The Summer of Love

It's the fortieth anniversary of the summer that became known as "The Summer of Love," when young people from all over the country got restless and headed west to San Francisco in a charming but naive attempt to create a countercultural utopia, or at least get high, listen to rock and roll, and have lots of sex. I was six years old that summer, and my priorities were my Matchbox cars and watching Captain Kangaroo. I have never been to San Francisco, I have never worn flowers in my hair, so I don't really have nostalgia for that time period. Nonetheless, I have often wished that I could have lived through it at a more appropriate age.

Today, unless we actually were there, I think most of us look at this time period for its kitsch. Tie-dyed shirts, VW microbuses, and psychedelic rock show posters are the artifacts left from what, at the time, must have seemed like a real sea change. The congregation of flower children in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood scared a lot of people, and rightly so. American would never be the same, for good or bad. In the end, the summer of love only lasted that one season, as drugs and a co-opting of the movement by commercialism doomed it. In October, those who were still around conducted a funeral for the entire movement, even though the effects lasted much longer.

There were no hippies in my family. I didn't come to know what it was all about until I was in high school. As with many, it started with the music. I gravitated away from top-4o radio when disco got popular, and started listening to FM stations like WPLJ and WNEW, where I learned about "classic" rock. Of course I knew about the Beatles, but now I was learning to love bands like the Rolling Stones, the Doors, The Who, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. My social circle in high school listened to all those groups, or the progressive-rock descendants of those bands like Queen, ELO, and Genesis. Punk rock was something on the horizon that we had heard of but didn't know much about. Today I do my best to keep up with the current music scene, but I always seem to go back to the sixties music, when a single radio station could play bubblegum, psychedelic, folk-rock and rhythm and blues, all in the same hour! I've come to love a lot of other types of music since then, from Talking Heads to Nirvana to The White Stripes, but nothing gets me going like a sixties song.

I also devoured any books or articles on the time period. For history classes I did papers on Abbie Hoffman and the Chicago conspiracy trial, or Allen Ginsberg. By this time, the late seventies, youth had returned to its usually apathetic state, but I wanted to be a rebel, and grew my hair long (I did not do drugs, though). I actually wished I had been born about twelve years earlier, when I could have went to college during those heady days, and not the drab Reagan years that I was stuck with. In retrospect, I was probably lucky to not have lived through it. First of all, if I were in any situation where "free love" was the norm, I would have likely come down with a serious case of clap, if the drugs hadn't killed me first. Then I would have been faced with this: my birthday, April 24th, was the first birthdate picked in the draft reinstitution, so I would have either had to go to Canada, jail or Vietnam. Living a life of quiet desperation seems a little more comfortable in comparison.

A lot of people who weren't even born then must look back at those days and think it was all pretty silly. The anthem of that time period, the Scott McKenzie song San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers In Your Hair) may seem like a drippy piece of nonsense. But I love that song, and just the other night put it on repeat on the CD player and listened to it four times straight. Co-written by John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, who in the end was destroyed by drugs, the song really transports me to a time that probably never was as I imagined it, when girls wore paisley skirts and went barefoot and for one brief moment cynicism seemed to vanish. There was a lot that went wrong with the hippie movement, but a lot that was right, and it's never too late to hope that some of that comes back.