Posted on 05/28/2007 3:25:01 PM PDT by Chi-townChief
The flowers that they wore in their hair have long since wilted, but the generation that came of age in the 1960s will spend the coming months recalling a summer four decades ago, when rock music, drugs and sexual liberation fused to create the Summer of Love.
From New York, where Janis Joplin's psychedelic Porsche is on display at the Whitney Museum of Art, to the Bay area, where Joplin's band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, will play at an anniversary tribute to the Monterey Pop music festival, the calendar will be flipped back to an earlier time that, in some ways, foreshadows the present:
*A Texan -- Lyndon Johnson -- was president.
*American troops were fighting an increasingly unpopular war.
*In California, the epicenter of the Summer of Love, an actor -- Ronald Reagan -- had recently been elected governor.
The events for the 40th anniversary -- a mark not usually celebrated as noisily as a 25th or 50th anniversary -- might reflect the fact that the Baby Boomers who were teenagers or young adults in the summer of 1967 are now well into their 50s or 60s, and they don't want to wait another 10 years to bask in the memories of their youth.
"It was a very special moment of optimism and idealism," said Amalie R. Rothschild, a photographer who amassed an archive of 20,000 photos of the era's rock musicians, mainly from their performances at the legendary Fillmore East concert hall in New York's East Village.
But the similarities between 1967 and 2007 could be an equally important factor, said Jason Fine, deputy managing editor of Rolling Stone, which published its first issue in November 1967 and is celebrating its anniversary with three issues, including one devoted to the Summer of Love ...
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
The ones who did not change (at least not inside) are now running the show. Government and corporations are dominated by them. That’s why we’re now in such a world of hurt. And it will only get worse over the next ten years - very few retire early.
They will drive us into ruin. They will cause the next election to be won by the Left. Great War comes after that.
“Everybody goes through their own ‘Age of Aquarius’ at some point.”
I have no idea what this means, so I guess I didn’t. LOL!
I welcome discussion of the Summer of Love. It offers an opportunity to discuss how much these idiots screwed up the world in the intervening 40 years.
The movement came to its logical end at Altamont, with the Hells Angels murdering a black man while the Stones sang "Sympathy for the Devil."
It's funny, my wife is five years older than me, and fondly remembers the flower power, hippy-dippy, peace and love '60s crap. I remember the darker end, when Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath constituted the unofficial jr. high religion.
I also remember my dad calling hippies, 'beatniks.' It was like, soooo embarassing. 8-)
Other fond elementary school memories: an argument in second grade over how to draw a peace sign correctly; an argument over whether "psychedelic" was a color; Yellow Submarine lunch boxes; Space Food Sticks.
‘All of these 50-65 year-old hippies running around is probably a sight you don’t wanna see.’
The irony of course is found in the slogan of the times.
‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty’
Absolutely.
Saw that too. It was great. That's more of what I remember as a kid.
I remember being in the emergency room getting stitches in the early '70s. I remember the sound of a woman screaming. Several firemen were trying to keep her on the gurney. God knows what she was on.
People forget that OD-ing was invented in the '60s.
I hope my 12 year old is not a born again hippie. She is always doing cartwheels instead of walking.
Awesome ... :)
It was really remarkable in the difference between the comments of the law enforcement folks, vs. the free love hippies. The filth, crime, etc. was rather frightening. I never wanna live with the society those hippies crave.
“It’s actually sad that such a large group of people still identify with that era.”
Yeah, that whole time was a liberal free for all, made irresistible to stupid people partly because of the music and partly because of the slyly self-congratulatory pseudo-philosophy “I want peace and love for the whole world, man”. (Translation - “I want sex and dope for me, man”). I grew up in California in the 60’s but neither I nor any of my 8 siblings fell for the drugs, free love or any of the other crap (although we still play the music to this day). Weird, huh?
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