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? - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake