[photo: Human Be-In, 1967, by Michael Culbertson]
Death of Hippie: An End to the Summer of Love.
Well, that didn’t work. Nice try, though. The idea, according to Diggers who helped start the whole thing nine months earlier with the Human Be-In, was to convince the media to point their cameras anywhere but the Haight. And to send the unwashed masses back to Nebraska.
Unfortunately, the unwashed masses were done with Nebraska. They kept coming. Bad drugs and criminals followed along with tour busses and an oppressive police presence. The original artists and musicians who lived there fled to Marin and other more bucolic locations.
Hippie culture rippled unabated from the wellspring that is the Haight. First of all, there was the music – a whole new genre known as psychedelic took the world by storm. Bellbottom jeans and hippie fashion were all the rage.
Soon, Burning Man exploded in the Black Rock Desert, attracting distinctly hippie-like revelers from all over creation. After the death of Jerry Garcia, Dead & Co rose from the ashes of the Grateful Dead. Dead cover bands popped up everywhere, some Jerry-centric, some with the ghost of PigPen out front. Those bands begat the burgeoning Skull & Roses Festival, currently featuring five days (April 19-23, 2023) of Grateful Dead songs in multifarious styles by some 32 bands. Grateful Dead music itself has become a genre of its own.
The 1967 Diggers intended “to end the commercialization of the hippie lifestyle and the mainstream appropriation of their social experiment.” You guessed it. To quote journalist and author Joel Selvin in a 2007 SF Chronicle piece “… the mythology of that summer in 1967 has never disappeared. The SF hippie, dancing in Golden Gate Park with long hair flowing, has become as much of an enduring American archetype as the gunfighters and cowboys who roamed the Wild West. The Summer of Love resonates in strip mall yoga classes, pop music, visual art, fashion, attitudes toward drugs, the personal computer revolution, and the current mad dash toward the greening of America.”
For those who still mourn the passing of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, take heart. It has evolved – something Jerry himself would most likely encourage in all of us – but it’s still out there. You just gotta poke around.
Check out Cynthia’s badass website: www.mywayisthehighway.com
