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In 1974, Wally Hope put together a small, informal, and completely unlicensed music festival adjacent to the Stonehenge historical monument in Wiltshire, in southwest England. It was an unmitigated disaster\u2014and a spectacular success. Naked hippies romped over “the stones,” music spilled across the vast Salisbury Plain, and the police came out in force to arrest every last longhair. At their mass trial, each of the incarcerated hippies gave his\/her name as “Wally.” One headline blared, “Wallies Give Judge the Willies!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The (utterly illegal) festival was staged again the following summer, timed to the Summer Solstice. But Wally Hope wasn’t there. He had been arrested (again) on trumped-up charges, thrown into a mental hospital, and crammed full of so many drugs that he eventually succumbed to health issues. His remains were taken by friends, cremated, and placed in a box.<\/p>\n\n\n
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In 1976 (attended by the author of Just One Little Hitch<\/em>), the third Stonehenge Free Festival, as it was being called, had become a cause c\u00e9lebr\u00e8, attracting thousands and thousands of music lovers, acid-heads, back-to-nature freaks, naked people, utopians, musicians, opium-sellers, and other future arbiters of polite British society. And the friends of Wally Hope brought something else with them: Wally’s cremains.<\/p>\n\n\n Was the 1976 festival a success? Who’s to say? Mark Orwoll, the author of Just One Little Hitch<\/em>, was there to offer a first-person point of view. The festival, as he recounts, was chaotic, with far too much nude dancing, psychedelics, anti-establishment rhetoric, wild sex underneath the music stage, and too little room in the tepees to find a place to crash at night. In other words, perfect. But the L.S.D. Band, playing at full volume at 3 a.m.–holy crap, even the hippest hippie in hippiedom would have put his foot down. And yet… And yet….<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the author writes in Just One Little Hitch<\/em>: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Wally Hope was arrested on a trumped-up drug charge in London a year later, thrown into prison without bail, and branded a schizophrenic, a diagnosis that resulted in so many prescribed drugs that his mental and physical health deteriorated. He committed suicide later that year, 1975.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was cremated, and a friend brought the box containing his ashes to Henge \u201976. On the top of the box were carved the words:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wally Hope<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Died 1975<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Aged 28<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A victim of ignorance<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The police allowed the hippies inside Stonehenge that morning. Following a ceremony by a dozen or so white-robed Druids, the ashes of Wally Hope were ceremoniously scattered among the stones that symbolized the gathering, and the community, that he had started. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The festival was over.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A dog went missing at the Glastonbury Music Festival in 1973. The owner walked through the (stoned, wasted, psychedelicized) crowd shouting out his pup’s name in hopes of finding him: “Wally! Wally! Wally!” The hippies at the festival began to take up the call, until suddenly 10,000 people chanted, in unison, “Wally! Wally! Wally!” One … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/justonelittlehitch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/henge-80-tribal-jam-stretch.jpg\")
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