Summer of Love is light years away
If you are feeling groovy, this column may be for you. It invites you to take a stroll down memory lane to conjure up something that happened 50 years ago: Yes, the Summer of Love.
How can you forget the Summer of Love? Quite easily. If you were alive 50 years ago, the mists of time have a way of creeping up on you like a fog. Sometimes this is a curse and sometimes a blessing if the details of your younger life are embarrassing like mine. Now, where was I in the narrative?
Oh yes, the Summer of Love. I wasn’t getting a whole lot of love in 1967, as best I can remember, although it wasn’t for lack of trying. To enhance my chance for romance, I was soon to buy a pair of bellbottom jeans and a silk shirt from India, making me look like a lad press-ganged into Her Majesty’s service from a foreign port. It wasn’t the look I was hoping for.
My hair did not cooperate with the spirit of the age, either. Long hair was the fashion,
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and mine was set early and unhelpfully on a course of male pattern baldness. But my excuse for not being hip and cool was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There I was across the Pacific Ocean in Australia in the Summer of Beer, where, admittedly, it is always the Summer of Beer, and I should have been in Monterey, Calif.
Down in Monterey, that was the ticket. I should have heard the first notes struck in the Summer of Love. It is said that the three-day Monterey International Pop Festival, held June 16-18, was the place where a generation found its voice and social change took to its feet and danced.
As it happens, I now live in (semi) retirement outside Monterey, so I find myself in the right place but at the wrong
time, just 50 years late, which is progress of a sort.
The local community is trying to make it up for those of us who didn’t get there. Radio stations play the tunes and various commemorative events are being held. My wife and I have been to a couple — the screening of the 1968 documentary of the festival, “Monterey Pop,” and an exhibition of photographs taken there.
The festival was held at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, a venue that is still there and is still ordinary and unremarkable. My last visit was to attend a bacon fest, or an artichoke fest, at any rate something to do with the Summer of Calories.
At a location more suited to kids from the 4-H club and their livestock, it is hard to imagine that for those three days in June 1967 this was a temporary roost to a menagerie of glittering rock legends who defined a generation.
What a galaxy of stars shined in Monterey then — they included The Mamas & the Papas, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Ravi Shankar, Otis Redding and Simon & Garfunkel. The Beatles were not there but almost everybody else of musical note in the ’60s was.
This weekend, on the same dates as in 1967, another, Monterey festival is being staged. Although unhip me is not familiar with the performers, they are probably competent. But the chances of legendary talents blossoming would seem about the same as my hair deciding to sprout late and long. And, last time I looked, I could get a three-day pass for $295, or my wife and I could buy a one-day pass for $244.60.
That is a lot of bread, man. I guess only rich hippies need apply. We’d have to sell a lot a tiedyed T-shirts to afford it. But maybe here’s a perfect metaphor for our greedy and materialistic age. Unfortunately, that’s not the worst of it.
The Summer of Love has gone; it was poisoned by silliness and excess and it took some of its own — Janis, Jimi — down with it. Yet at least it was idealistic and sought to reach out to people who needed the love.
In its place, we have the Summer of Hate, a season of willful ignorance, deliberate provocations and no inspirational goals except making the rich richer. On the grand stage of national life, the generation unpleased 50 years ago is now pleased to be taking its revenge on this generation.
Bummer. I will miss the new festival, instead waiting in hope for a Summer of Reason before rocking on.
Reg Henry is a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist. Email him at rhenry post-gazette.com.