The psychedelic revolution
"If you come to San Francisco, don't forget to put flowers in your hair..." In the summer of 1967, the hippie anthem sung by Scott Mc Kenzie accompanied the arrival in San Francisco of tens of thousands of young people in revolt against the conformism of America of the sixties. The epicenter of the movement was in Haight-Ashbury, a quiet neighborhood of cheap Victorian houses and the wide lawns of nearby Golden Gate Park. It all began in January, when 30,000 people, many from libertarian UC Berkeley, converged on the city to attend the Human Be-In festival. The Grateful Dead performed a free concert, along with Allen Ginsberg, founder of the Beat Generation, who recited his poems. The psychologist Timothy Leary, champion of LSD, says on stage "Get out of your mind and into your senses", encouraging with this cryptic formula his audience to take the famous blotter that circulates in the audience, along with marijuana and peyote from nearby Mexico. At the time, the Merry Pranksters group travelled the region in a red bus to offer this substance, mass-produced in California, along with a acid testdiploma... If the epicentre of psychedelic culture is in California, it is also because LSD is mass-produced there. Augustus Owsley Stanley, a former Berkeley literature student, was the first private person to synthesize the drug in 1964. From his lab, he is credited with producing the first million doses ofacid, which only became illegal in October 1966.
The San Francisco Sound
Under the influence of psychotropic volutes, the hippie musicians of what will be called the "San Francisco Sound" signed the soundtrack of the Summer of Love and broke with the rock standards. Their songs leaned towards folk and jazz, stretching into long epic instrumental improvisations that went well beyond the three minutes required for radio hits. In fact, by dint of stretching the melodies and multiplying the solos, the tracks sometimes last up to half an hour... As for the message carried by the lyrics, it revolves around love, hedonism, solidarity, travel and wisdom, with numerous references to the Beat Generation authors who gravitate to the Bay Area, such as Allen Ginsberg, but also Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder or even William Burroughs. In addition to the Grateful Dead, known for their drum duo, the main representatives of the San Francisco Sound are Jefferson Airplane and its acoustic blues variation, Hot Tuna, Carlos Santana, Steve Miller Blues Band, The Charlatans, Quicksilver Messenger Service or, in a more soulful version with a large brass section, the black band Sly & the Family Stone.. Within these formations, some women occupy leading roles as Grace Slick, the singer of Jefferson Airplane, or Janis Joplin, who started with Big Brother & The Holding Company. All these groups performed in the Fillmore and Winterland venues, often under the aegis of producer Bill Graham, who hired many local artists to design the psychedelic concert posters, largely inspired by the Art Deco movement of the early 20th century. The movement also affected the East Coast, where bands such as Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago could be found. Beyond the seas, LSD is also presumed to have had a fundamental role in the genesis of the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band released in June 1967. For the anecdote, Paul McCartney borrows besides in May the jet of Franck Sinatra to give a test pressing of the disc to the group Jefferson Airplane in its den of Haight-Ashbury.
The Monterey Pop Festival
In June 1967, a huge festival dedicated to the new rock wave and in particular to the San Francisco Sound was organized in Monterey, a small town located on the Pacific coast, south of the Bay Area. At the organization, we find producers Lou Adler, Alan Pariser and Derek Taylor, but also members of The Beatles and The Beach Boys, as well as John Phillips of The Mamas and The Papas, author of the famous song San Francisco interpreted by Scott Mc Kenzie, who promotes the event. For three days, the concerts follow one another in front of some 80,000 people. Jimi Hendrix finishes his Wild thing by spraying his guitar with gasoline before setting it on fire, in one of the most famous images in the history of rock. We dance on Janis Joplin, whose epic performance will make her a star, Jefferson Airplane with his hits Somebody to love and White Rabbit, The Who, who arrived from England to make a name for themselves across the Atlantic, Otis Redding, the shooting star of R'n'B who will disappear in a plane crash a few weeks later, and the Indian Ravi Shankar, who has just made his fame by playing with the Beatles and who will give a whole afternoon recital on the sitar. Paul McCartney attended the festival incognito, accompanied by his sidekick George Harrison, as did Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, who even came on stage to introduce Jimi Hendrix. The sun was shining, the atmosphere was euphoric, and the bands on the bill sometimes gave a second impromptu concert in the campsite. The mainstream media ignored the event, but the fanzines and independent radio stations gave it a resounding echo in the Americanunderground. It would become legendary when the documentary Monterey Pop was released the following year. nothing was rehearsed, nothing was prepared or orchestrated," said director D.A. Pennebaker. That, for me, is the only way to make a documentary. If Etna wakes up, you have to be there, that's all, and find a way to watch. The musicians of that era were fascinating, completely consumed by their passion for the blues and the importance of the moment." The event would set the example for a whole series of pacifist festivals, including those on the Isle of Wight in 1968 in England and of course Woodstock in 1969 in New York State. As for the song interpreted by Scott Mc Kenzie, which is played on a loop on the radio, it attracts all summer the American flowery youth in the Bay Area before making the tour of the world, even being taken up in French by Johnny Hallyday.
A message of love
At the end of the Monterey Pop Festival, San Francisco once again became the epicenter of the hippie revolution. This revolution took the form of an informal gathering of people of good will, desiring a more fraternal world against a backdrop of Hindu chants and the roar of motorcycles. The "diggers", an avant-garde theater group, organized concerts, food distributions and free medical care in Golden Gate Park and Haight-Ashbury. The free store, a sort of thrift store/bazaar, also donates its clothes. The drifts of theAmerican way of life are publicly questioned during the concerts: the consumer society, the religious conservatism, the racial segregation, the destruction of nature and, of course, the Vietnam war where a hundred young Americans die every week. All of this against a backdrop of free love (encouraged by the widespread use of the contraceptive pill) which is sometimes experienced in the thickets of the park... Artists from all over the world came to take part in the effervescence, like the dancer Rudolf Nureyev. This joyful agitation is reported by The Oracle of San Francisco, a fiery newspaper launched by the poet Allen Cohen, whose global readership reaches half a million people at its peak, but it is not to the liking of puritan America: television channels like CBS rush to denounce the scandal. When Ronald Reagan, the new Republican governor of California, exclaims "A hippie is someone who dresses like Tarzan, has Jane's hair and smells like Cheetah".
The death of the hippie
But with the influx of people from all over the country, the situation eventually deteriorates. Dealers, beggars and biker gangs join the children of Flower Power on the streets. Heroin appeared, crime increased and rapes were reported. The police were picking up undocumented minors by the shovelful, presuming them to be runaways or refractory to the military service that was supposed to send them to Vietnam. When George Harrison arrived in San Francisco on August 7, 1967 with his wife Pattie and took a walk through Haight-Ashbury, heart-shaped glasses on his nose, followed by thousands of people like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, he was taken aback by what he saw: "I went there expecting to find a dazzling place, populated by cool bohemians making art," he recounts in The Beatles Anthology, "but it was packed with horrible, pimply, stoned teenage runaways. " The hippies began to leave the neighborhood for communities on the Pacific Coast, and eventually, accustomed to happenings, they organized a sort of funeral ceremony themselves on October 6, 1967, closing the Summer of Love. A short silent film entitled Death of a Hippie, available at the California Historical Society on Mission Street, shows the scene: a coffin nailed in a backyard crossed by white rabbits, flags at the head of the procession, the final pyre. A funeral finally interrupted by real firemen... At the same time, the police made a drug raid in the neighborhood, up to the house of the Grateful Dead at 710 Ashbury Street
The utopia will have lasted only a few months, but the shock wave will travel the planet for decades. From this episode, there remains today in Haight-Ashbury the folklore of the incense stores, the colorful thrift stores, the Indian fabric stores, and a few record shops where you can still find the sumptuous psychedelic posters of the concerts of the time. For fifty years, hippie apprentices from all over the world have been coming here to decorate their dorm rooms, or to try to recapture some of the thrills of that summer of love in front of Jimi Hendrix 's or Janis Joplin's old addresses, during some thematic guided tours or during the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair..
But beyond the nostalgic decorum, the counter-culture of the sixties especially favored the advent of ecology, organic, feminism, pacifism, the fight against racism and homophobia, as well as the Burning Man festival which drains every year in the neighboring Nevada some 70 000 freaks coming from all over California, the United States and even the whole world to live an enchanted community experience. The Summer of Love also propelled the humanistic and spiritual values that still shape the consciousness of Californians today. The difference is that the hippies of yesteryear have gradually given way to the hipsters, who are much more individualistic and consumer-oriented. But that's another story.
