I saw You Are What You Eat at the Key Theater in Washington, D.C. The year was 1968 and I had just returned from a trip to the Haight Ashbury to my $75 a month apartment off Dupont Circle. I was a full-blown, hash-smoking, sexed-up hippie looking for kicks wherever I could find them. But you know how kicks are - “they just kept getting harder to find.” I’d go to the movies regularly in hopes of discovering something that might alter my consciousness, the usual stuff: Fellini, Bunuel, Cocteau, Godard…etc. Most of the good shit was coming from Europe, but there were a handful of film makers in America that were exploring film’s innate ability to blow your mind, most of whom were coming out of New York and West Coast experimental film communities. Bruce Connor, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, John Waters and The Kuchar Brothers were making movies that were clearly informed by psychedelia, rock and roll and the emerging sexual freedom of the Sixties. One of those was Barry Feinstein’s You Are What You Eat, a hippie movie that tosses earnestness to the side and has the good humor to poke fun at itself.

Made up of a cast of genuine flower children (no plastic people here) and some freaky long-haired musicians, including hippie-hater Frank Zappa, David Crosby, Tiny Tim and Paul Butterfield, YAWYE is a surreal counter-culture free-for-all with a satirical eye and a shitload of manic energy. And it features a supremely cool soundtrack of synthesizers, head music, jazzy improvs and electronic weirdness creating the sonic equivalent of a black light poster.

So did it alter my consciousness when I was 17? Nah. It was just too damned goofy and by 1968 I had grown less enthralled by the aura of the new age and was becoming more involved with radical politics. I cut my hair and moved to Berkeley. If you are what you eat, my hippie days had become a naked lunch.

This YouTube upload is the best quality I’ve seen of You Are What You Eat since seeing it years ago on the big screen. Enjoy.