The Summer of Love

I missed the Sixties, as I was a kid, and it's just as well. I'm non-communitarian, unattracted to drugs, not a rock & roller (which is not to say that I dislike all rock music), suspicious of vague and trendy varieties of "spiritualism." I'm pretty bourgeois and traditionalist, and I'm more past-oriented than future-oriented (or even, for that matter, present-oriented). No, the Sixties and I wouldn't have been a good fit; I hit college in the late Seventies, when things had really calmed down.

But I am kind of fascinated by the Sixties (by which we always mean, the late Sixties stretching into the early Seventies), in part because the guiding impulses of those years are so far from my temperament, in part because I do have a strong historical/sociological impetus (and boy, did those years become "history" fast).

The other night I watched (on DVD) a PBS American Experience documentary on the Summer of Love, which did about as good a job as could be managed in an hour; the subject deserved more time. The narration was intelligent, the unearthed contemporary footage excellent, and the talking head interviews reasonably good. Too many of the latter's stories were begun and not finished, though. I got interested in the fortunes of a woman who had made it to San Francisco in 1967 as a 13 year old runaway / hitch-hiker; but once the documentary deposited her at Haight and Ashbury it lost interest or ran out of time. She clearly survived to be interviewed now, but how did her experiences affect her? (Another interviewee looks so ghastly worn that one suspects the revolution was very hard on him indeed -- but again, the film-makers don't go there.)

The Summer of Love, based on what I've read about it in Jay Stevens's wonderful Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, was a gassy Utopian idea that turned sour very quickly. The Haight-Ashbury, and San Francisco generally, were scarcely prepared (how could they have been?) for that kind of influx of bodies (estimated at 50,000-100,000), especially since many of the pilgrims arrived in town close to destitute. Services were strained, conditions deteriorated, tempers flared, crime and exploitation flourished. And as Stevens aptly puts it, once the use of hallucinogens expanded beyond a self-selected elite of consciousness explorers and became a widespread youth sacrament, the results were a bad trip: "Instead of creating a taste for enlightenment, LSD was promoting a love of sensation, the more intense the better."

More reading I should do on this subject: Charles Perry's The Haight-Ashbury; Joel Selvin's Summer of Love (both Perry and Selvin are interviewed in the documentary, and Selvin is especially sharp, noting how he started to turn off to the whole experience when it became "squalid"); Martin Lee's Acid Dreams.