Summer o' Love.. or S E X... or sumthin

[lsanderson]

Art Review | 'Summer of Love'
Through Rose-Colored Granny Glasses
By HOLLAND COTTER

Tear gas, pot and patchouli were the scents of the 1960s. You can almost detect the last two, spicy and pungent, wafting through “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

But tear gas, with its weird-sweet burn, is missing in a show that remembers a lot, but forgets much more, about what was happening 40 years ago, when America was losing its mind to save, some would say, its soul.

The so-called Summer of Love was a local event with national repercussions. Word spread that a “Human Be-In” would convene at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in January 1967. Young people from across the country poured into the city, and by the summer they had filled the hippie neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury and were crashing in parks and streets. More

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[kightp.livejournal.com]

"Say you were a middle-class American white kid in 1964. What were you listening to? Jan and Dean, the Shangri-Las. Surfers and bikers. Then you and some friends see the Beatles on their first American tour. They’re so new: four skinny, pale, dandyish guys with femme haircuts singing “Love me do.” The girls in the audience scream. The boys cheer. Ringo shakes his mop and the boys scream too. Hysteria. It’s a high.

Four years later the Beatles are in India, and you’re in college, at a concert, smoking grass and this truly unusual woman named Janis is swinging her hair across the stage. She’s commanding you to take a little piece of her heart. She’s white but sounds black, and she’s reckless, eyes closed, right at the edge of the stage. She’ll fall! Does she care? Outside there’s a war, and the world feels weird, but not in here, tonight.

Then you’re tripping, and Jimi Hendrix is up there on some other stage with this tremendous light show cued to the pulse of the cosmos exploding behind him. No flowers now. No mellow. He strangles the national anthem, then ignites his guitar. Someone behind or beside you whispers: Detroit is on fire. A Buddhist monk torched himself in Saigon. People are making draft-card bonfires. Flames are spilling out of the music, spreading off the stage and into life. You don’t know where acid stops and reality starts. "

Whoa, who was eavesdropping on my adolescence?

Seriously. I spent the Summer of Love - my last summer before college - hitchiking back and forth between home in the Sacramento foothills and the Haight, sleeping where (and with whom) whim took me, dancing bare-chested to Janis and the Airplane and lesser-known(and mostly forgotten) bands in Speedway Meadows, and generally getting my groove on.

Tear gas? That would come the following summer, in Chicago. But in the summer of '67, everything was still possible...