I’ve always thought of myself as “beat” rather than “hippie”. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and the rest are just perfect sometimes and just awful the rest. You have to dig through their work to find the great stuff, but it is worth it.
Here is a very cool interview that Jack Kerouac did with Steve Allen (Allen was beat, too). Jack reads from the intro to On The Road, unfortunately cut short, but it is just wonderful.