Ace of Cups is an American rock band formed in San Francisco in 1967 during the Summer of Love era. It has been described as one of the first all-female rock bands.

The Merry Pranksters were followers of American author Ken Kesey. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters lived communally at Kesey's homes in California and Oregon, and are noted for the sociological significance of a lengthy road trip they took in the summer of 1964, traveling across the United States in a psychedelic painted school bus called Furthur, organizing parties, and giving out LSD. During this time they met many of the guiding lights of the 1960s cultural movement and presaged what are commonly thought of as hippies with odd behavior, tie-dyed and red, white, and blue clothing, and renunciation of normal society, which they dubbed The Establishment. Tom Wolfe chronicled their early escapades in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and documents a 1966 trip on Furthur from Mexico through Houston, stopping to visit Kesey's friend the novelist Larry McMurtry. Kesey was in flight from a drug charge at the time.