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 ...
Smelly hippie alert!
I thought they were nuts then and my opinion has not changed.
My parents got married that summer. They are still together.
Don’t much care about the goings on of the summer of love, but 1967 produced some of the best music of all time! 1966-1967, the best years in rock history, IMO!
That was my first thought. No mention of the smell.
My boys had grown very tired over the years hearing their dad express his "less than flattering" opinions about hippies.
Wish we could have dropped 'em on Hanoi instead of bombs...
All that sex and all those drugs. (huge sigh of nostalgia)
Unfortunately, I was in college at a socially backward engineering school in Philadelphia and was in ROTC. The best slogan I could muster was, "Make love and war."
I envied the hippies for their clothes, long hair, free sex, drugs and attitude. But they were getting far more sex than I was -- and I've never forgiven them for that.
I think ‘54 to ‘63 were.
I see the people that era produced and I just shake my head.
Oh, my Dad didn't care about them either.
"The colors, man! The Colors!!"
I wonder if that is why I hate hippies so much?
I don't know how old you are. I'm 56. Everybody goes through their own "Age of Aquarius" at some point.
The important thing about all this is at what point do you decide to give up the narcissitic beliefs of youth and begin the true journey of life through all its stages?
Some people never "grow up"
FMCDH(BITS)
+1
Well said.
Some of the best times of my life.
THEN LOVE
Yes it did! Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow LP is one of my all time favorite albums. Great stuff!
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