Groovy, man
By Casey Gillis on Aug. 06, 2007
It’s been 40 years since the Summer of Love, when the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco was overrun with hippies, free food, free drugs and free love.
According to a recent PBS “American Experience” documentary, as many as 100,000 young people from all over the world flocked to “the Haight” during the summer of 1967 to join in the hippie experience.
Guided by psychedelic drugs like LSD and rock music, they questioned authority and “turned on to peace, love and personal freedom,” according to the book “Turbulent Years: The ’60s.”
“It was a strongly influential period for mores and cultures that followed it,” Peter Berg, who lived in San Francisco at the time, told PBS. “I think it was a breeding ground for most of the social movements that have come since then: ecology, the women’s movement, the gay movement. And more liberated ideas about sexuality, and about the freedom of one’s own mind flowed forward from that. It was a strange culmination of rejection of what had come before it.”
While that summer was the height of hippie-dom, the actual hippie movement began years before with events like the Trips Festival, the Love Pageant and the Human Be-In.
The first real use of the word, a shortened version of “hipsters,” came in a 1965 San Francisco Examiner article about the Haight.
And while the Summer of Love only lasted a few months, it had far-reaching implications, as many of the people who participated brought home these new ideas home with them.
“If you made a chart of the things we were trying to do in the Summer of Love, they’ve all been done,” Judy Goldhaft, a dancer who moved to San Francisco after college, told PBS. “… A more natural lifestyle … the organic foods movement is incredibly strong. … The alternative medicine — nobody knew anything except Western industrial medicine at that point. We began experimenting with herbs and looking for less invasive ways to do things. And they began working.
“We wanted to move the puritanical Fifties culture into a more sensuous, luxurious, exuberant society,” she added. “I think that’s happened. Everything is out in the open.”
Below, find everything you ever wanted to know about the Summer of Love and the events surrounding it.
The people
Harvard professor Timothy Leary was one of LSD’s main champions in the 1960s, according to the book “Sixties People.” In 1960, he began giving psychedelic lessons to his students and later, along with fellow professor Richard Alpert, began experimenting on them with LSD.
By 1962, he was fired for his, um, unconventional teaching practices, and eventually started a religion called the League for Spiritual Discovery.
Leary’s West Coast counterpart was Ken Kesey, the author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and the first person to refer to LSD as acid.
In 1964, he hit the road with the Merry Pranksters, a group of hippies fueled by LSD visions. According to “Sixties People,” they traveled around in a tricked out psychedelic bus with the goal of pranking everyone they came across.
A year later, Kesey began doing “acid tests,” in which he and the Pranksters handed it out at antiwar rallies, parties and campus gatherings. In the end, those tests “helped establish the psychedelic lifestyle,” reports “Sixties People.”
People were “encouraged by these acid tests to drop out and embark on a great grope towards a mental condition they called expanded consciousness.”
The Diggers were an anarchistic street theater group that gave out necessities like clothing, medical care and food at their free store during the Summer of Love, according to “Turbulent Years: The ’60s.”
“In the deepest sense, The Diggers provided a horizon that includes not only a rejection of material values, but a celebration of the self and personal expression that would be necessary ingredients in a liberated human society and personality,” member Peter Berg told PBS for its documentary.
The music
Some of the best pop music in history was released in the 1960s, says Dwight Rounds, author of “The Year the Music Died.”
“The music was new,” he says. “That kind of stuff didn’t exist before 1962. There were distinctive voices, starting with Bob Dylan and going to Neil Young and John Fogerty.”
According to “Turbulent Years,” Bob Dylan’s first real exposure came when folk rocker Joan Baez introduced him to the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963.
A year later, Beatlemania consumed the United States when John, Paul, George and Ringo topped the charts with their cookie cutter pop music. It wasn’t long before other British imports like the Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, The Who, The Kinks and Gerry and the Pacemakers followed and also found success here.
“Before (the Beatles) appeared on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ I had zero interest in music,” Rounds says. “(Then) I became spoiled. I thought the Beatles were the ordinary, but never found anything that came close.”
At the height of the British Invasion, the Beatles started moving in a different direction with their own sound, first with 1965’s “Rubber Soul” and then 1967’s “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” an album that was very much influenced by drugs.
According to “Turbulent Years,” “Rubber Soul” and The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” began the acid/psychedelic rock era.
Other acid rockers followed, including Jefferson Airplane, Jim Morrison and the Doors, Iron Butterfly, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
Rounds says one characteristic of psychedelic music is a swishing sound — heard on songs like the Beatles’ “Blue Jay Way” and The Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park” — that’s achieved by using two identical dubs of the same material played at a different tempo. Others include the use of horns and wind instruments, as heard on “Sgt. Pepper’s” and the Rolling Stones’ “Her Majesty’s Secret Request,” and a “wa wa” sound, which Jimi Hendrix put in a lot of his music, saying they were underwater sounds he’d heard in his dreams.
Rounds says some top songs from the Summer of Love include the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and the Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday.”
“It all kind of stopped for me in 1972,” he says. “To me, the music really started going downhill. To this day, I still listen to the (1960’s) music every day.”
The publications
During the height of the hippie movement, underground newspapers and publications were in full supply. There was the Berkeley Barb, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Chicago Seed and the New York East Village’s Other.
One of the most well known publications at the time was San Francisco Oracle (above, right). “Turbulent Years: The ’60s” reports that the Oracle was full of interviews, poetry and essays on new sciences like acupuncture and astrology. Truly a publication for the psychedelic age, it’s pages were full of bright colors, wild page layouts, and had themes issues that included “Youth Quake,” “The Aquarian Age” and “Psychedelics, Flowers and War,” according to PBS.
The Summer of Love also brought us Rolling Stone magazine, which was founded in 1967 by a then 20-year-old named Jann Wenner.
According to “Turbulent Years,” the first issue featured a story about members of the Grateful Dead being busted for drugs in the Haight, and another one about discrimination against blacks in the TV industry. Within two years, it had a circulation of 64,000.
The events
1965: Poet Allen Ginsberg coined the term “flower power” when he asked peace marchers to use masses of flowers as protest.
January 1966: The Trips Festival, a celebration of the LSD experience, is held in San Francisco’s Longshoremen’s Hall. The drug was everywhere — mixed into punch, ice cream and cakes.
Oct. 6, 1966: A group of San Francisco hippies staged a Love Pageant to celebrate psychedelic drugs. According to “Sixties People,” they chose Oct. 6 because it was the day California’s law making LSD illegal went into effect.
Jan. 14, 1967: More than 20,000 people flocked to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco for the “Human Be-In,” which further put hippies into the national spotlight, according to PBS’s Web site. The Diggers passed out acid and sandwiches to those in attendance as rockers like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead performed and people like Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Richard Alpert spoke.
April 5, 1967: College and high school students began streaming into the Haight during their spring break, causing city leaders to worry about what will happen come summer when they’re all out of school. In response to their concerns, leaders of the Haight community formed the Council of the Summer of Love, according to PBS’s documentary.
June 21, 1967: The official start of summer that year, and thus, the start of the Summer of Love. But the bliss didn’t last very long. The neighborhood couldn’t handle the sudden influx of people, and it quickly became overcrowded, resulting in homelessness, hunger and crime. Come fall, most people left the Haight to return to school, but they brought with them all these new ideas, behaviors and fashions, according to PBS.
Oct. 7, 1967: Those who were still hanging around the Haight staged the “Death of the Hippie,” a mock funeral to end the hippie scene, which had become “overhyped” and “overattended,” according to PBS’s documentary.
April 29, 1968: “Hair,” the first pop-rock musical, hit Broadway with messages of drug use, love and sexual freedom and protests against war.
COMMENTS
U guys goto get with the program…times have changed, there is a new breed of hippy out there..Nothing wrong with Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, electronic music is just so much more for the mind. We learned from the hippies who messed up and we r moving forward… In Trance we trust…take care old school, welcome to the new age…