Events - Soul-search at Summer of Love

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Soul-search at Summer of Love

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A fan at Golden Gate Park. Photo / Reuters

September 04, 2007
NZ Herald

SAN FRANCISCO - Some of the biggest musical stars of the 1960s counterculture gathered in San Francisco yesterday for a concert to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, yet backstage many voiced disappointment about the era's unfulfilled ideals.

The Summer of Love of 1967 made San Francisco a magnet for youth who wanted to experiment with sex, drugs, rock and roll and an alternative hippie lifestyle. "We thought, this is it, we're going to change the world, actually we're going to become the Christian world of love," Ray Manzarek, 68, keyboardist for The Doors, said. "Of course, it didn't happen. Here we are 40 years later and we are still at war."

"It was a great disappointment," said Manzarek, who attended the famed San Francisco January 1967 "Human Be-In," credited with drawing young people to the city, with Doors singer Jim Morrison and other bandmates.

The '60s lived again as Manzarek, Jefferson Starship and other legends performed, thousands of fans donned tie-die shirts and bell bottom pants and the smell of marijuana wafted through the air. Two women wandered through the crowd in Golden Gate Park offering free hugs. In keeping with the spirit of those times, the concert was free.

In the 1960s, many in the counterculture felt they could change the world by removing societal constraints and ending the Vietnam War. Fito De La Parra, drummer for the band Canned Heat, said his generation never lived up to its ideals. "On the whole, I feel betrayed," he said backstage after playing before what organisers estimated was 40,000 fans. "I feel that a lot of the ideals that we held valuable in the 1960s were betrayed by their own people, by their own hippies. Many of them betrayed themselves because they went for the buck, and they became rich yuppies and Republicans."

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The colours remain vibrant even if there are miles on the clock. Photo / Reuters

Barry Melton, best known by his nickname "The Fish" and his partnership with Country Joe McDonald, said the 1960s social movements deserve credit for advancing issues such as women's and gay rights and environmental consciousness, but the youth of the day went overboard with drugs.

Melton, now a public defender criminal lawyer, said: "For one thing we had an absolute benign attitude about drugs that was pretty naive. Excessive was Jim Morrison dying of alcohol poisoning, Jimi Hendrix dying in his own vomit."

The inability to achieve unending love and friendship was evidenced by the many bands long since broken up, often acrimoniously. James Gurley, 67, played with Big Brother and the Holding Company, whose lead singer Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose. Gurley said he had not spoken with his fellow band guitarist for a decade after a falling-out. "I expected we'd all be friends later," he said. "My disappointment is in myself. My assessments were off base; I mis-assessed human nature."

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/...ectid=10461477