SAN FRANCISCO, June 3, 2007
Remembering The Summer Of Love
Forty Years Ago, The World Was Introduced To The Counterculture
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Play CBS Video Video Monterey Pop Festival CBS News RAW: Listen to songs performed by bands at the Monterey Pop Festival held in Monterey, California.
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Jimi Hendrix became a rock star after a stunning performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. (CBS)
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Photo Essay Monterey Pop Images The 1967 Monterey Pop Festival was the seminal event of the Summer of Love.
It was in January of that year that up to 30,000 people gathered in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
"One of the things we did was we got together an event called 'The Human Be In' and it went off pretty damned well," Grateful Deal guitarist Bob Weir told Sunday Morning correspondent John Blackstone. "You know, we were starting to feel our oats and starting to think of ourselves as a movement."
It was at the Human Be In that Timothy Leary gave the movement a motto: "Turn on, tune in, drop out." The timing was right for a generation beginning to come of age.
"There was this big demographic bulge that happened from the baby boom," Weir said. "So there were just a lot more kids. And so there was a sort of infusion of youth energy."
That youthful energy was on full display a few months later at The Monterey Pop Festival. For three days in June, 200,000 people came to listen. There had never been a festival like it.
Many performers who would shape rock for years to come — like The Who, Simon and Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin — made their first big appearance. The bands performed for free. Those who came to listen paid just $1, if they paid anything. The Summer of Love had begun.
"This was an episode in the great unfolding of the '60s," said sociologist and author Todd Gitlin, "which was a time when a remarkable number of people thought that they could actually live life differently."Photos: Monterey Pop
Gitlin has written extensively about the '60s when the war in Vietnam, the struggle for civil rights and a growing women's movement turned many into activists.
"So in that setting, while the Summer of Love was odd, it wasn't that odd," he said. "Because the whole period was odd — the whole period was full of thousands of people doing remarkable things, especially young people."
"It felt like being at the crest of a wave," Judy Goldhaft, who belonged to a group called the Diggers.
She knew exactly where that wave was cresting — in the San Francisco neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury.
"My friends have said, 'You'd wake up in the morning and you'd never know who was on your living room floor sleeping.' They were packed."
The Diggers were a group of actors, artists and anarchists who saw Haight Ashbury as a place where they could transform society.
"And we felt that we could do many things, many impossible things, we were capable of doing them," Goldhaft said.
"We approached newcomers into the Haight-Ashbury and establishment with the proposition, everything is free," Peter Berg, another Digger, said. "So I would say to a policeman, 'Why don't you put 'free' in front of something that you want to do? And then do it?' Become a free cop. What would a free cop be like? What would a free banker be like? What would a free fireman be like?" That was our approach. It was fun-loving."
The Diggers ran a free store. They gave away free food. On Haight Street there was a free clinic and plenty of free expression. The young quickly embraced free love. And the neighborhood rock bands gave free concerts.
"People would pony up and we'd rent a flatbed truck and put our equipment on it and take it down to the panhandle to the park," Weir said. "And set up and play."
"Rock music became, for the counterculture, what the newspaper had been for the straight culture: It became the way that people talked to each other and sent the word out," said Sunday Morning music critic Bill Flanagan of MTV. "As the word got out, newspapers and TV across the country picked up the story of young people flooding into Haight Ashbury. All those things sort of came together and created the first great rock marketing event, created a kind of nationwide notion that everyone should leave their parents, get in a Volkswagen bus, and head to San Francisco."
The more that was written, the more people came.
"I once described 1966 as the Summer of Love; 1967 was the summer of a million people," Goldhalf said.
"The media, to a large extent had created this 'hippie' who was a person making a 'V for Victory' sign with a silly grin, and wearing 50 buttons that said this and that. That wasn't what a lot of us were doing," Berg said.
For outsiders the "hippie" life style could seem as foreign as some distant culture. When CBS sent Harry Reasoner to Haight-Ashbury in 1967 he was clearly disturbed by what he found:
"There's the real danger that more and more young people may follow the call to turn on, tune in, drop out," he said then.
One stop for the CBS cameras was 710 Ashbury Street, the home of the Grateful Dead. Weir was 20 years old and tried to offer reassurance that there was nothing to fear in what was happening here.
"That the people that live in the community and play around with dope and stuff like that they don't have wars, you know, and they don't have a lot of the problems that larger society has," he said in 1967.
Today, Weir says he knew back then that he and his friends were scaring the older generation, and they were having fun doing it.
"I mean, we weren't dangerous," he said. "We knew that. And if they didn't, well, sooner or later they'd figure it out."
Soon enough though, things started to get dangerous in Haight-Ashbury. Marijuana and LSD had long been part of the scene. But as the kids poured in in the summer of '67, the drugs got harder and more hazardous.
© MMVII, CBS Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
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See all 23 CommentsJune 15-17th, 2007. www.mainstreetmotionmedia.com
http://community.eons.com/groups/group/hippies-for-life
That's why he call's himself McVet - like McDonalds, McNewspaper, McHouse - all alluding to a certain cheapness, cookie-cutter kind of thing.
Everyone knows his comments & opinions are McIrrelevant.
It was my experience that when guys in my town came home from Nam, with very few exceptions,they melted right in with the counterculture. It was as if they had a social home to come back to. The few that felt like outsiders were probably not going to fit in even if they had stayed home.
In the "Winter Soldier" documentary from '70 a vet says that the first time he smiled in a long while was when he was in a VA hospital and someone showed him a newspaper article on Woodstock. The rest of the vets in the room clapped when he said that. There's so much that people don't know about that period.
Posted by MCVet at 03:30 PM : Jun 03, 2007
Pretty vicious for a Sunday...wow.
tune in: the love
drop out: of the hate
long live the hippies!!
Until the Woodstock movie came out most boomers didn't "get it" and even after the movie, to most of them it was just fashion. To be denied service in restaurants, to be profiled by the police, to be denied jobs, to be treated to a haircut and beating in the south just because of how you looked and even to be refused entry into Disneyland required a commitment to that lifestyle.
And yes drugs were a big part of the inner change that caused people to become "freaks". Marijuana and LSD provided insights that caused some people to adopt a more natural lifestyle change. They opened the mind to realities not considered before. Among them that we were all connected and love was elemental.
Ask any person that was a real freak from that period to recount their best experience and it will invariably include LSD. White powder drugs ruined the dream for some but "straight" propaganda was the real culprit.
Unless you were there and unless you were tuned in it would take hours to explain the truth. This report was even handed, unlike the faux documentary by the History Channel, but it's still only a basic intro to a period in history that was unique and misunderstood.
Okay, the using drugs part is illegal... promiscuous *** is stupid and dangerous, never mind the emotional ramifications of breaking another person's relationship (so much for peace and harmony...)
Sounds really good; very creative, yes...
But the lyrics either condone drug use... or are subversive. Often because drug use was illegal, or for other reasons...
The irony is the selfishness of that generation; the results of which became the yuppies of the 1980s.
SOME might argue the same folks are tearing things down in this country today; fulfilling their drugged-up fantasies of 40 years ago. Sounds far-fetched, but what the h3ll. Anything's possible, I suppose.
All I know is, and this is unrelated, priests have sermons about America being underpopulated and ask where the next generation of scientists will come from to resolve these problems... maybe Father Corapi hasn't been reading up on the news when he made that videotaped sermon - those jobs are leaving America... (that aside, he's had some interesting sermons...)
When Hendrix started to burn his guitar I was so stunned I put my camera down and watched in amazement. That powerful gathering in 1967 was the first real tribute to rock and roll!
Thank you Lou ADler and John Phillips!
Tom Gundelfinger O'Neal
www.tgoportfolio.com
"The War In the Living Room" drove so much of what went on at that time . . . we pointed out, that back then, the photo shown during %u201CThe AP%u201D piece: The man with the gun to his head, and many like it (the girl running naked and on fire) were in our living rooms every night, via the evening news, which the AP contributed to. We also made the distinction that today, with 2 wars going on, they don't see the "war in the living room." They see well screened scenes, chaos in the distance, and no endless lines of coffins coming in to Dover.
Yes, your piece was a nice reminder about the Summer of Love - but the evenings of the war in our living rooms played a big role in looking for that love!
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