Wikipedia:Today's featured article/July 16, 2011



Mantra-Rock Dance was a musical countercultural event held on January 29, 1967, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. It was organized by followers of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness as an opportunity for its founder, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, to address a wider public, and as a promotional and fundraising effort for their first center on the West Coast of the United States. The Mantra-Rock Dance featured American rock groups the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company (for whom Janis Joplin was the lead singer) and Moby Grape; these bands agreed to appear with Prabhupada and to perform for free. 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 on stage 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 hippy 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. (more...)

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