PRESENTS
Historic Headshops Profiling the pioneering purveyors of paraphernalia.
BOBBY BLACK
cannthropology
68
WORLD OF Cannabis
leafmagazines.com
Before the advent of the internet, there was only one place to find all of the stoner essentials: a headshop. From blacklight posters to bongs (excuse me …“water pipes”), records to roach clips, vibrators to vaporizers – the classic headshops were not only emporiums for all things sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, they were also hubs where counterculture art, ideas, information and publications could be disseminated. THE PSYCHEDELIC SHOP The very first headshop in America opened its doors to the public on January 3, 1966 – in precisely the location you’d likely expect: at the center of the drug-fueled hippie revolution in San Francisco. Called the Psychedelic Shop, it was founded by Army Vet Ron Thelin and his brother Jay, who used $500 of savings to lease a storefront at 1535 Haight Street, then plastered the walls with burlap, mandalas and hallucinogenic art, and stocked it with esoteric books, beaded jewelry, incense, pipes and other paraphernalia. Almost immediately, the Psych Shop became a hub of the emerging hippie scene – selling tickets to concerts and other happenings, serving as a meeting place for the Diggers activist group and distributing underground literature. The Thelins even used some of the shop’s revenue to start their own counterculture newspaper, which later became the San Francisco Oracle. Predictably though, their establishment drew unwanted attention from law enforcement; that November, the SFPD vice squad raided the shop and arrested one of their employees for selling a copy of “The Love Book” (a compilation of graphic sexual and religious poetry) to an undercover officer – charging him and Ron Thelin with distribution of obscenity. Their subsequent court case became the longest-running criminal trial in San Francisco’s history and a nationwide cause célèbre for freedom of speech.
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Above: The archetypal headshop—Captain Ed’s Smoke Shoppe. Left: Jay and Ron Thelin in front of their Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street, 1966.
Despite this setback, the shop continued to thrive throughout the Summer of Love … but by the fall of 1967, the crowds and commercialization had become too much for the Thelins. Believing the hippie ideal had gotten lost in the circus sideshow of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, they decided to close the Psychedelic Shop. On October 4-6, Thelin and the Diggers organized a “Death of the Hippies” happening – giving away everything in the shop, placing the store’s sign in a casket and leading a symbolic funeral procession through The Haight. And just like that, after less than two years, America’s first headshop was history.
VILLAGE VANGUARDS While the Psychedelic Shop was the first ostensible headshop, it would be a similar store which opened four months later in New York City that would give the new industry its name. In May 1966, an ex-architect from the Bronx named Jeff Glick and his wife Betsy opened an alternative smokeshop on East Ninth Street in the Lower East Side called simply the Head Shop. Though Glick never officially explained the reason behind the name, common wisdom assumed that the word “Head” referred to the colloquial term for a drug enthusiast, such as a “pothead” or “acid head.” Though there are a few other urban Trippy promo for the legends about the Head Shop in NYC. origin of the name, Glick’s shop is, to my knowledge, the first official use of the term and therefore deserves the credit.
Psychedelic Shop’s first anniversary poster (1967).
