I have fond memories of watching the Jefferson Airplane and other rock groups at free concerts in the GG Park Panhandle near Haight/Ashbury in the mid-1960s. This is before things got expensive a couple years later with paying $3.50 a ticket at Fillmore West, lol. At one free concert at GG Park, I got all the members of Grateful Dead to sign a record album cover. Those were good times, the city was clean and decent.
That lyrical section by Hunter S. Thompson——
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas