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Mantra-Rock Dance was a musical countercultural event held on January 29, 1967, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. It was organized by followers of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness as an opportunity for its founder, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, to address a wider public, and as a promotional and fundraising effort for their first center on the West Coast of the United States. The Mantra-Rock Dance featured American rock groups the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company (for whom Janis Joplin was the lead singer) and Moby Grape; these bands agreed to appear with Prabhupada and to perform for free. The participation of countercultural leaders considerably boosted the event's popularity; among them were the poet Allen Ginsberg, who led the singing of the Hare Krishna mantra on stage along with Prabhupada, and LSD promoters Timothy Leary and Stanley Augustus Owsley III. The Mantra-Rock Dance concert was later called "the ultimate high" and "the major spiritual event of the San Francisco hippy era". It led to favorable media exposures for Prabhupada and his followers, and brought the Hare Krishna movement to the wider attention of the American public. (more...)

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• 622 – The epoch of the Islamic calendar occurred, marking the year that Muhammad began his Hijra from Mecca to Medina.
• 1782 – Mozart's opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail made its premiere, after which Emperor Joseph II (pictured) anecdotally made the complaint that it had "too many notes".
• 1931 – Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie signed the nation's first constitution, the first time in history that an absolute ruler voluntarily shared sovereignty with his subjects.
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• 1965 – South Vietnamese Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao—an undetected communist spy—was hunted down and killed after being sentenced to death in absentia for a February 1965 coup attempt against Nguyen Khanh.

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