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The Summer of Love
They came by the thousands from all across the United States. Their destination: San Francisco. Anxious to reject the stifling conformity of the cold war era, kids in their late teens and twenties borrowed a mantra from psychedelic guru Timothy Leary: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Turning on—exploring different levels of consciousness, usually with the help of hallucinogens. Tuning in—acting in harmony with the world. Dropping out—relying upon one’s new self to create a personal reality. They called themselves hippies, and after the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in January 1967, and the mass migration that came in its wake, San Francisco became the epicenter of the hippie counterculture. The mayor warned the hippies to stay away, but they came anyway.
The coming together spurred creativity in all fields, especially music. The music was celebrated at the three-day Monterey International Pop Music Festival, held in June 1967. The Summer of Love began there. Festival organizers included John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas. Papa John had been in a folk group with Scott McKenzie, and was asked to write a song for McKenzie’s first single. “Scott,” remembered Phillips, “came up with a brilliant idea. ‘Why don’t you write a song about all the kids coming west for the Monterey Pop Festival—about what they could expect, and how they should handle the whole thing?’” No song better captured an era than San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair). Around the same time, Phillips wrote a more personal song about how the Mamas and the Papas came together. He and his wife, Michelle, had taken Denny Doherty to the Virgin Islands to live in a boarding house on Creeque Alley. Mama Cass (Elliot) joined them, and they hung around until their money ran out. Creeque Alley explained how it all went down, but with Michelle Phillips’ January 2007 reading of the eulogy for Doherty in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the saga neared its end. With his death, she became the group’s sole survivor.
Jefferson Airplane embodied the sound of San Francisco, and Somebody to Love was the Airplane’s first and biggest hit. The song came to the band with their new lead singer, Grace Slick (she’d recorded it earlier with her husband’s band, the Great Society). Jefferson Airplane was also one of the first to record Get Together. Its sentiments seemed so ’67, but were actually so ’63 (the first version was by the Kingston Trio). Jefferson Airplane covered the song in 1966, and then came the Youngbloods’ version. The summer of ’67 should have been its moment, but the song didn’t reach the top 10 until 1969, when it was featured in a television public service announcement for the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
The quintessential Summer of Love band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, came together right on San Francisco’s Haight Street. After Janis Joplin joined, they moved out to Marin County to live communally and work on their music. Joplin was San Francisco personified. She’d come from elsewhere, drawn by the music and the times, and transformed herself simply by being there. Down on Me, from Big Brother’s first LP, stunned the Monterey Pop crowd. It was an old spiritual that dated back to the 1930s or earlier, but Joplin remade it in her image. Its success attracted Bob Dylan’s manager and record label. “But,” said Big Brother’s drummer, Dave Getz, “we were much happier in 1966, when we were first getting together, driving around in a hearse, when everybody loved everyone.”
The spirit of San Francisco in the summer of 1967 even affected England’s hardnosed R&B band the Animals. Leader Eric Burdon assembled a new incarnation of the band that played to unappreciative East Coast and Midwest audiences. Then they arrived in San Francisco, and felt as if they’d come home. The experience was celebrated in San Franciscan Nights, in which Burdon exhorted even those who lived overseas to experience the dawning of a new age.
Psychedelic music wasn’t confined to the West Coast, though. In New York, the Blues Magoos recorded the first hallucinogenic rock LP, Psychedelic Lollipop, and one of the songs from that album, (We Ain’t Got) Nothin’ Yet, cracked the top five. Also in New York, Vanilla Fudge slowed down and distorted the Supremes 1966 No. 1 pop hit You Keep Me Hangin’ On. Even Diana Ross and the Supremes’ summer of ’67 hit, Reflections, featured an oscillator. Within a year, it seemed as if everything had irreversibly changed.
“Moon” and “June” pop songs seemed to have gone forever, though they were just waiting for the ’70s. Among the often deliberately obscure song-poems that charted in ’67, none stood out like A Whiter Shade of Pale. The story goes that it came about when singer Gary Brooker told London’s legendary music impresario Guy Stevens that he was leaving his band. Stevens introduced him to a poet, Keith Reid, and they heard Stevens’ wife say, “Guy, you look a whiter shade of pale.” Meanwhile, Stevens was looking after a friend’s exotic cat, Procol Harum (close to the Latin phrase for “beyond these things”). Brooker met an organist, Matthew Fisher, and together they set Reid’s poem to music. Sometimes A Whiter Shade of Pale seems like a hymn, sometimes like the world seen through drunk or stoned eyes. No one has ever figured it out, and Reid likes it that way.
In December 1967, The Nation declared “almost anything might happen in 1968.” The assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 was followed by riots in more than one hundred cities. Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated barely eight weeks later. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August almost disintegrated into anarchy. The Vietnam War escalated, and there were rumors of mass desertions. Clinging to the ethos of the Summer of Love wasn’t so easy. Revolution was averted, but much changed, especially the music. The sounds of that far-off summer put us in touch with ourselves as we were then, reminding us of how we made sense of the turmoil around us. And who we dated, what we wore, what we did. Who we were.
—Colin Escott
Colin Escott is the author of Good Rockin’ Tonight: The Story of Sun Records, Hank Williams: The Biography, and the music journalism anthology Tattooed on Their Tongues.
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