One swallow that made the Summer of Love – Times of India (blog)

50 years after hippies, free love, getting high and flower children entered our cultural lexicon, Indrajit Hazra looks back at the legacy of that short summer in 1967

Well, lets face it. Most of us rewatch Woodstock, the 1970 documentary film, not just to refill our dipping musical quotient, but also to see those acid-tripped out women dancing naked and displaying their ample bottoms. (Please do note how effectively Ive made the collective of us come in handy to cover my own derriere.)

There was a time when all this counterculture free love, peace and joss sticks part-outraged, part-titillated a generation that was as dogmatic about family values and tradition as their instigators were about turning on, tuning in and dropping out. Today, 50 years after American mainstream media first caught the zeitgeist to effectively introduce the world to a (21st century jargon alert) lifestyle choice, the Summer of Love of 1967 in San Francisco and its many descendants come across as cute, silly, and fun(ny), like one of those PG rated films you saw with a thrill as a kid, but which now looks not just tame, but Nat Geo-worthy.

Janis Joplin performs in Golden Gate Park

In the summer of 1969, over 40,000 people gathered over four days at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in upstate New York. With it, the counterculture movement had reached its apogee, that apogee decided by Life magazine and other mainstream media publications. But it was two years earlier that hippies, free love, getting high and flower children firmly entered the American cultural lexicon. It then quickly, via media, spread its grooviness in the country called London, and then to other parts of the world where the term gap year was yet to be invented.

Hippies the term having the same source as todays hipster, which, in turn, came to initially describe liberal-minded young folks moving into New Yorks arty beatnik haven of Greenwich Village or San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury district had existed before The Summer of Love. Inspired by the Beat movement of the 1950s and its protagonists like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the hippies method-acted life in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, with more than just a solitary child-like couple and plenty of great music thrown in.

The Summer of Love, with its numerous bed-ins and events and its emphasis on being part of a collective (that ironically rejected the herd), was the culmination of all that was gathering prior to The Beatles coming out with Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and Timothy Leary presenting his The Death of the Mind lecture in colleges across the US describing the joys of the LSD experience.

Communal living, rejecting authority, and turning ones back against consumerist society was the credo. The Summer of Love was seen as the natural result of a new generations Winter of Discontent.

In 1960, the Pill, the Combined Oral Contraceptive Pill (COCP), did far more to usher the sexual revolution than the ones Jefferson Airplanes White Rabbit mentions makes you larger and makes you small. Poet Philip Larkin was as right as any Baby Boomer who came after him insisting that liberation came with free love and howling at the moon, when he wrote in Annus Mirabilis in June 1967: Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me) -/ Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles first LP.

But it was far easier to capture in pictures the Beautiful People than the Pill, or the words of a poet from Hull.

The anti-consumerist tag was somewhat ironic, considering that the Summer of Love itself was a product to be consumed through fashion, music, the stage, advertising, and the shimmering billboard of sex and drugs and rocknroll or, at least gentle strumming and/or incredibly long jam sessions that could be appreciated only with a generous amount of marijuana intake. And, there had to be long hair, as a counter-uniform.

Hippies dawdle at the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, the epicenter of the Summer of Love, in San Francisco in 1967

In London, the Summer of Love took upon itself to be more openly consumerist, a throwback to the era of the Dandy. And if Austin Powers version of Londons Swinging Sixties is a comic exaggeration of what was really going on in Paradise with its centre at Carnaby Street, it is only a slight exaggeration. Rebellion was no longer confined to the slightly dangerous Marlon Brando-ian Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against? Whadda you got? (That Teddy Boy switchblade cockiness would resurface with punk.) Now, it was Peace, man, Live and let live, and about sharing accommodation, food, recreational drugs, bodies. This was New Testament-style Christian brother/sisterhood with dollops of pagan intercourse.

As all collective movements go, the birth of the Summer of Love was as imaginative as its death, announced prematurely in typical exhibitionist fashion when a ceremony was held on October 6, 1967, with the funeral notice: In the Haight-Ashbury District of this city, Hippie, devoted son of mass media. It is with reason that own-man Bob Dylan refused to take part in the Woodstock festival, even though he actually lived there. Ostensibly, as he wrote later in Chronicles Volume One, he was upset with moochers showing up from as far away as California on pilgrimages. rogue radicals looking for the Prince of Protest began to arrive unaccountable-looking characters, gargoyle-looking gals, scarecrows, stragglers looking to party, raid the pantry.

But Dylan also mentions why The Counterculture could be as stifling as The Culture: all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul nauseating me the streets exploding, fire of angel boiling the contra communes the lying, noisy voices the free love, the anti-money system movement the whole shebang [I] didnt want to be in that group portrait.

But plenty of others will be in that (re)group portrait this summer. Throughout the year, San Francisco will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Retired Baby Boomers will reconnect and recollect when their bodies were beautiful and before they made a Silicon Valley out of All You Need Is Love. According to organisers of the celebrations, there will be a wealth of events, ranging from wine tastings to sailboat regattas, a 60s dance party, featuring a Beatles cover band and more groovy stuff, Folsom Street Fair this sub-culture festival attracts leather fetish enthusiasts from around the world. Sounds groovy.

But the Summer of Love did do something that for all its fun, flakiness and ephemeral quality (read: double-standards) has left its mark as the new normal: emphasising more than anything else the value of individual freedom.

It was also there in 17th century Paris, 18th century Awadh, 1920s Berlin and New York. But the Summer of Love democratised free spirit. It was no longer the monopoly of aristocrats, nawabs and flappers. Love, and much more, suddenly was there to flaunt for the middle-classes. One day, perhaps, our very own Romeos and the youth could also come to the same happy, far out conclusion, without being tied to their parents aprons.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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One swallow that made the Summer of Love - Times of India (blog)