Celebration (aka Celebration At Big Sur) was a concert/gathering held in September of 1969 (one month after Woodstock) at the Esalen Institute in the Big Sur mountains of California. The musical line-up included Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, John Sebastian, Mimi Farina and Dorothy Morrison & the Combs Sisters. The Incredible String Band were there but sadly do not appear in the film.

I spent some time at the Esalen Institute in 1969 when I played the mridangam in the orchestra of hippie theater company The Floating Lotus Magic Opera. I remember soaking in the steamy hot tubs that overlooked the Pacific ocean, mystical fog rolling up the cliffs as the sun shimmered and melted into the west. The experience was greatly enhanced after eating a tab of licorice-flavored Batman acid.

With its upbeat energy and ageing, dancing flower children, Celebration may have been the last wisp of 1967’s Summer Of Love vibration before the Aquarian Age was beaten into the ground by a pool stick three months later at Altamont.

Having been at both Big Sur and Altamont, the experience was as different as peyote is from meth.