Human Be-In hits golden milestone
50 years since event etched its place in history
Sixteen-year-old Rusty Goldman, in love beads strung by his brother’s girlfriend and a Neil Young-style buckskin jacket with fringe, didn’t know what to expect from a poster with psychedelic lettering advertising a “Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.”
When asked to recall the event after 50 years, Goldman gets out of his chair at his coastal home and turns a full circle to transport himself back to San Francisco on Jan. 14, 1967 — though he looks like he has been there all along. He wears a charlatan’s top hat, and he’d be wearing that fringe jacket if it still fit.
“I remember incense in the air and the crowd getting larger and larger,” says Goldman, 66, who expected maybe 1,000 people at the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park but swears there were 30,000. “Beads. Flowers. Not as many people had long hair as you may have thought . ... And a sense of awe. … The Human Be-In was like a birthday for everybody who was there.”
It lasted only an afternoon, but it has been etched in histo-
ry as a great moment of music, acid experimentation, fellowship and peace. On any calendar of the counterculture, it marks the day that Timothy Leary, dressed all in white with a flower over each ear, advised the audience: “Tune in, turn on, drop out.” This was the signal event of the 1960s, a catalyst to the Summer of Love. Everything from “loveins” to “Laugh-In” came out of the Human Be-In.
“We knew that we were preparing for an invasion” of youth embracing the counterculture, recalls guitarist Barry “the Fish” Melton, who was scheduled to play. “We knew it was coming, we expected it, and there were preparations being made significantly in advance. And the Be-In, right there in January of 1967, was the first time we waved the flag.”
That flag is still waving, at every big daylong event that combines art, culture, politics and music in a park setting. The Tibetan Freedom Concert, the Bill Graham Memorial, even Outside Lands with its threefigure ticket prices, descends from that single, primitive day at the Polo Fields.
The Be-In was also a landmark in grassroots activism — something that the Dakota Access Pipeline movement leaders could likely relate to five decades later. It was a beacon, calling for like-minded people to gather and build a world without war, corporatism or conformity.
“We were a smallish wave in a very big ocean, and we were aware that there were others like us,” said Martine Algier, who helped publicize the Be-In. “There was an awakening going on, and we knew it was happening across the country, and we knew there were pockets of people out there who felt isolated and alone and scared. We wanted to send a signal out to them: ‘Hey, it’s OK to come out and spread your wings. … You are not alone.’ ”
Similarly themed gatherings had occurred earlier in Golden Gate Park and the Panhandle. Bill Graham had operated the Fillmore Auditorium for more than a year by early 1967, hosting ticketed events with many of the Be-In participants, including the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Sons of Champlin and poets Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure.
But the Be-In had all that for free, drawing the biggest, most eclectic counterculture crowd to date. The Hells Angels were invited to act as “guardian angels,” providing security and keeping the music equipment safe.
For the first time, the flower children (the term hippie was not yet in wide usage) had created something too big for the square world to ignore.
“Afterwards, I knew that there was an actual day, Jan. 14, 1967, on which I was initiated into this new society, this new religion, as surely as if I had been initiated into the Ghost Dance Religion of the American Indians,” wrote Helen Swick Perry in her 1970 nonfiction account, “The Human Be-In.” “Retrospectively, I feel quite certain that the Be-In also marked the beginning of nationwide attention.”
Half a century later, nationwide attention is being sought again, for a yearlong arts and cultural overload.
“There truly was a marked difference between ‘before’ and ‘after’ Jan. 14, 1967,” said Anthea Hartig, executive director of the California Historical Society, an organizing partner in the upcoming commemoration. “The cool thing about that day was that so many people from so many backgrounds came to the Gathering of the Tribes,” Hartig says. “They came to protest the Vietnam War and to celebrate love — in short, to ramp up the revolution. That vision remains provocative today and especially striking in this moment’s segmented and polarized environment.”
Algier, who was 24 at the time, remembers just a few weeks of preparation for the Be-In. But the event was well organized, Algier recalled. Many meetings took place at 1371 Haight St., two blocks from where Grateful Dead band members lived.
Algier remembers multiple news conferences being held, in an attempt to clear up erroneous information being reported. TV and print reporters were offered baked goods and tea, and beads and flowers were placed around their necks.
“We wanted them to see us as peaceful, not as protesters, but as people that were genuinely trying to live in a different way, and not in a way that was threatening to anybody,” Algier says.
The word about the Be-In was spread through handbills and posters, in four separate designs, one each by Rick Griffin and Stanley Mouse, among the biggest names in psychedelic art. Additional handbills were drawn by Amy McGil and Michael Bowen, one of the organizers, and included a map to the Polo Fields on the back.
Goldman, a ’60s historian/archivist and collector nicknamed Professor Poster, owns signed originals of all four, and the master plates for two.
The term “Gathering of the Tribes” meant leftovers from the North Beach Beat scene and Berkeley’s antiwar protesters. It meant the Hells Angels and the flower children, and it meant impressionable high school teens and anybody on the cusp of either needing a haircut or deciding not to get one.
Organizers got lucky with the weather, which was sunny and unseasonably warm, conducive to bringing “family, animals, cymbals, drums, chimes, flutes, flowers, incense, feathers, candles, banners, flags,” as one of the posters requested.
“I can remember flowers dropping from the sky,” says Goldman, who claims a plane dropped a sea of carnations. A parachutist touched down and spread tablets of LSD as if scattering seeds. Goldman cannot remember if he took any of those tablets, but he definitely partook of the marijuana being passed freely.
Also in the crowd was Jim “Dancer” Anderson, who was 19 and then working at his uncle’s warehouse in Dogpatch.
“I met a gentleman at the show who turned me on to a joint and my whole world changed, and that is how it started,” recalls Anderson,
who lived with his wife in Hayward at the time. “Six months later, I was single and moved to the Haight.”
In a 30-minute news feature on the Human Be-in made by a crew claiming to represent TV station KQED, there is no evidence of a program, a stage announcer or traffic closures.
Volkswagen buses wheezed by behind the stage as the day began with poet Gary Snyder blowing a horn. Then came some mantra chanting by Ginsberg and Snyder. Then there was a plea for “peace in America. Peace in Vietnam. Peace in San Francisco. Peace in Hanoi ...” and so on.
The day’s first bit of music came when McClure recited poetry while strumming an autoharp. At the poem’s end he repeated the phrase, “This is really it, and it is all perfect,” three times.
The “San Francisco bands” that had been vaguely advertised turned out to be the Big Four — the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding Company. (Big Brother cofounder Peter Albin claims the band was in Los Angeles and never quite made it, though there are still people who swear they heard Janis Joplin wail.)
Melton of Country Joe and the Fish brought his guitar and was scheduled to play but never made it to the stage.
“I realized whatever I did made me incapable of doing much more than being there,” Melton said. “I had taken entirely too much of a three-letter foreign substance.”
The artist does remember the stage and the sound, professionally assembled under the expert guidance of Graham. The stage, though, was crowded with people who vastly outnumbered the performers. There were children and dancers — most prominently Ginsberg dancing with his mouth hanging open to “Dancing in the Street.” It looks bizarre on film in 2017, but his free form would become a standard move among Deadheads.
The crowd wasn’t all flower children — or even half. Footage shows a constant flow of men roaming through in button-down oxford shirts, looking to see what all the fuss was about.
When the sun started to set, people remembered that it was January. An unidentified poet asked the crowd to “turn, face the sun and move toward it . ... Open your mind and don’t close it anymore. I would say this to all members of the establishment, that we are proud and happy to have you in our brave new world.’’
Ginsberg and Snyder led a Buddhist chant as the sun went down and the flower children flowed back into the city, not knowing that they’d reached the counterculture high-water mark for the year to follow.
The Summer of Love had already begun. And it was only winter.
Before long, Gray Line was offering bus tours of the park and the Haight, handing passengers a printed glossary of hippie terms.
After the Be-In, “the crowds on Haight Street got bigger and bigger and bigger,” says Goldman. “Word spread like fire. Everybody came to San Francisco.’’
The Summer of Love’s loudest clarion call, the release of “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” sung by Scott McKenzie, was still four months away.
Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop culture critic, and Sam Whiting is a staff writer. Email: phartlaub@ sfchronicle.com, swhiting@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub, @sfchronicle_art