SUMMER OF LOVE 40 YEARS LATER

Goodbye Innocence, Hello Hippies! The Party Starts As Rock 'N' Roll
Ethos, LSD Inspire Beatniks and Beckon an Influx of Free Spirits to
San Francisco

Before the Summer of Love in 1967, there was the Beat Generation,
whose counterculture ethos was defined by Jack Kerouac's "On the
Road." The 1957 publication of Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness
novel drew thousands of like-minded searchers to San Francisco's
North Beach, the heart of Beat culture. Once LSD and electric guitars
were added, a new psychedelic underground swirled throughout the
city. Those who were there recall the transformative power of the
psychedelic experience.

David Getz/Big Brother and the Holding Company: I was 25 years old
and I really thought I knew where it was at, that I really knew how
to teach painting and what painting was about and all of that. ...
And then I dropped acid. I met Peter Albin and I was in a band. I
thought when I first got in the band -- this is before Janis (Joplin)
was in that band -- I thought, "This is fun, I'll get laid a lot, be
more of a part of this great scene that's going on, starting out, and
have some fun playing music." ... Within a year after I joined that
band, I wasn't painting. I wasn't teaching. I didn't get hired again.
My hair was long. I started to look different than everybody.

Alton Kelley: I came out originally in the winter of '64 and settled
in on Pine Street. Went up to the Red Dog Saloon with the Charlatans.
They were putting the Red Dog together. Then we came back and said,
"What are we going to do now?" That's when we started the Family Dog.
I was one of the four original members. We got Bill Ham to do a light
show. We rented Longshoreman's Hall, threw a few dances and found out
we weren't very good businesspeople.

Michael Rossman: Also in late '65, the rock dances started happening,
the first public events of what came to be called the
countercommunity or, in this local case, the Haight-Ashbury.

Before more than a thousand long-haired weirdos showed up at the
first Family Dog dance at Longshoreman's Hall, nobody had any idea
there were even that many hippies around town. The dances proved
popular and quickly moved in late '65 to the Fillmore Auditorium.
That's where Bill Graham began presenting weekly shows in January
1966. Before long, Chet Helms opened weekly dances at the Avalon
Ballroom at Sutter and Van Ness, and the golden age of the San
Francisco rock underground was in full swing. Dancers flocked to the
halls, grooving beneath pulsing, throbbing psychedelic light shows.
Large portions of the audience were under the influence of LSD. The
bands often were, too. Helms recognized these tribal rites as Dionysian revels.

Bob Weir/Grateful Dead: I left home when I was 17 and stepped into a
situation where I could make a good living, or at least a decent
living, in a communal environment doing what I always wanted to do,
which was make music. It was just wonderful to step from home into
that environment and be able to live that way. I think maybe a lot of
other people, maybe they weren't quite as young as I was, but still
it was the best of all possible homes for us. We were the young,
artistic community and we didn't have to struggle quite as much as
young artists normally do, because there was a big market for what we
had to offer right there in the neighborhood.

Stewart Brand: In January of '66, we did the Trips Festival and had
something like 10,000 people over three nights. At that point, nobody
had any idea there was that many hippies in the world, never mind the Bay Area.

Revolution was in the air. Free thinkers turned to social action. A
Haight-Ashbury group calling itself the Diggers began to serve free
food every day in the Panhandle, made from scraps scavenged from
local supermarkets and restaurants. Soon, the Diggers opened the Free
Store on Haight Street, where everything in the store was given away.

Peter Berg: Emmett Grogan walked into the San Francisco Mime Troupe
when I was the assistant director and Judy (Goldhaft) had been there
a long time. Billy Murcott had been reading a book about (Gerrard)
Winstanley, the leader of the English heretical, communalistic group
- -- and very Christian, by the way -- called the Diggers. So Billy
said, "Well, you know, dig, like to dig, dig this, man." Together
they made a manifesto that they tacked up on the front door of the
Mime Troupe on Howard Street, next to that journalists' bar, the M&M.
This was like (Martin Luther) tacking the 95 Theses on the cathedral
door. ... A lot of people collaborated on the ideas -- "everything is
free, do your own thing."

Judy Goldhaft: That was the Diggers' phrase. ... We opened the first
Free Store right after the manifesto.

Peter Coyote: We wanted to use our improvisatory skills to create
theatrical events that no one would know was theater. So Peter Berg
created the Free Store, in which not only were the goods free, but so
were all the roles: manager, owner, boss. People would come in and
say, "Who's in charge here?" and we'd say, "You are." So, if you just
stood there and looked stupid, there was no sense blaming the Pig or
the Man or the System for your shabby little life. You've been
offered a gift of the imagination and you dropped the ball. By the
same token, if you said, "Oh, I'm in charge, great, let's clean this
place up, it's filthy," we'd do that. In retrospect, the Diggers were
probably a four-year performance art piece designed to trigger a
fundamental dialogue about power and money and class and status and
who owned what in American society.

Wavy Gravy: I clicked my heels three times and found myself standing
in a corner of the Digger Free Store on Haight Street. There was a
swing in the window, an actual swing, inhabited by a spunky
7-year-old, celebrating her blackness and swinging in the sunshine.
Into this timeless moment, came these words loud and clear, into the
very ear of my ear: "Wanna help?" In what seemed merely a moment, I
had helped to fold every last garment like magic. No surprise, my
fellow folder was Emmett Grogan.

Other stores along Haight Street, such as the Thelin brothers'
Psychedelic Shop and the rainbow-colored underground newspaper the
Oracle, gave the growing social experiment an even stronger sense of
community. Before long, the Haight had its own free medical clinic, a
first in the country.

Dr. David Smith: My parents died in the '50s, when I was in my teens.
I inherited some money and I bought an apartment building to have a
home. I didn't have any brothers or sisters. That's where I lived.
That was basically right on the outskirts of the Haight, but I had
absolutely no social activism. I just happened to be a drug expert on
the outskirts of the drug revolution. All that Hippie Hill stuff just
started. It just totally boggled my mind. I took LSD and had a
spiritual experience. I had a cultural transformation and ended up
starting the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. After I took LSD and got
involved in the counterculture, the air moved and you became one with
the world. Suddenly, you had to help the poor. It was this
consciousness transformation that happened during that time.

The dance halls were serving a nightly cultural renaissance, where
old bluesmen or celebrated jazz artists shared the stage with the new
psychedelic San Francisco bands, everything from Bo Diddley to Lenny Bruce.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Before, up through the Human Be-In, the Haight
was really sort of innocent, clean. I remember the early Jefferson
Airplane, which was very lyrical. I was going to Fillmore quite a
bit. (Poet) Andre Voznesensky and I performed in between sets of the
Jefferson Airplane at the old Fillmore. Bill Graham generously
offered us the stage. I was reading translations of Andre's poems. He
was doing them in Russian. There was a light show going on.

In January 1967, the crowd for the Human Be-In, a Gathering of the
Tribes, organized by Haight-Ashbury communards, swelled into the tens
of thousands, filling the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park for a day
of rock music, poetry, Buddhist chants -- a day of peace and music
where the Hells Angels took care of lost children. A Harvard
professor named Timothy Leary issued the marching orders, admonishing
the crowd to "turn on, tune in and drop out."

Michael McClure: I was sitting onstage next to Allen Ginsberg and
Gary Snyder. Timothy Leary was up there, and Lenore Kandel. I sang
one of my poems, "The God I Worship Is a Lion." It was the first
great congregation of the young seeker people, known as the
counterculture, who were drawing together to create their own huge
family, and to celebrate it in their own huge tribe, and to celebrate
it with music and dance and song and psychedelics and some real good
political things.

Ferlinghetti: I was onstage right next to Allen Ginsberg at the Human
Be-In. I had an autoharp, which I was playing in those days. Luckily,
they never allowed me to perform because it would've been a disaster.
There was a sea of 10,000 faces. Don't know how many they actually
counted. I remember, in the sunset, this lone parachutist descended
on the crowd.

The March 1966 Life magazine cover article on LSD led to the
psychedelic drug being made illegal by October. But the genie was out
of the bottle. Word about the Haight-Ashbury had spread -- not least
by finger-wagging mainstream media -- which inadvertently gave the
burgeoning movement the best advertising it could have. People were
already starting to trail into town in early 1967.

Getz: It was a time when, in the beginning of '67, where the band had
moved back from living together in a house in Lagunitas to having our
own places in the city. I was living on the outskirts of the Haight,
in the Fillmore, a little apartment I had. It was kind of a nice time
in the beginning of '67, before all the influx of all those people,
still Lagunitas. People knew each other. You could go down to Haight
Street and see your friends, walk around, go to the different dances.
My life had really shifted into a place where I was completely
consumed with the business and the music of Big Brother.

Country Joe McDonald: Everything just started changing. For me, I
think it changed because it was the Bay Area. The Bay Area allowed
that sort of thing to happen and it could happen, magically. And I
was changing with it. I was very, very happy. It was very
interesting. The music was new. The clothes were new. The drug thing
was interesting. To me, it had an erotic sexual thing, which was the
opposite of the repressed thing that I grew up with in the '50s.

Kelley: But those first years -- '65, '66, '67 -- it was really a
great neighborhood, the Haight-Ashbury. Everybody knew everybody. It
was really fun. Everybody was really enjoying themselves. It was sort
of the opposite of the beatnik era. They all dressed in black and
were on kind of a downer. We all came out of the rock 'n' roll world
and not World War II. We all had this background behind us of Chuck
Berry and Little Richard.

Margo St. James: That's when I got my nun's habit from Dick Gregory.
He sent it to me from New York. So I was having my own Summer of Love
and happening and running my salon, if you will. The neighbor lady
didn't like me laying topless in my little garden because, on her
deck, she had a 16-year-old boy. I had a black girlfriend living with
us, Barbara. This lady next door was kinda antsy. She'd be watering
her flowers up there and make sure to squirt me with the water.

One day I put on my nun's habit and walked down to Haight Street. The
florist ran out and gave me some flowers. He thought I was from the
Good Shepherd. He said, "You're doing such good work." Then the
neighbor lady's husband passes me on the street and I thought, "Oh,
I'm busted now." But he didn't recognize me. I had on the Mammy
Yoakum shoes, the rimless glasses with, of course, the whole habit.
That was my contribution to the Haight, just providing a place for
people to hang out and meet. I had Steve Mann living with me. Frank
Zappa came by to see Steve. Dr. John came by, Mac Rebennack. I had a
grand piano there, so we always had live music there. I loved it.

Rossman: The thing about weed and political action, in that era, when
you sucked on a joint, you inhaled not simply some smoke, but you
inhaled this whole complex of cultural attitudes, not only opposition
to the war, but a liking for madras bedspreads, an inclination to
taste new and interesting foods, to feel less guilty about cutting
class, to disrespect authority more because they were trying to make
you a criminal for having these experiences and changes of
perspective. When you made millions of young people criminals this
way, on the narrow issue of whether they could put this plant's smoke
or that plant's smoke in their bodies, you corrupted their attitudes
about a whole lot in the culture.

Julia Brigden (Girl Freiberg): From my perspective, it seems to me
that LSD had a lot to do with the mind-set at least that me and some
of my friends had. That sort of changed perspective on everything and
added this spiritual side that not having grown up in a church -- my
family looked at church as a sort of primitive hangover -- not having
been exposed to any sort of religion, it was really exciting to be
exposed to LSD and realize that there was this whole bigger context
out there and we this little tiny piece of the great web of life.

. Tuesday, Part III: As soon as the school year was over, they began
to head for San Francisco. Summer would arrive early that year.