SUMMER OF LOVE: 40 YEARS LATER: THE PARTY GETS OUT OF HAND

The Youth of America and Beyond Fill the City. Then Things Take an Ugly Turn.

They were heading west 40 years ago, an army of young men and women,
and they even had their own marching music, Scott McKenzie's "San
Francisco (Be Sure and Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)." The headline
in The Chronicle called it "The Invasion of the Flower Children." As
many as 100,000 youths were said to be coming for the Summer of Love
as soon as the school year was over. As early as Easter, the streets
of the city started to fill up with kids from all across the country.

But they didn't turn out to be the literate beatniks and poetic
artists who had come out earlier. These kids were squalid, ragged
castoffs and, as they crowded the sidewalks of Haight Street night
and day, they came to be known as street people.

Dr. David Smith: People started coming out in '66. The Thelin
brothers (owners of Haight Street's Psychedelic Shop) declared this
the Summer of Love, and we were already starting to see kids coming
out. We went to the city (government) and said there's going to be
all these kids coming. Our limited resources are already overwhelmed.
They didn't want to set anything up for them.

Carolyn Garcia (Mountain Girl): We were living at 710 Ashbury St. and
just kind of aghast at the amount of people that showed up down on
Haight Street every day. It was just incredible numbers of just sort
of loose, roaming, very young people. Summer was foggy that year, so
people were kind of cold and uncomfortable. It was sort of like a
farmer unloading a truckload of onions. Once the onions start to
move, there's no stopping them. That's kind of how it felt, that the
streets were just filling up with people, vegetables yearning to be free.

Michael McClure: The Summer of Love was a vast influx. You know the
Diggers had started the free movement, and deliberately, and with
plans aforethought and with good intentions, drew in God knows how
many young people from all over the United States, and all over
Europe and Asia, to come in and crash and experience that. And either
stay here or go back home with it, take what they learned with them.
So it was a huge population experiment of people with new ideas,
absorbing new ideas, and creating new ideas.

Peter Berg: You could print something on an 8-and-one-half-inch by-11
piece of paper and in three hours, 5,000 people would show up for an
event in the Panhandle or Speedway Meadow.

Judy Goldhaft: We knew a lot of people were coming to San Francisco.
We knew that they needed basic human goods. We also did the free
medical clinic as well. It started in the Free Store. We also
considered that we were providing a university of the streets. We
knew the people would go back to where they came from, but we thought
that if we could show them that society could be different, that they
could go and re-create their own society when they went back.

Paul Krassner: The Summer of Love was really a state of mind. You
could walk along Haight Street and somebody would say, "Hey, you
wanna try this pill?" and you would do it, just because you admired
his halo. It was very open and trusting. Personally, I realized I
wasn't the only Martian on the block. It was like a convention of Martians.

Michael Rossman: They were the people who said, well, we're going to
have Summer of Love. People were coming from all over the country.
Well, people were coming from all over the country already. The
Haight was in deep trouble by the dawn of 1967.

Bob Weir/Grateful Dead: We started getting break-ins and stuff like
that. There were a lot of people on the street. Whereas before
everybody had a place to go, everybody had something to do. We were
in a band. The guys who were running the coffee shops were running
the coffee shops, or the clothing shops or the head shops. The
Diggers were doing their thing. The poets were writing and poster
artists were making posters. Everybody was busy.

We would come together for celebrations and stuff like that, and it
was a lot of fun. But starting around June, the creativity of the
scene was starting to be piled over by just having to batten down the
hatches, bar your doors and windows 'cause there were speed freaks on
the street. I had the front room at 710 Ashbury, and people were
coming through my front window with fair regularity. They dressed the
part -- they were dressed like hippies. But I don't think that they
really got it.

David Freiberg/Quicksilver Messenger Service: I had about two weeks
that were really happy. After that, it faded pretty quickly ... The
drugs changed. The Gray Lines started going up the street. Haight
became one-way. By July, I'd moved to Marin.

McClure: Methedrine hit, which burned the edges of everything, and
did much to destroy it.

Krassner: There were buses with tourists going down Haight Street,
and bus drivers were trained in social significance. They never went
beyond that in the description of it. The hippies outside on Haight
Street held up mirrors so that the tourists taking photographs would
get a picture of themselves holding up their cameras. Time magazine
did a cover story on the hippies. They sent a cable to their San
Francisco bureau, and instructed their researchers at the time -- and
this is a quote -- to "go at description and delineation of the
subculture as if you were studying the Samoans or the Trobriand
Islanders," unquote.

Berg: People were walking down the street six-deep. Kids were coming
in from all over the United States wearing rainbow-colored clothes
and psychedelic scarves around their necks, and suddenly everybody is
smoking pot. And if you drive through the Haight, you're smelling it.
People are sitting on the sidewalk. They're dancing on the sidewalk.
They're stopping the traffic. I lived there, so I saw this going on.

In June, the Monterey International Pop Festival brought the new San
Francisco rock sound, as well as the new rock from London such as the
Who and Jimi Hendrix, to the outside world. With two hits on the
radio already that year from the band's second album, Jefferson
Airplane was leading the new rock movement out of the underground, to
be followed shortly by the other San Francisco bands.

Grace Slick/Jefferson Airplane: We were in the studio about six
months with (the band's third album) "After Bathing At Baxter's,"
living in a place in L.A. the Beatles had formerly rented. RCA was
paying for it. They were paying for studio time. They were paying for
everything. So it was fantastic. Suits are paying and we're having a
good time. I liked that a lot.

David Getz/Big Brother and the Holding Company: After Monterey Pop,
that's when Big Brother started to unravel. It's when Albert Grossman
(the band's future manager) came into the picture. It's when Janis
started to become a superstar. It's when the separation of Janis and
the band started. It's when Bill Graham started to hire us, which he
wouldn't before that time because we had been previously managed by
Chet Helms, who was his archrival, at least in his mind, Bill's mind.
After Monterey, we started to work at the Fillmore a lot. Toward the
end of the year, we started to travel out of town.

Weir: In June of '67, we had our first New York gig, I think, Cafe au
Go Go, and we did almost a week there. That was our first little trip
to New York and people were starting to take us seriously. They flew
us in to do the Monterey Pop Festival and that was a lot of fun,
although I think everybody could see at the time the whole situation
in San Francisco was turning.

San Francisco was the center of the universe for young people. Even
Mayor Joe Alioto's daughter was not immune.

Angela Alioto: I remember so many walks in the park where he would go
out to see what was happening and he would meet a lot of the vans
that came from out of town. I was a junior in high school at the
Convent of the Sacred Heart. My dad and mom had six children and I
was the only girl. And Dad was Sicilian, so he kept an eye on me, to
say the least. All my brothers were always hanging out in Golden Gate
Park and checking out all the singers. I wouldn't be allowed to, so I
had to sneak. One day I snuck out 'cause I had to see Janis Joplin --
"Take a little piece of my heart" always knocked me out -- and I saw
one of my brothers there, so I got so busted. I remember that summer
so well. I got busted by Dad about four times and they were serious
because he put some serious restrictions on me.

While the city was filled with love, flowers and music, there was
still a war going on and many people were consumed by it, in many
different ways.

David Harris: In spring of 1966, I was elected student body president
of Stanford, a radical student body president, an unheard of
phenomenon at that time. I had announced, shortly after my election,
that I wouldn't cooperate with the Selective Service System anymore.
Sent my draft cards back to the government. And set out to get other
people to do likewise. So by June of 1967, we had just founded the
resistance, which was a national antidraft group that was committing
civil disobedience against the conscription system and we were out organizing.

Joan Baez: A lot of people were summer of loving it. I was much too
serious. I was doing the Institute of Non-Violence. I was going to
jail, thinking about marrying draft resistors. I remember David's
visit and he was as serious as I was. He was Mr. Draft Resistance.

We were in Santa Rita, twice -- once in October and a second time in
December. I remember because Martin Luther King came to visit us the
second time at Christmas. The first time was 10 days and the second
time was three months with 45 days suspended. They threw my mother
and me out after a month because they thought we were instigating
stuff. My mother was, but I wasn't. She was sneaking candy bars into
the holding cells because she felt sorry for the people.

Krassner: During the Summer of Love, there was this Expo '67 in
Montreal, and I was invited to speak at the Youth Pavilion. This was
during the Vietnam War. You weren't supposed to protest. I got past
customs, and the only thing I brought with me was a tab of acid. I
was interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and during
the interview, the acid was peaking. I had to describe the American
pavilion, and I remember saying, "This pavilion is really beautiful,
with all these flowing colors."

I burned my draft card there on camera. They had Marines there,
guarding the place, who had gone to special protocol school. The
lieutenant called the captain, and when the interview was finished,
the captain told me it was against the law to burn your draft card.
But it wasn't really my draft card. I was speaking at campuses around
the country then, so I had a lot of photostats of my draft card. So I
showed the captain my real draft card, and the lieutenant went nuts.
He said, "But he burned it, sir, I saw him, he burned it." So I said,
"I burned the Photostat of my draft card, and I lied on TV. That's
not a crime. People do it all the time." The captain said it was also
against the law to make a copy of your draft card. So I said, "Well,
I destroyed the evidence."

It was not only a time of protest against a war on the other side of
the world, it was also a time of protest, for some, at home. After
the 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles, the nation's ghettos awakened to
a new, more militant brand of black leadership. Across the bay in
Oakland, young blacks armed themselves for self-protection and some
recognized, in the hippies, common social goals.

David Hilliard: It was this counterculture movement. You're talking
Timothy Leary, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, people like that, Baba Ram
Dass. People who were beginning to make history. People who chose
life over death. People who opposed the unjust war being waged in
Southeast Asia, particularly the war in Vietnam. There was a time
where there was a unity of ideas and action between our Black Panther
Party and those counterculture hippies like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry
Rubin. Emmett Grogan over in San Francisco with the Diggers.

Those were our comrades. We were brought together. Because we all had
a unity of thought and ideas against this unjust war. They were, as
far as we were concerned, our comrades. They were in a lot of ways
involved in cultural revolution. We were involved in more sterner
stuff. Coming out of the civil rights era where people were being
beaten and children being killed in the South in church, brings to
mind the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, people being
beaten on the Peddis Bridge. So it was a very vibrant and a very
tumultuous period. The counterculture who opposed the war, the
hippies, they were our comrades.

But social and political protests were beside the point in a
Haight-Ashbury overrun by penniless transients posing as hippies.
Almost overnight, the scene disintegrated.

Stewart Brand: In Dan O'Neill's language, it was an epidemic of crabs
masquerading as a revolution.

Alton Kelley: I think one of the things that sparked it: the Beatle
haircut. Everybody started letting their hair grow and that made it
easier to identify who you were and all that. That was also the
downfall, too, because then all the criminals hid behind the haircut.
By 1968, it had pretty much gone to hell with all the religious nuts
coming, the politicos, the junkies, dope dealers. It really kinda went crazy.

In August, George Harrison visited the Haight. He walked down to
Hippie Hill, played a couple of songs on a borrowed guitar and walked
off in the night, his visit forever commemorated by photos of him
wearing those stupid heart-shaped glasses. Just this brief contact
with the children of the Summer of Love was enough to turn Harrison
off the drug scene for the rest of his life.

Wednesday, Part IV: What was that? Did it really happen? The hippies
look back and wonder -- what did we do?