Summer daze 50 years too late
The hippie culture fascinated a youthful Grant Smithies but he finally sees the fabled hippie city with middle-aged eyes.
If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. But I arrived with zero blooms and a buzz-cut, 50 years too late for 1967’s Summer of Love.
I was stoked to finally get there. San Francisco had gleamed in my imagination most of my adult life.
When I moved to Wellington for my first job, I shifted into a Kilbirnie flat where there was pot growing in a compartment behind the hot water cylinder.
One of my landlord’s mates would bring over records made within spitting distance of the Golden Gate Bridge. The sounds heaved around, whirled and warped, stretched, melted.
‘‘One pill makes you larger; one pill makes you small,’’ hollered a woman with a fierce scary voice. ‘‘I want to take you HIGHER!’’ grunted some righteous dude over thumping bass. ‘‘What a long, strange trip it’s been,’’ sang someone else over a mutant blues shuffle.
There was something in the water in that town. I would have to go to San Francisco one day and see what it was. I was in my 50s by the time I finally made it, stashing my bag in an eggshell-blue room near the Fillmore, where the faithful once queued to see the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Sly Stone, Santana, The Doors.
It was a work trip, so I got to work. In a boardroom high above the city, I soon found myself shaking hands with an impossibly well-groomed hombre
magazine had declared one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. Clean-cut, muscular, worth more than US$3.3 billion, he was Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky. He talked, I listened, then I got the hell out of there, my phone full of ruthlessly optimistic quotes, my time now my own.
What a place! Narrow wooden houses that might have been transplanted from Wellington’s Mt Victoria rambled up and down hillsides, each neighbourhood with its own distinctive character, the whole shebang rendered moody by afternoon fog that rolled in off the Pacific Ocean.
The air seemed charged with some special rebel electricity. At one point, this beautiful city was at the vanguard of early civil, feminist and gay rights movements, green politics, recreational drug use, bare-ass public nakedness, loose and juicy writing, mad music.
These days, umpteen tech corporations and startups are headquartered nearby, making property values the highest in America, with gentrification and brutal rent hikes forcing out broke-ass writers, artists, musicians and activists who had once given this place its unique tang.
Even so, I went out hunting for vestiges of the counter-culture that had fascinated me as a THC-addled youth.
Out in North Beach, I parked my lardy arse at Caffe Trieste, ground zero of the city’s Beat scene during the 1950s when it was a second home to writers Allen Ginsberg, Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac, and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who founded City Lights bookstore just around the corner.
I
sat at the back-corner table where Francis Ford Coppola later bashed out The Godfather screenplay, surveying a wellworn joint that once hosted hip cats in unironic berets reciting poetry while some goateed compadre pounded bongos. Bongos!
Literary ghosts crowded around as I drank so-so coffee, hoping some sort of residual boho prose-juice was soaking in.
Afterwards, I sauntered through The Castro, one of the first out-andproud gay neighbourhoods in America, and was delighted to encounter an elderly dude who was butt naked save for sandals, backpack and a jiggly white ‘‘cock sock’’ now required by law after the city’s ‘‘clothing-optional’’ status was overturned in 2012.
I wandered among weed smokers, winos, gym-body sunbathers in Speedos and slo-mo tai chi practitioners in Delores Park, ate Mexican tucker opposite the famous murals on early feminist centre The Women’s Building, strolled through Golden Gate Park where Apple co
founder Steve Jobs used to go for long walks, baked to the gills, reimagining the future after dropping inspirational acid.
I shivered like a tuning fork at Land’s End as a brisk wind tore through the wires of Golden Gate Bridge, then warmed back up with duck dumplings in Chinatown.
I drank way too much at Toronado, a famous dive bar run by grumpy bikers, with loud punk and metal records screeching from the speakers while you drown today’s sorrows and work up new ones for morning.
The social network? My heart broke around the intersection of Mission and 14th Street where the wretched, the mad and the homeless pitch tents and scramble for loose change just a few blocks from Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s US$14 million mansion.
And then, inevitably, one April afternoon when San Francisco was sweltering with the hottest temperatures since 1954, I washed up at the fabled intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets.
Janis Joplin used to blat around here on a Vespa, hopped up on amphetamines and whisky, while the Grateful Dead all lived in a big house at 710 Ashbury. The country’s first ‘‘head shop’’, The Psychedelic Store, was here too, blending altruism and commerce with pipes, posters, pot and LSD for sale, free food, and a meditation room out the back.
On July 7, 1967, a Time magazine cover story entitled The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture threw a national spotlight on Haight-Ashbury, attracting a flood of outsiders to the area and popularising the nascent hippie movement around the world.
For a few short months in 1967, upwards of 200,000 young people showed up for a globally unprecedented bacchanal that locals tagged ‘‘the Summer of Love’’.
The conformity and materialism of their parents’ generation were declared a very bad trip indeed as young seekers poured into this oncelawless gold-rush town to ‘‘turn on, tune in, drop out’’ to an acid-rock soundtrack. Ransacking costume stores for velvet gowns, brocade tunics and three-quarter coats, kids from Detroit or Toronto or Texas would dress like Edwardians who had survived an explosion in a dye factory, take hallucinogens, dance like trees in the wind, shag in the streets.
I
t was an unforgettable summer, profoundly transforming American culture and sending ripples around the world but I missed it, too busy being a child 11,265 kilometres away in Whanganui.
But I was here now and a lot had changed. In the renovated Victorian houses once squatted in by herds of hippies, affluent tech entrepreneurs now cluster.
There are still garishly painted head shops galore, hawking tie-died Grateful Dead T-shirts, little copper hash pipes, posters of Jefferson Airplane, slender editions of Allan Ginsberg’s Howl, the whole nine. Did I buy a T-shirt featuring cosmic jazz kingpin Sun Ra floating free through the Milky Way? Of course.
But Haight-Ashbury is now more theme park than bold social experiment, the hedonistic revolutionaries of old superseded by culture tourists like me, nostalgic for a utopian communal vibe that was highly romanticised in the first place.
To see that first Summer of Love
from a clear-eyed cynic’s perspective, you can do no better than reporter Joan Didion’s 1968 essay, Slouching
Towards Bethlehem.
Barefoot lost teenagers with glazed eyes and track marks, rape masquerading as ‘‘free love’’, shaky mental health posing as openmindedness, predatory straight dudes prowling around Haight trying to score a ‘‘hippie chick’’ for the night.
Delivered as impressionistic fragments, Didion paints a bleak picture of a city swamped by juvenile runaways from all over the country, drawn here for kicks or fleeing harsh lives elsewhere.
This still persists here too.
On lower Haight one day, I met a dazed young soul who had been sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park.
He was from Chicago, he said, and ‘‘heading back there soon’’ but in the meantime, here he was dirty, bewildered, barefoot and hungry, tapping me for loose change.
We were barely a hundred metres from the place where anti-capitalist activists The Diggers built their headquarters in an old garage in the late 1960s, helping dispense free food, clothes and medical care during that summer when the love proved unsustainable.
Crime, overcrowding, sexually transmitted diseases and drug psychosis built steadily in the Haight that year and, by autumn, thousands left the city, washed out and exhausted, to resume their college studies, find a job or simply get some rest. On October 6, 1967, The Diggers held a ‘‘Death of The Hippie’’ mock funeral, carrying a coffin through Haight-Ashbury with a dollar sign daubed on the side.
All things must pass.
The day before I left San Francisco to come home, I was back on Haight, mooching around record stores, when a sad message reached me by phone from New Zealand.
One of my musical heroes was gone. Just a few months earlier, I had seen Prince play his first ever Auckland show, and he had just died alone at Paisley Park in Minnesota of an accidental opioid overdose.
I was still absorbing the news when a man rushed in off the street, scooped an armful of LPs from the record bins, and bought every Prince record in the shop.
The shopkeeper was bummed out, man.
‘‘That cost me so much money!’’ he wailed.
‘‘Death is good for business but we usually have the time to put the prices up before we get cleaned out.’’