If you’re going to San Francisco...
Wear some flowers in your hair and take a walk around Haight-Ashbury for a potted history of hippiedom. Steve Meacham reports.
Isn’t it ironic that the Summer of Love began in a street pronounced Hate? Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco is perhaps the most photographed street sign in the world.
It was at this junction, 50 years ago, that a baton was metaphorically handed over from the beatniks of the 1950s to a younger generation known by a word never heard before: ‘‘Hippies’’.
So naturally the district of Haight-Ashbury – renamed ‘‘Hashbury’’ by Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson in a piece for the New York Times Magazine in 1967 – will be the focus of much attention throughout 2017 when the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of a social phenomenon that came to be known as the Summer of Love.
Remember the song San Francisco (Scott McKenzie’s worldwide hit that symbolised that summer)? ‘‘If you’re going to San Francisco/Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair/If you’re going to San Francisco/ You’re going to meet some gentle people there...?’’ Get used to it. It will be played ceaselessly. The city it’s named after has planned a whole calendar of events to encourage a new flood of tourists back to the home of hippiedom.
So here I am, a few months early, armed only with a US$4.50 (NZ$6) walking trail map, to do my own private pilgrimage.
It’s 6pm on a beautiful summer evening, and I’m having a beer and burger outside Magnolia Gastropub and Brewery, in the heart of Haight-Ashbury. I’ve spent the day revisiting most of the key places that should be on any Summer of Love tour.
On the corner of Haight and Masonic, the Magnolia has been one of San Francisco’s finest boutique pubs for almost 20 years, selling a range of beers brewed on the premises. Yet back in the day, this building was one of the landmarks of the love revolution. Magnolia Thunderpussy – a burlesque artiste, radio personality and restauranteur – ran her eponymous diner here. The menu is a historical delight, celebrated for its sense of fun and cheap prices. But what Thunderpussy (real name Patricia Donna Mallon) was really famous for was her late late-night delivery service, featuring her city-wide and distinctively phallic sense of food presentation. These proved particularly popular with the bands (Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills and Nash, for example) who were recording at Wally Heider’s studio in the 1960s.
So why did the HaightAshbury district become the centre of hippie culture? My walking tour has revealed that it was partly a real estate story. In the 60s, H-A was a depressed area, with decent-sized historic homes at affordable prices. The suburb was on the outskirts of the city but close to two of the parks which were to figure prominently in the Summer of Love – the Panhandle and the even larger Golden Gate Park.
Musicians began flocking here, most notably the Grateful Dead who lived at 710a Ashbury St – a Queen Anne-style building from the 1890s – from October 1966 to March 1968. They were bankrolled by their LSD manufacturer, and made their house a kind of alternative community centre to more or less any visiting hippie, handing out free food, lodging and healthcare, and reputedly giving more free concerts than any other band in history.
Across the street, at 719 Ashbury, was the headquarters of the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels.
A frequent guest at the Grateful Dead house was Janis Joplin, who ‘‘dated’’ Ron (Pigpen) McKernan, the Dead’s original keyboard player. According to the excellent 2015 documentary, Janis: Little Girl Blue (essential viewing for anyone who wants to explore the Summer of Love), Janis’ loud lovemaking kept the other band members awake at night.
But like Janis, Pigpen was dead at 27. So too was Jimi Hendrix, another founder member of Rock’s 27 Club. Hendrix lived in an apartment, 1524A Haight St, now known as the Hendrix House and painted red in his honour. The guitarist was here while recording his album, Live at Winterland. (Sadly, Winterland, the ballroom, skating rink and musical venue which closed on New Year’s Eve, 1978 – most famous as the venue for The Band’s last concert in 1976 which was filmed by Martin Scorsese as The Last Waltz – is long demolished).
Today the Hendrix house is a private residence, but there are now two murals (one showing the guitarist) on either side of the house. The shop downstairs sells, PHOTOS: 123RF appropriately, ‘‘smoking paraphernalia’’.
Country Joe McDonald, front man for the psychedelic rock band Country Joe and The Fish, was another of Janis’ lovers – and another stop on my walking tour. McDonald lived in an apartment at 612 Ashbury, known as the Fish Tank to locals in 1967. This is where he wrote one of the finest anti-Vietnam War songs of the 60s, The Fish Cheer/I-Feel-LikeI’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag, with its chorus: ‘‘And it’s 1-2-3/What are we fighting for?/Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn/Next stop is Vietnam ...’’
Of course, the Hells Angels weren’t the only dubious personalities in Haight-Ashbury around that time.
Charles Manson and his ‘‘family’’ were renting a house on 636 Cole St. They were also part of the Summer of Love, after Manson had been released from his second prison sentence.
Manson apparently selected H-A because he believed it would be easy to recruit lost souls. If so, he succeeded. But the deranged ‘‘guru’’ packed his deluded followers into a converted school bus in 1968 – and went to Southern California, culminating in the murders of Sharon Tate and her unborn baby.
Strictly speaking, the Jefferson Airplane House, on the corner of Fulton and Willard (a 17-room estate near the north-east corner of Golden Gate Park) wasn’t part of the Summer of Love. The group didn’t buy it until the following year, for US$70,000. And yes, they sold it at a vast profit.
Graham Nash’s house at 737 Buena Vista West is ruled out for the same reason (he didn’t buy it until the 1970s, though it’s also the home where Jack London wrote his classic novel, White Fang). As for ‘‘the Patty Hearst hideout house’’ at 1235 Masonic Ave, the heiress wasn’t kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army until 1974.
And by then, another Winter of Discontent had replaced the Summer of Love. - Traveller