The ‘Summer of Love’ refers to a few months in 1967, focused particularly on the San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, during which new styles of music, art, literature and lifestyles, which collectively took on the adjective psychedelic, became popular across the western world. London, in particular, had its own Summer of Love in that same year.
Psychedelic Music
For most people, what first comes to mind about the Summer of Love is its music. Centred on a small number of venues, including the Fillmore, the Avalon Ballroom and Winterland, this music developed around a number of bands including The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Country Joe and the Fish. This psychedelic style of music (drawing largely on blues, garage bands such as the 13th Floor Elevators, folk music, and also the Indian influences introduced earlier to popular music by The Beatles and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones) had developed over the previous year and spread rapidly across the world. 1967 saw an explosion of truly memorable music and culminated in the Monterey International Pop Festival.
The music was new because it broke the mold of relatively short, well-planned and precise songs that would fit onto a 45 rpm ‘single’, receive airplay on national radio and be played in then same way each time they were given a live performance. It became permissible to have large elements of improvisation in live performance and albums, not singles, became the main focus of the bands’ recording. The music was free-form and the innovative use of stereo, with different instruments appearing in different speakers and sounds moving from one speaker to the other giving a ‘swirling’ sound, became ‘mind-bending’.
Psychedelic Drugs
This music had a symbiotic relationship with the drugs that characterised the Summer of Love, cannabis and, above all, LSD. These drugs were associated with notions of personal development and LSD in particular was believed to offer a route to enlightenment. This desire for enlightenment (stemming in part from a rejection of consumerist culture, the nuclear threat underpinning the Cold War, and the Vietnam War) tied in with interest in Eastern mysticism. Part of the appeal of these two drugs was the ‘naturalness’ of cannabis (it is a plant) and the ability that LSD gives those who take it to ‘become part of’ the greater whole and to engender amazement with the wonders of nature.
Psychedelic People
Those involved in the Summer of Love were known as hippies or flower children. The latter came from the use of flowers as symbols of peace and symbols of the rejection of US militarisation and the Vietnam War. They wore clothes that were colourful, flowing and drew on Art Nouveau, popular representations of gypsy style and other travellers, and Indian symbolism. Interpersonal relationships were based on love, and the phrase ‘Free Love’ became notorious the world over due to the emphasis on sexual love placed on it by most who heard it.
The End
By the end of 1967, the hippie scene in San Francisco had changed out of all recognition, becoming a victim of the very thing it rejected, commercialism. Instead of becoming psychedelic by lifestyle, it was now possible to buy a psychedelic lifestyle. Their innocence and belief in the inherent goodness of people had left the Flower Children prey to crooks, con-men, parasites and perverts, and the scene had become very seedy.
The Legacy
Many of those who were part of the international Summer of Love went on to become part of the broader counterculture out of which developed the Women’s Movement and the Green Movement. The music is also still there.
Alistair McCulloch - Alistair McCulloch has been listening to good music since his early teenage years in the 1960s. It is his genuine belief that music ...
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