Coming Soon
About the Rainbow Gypsies
In 1969 a band of self-styled hippie gypsies, clad in rainbow rags and waving their freak flag high, dance their way around the world, from their homes in America to an ashram on the banks of the Ganges. Set in the psychedelic 60s, the Rainbow Gypsies is a unique journey that simply could not be made today.
Watch the Trailer
INTRODUCTION
Getting To Know The Rainbow Gypsies
By Peter Crisp – Scribe to the Tribe
My first encounter with the Rainbow Gypsies was at Glastonbury Fayre in 1971. Read More
Ricardo
In 1969, my life at the age of 18 took a giant change of course. All my dreams and fantasies of love, dance and adventure were about to unfold through the most unlikely of circumstances.
Leaving my home town of Santa Barbara the day after high school graduation, I hitchhiked up the coast to the Emerald City of San Francisco, ready to put behind me the family drama of my angry, alcoholic dad, my depressed, bipolar mom, and my three tormented brothers. I wanted to escape the fighting. The war in Vietnam was raging, and I was about to be drafted; it was obviously time to exit stage left. I just wanted to be happy.
Fortunately, by a stroke of innocence and intuition, my closest friend became my journal…
COFFEETABLE
Getting To Know The Rainbow Gypsies
This was the incredible free festival staged at Worthy Farm in Somerset, England, to celebrate the summer solstice. For the first time, the iconic pyramid stage was erected within sight of Glastonbury Tor, as thousands of freaks, hippies, travelers and pilgrims gathered for a scaled-down typically British version of Woodstock. It was, coincidentally, my 21st birthday.
And it was here among the milling crowds of colorful characters surrounding the pyramid stage, that I first encountered the Gypsies. A spontaneous conga line formed out of nowhere, drums pounding, flutes wailing, tambourines shaking, a solo trombone blasting, as they came snaking through the festival grounds.
The line whirled and swirled into a vortex of movement around an intense epicenter of tribal rhythms, wild yells and cries of pleasure and there they were – writhing and contorting their bodies into a frenzy of dance and abandon: Jamian, Ricardo and Fantuzzi aka The Rainbow Gypsies.
But I didn’t really get to know them until exactly one year later, when they came directly from the beaches of Goa to visit me on my farm in Wales.
(The world was very different then. To give you an idea of how different: on my passport where it said Occupation, I had written: musician/farmer. Of course, I was neither.
So here they came again, the Rainbow Gypsies, into my converted barn on a hilltop in Wales. Another summer solstice, another birthday, another celebration, another kaleidoscopic circle of song and dance, drumming and chanting, another feast of love.
But I didn’t really REALLY get to know them until I walked into a Rainbow Gypsy Production Meeting in 2008 and was granted access to the archives: photographs, journals, diaries, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, letters and post cards – all relating the adventures of the gypsies as they traveled from the United States to India between 1969 and 1972.
Here, on the table of the Rainbow Gypsy HQ in LA, was a unique collection of materials capturing an extraordinary era, featuring a bunch of wild characters and telling the story of an unforgettable journey, a journey that simply could not be made today.
As I looked through the archives, I felt a growing excitement.
Studying the photographs…
Reading the journals and diaries…
Holding the letters and post cards in my hands…
As I delved deeper into the rainbow archives…
I began to see an opportunity to weave a tapestry that would reveal this ‘journey to the east’ in all its psychedelic glory. At the same time, the book would stand as an authentic chronicle of the endlessly recurring quest for the holy grail of enlightenment – the pot of gold at rainbow’s end.
“But how can it be told, this tale of a unique journey, of a unique communion of minds, of such a wonderfully exalted and spiritual life?”
Hermann Hesse
It begins in San Francisco in the summer of 1969…