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Legendary music producer (and more recently, infamous accused murderer) Phil Spector has a cameo as a drug dealer.
How others will see it. Easy Rider became an instant classic, and spawned numerous counter-culture low budget imitations. (Probably the most commercially successful among these was Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke, which rejected philosophical pretensions in favor of simple druggie humor.)
Laconic Peter Fonda and manic-depressive Dennis Hopper (who also directed) got much mileage from the movie, but not as much as Jack Nicholson, who landed an Academy Award nomination. Soon after, Nicholson made Five Easy Pieces, and became a true ten year overnight success.
How I felt about it. Easy Rider received one other Oscar nomination, for its script, which was partly improvised by Hopper and Fonda. Also credited was Terry Southern, who had previously written two brilliant black comedies, Dr. Strangelove (1964) and The Loved One. One has to suspect that Southern was the secret ingredient of the success of Easy Rider, although Hopper did make shrewd decisions, such as casting local yokels for the diner scene.
A recurrent theme in Easy Rider is prejudice. Rednecks and law enforcement despise the hippies. Nicholson's character opines that this is because the rednecks despise the biker hippies' freedom. Of course, this is what the bikers would like to believe. But it is really about conformity. The hippies are simply not conforming, and therefore, they must be punished. It is the rednecks' belief that they are sergeants in an army that includes all American males. The hippies aren't free. They're slackers, and unkempt slackers at that.
The bikers do find acceptance here and there: at a rural ranch, or in New Orleans during Mardis Gras, where practically anything goes. Fonda's "date" (TAMI Show choreographer and future "Mickey" singer Toni Basil) can even take her clothes off in public without getting arrested. But hostility from Johnny Law and armed rednecks is always around the corner.
The lot of the hippie is difficult, because the culture emphasizes the present and not the future. Money is spent, not saved, and certainly not earned by pumping gas or waiting tables. Austerity is valued, partly as the opposite of capitalism, but mostly because there is no choice. If you have no money, or can't rent a hotel room, what else can the hippie traveller do except find a hopefully safe open spot to spend the night near the highway.
The two hippies, Wyatt and Billy, are close-knit but do allow others to briefly enter their world. They must do drugs, though. Nicholson is introduced to marijuana, and the two prostitutes take acid. Naturally, they are reluctant at first, but are compelled to partake by Wyatt, who passes the joint to Nicholson and puts the tablets into the mouths of Basil and Black. Drug use is essential because to the hippie, the stoned life is as real as being sober.
The lifestyle is unsustainable, which is why there are no more flower children communes, and why lone hippie bikers are seldom seen. Thus, Easy Rider doesn't really document the beginning of an era. Instead, it shows how it ended, in a bad acid trip and under the heavy boot of The Man.