I started hearing about the hippies in San Francisco in the
mid-1960s when I was a teenager living in New York City. I mostly knew about
the hippies from reading Ramparts, a
political and arts magazine based in San Francisco. I devoured each issue of Ramparts that arrived in the mail, with its articles and photos on the radical experiments in lifestyles taking place in the
Bay Area. I read about the collective called the Diggers distributing free food. I dug the solarized, DayGlo posters for the Fillmore Auditorium’s rock concerts
with the letters rippling like flames. I saw the long hair for women and men
and the loose-fitting garments made from paisley Indian bedspreads. The more I
saw in Ramparts and heard about on
the news, the more I was hooked. I had to experience all of it firsthand.
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| Rock poster, San Francisco, 1960s |
I was only 15, but I had a mom who was an unusual free
spirit. It didn’t take too much convincing to get her to agree to leave New
York and spend June, July, and August in San Francisco in 1967. I might be the
only person who went to the Summer of Love with his mother.
My mother, my sister, and I arrived in San Francisco in
early June with no clear idea of where we would stay. We found a hotel room
near Union Square when we first arrived, but that proved extremely expensive. Our
search in the San Francisco Chronicle for
short-term rentals didn’t yield any results. Wandering around North Beach one
day, we happened by chance to pass the office of Ramparts magazine. On an impulse we went inside and my mother asked
the receptionist if she knew of any apartments for rent for the summer. It turned
out the receptionist lived nearby on Leavenworth Street at the top
of Russian Hill, and offered to rent us her place for the summer, while she moved
in with her boyfriend. Kismet!
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| The Rogow family in 1967 |
You don’t hear much about this in the nostalgic recollections of the Summer of Love, but it turned out that
the hippie movement had pretty much peaked in San Francisco by June of 1967.
Many of the original hippies had left the increasingly violent drug scene in
the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to move to communes in the country. Haight Street itself was
bumper-to-bumper with rubbernecking tourists gawking at the latter-day hippies
who were still in town, hawking copies of the San Francisco Oracle and the Berkeley Barb alternative newspaper to sightseers. There were head
shops selling posters of Che Guevara and the guy on the Zig Zag rolling papers
package, who looked strangely alike.
We went to the opening of a show by the artists who created
the rock posters for the Fillmore Auditorium: Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso,
and others. I idolized those artists and their rippled lettering that was like
a secret code you had to learn by training your eyes to see the
negative spaces. By the Summer of Love, though, those artists were selling
their work in a fancy Union Square gallery, sitting in the back yakking about how
much they were charging for their surrealist collages.
You could smell the pot in the air in Golden Gate Park, but
beyond that, you could smell the freedom in the air. You could dress any way
you liked (although the hippie rejection of style involved a style of its own).
You could also love anyone you liked, and you could give things away for free
(definitely verboten in the consumer
culture of the U.S.A. post-World War II). At the Fillmore Auditorium, you could
dance in a strange, unchoreographed way, wheeling your arms in the air and jumping up
and down, while blobs of colored oils throbbed on the walls in a projected
light show.
I remember my mother taking me to a gay bar on Grant Street
(how many moms took their teenage sons to gay bars, especially in 1967?). We
watched as two men partner danced to the tune of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.”
I’d never seen a gay couple dance together before—that was also eye-opening. We
heard the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish playing free concerts in
the parks.
My sister briefly dated the son of Harry Bridges, the leader
of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, so a whiff of the militant
labor history of San Francisco also reached us. We socialized with the family
of Earl Conrad, a radical novelist and nonfiction writer who lived with his
wife in a very urban apartment in the Tenderloin neighborhood. We had met Earl
in New York when he was researching a book that mentioned my dad Lee Rogow, also a
writer.
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| The author Earl Conrad |
Evenings we often took the N Judah trolley all the way to
the end of the line near the beach, to watch foreign films at the now-defunct
Surf Theatre, a great old neighborhood movie house from the 1920s that showed
the innovative flicks of Bergman, Fellini, and the Italian avant-garde
directors. The impenetrable fog at night in that part of the city resembled an
apocalyptic landscape out of an Antonioni film.
That first glimpse of the West of the United States was an
eye-opener for me. It wasn’t that New York was devoid of culture and liberty—just
the opposite. But something different was happening on the West Coast, a new
kind of freedom that made for a bubbling arts and literary scene, more open to
new ideas and lifestyles and to the cultures of the Pacific Rim.
For me as a writer, that summer was formative because it
gave me the sense that the old culture and politics were crumbling,
particularly in the face of the Vietnam War and the rebellions in the ghettos
of the United States. Despite the commercialization of hippie art and fashions,
there was a shared sense that a new and more liberating culture was being
created. The literature that we read in school was fine, but it wasn’t the
fiction and poetry that the current era demanded. That was still to be
invented. The sense of openness was enormously empowering.
One thing I came to recognize only much later about the
Summer of Love and the hippie movement was that they were the continuation of
centuries of social and artistic experimentation. From the French
Enlightenment, to the commune in the Lake District that Wordsworth and Coleridge founded, to the utopian socialist philosophies and phalansteries of
the mid-nineteenth century, to the free-form designs of art nouveau, to the international
Arts and Crafts movement, to the bohemian lifestyles of the Left Bank and
Greenwich Village, to the Bengali renaissance and the mysticism of Sri Aurobindo,
the roots of the Summer of Love went very deep into global culture and history.
If many of us had known that in 1967, or been willing to
acknowledge that our New Age and New Left culture and politics were part of a
long and rich legacy that had its ups and downs throughout history, I think it
would have been easier to sustain the momentum of the 1960s for radical
political, social, and artistic change. As it was, that momentum began to
decline even as it peaked in 1968, the year that Richard Nixon was first
elected president of the United States. Very soon, there was a mass exodus from
the Counter Culture of the 1960s back toward the status quo and consumer
culture. I hope that the revival of interest in the Summer of Love will encourage new forms of social and artistic experimentation
that will continue the legacy of social, personal, and artistic transformation.
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe
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