Sonoma County residents share their personal stories from the Summer of Love

Did we really change the world?

By Alexandra Jacopetti Hart

Did the '60s-'70s counterculture change the world? If so, how? I'm finding the influences are broader than anyone could have been imagined in what the world saw as the flowering of the Bay Area counterculture, the year the runaways became flower children, the now-named Summer of Love.

But it had been brewing. James Baldwin wrote that 1960 was the “Break-out of Freedom” moment. He was tracking Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, which was intricately intertwined with the anti-Vietnam War actions, and the peace movement (make love not war), and the beginnings of the counterculture as I experienced it. Another thread was the Beat Generation, out of which the hippies slowly emerged. Slow, that is, until it all started oozing out from behind the closed doors of small enclaves of people who previously didn't know each other existed. The marker for that was the Trips Festival in San Francisco in January of 1966. I was there; I helped create it.

Earlier, gatherings to demonstrate against the war, peace groups, people going to the south to join MLK and the Civil Rights activities and some of them being murdered were all public, but which of these can signal the beginning? Why not go with just saying the Sixties?

At this time, the public word was that marijuana was dangerous, illegal, and would lead to stronger stuff. But no, it turned out we were being lied to. Having just come out of the constricting, boring 1950s, and having had parents who taught me about “straight and crooked thinking,” I recognized the crooked thinking that lying reveals. What else were the establishment folks concealing, even from themselves? I asked myself. That sentiment later expressed itself as “Don't trust anyone over 30” - one of our youthful errors.

And then there was LSD. My first encounter with it was late in 1962 or '63. The veils really dropped on any question taken into an LSD journey, if one was careful of “set and setting” as Alpert and Leary suggested. I found it very simple to cull the mainstream cultural download from what I believed in my core being. And that was revolutionary.

Later on, maybe a decade later, I found that the usefulness of LSD had paled, mainly because my primary questions about existence had been satisfactorily answered. I never used it for purposes other than inner discovery, and with a sense of the sacred. The shadow side of the psychedelic drug discoveries was, of course, the proliferation of other drugs that provided an escape and diminution of pain rather than illumination, resulting in the worldwide problem with addictive opiates and related substances.

Spiritual encounters, seeking, and other practices also delivered people to the door to one's deeper being. There was something electric in the air, and it touched everything. Consider the music: folk music, especially Joan Baez and the protest songs that soon emerged; Bob Dylan, whose first songs were inspired by Woody Guthrie; popular music, especially the Beatles brought a range of expression; and rock 'n' roll itself with its irrepressible beat and mind-blowing lyrics. These sounds and ideas permeated the consciousness of the nation - and the planet. How could it not change?

Consider the popular slogans of the times:

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (Ram Dass): While “Turn On” did mean marijuana to many people, it really meant to find your passion - to get involved with life, not to be passive.

“Tune in” meant to get connected to what was going on around you: cooperate with others. “Drop Out” did often mean dropping out of school or the corporate world or whatever wasn't serving you, but it really meant leaving pre-programmed ideas behind and thinking for yourself, finding your own truth.

“Question Authority” meant to discover what the deeper meaning and deeper truth was, to find the truth and justice in any given path or action.

Many of the early counterculture folks, like Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass) were serious thinkers with desires to improve life through whatever their particular medium was. In small towns like Bolinas or Sonoma's west county, very bright people were looking at the potential problems of and fixes for climate change, pesticide use, resource diminution, war, overconsumption, environmental degradation. They were seeing the need for recycling, social reforms, alternative energy, green building, new approaches to human relations and alternative healthcare, just to name a few. Independence, creativity, sharing and caring, loving and natural processes were primary values.

In some cases, real progress was made, that we still see evolving today:

-Various freedom-based movements like the civil rights movement and the peace and anti-Vietnam War efforts contributed to an overall free speech movement, especially on college campuses. Along with student revolutionaries and student rights, this gave rise to the next iteration of women's rights leading to the first effort to pass the ERA in 1971, followed by women's consciousness-raising groups and feminist thought.

-Recognition of the needs and humanity of diverse groups emerged in the farmworkers' rights movement lead by Cesár Chavez and Dolores Huerta; the Gray Panthers and Black Panthers; efforts toward gender and gay rights; an appreciation of cultural differences and “work of the hands” - arts and crafts from around the world; recognition of the importance of First Peoples' values and culture.

- The sexual revolution was probably instigated by the advent of oral contraceptives in 1960, then was folded into women's and gay rights movements that eventually included bisexual, transgender and now intersexed and fluid gender rights. Of course, there is often a shadow side such as the free love backfire of the spread of the AIDS epidemic.

- Concerns for the planet showed up in myriad ways. Ecology was a word we learned the meaning of; we became enmeshed in the many environmental movements, including a deep concern for clean air and water and organic farming and gardening practices. Back-to-the-land folks created off-the-grid communes and cooperative communities that experimented in a variety of lifestyles, often including self-sufficiency and voluntary simplicity. Many of these values still exist and new improvements are being explored today. Hardworking, dedicated folks put recycle/reduce/reuse ideas firmly in place. This had a parallel incentive to reduce our country's heavy consumerism and waste, now still a major social issue. Alternative energy was and continues to be deeply explored as a way toward planetary energy sustainability. Alternative technologies for green building and architecture got a great start with Lloyd Kahn's book “Shelter.”

- Self-expression, Creativity, and Spiritual Exploration burgeoned as the counterculture showed respect for everyone's talent and right to personal. This was evidenced by a fascination with Eastern thought, religions and travel. Indian gurus were made popular through the Beatles' sojourn with Maharishi and others who financed their travel by bringing back handmade goods from foreign climes. Eastern philosophies and meditation, yoga, and martial arts came to America from the East. The exploration of “inner space” was aided by such people as Alan Watts and the Dalai Lama and the advent of the human potential movement.

- Alternative health and medical practices like acupuncture and Chinese herbology as well as home-grown herbal medicine and herbalist practitioners heralded a wide variety of bodywork, psychological and sociological modes which continue to evolve today. Midwives regained an important role in helping to birth babies in a time-honored “women's way.” Today midwives are held in regard in hospital settings, providing many women with a natural, simpler, and easier birthing experience while also having the safety of modern medicine as backup in difficult situations. Psychologists, not just psychiatrists, hung out their shingles to aid ordinary people with their psychological integration.

- Artistry and self-expression has had its boundaries enlarged significantly. Using a variety of materials, not just paint and canvas or metal and sculpture, now qualifies as “fine art.” My book “Native Funk & Flash” introduced the notion that anyone could be an artist simply by creatively repairing favorite clothes by embroidering, patching or painting them. This could not only make them beautiful and meaningful to you or as gifts of love and affection, but often served as an introduction to others, displaying who you were and identifying you as “tribe.” And it served the anti-consumerism impulse. This clothing easily morphed into the art wearables world we still celebrate today, not to mention the style that has persisted of pre-stressed, torn and worn-through denim.

- Rock 'n' Roll, world music, folk and New Age music were all let loose. John Cage squeaked chairs across a stage; Windham Hill artists flinched at the New Age label but loved that there was a place for their new sounds to hold sway; African, Native American, Irish, and other traditional sounds could be heard over the radio; and the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane, belted their rock 'n' roll over the airwaves for generations to come. Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell gave new meaning to folk and rock music: we no longer were restricted to hearing only popular, classical or jazz choices.

This just skims the top of what came out of the 1960s explosion from black and white into full color, marked on our timeline by the Summer of Love. What would our world be like without all this change?

We wanted to turn on the world and find the life at the center. The passion. The good. We were trying to do the hard work of finding a better way to truth, love and peace.

Yes, we did change the world. Yes, there was and still is opposition; not everyone wanted to leave the 1950s behind, and a true cultural shift on a global scale will certainly take many generations. Let us pray that civilization gets to continue long enough to see the creation of gentler, kinder and more caring cultures, worldwide, based on love over fear.

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In-Between Worlds: Remembering life as a young teen in the North Bay in 1967

By Maureen “Mo” Hurley

You know the Robin Williams line-even if he didn't say it: if you remember the 60s, you weren't really there. But we were really there.What my classmate Robin should have said: Remembering the ‘60s is tricky, at best.

I grew up between worlds and times in the San Geronimo Valley, a rural enclave in West Marin that was rapidly becoming an alternative lifestyle destination. A lot of interesting folks who shunned the cities and suburbs wound up in The Valley, as it was called. It was an uneasy marriage of radically different worlds.

I attended Lagunitas School District-aka, LSD. I was straddling the old redneck ranchers' world and living with my Irish Victorian granny, and the Flower Children dancing in the dawn of a New Age-and me in the middle, trying to toe the mutable line. Not an easy task.

During the late 60s, I attended Sir Francis Drake High School-the only high school in the nation to shut down a local draft board. We were a pretty radicalized group of kids.

Our student body president was Jared Rossman from Fairfax. That last name should ring a bell-as his older brother, Michael Rossman, was a key figure in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964.

On the eve of The Summer of Love, we shut down the San Rafael Draft Board, we made the cover of Time Magazine and the 6 O'Clock news. And we gave the FBI a new client list.

When the school district took away our buses, I was the roadside kid hitching home from school. This is how I met most of the rock musicians of that era, Ken Kesey and his cast of Merry Pranksters, and boarded Further, etc.

During the Summer of Love, I was pretty straight, I was also very young. I was 14-a mere ‘tweenie. Between worlds. What I remember most from that era was the original 1967 “A Gathering of the Tribes Human Be- In” in Golden Gate Park. It was a protest gathering to counter a new California law to make LSD illegal. Timothy Leary famously said from the stage, “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and then came tripping out through the audience to give my mom a hug.

A Beatnik and a Project Artaud painter, my mom Maureen Reilly was one of the first artists to embrace the hippie movement. She was at the epicenter of The Summer of Love. Mom dragged me through the Haight early and often.

Sometimes our worlds intersected. I was a wide-eyed kid trying to take it all in. A vicarious bystander.

Sure, there was fallout, growing up like that in uncharted territory. But I survived the social revolution more or less intact. I didn't know it at the time, but I was meeting the future mentors of our generation: Richard Alpert “Ram Dass”), Allen Ginsberg, who chanted mantras, Gary Snyder, Lenore Kandel, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jerry Rubin. Most of the bands who played in the parks were our near neighbors in West Marin: Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

For some reason, although we lived in the epicenter of this sociological turmoil, it's hard to write about it. So, from time to time I whittle away at it, in search of the through line. Memory's always a work in progress.

I told former Sonoma County poet, Colorado Arts Commissioner Art Goodtimes, a mushroom aficionado, that I had a wild mother who claimed I was an amanita child. As if that explained things. We laughed and blamed the drugs.

I was living among this out in rural western edge of the county and commuting into the suburbs to go to school, holding onto a dual life between worlds, while most of my friends were defecting, tuning in and dropping out, and running off with bands or the circus. It was some crazy times. Somehow we grew up between the Be-in, The Summer of Love, and the Kent State Massacre.

This was our legacy.

Yes, we were really there. And we do remember. Robert Frost wrote: The best way out is always through. We survived the ‘tween years-we could see no other way out but through. What a long, strange trip it's been.

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San Francisco Summer: ‘a new blend of Eden and utopia'

By Ronald Kinkaid

I was a 16-year-old high school student living in Santa Barbara County during the summer of 1967. Between listening to replays of the Beatles' “All You Need Is Love,” I heard that there was a new blend of Eden and utopia happening in San Francisco. For some reason that I would not repeat today as a parent or grandparent, my mother loaned me the old family Ford sedan and reluctantly gave me her blessing to have a short vacation in the fabled city of San Francisco.

So I packed light and drove north in one day with my friend Charlie R. We parked the car on Stanyan Street and sleep in it at night despite being surrounded by sights and sounds that went on 24 hours - flashing lights, noisy vehicles, boisterous people, fighting dogs, blaring music. During the day, despite being jaded from lack of sleep, we walked endlessly up and down Haight Street, about a mile in all. Unless you actually lived in the Haight-Ashbury, that's what you did. Maybe we were looking for John Lennon or George Harrison who - word was - paid a visit to the Haight-Ashbury that summer.

To a new arrival there, it felt like you were in a foreign bazaar - new sights all the time. The street was packed with people of every dress and description from every part of the U.S., the sidewalks so crowded that people spilled out onto the street. The Haight Street vehicle traffic inched slowly past everyone, lots of it “straight” people coming from around the Bay Area just to gawk at the “freaks.” There were even bus lines offering tours of the Haight Ashbury, like a shuttle going through the San Francisco zoo taking in the exotic animals. The people on the street would ham it up for the tourists to confirm their worst fears on the fall of America.

In the exuberant spirit of the time there were places to get free clothes and medical care. People were fed for free in the Golden Gate Park panhandle. Impromptu acoustic “bands” cropped up everywhere to entertain for free. Dozens of guitar and bongo players of varying ability sat on the sidewalk or the curbs of Haight Street playing their hearts out. People would wander in and out of the “hippie” shops - poster stores, head shops with drug paraphernalia, places with hip clothing - usually just looking. Believe it or not, you could occasionally hear new Scott McKenzie's recording, “San Francisco,” drift from an open doorway or window along with other popular songs like “The Eve of Destruction,” a tune incongruous with our Edenic venture. One night Charlie and I got into the Straight Theater on Haight Street (long since demolished) and listened to a great performance by the Charlie Musselwhite Band, light show and all.

The sleeping in the car grew old after a few nights of little sleep, so we took our sleeping bags and camped out in the open just above the carousel at the children's play area in the Golden Gate Park. Early the next morning, we woke suddenly to the sound of two car doors closing nearby. We looked down over the openings to our sleeping bags to see two SF policemen approaching us on foot. Before you could say “likety-split,” we had gathered our few items and fled into the park bushes clear out of sight. Charlie and I decided that we had seen enough of the city, Eden or not, so we got back to the car on Stanyan Street and headed south on Highway 1.

We drove past the Monterey Music Festival noticing and wondering about all the people but having no idea that we were missing some of the greatest musical performances of all time. The old Ford got us through the roller coaster drive through Big Sur, but as I neared a few blocks of my home in Santa Maria, the car brakes failed completely. The brake fluid had dried up. Luckily, I was able to coast the car to a stop at a street curb. Charlie and I looked at each other in dismay. Quite a youthful adventure! We had barely missed the trip of a lifetime - one over the awesome, high cliffs of Big Sur into the Pacific Ocean.

Ron Kinkaid is a retired teacher living in Petaluma who studies the writings of James Joyce. He taught history, social studies, language arts and drama in Mendocino and Sonoma Counties for nearly 40 years.

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Chance discoveries of now legendary musical talent

By Brad Horrall

In late August of 1967, having heard of the “be in,” my best friend, Danny, and I set out from Albuquerque for San Francisco. Between semesters at University of New Mexico, we had worked all summer; Danny as a mechanic in his dad's auto air-conditioning shop and me as a mechanical draftsman for a company under contract to the Federal Government.

We planned to be gone for two weeks, returning in time for the fall semester. We took a circuitous route, going through Las Vegas, Bryce and Zion Parks and Lake Tahoe. When camping in Bryce we met a family who invited us to join them for dinner. They had a son maybe three or four years younger than us. During dinner they asked where we were headed, only to find out they were from El Cerrito, which bordered Berkeley. And, they had a rental house that was vacant while some work was being done it. They offered to let us stay in the house, and a few days later when we arrived in the Bay Area, we did just that.

Our first night there the family invited us to dinner at their house that was next door to the rental. After dinner their son invited us downstairs to his room to hear some records. He played the first albums by Jimi Hendrix and by Big Brother & The Holding Company. I had never heard of either before and was just blown away.

The next night Danny and I went to The Fillmore in San Francisco. We just went; we had no idea who was playing. When we got there we discovered the headliner was Cream, supported by American Flag and Gary Burton. I had heard of Cream, but did not know their music. I did not know this was their first U.S. appearance. I did not know who Eric Clapton was. Both American Flag and Cream were amazing. Eric Clapton did none of the singing; bassist Jack Bruce did all of the vocals. And the light show behind the bands was something we had never experienced either.

The following night we were off to the Avalon Ballroom. Again, we did not know who was playing. The band was the Golliwogs. Great rock 'n' roll, I remember a very long version of “Who Do You Love.” A few months later the band changed their name to Creedence Clearwater Revival. While mingling and listening to the music some guy asked me “Are you on a trip?” I said, “Wow, how did you know, we drove out here from Albuquerque.” No sooner had I uttered those words that I realized that was not the kind of trip he was talking about. Ah, such innocence.

The next day we went to Berkeley and were walking down Telegraph Avenue. We went in to Cody's Bookstore (still there today, I believe). I bought a magazine - Volume 1, Issue 1, of “Rolling Stone.” I thought it was going to be all about my favorite band, The Rolling Stones, and was disappointed it was not. If only I still had that magazine today.

While walking on Telegraph, in a window I saw a poster for a concert - Big Brother & The Holding Company in Denver, Colorado. Well, Denver is just a four-hour drive from Albuquerque. They were playing Sept. 8-9 at the Denver Family Dog. We went to that Sept. 8 show. And a couple of weeks later we went back to Denver to see the Doors.

That was my Summer of Love and my love of rock 'n' roll has never subsided.

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