The Farm Band Mantra – 777 2 × Vinyl, LP, Album 1972

$

30

Just a crazy 60s relic to own. Some good jams and a gatefold featuring a shot of the community.

Associated with the Tennessee Farm, an intentional community near Summertown, Tennessee. 

The band produced four albums and a handful of singles that were distributed at their free concerts around the United States. 

The Farm was established after Stephen Gaskin and friends led a caravan of 60 buses, vans, and trucks from San Francisco on a four-month speaking tour across the US. Along the way, they became a community, lacking only in land to put down roots. After returning to California, the decision was made to buy land together. Combining all their resources would finance purchase of only about fifty acres in California. Another month on the road brought the group back to Tennessee, where they checked out various places that might be suitable to settle. They decided on property in Lewis County, about seventy miles south of Nashville.[4] After buying 1,064 acres (4.1 km2) for $70 per acre, the group began building its community in the woods alongside the network of crude logging roads that followed its ridgelines. Shortly thereafter, an adjoining 750 acres (3.0 km2) were purchased for $100 per acre.

From its founding in the 1970s, Farm members took vows of poverty and owned no personal possessions other than clothing and tools, though this restriction loosened as time passed. During that time, Farm members did not use artificial birth control, alcohol, tobacco, man-made psychotropics,[5] or animal products. Many of the early buildings on the Farm were unconventional, ranging from converted school buses to modified 16 x 32 army tents. Over time, larger homes were constructed, each providing shelter for multiple families and single people, often with up to 40 people under one roof. Visitors were also housed in a two-story tent made by sewing two army tents together.

In the early days, Gaskin was considered the "abbot of the monastery" and made many of the governmental decisions for the group. His role was eventually taken over by a "council of elders" and then a "board of directors" consisting of some of the most respected and influential members of the Farm community. The Farm formed a non-profit corporation called The Foundation to provide a common financial structure for the community and members contributed their incomes to it. A security crew constantly maintained a welcome center at the entrance gate where all traffic passed and was logged.

In the original manifestation of The Farm, all members were believers in the holiness of life and that smoking marijuana was a sacrament. Founding members had all used LSD numerous times and believed they had experienced shared psychedelic vision that bound them together. They said that their cultural conditioning had been blown away enough to experience a world of higher consciousness. They believed in the reality of a spiritual dimension and in universal brotherhood.[5]