KEY POINTS:
Some things in America haven't changed too much in 40 years. A Texan still occupies the White House (although not for too much longer). The country is still fighting an unpopular war on the other side of the world. And a conservative actor is, despite much guffawing and scepticism, the Governor of California and proving popular.
In many other respects, our contemporary world feels aeons apart from the heady, smoke-hazed, tie-dyed, long-haired, bead-wearing, psychedelic moment that seized San Francisco at the height of the Flower Power movement and came to be known as the Summer of Love.
Back then, during several months in 1967, young people convinced themselves they were joining a global revolution by the simple act of growing their hair, catching a bus to the West Coast, taking drugs and getting laid. Nothing so idealistic, or so rooted in the principles of consequence-free human pleasure, has come along to grip us since.
Then again, the world has grown a lot wearier. And the Summer of Love, in retrospect, has lost a lot of the excitement that greeted it at the time. The "squares" - conventional, conservative Middle Americans the hippies were railing against - never lost their grip on power. And even hippies, looking back on the experience, seem increasingly to regard it as an ill-advised, bad acid trip.
The hippies didn't change the world. They didn't stop the war in Vietnam - not for another eight years, anyway. They probably did more than their share to shock the conscience of middle America and ease the path to Richard Nixon's election on the 1968 Republican ticket.
They certainly proved self-destructive - whether it was Jimi and Janis and Jim coming to untimely ends through drugs or alcohol, or criminals and bums riding the free-love bandwagon and ripping everyone blind, or Hell's Angels beating the hell out of the crowd at a notorious Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, bringing the Sixties to the shabbiest of ends.
None of that was obvious, or easily predictable, in those heady days when Scott McKenzie sang about going to San Francisco with flowers in his hair, and everywhere was the breathy excitement of a generation breaking the taboos of a puritanical society, following its instincts and living free.
The Summer of Love, in reality, lasted close to a full year, starting with the so-called Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in January 1967, which attracted 35,000, and continuing with a veritable avalanche of people descending on the city's Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in search of pot, speed, acid, rock'n'roll and any excuse to escape the pain and strait-jacketed convention of their ordinary lives.
This was the coming of age of the Grateful Dead, who lived in the Haight, and other city bands including Jefferson Airplane. Local bands, along with Jimi Hendrix and British imports such as The Who, played at the Monterey Pop festival, just a couple of hours' drive south, in June that year and introduced a new mass audience to the cutting edge of rock and psychedelia.
The music was perhaps the biggest draw, encapsulating all the hopes and idealistic fervour of the moment. Another attraction was the run-down Victorian houses of the Haight, where a drifter could live, with a bit of cajoling and sharing of floorspace, free of charge for months on end.
The people kept coming, and coming, until the city was full to burst. "Summer was foggy that year, so people were kind of cold and uncomfortable," Carolyn Garcia, the widow of Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia, recalled. "It was sort of like a farmer unloading a truckload of onions. Once the onions start to move, there's no stopping them."
The party ended largely under the sheer weight of numbers. The drifters and hippies hanging around the Haight weren't so much fun if you happened to live there.
The purists of the movement suspected they were being commercialised and objectified. How many revolutionaries, after all, attract the services of a tour bus company ferrying in new recruits? In October 1967 they held a symbolic funeral for the hippy down Haight Street and abandoned the district to the tourist industry, which still sends visitors there in search of a Sixties nostalgia trip - with warnings to watch out for the beggars.
It's common, these days, to hear laments for Haight-Ashbury, how it has become a seedy shadow of its former self. Many articles in US newspapers have focused on the Haight's ever-troublesome homeless population and run-down air. Scratch a few veterans of 1967, though, and they will tell you the best of the Haight had already gone. "The Haight was in deep trouble by the dawn of 1967," a local writer, Michael Rossman, points out.
Yet the whole of America was going through a social earthquake in the wake of the civil-rights movement. Los Angeles had gone up in flames in the Watts riot, and Detroit exploded in the year of the Summer of Love.
Vietnam was getting close to boiling point. The gap between rich and poor had grown so great that President Lyndon B Johnson declared a War on Poverty.
When writer Joan Didion visited San Francisco that spring, she found it haunting rather than joyful. "It was not a country in open revolution. The market was steady and the GNP high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose, and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not."
San Francisco, Didion felt, was where the haemorrhaging of American society made itself felt. "San Francisco," she wrote, "was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves 'hippies'."
The police started to get nasty when hippies tried to block city traffic, or did anything untoward outside the confines of Haight-Ashbury. Long-time residents grew exasperated, and played tricks such as holding mirrors up in their windows so photographs taken of them would end up being a reflected shot of the photographer.
This was, of course, no way to organise any kind of resistance to the dominant ruling order. It wasn't even particularly loving, except in the sense that people slept with each other a lot. "If you look at all the political agendas of the 1960s, they basically failed," said actor Peter Coyote. "We didn't end capitalism. We didn't end imperialism. We didn't end racism."
As acolytes of the Sixties counter-culture look back to the Vietnam War and then forward to Iraq, one of their abiding frustrations is that they have no more idea what to do now than they did then.
Rather, the legacy of the era is to be found in music, art and the kind of spiritual explorations represented by yoga, meditation and religions.
The year began with the debut album of The Doors, continued with Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow, and culminated in the June release of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. It's the music, and the art, that will dominate this year's celebrations of the events of 40 years ago. Several bands who played for the Human Be-In will reconvene for a September concert, among them Country Joe MacDonald, New Riders of the Purple Sage - and Ray Manzarek, of The Doors.
But still critics ask: what are we celebrating? The New York Times wrote: "We discover in 40-year retrospect that love was never all you needed; in the 1960s, in fact, it was barely there. Young people are by definition narcissistic, all clammy ego. There is no past that matters."
The Summer of Love was experienced almost entirely in the present. No wonder it seemed so steeped in import at the time - and now seems so strangely anticlimactic.
- INDEPENDENT
