The war protest movement during the 1960s actually included a larger context, the protest of the Hippie (i.e., Beat) generation against middle-class norms and values. Nonetheless, rockers like Bob Dylan, The Doors, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell wrote and performed anthem after anthem for the protest movement to rock fans across the country. However, many of the lyrics and themes of songs like Blowin’ In The Wind, Break On Through, Big Yellow Taxi and many others were inspired by the poetry and writing of other artists against the war and middle-class American values and norms. Certainly, the biggest group of writers influencing these artists were the members of the Beat Generation of writers, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburgh, William S. Burroughs and others. The social satire, black humor, anti-establishment writings of these writers leant similar characteristics to the songs of Dylan, The Doors, Baez and Mitchell. The Beat writers completely rejected middle-class values and lifestyle, and, instead, championed pacifism, respect for nature versus technology, and expansion of individual consciousness. Drug experimentation played a major role in this expansion for the Beat writers and the musicians mentioned. Certainly Jim Morrison’s hallucinogen-oriented lyrics and musical psychedelia which encouraged people to light their fires and break on through to the other side, we symbolic of the transcendental nature of the Beat’s. Like Allen Ginsburg’s poem Howl, a raving diatribe against the absurd, insane condition of middle-class values, Morrison’s Break on Through encouraged people to reject middle-class lifestyles and break on through to a world of higher perception, deeper feeling and more honest emotions and behavior connected to their animal nature and nature at large. In Ginsburg’s poem one passage depicts the mental breakdown of his longtime friend, Carl Solomon, “who threw po
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