Were The Beatles hippies

Answer 1

not so much

---- The Hippy movement essentially began in the Haight Ashbury suburb of San Francisco, and was a development of earlier West Coast countercultures, including the Beat movement and Aldous Huxley's original experiments with LSD.

By the time that Hippy ideas began to be important in Britain (around 1966) The Beatles were already well established, but the Beatles rapidly adopted Hippy ideas, dress and drug habits for their Sergeant Pepper LP.

The LP before Sergeant Pepper - Revolver - is much more European in its influences, and even though the Beatles were heavily influenced by Hippy ideas they were never a Hippy band to the extent of (for example) Pink Floyd, or the Soft Machine.

Shortly after Sergeant Pepper the Beatles made a TV movie Magical Mystery Tour which is even more deeply influenced by Hippy ideas than Sergeant Pepper was. The film plot develops around a Magic Bus (Ken Kesey's Magic Bus was part of the basic folklore of Hippy philosophy), but by the time the Beatles made the White Album (follow up to Sergeant Pepper) they had already returned to using British Music Hall motifs and a satirical stance (eg in Back in the USSR). Both British Music Hall and satire were no part of Hippy culture (which was Utopian and down home American in origin).