A Long, Strange Trip

“Hey, do you want some hash for the road?” Normal Bean asks when he’s done with the interview. He grabs an empty, smell-proof canister and plops down on the floor, sorting through Mason jars filled with crushed bud. Since Bean got his cancer diagnosis, weed has taken on a new meaning in his life: marijuana is now medical as well as recreational. Scotch tape labels the jars, boasting names like “Purple Haze” and “Supersonic”: his own personal strains. He ends every interview this way. Bean’s just that kind of guy: he gives what he can, and takes what he must. Marijuana, something that he happens to always have in excess, is a common parting gift from his house in West Eugene.

Bean has lived a long and interesting life from his time as a foster child in the Ozarks to his adventures with the Merry Pranksters in Eugene. He is known in the counterculture scene as the guitarist for the Normal Bean Band, an events organizer and a marijuana activist. In 2021, he opened The Hippie Museum in Springfield as a way to commemorate a life full of adventures and music.

Recently, Bean was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Some days, after a round of chemotherapy, it is hard for him to leave the bed. “It’s all about prolonging my life now,” he said. “But there are still ways to find joy today.”

He still works on projects, in his garden, and around the house, but in a modified way. Instead of hauling around heavy yard equipment, he has to limit what he can carry to around five pounds. It’s impossible for him to run the Hippie Museum, which has shut down temporarily. “Heather [my wife] used to call me a Spartan because I was indestructible, I never aged, never faltered, so this has been a big adjustment,” he said.

Bean likely got his iron attitude from his unorthodox upbringing. When he was three, his uncle kidnapped him from his father’s house, where he was being abused. But Bean was left to fend for himself after his aunt passed away because his uncle was a long-haul truck driver. “I lived on raw potatoes and learned how to open a tuna can without a can opener,” he said.

The other kids that lived around him were older, and hippies. They smoked weed, dropped acid, and skipped out on school. Bean explained that the only reason he went to school was to eat lunch, but he didn’t feel that he was learning anything. He had already read the encyclopedia three or four times by the time he was in third grade, and thought doing the homework was useless. He refused to turn it in all year.

“So I got into an argument with this one teacher,” he said. She punished him by making him stand on a line all recess, a line that kids went to when they got in trouble. “I was on the line the entire year because I refused to give in and would not hand in my stuff. To the point where the kids came and stood on the line with me.”

A collection of Normal Bean’s Hashish.

When he was in seventh grade, his uncle Chuck sold the house Bean was living in and signed him over to the state. From here he entered the foster system. Bean was moved all around Missouri, living with wealthy and poor families. One family he remembers living with during middle school, the Munsons, were the wealthiest people he ever met. “I went from the hippie world, smoking pot, drive-by shooting to the most mellow environment,” he said.

These changes were jarring for Bean. At one point, his birth mother showed up and took him in. She was medically unfit to care for Bean, but he didn’t mind. He lived with her and her boyfriend, Dick Norman, for 30 days and learned how to play guitar. “I sat there and played ‘Rocky Top Tennessee’ with him, and my mom would sing,” he remembers fondly.

But his stint with his mother was short-lived, and before long Bean was back in foster care. In high school, he continued his passion for music through the school band. He formed the first iteration of the Normal Bean Band with his new foster brothers who lived on a farm in the Ozarks. He was living with a Mormon family then, and remembers his time with them fondly.

“I was never vindictive of my situation, I was just grateful for all the fabulous luck I had through it,” he said on growing up in the foster system. “Even the most tragic things, the sad times, I try to remember through a happy light.”

When he graduated high school, Bean evaluated his options. He could go on a mission through the Mormon Church —spreading the gospel that he wasn’t sure he believed in— or he could enlist in the army. He chose the latter, planning on saving up some money for college. The enlistment program was long and grueling, especially for ranger school. The program that Bean went through was called RIP —Ranger Indoctrination Program—, and was infamous for tiring out even the strongest enrollers.

He struggled through as his friends fell away. Bean learned how to do things like actively relax his muscles one by one so he could fall asleep in five minutes, or how to function without food and water for days on end. “There was a time when I realized, ‘Wow I’m making the run times, wow I’m doing hundreds of pushups,’ just because that’s what I had to do,” he said. He graduated from ranger school and became a first battalion ranger, stationed in Savannah, Georgia.

After working as a ranger for four years, Bean decided it was time for a change. He moved back to Mississippi and back to what he knew: growing pot, being a hippie, and being a musician. He reunited with the Normal Bean Band and started playing shows for college students out in the woods.

“We were Ozark original rock and roll,” Bean said. “So when a party went down in the woods, all the kids from the University of Arkansas and other schools, where were they going? They’re coming to our show!”

Bean paints a picture of these shows out in the woods: a bassist so in tune with his instrument that it seems like he’s levitating 10 feet off the ground. The band is illuminated by the flames of a giant bonfire, white oaks and pine trees in the background. Bean, buzzing with energy for hours, feeding off the vibes from the crowd.

But Bean couldn’t stay in the South forever. The police were growing suspicious of him and his crew who had suddenly accumulated a lot of wealth and followers. People were wearing Normal Bean Band t-shirts around town, and showing up to his house for underground shows. Normal wanted to flee the scene while things were still fun, before they got ugly. “I wasn’t working a regular job, I was being a musician and growing pot,” he explained. “I realized that was a no-win. I quit and came out to the West Coast.”

Some of his friends who stayed in the Ozarks ended up getting arrested for marijuana possession. Bean feels like he left at the perfect time, and ended up settling down in Eugene in the late ‘90s. He knew he wanted to continue his work in the music scene, but didn’t want to work as a musician anymore. “I was tired of people always trying to take advantage of me,” he said.

When he was playing with the Normal Bean Band in the Ozarks, Normal refused to sign with any big record labels, knowing they would just want to profit off him. Fans would distribute recordings of their live shows via a tape network so that the music could easily get to who it really was for: the people.

Normal started working as a music coordinator and producer in Eugene, empowering local bands to play for the people instead of corporations. He also got involved in marijuana activist circles, something he’s still passionate about today.

“When my sickness happened, I said, ‘Win, lose, or draw, I’m finally going to get to tell the truth’, and this time I’m the guy it’s happening to.”

He’s been advocating for medical marijuana since long before it was legal and now experiences the effects firsthand. “I can tell you now that marijuana helps you cope with cancer.”

Normal held up a small red tin of Drops edibles in one hand and a retro Darth Vader lunch box filled with orange pill bottles from his doctor in the other. He compares taking a gummy to taking his cancer medications, which he takes three times a day. “When I eat a gummy, I sit up and my will to live is there,” he said. “Without it, I go, ‘Why don’t I just die, let’s just get this over with man.’”

Normal also became involved in reiterations of the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock when he moved to Eugene. He played Woodstock's 40th, 45th, and 50th anniversary shows, and from there, fondly remembers uniting the East and West Coast hippie families under the Flag for Universal Peace. 

“West Coast meets East Coast makes WE,” he said on uniting the two sides of the nation. He met hundreds of interesting musicians and people at Woodstock’s 50th anniversary, and from here, got the idea of starting the Hippie Museum. He realized that he had been holding on to lots of merch and memorabilia from his time in the music scene: signed posters, photographs, tie-dyed banners, a lifesize cutout of Frank Zappa in a leopard print speedo. 

“I’ve just been throwing stuff in boxes my whole life, I had no idea how much stuff I had,” he said with a laugh. He remembers the visceral experience of putting up all the ephemera and being surrounded with a physical record of his own life. 

“It was so cool to open up the museum,” Normal’s wife Heather said, her chihuahua, Blue, perched on her lap. “It was like seeing mine and Normal’s life on the wall.”

It was special for Normal to see other artists come to the museum and be confronted with their own history. Whenever he played or attended shows, the musicians around him always counted on him to archive the merchandise. “They were always like, ‘Normal’s got it,’” he said. “Watching them see all the stuff because they were there, it was like them walking down a walk of life.”

The museum opened with a show from Big Brother and the Holding Company. It continued to do both private and public shows throughout the time it was open. “The Hippie Museum was really not for the public, it was for all the musicians,” Normal said. People would just hang out and jam, smoke a joint, and chat. “It became our den, our home base,” he said.

As Normal’s cancer continued to spread, he had less and less energy every day. Eventually, maintaining and paying for the property became too much for him. He was forced to close the museum and move out to West Eugene to rest and recuperate.

His house today is filled with hippie ephemera from the museum: signed Grateful Dead concert posters hanging in the living room, tie-dye sheets from the Normal Bean Band stage up in the den, Bean’s guitars up on the wall. Surrounded by his life’s collections, Normal spends his days in an armchair, watching old TV shows and smoking a doobie. His yard is filled with marijuana bushes, lovingly attended to, with drying nets that hang stalks in the den.

“I’m not afraid to die,” he said. Normal doesn’t know what’s next for him, but he wants to make the most of the life he’s living. Right now he’s working to digitize parts of the Hippie Museum, to spread the message of the Universal Love Family Online. He wants to tell his story and impart his knowledge to the next generation of the counterculture. “My star burnt bright,” he said with a smile.