Culture & Community: Feature Article: The Gathering of the Tribes on a Warm San Franciscan Night

Christine Hall rants about how the Summer of Love and the hippies are portrayed in the mainstream media. In the process, she manages to let you in on a little more of the history of that magickal summer.

The Human Be-in that happened in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park to ring-in the Summer of Love was more than a great party. It served the purpose of unifying many of the subcultures that existed in and around the city by the bay into a single counter culture. The history of hippiedom revolves around this almost forgotten event.

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1970 Black Panther Party pamphlet combining an
anti-drug message with revolutionary politics.

However, if we left it to the mainstream media and the politicians, everything that was good about the sixties, everything that was good about the hippies, everything that was good about student radicals, everything that was good about the Black Panthers, would be lost in the darkness of unwritten history. According to the press and politicos, the sixties were little but a time of excess. We hippies did nothing but smoke dope, drop acid and fuck. Oh yes, we were also vulgar.

They'll admit that we wanted to make the world a better place, but imply that we were too stoned, too busy “balling” and otherwise living a hedonistic lifestyle to do any good.

This is how they talked about us then, and how they want us to be remembered now.

Of course, this is just good old fashioned bullshit, brought about because the powers that be, from the Clintons to the Bushes, from Haliburton to Starbucks, are just as scared of us today as Nixon, Humphrey, General Electric and Dow Chemical were back then.

To be sure, they love to pretend that they're not, to claim that they love the old hippies, and to marginalize us in the process. They parade vintage footage from '67 or '69 on the Today show, Nightly News, and on tabloid TV mainstays like ET, “celebrating” the birthday of the Summer of Love or Woodstock. The message they're trying to get across is, “It's been forty years and they're gone. The world's still here, and the world's still the same. They never accomplished anything but smoking dope.”

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The Original Woodstock Poster with the Wallkill, New York
location. The festival was eventually held in Bethel.

We veterans from the peace-love-and-groovy days see through this because they were up to the same tricks then, when the movement was young and vital. We've seen it before. We expect we'll see it again.

They can try to marginalize us all they want – but the truth is plain to see for anyone who bothers to look for the facts. Both before the Summer of Love and the Human Be-in that ushered it in, and continuing up until this day, the counter culture that was born of the sixties has brought historical change to this country on a scale never before seen.

It was the idealistic youth of the sixties who went “down south” on voter registration drives to help bring an end to segregation in Dixie. Likewise, it was the antiwar movement that brought down the Johnson administration, and eventually caused middle America to see that it was past time to “end the war now.” Indeed, it is the actual and spiritual children of these sixties era activists who today are forcing Pelosi's hand on the war in Iraq.

There is hardly an aspect of early 21st century life that doesn't have some kind of roots in the sixties counter culture. The second round of feminism, gay rights, abortion rights, the environment – all of these were originally championed by the hippies, who were supposedly too stoned to ever make a difference.

But, of course, the powers that be never understood the drug culture.

The psychedelic movement was fueled by hallucinogenics like acid, peyote buttons and magic mushrooms. The media would like you to believe that we were merely having a good time and killing brain cells when we “experimented” with drugs. In truth, the word of the day was “consciousness expansion,” and it was through the psychedelic experience that we first began to see through the lies that we were being (and are still being) fed.

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"Land of Psychedelic Illuminations" - ©Brian Exton

We saw through the lie that the Selective Service System's labyrinth of deferments were designed to be fair, realizing they were really meant to send poor blacks and uneducated southerners off to war while protecting the sons of WASPS. We saw through the lie that the American economy was meant to reward hard work and innovation. Instead, it was (and mainly still is) a good old boy network where the poor were kept poor to keep them in the workforce. We saw through the lie that America is a democracy, that politicians want what is right for the American people, that the “policeman is your friend.”

Through our underground newspapers, we learned that the CIA was financing their operations in Southeast Asia by bringing cheap heroin to America, and that this heroin was being introduced to Harlem and other black neighborhoods for nefarious purposes. Before Watergate, our hippie press exposed Nixon's plans to use the 1974 Republican Convention, scheduled to take place in San Diego, to “postpone” the election and declare martial law. Although this allegation was never proved, it must be noted that shortly after the Los Angeles Free Press broke the story, the Republicans suddenly dropped San Diego as the convention city in favor of Miami, where the Democrats were already planning on having their convention.

The Human Be-in which began the Summer of Love was not just a party, as the media would have you believe, it was a gathering of tribes, an attempt to forge a single counter-culture out of the many counter cultural groups that dotted the San Francisco Bay Area at the time. These groups had little in common other than a belief that mainstream society was in need of change. Badly in need of change.

At this event, the Beat poets passed the torch of hipness (which really meant compassionate common sense) on to the hippie generation. The laid-back apolitical hippies connected with the all-too-political agenda of the student radicals from Berkeley. The Oakland Hell's Angels tried to figure out a way to mellow-out and become a part of this "happening" that was about to happen.

The Human Be-in's great accomplishment, all but lost to unwritten history, is that it forged a single counter culture out of these groups that had been separate subcultures. But all the media wants you only to remember the specter of “sex, drugs & rock 'n' roll.”

That was there too, but much differently than it's been portrayed. Remember, that magickal summer in San Francisco was characterized by the phrase “free love,” not “free sex.” Drugs were encouraged for “consciousness expansion,” with hard-core non-consciousness-expanding drugs like speed , heroin and alcohol held in disdain. And music told the story of our lives in much the same way that the Beats had used literature.

That summer, Eric Burdon attempted to memorialize the moment in the song “San Franciscan Nights.” Fitting. For music was the glue that bound the many factions of the new counter culture together.

Next week we'll begin looking at the music that was the soundtrack of our lives.

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