Hippie Trivia
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47 free Hippie trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
For a movement that was less than a fifth of one percent of Americans in 1968, the hippies left an outsized mark: the festivals, the fashion, the language, and a peace symbol borrowed from British nuclear protesters. This quiz traces the story from the beatniks of North Beach to the Haight, the Acid Tests, the Human Be-In and the Summer of Love, then out along the Hippie trail to Kathmandu and forward to Burning Man. It suits a 60s-themed party, a history class, or anyone who has ever wondered where the word hippie actually came from. The early questions are ones most people can guess; the later ones cover Chet Helms, Owsley Stanley, Der Wandervogel and the man some call the first hippie of all. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia article on hippies, and each question links to the sentence that supports it.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01'Hippie' is usually traced to which older slang word?
Hipster
Hipster, 1940s jive for someone in the know, is the usual answer: San Francisco's newcomers were derided as junior-grade hipsters, though both words go back to 'hip'.
Q 02Which San Francisco district became the centre of hippie culture?
Haight-Ashbury
Haight-Ashbury offered big, run-down Victorian houses at low rents, so young bohemians drifted across town from North Beach and shared them communally.
Q 03Which singer wrote the song 'Woodstock' despite missing the festival to appear on a television talk show?
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell stayed in New York for The Dick Cavett Show on her manager's advice, watched the festival on a hotel television and wrote the song from her boyfriend Graham Nash's account.
Q 04Which earlier movement did the hippies inherit their tradition of cultural dissent from?
The Beat Generation
The Beat Generation handed on more than ideas: Neal Cassady, the model for the hero of On the Road, drove the Merry Pranksters' bus, and Allen Ginsberg became a regular at hippie and anti-war gatherings.
Q 05Which gathering in Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967, drew 20,000 to 30,000 hippies?
The Human Be-In
The Human Be-In, billed as 'A Gathering of the Tribes', put hippies on the national news as never before, and that coverage drew far bigger crowds to the city a few months later.
Q 06What name is given to the months of 1967 when up to 100,000 young people converged on San Francisco?
The Summer of Love
The Summer of Love got its name in advance: that spring local groups formed a Council for a Summer of Love to plan food, housing and clinics for the crowds they knew were coming.
Q 07Whose hit song urged listeners heading to San Francisco to wear flowers in their hair?
Scott McKenzie
Scott McKenzie sang it, but John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas wrote the song, as publicity for a festival he was staging and to calm a host town nervous about the crowds.
Q 08Which June 1967 festival introduced the rock festival format to a wide audience?
Monterey International Pop
Monterey International Pop saw Jimi Hendrix douse his guitar in lighter fluid and set it alight, and the film of the weekend helped make it the template for Woodstock two years later.
Q 09Which novelist led the Merry Pranksters on their bus trips?
Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey first took LSD as a volunteer in government-funded drug trials at a Menlo Park veterans' hospital, where night shifts as an aide also gave him One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Q 10What was the name of the Merry Pranksters' famous school bus?
Furthur
Furthur, a 1939 school bus bought for the trip in 1964, was wired for sound and filmed all the way to the New York World's Fair, with Neal Cassady at the wheel.
Q 11Which Tom Wolfe book chronicled the Merry Pranksters and their cross-country bus trip?
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was reported after the event: Wolfe first met the Pranksters' leader in a county jail in 1966, two years after the bus trip his book made famous.
Q 12Which band, first known as the Warlocks, was the house band at the Merry Pranksters' LSD parties?
Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead played those parties as high as the dancers, stretching songs far beyond the three-minute single, and that is where their long improvised jams began.
Q 13Which 1969 road movie sends two bikers, played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, through a hippie commune?
Q 21Which political offshoot, led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, nominated a pig for president in 1968?
The Yippies
The Yippies, who styled themselves the Youth International Party, put up a pig called Pigasus in Chicago; police seized the candidate at his own launch and arrested several of his backers.
Q 22Which Berkeley plot, planted in 1969, led Governor Reagan to send in the National Guard?
People's Park
People's Park was cleared and fenced at dawn on May 15, 1969; in the 'Bloody Thursday' riot that followed, police gunfire killed a man watching from a rooftop, and troops held Berkeley for about two weeks.
Q 23Which commune, led by Wavy Gravy, provided security at Woodstock?
The Hog Farm
Easy Rider
Easy Rider had to build its commune on a Malibu hillside from photographs, because the real New Buffalo commune near Taos refused to let the crew film there.
Q 14Which chemist supplied much of the LSD behind the early San Francisco scene?
Owsley Stanley
Owsley Stanley, known as Bear, made LSD so pure that the Oxford English Dictionary lists 'Owsley' as a word for it, and he spent the proceeds bankrolling a San Francisco band and mixing its sound.
Q 15Jefferson Airplane's 1967 hit about size-changing pills draws on which children's book?
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland gave 'White Rabbit' its imagery: Grace Slick wrote the song as a jab at parents who read children such stories and then wondered why they grew up to try drugs.
Q 16Which street-theatre group ran free stores and declared the 'death of the hippie' in 1967?
The Diggers
The Diggers cooked donated and salvaged food and served it free in the park every day; their mock funeral for 'Hippie' that October told would-be newcomers to stay home.
Q 17Avalon Ballroom promoter Chet Helms recruited which Texan to sing with Big Brother and the Holding Company?
Janis Joplin
Janis Joplin had hitchhiked from Texas to San Francisco with Helms in 1963; three years later he sent a friend to Austin to fetch her back as the band's lead singer.
Q 18Which 1966 Los Angeles clashes inspired Buffalo Springfield's 'For What It's Worth'?
The Sunset Strip curfew riots
The Sunset Strip curfew riots of November 1966, centred on the Pandora's Box club, prompted Stephen Stills to write Buffalo Springfield's 'For What It's Worth'; Peter Fonda was among those detained.
Q 19Which magazine's July 7, 1967 cover story was titled "The Hippies: The Philosophy of a Subculture"?
Time
Time opened its cover story by setting the historian Arnold Toynbee, who called the hippies 'a red warning light for the American way of life', against a bishop who likened them to the early Christians.
Q 20Which Beatle walked through San Francisco's hippie district in 1967, was dismayed and gave up LSD?
George Harrison
George Harrison came away disenchanted by a district he found full of dropouts; he called the visit the turning point that put him off 'the whole drug cult' and LSD with it.
The Hog Farm learned from reporters at the airport that it was the security team too; Wavy Gravy named it the 'Please Force' and said its weapons would be cream pies and seltzer bottles.
Q 24Which December 1969 festival, billed as 'Woodstock West', was scarred by a fatal stabbing by a Hells Angel?
Altamont Free Concert
The Altamont Free Concert used Hells Angels as its security; one of them stabbed Meredith Hunter during the Rolling Stones' set and was acquitted after jurors saw film of Hunter drawing a revolver.
Q 25In Arlo Guthrie's 'Alice's Restaurant', which offence on his record makes the draft board turn him away?
Littering
Littering: the 18-minute song tells a mostly true story, in which Guthrie found the town tip closed on Thanksgiving 1965, added his load to a pile off a side road instead and saw the conviction counted against him at his army physical.
Q 26Which Beatles song was Britain's entry in Our World, the first live global TV link-up, in 1967?
All You Need Is Love
All You Need Is Love went out live to an estimated 400 million viewers or more that night, which is why John Lennon kept its words simple enough for the whole world to follow.
Q 27Which German youth movement is regarded as a 'proto-hippie' precursor?
Der Wandervogel
Der Wandervogel ('wandering bird') grew out of schoolboy hikes around a Berlin suburb in the 1890s and swapped city life for folk songs and camping, until the Nazi state abolished independent youth groups in the 1930s.
Q 28Which singer took 'Nature Boy', written by the long-haired Los Angeles nature mystic eden ahbez, to number one in 1948?
Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole came by the song only because ahbez, brushed off by the singer's manager backstage, left the tattered sheet music with his valet instead.
Q 29Which psychologist founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, declaring LSD its sacrament?
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist dismissed in 1963, founded the League for Spiritual Discovery in 1966, hoping a freedom-of-religion defence would keep LSD legal for members; it failed.
Q 30Which Beatles song was inspired by the 1964 manual The Psychedelic Experience?
Tomorrow Never Knows
Tomorrow Never Knows began when John Lennon picked the book up in a London bookshop and carried its advice to switch off the mind and float downstream almost word for word into his opening line.