On the Trail of Easy Rider: 40 Years On... Still Searching for America

Joel Selvin:
Easy Rider is a set of questions posed at the beginning of the decline and fall of the American civilization.

Country Joe McDonald:
Will there be a next Woodstock? Woodstock is now, it's Facebook, it's Twitter. The new Woodstock is happening right now, involving 100 million people, because Woodstock was really a gathering, and the 60s was about that: gathering. How do we get together?

Charles Shaar Murray:
Bikers were always pretty right wing. In the sixties the Hells Angels used to bust up peace marches, and at one point Sonny Barger, who was the chief of the Oakland angels, most notorious for Altamont, wrote to the president offering the services of Hells Angels as a guerilla, spelled GORILLA, force in Vietnam. They volunteered to serve in Vietnam! Though the US military, having one of its rare attacks of good sense, concluded that their efforts would not be well served by having a gang of drunk, stoned bikers zooming through the countryside looking for people to shoot.

Rick Doblin:
Steve Jobs has said that one of the most important experiences of his life was taking LSD. Kary Mullis, Nobel prize winner in physics, who developed the polymerase chain reaction that is used all over the place in DNA recognition - he says that marijuana and psychedelics helped him with his creativity. We are in a cultural crisis, we need these tools, we need these altered states of consciousness available that are unique. Dr. Stan Grof, the world's leading LSD researcher and theorist, said that psychedelics are to the study of the mind what the telescope is for astronomy and the microscope is for biology.

Peter Fonda:
Most communes at that time were run by misogynists. They weren't for real, and I could see through that sh*t, cos I visited quite a few communes. A couple were really into it, more like a kibbutz, but most of them were these guys who wanted a lot of little girls around them - Charles Manson without the killing!

Peter Coyote:
Free love was wonderful until it was your wife. It was great. I was a huge proponent of free love. I practiced my own scorched earth policy, no survivors. But then you come home one day, and your door is locked and there is a motorcycle in front of the house. That doesn't feel so good. I saw a lot of that. I called it death over the orange juice. The next morning everyone trying to be civil and you know: Good Morning. How are things? Would you please pass the orange juice? Yes you c*nt!

Dennis Hopper:
We didn't have any cocaine when we made Easy Rider. It wasn't popular, it wasn't around and that was the reason I chose it. Cocaine I'd had once with a guy from the Count Basie Band. It was called the drug of kings and I thought man, and I'd heard that Freud had used it and I thought wow, that would be cool. And it's real expensive, it's the drug of kings - so lets make it coke. After Easy Rider, suddenly cocaine was going around, being passed around on silver platters at parties - it wasn't even being hidden.

Guy Lawson:
One of the things that is important about the drug debate - it's put in terms of cultural signifiers, but never looked at as a commercial, straight-up business. There is a corporate mentality to drug dealing, it is an industry, the same size as the airline industry in the United States - a fifty billion dollar industry - it has all the textures, the modalities, the integrations: horizontal and vertical. The War on Drugs has been lost. People who are against some form of decriminalisation, or a least addressing the essence of the question, are just throwing Mexico to the wolves for their own righteous reasons.

Michael Simmons:
There is nothing veiled about the ending of Easy Rider. It definitely is a comment on America. We're still living with those two redneck lunatics in the truck shooting at Hippies. Except now they're at tea bag rallies and they're rooting for Sarah Palin. But they haven't gone away, unfortunately - they've spawned.