Remembering The Summer Of Love

In 1967 the invitation to America's youth came in the lyrics of a song, "San Francisco," recorded by Scott McKenzie. It beckoned listeners to come to the city and be sure to wear flowers in their hair. And tens of thousands did just that.

It was in January of that year that up to 30,000 people gathered in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

"One of the things we did was we got together an event called 'The Human Be In' and it went off pretty damned well," Grateful Deal guitarist Bob Weir told Sunday Morning correspondent John Blackstone. "You know, we were starting to feel our oats and starting to think of ourselves as a movement."

It was at the Human Be In that Timothy Leary gave the movement a motto: "Turn on, tune in, drop out." The timing was right for a generation beginning to come of age.

"There was this big demographic bulge that happened from the baby boom," Weir said. "So there were just a lot more kids. And so there was a sort of infusion of youth energy."

That youthful energy was on full display a few months later at The Monterey Pop Festival. For three days in June, 200,000 people came to listen. There had never been a festival like it.

Many performers who would shape rock for years to come — like The Who, Simon and Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin — made their first big appearance. The bands performed for free. Those who came to listen paid just $1, if they paid anything. The Summer of Love had begun.

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Photos: Monterey Pop

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Gitlin has written extensively about the '60s when the war in Vietnam, the struggle for civil rights and a growing women's movement turned many into activists.

"So in that setting, while the Summer of Love was odd, it wasn't that odd," he said. "Because the whole period was odd — the whole period was full of thousands of people doing remarkable things, especially young people."

"It felt like being at the crest of a wave," Judy Goldhaft, who belonged to a group called the Diggers.

She knew exactly where that wave was cresting — in the San Francisco neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury.

"My friends have said, 'You'd wake up in the morning and you'd never know who was on your living room floor sleeping.' They were packed."

The Diggers were a group of actors, artists and anarchists who saw Haight Ashbury as a place where they could transform society.

"And we felt that we could do many things, many impossible things, we were capable of doing them," Goldhaft said.

"We approached newcomers into the Haight-Ashbury and establishment with the proposition, everything is free," Peter Berg, another Digger, said. "So I would say to a policeman, 'Why don't you put 'free' in front of something that you want to do? And then do it?' Become a free cop. What would a free cop be like? What would a free banker be like? What would a free fireman be like?" That was our approach. It was fun-loving."

The Diggers ran a free store. They gave away free food. On Haight Street there was a free clinic and plenty of free expression. The young quickly embraced free love. And the neighborhood rock bands gave free concerts.

"People would pony up and we'd rent a flatbed truck and put our equipment on it and take it down to the panhandle to the park," Weir said. "And set up and play."

"Rock music became, for the counterculture, what the newspaper had been for the straight culture: It became the way that people talked to each other and sent the word out," said Sunday Morning music critic Bill Flanagan of MTV. "As the word got out, newspapers and TV across the country picked up the story of young people flooding into Haight Ashbury. All those things sort of came together and created the first great rock marketing event, created a kind of nationwide notion that everyone should leave their parents, get in a Volkswagen bus, and head to San Francisco."

The more that was written, the more people came.

"I once described 1966 as the Summer of Love; 1967 was the summer of a million people," Goldhalf said.

"The media, to a large extent had created this 'hippie' who was a person making a 'V for Victory' sign with a silly grin, and wearing 50 buttons that said this and that. That wasn't what a lot of us were doing," Berg said.

For outsiders the "hippie" life style could seem as foreign as some distant culture. When CBS sent Harry Reasoner to Haight-Ashbury in 1967 he was clearly disturbed by what he found:

"There's the real danger that more and more young people may follow the call to turn on, tune in, drop out," he said then.

One stop for the CBS cameras was 710 Ashbury Street, the home of the Grateful Dead. Weir was 20 years old and tried to offer reassurance that there was nothing to fear in what was happening here.

"That the people that live in the community and play around with dope and stuff like that they don't have wars, you know, and they don't have a lot of the problems that larger society has," he said in 1967.

Today, Weir says he knew back then that he and his friends were scaring the older generation, and they were having fun doing it.

"I mean, we weren't dangerous," he said. "We knew that. And if they didn't, well, sooner or later they'd figure it out."

Soon enough though, things started to get dangerous in Haight-Ashbury. Marijuana and LSD had long been part of the scene. But as the kids poured in in the summer of '67, the drugs got harder and more hazardous.

"Every wing nut, everybody who was interested in gettin' in on some of the drugs and free love and all that kinda stuff — they all ended up in San Francisco," Weir said.

Dreams of transforming society turned into business as usual, particularly for the drug dealers.

"You know, in 1967 a great deal of what happened in the Haight-Ashbury and in the aura of the Haight-Ashbury was commercial," Gitlin said. "You know, there were shops, people making money selling drug equipment. Or selling drugs. They were parasites on a cultural movement."

In October '67 the Diggers declared the death of the hippie with a mock funeral. The summer's magic had been fleeting.

"Anybody talking about the Summer of Love is basically dealing with Baby Boomer nostalgia," Flanagan said.

That nostalgia is certainly on display this 40th anniversary. Among those remembering is New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. The posters from that era were never meant to last, but now they are treasured. Haight Ashbury has spent 40 years reliving the Summer of Love. There's still plenty of free expression here, along with a free clinic, a taste for tie die and all things psychedelic.

Most significantly perhaps, 40 years later, we're still listening to the music of 1967.

"At that time, all the best minds of the generation went into music," Flanagan said. "That's why the music lasts when most of the other things from the culture at that time are forgotten. And the music provides a soundtrack for the memories of a summer when so much seemed possible."

See images from Monterey Pop link=http://www.tgoportfolio.com/>here.

Watch some footage from Monterey Pop here.

Events Commemorating the Summer of Love:

The Public Theatre
To commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the Summer of Love, New York's Public Theater will be presenting performances of "Romeo & Juliet," which runs 6/5 through 7/8; "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which runs 8/7 through 9/9; and "Hair" (TBD).
Public Theatre's Web site.

Exhibits:

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

The Rock Hall is located at:
One Key Plaza
751 Erieside Ave
Cleveland, Ohio, 44114

Rock Hall Summer of Love exhibits include: