Tales of love and Haight
As San Francisco celebrates 50 years since the summer of love, MIKE LOCKLEY unleashes his inner hippy in the city by the bay
THE summer of love, a brief orgy of sex and mind-bending substances, never made it to my corner of the Black Country. There was Debra who worked at the local chippy. She remains the only woman I’ve met who could shovel chips seductively, but her love was more easy than free.
It came at a cost – usually three glasses of a 1960s beverage romantically known as “Legover”, a rocket fuel mix of Cherry B and cider.
No, the summer of love never made it to my neck of the woods, although I briefly wore an Afghan coat. The ornately embroidered garment smelled of dead dog when wet. Debra didn’t mind.
A few arty young men attempted to buy into the West Coast dream by lighting joss sticks and clutching Grateful Dead albums, but they paid a heavy price for their bohemian bent. Only once did they get the DJ at our village hall disco to include a Velvet Underground track among the wall-to-wall Tamla Motown tracks.
As they jerked and gyrated wildly to the music, I laughed so much that stuff came out of my nose, not the other way round.
Yes, I was there during the summer of love, but missed the boat despite our parish winning a regional Britain in Bloom title. I’d watch grainy television images of writhing, semi-clad individuals, their inhibitions clouded by chemicals, to a soundtrack of dad’s disapproval.
“I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s apron,” he’d growl. “You can’t tell if that one’s a man or a woman. Thank God we didn’t rely on that generation to win the war.” Yes, I was there, on the sidelines. So I was grateful for the opportunity to visit San Francisco as the countdown to celebrations marking 50 years since an LSD revolution, its soldiers sporting flowers in their hair, spread peace and love across the planet. I wanted to know if the summer of love truly existed as a fleeting moment that sparked cultural sea-change and global peace. Or was it simply a mass San Francisco, drug-fuelled squat that the media, sensing clickbait long before clicks existed, labelled and massaged into a movement? Sex and drugs and rock’n’roll sells. This was sex and drugs and rock’n’ roll with a sprinkling of flower petals.
But it was a revolution not embraced by San Francisco’s Hispanic and black minorities who had the most to rebel against. This was a non-violent war waged by middle-class kids, wrapped in floral gowns and stupefied by hallucinogenic substances.
More importantly, I travelled to California to discover if the summer of love had made a lasting difference. It hasn’t. George Harrison visited Haight Ashbury, the pocket of San Francisco that became the hippy movement’s hub, on August 8, 1967, and dismissed it as a community populated by “hideous, spotty teenagers”.
The acned young people have left the streets, replaced by the homeless and their dogs. The Fillmore West, a famed venue that once trembled to the raw energy of such bands as the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Jefferson Airplane, is now a Honda dealership.
The love didn’t last in Haight Ashbury. Those who were there – and I met a number of the flower power figureheads – admit weeds choked the garden as soon as speed and heroin replaced LSD as Haight’s drug of choice.
Those ex-hippies who once saw love all around are now old, grey and curmudgeonly. I learned something from those sages: the scent of sandlewood doesn’t suit a 70-yearold.
During a California Historical Society debate, they clashed over the causes of the hippy decline, while Ann Cohen, widow of poet Allen Cohen, remained serene and floral. A tad dizzy, but serene.
Despite their words, there were plenty of thorns in the Garden of Eden. Women who dropped out, then dropped in to Haight, faced sexual predators drawn by the prospect of easy sex. Drug dealers were no less menacing.
And the street “spiritual gurus” included Charles Manson, who lured vulnerable runaways to his commune at 636 Cole Street.
Even Haight’s history as a hippy hub has been glossed by time. To a large extent, naive, wealthy young people opened the doors of their imposing, grandiose homes to free spirits and the freeloaders moved in en masse.
Haight was a paradise: a paradise for the sex-obsessed, the drug pushers and the squatters.
I may be among those who dismiss Flower Power as early fake news, but there’s no denying my four days were an amazing, heady rock and roll odyssey.
They also provided an insight into a city that is as intoxicating and hypnotic as the drugs that painted