It's time to get real, man, about the Summer of Love

by Chris Vognar

The Dallas Morning News (MCT)

15 August 2007

The hippies are coming to town.

Forty years ago, such a proclamation would have had hands wringing and tongues clucking in a “Not in my back yard” chorus. But today it merely signals an oldies tour - and another effort to profit from the Summer of Love.

Featuring the likes of the Zombies and Country Joe McDonald, “Hippiefest” celebrates the 40th anniversary of that summer, described in publicity materials as “an era of liberation, experimentation, long hair and flower power.”

That’s the popular image, set forth in commercials, new music compilations from Starbucks and Rhino Records, the psychedelic, Beatles-inspired movie “Across the Universe” (coming in September) and the public imagination.

Few choose to recall that it was also a summer of riots in cities from Newark to Detroit. Or that the Dallas City Council and police tried to clear the longhairs out. Or that by the end of the summer in San Francisco, the epicenter of the free-love migration, starving speed addicts were catching cats on the street and eating them.

It seems some of the realities just aren’t as marketable as others. And for all the social change and great music that emerged, the so-called Summer of Love now boils down to a hallowed place in today’s nostalgia economy.

“In our pop cultural history, we take a rosy and somewhat foggy view of our not-so-distant past,” says Rachel Weingarten, president of GTK Marketing Group and author of the retro beauty study “Hello Gorgeous! Beauty Products in America, `40s-’60s.” “For that reason, our nostalgia embraces all of the good with precious little of the bad.”

Institutions high and low are cashing in, from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s solid but uninspiring exhibit “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era” (running through Sept. 16 in New York) to Lucky Brand Jeans, which designed a multicolored “Denim Highway” bus to cruise the country and spread the love. The bus was spruced up by the guys behind MTV’s “Pimp My Ride.”

Because nothing says Summer of Love like “Pimp My Ride.”

So where does the reality stop and the pimping begin? Let’s look for answers on a trip down memory lane. First stop: San Francisco, or Summer of Love Central.

The Summer of Love originated in San Francisco, where the Haight-Ashbury district became a destination for thousands of youngsters fueled by curiosity and utopian desire. The likes of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service packed venues such as the Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom for psychedelic jam sessions that went deep into the night.

So it certainly wasn’t about marketing, right?

Right?

“The Summer of Love never really happened,” writes Joel Selvin, the veteran San Francisco music critic, in his book “Summer of Love.” “Invented by the fevered imaginations of writers for weekly news magazines, the phrase entered the public vocabulary with the impact of a sledgehammer, glibly encompassing a social movement sweeping the youth of the world, hitting the target with the pinpoint accuracy of a shotgun blast.”

So yes, the masses did go to San Francisco, and many wore flowers in their hair (as suggested in the Scott McKenzie-John Phillips song, recorded, incidentally, in Los Angeles). The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary issue estimates that 75,000 flooded Haight-Ashbury alone. But the idea of an officially sanctioned “Summer of Love” - or an officially sanctioned anything - would seem to fly in the face of Timothy Leary’s mandate to turn on, tune in and drop out.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean there was no love in the air.

“There sure was a summer of love for me,” says Country Joe McDonald, who was a regular on the San Francisco scene. “It was friendly and positive, which contrasted tremendously with the other vibes that were going around - war and competition and stuff like that. It was unique and creative and artistic, a nice vibe for trying out new things and not being paranoid and being friendly. It was an age of innocence.”

As for the marketing rush, McDonald concedes it was happening back then, too. “They put out posters and advertised and hoped people would come,” he says. “In America, everything is for sale, so that’s the way it’s done. You have to get the word out.”

Except back then, there was actually a place to go. Today, there’s just stuff to buy.

The fun memories get sold back to us. The drug overdoses? The riots? The feline dining? Not so much.

“Memories are always tricky,” says McDonald. “People remember what they want sometimes. They forget things and get confused.”

Some might be surprised to learn that Dallas, like most major cities then, had its own hippie scene.

Few would be surprised to learn that the changing times weren’t welcomed here with open arms.

“There really wasn’t much of a Summer of Love in Dallas,” says Mike Rhyner.

Today, Rhyner is co-host of “The Hardline,” the sports talk show that airs from 3 to 7 p.m. weekdays on KTCK-AM. On The Ticket, he’s known as the Old Gray Wolf. But in the summer of `67, he was a 17-year-old student at Kimball High School who was eager to check out the scene.

Much of that scene unfolded at Lee Park on Turtle Creek Boulevard, where musicians gathered to jam and curious youngsters went to partake in the burgeoning hippie culture.

“It was a very docile scene and a very unique scene in Dallas,” says Rhyner by phone. “Freaks and straights intermingled very peaceably. It was good times, man.”

But it wasn’t always so peaceable. Rhyner remembers the police in riot gear busting up the party with billy clubs.

“Their marching orders from the Dallas establishment was to quash this thing,” says Rhyner. “That’s the way it was in a lot of cities, especially out here in the remote-yet-burgeoning outpost of Dallas.”

According to Dallas Morning Newsarchives, the City Council voiced its Summer of Love disapproval with an ordinance to curb activities at Stone Place, the downtown pedestrian cut-through, in August 1967.

“There was always someone down there playing the guitar or selling the underground newspaper, Dallas Notes From the Underground,” recalls Morris Smart, a Dallas native who was 16 in `67. “You could even find someone down there selling some refreshments, but you had to be careful of that stuff. It was the hip thing to say you did: `Yeah, we went and hung out at Stone Place.’”

The City Council didn’t find it very hip. “Businessmen in the area of the pedestrian way complained that the preachers and beatniks were interfering with business and annoying pedestrians,” reported The Dallas Morning News on Aug. 8, 1967. Shortly thereafter, the council decided to require police permits for people engaged in “demonstrations, speeches or unusual acts or exhibitions.”

As Smart, who now owns a local drywall company, says: “It was less than four years after Kennedy was killed. Things were changing, but they hadn’t changed a lot here.

“This wasn’t ground zero for the Summer of Love. This is a long way from California.”

Ralph Arlyck moved from New York to Haight-Ashbury just in time for the Summer of Love. “I wasn’t making a pilgrimage,” he says from his home in New York, where he returned after just a few years in California. “I just wanted to try California and found myself in the Haight because that’s where there was a cheap apartment.”

He had mixed feelings then. And does now. He put those feelings into a clear-headed personal documentary, “Following Sean,” that aired recently on PBS’ “POV” series and is available on DVD.

“I saw a lot of lost souls then, people living on the street, lost kids who really didn’t know how to take care of themselves,” he says. “Just people who really looked like they were heading for trouble. You just hoped their parents would come and get them at some point.”

But he also made some great friends and had some wonderful times. “I don’t romanticize it, which is not to say there are not a lot of things that I love about it,” he says. “I feel ambivalent about the period, and that expressed itself in the film.”

Summer of Ambivalence? It doesn’t lend itself to a multicolored psychedelic design. Nor does it have that Madison Avenue ring.

But it has something else: the acknowledgment that few periods or events can be boiled down to a slogan, a cliche or a spiffy new pair of jeans. Even when they come to town in a Lucky Brand bus.