The Summer of Love Plus 30: You Want to Smoke a Banana?
By Paul Krassner
LOS ANGELESO.K., get your stereotypes ready, because it's here
the 30th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Ancient history to some;
a scapegoat for current problems to others, and, for those who were
there, flashbacks to living an alternative to the blandness and repression
of the EisenhowerNixon era, further fueled by the assassination of
John F. Kennedy, which left a void that the Beatles would partly fill.
Sgt. Pepper to the rescue.
But the Summer of Love was about far more than sex, drugs
and rock 'n' roll. The blossoming counterculture was, at its core, a
spiritual revolution, with religions of repression replaced by
communities of liberation. Psychotropic drugs were their sacrament.
Actually, the Summer of Love began on the afternoon of Oct.
6, 1966, the day LSD became illegal. In San Francisco, precisely at 2
P.M., I stood with thousands of young people who had gathered for
the purpose of simultaneously swallowing tabs of LSD iri front of the
police. Internal possession was not a crime. We were sending a
message: We trusted our friends more than we trusted our government.
The event had been publicized by a latterday "declaration of
independence," asserting it was "necessary for the people to cease to
recognize the obsolete social patterns which had isolated man from his
consciousness and to create with the youthful energies of the world
revolutionary communities to which the 2billionyearold life process
entitles them .... That the creation endows us with inalienable rights,
that among these are: the freedom of the body, the pursuit of joy and
the expansion of consciousness, and that to secure these rights, we the
citizens of the Earth declare our love and compassion for all conflicting
hatecarrying men and women of the world."
When Time magazine prepared to publish a cover story on the
hippie phenomenon, a cable to its San Francisco bureau instructed
researchers to "go at the description and delineation of the subculture
as if you were studying the Samoans or the Trobriand Islands." It was
an appropriate approach. At the summer solstice celebration in San
Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the same hippies who had ridiculed
President Lyndon Johnson's call for a national day of prayer were
imploring the sun to come out at 5 A.M. They had given up trying to
influence the administration but were still trying to influence the
universe.
However, as the Vietnam War escalated the flower children
began to grow thorns. They participated in peace demonstrations, from
floating a yellow submarine in the Hudson River to exorcising the
Pentagon.
Although San Francisco had become the focus of a hippie
pilgrimage, the Summer of Love was being celebrated across the nation.
Shortly after the seminal Monterey Pop Festival presented jimi Hendrix,
Janis Joplin and Otls Redding, I performed standup at a concert in
Pittsburgh, featuring the Grateful Dead, the Fugs and the Velvet
Underground. Never before had so many local freaks been in the same
place at one time. They were both astounded and reassured. It was as
though all the only Martiansontheirblocks were attending their first
Martian convention.
The underground papers, with the aid of the Underground
Press Syndicate, played a vital role in spreading the word about the
Summer of Love. But the word wasn't always the truth. In New York,
for example editors of the East Village Other launched the Great
Banana Hoax.
The mainstream wire services picked up the story that bananas
contained a substance like serotonin, released by LSD in the brain. It
quickly became known nationwide that you could get high legally from
smoking dried banana skins. In San Francisco, there was a banana
smokein, and one entrepreneur started a successful mailorder banana
powder business. Federal agents headed for their own laboratories,
cooking, scraping and grinding 30 pounds of bananas according to a
recipe published in the underground papers. For three weeks, the Food
and Drug Administration tried to "smoke" the dried banana peels.
At a benefit in San Francisco, I mentioned that the next big
drug would be FDA. Sure enough, Time soon reported there would be
a "superhallucinogen called FDA." Silly me, I thought I'd made that
up.
Meanwhile, the quality of cooption has not been strained.
"Today is the first day of the rest of your life" was used in a
TV ad for a breakfast cereal. "Classic" rock songs are used to sell all
kinds of products. And the Summer of Love has become a commodity.
Indeed, in San Francisco, Bill Graham Productions has been trying to
trademark the phrase. And, in red spray paint, on a brick wall just off
Haight Street, standing out among the graffiti like John Hancock's
signature on the first Declaration of Independence, this message sums it
up: "Love Is Revenue."

The author is a writer whose comedy CD, "Brain Damage
Control," will appear in July. He contributed this comment to the Los
Angeles Times.