Cows Are Freaky When They Look at You: / An Oral History of the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers / With a Foreword by William S. Burroughs

Ohle, David; Martin, Roger; Susan Brosseau [ William S. Burroughs ]

ISBN 10: 0922820139 / ISBN 13: 9780922820139

Published by Watermark Press; Wichita, Kansas, U.S.A., 1991

About this Item

The West coast had it's Haight Ashbury, New York had it's 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 Collection 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 counterculture, 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.

Seller Inventory # WP-COWS

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Cows Are Freaky When They Look at You: / An Oral History of the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers / With a Foreword by William S. Burroughs
• Publisher: Watermark Press; Wichita, Kansas, U.S.A.
• Publication Date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0922820139
• ISBN 13: 9780922820139
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 5th or later Edition
• Condition: New
• Seller catalogs:
  • .Americana
  • .Literature
  • . Kansas

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Reviews

The Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers were marijuana harvesters around Lawrence, Kansas during the 1960s and 1970s. A variety of the weed known locally as K-pot grew plentifully, nurturing a counterculture celebrated here in a foreword by William S. Burroughs and a series of oral history excerpts by Lawrence's former hippies. Their recollections focus mainly upon drugs, sex, and violence, tales and tall tales lovingly preserved to the final raunchy detail. Alternately funny and nasty, the book is a nearly perfect memento of the utter pointlessness of the era's excesses. Readers nostalgic for "that peace and love shit" will go unrewarded, but a dope harvest makes a good episode. This is marginal, though, even for the deepest regional collections.
- Robert F. Nardini, North Chichester, N.H.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.