Before the Summer of Love went viral
The Summer of Love didn’t start when Scott McKenzie sang that people were going to San Francisco. It was a slow train to 1967, a dozen years in the buildup and several more years in the comedown. That is the long view taken in “On the Road to the Summer of Love,” a story told primarily in images by underappreciated photographers at the California Historical Society.
“There are images in this show that have very literally never been seen before,” says guest curator Dennis McNally, who spent six months traversing from Santa Rosa to Santa Cruz to uncover 100 photographs by 20 photographers.
“I was seeking pictures of the rock ’n’ rollers in their first incarnations as folkies,” says McNally, who has plenty of contacts thanks to his prior career as the official historian for the Grateful Dead.
He knew where to find Jerry Melrose’s picture of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter looking like twothirds of the Kingston Trio. That image, from a folk club in 1962, has never before been exhibited in a gallery.
Finding a shot from that same era of Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen took more sleuthing. After six or seven dead ends, McNally found himself at the Sonoma County home of Marjorie Alette, a retired medical photographer who had once dated Kaukonen.
Alette spread a dozen prints across her dining room table, and the one that jumped out at McNally featured Kaukonen looking like Woody Guthrie while backing a then-unknown singer making her Bay Area debut.
“There is Janis Joplin standing onstage wearing a basic black dress, the most conventional clothing anyone has seen on her,” says McNally, adding that within a song or two Joplin realized she was overdressed and went backstage to change into her jeans. That 1962 picture, from the Offstage in San Jose, has never been exhibited anywhere.
The images in the exhibition form a continuum that starts in the mid-1950s.
“If you are going to trace the story of the Summer of Love, you have to go back to the Beats,” says McNally, who tracked down Chris Redl, son of the late photographer Harry Redl, in Marin County.
McNally walked into Redl’s house and immediately saw that every image he wanted was on the living room wall. Now they are on the wall of the CHS — Allen Ginsberg at the Drake Hotel, Michael McClure lying on his bed, Lawrence Ferlinghetti in the basement of City Lights.
San Francisco was on its way to the Summer of Love as early as 1958 and was the home base for the pop culture phenomenon until it stopped in 1967. In the show, the “Death of the Hippie” funeral procession up Haight Street in October 1967 is represented by a seven-minute silent film.
But the exhibit runs into 1970 as well, showing that what was happening in San Francisco was happening elsewhere, as depicted in Robert Altman’s image of free-form dancers at a festival in Boulder, Colo..
“The Summer of Love came to an end in San Francisco, but in so doing it spread across the country,” McNally says. “It went national — or in the current jargon, the Summer of Love went viral.”