The neighbourhood homes of the guys from Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane or of Janis Joplin and the Mama‘s And The Papa‘s have become destinations of a modern pilgrimage. The kids at Haight Ashbury aren’t flower children anymore, some are just sort of tourists, or they’re just drug addicts.

In the nearby Castro, headquarters of the first gay movement in the world, people are still mourning about the death toll that AIDS took all thorugh the 80ies and 90ies. They still decorate the walls of cafes and nightclubs giving a bitter edge to the long gone days of free love and careless orgies.

We are meeting on of rock‘s greatest voices in Joshua Tree National Park: Eric Burdon, who brought the world „The House Of The Rising Sun“, „Spill The Wine“ or „Warm San Franciscan Night“, is talking about the LSD-trips of his youth, and how times were more gentle, but that opportunities of modern, state-of-the-art sound technology are not to bad either. In the old university- and protest-town of Berkeley we‘re meeting Country Joe McDonald, the man who famously chanted „Gimme an F…“ on stage in Woodstock, 1969. And he continues to perform that, and also his early environmentalist anthem „Save The Whales“. Only for slightly smaller audiences now.

In Haight Ashbury we are talking to John Perry Barlow, the man behind the texts and lyrics of most Garteful Dead songs, who lived in Haight-Ashbury at the peak of the Hippie haze, and who is now an internet guru. No more flowers in his hair, but now with a lot new pies in the skys.