The Mantra-Rock Dance was a counterculture music event held on January 29, 1967, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. It was organized by followers of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness as an opportunity for its founder, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, to address a wider public. The event featured some of the most prominent Californian rock groups of the time, such as the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin. It also brought the poet Allen Ginsberg and LSD promoters Timothy Leary and Augustus Owsley Stanley III to the event. The proceeds were donated to the local Hare Krishna temple.
About Mantra-Rock Dance in brief
The Mantra-Rock Dance was a counterculture music event held on January 29, 1967, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. It was organized by followers of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness as an opportunity for its founder, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, to address a wider public. The event featured some of the most prominent Californian rock groups of the time, such as the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, as well as the then relatively unknown Moby Grape. The proceeds were donated to the local Hare Krishna temple. It led to favorable media exposures for PrabHupada and his followers, and brought the Hare Krishna movement to the wider attention of the American public. It also brought the poet Allen Ginsberg and LSD promoters Timothy Leary and Augustus Owsley Stanley III to the event. The 40th anniversary of the concert was commemorated in 2007 in Berkeley, California. The concert was later called ‘the ultimate high’ and ‘the major spiritual event of the San Francisco hippie era’ and was attended by hundreds of hippie and countercultural leaders, including Ginsberg, Leary, Gary Snyder, and Alan Watts.
It has been described as ‘the most influential event in the history of the hippie movement’ in the U.S. and one of the biggest events of the 1960s and ’70s. It is still held in the same venue as the original concert, which is still open to the public today, but has been closed to non-Hare Krishna devotees since the 1980s. The Mantra Rock Dance was held in honor of A.C. Bhaktivedta Swami Prabh upada, a Gaudiya Vaishnava sannyasi and teacher, who arrived in New York City from his native India in 1965. He was an authentic swami from India, now trying to spread the authentic chanting of Hare Krishna in America. He sang the mantra he had learned in India as part of his philosophy and declared that it was a state of ‘brings’ He was glad that he was able to introduce the swami to the Haight-Ashbury community of San Francisco, which at that time was turning into the hub of the Hippie counterculture. Some of his New York followers objected to what they saw as an inappropriate invitation of their guru to a place full of \”amplified guitars, pounding drums, wild light shows, and hundreds of drugged hippies,\” but he agreed to go.
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This page is based on the article Mantra-Rock Dance published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
