By Stevenson Swanson
Chicago Tribune
NEW YORK - The flowers that they wore in their hair have long since wilted, but the generation that came of age in the 1960s will spend the coming months recalling a summer four decades ago, when rock music, drugs and sexual liberation fused to create the Summer of Love.
From New York, where Janis Joplin’s psychedelic Porsche is on display at the Whitney Museum of Art, to the Bay Area, where Joplin’s band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, will play at an anniversary tribute to the Monterey Pop music festival, the calendar will be flipped back to an earlier time that, in some ways, foreshadows the present:
A Texan - Lyndon Johnson - was president.
American troops were fighting an increasingly unpopular war.
In California, the epicenter of the Summer of Love, an actor - Ronald Reagan - had recently been elected governor.
The slew of events for the 40th anniversary - a mark not usually celebrated as noisily as a 25th or 50th anniversary - might reflect the fact that the Baby Boomers who were teenagers or young adults in the summer of 1967 are now well into their 50s or 60s, and they don’t want to wait another 10 years to bask in the memories of their youth.
``It was a very special moment of optimism and idealism,’’ said Amalie R. Rothschild, a photographer who amassed an archive of 20,000 photos of the era’s rock musicians, mainly from their performances at the legendary Fillmore East concert hall in New York’s East Village.
But the similarities between 1967 and 2007 could be an equally important factor, said Jason Fine, deputy managing editor of Rolling Stone, which published its first issue in November 1967 and is celebrating its anniversary with three special issues, including one devoted to the Summer of Love that will be published in June.
I think there are a lot of parallels between 2007 and 1967, culturally and politically,'' said Fine, citing a recent crop of protest songs by such performers as Norah Jones, Bright Eyes, Linkin Park and Randy Newman. That’s one reason the Summer of Love is sort of worth paying attention to now.’’
Among other anniversary events planned for the coming months are a concert performance of Hair'' by New York's Public Theater, which presented the original production of the tribal love rock musical’’ in 1967; several CD releases, including a commemorative two-disc set of live performances from the three-day Monterey Pop festival; and a documentary on cable channel VH1, ``Monterey 40,’’ about the landmark concert, where Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire and Pete Townshend of The Who smashed his to bits.
So what was the Summer of Love?
Most accounts say the summer'' actually began on Jan. 14, 1967, with the Human Be-In,’’ billed as a Renaissance of compassion, awareness and love'' in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, which drew upwards of 20,000 people. The Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane performed, and among the speakers were poet Allen Ginsberg and LSD guru Timothy Leary, who for the first time used the phrase he would make famous: Turn on, tune in, drop out.’’
The event established San Francisco as the center of the emerging counterculture of hippies and flower children, and Scott McKenzie’s hit song San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)'' promised that summertime will be a love-in there.’’
Several San Francisco activists soon formed the Council for the Summer of Love to help prepare the city for the influx of young people from across the country that was expected after schools and colleges let out for summer.
But with as many as 100,000 summertime visitors looking for cheap housing and food, the city’s Haight-Ashbury district quickly degenerated from a love-in to a dirty, unsafe area. In October, the Summer of Love ended with a mock ``Death of Hippie’’ funeral in San Francisco, with the clear message that America’s flower children should plant themselves elsewhere.
And as the Whitney’s exhibit ``Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era’’ demonstrates, the combination of drugs, rock and a rebellious attitude toward authority were hardly confined to the Bay area - or 1967. The exhibit, which runs until Sept. 16, is filled with swirling, mind-bending posters, and now-yellowing copies of underground newspapers from the mid- to late-1960s.
The Fifth Estate, a Detroit alternative paper, filled its front page in January 1968 with a list of New Year’s resolutions, starting with Legalize marijuana,'' and Overthrow the government.’’
Paperback books and magazines show how the mass media quickly picked up on the drug culture and the psychedelic art it engendered. A Life magazine cover in 1966 on LSD warned of the exploding threat of the mind drug that got out of control,'' calling LSD turmoil in a capsule.’’ But Playboy’s 1967 Christmas issue features a psychedelic drawing of a Playboy Bunny, with green hair and bunny ears.
The exhibit’s collection of album covers - at a time when music was played on large, black plastic discs called records'' - serve as a reminder that 1967 was one of rock music's great years, with debut albums from the Grateful Dead, the Doors, and Pink Floyd, as well as the television broadcast of the Beatles premiering All You Need is Love.’’ And on June 1 of that year, the group released ``Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’’ frequently cited by rock critics as one of the most influential albums in rock music.
The music was like a drive shaft,'' said Joshua White, 64, who produced light shows to accompany musicians at the Fillmore East. It drove everything else.’’
The 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love has not occasioned universal nostalgia. In the nation’s culture wars, the 1960s are a rallying point for conservatives, who view the decade as the source of many of the social trends that they decry, such as a high divorce rate, legalized abortion, and, more recently, the drive for legalized same-sex marriage.
The truth ... is that the second half of the decade ... was an intellectual and moral wasteland whose only worthwhile contribution to Western culture was a handful of memorable songs,'' wrote Mark Goldblatt in a recent issue of National Review, the conservative magazine. Aging hippies still don’t get how futile and derivative their endeavors were.’’
But some of the issues that are targets of conservatives - such as student anti-war protests, feminism and the environmental movement - came later in the 1960s, said Rolling Stone’s Fine.
A lot of what was happening in the summer of 1967 wasn't about politics or even anti-war,'' said Fine. It was much more personal. And those kinds of developments have certainly stuck around. Our attitudes about sex, drugs and spirituality are all rooted in that time. That wasn’t a blip.’’