San Francisco.
If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to check out the trams at the airport. They’re done up in psychedelic colors. And over by the gates you can have your picture taken in a mock-up of an old VW bus like the hippies used to drive, also decorated psychedelically. Wearing flowers in your hair is strictly optional.
When you get into the city proper, passing several psychedelic billboards, you’ll find it jumping with events celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Having come to an end half a century ago, the Summer of Love is one of those events San Francisco has never quite got over, like the gold rush and those two earthquakes. The summer of 1967 is considered by people who like to consider such things to be the high-water mark of the hippies, the climax of the counterculture, the Camelot moment when all that was lovely and innocent about the sixties blossomed fleetingly from the potential to the actual.
The locus of the Summer of Love was the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. This summer old VW buses — real ones, each of them an antique, and also painted psychedelically — are cruising its streets, carrying tourists past the historic sites while an eccentrically dressed guide explains what they’re looking at. Afterwards you could stop for a Summer of Love happy hour at the Love clothing store at the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets or enjoy a “Hippie Lunch Combo” ($14) at a restaurant down the block. A few blocks further, past the historic “Hippie Hill” in Golden Gate Park, you come upon the de Young museum, one of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The de Young is showing its most popular exhibit in years, “The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock and Roll.” The museum restaurant has invented a pair of drinks for the occasion: the “Acid Trip” (a margarita with Midori) and the “Flower Child” (Blue Curaçao, vodka, lemonade), both for $12.
The de Young’s is not the only show in town. An exhibit called “On the Road to the Summer of Love” is at the California Historical Society downtown, which is only a stone’s throw away from the San Francisco Central Library, where, in addition to its four Summer of Love exhibits, seminars are being held with titles like “Hippie Food” and “Jefferson Airplane: A Deep Dive.” From there you can walk to City Hall for an exhibition of photos of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
Back in the Haight district, the branch library is offering tie-dye classes and a 1967 fashion show. Over the hill, in the Castro district, the GLBT History Museum celebrates with “Lavender Tinted Glasses,” an exhibit “highlighting the roles of four queers in the making of the Summer of Love.” You probably missed the big Summer of Love concert and light show in the park, but there’s talk of another one coming up. There was also some SOL stuff across the bay in Berkeley, but that was just bandwagoning. Berkeley suffers from a notorious case of San Francisco envy.
The de Young’s show is by far the most ambitious of the Summer of Love commemorations, filling its largest exhibit space with relics that evoke that scented and beflowered season: original handmade clothes, poster art, photographs, simulated light shows, and scores of lapel buttons, even though hippies seldom wore clothes with lapels; also Janis Joplin’s (very showy) handbag and the famous “Captain Trips” top hat owned by Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist and, since his martyrdom from a heroin overdose in the 1990s, the patron saint of hippies. Garcia wore the hat off and on for two years before he gave it to a neighbor, who sold it for $117,000 in 2014.
If visitors doubt the significance of all this material, or of the SOL itself, they need only consider the large display of street signs erected to greet them as they enter the museum. The central one simulates the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets. The others are more fanciful. One marks an intersection of Free Love and Marriage Equality. Another pair of signs joins Civil Rights with Black Lives Matter. Another: Hippie intersects with Hipster. The Whole Earth Catalog meets the World Wide Web.
The message to museumgoers is clear: Just because the Summer of Love took place 50 long years ago, well before most of you were born — before 60 percent of the country was born — nobody should get the idea that it’s something irrelevant, some dim event from antiquity like the Wars of the Roses or the Annexation of Guam. The street signs trace a genealogy from then to now. Without the hippies’ belief in free love, there’d be no gay marriage. The Whole Earth Catalog was the foreshadowing of the Internet. No civil rights movement in the 1960s would mean no #blacklivesmatter today. Many of the things that thrill a millennial heart sprouted in the Summer of Love. With no hippies, we’d have no hipsters. Think of it.
The exhibit itself isn’t quite so didactic. It’s devoted to the aesthetics of the Summer of Love, surely the movement’s most appealing aspect. Hippies were much better at art than ideas. The exhibit features clothes and posters and photographs, while the speakers boom with what is supposed to be the “San Francisco Sound,” a school of rock discovered in 1967 and left undefined ever since. Nearly every item on display catches the eye.
The exhibit takes advantage of one of history’s little jokes: Though famous for sexual liberation, the baby boomers were the last generation in which nearly every girl was expected to learn how to sew. As a consequence the most mundane item of clothing could be made singular and beautiful. Fifty years ago, denim was the textile of the lower classes, infra dig for all but farmers and men who worked with their hands. The hippies claimed it, and under the imagination of a Summer of Love dressmaker, the lowliest pair of blue jeans could become gloriously exotic with studs and stitching and higgledy-piggledy patchwork. The still-brighter colors of the print dresses, all whipped together in gaudy swirls, might have become a cliché, but here they seem exuberant and witty. The marquee piece in the fashion displays is a crocheted wedding dress, complete with a train several feet long, in a mild combination of pastels. Curators swear it was actually worn at a wedding — but just once.
Clothes for men, at least for the dandies represented here, were a hodgepodge of found styles: American Indian, Victorian, and Old West affectations scrambled together. There was a nostalgic, even reactionary, element to the hippie aesthetic. These were very retrograde progressives. They claimed to be rebelling against the soulless uniformity of mass production, and so tried to revive an artisanal way of providing necessities, forgoing polyester for natural fibers, favoring hand stitching over machine made. Almost every piece of clothing here is one of a kind. The only mass-produced items are a few microdresses stamped with peace signs. But they come from the early 1970s, when a lot of things had gone wrong.
The art posters, usually advertisements for local rock concerts, had an old-timey feel too. The first rock advertisements to appear in the Haight looked like fight cards for a boxing match: crude block lettering, red or black on a white background, a solitary picture of the performer. Later, elements were incorporated from the “Wild West” wanted posters — familiar to a generation reared on TV shows like Have Gun, Will Travel and Gunsmoke.
Most of the poster artists had no formal training, but when they discovered offset printing, they quickly pushed the range of its possibilities. The unthought-of juxtaposition of amoeba-like blobs in lurid colors — canary yellow lettering over a whorehouse red background — created the vibrating effect the posters are now famous for. The letters themselves were of a typeface not previously seen on our planet. The lettering does take some getting used to — it is, in a word, illegible.
In any other era, visual advertising that customers cannot read would be considered not such a great idea. Yet the hippie promoters who were paying the hippie artists to publicize their hippie shows gave the artists “carte blanche,” says Colleen Terry, one of the de Young curators. The posters were understood to be advertising not merely upcoming individual concerts but the subversive adventure of concertgoing, a kind of romanticized endorsement of the Haight experience itself — and this too could be good for business. There was no doubting the demand. No sooner would the posters go up than they were snatched away by passersby, to reappear as wall hangings in tumbledown walk-ups badly in need of decoration. The de Young began collecting the rock posters in early 1968.
Besides, the obscurantism was deliberate. It created a kind of freemasonry. Hippies could (allegedly) decrypt them, especially when stoned, and the rest of us couldn’t. In an essay in the show’s companion book, Terry quotes one of the most celebrated poster artists, Victor Moscoso: “The goal of my posters was, ideally, if somebody was across the street, they’d see the vibrating colors and say, What’s that? They cross the street and spend a half hour or a week trying to read it.”
Having prowled the poster displays as sober as a judge, I can report that the obscurantism is part of their enduring charm. You can’t mistake the inventiveness that went into their design and execution, and they retain the power to lighten and lift the spirit. They are humorous, original, unpretentious, and wildly allusive — popular art of a heightened kind. And utterly misleading.
Christmas in the Summer of Love
On one of my visits to the “Summer of Love Experience” I fell in with an elderly woman, Susan (not her real name), a lifelong San Franciscan who was being steered through the exhibit in a wheelchair pushed by her middle-aged daughter. Susan was dressed for the experience. Her faded jean jacket was covered in buttons that seemed to be of sixties vintage: I was able to read “Ban the Bomb” and “Love Bug.” Elaborate, colorful scarves were draped loosely over her shoulders and around her neck. Her blue jeans, also faded to perfection, had been stylishly torn to expose her tiny knees. She wore expensive boots with complicated stitching. In her lap she kept a floppy, wide-brimmed hat.
She seemed to be enjoying her stroll, or roll, down memory lane immensely. Her daughter read her the wall plaques and Susan, straining to hear, would nod. When she rolled into a room designed to simulate a poster shop from the Haight, covered floor to ceiling in psychedelia, she chuckled. “Oh yes,” she said. “I think I remember all of these.” Before a photo of the Grateful Dead performing on Haight Street, she said something indistinct about “Jerry.” When we came to a photo of a theatrical troupe of transvestites, who were briefly the toast of San Francisco, she asked her daughter to stop and to identify the picture.
The daughter looked at the wall plaque and said, “It’s the Cockettes, Mom.”
“What?” said Susan, leaning forward in the chair.
“The COCKETTES!”
Susan sat back. “Oh yes, they were wonderful,” she said. “I saw them once performing in front of Grace Cathedral, on Christmas Eve.”
“Christmas Eve?” said her daughter. “The Cockettes?”
“Oh, yes. Marvelous!”
“When was that, Mom?”
Susan waved a bony hand. “Oh,” she said, “forever ago.”
With No Beginning and No End
Any investigation of the Summer of Love instantly runs up against the problem of chronology. Take the “poster era” as an example. In September 1967, Life magazine ran a cover story announcing the onset of “The Big Poster Hang-Up”; more than a million were being printed and sold every week. Four months later, the premier poster shop in the Haight closed and the San Francisco Chronicle announced the “death of the great poster trip.” Can four months be an era?
And what about the Summer of Love, of which the “poster era” was merely a phase? The excellent exhibit at the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society traces the roots of the SOL back to the beatniks of the 1950s, and it’s true that some beats, especially the poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, made the transition from bongo-playing beatnik to bong-playing hippie without missing a beat, if you’ll please forgive me. Both men helped sponsor the Human Be-In, a 40,000-strong assemblage of young people held in Golden Gate Park in January 1967. The Be-In is often identified as the kick-off to the Summer of Love and the hippie era. Other authorities say the Summer of Love commenced in mid-June with the Monterey Pop Festival, which brought San Francisco bands like Jefferson Airplane to the attention of a national audience.
For his part, the historian William Schnabel, in his Summer of Love and Haight, says the January Be-In was not the beginning but the peak of the hippie era, and by the time summer rolled around it was more or less kaput. This would mean that the Summer of Love was over before it began. (Maybe the hippies really did discover an alternative reality.) The most energetic historian of the SOL, Dennis McNally, has declared authoritatively: “The true Summer of Love was not the public affair of 1967, but the private social experiments that took place, largely in the Haight-Ashbury, in 1966,” including a raucous party at the Grateful Dead’s place. An interested amateur can only wish these guys would get on the same page.
The confusion suggests that the Summer of Love as we’ve come to know it was a confection of marketers and media, particularly of the trendsniffers at the newsweeklies. They were powerful cultural arbiters in those days, setting the agenda even for the TV networks, who descended on the Haight once the flare went up from Time, Newsweek, Look, and the other leading magazines. “Summer of Love” is a catchy phrase, though, and it works as shorthand for the origins of what was then called the counterculture and which is now, in many deep and surviving particulars, just the culture.
Up for Grabs
Whenever the SOL began, whenever it ended, the basic storyline is always the same: a dream of Utopia, an Eden of innocence, and then the Fall. The dream was the recurring dream of antinomianism — the belief that all traditional arrangements of morality, family, commerce, and religion can be discarded and arrangements of one’s own devising put in their place. “Western civilization is up for grabs,” said one hippie leader, and “a new mode of being” was being born. McNally, the historian, says the movement took aim at what was assumed to be the heart of American culture. The hippies, he writes, “challenged the nuclear family, materialism, violence, the Vietnam war, and the bulk of the ideas they’d been raised on.”
Well, two out of five isn’t bad: The Vietnam war is over, and the nuclear family has been all but finished off. Materialism and violence live on, however, as a stroll through the Haight this summer confirms. In any case, it’s hard to argue that the hippies didn’t have good reason to seek alternatives to American life in the mid-1960s. By then a lot of people were beginning to wonder whether the available channels of the popular culture, from music to food, from clothes to movies and TV, would ever produce anything of distinction, or even of intelligent interest. If you ever wonder why the sixties cultural revolution was necessary, listen to a hit album by the Ray Conniff Singers, watch a Bob Hope variety special from NBC, try on a pair of Sansabelt polyester slacks, or choke down a Wonder Bread sandwich made with Welch’s grape jelly and Skippy creamy peanut butter spread. The hippies had a point.
And they never seemed to doubt that their antinomianism was the surest way out of this cul-de-sac. But there was a puritan streak in them, too, these children of the middle and upper-middle classes, the spawn of the greatest generation. They went to San Francisco to start a party, but the party had to stand for something other than self-indulgence. A high-minded justification was wanting. There were plenty of brainy, publicity-minded shamans around — the Harvard professor and LSD evangelist Timothy Leary or the pantheist philosopher Alan Watts — to provide it.
And so LSD wasn’t just an enjoyable if risky intoxicant, it had to be a gateway to a new reality or, if you were really lucky, God Itself. Sex, no matter how overworked, was a means of achieving personal authenticity and throwing off bourgeois shackles. The avoidance of work was a noble attempt to end-run the soul-deadening mechanisms of capitalism and create a new economy without money. Toying with half-baked, Americanized versions of Eastern mysticism was a way of transcending the limits imposed by Judaism and Christianity, leading to new realms of the spirit.
Historians of the SOL keep this tradition alive. Most of them are evangelists rather than historians, in fact. You will read that hippies “experimented with sexual liberation,” as though they were dressed in lab coats like Masters and Johnson, when all it really means is that they were having a lot of sex. When you read the hippies were “exploring the frontiers of consciousness” you know they’re getting high. An “experimental college,” like one in the Haight, means a college where nobody studies or has to take a test. “Alternative commerce” is bartering or, in many instances, thievery.
Experiments require a laboratory, of course, and Haight-Ashbury presented itself. It was a down-at-the-heels but centrally located neighborhood not far from downtown and adjacent to Golden Gate Park. In the mid-sixties, the Haight was on a downward trend in the urban lifecycle: The earlier population of Italian and Irish tradesmen were moving their families to the suburbs, and many of its grand Victorian and Queen Anne style townhouses had been split up for apartments after the war. A proposed freeway threatened to slice the neighborhood in half, further driving down housing prices, which in turn drew in the artists and bohemians fleeing pricier North Beach. If you were planning to explore consciousness, the Haight was as good a place as any.
As the SOL approached, the neighborhood contained a few thousand hippies — or “freaks,” the tag many preferred, “hippies” sounding too cute for such a momentous experiment. (“Flower children” came into use a bit later.) Life was rigidly non-hierarchical. Even at concerts, bands played right on the dance floor, among the frugging crowd, since to climb a stage suggested a form of dominance, a leader/follower arrangement, like the kind everyone was trying to escape. Property, of course, was theoretically communal. A locked door was a sign of mistrust. The use of alcohol was discouraged and the use of weed mandatory. Parents drank alcohol.
Then, into this bizarre and ultimately tragic chapter in American Utopianism, strode the Diggers.
A Voice in the Wilderness
A familiar voice narrates the audio tour at the de Young museum. It’s Peter Coyote — the obvious choice for such a gig.
Coyote — he chose the name after he saw coyote tracks in the snow; he was high at the time — is the most prominent surviving figure from the Summer of Love and the counterculture it encapsulated. He helped found the Diggers, a swashbuckling group of crypto-anarchists who moved among the hippies and tried to anchor their behavior in a larger revolutionary theory. For the last 30 years Coyote has worked as an actor in small European films and on American TV. He’s got several episodes of Law & Order under his belt. You can hear his distinctive baritone narrating Ken Burns’s documentaries, including the upcoming Vietnam series; also car commercials.
Still a political activist, he has become a face for the 50th anniversary, turning up on radio, appearing in documentaries by the BBC and PBS, and sitting in on chin-wags in various venues. But he’s had enough. He turned down a request to be interviewed for this article. “I’m all ‘Summered’ out,” he said.
Coyote is also a writer. His memoir Sleeping Where I Fall, published in 1998 and reissued not long ago, is one of the few books of distinction about the sixties counterculture produced by a full-throated participant. It is richly atmospheric and stylishly written, showing at times a gift for genuine psychological penetration. The memoirist himself is not an appealing man — he’s heedless, amoral, censorious when it suits him, given to flights of sanctimony, always quick to let himself off the hook — but Coyote’s honesty doesn’t feel like the kind that can be faked. This is really him. Sleeping Where I Fall is indispensable to anyone who wants to try to understand the Summer of Love from the inside.
For Coyote’s project was the hippie project: the pursuit of “absolute freedom,” to “live without the limits of law or convention.” Every assumption of normal American life was to be reexamined. Indeed, in the counterculture the very word normal required air quotes. “The real work,” he tells us, “was to create free life amid the desert of industrial capitalism.” He grew up in that desert — specifically, Englewood, New Jersey. His father was a wealthy businessman, his mother a homemaker. “I knew first hand about the personal costs of inauthenticity” — his parents were inauthentic — “and unearned privilege.” He had suffered for his wealth, in other words, and now it was everybody else’s turn.
Coyote’s sense of alienation was widely shared and essential to the rise of the hippies. He fled to San Francisco. There, he writes, “I was introduced to an analytical perspective that explained how money was created and privileges protected by the political process.” The idea to form the Diggers emerged from this analysis. In the many retellings of the Summer of Love currently on offer, the Diggers invariably play the role of heroes. Their writings, says the left-wing journalist David Talbot in his interesting history Season of the Witch, “were among the earliest and most passionate expressions of what would later be called San Francisco values.” Membership was loosely defined and at one time numbered a hundred or more. The group was equal parts a performance art troupe, a countercultural Salvation Army, and a criminal enterprise.
The Diggers set about creating in the Haight a “free economy,” a community that would function without money. Money, the Diggers believed, was the ultimate instrument of bourgeois manipulation. Their new economic model was meant to spread nationwide until the industrial desert bloomed. They would offer free meals to anyone who wanted one, especially to the growing assemblies of street people beginning to crowd the neighborhood. They scrounged in grocery store dumpsters and cajoled produce sellers, and if that failed they simply stole whatever they needed. Every day huge vats of turkey stew and homemade bread were dished out in the neighborhood park.
They set up “free stores” in abandoned storefronts. The stores, said the Diggers, were “designed to encourage reflection on the relationships among goods and roles — owner, employee, customer — implied by a store.” The merchandise was donated, solicited, or, again, stolen. Often the stores were left unattended, the idea being that whoever wandered in could become the manager for as long as he wanted. Old toasters, clothes, musical instruments, all kinds of urban detritus walked right out the door. There was even, briefly, a “free bank,” though without money a bank was puzzling to operate.
Maybe it was the failure of the bank, but before too long Coyote and the Diggers encountered the painful truth that if you were going to live free, you needed money. Indeed, the food and merchandise they were giving away was drawn from the surplus created by a money-driven capitalist economy. No money, no capital; no capital, no surplus; no surplus, no free stuff.
By the Diggers’ own admission, and for ideological reasons, getting a straight job was a last resort, to be considered only after all other options had been exhausted. Fundraising trips to rich people were more appealing. Diggers were dispatched to New York and Los Angeles to milk plump and credulous cows like Peter Fonda and Paul Simon. High-minded as ever, Coyote explains that the fundraisers were an effort to “engage [donors] in a new social arrangement as much as an opportunity to get funds for our work.” The actor James Coburn got a glimpse of the new social arrangement when he declined to donate, after which a Digger tried to set his house on fire. Peter Tork of the Monkees volunteered to put up a band of Diggers when they came to L.A. When they left, one Digger recalled, “the boys ripped him off for everything that was liftable.”
But it wasn’t all stars and show biz. Coyote says the group developed a thriving traffic in stolen telephone credit cards, which were very widely used at the time. “Ditto for gasoline and bank credit cards,” he writes, without apparent remorse, “which often underwrote our long journeys and deliveries of supplies to the growing number of Digger family houses.” Given such tactics, it’s little wonder that the group eventually made common cause with gangs of murderous thugs like the Hells Angels and the Black Panthers.
But petty criminality was a way of life during the Summer of Love. To cite a last instance: After the Grateful Dead closed out the Monterey Pop Festival on the last night, they stole all the sound equipment that the promoters had rented for the weekend and drove it back to their house in San Francisco. It was top-of-the-line sound equipment, and the Dead needed sound equipment. The theft has entered the band’s legend as one more charming tale from that magical time. The great journalist Nicholas von Hoffman, who wrote about the SOL with a sympathetic but gimlet eye, once said the Summer of Love was “the greatest crime story since Prohibition.”
From Free Stores to Free Love
Meanwhile, thanks to the newly discovered birth control pill, the hippies in the Haight had managed to achieve levels of sexual incontinence that were simply staggering. The old Utopian phrase “Free Love” entered the national vocabulary. One of the current exhibits at the San Francisco Public Library displays the “Haight Ashbury Song Book,” by a writer named Ashleigh Brilliant. The book is opened to “The Intercourse Song”:
There’s more, and then it concludes:
The Diggers did their part for the cause of Free Love. Coyote, by his own admission, pitched in enthusiastically, to the point where even Wilt Chamberlain might have wondered if the man was overdoing it. Though they had helped put on the Human Be-In in January 1967, the Diggers had detected signs of bourgeois timidity in that blissful but relatively chaste daylong romp in the park. The following month they proposed a happening that would last an entire weekend and explore still more revolutionary modes of living.
It was to be called “The Invisible Circus.” They persuaded the board of Glide Memorial Church, a middle-class black congregation with countercultural sympathies, to lend their building for what the church board thought would be a political event. Dazzling street posters spread the word around the neighborhood. When the doors opened Friday night, the crowd was so large that admission had to be controlled — the only thing, it transpired, that had to be controlled.
Coyote touches only briefly on the Invisible Circus in his memoir; he was laid up in his, or someone’s, apartment with the flu. But one of his colleagues, Emmett Grogan, described the doings in his samizdat memoir, Ringolevio, published in 1972, a few years before his death from an overdose of heroin.
The party planners, Grogan explained, had turned the church kitchen into a “recreation room,” the centerpiece being a punch bowl filled with Tang, “spiked with salutary doses of acid.” The church offices upstairs were subdivided, hung with sheets, outfitted with mattresses and lubricants, and labeled “love-making salons.” The makeshift rooms were quickly occupied; a queue formed.
As a nod to the original cover story, a group of straights — a lawyer, a clergyman, a cop from community relations — was invited to join a panel discussion on the “Meaning of Obscenity.” As they made their presentations, a Digger crept into the glass case behind them and, as planned, displayed his genitals, clowning all the while. The audience, Grogan wrote, went wild with delight, but the clueless straights droned on. As the discussion wound down, a mattress was brought in, carrying a naked man and woman. The mattress was laid on the table in front of the panelists, and the couple had sex. There the discussion ended.
Back in the sanctuary, a vast, cathedral-like space, the large altar was covered with copulating couples, along with “a naked weight lifter standing on top of some sort of tabernacle in a beam of light, masturbating and panting himself into a trance.” A group of “teeny boppers” watched a circle of drag queens fellating one another; the girls giggled, reported Grogan. And so on. “Some Frisco Hells Angels in the back pews,” Grogan continued, “were being entertained by a beautiful woman in a Carmelite nun habit who kept shouting for ‘More!’ ‘More!’ and they were giving it to her.” Those crazy kids.
Finally, after 10 hours, the church board members tumbled to what the Love Generation was up to. Cops and fire marshals were called, and the Invisible Circus drew prematurely to a close.
Even though Coyote missed the circus, he of course heard all about it, and in Sleeping he renders his summary judgment: “this Digger party [was] consonant with the emerging spirit of the times and with our intention to stretch the envelope of cultural possibilities. Permission was the rule . . . and no one was hurt, wounded, shunned, or scorned.” I wonder if he checked up on the woman in the nun habit.
Survival School
“Look, mom,” said Susan’s daughter, back at the de Young. They had stopped before a flyer distributed by the Diggers as the Haight’s hippie population swelled. “It’s from the Diggers,” she said. “You know the Diggers.”
“Oh yes,” Susan said. “They were famous. Peter Coyote.”
The daughter read aloud: “Survival School: how to stay alive on Haight Street.” She paused and chuckled, and Susan joined in.
“Isn’t that something?” she said.
“A series of three classes,” the daughter continued, “designed to save you from becoming a psychedelic casualty.”
“Oh my,” said Susan, laughing. They rolled on to the next exhibit and Susan looked up at her daughter. “Of course, it’s easy for us to laugh now, but back then . . . ”
Lonely Hearts
George Harrison and his wife visited San Francisco at the height of the Summer of Love. They wanted to see Haight-Ashbury. They walked the streets and quickly drew a crowd of flower children.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had been released just weeks before and, as was said, blown minds the world over. And here was one of its creators come to bestow a Beatle blessing on the counterculture of the Haight. The perfect alignment of man and moment, prophet and place: The photos taken that day, writes the rock music historian Joel Selvin, “became the single most enduring image from the city in the Summer of Love.”
From behind Harrison’s famous heart-shaped sunglasses, however, things looked different from what he’d been reading in the press.
“I went there expecting it to be a brilliant place,” Harrison said years later, “with groovy gypsy people making works of art and paintings and carvings in little workshops. But it was full of horrible spotty drop-out kids on drugs. . . .
“I could only describe it as being like the Bowery: a lot of bums and drop-outs, many of them very young kids who’d dropped acid and come from all over America to this Mecca of LSD. It certainly showed me what was really happening in the drug culture. It wasn’t what I’d thought — spiritual awakenings and being artistic — it was like alcoholism, like any addiction.”
The Harrisons wandered toward the park. The crowd grew and pressed in. When Harrison declined a joint from one of the hippies, he sensed a rising air of menace. “You’re putting me down, man,” said the offended flower child. Harrison’s limo appeared and his party ducked in, headed for the airport to fly to L.A.
“That was a turning point for me,” Harrison said. “That’s when I went right off the whole drug cult.”
“Our city has become the momentary focus of a worldwide spiritual awakening,” wrote a columnist for a Haight newspaper, and the mainstream press, always in the market for such things, wrote it up that way too. One sure method to kill a spiritual awakening is to publicize it, and the celebrants of the Summer of Love often blame the media for what followed. But this is unfair. The main daily newspaper in San Francisco, the Chronicle, was particularly taken with “the young pioneers flocking into the city,” as Talbot writes in Season of the Witch. “The paper adopted an affectionate, even solicitous, tone toward the hippies.” Press reports from elsewhere often did the same.
What the current celebrants really regret is the power of the 1960s press to make the freaks famous. Mass media, by which every American anywhere could hear about the same thing at the same moment, was just beginning to take hold. After the Be-In, with its enchanting photos of flower-laden, half-dressed young women dancing in meadows, San Franciscan hippies became irresistible feature fodder. The word went forth: The Haight was “liberated turf.”
The counterculture became self-parody before it became tragedy. The news features led to caricature, which made the freaks seem tame enough for American commerce to celebrate them too. Diners around the country offered Love Dogs and Love Burgers. Bonwit Teller sold hippie wigs. Many of the dazzling clothes on exhibit at the de Young became templates for knock-offs, filling the racks at discount stores. Publishing companies produced potboilers: The Hippie Papers, The Hippie File, The Hippie Cookbook, The Hippy’s Handbook, each of their covers featuring photos of long-haired young women in varying states of undress. One enterprising San Franciscan began a business called “Hire a Hippie,” allowing wealthy people to introduce a real hippie to their friends at cocktail parties on Nob Hill. Busses loaded with tourists rolled up and down Haight Street. (When the tourists would debark, Coyote recalls, the flower children would spray paint their camera lenses.)
The travel time from neologism to catchphrase to cliché had never been quicker. No sooner had a hippie phrase entered the general vocabulary than it became a punch line. After a brief moment of saturation, nobody seriously said “groovy” or “far out” ever again. It didn’t help that so many prominent adults were eager to grovel before this parody of youth. One look at the aging B-list actor Peter Lawford as he draped himself in love beads, sprouted salt-and-pepper mutton chops, designated his beach house a “pad,” and declared Jefferson Airplane “groovy” is enough to capture the true horror of the thing, and there were many more like him, in every corner of the straight world. Chroniclers of the Summer of Love like to belabor the brutal oppression of hippies by civil authorities. And there were indeed drug raids, neighborhood sweeps to round up runaways, and the occasional enforcement of vagrancy laws. But the opposite is nearer the truth. The dominant culture caved with astonishing speed.
The Jingle
The main effect of the hippies’ sudden fame was to draw unwanted wannabes to the Haight—unwanted, that is, by the hippies who were already there. Through the spring of ’67 kids from all over had been trickling in, but by June, when schools across the country let out, the trickle grew to a flood. John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas wrote the pied piper tune “San Francisco,” with its unfortunately deathless line: “If you’re going to San Francisco / be sure to wear some flowers in your hair” because “you’re gonna meet some gentle people there.” Kids in the heartland believed it. Recorded by a friend of Phillips, the song reached number four on the national charts and refused to go away for the rest of the summer. (Phillips wrote the song as an advertising jingle for the Monterey Pop Festival, which he co-produced. He lived in L.A.)
Head counts of the new arrivals ranged from 50,000 to 100,000. For veterans of the Haight — residents who had been squatting since 1966, for example — the in-migration of 1967 signaled the end of the experiment. “A number of older hands realized the area was poised to become unlivable,” Coyote writes, and many of them decided to roll up the futon and move to pristine Marin County, where one was much less likely to step on a used syringe or discarded condom.
The SOL literature is filled with complaints from veteran hippies that many of the newbies weren’t into peace or love or the eradication of money; some were even criminals, presumably the kind who stole things for reasons less wholesome than the Diggers’ reasons for stealing things. In the fall, the older hippies held a mock funeral for “The Last Hippie,” as a way of declaring the end of an era. They carried a casket down Haight Street and burned it on Hippie Hill. The kids just arrived from Cincinnati or Philadelphia must have wondered, What the hell? They’d traveled all this way and . . . no more hippies? It was a cruel bait-and-switch.
The escape of the Diggers, the Dead, and other freaks to less crowded, more pleasant environs has a sour flavor of “there goes the neighborhood” to it — a hippie version of white flight. One unremarked detail about the hippie movement is that its more prominent members tended to come from families with means; most of the lovers Coyote identifies seem to be daughters of the upper class, even an heiress to the Parker Pen fortune. The great unwashed immigrants sweeping uninvited over the Haight, on the other hand, were more . . . diverse. The hippie revulsion at mass production, the preference for the handmade and homespun: These were class markers. An “old money” distaste for the parvenus was probably inevitable. So it was off to Mill Valley. Some bourgeois habits are hard to shake.
The Crowded Doorways
The point is undeniable: The quality of life in the Haight, never high to begin with, quickly fell, from “simple squalor” to “abandoned monkey house.” Crime soared, heroin was everywhere, the numbers of homeless soared, runaways as young as 10 were left to sleep in doorways.
Even the most romantic of the Summer of Love celebrants acknowledge the decline. The exhibits this summer don’t shy from the horrors that followed the SOL: There are chilling photos from the waiting room at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, which volunteer doctors had founded to provide routine medical care for the hippies but which was now overwhelmed by cases of mental illness and heroin or methedrine addiction. You can read the tales of the runaways lost to dope or prostitution or some other predation. One exhibit at the library shows a “contact” section of a local newsletter, with entries written by parents desperate to find their children. “Please write — Mom.” “Please come home.” “Please write and tell us if you are okay — Mom and Dad.” “We miss you so much. the Family”
There’s a comment book at the exit of the main exhibit in the library. The day before I was there a visitor had written: “If you’re nostalgic for all this, you’re under 50.”
The Shadow
So what happened? If everyone agrees that the “experiment” in the Haight ended in a Hobbesian tar pit of crime and misery, what caused the failure?
The people who celebrate the Summer of Love prefer to find causes beyond the counterculture itself. Peter Lewis, a surviving member of the 1960s San Francisco band Moby Grape, finds the cause in geopolitics. “Always lurking below [the SOL] there was this seething hatred and fear from Vietnam and the Cold War.” The founder of the Haight clinic blames the “conservative element in American culture” and the distorting effects of the media’s superficial coverage of the Haight experiment. “The Haight Ashbury was decimated by hard drugs, essentially speed and heroin,” writes William Schnabel in Summer of Love and Haight. “The question is who introduced these drugs into the neighborhood and who had the means of producing them?” His tentative answer: the CIA, through distribution networks arranged by the mafia.
David Talbot agrees. In Season of the Witch, he acknowledges that there was “always a dark shadow around the San Francisco rainbow. From the very beginning violence, desperation, and fear stalked the streets of the Haight, side by side with the euphoria.” The stalker was the government. Talbot cites no less an authority than Tom Hayden, the sixties activist, that the CIA’s spread of harmful drugs into the Haight was akin to the military’s distribution of alcohol to American Indians in the 19th century. But Talbot goes further still. “As San Francisco’s revolution spread” — bringing word to the heartland of “alternative commerce,” free culture, sexual liberation, and ecological consciousness — “the poison in America’s soul was also billowing.” It was bound to blow westward. The Haight collapsed when the poison from the rest of the country passed through it, like a pestilence.
In all the celebrations of the Summer of Love, you will look in vain for a hint of remorse or self-blame. Not an “oops,” not a “yikes, I think we went a little overboard that time,” not a “boy, I’d like a do-over on 1967.” baby boomers, especially the ex-hippie division, are averse to second-guessing themselves. Nowhere in the literature have I found a hint of one explanation that is far more obvious and plausible than the others.
Which is this: The seeds of the destruction of the Haight experiment could be found in its own antinomianism, in its original inspiration. Maybe the wholesale rejection of time-honored and time-tested values — monogamy, moderation, good manners, self-denial, self-control, the sanctity of private property, personal accountability to higher authorities, both material and spiritual — leads to squalor and misery. Maybe the project they’re celebrating in San Francisco this summer was doomed from the start.
Pictures in a Case
For $10 in the Haight you can buy a map that shows you where Charles Manson lived, the storefront that housed San Francisco’s first poster shop, the site of the Be-In, the Jefferson Airplane mansion, and Hippie Hill, the glade in Golden Gate Park where Haight Street ends and the youth used to gather and the Last Hippie was set ablaze. Kids gather there still, although for some of them, given the slightly menacing and aggressive air, “flower child” would be a misnomer.
The sidewalks are choked with tourists and bums. One neighborhood fixture waves his sign at passing cars: “Smile If You Masturbate.” Occasionally a mother in yoga pants pushes through the clusters of street people, using her baby carriage as a battering ram, ignoring the leering and the muttering. The days are long past when cops walked the beat in hopes of dispersing groups that blocked the rights of way.
I decided to spring for a walking tour because the come-on was hard to resist. The brochure said the tour would be “A poetic and symbolic act of retracing the footsteps of so many, returning with greater understanding and heightened consciousness.”
This was an exaggeration. I did learn from my guide that Ronald Reagan, then California’s governor, had caused homelessness as a kind of revenge for the Summer of Love, and that Jim Jones, the one-time San Francisco celebrity preacher, had been goaded by the CIA into encouraging 900 of his followers to commit suicide at Jonestown in the jungles of Guyana.
We saw the landmarks. Outside the old Victorian mansion where the Grateful Dead once lived, every kind of tourist gathers, frat bros and matrons and fourth-generation hippies who were born too late. They pose for pictures and carve their initials and good wishes into the forgiving bark of the tree out front. Eyeing the street people, one of the tourists in our group asked about crime. The guide — an old hippie and an avid civic booster — was evasive. But the numbers are easy to find. The Haight district has one of the highest crime rates in the city. The crime rate for the city at large is 142 percent higher than the national average.
When the tour was over I walked back downtown to the library to take a last look at the exhibits there. I saw something I’d missed in my first walk through. There was another thing absent from all the celebrations: They were neglecting the people who lived in the Haight before the Summer of Love, before the freaks arrived and the world changed. But here they were, in the basement of the library. At the end of the exhibit there’s a single display case, labeled “The Rest of Us,” as a reminder that not every San Franciscan participated in the Summer of Love.
They are photos from the mid-sixties. One shows a beauty shop, beehived women lined up for their weekly rinse; another is a family picture of a wedding party, fading with that washed-out color you find in sixties Polaroids. In another a line of middle-school cheerleaders smiles brightly, and there are a few men in suits and ties. They all look so odd — odder to the eye than the surrounding pictures of dancing hippies — and not simply because they’re antiques a half-century old. They look odd because, with the smiles and the attitude of self-assurance and contentment, they look clueless. We know something they don’t know. They don’t know what’s about to hit them.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
