Summer of Love

• 1. Introduction

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  The Summer of Love arrived in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in 1967, and by the time it was over, a PBS documentary would call it "the largest migration of young people in the history of America." As many as 100,000 people flooded into a single urban neighborhood over a single season. They were teenagers, college students, runaways, beatniks, and hippies, drawn by something that was simultaneously a social experiment and a spectacle.

  What pulled so many people to one corner of one city? What happened when the neighborhood could not hold them? And what does it mean that San Francisco staged a mock funeral for the whole thing before autumn even arrived? This documentary follows the Summer of Love from its unlikely beginnings in a January gathering to its ceremonial close on the 6th of October, 1967.

• 2. The Human Be-In

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  On the 14th of January, 1967, artist Michael Bowen produced a celebration in Golden Gate Park called the Human Be-In. Roughly 30,000 people gathered that day, and the event did more than fill a park. It gave the coming summer a phrase that would define it.

  Timothy Leary stood before the crowd and delivered his now-famous line: "turn on, tune in, drop out." Leary had already lost his untenured position on the Psychology faculty at Harvard University after advocating psychedelic drug use. His colleague Richard Alpert, who had shared psilocybin sessions with Leary and invited graduate students to participate, would later become known to millions as the spiritual teacher Ram Dass.

  Leary's phrase captured ideas that were already circulating: experimenting with psychedelics, communal living, political decentralization, and stepping outside of conventional society. "Dropping out" spread rapidly among high school and college students, many of whom left their studies for a summer or longer. The Haight-Ashbury's own newspaper, the San Francisco Oracle, announced the Be-In with a call for "a revolution formed with a renaissance of compassion, awareness, and love." The Oracle's pass-around readership that summer is thought to have exceeded half a million people.

• 3. Planning and the Press

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  The term "Summer of Love" did not emerge organically from the crowd. It originated with a formal body called the Council for the Summer of Love, assembled during the spring of 1967. The council brought together the Family Dog hippie commune, The Straight Theatre, The Diggers, the San Francisco Oracle, and about 25 other individuals. Their initial purpose was practical: they expected a wave of young people and wanted to prepare housing, food, sanitation, and medical services.

  National media did much of the council's work for them. San Francisco Mayor John F. Shelley and the city's Board of Supervisors tried to stop the influx, which drew exactly the press attention they had hoped to prevent. The San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle ran stories that alerted outlets across the country. Newsweek printed a four-page color article titled "Dropouts on a Mission" on the 6th of February, 1967. Time magazine followed on the 17th of March with a piece called "Love on Haight." Newsweek returned on the 12th of June with "The Hippies are Coming." Hunter S. Thompson coined the nickname "Hashbury" in The New York Times Magazine. Each article sent more young people west.

  Psychedelic poster artist Bob Schnepf was commissioned by Chet Helms to create the official Summer of Love poster, which became a lasting icon of the era.

• 4. Music and the Monterey Moment

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  John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas wrote "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" for his friend Scott McKenzie. The song served a dual purpose: it promoted the Monterey Pop Festival that Phillips was helping to organize, and it gave the flower children of San Francisco a kind of anthem. Released on the 13th of May, 1967, the single climbed to number four on the Billboard Hot 100 by the week ending the 1st of July, holding that position for four consecutive weeks. In the United Kingdom and across much of Europe, it reached number one. The single reportedly sold more than seven million copies worldwide.

  Monterey itself drew enormous crowds. Approximately 30,000 people attended the festival's first day, and by the final day that figure had grown to 60,000. The lineup brought together the Who, the Grateful Dead, the Animals, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Otis Redding, the Byrds, and Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin. Coverage of the festival sent additional waves of people toward California.

  In August of 1967, George Harrison visited Haight-Ashbury, walking through the neighborhood strumming his guitar. He later described the experience critically, telling interviewers he found the scene filled with bums rather than the idealistic gathering he might have expected.

• 5. The Diggers and Free Culture

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  Before the summer crowds arrived, a radical anarchist collective called the Diggers had already embedded themselves in San Francisco in 1966. Their goal was to help young people find liberation in the city, and their method was to make everything free.

  The Diggers ran a Free Store where anyone could take what they needed. They published a free newsletter called The Digger Papers, which offered practical information on food, shelter, drug use, and human rights. The Haight Ashbury Free Clinics opened on the 7th of June, 1967, providing medical treatment at no cost. The Diggers also assisted the council in organizing food and sanitation logistics as the crowds swelled.

  Ken Kesey, a West Coast figure who had volunteered for a CIA-sponsored LSD experiment in 1959 and later wrote the bestselling novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, organized a different kind of outreach. He painted an old school bus with psychedelic imagery, gathered a group he called the Merry Pranksters, and traveled the country hosting "acid tests," where a diluted form of LSD was distributed and participants who finished received diplomas. Cannabis also spread widely during the period, though new laws were enacted to restrict both it and LSD. Protesters held gatherings they called "smoke-ins" during July and August to oppose the restrictions, without success.

• 6. Overflow and Fracture

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  Haight-Ashbury could not hold what it had summoned. The neighborhood's infrastructure buckled under the weight of the influx. Overcrowding, homelessness, hunger, drug problems, and crime moved through the district as the summer wore on. The people who had arrived ranged far beyond the idealistic core: middle-class vacationers, teenagers drawn by peer pressure and the promise of a cultural utopia, and military personnel from bases within driving distance all joined the crowd.

  The ripple effects reached other cities. In Manhattan, near Greenwich Village, a Memorial Day 1967 concert in Tompkins Square Park ended with 38 arrests after some attendees threw objects at police officers who had asked for the volume to be lowered. Mayor John Lindsay and Police Commissioner Howard R. Leary debated publicly over the "threat of the hippie." The editor of the East Village Other, Allan Katzman, predicted that 50,000 hippies would descend on the area for the summer.

  In Denver, Chet Helms and Barry Fey held their own Human Be-In in City Park, drawing 5,000 people. The Grateful Dead, Odetta, and Captain Beefheart performed. Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary were reportedly in attendance. The Family Dog Productions venue opened in Denver in September of that year. As Denver native Bruce Bond observed in the 2021 documentary The Tale of the Dog, "It's not like the Summer of Love ended in Frisco. It just moved east, to Denver."

• 7. The Death of the Hippie

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  By October, the Haight was emptying. Many participants had left to join the back-to-the-land movement, return to school, or, as the organizers themselves put it, simply "get a job." Those who remained wanted to mark the moment formally.

  On the 6th of October, 1967, a mock funeral called "The Death of the Hippie" was staged in the neighborhood. Organizer Mary Kasper explained the ceremony's intent plainly: "We wanted to signal that this was the end of it, to stay where you are, bring the revolution to where you live and don't come here because it's over and done with." Eleven days later, on the 17th of October, the rock musical Hair opened Off-Broadway in New York, dramatizing the hippie counterculture and the sexual revolution of the decade.

  The Summer of Love's legacy reached across time and geography in ways its organizers did not plan. Behind the Iron Curtain, a Soviet counter-cultural movement called the Flower Children adopted hippie fashion, anti-war slogans, and the phrase "Make love, not war" to protest repression under the pre-perestroika Soviet Union. In Britain, the summers of 1988 and 1989 were collectively dubbed the Second Summer of Love, a period of acid house music and rave culture that drew self-conscious comparisons to 1967. The 40th anniversary concert in Golden Gate Park's Speedway Meadows on the 2nd of September, 2007 drew over 150,000 people, produced by 2b1 Multimedia and the Council of Light.