Cows Are Freaky When They Look at You: An Oral History of the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers

The west coast had its Haight Ashbury. New York had its Greenwich Village. But just as vital and astounding was the loosely unified band of hippies, outlaws and freaks that lived in and around Lawrence, Kansas in the '60s. A collocation of farm kids, University hangers-on, bikers, and middle class dropouts, the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers blazed their own unique trail across the crazed landscape of the counter-culture, harvesting Kansas "hemp" for sale to unsuspecting outsiders, raising hell and kids, making love, and occasionally dying. These stories are the result of numerous tape sessions with the survivors, freely associated tales of the fantastic and bizarre, episodes of love and joy, death, desertion and loss, but always recollections that sing with exuberance. The Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers were the Midwestern partisans of the counterculture struggle against mediocrity, conformity and war. This book is truth and fiction, fiction and truth. It is, in a real sense, a document from the times. Foreword by William S. Burroughs.