The Mantra-Rock Dance was a counterculture music event held on , 1967, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. It was organized by followers of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) as an opportunity for its founder, Swami Prabhupada, to address a wider public. It was also a promotional and fundraising effort for their first center on the West Coast of the United States.
The Mantra-Rock Dance featured some of the most prominent Californian rock groups of the time, such as the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, as well as the then relatively unknown Moby Grape. The bands agreed to appear with Prabhupada and to perform for free; the proceeds were donated to the local Hare Krishna temple. The participation of countercultural leaders considerably boosted the event's popularity; among them were the poet Allen Ginsberg, who led the singing of the Hare Krishna mantra onstage along with Prabhupada, and LSD promoters Timothy Leary and Augustus Owsley Stanley III.
The Mantra-Rock Dance concert was later called "the ultimate high" and "the major spiritual event of the San Francisco hippie era." It led to favorable media exposures for Prabhupada and his followers, and brought the Hare Krishna movement to the wider attention of the American public. The 40th anniversary of the Mantra-Rock Dance was commemorated in 2007 in Berkeley, California.
Background
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (also referred to as "Bhaktivedanta Swami" or "Prabhupada"), a Gaudiya Vaishnava sannyasi and teacher, arrived in New York City from his native India in 1965 and "caught the powerful rising tide" of a counterculture that was fascinated with his homeland and open to new forms of "consciousness-expanding spirituality." After establishing his first American temple in New York City at 26 Second Avenue, Prabhupada requested his early follower Mukunda Das and his wife Janaki Dasi to open a similar ISKCON center on the West Coast of the United States.
Mukunda and Janaki met up with friends from college, who would later come to be known as Shyamasundar Das, Gurudas, Malati Dasi, and Yamuna Dasi. Teaming up with them, Mukunda rented a storefront in the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, which at that time was turning into the hub of the hippie counterculture, and stayed to take care of the developing new center.
Preparation and promotion
To raise funds, gain supporters for the new temple, and to popularize Prabhupada's teachings among the hippie and countercultural audience of the Haight-Ashbury scene, the team decided to hold a charitable rock concert and invited Prabhupada to attend. Despite his position as a Vaishnava sannyasi and some of his New York followers objecting to what they saw as an inappropriate invitation of their guru to a place full of "amplified guitars, pounding drums, wild light shows, and hundreds of drugged hippies," Prabhupada agreed to travel from New York to San Francisco and take part in the event. Using their acquaintance with Rock Scully, manager of the Grateful Dead, and Sam Andrew, founding member and guitarist of the Big Brother and the Holding Company – who were among the most prominent rock bands in California at the time – Shyamasundar and Gurudas secured their consent to perform for charity at the concert, charging only the "musicians' union minimum" of $250. Malati Dasi happened to hear Moby Grape, a relatively unknown group at the time, and she convinced the other team members to invite the band to play at the concert as well.
Another leading countercultural figure, the beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg, was a supporter of Prabhupada. He had met the swami earlier in New York and assisted him in extending his United States visa. Despite disagreeing with many of Prabhupada's required prohibitions, especially the ones pertaining to drugs and promiscuity, Ginsberg often publicly sang the Hare Krishna mantra, which he had learned in India. He made the mantra part of his philosophy and declared that it "brings a state of ecstasy." He was glad that Prabhupada, an authentic swami from India, was now trying to spread the chanting in America. Along with other countercultural ideologues like Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder, and Alan Watts, Ginsberg hoped to incorporate Prabhupada and the chanting of Hare Krishna into the hippie movement. Ginsberg agreed to take part in the Mantra-Rock Dance concert and to introduce the swami to the Haight-Ashbury hippie community.