Pubdate: Tue, 22 May 2007
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Page: E - 1
Copyright: 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact:  http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic
Note: Chronicle Staff Writer Jesse Hamlin contributed to this series.
Series: Part I http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n623/a03.html Part 
II http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n627/a05.html

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?
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake