Ironically
Freaks was a term coined by who knows honestly
The 1970 cartoon of hippies....
David Crosby in Almost Cut My Hair sang of letting my freak flag fly....
I was born in 1957 and I know of you smoked weed and had long hair and considered yourself somewhat counterculture ...even though that is quaint by today’s standards...you were indeed a “freak”
That hamfisted movie Joe with Peter Boyle mentions Freaks.....as does Arlo Guthrie addressing Woodstock
I think Garcia also speaks of freaks as counter culture folk much earlier
I honestly don’t know.....it was there as I came up
Another word in the same vein....cool....is someone cool.....as in do they smoke weed or are they ok with it
These distinctions...however silly now...were paramount from say mid 60s to late 70s ....
Another thing about freak.....freak shows at fairs....we had real one then.....lobster boy, bearded lady, slug boy, tall man, midget and so on....it was sad to me even then honestly
I think the freak hippie thing started in Los Angeles ....Zappa speaks of it very early....and hippies didn’t call themselves hippies
They called each other freaks....even in Mississippi though we were usually a few year down the arc
Back then fashion moved inward from the coasts....music was universal but clothes took a few seasons
Now everyone shops same stuff from Boise to Boston and Marta to Manhattan
I was in Manhattan two summers ago...people dressed same as Nashville
It was far different 35-60 years ago that way
White-collared conservatives, flashing down the street
Pointing their plastic finger at me
They’re hoping soon my kind will drop and die
But I’m going to wave my freak flag high
- “If 6 Was 9,” Jimi Hendrix, 1967
I don’t remember hearing “freak” being used until the early ‘70s. It could have begun with The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic which dates back to 1968, but who knows if the artist came up with the name himself or not. It might have started on the east coast and then worked its way out here to California.
“Cool” is a much older term, dates back at least to the beatnik era and probably jazz culture before that. IIRC you can hear Bob Denver’s Maynard G Krebs using it as slang in Dobie Gillis.
“Hippie” I think was something Time Magazine came up with circa summer of 1967. A neologism based on “hip”, another allegedly beatnik favorite. Break out a copy of On The Road or Naked Lunch to see what Kerouac and William S Burroughs used. Or maybe Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”.