 Haight-Ashbury
While
Swinging London vibrated to the Mod sound of The Who and
The Small Faces, an entirely different youth scene had developed half a world
away - It was all Love and Peace on the west coast of America.
The hits of 1967, including San
Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers In Your Hair) by Scott
McKenzie, Let's Go To San Francisco by The Flowerpot
Men, and
San Franciscan Nights by Eric Burdon, advertised a
counter-culture which had been evolving since 1965. Centred on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury
district (nicknamed The Hashbury) with its elegantly crumbling wooden
Victorian houses, a new generation inspired by the beatniks of the
1950s came into being. They called themselves Hippies and their gurus
were rock bands with idiosyncratic names like Jefferson
Airplane, The
Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger
Service.
One striking feature of this
counter-culture was its rejection of traditional American consumer
society values and ethics. Hippies didn't work (except in their own
communes). They took drugs openly, and some indulged in group sex. The
Haight-Ashbury scene was anti-war, against capitalism, and pro both
love and dope.
Many hippie rock concerts were free, held
either outdoors, or in huge ballrooms heavy with marijuana smoke and
illuminated by complex psychedelic light shows and projections of
slides and films. On January 14 1967, 20,000 hippies showed up for the
first 'Human Be-In and Gathering of the Tribes' - an open-air event at
the Polo Grounds in Golden Gate Park. Opened by LSD advocate Timothy
Leary chanting his notorious slogan "Turn on, tune in, drop out", it
featured music by Jefferson
Airplane, Big Brother & The Holding
Company and Quicksilver Messenger
Service.
Responding to the new attitude, veteran
DJ Tom 'Big daddy' Donohue initiated 'progressive FM radio' on the
city's KMPX station. Ignoring the current pop charts and favoring album tracks (regardless of length). The format proved popular.
As disaffected teens from all over America (and the
world) flocked to San Francisco, the record industry (part of the
capitalist system the kids were rejecting!) saw a new marketing
opportunity, and before long the reputations of acts such as The Beach
Boys and The Four Seasons were rendered quaintly obsolete by the music
of The Electric Prunes, Strawberry Alarm Clock and other
surrealistically titled outfits.
 The increasing celebrity status of
Haight-Ashbury was confirmed when the Greyhound Bus Co announced plans
to run tourist trips through the area. Soon, many of the kids
attending the shows at the Fillmore or Avalon Ballrooms, supposed
palaces of psychedelic rock culture, were "weekend hippies", holding
down steady jobs throughout the week and dressing up when Friday night
came around.
Writing in the New York Times in
May 1967, Hunter S Thompson declared, "The Hashbury is the new capital
of what is rapidly becoming a drug culture . . . Love is the password,
but paranoia is the style". In other words, hippies saw drugs as a
passport to bliss. But they were also a ticket to jail. Thompson went
on to suggest that the Hashbury was merely the tip of an iceberg
because "drugs, orgies and freak-outs were almost as common to a much
larger and more discrete" cross-section of 'respectable' San
Franciscans.
Even though George Harrison visited
Haight-Ashbury in August and conferred The
Beatles' stamp of approval
on the scene, the end was already in sight. In October, disillusioned
flower children held the 'Death of Hippie' event, featuring a mock
funeral to the protest at the commercialisation of their way of life.
As 1967 drew to a close, many of the first-generation hippies had
moved out of the San Francisco area.
Ed Denson, manager of Country Joe & The
Fish captured the mood when he said, "I'm very pessimistic. Most of
the hippies I know don't really understand what kind of world they're
living in. If they were more realistic, they'd stand a better chance
of surviving". |
