Far Out Company

Directions Website Contact the business

Far Out Company Countercultural rarity visual overload Keeping it cosmic.

I had heard the story of the Fleetwood Mac “Munich Incident” of 1970, when the band attended a party at a castle in the ...
10/10/2026

I had heard the story of the Fleetwood Mac “Munich Incident” of 1970, when the band attended a party at a castle in the forest owned by mysterious “rich hippies” who gave the band large quantities of L*D, which allegedly psychologically “destroyed” guitarists Peter Green and Danny Kirwan. I was wondering who these “Munich Jet Set hippie brats” (as Mick Fleetwood called them) were. It was these two.

Rainer Langhans and Uschi Obermaier came to Munich’s Highfish Kommune from Berlin’s Kommune 1, where Langhans participated in provocations such as the planned “pudding assassination” of visiting U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Ursula “Uschi” Obermaier was a successful model and actress who was originally involved with the Munich art-and-music commune Amon Düül, and later involved with Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger. While living at Kommune 1, the press called them “the most beautiful couple of the APO”—the German extra-parliamentary opposition.

After Kommune 1 disintegrated in 1969, the couple joined Munich’s Highfish Kommune and quickly became its public face. Obermaier’s modeling income became the commune’s principal source of funds. Langhans was a strategist and “practical media theorist” who envisioned Highfish as a pop-media factory, producing photography, fashion, posters, video, underground film and major concerts.

The “Munich Incident” for Fleetwood Mac actually took place over a few days in March 1970 and involved a lot of basement jamming with members of the Amon Düül circle at Kronwinkl Castle. Fleetwood Mac’s surviving members remembered it as the night Green was “taken away” from them. Green remembered it as a voluntary, musically liberating experience that enabled him to break through the blues language he had been playing for years. He also connected the trip with a vision of an angel holding a starving Biafran child, which he interpreted as an instruction to help others, reinforcing his already growing desire to give money away.

After the incident, Green came back to London and released his solo album ‘The End of the Game,’ which many critics disparaged as “directionless jamming” but which sounds pretty great if you’re into Krautrock.

Imagery from ‘70s issues of Spare Rib, a pioneering UK women’s liberation magazine founded by Rosie Boycott (previously ...
10/04/2026

Imagery from ‘70s issues of Spare Rib, a pioneering UK women’s liberation magazine founded by Rosie Boycott (previously of Frendz underground newspaper, featured here not long ago) and Marsha Rowe.

Spare Rib emerged from the counterculture and borrowed the look of a conventional women’s magazine but filled it with left-leaning feminist and ‘70s New Age wellness content. As the ‘70s evolved it became more punk and a forum for debate among different streams of the movement.

10/03/2026

Footage from ‘W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism’ (1971) by Dušan Makavejev.

The film is far-out and intercuts fictional and documentary elements. The fictional side is an imaginative and satirical narrative about an outspoken female advocate of sexual liberation who seduces a Stalin-like Soviet celebrity figure skater. The documentary side clipped here features Reich’s daughter Eva and footage from Reich’s Orgonon estate in Rangeley, Maine, which is a beautiful place to visit. Makavejev said that the film was “in part, a personal response to the life and teachings of Dr. Wilhelm Reich.”

Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst and protégé of Freud who developed a clinical approach that linked emotional life to the body, a social theory that linked sexual repression to authoritarian politics, and a body of experimental research into what he came to call orgone energy. Among other things he had a deep influence on the ‘60s and ‘70s counterculture, as many of his ideas became foundational to the human potential movement (bodywork, Gestalt therapy, primal scream and encounter groups popularized by Esalen all trace directly back to him) as well as commune and back-to-the-land communities.

I was once pretty obsessed with Reich as a student at the New School, where Reich taught in the ‘40s until he started getting in trouble for claims about his orgone accumulator, which then fueled his paranoia. He was ultimately imprisoned for violating an injunction prohibiting interstate shipment of orgone accumulators, and died of a heart attack at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.

09/26/2026

Pentangle getting more electric than usual on Australian TV circa 1972

This song ‘Reflection’ is an original jam (it just sounds ancient), but many of their songs were traditional ones that they transformed and made their own. Singer Jacqui McShee brought the traditional songs (English, Scottish, Appalachian, American spirituals), though she’s said she didn’t own folk records and was mostly listening to jazz. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn were major figures in London’s acoustic-guitar scene, while bassist Danny Thompson and drummer Terry Cox were essentially jazz musicians.

They often treated an ancient ballad as a jazz standard, with the old song supplying the melody and the harmony while the band supplied an entirely new rhythmic and harmonic environment. Renbourn specifically said that Terry Cox would devise percussion around the internal rhythm of the old song rather than simply putting a rock beat underneath it.

Early ‘70s shots from the Sausalito hippie houseboat scene by photographer Pirkle Jones. Soundtrack by David Crosby, fro...
09/25/2026

Early ‘70s shots from the Sausalito hippie houseboat scene by photographer Pirkle Jones.

Soundtrack by David Crosby, from the album he wrote while living on a Sausalito houseboat in November 1970.

09/18/2026

From ‘Catherine and John Fagan: Woodbury Alternative Living’ (1973) via the Vermont Historical Society.

East Hill Road in Woodbury, VT was one node in the Goddard-centered central Vermont back-to-the-land migration in the ‘70s, populated by builders, craftspeople, political radicals and homesteaders. This footage was taken during the locally famous 1973 mud season, when many of Vermont’s extensive dirt roads (there are more dirt roads than paved ones) were made impassable by heavy rains.

09/13/2026

Dean Stockwell plays a classic holier-than-thou hippie archetype in ‘Psych-Out’ (1968), with Jack Nicholson as Stoney and Susan Strasberg as the deaf protagonist searching the Haight for her tripped-out brother (Bruce Dern).

09/12/2026

Cult Time: Footage of Rajneeshpuram at its peak, from ‘Gods of the New Age’ (1984).

In 1981, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later known as Osho) purchased Big Muddy Ranch, an enormous 64,000-acre former cattle ranch near Antelope in north-central Oregon, for about $5.7 million. His Rajneeshee followers, largely led by his personal secretary Ma Anand Sheela, constructed roads, housing, farms, an airport, restaurants, shops, a medical center, sewage and water systems, and enormous communal meeting facilities like this one in the video.

In this footage Rajneeshpuram was flourishing, but soon afterward it began to collapse spectacularly amid a political war with the surrounding communities. Leadership began bringing in thousands of homeless people from cities around the country in what was presented publicly as a humanitarian program, but whose main objective was to register them to vote in local elections. Then some members cultured Salmonella in a laboratory and deliberately contaminated local restaurants as part of a strategy to incapacitate voters before election day, marking the first modern bioterror attack on U.S. soil. Investigations soon uncovered other crimes in the inner circle like illegal wiretapping, immigration fraud, arson, poisoning plots and attempted murder.

Rajneeshpuram collapsed in 1985, when Sheela fled to Europe, before being extradited to the U.S. and imprisoned. Today the former commune is an active Christian youth camp called Washington Family Ranch, and the air strip is still there and operational. It’s private property and they say they do not offer historical tours.

09/06/2026

From the BBC Man Alive series, 1970, about the “hippie trail” which generally ran from London → Amsterdam → Istanbul → Tehran → Kabul → India → Kathmandu.

The final stop on the hippie trail was Freak Street, officially known as Jhochhen Tole in Kathmandu. It was a legal cannabis hub until 1973, when the Nepali government banned cannabis and o***m under pressure from the U.S. government and revoked the visas of long-term “freaks.”

Address

PO Box 98
Ossipee, NH
03864

Website

,

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Far Out Company posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Far Out Company:

Shortcuts

Share

Category