-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: January 14, 2007 11:19:04 PM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Been There Then -- From Acid to Antacid
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2154794.ece
Hippies mark 40th anniversary of San Francisco's Summer of Love
By Lisa Leff in San Francisco
Published: 15 January 2007
Their hair, once a symbol of youthful rebellion, is now shot
through with grey. Bodies that writhed with wild abandon to
psychedelic music sport stiff knees and wrinkles.
"How many of you are on acid right now?" rock critic Joel Selvin
asked an audience of former hippies who turned out yesterday to
mark the 40th anniversary of the Human Be-in, the counterculture
event that set the stage for the Summer of Love. "How many of you
are on antacid right now? "
In many ways, the '60s were born on 14 January, 1967 when
musicians, poets, visionaries, student radicals and wayward youth
gathered in Golden Gate Park.
Those who were there agree that neither they nor San Francisco have
been the same since. Part rock concert, part protest, part literary
festival, the Human Be-in was billed at the time as a "Gathering of
the Tribes" meant to unite and stir up the various wings of the
counterculture movement.
Estimates of the number of people who cavorted on the park's Polo
Fields that day range from 10,000 to 50,000.
The speakers and bands who appeared reads like a "Who's Who" of
1960s icons: LSD advocate Timothy Leary, poets Allen Ginsberg and
Gary Snyder, comedian Dick Gregory, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson
Airplane.
Psychedelic drugs were in plentiful supply, courtesy of a
parachutist who tossed free samples to the crowd. "Over the years,
probably a dozen people have come up to me and said: 'You guys were
fantastic!' laughed David Getz, the drummer for Big Brother and the
Holding Company, Janis Joplin's band, which was not on the lineup
that day. "I say: 'We weren't there,' And they say: 'No, I saw
you!' Maybe they did."
By that summer, publicity about "the happening" , had encouraged
thousands more young people to go to San Francisco with flowers in
their hair.
At the commemorative forum, panelist Jim O'Donnell recalled the
transformative days leading up to the Be-In. "My life turned from
academia to sex, drugs and rock'n'roll - unfortunately, not
necessarily in that order."
Like other panellists, O'Donnell and Getz remembered the Human Be-
in as both the beginning and the end, an event that would be much
duplicated but never equalled.
"The Human Be-in was a creation from within the San Francisco
counterculture," Getz said. "The Summer of Love was a creation of
the national news media that befell San Francisco."
Selvin noted that many of the young people who flocked to San
Francisco that year were not emotionally equipped to handle the raw
experiences they encountered and "some of them wound up as debris".
But Peder Jones, an educational publisher who attended the Be-in,
said that despite the drug-soaked atmosphere, "not every hippie
wound up incapable and penniless. We ended up doing jobs that
didn't exist when we started college. The idea of groups doing
things together started to make sense."
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