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Between now and the Autumnal Equinox, we'll be publishing a series of weekly articles by Christine Hall under the heading "The Summer of Love – 40 Years After." These articles will not only focus on the summer of 1967, but will cover the events that led up to this historic (some would say mythological) event, and on events that followed as a direct consequence.
The Summer of Love – 40 Years After
It Was Forty Years Ago Today, Sgt Pepper Taught the Band to Play
by Christine Hall In 1967, personal computers were, as yet, unimagined and the advent of the Internet was nearly thirty years away. There were no VCRs or DVDs; if you wanted to see a movie you had to go to the theater or wait for it to be shown on over-the-air television. If you needed to do research, say for an article such as this, you had to make a trip to the library. If you wanted a copy of the latest hit song, you had to travel to a record store, as there was not even the idea that one day it would be possible to point, click and download.
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Poster advertising the Human Be-In in 1967. But in 1967, the world was as modern a place as it had ever been. Most shows broadcast on the three television networks were in color, even if most families did not yet have a color set. In some markets TV, even in black and white, could be seen in unbelievable clarity by using a new phenomenon called “cable TV.” FM radio was in stereo and you could carry your music with you using new inventions like transistor radios and cassettes. Cinerama domes, with their semicircular screens, were in almost every major American city, promising to make movies bigger and better than ever.
In your car, which was sleek and powerful, you listened to music, without commercials or chatter, on an 8 Track player. You flew down an Interstate highway system that was ultramodern and not yet complete. If you needed to travel out-of-town or out-of-state, buses and trains went virtually everywhere cheaply – or you could fly for a few dollars more.
There was easy and effective birth control, for the first time in the history of the planet, and no major strains of disease had grown resistant to antibiotics. Even though open heart surgery was a desperate measure that nearly always meant that you were about to die, there were promising experiments in heart transplant surgery ongoing in South Africa.
Back then, when the Beatles were Fab, America belonged to the young. Because of the huge number of “baby boomers,” those who had been born during the birthrate bubble that occurred in the decade or so following World War II, the average age of the average American was at a historical low. By 1967, the oldest of these boomers were 22 years old – and that summer the boomer generation descended on the city of San Francisco with a vengeance. So much so that they gave that season a title – The Summer of Love.
In retrospect, The Summer of Love was but a blip on the graph of time, but it was a blip that continues to effect the core of American life to this day, both for better and worse. On the worse side: the divisiveness in world view that began to form during that period is today represented by the specter of red and blue states and in bitter fights over such issues as abortion rights. For the better: the roots of the modern New Age and NeoPagan movements can be traced directly through sixties era San Francisco. Like it or not, the New Age grew out of the LSD inspired consciousness movement that was promoted by the likes of Owsley, Ken Kesey, Tim Leary and Richard Alpert.
The Summer of Love is actually a misnomer. By all accounts, this “summer” actually began in the heart of winter, on January 14, 1967, with the “Human Be-in” at Golden Gate Park. The name of this event was a pun on the term “sit-in,” which had become a mainstay as a method to protest everything from the war in Vietnam to racial segregation. The idea was that humanist values would be brought to the sit-in idea – hence, Human Be-in.
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Jefferson Airplane at Human Be-in.
The Be-in was announced on the cover of the first edition of The San Francisco Oracle, the city's first “underground” newspaper, as "A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In." The tone for the afternoon was set by Timothy Leary, in his first San Francisco appearance, with his famous phrase "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out." Also on the bill was Leary's Harvard colleague, and then fellow LSD proponent, Richard Alpert, who was soon to change his name to Baba Ram Dass and quit advocating the use of acid in favor of meditation. Allen Ginsberg chanted mantras and led the crowd through a cycle of “oms.” Dick Gregory and Jerry Rubin were also on the bill and music was provided by Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Oh yes, one more thing – a then unheard of 35,000 people showed-up, despite the fact that the event received practically no advance publicity.
That, of course, guaranteed the event would get plenty of after-the-fact publicity. Suddenly the hippies and the counter culture had moxie. The news media had a field day, and beamed images of the event into homes across America on their evening news broadcasts, making the country aware of a flower-children movement of peace and love happening on the West Coast. By the time summer arrived, Haight-Ashbury was becoming overfilled with runaway teens from all corners of the country, eager to sign up for service in the peace, love, groovy, and pass-the-joint army, giving rise to another moniker for the year: “the year of the runaway.”
On June 3. just as summer was beginning, the Beatles, in those days the most popular musical group on the planet, announced to the world that they were on the same wavelength, with the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. With it's references to the drug culture (“With a Little Help From My Friends” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"), to Eastern meditation (Harrison's "Within You Without You"), and to the runaway phenomenon (“She's Leaving Home"), the album gave credibility to the notion that the hippie enclaves in San Francisco and other cities were a real cultural fact.
About the same time, Columbia Records released Scott McKenzie's “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” which was penned by The Mamas and the Papas' John Phillips to promote the upcoming Monterey Pop Festival, which the group was helping organize. The lyrics, reportedly written in less than twenty minutes, could've been part of a campaign by the San Francisco Hippie Chamber of Commerce, if there had been one: “For those who come to San Francisco; Summertime will be a love-in there; In the streets of San Francisco; Gentle people with flowers in their hair.” The song became an instant icon, selling five million copies, and further prompting the exodus of American youth to the bay city.
The event that Scott McKenzie's song was meant to promote, brought even more seekers of the hippie lifestyle to the bay area. The Monterey Pop Festival, the precursor to Woodstock, was held at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey County, about a hundred miles south of San Francisco, from June 16th to the 18th. An astonishing 200,000 people packed the fairgrounds for this event, which featured performances by The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, Ravi Shankar, The Who, Hugh Masekela, The Grateful Dead, The Association, Buffalo Springfield, Country Joe and The Fish, Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Canned Heat, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, The Steve Miller Band, The Blues Project, The Mamas and the Papas and more.
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Poster advertising the Monterey Pop Festival
The festival was also notable for featuring the first major concert performances by Janis Joplin (with Big Brother and the Holding Company), Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding, with Hendrix appearing at the insistence of festival board member Paul McCartney. All performers at the event except Ravi Shankar performed for free, with the proceeds going to charity.
That summer's influx of newcomers to the Haight began to cause problems, as the neighborhood could not assimilate so many people in such a short time. Homelessness, hunger, drug problems, and crime began to afflict the neighborhood, and many of the older hippies and beatniks moved to Marin County. By summer's end, however, most of the newcomers began to leave, returning back to their colleges or universities, or back home to mom and dad. But as they returned to their home towns, they took the utopian ideas they'd picked-up in San Francisco back with them. America would never be the same.
In October 1967, the Diggers, a guerrilla street theater group, staged “The Death of Hippie,” a mock funeral and parade where masked participants carried a coffin with the words "Hippie--Son of Media" on the side. The event was staged in a manner so that any media that covered the story would be strengthening the Digger message that hippies were a media invention.
The Summer of Love was over.
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Editor's note: If you can't wait for the next installment in this series, you might want to read these related articles that are already on our site:
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2007 by AlternativeApproaches.com
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