrounge enough food for the day, since anything you had brought had probably been stolen, and unless you had a security badge you couldn’t leave the site to get groceries.

Finally, there was dope, and it was plentiful. You had only to walk to the intersection of Cocaine Row and Smack Street (as the makeshift signs proclaimed) to find dealers hawking an estimated 30 varieties of mindbender, only two of which could be smoked. Plastic syringes, at $1 apiece, were selling briskly.

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The dope trade was bullish. A Custer-haired kid from Ohio expressed a not uncommon opinion succinctly: “This festival is fricked. Nobody came here for the music — they all came to sell or do dope.” The doing was well-nigh universal; a person couldn’t advance three feet in the crowd without being offered something or other of dubious chemical origins. During a three-hour period on Friday night, 20 people openly shot up at the rear of the stage.

An amateur but knowledgeable pharmacologist from Texas surveyed the traffic in dope and reported the quality of drugs overall to be fair, but said there was more poor stuff than good available. He bought samples, for instance, of all the THC available (at $1.25 a hit) and found it to be all PCP — at one time called “the peace pill,” an animal tranquilizer

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