SUMMER OF LOVE: 40 YEARS LATER: JUST A SEASON, BUT IT LIVES ON

From Politics to Music to Sexuality -- Even to the Way the PC Was
Designed -- The Values Are Ingrained in Our Culture

Forty years later, the ripples from the Haight-Ashbury are still
being felt in our culture. The event itself may have gone bad almost
at once, but the fact that the Summer of Love had a profound and
lasting impact on American life -- that's one thing on which all the
now-gray leaders of what was once called the Youth Movement agree,
even if they debate what lasted and what didn't. The effects are
here, undeniable and quantifiable -- in pop music, human
relationships and sexuality, racial and ethnic diversity, a whole
agenda of social thought and, yes, drugs.

David Freiberg/Quicksilver Messenger Service: There's still hippies.
I see them every time we play.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: That (movement) changed the whole country. All
the main aspects of the hippie counterculture were ingested into the
middle class -- the music, the clothes, the psychedelic colors, the
anti-war movement. Herbert Marcuse spoke of the enormous capacity of
the dominant society to ingest its own most dissonant elements.
That's just what happened.

Peter Coyote: If you look at all the political agendas of the 1960s,
they basically failed. We didn't end capitalism. We didn't end
imperialism. We didn't end racism. Yeah, the war ended. But if you
look at the cultural agendas, they all worked.

Stewart Brand: It was a permission-to-try-everything period where
people encouraged each other to try things and to say things that
were indefensible, if you looked at them closely, like Mao is a great leader.

Carolyn Garcia (Mountain Girl): I see remnants of that movement
everywhere. It's sort of like the nuts in Ben and Jerry's ice cream
- -- it's so thoroughly mixed in, we sort of expect it. The nice thing
is that eccentricity is no longer so foreign. We've embraced
diversity in a lot of ways in this country. I do think it's done us a
tremendous service.

Peter Berg: This is 2007, and it's been longer from "now" to "then,"
than "then" was from the '30s. It's an incredible thing to consider.
Since time has speeded up a lot in our era, that makes it really
antique. And there are people today who lived through it who tend to
renounce it. Like, we were wrong-headed, or we didn't know the
effects of drugs. I don't know where that spirit of renunciation
comes from. I'm not like that.

Judy Goldhaft: The ideas for the rest of the continent spring out of
the earth here. The Ohlone Indians said we dance here on the edge of the world.

David Smith: If it could have just stopped with the vision, that
would have been great. But drugs seem to never stop. The movement
encompassed such a broad spectrum of human enterprise -- from
spiritual to sexual, from sweeping political ideas to intimate
details of personal living. Music, food, art, fashion -- nothing
passed through the firestorm of the '60s unchanged. Signs are everywhere.

Alton Kelley: It's all over the place. The very fact that people
dress like they do, maybe a little more radical than we were, but I
think all of these kind of wild-looking children are part of that
thing, that freedom where you're not just a cookie-cutter person.

Michael Rossman: The range of experiments that characterized the
Haight continued all over the country because it was a hydra with no
central head. The whole range of inner exploration ... we're 40 years
downstream and if you go cruise the telephone poles you still see the
advertisements for the gurus and the wellness center and the yoga classes.

Paul Krassner: It was sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, and those were
all fun. But at the core of the counterculture was a spiritual
revolution, in a sense of leaving the Western religions of control,
and exploring the eastern disciplines of liberation.

Angela Alioto: The Summer of Love really stressed the principles of
St. Francis of Assisi, the guy who loved the environment, loved
animals, loved the sick and poor and was against war. That was
exactly what the Summer of Love was. ... The Summer of Love was
flat-out beautiful.

Margot St. James: People are finally, four decades later, they're
getting hip to what I think the beats and hippies were espousing -- a
way of life that doesn't damage the planet and doesn't damage people.
At that time, they called them Third World countries; they now call
them Developing Nations.

Rock music gave the movement a public voice. It provided an easy
entrance to the subculture and spread easily around the world. The
early heroes of San Francisco rock not only broke the three-minute
barrier in pop music -- stretching songs past the boundaries of the
length of a 45 RPM single record for the first time -- but they were
making startling, fresh music unlike anything that had ever been heard before.

Bob Weir/Grateful Dead: We were enamored of the notion that the times
were changing. We were well aware that we were the tip of a pretty
massive iceberg of population preponderance of youth and that we were
in some regards the face of the youth culture movement.

Grace Slick/Jefferson Airplane: We thought enough information could
change people's minds. If they sat around and considered it and
weighed it, they'd see what was going on was probably not
appropriate. And it's the same thing as anybody trying to do that
today. ... But the basic desires of men to kill each other haven't
changed at all. It's just stupid.

David Getz/Big Brother and the Holding Company: Who did more for
African American people in this country -- Rosa Parks or Tiger Woods?
Maybe somebody like Otis Redding and Janis Joplin, maybe that
connection had more of a reverberation in the area of civil rights
and racial awareness than some things that are more obviously political.

The message radiating from the Haight was far more personal than were
political or social issues, complex as they were, such as the Vietnam
War or voting rights in Mississippi. The very premises of modern
American life were under scrutiny and suspicion.

David Harris: There was an understanding that the larger society was
discredited and that the war was wrong, but the statement that was
happening on the streets of the Haight-Ashbury was far more personal
than that. It didn't address itself to the political issues of the day.

Coyote: I am still proud to say that I'm an anarchist. It's a viable
political, decentralized system. I don't see much evidence that huge
nationalized, centralized states, under either communism or
capitalism, work very well for the majority of their citizens.

Slick: I've heard a lot of guys say "I became a lawyer because my
father had a firm." They spent 25 years, wasted their lives, and they
wanted to be a landscaper. You know what I mean? ... I did pretty
much most of the stuff I had in mind. I don't sit around thinking I
wasted my life making breakfast for old Fred. Uh-uh. Didn't do it.

The spirit of the late, lamented counterculture lives on. It lives at
every yoga class in a strip mall, at every outdoor rock concert, in
the organic produce section of your local supermarket and even in the
heart of every personal computer.

Steve Wozniak: We were meeting at our Homebrew Computer Club right
there at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) in Menlo Park and
were surrounded by a lot of the old hippie thinkers from the
counterculture movement, basically trying to apply the same internal
drives and passions into the use of technology to get us to that
better, good world where people were equal and not so subject to the
major corporations of the time, having all the power. The guy who
knew how to program a computer was going to be the most important
person in the company, more important than the CEO. It was so tied in
with empowering the normal low-level people. That's not where it
turned out now, but it's sure where the ideal got us going in that directions.

Brand: Burning Man, they have surpassed in every way the various
things we were attempting with the Acid Tests and the Trips Festival.
Burning Man has realized with such depth and thoroughness and ongoing
originality and ability to scale and minimalist rules, but enough
rules that you can function, and all the things we were farting
around with, Larry Harvey has really pulled off.

David Hilliard: I think the entire political landscape has been
changed by the actions of the people from the '60s. Many of the
politicians who are now in Congress, senators, were people from the
'60s. I think it had a tremendous impact on the political landscape.

Will Hearst III: I was in New York driving in a taxicab. Every
taxicab driver is a philosopher, as well as politician and observer
of the political scene. This guy was ragging on me. "God damn it --
the frickin' beatniks won." And I said, "What? What are you talking
about?" Were driving through Manhattan in the year 2000. He says,
"God damn, my kid goes to public school. God damn, when I went to
school the teachers came in and they were dressed in a jacket and tie
and it was Mr. this, Sir that. Now I go into my kid's classroom and
the goddamned teacher looks like a beatnik. He's got jeans on. He's
got an open neck shirt. They won, they won. That's what happened in
America. They won."

Some things never change, of course: Shortly after this interview,
when Joan Baez went to Washington, D.C., to sing with John Mellencamp
at Walter Reed, the Army refused to allow her to appear.

Joan Baez: There is a song now that competes for me with "With God on
Our Side," the song I've been waiting for, the song I thought was
really brilliant and moving, and that's Tom Waits' song "The Day
After Tomorrow." I'm going to go to Walter Reed Hospital for a John
Mellencamp concert and sing that song in the middle of the concert.
So it is so beautiful that it just kind of knocked my sock off. I
just do it by myself. I don't do it with any other musician. Christ,
what a song. I do it beautifully, if you don't mind my saying that.

Country Joe McDonald: All the things that Country Joe McDonald is, I
became that in Summer of Love. The great thing about it is that it
didn't stop. It gave me a reason to be alive, to live and to have
hopes and dreams. ... It opened up a door and I walked through it and
I'm still going through it right now.

Getz: I've done a lot of different things since the '60s, since Big
Brother had its moment in time, its three and a half years. I've done
a lot of other things. I've done art. I've done teaching. I've played
jazz. I've done a whole lot of other things. But my tombstone is
probably going to say Dave Getz played drums with Janis Joplin and
Big Brother and the Holding Company, no matter what I do.

Weir: I've never been called upon to really grow up. It just hasn't
been part of my job description. What I grew into being back then,
I'm still pretty much that same guy. I'm still open -- I try to stay
open -- and I still question authority. I still believe in everybody
pulling together and accomplishing stuff that is too difficult to do
on any individual or small collective basis. I'm still making music
and still wondering about it all, wondering about the cosmos and our
place in it. Never gone away.