NOBODY really knows when the hippie movement started.

Some trace it back as far as the Cynics of Ancient Greece. Others point to the Diggers of 17th Century England or the German “Nature Boys” who moved to California in the early 1900s to live as shirtless, long-haired vegans.

Whatever the origin, by 1967 the dream of an alternative way of living was on the verge of becoming a reality, when the so-called Summer of Love saw 100,000 young people converge on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district.

These “longhairs” hung out in the parks playing folk and rock music, smoking marijuana, dropping LSD and basically rejecting everything that conservative post-war America stood for. It was sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, baby, with a side serving of radical politics.

But if the hippie dream started on the hilly streets of San Francisco, it ended 70km inland at a speedway track in the little town of Altamont.

On the night of December 6, 1969, young concertgoer Meredith Hunter was stabbed and brutally bashed to death by a Hells Angels “security guard” high on the fear and chaos that permeated the Altamont Free Concert outside of San Francisco.

Earlier in the day a six-month pregnant Denise Jewkes, from local band The Ace of Cups, was hit in the head by a beer bottle lobbed from the crowd.

It fractured her skull, forcing her into emergency surgery.

When the Rolling Stones arrived in a helicopter Mick Jagger was immediately punched in the face as he emerged from the aircraft. Things were tense, to say the least.

While a clearly scared Jagger and the rest of the Stones attempted just to get to the end of Under My Thumb, the 18-year-old Hunter – high on methamphetamine – got into a fight with the Angels who were attempting to “persuade” the crowd to move back with sawn-off pool cues and motorcycle chains.

Beaten back by the angry bikers attempting to stop their Harleys from being knocked over, an enraged Hunter re-emerged waving a pistol.

Angel Alan Passaro rushed the young black man, knife raised, and stabbed him five times in the back while fists and feet rained down blows.

Hunter was one of three to die at the concert.

“It did not look like a bunch of happy hippies in streaming colours,” said Marty Balin, lead singer of San Francisco’s Jefferson Airplane, imagining instead medieval images of Hell.

“It looked more like sepia-toned Hieronymus Bosch.”

It was a brutal end to a tumultuous decade and a year to remember: Richard Nixon was inaugurated President, the gay rights movement kicked into gear, Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, man walked on the moon, Woodstock wowed us, and the Manson Family killings shocked the world.

We look at some of the key moments in a year of hope and horror that changed the world.

January

January 30: If 1969 ended with actual death, it started with a virtual death.

The death of The Beatles. To be fair, the band had been on life support for some time, having stopped playing live three years earlier.

Blame Yoko, blame egos, blame the fact that they’d literally done everything there was to do in pop music, the fact remains the same – the greatest band of all time was finished.

While the history books will show that John, Paul, George and Ringo officially called it quits in 1970, the facts are that it was a hastily organised show on the roof of Apple Records that would be last time the Fab Four would ever play in front of a live audience.

Album release: Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin

February

February 7: As the Southern Aurora express train approached the Victorian hamlet of Violet Town it should have slowed down.

The overnight trip from Sydney to Melbourne was nearing its end, and the people on board were waking up and looking forward to disembarking.

What they didn’t know was that the train’s driver, Jack Bowden, had died of a heart attack some 10km back up the track.

The Southern Aurora sped through two warning signals and a stop signal before smashing into a freight train. Nine passengers were killed and 47 more were seriously injured.

Album release: Kick Out The Jams, MC5

March

March 1: “I ain’t talking about no revolution,” a clearly drunk Jim Morrison shouted at The Doors fans in Miami’s Dinner Key Auditorium.

“And I’m not talking about no demonstration! I’m talking about having a good time!” Morrison, it seems, might have had too much of a good time on that hot Southern night – he was charged with indecent exposure.

Did the Lizard King reveal his … lizard … to adoring Floridians? That depends who you ask. Some swear they saw everything, others claim it was a mass hallucination.

Within two years Morrison would be found dead in a Paris bathtub. He was appealing the charges at the time.

Album release: The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground

April

April 17: Specialist Fifth Class Thomas Van Putten is recovered by US forces after more than year in a Vietcong prison camp and three weeks surviving in the hostile jungle.

After attempting to escape on two previous occasions, Van Putten finally slipped away from his guard on March 28.

For 21 days the soldier used every bit of his training to survive, narrowly avoiding recapture on two occasions.

Once he gave his pursuers the slip by placing his black underpants on his head for camouflage and pulling himself along in the water of a stream until he was out of sight.

His entire food intake during the ordeal consisted of a frog, a lizard and a few pieces of rotting fruit.

Van Putten was one of only two Americans to successfully escape from the an enemy prison during the Vietnam War.

Album release: Nashville Skyline, Bob Dylan

May

May 15: Doctors were baffled by the strange illness that struck down 16-year-old Missouri teenager Robert Raymond.

The boy had presented with warts and sores, swelling, pale skin and shortness of breath. He died from pneumonia on May 15.

Following the discovery of HIV in the 1980s, tissue samples belonging to Raymond were tested and it was, eventually, acknowledged that the boy was the first confirmed case of HIV in North America.

Album release: Clouds; Joni Mitchell

June

June 28: It was 1.20am on a warm summer’s evening in New York City when four cops raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village.

It was still illegal to be gay, and New York’s queer community was in a bind.

The city’s gay bars were run by the mafia, who paid off the cops to look the other way and at the same time blackmailed the patrons with the threat of outing them.

They’d had enough, and the raid was the final straw.

As the cops roughed up patrons and started arresting people, paying special attention to the drag queens, the crowd fought back, throwing bottles and shouting “Pigs!”.

The next few days became a running battle between the queer community and the police in what became known as the Stonewall Riots, a cornerstone of the gay and lesbian rights movement.

Album release: From Elvis in Memphis, Elvis Presley

July

July 1: The formal investiture of the Queen’s eldest son Charles as the Prince of Wales was a symbolic ceremony that involved Elizabeth placing a small crown on his head within the walls of Caernarvon Castle in Wales.

Not everyone was happy with the symbolism though.

Welsh nationalists exploded bombs in the lead up to the ceremony to protest the 21-year-old’s appointment as a sovereign of Wales, and two members of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru were killed while attempting to plant a bomb in a Welsh hotel.

Following the ceremony, a British Army soldier was killed by a car bomb.

July 16: Landing a man on the moon was about much more than space exploration.

The first country to successfully pull it off could claim cultural, scientific, technological and military superiority. In other words, there was a lot riding on it.

It’s estimated that a million people lined the roadsides, beaches and vantage points to watch the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” E. Aldrin Jr leave the earth perched atop the powerful Saturn V AS-506 rocket.

It was 9.32am local time, and the world would be changed forever. At 20:17 UTC (coordinated universal time) on Sunday, July 20, the Eagle lunar lander became the first manned craft to touchdown on a celestial body other than earth, just 65 years after the Wright brothers flew the first plane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong said as he stepped onto the lunar surface.

More than half a billion people watched the event on television.

Album release: Unhalfbricking, Fairport Convention

August

Two entries, because beyond the moon landing they are the two defining events of 1969.

August 8: Acting on the orders of the charismatic but demented Charles Manson, four members of his so-called family entered the house of actress Sharon Tate and her director husband Roman Polanski.

The heavily pregnant Tate and three friends were callously slain, along with a young visitor who was killed as he tried to leave the home.

The word “pig” was written on the front door of the home in Tate’s blood.

The following night Manson accompanied his Family members to the home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary.

Both were killed in a gruesome fashion.

The murders shocked America to its core, sent a shockwave of panic through Hollywood’s elite and rattled even the most hardboiled cops.

August 15: Max Yager owned a 200-acre farm at Bethel, New York, an hour or so from the town of Woodstock.

He could never have known how famous that farm would become when he said yes to a rag-tag bunch of hippies’ plan to hold a concert on his rolling green fields.

More than 200,000 (or perhaps as many as 400,000 according to some estimates) rock fans made a pilgrimage to Yager’s farm to watch Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Country Joe, Santana, Canned Heat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janice Joplin, The Who, Sly Stone, Jefferson Airplane, The Band, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Jimi Hendrix and more.

The fences were knocked down, it rained, there was nowhere near enough food or sanitation, and too many people freaked out on the infamous “brown acid”, but Woodstock went down in history as the rock festival that all others would be measured against.

Album release: Green River, Creedence Clearwater Revival

September

September 13: Cowardly great dane Scooby-doo, his sidekick Shaggy and their mystery-solving gang were introduced to Saturday morning television, partly as a response to complaints that children’s cartoons had become far too violent.

“Violence will be out of children’s programming this fall,” Hanna-Barbera co-producer Joseph Barbera said.

“Scooby Doo, Where Are You! is a series about a chicken-hearted Great Dane which, along with four high school students, solves tales of the supernatural.”

Another bastion of wholesome television, The Brady Bunch, began on September 26.

Album release: Abbey Road, The Beatles

October

October 29: It was half-past-ten in the evening when computer boffins at UCLA sent the very first message over ARPANET, the network that would eventually become the internet and change the world forever.

The message, transmitted from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute was supposed to say LOG, after which SRI was supposed to reply with IN.

The L was sent, and a phone call was made to make sure it arrived. Then the O was transmitted. The SRI computer crashed before the G could be transmitted.

Album release: Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), The Kinks

November

November 19: Pete Conrad and Alan Bean successfully land Apollo 12 lunar module Intrepid on the northern edge of the Mare Cognitum crater, becoming the third and fourth humans to land on the surface of the moon.

There were plans to beam back live colour images from the lunar surface into the lounge rooms across the globe, but Bean accidentally burned out the imaging tube of the camera after he pointed it directly at the sun.

Album release: The Allman Brothers Band, self titled

December

December 6: It was billed as Woodstock West, and the Altamont Free Concert attracted similar crowds of 300,000 rock fans.

That’s where the similarities ended though.

By the time the concert, which features Jefferson Airplane, Santana, The Rolling Stones and more, ended Meredith Hunter would be dead at the hands of the Hells Angels “security team”, two people were killed after being hit by cars and another punter would drown in a canal.

“The vibes were bad. Something was very peculiar, not particularly bad, just real peculiar,” Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick later said.

“It was that kind of hazy, abrasive and unsure day. I had expected the loving vibes of Woodstock but that wasn’t coming at me. This was a whole different thing.” Altamont is often mentioned alongside the Manson Family murders as the death of the sixties ethos.

Album release: Let It Bleed, The Rolling Stones

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, The Advertiser and Sunday Mail are running a week-long series looking back on life in South Australia in 1969. See tomorrow’s Sunday Mail for part one.