LSD, Ecstasy, and a Blast of Utopianism: How 1967's “Summer of Love” All Began
The Human Be-In was an event held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park Polo Fields on January 14, 1967. This so-called “Gathering of the Tribes” drew more than 20,000 people and came to symbolize the counterculture movement of the 1960s. It featured The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver, and Big Brother And The Holding Company. It was a prelude to San Francisco's Summer of Love, which made the Haight-Ashbury LSD district a symbol of American counterculture and introduced the word "psychedelic" to suburbia. A new California law banning the use of the psychedelic drug LSD that had come into effect on October 6, 1966.
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Human Be-In, Volume 1, page 1 of the San Francisco Oracle, January 1967
In 1967 San Francisco Was Going Crazy
Allen Ginsberg & Timothy Leary showed up along with thousands of sympathizers...
Vids: Jerry Abrams - Be In (1967) Music By Blue Cheer | Human Be-In - recorded live Jan 14, 1967 | GRATEFUL DEAD 1/14/1967 ~ Human Be-In
The Human Be-In was an event held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park Polo Fields on January 14, 1967. This so-called “Gathering of the Tribes” drew more than 20,000 people and came to symbolize the counterculture movement of the 1960s. It featured The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver, and Big Brother And The Holding Company. It was a prelude to San Francisco's Summer of Love, which made the Haight-Ashbury LSD district a symbol of American counterculture and introduced the word "psychedelic" to suburbia. A new California law banning the use of the psychedelic drug LSD that had come into effect on October 6, 1966.
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In a 25-square-block area of San Francisco, in the summer of 1967, an ecstatic, Dionysian mini-world sprang up like a mushroom, dividing American culture into a Before and After unparalleled since World War II. If you were between 15 and 30 that year, it was almost impossible to resist the lure of that transcendent, peer-driven season of glamour, ecstasy, and Utopianism. It was billed as the Summer of Love, and its creators did not employ a single publicist or craft a media plan. Yet the phenomenon washed over America like a tidal wave, erasing the last dregs of the martini-sipping Mad Men era and ushering in a series of liberations and awakenings that irreversibly changed our way of life.
“It was this magical moment … this liberation movement, a time of sharing that was very special,” with “a lot of trust going around,” says Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, who had a baby with Ken Kesey, the man who helped kick off that season, and who then married Jerry Garcia, the man who epitomized its fruition. “The Summer of Love became the template: the Arab Spring is related to the Summer of Love; Occupy Wall Street is related to the Summer of Love,” says Joe McDonald, the creator and lead singer of Country Joe and the Fish and a boyfriend of one of that summer’s two queens, Janis Joplin. “And it became the new status quo,” he continues. “The Aquarian Age! They all want sex. They all want to have fun. Everyone wants hope. We opened the door, and everybody went through it, and everything changed after that. Sir Edward Cook, the biographer of Florence Nightingale, said that when the success of an idea of past generations is ingrained in the public and taken for granted the source is forgotten.”
Well, here is that source, according to the people who lived it.
Suddenly That Summer (Vanity Fair)
Human Be-In, Volume 1, page 1 of the San Francisco Oracle, January 1967
In 1967 San Francisco Was Going Crazy
Allen Ginsberg & Timothy Leary showed up along with thousands of sympathizers...
Vids: Jerry Abrams - Be In (1967) Music By Blue Cheer | Human Be-In - recorded live Jan 14, 1967 | GRATEFUL DEAD 1/14/1967 ~ Human Be-In
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