1967, THE SUMMER OF LOVE : There Was a Brief Moment When the Sun Really Shone

I’ll get right to the point: 1967 was one of the best years of my life.

That was the summer of “Sgt. Pepper,” the Beatles’ anthem for an era; the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” an invitation of another sort; the Monterey Pop Festival, and the Human Be-In. Music and love would set us free.

I had been pretty much a loner until 1967. As the editor of TeenSet, a teen-age rock magazine, I frequently pointed my pink VW convertible north to San Francisco to check out the real action. The drive took seven hours on U.S. 101 and by the time I pulled into the Hyde Park Suites on North Point, I was not tired: I was ready to roll.

I spent long, loud nights at the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms, not just listening but absorbing music by Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Youngbloods, Dino Valente (he wrote “Get Together”: “Come on, people, now, smile on your brother . . . “), Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Sons of Champlin, Country Joe and the Fish, Big Brother and the Holding Company, every single performance backlit by dazzling light shows. You remember light shows--swirling, rhythmic blobs of color, photographs and weird graphic images projected on a screen behind the performers. Sometimes the light shows, especially those by Glen McKay’s Headlights, were better than the music--but not very often.

I walked up and down Haight Street, trying, with little success, to decipher the print on all those psychedelic posters. I hung out in poorly furnished backstage dressing rooms waiting for words of wisdom from occasionally wise--but usually just smart-aleck--rock stars. My mornings were beautiful, most of them spent at Portofino in the top of Ghirardelli Square, sipping an exotic coffee that looked like a sundae and staring out across the bay to the Golden Gate. Maybe the Summer of Love could have flowered in Cincinnati, but it sure was prettier in San Francisco.

I’d never before been around so many people of like interests, commitments, passions. The music bound us all, but so did the attitude: Be kind, be tolerant. Don’t judge people by the way they look, and maybe, if we’re lucky, they won’t judge us. Share everything. Stay high. “Hey, man--peace.” I adopted some of their ideas, adapted several of my old ones, and threw out a few my mother taught me.

That summer was benign, warm, friendly and unafraid. Hell’s Angels were cool; Black Panthers were right on. Along with the cozy feelings of community abroad in the land--or at least among the younger inhabitants--came a jolt of power that united us against them: the power structure, the multinational corporations, the military, the politicians. For the first time in our lives--my life, anyway--we felt we could do anything, we could take the world in a loving way.

Monterey looms over 1967, right up there with the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” as a rock ‘n’ roll benchmark. It was the first-ever rock festival (subtitled “Music, Love and Flowers”), and it attracted some top names (Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas) and several who would become major stars, thanks in large part to their electricity at Monterey: Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding.

There were no arrests at Monterey. Not one. The police were photographed festooned with flowers, and near the end of the three-day event, festival co-founder Derek Taylor draped a bead necklace around the neck of the Monterey chief of police with the comment, “This is from me to you and it makes us one.” Nobody laughed.

My friend Sue was in school in Michigan and spent long hours staring at her Jim Morrison poster. She knew, with the smug cool of a very hip teen-ager, that she would never wear flowers in her hair in San Francisco or anywhere else. She spent her time spinning the radio dial, riveted by rock ‘n’ roll that Meant Something. “That was the year my passion for Paul Revere and the Raiders began to fade,” she said, laughing long distance from Detroit.

Not everybody thought 1967 was such a great year. One friend, a writer, spent the year dealing with her husband’s mental breakdown and her own job upheavals. Another friend, Marie, an art director, doesn’t look back. “I think people get better when they get older. The present is always better than the past. Always.”

Well, maybe. We are certainly older, and if we’re lucky, wiser, but I still contend that much of what I like about myself today grew out of those days of self-discovery. We were so innocent then. It’s not easy to remember this today, but in 1967 most of us were not yet “liberated”--sexually, professionally, personally or many other ways. The changes started in the early ‘60s, but it wasn’t until 1967 that they all came together: We could live our lives the way we wanted to and not the way others told us or expected us to.

In 1967 I finally understood what I’d always been taught and never really believed: People can be-- want to be--good and kind and generous and unafraid, even to strangers. For a brief moment love--or at least absence of suspicion--did prevail. We smiled on our brothers and sisters, and meant it. I don’t look back on that as something that was betrayed or refuted later. Too many people have written off the late ‘60s as some kind of sociological bad acid trip. It wasn’t. It was a great ride. And even though, for some, the ride later crashed in flames at Altamont and Kent State, even though the Haight-Ashbury dream turned into a drug nightmare, a good part of 1967’s legacy was confidence, hope--and kindness.

Looking back is one of the comforts and pleasures of getting older, because we think we know what happened. On the other hand, “the future’s uncertain and the end is always near,” as Jim Morrison once sang. I comfort myself in these prim, grim days with the notion that some of those 1967 attitudes will come around again.

The Summer of Love was only 20 years ago. I expect that, within 10 years or so, the sons and daughters of all our materialistic yuppies will have a thing or two to add to the lexicon of rebellion.

I can’t wait. I’m ready now .