The Summer Of Love Yeech
I was in San Francisco during what is referred to as The Summer of Love.
Until it was recently brought to my attention, I had no idea that there was some sort of 40th anniversary thing happening.
Furthermore, I couldn't conceive of why anyone would consider commemorating that squalid event.
Many of my friends ask me what it was like.
Actually, I never fathomed the reason for so much importance being placed on the 60s "cultural revolution.
" From my perspective, forty-odd years down the road, other than the music, nothing much of any real significance came out of the whole 60s scene.
People are still as greedy and exploitive as ever, its politics as usual, and instead of fighting the "Threat of communism to our way of life," we now have the innocuous "Terrorist's threat to our way of life.
" Nothing of any consequence has really changed because of "The Summer of Love".
In fact, the world has become more Orwellian in nature, body bags containing dead soldiers are still piling-up and the arms merchants are getting richer than ever.
It was the year leading-up to the Summer of 67 that I tend to remember with any degree of nostalgia.
On Friday and Saturday nights, you could go to the Fillmore or Avalon and catch groups like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Jefferson Airplane, Blue Cheer, etc.
heading the bill with two other acts.
The price was three dollars.
Both venues only accommodated about a thousand people so you could see the musicians without binoculars or on a closed circuit television screen.
It was also common to encounter writers and poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allan Ginsberg and Ken Kesey or his 'Merry Prankster' associate and Jack Kerouac's muse, Neil Cassady, at a party or at one of the coffee shops in North Beach.
The atmosphere was casual and things seemed to happen on a whim.
It was just all for the fun of making something happen; there weren't any apparent ulterior motives involved.
However, things rapidly changed in the Summer of 1967.
It was almost like a rerun of the 1849 Gold Rush on the old Barbary Coast except it was all concentrated in the Haight Ashbury District.
By mid-June, it seemed like the whole world flooded into the city to get a piece of the action.
They arrived in hordes: the starry eyed, the radicals, the runaways, the college students on summer break, the petty thieves, the aspiring musicians looking for their big break, the hustlers, and the Machiavellian predators like Charles Manson.
They were all looking to get a piece of the action.
Everybody seemed to be looking for something, but they didn't quite know what it was, so the quest turned to staying stoned out of their minds and seeking-out sexual gratification.
By mid-Summer, drug dealers and panhandlers lined Haight Street and pathetic psychedelic pilgrims had set-up housekeeping in the doorways.
Instead of a casual walk up the street, the trip from Buena Vista Park to Golden Gate Park became a venture into a predatory environment accompanied by a sustained chorus of "Spare change" and "Acid, speed, weed.
" Along with the fluffy visions of 'free love' and 'high times', there was also epidemic venereal disease and hepatitis.
San Francisco General Hospital actually had a hepatitis ward.
There was an industrial scale ('take your number and wait') VD clinic, and the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic was also injecting gallons of penicillin into the venereal disease ridden hippies.
The once cozy Haight Ashbury community became a dangerous place.
When night fell, speed-freaks and junkies lurked in shadowed doorways and alleys waiting for someone to mug.
The sense of community vanished and many of the people responsible for creating the scene literally headed for the hills in Mendocino or Marin County to escape the squalor.
By the end of the Summer of 67, the Haight/Ashbury had turned into a crime ridden cesspool.
In my opinion, "The Summer of Love" was nothing more than a media generated event and perpetuated fanciful myth.
(ends)
Until it was recently brought to my attention, I had no idea that there was some sort of 40th anniversary thing happening.
Furthermore, I couldn't conceive of why anyone would consider commemorating that squalid event.
Many of my friends ask me what it was like.
Actually, I never fathomed the reason for so much importance being placed on the 60s "cultural revolution.
" From my perspective, forty-odd years down the road, other than the music, nothing much of any real significance came out of the whole 60s scene.
People are still as greedy and exploitive as ever, its politics as usual, and instead of fighting the "Threat of communism to our way of life," we now have the innocuous "Terrorist's threat to our way of life.
" Nothing of any consequence has really changed because of "The Summer of Love".
In fact, the world has become more Orwellian in nature, body bags containing dead soldiers are still piling-up and the arms merchants are getting richer than ever.
It was the year leading-up to the Summer of 67 that I tend to remember with any degree of nostalgia.
On Friday and Saturday nights, you could go to the Fillmore or Avalon and catch groups like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Jefferson Airplane, Blue Cheer, etc.
heading the bill with two other acts.
The price was three dollars.
Both venues only accommodated about a thousand people so you could see the musicians without binoculars or on a closed circuit television screen.
It was also common to encounter writers and poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allan Ginsberg and Ken Kesey or his 'Merry Prankster' associate and Jack Kerouac's muse, Neil Cassady, at a party or at one of the coffee shops in North Beach.
The atmosphere was casual and things seemed to happen on a whim.
It was just all for the fun of making something happen; there weren't any apparent ulterior motives involved.
However, things rapidly changed in the Summer of 1967.
It was almost like a rerun of the 1849 Gold Rush on the old Barbary Coast except it was all concentrated in the Haight Ashbury District.
By mid-June, it seemed like the whole world flooded into the city to get a piece of the action.
They arrived in hordes: the starry eyed, the radicals, the runaways, the college students on summer break, the petty thieves, the aspiring musicians looking for their big break, the hustlers, and the Machiavellian predators like Charles Manson.
They were all looking to get a piece of the action.
Everybody seemed to be looking for something, but they didn't quite know what it was, so the quest turned to staying stoned out of their minds and seeking-out sexual gratification.
By mid-Summer, drug dealers and panhandlers lined Haight Street and pathetic psychedelic pilgrims had set-up housekeeping in the doorways.
Instead of a casual walk up the street, the trip from Buena Vista Park to Golden Gate Park became a venture into a predatory environment accompanied by a sustained chorus of "Spare change" and "Acid, speed, weed.
" Along with the fluffy visions of 'free love' and 'high times', there was also epidemic venereal disease and hepatitis.
San Francisco General Hospital actually had a hepatitis ward.
There was an industrial scale ('take your number and wait') VD clinic, and the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic was also injecting gallons of penicillin into the venereal disease ridden hippies.
The once cozy Haight Ashbury community became a dangerous place.
When night fell, speed-freaks and junkies lurked in shadowed doorways and alleys waiting for someone to mug.
The sense of community vanished and many of the people responsible for creating the scene literally headed for the hills in Mendocino or Marin County to escape the squalor.
By the end of the Summer of 67, the Haight/Ashbury had turned into a crime ridden cesspool.
In my opinion, "The Summer of Love" was nothing more than a media generated event and perpetuated fanciful myth.
(ends)
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