40 Years of the Summer of Love and All I Got Was This Lousy Article

by Tommi Avicolli-Mecca, 2007-09-04

What do you call a bunch of pieced-together old rock and blues bands trying to recapture the glory days of their rebellious youth in front of a crowd that’s drinking designer water in plastic bottles and carrying cellphone and ipods, not to mention ATM cards? The 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco!

Four decades after a generation unleashed one of the biggest and most commercially lucrative cultural revolutions in history, the commemoration in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park pushed few limits. The most outrageous moment at the September 2 event occurred when Country Joe McDonald recreated his infamous “Give me an F, give me a U, give me a C, give me a K” chant at the opening of his popular “Fixin To Die” anti-Vietnam war song.

The difference was that he had us scream it over and over again, to break a world record for number of times the word has been repeated in a row. I think we ended up saying it 33 times. It was fun watching the discomfort on the faces of some of the family types near where I was sitting.

I didn’t stay for the whole event, but I don’t expect that anyone’s lives were changed, as they were forty years ago. Much has been said about that time in San Francisco. The reality doesn’t match the urban legend. Young people came, drawn by the promise of personal freedom and the abundance of drugs, not necessarily by an urgent need to create social change.

The Haight was overwhelmed and devastated. Thousands of young people swarmed in from all over the country with no money and no means of support. Social services, such as the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, sprang up overnight to deal with the many problems that arose. Politicians and cops freaked out big time and tried to spoil the party. In the fall, the Diggers, a group that took its name from 17th Century English anarchists, staged a mock funeral for “hippies” and “flower children.”

The 60s came crashing to a halt with the end of the Vietnam War in 1973-74. With no draft to protest, antiwar student activists found careers in corporate America. Gay Liberation and feminism, which many in the counterculture did not like, stepped to the forefront. Phil Ochs, a protest singer who gave us many a good anti-establishment song, killed himself. He was probably seeing the near future: The emergence of the first yuppies. In the 80s and early 90s, AIDS wiped out many who had swelled the Haight Ashbury, the West Village and other alternative youth gathering places.

The turbulent decade of the 60s produced many positive lasting effects. It loosened sexual mores, it gave people of color, women and queers a voice, and it opened up free speech in areas where it didn’t exist, such as on college campuses. For some of us, it changed the direction of our lives. How different my choices would have been had I not gotten involved with SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, a radical anti-war group) in 1969 and the Gay Liberation Front in 1971.

A 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love would have been more meaningful if food, water and other things were provided free (perhaps people could have been encouraged to bring items to share), if there were no ATM machines or vendors of any kind, and if people on stage did not urged the crowd to “vote for Democrats.”

Perhaps these might be good suggestions for the 50th anniversary.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical, southern Italian, working-class, atheist queer performer and writer with a website: www.avicollimecca.com