SUMMER OF LOVE

:''This article refers to the summer of 1967. For the film of a similar name, please go to My Summer of Love. For the Beach Boys song, see Summer of Love (song).''
'The Summer of Love' was the summer of 1967, particularly in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where thousands of young people loosely and freely united for a new social experience. As a result, the hippie counterculture movement came into public awareness.

Contents

Background

The music

The summer

References

See also

External links

Background

The beginning of the ''Summer of Love'' has popularly been attributed to the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967. The size of that event awakened mass media to the hippie counterculture that was blossoming in the Haight-Ashbury. The movement was fed by the counterculture's own media, particularly ''The San Francisco Oracle'', whose pass-around readership topped a half-million at its peak that year.^[1] The grassroots street theater/activism of The Diggers also garnered media attention.
College and high school students began streaming into the Haight during their Spring, 1967 break. City government leaders, determined to stop the influx of young people once schools let out for summer, unwittingly brought additional attention to the scene. An ongoing series of articles in local papers alerted national media to the hippies' growing momentum. That spring, Haight community leaders responded by forming the Council of the Summer of Love, giving the word-of-mouth event an official-sounding name.

The music

John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas took 20 minutes to write the following lyrics for the song '"San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)"':
Scott McKenzie's recording of the song was released in May 1967. The song was designed originally to promote the June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, the world's first major rock festival, which was attended by over 200,000 people. "San Francisco" became an instant hit (#4 in the U. S., #1 in the U.K.) and quickly transcended its original purpose.
The evolution of The Beatles and their music also contributed to the global impact of the ''Summer of Love''. The Beatles' album ''Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'' was released on June 1, 1967, in Europe and two days later in the U.S.^[2] With its psychedelic influences, Indian instrumentals, vivid album cover and drug references, it encapsulated the very essence of the ''Summer of Love''. The Beatles had moved beyond their "moptop" era, and on June 25, 1967, their song "All You Need Is Love" was heard around the world as part of the "Our World" radio broadcast, further emphasizing the countercultural ideals of love, freedom, and unity.

The summer

During the ''Summer of Love'', as many as 100,000 young people from around the world flocked to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Berkeley and other San Francisco Bay Area cities to join in a popularized version of the hippie experience.[2] Free food, free drugs and free love were available in Golden Gate Park, a Free Clinic (whose work continues today) was established for medical treatment, and a Free Store gave away basic necessities to anyone who needed them.
The ''Summer of Love'' attracted a wide range of people of various ages: teenagers and college students drawn by their peers and the allure of joining a cultural utopia, middle-class vacationers who came to gawk like tourists, and even partying military personnel from bases within an easy drive's distance. The large influx of newcomers began to cause problems. The neighborhood could not accommodate so many people descending on it so quickly, and the Haight-Ashbury scene deteriorated rapidly. Overcrowding, homelessness, hunger, drug problems, and crime afflicted the neighborhood. Many people simply left in the fall to resume their college studies.^[3] But when the newly recruited Flower Children returned home, they brought new ideas, ideals, behaviors, and to most major cities in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
On October 7, 1967, those remaining in the Haight staged a mock funeral, "The Death of the Hippie" ceremony, to signal the end of the played-out scene.^[4]
The phrase "Summer of Love" (or, more accurately, the "Second Summer of Love") is sometimes used (particularly in the UK) to refer to the summers of 1988 and 1989 and the rise of Acid House music and rave culture.

References

1. Summer of Love: Underground News
2. [1]
3.

4. The Year of the Hippie: Timeline

See also

★ 1967 in music

★ Diggers (theater)

★ Ken Kesey

★ Allen Ginsberg

★ Free love

★ Grateful Dead

★ Joan Baez

★ Hippie

★ Human Be-In

★ Central Park Be-In

★ Jefferson Airplane

★ LSD

★ The Doors

★ Monterey Pop Festival

★ San Francisco Oracle

★ Summer of Love (Sliders)

★ Timothy Leary

★ STP (DOM)

★ The Second Summer of Love (United Kingdom, 1988)

★ Été 67

External links

★ Summer of Love photo gallery

★ San Francisco Chronicle Summer of Love: 40 years later

★ Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era Exhibit of the Whitney Museum, New York

★ Monterey Pop art director and poster designer Tom Wilkes

★ The Summer of Love, Performers in Britain and the United States, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the American National Biography

★ Long Hot Summer of Love Writer Mark Jacobson reminisces about his experiences during the Summer of Love in New York, from New York Magazine