Early in August 1967, the Beatles’ George Harrison, then on a week-long visit to California, decided to pay a visit to Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. Here, guitar clutched across his chest, he is supposed to have strolled troubadour-like among the bead-strung and be-kaftaned crowd, singing the newly-written Lennon-McCartney composition ‘Baby You’re a Rich Man.’
And what did George make of the center of the West Coast hippy movement? According to the Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, who was riding shotgun, his reaction was only just short of disgust. The Haight, it soon became apparent, was simply a magnet for ‘ghastly drop-outs, bums and spotty youths, all of them out of their brains.’ Benign and enthusiastic when the Beatle began his walkabout, the mood of the crowd turned sour when he declined the offer of some STP. Shortly afterwards, Harrison and his entourage beat a hasty retreat.
One of the oddest aspects of the ‘Summer of Love’, whose half-century commemorations are already kicking into gear in America and the UK, is how quickly the bloom came off its reputation and how rapidly cultural critics changed their minds about a phenomenon that had previously been treated with a certain amount of respect.
Ominously, the detractors included not only many original hippies, convinced that by entering the mainstream media the movement had ‘sold out’, but contemporary satirists who took one look at the world of open air festivals, ‘flower power’ and psychedelic drugs and knew instinctively that they were onto a good thing.
Of all the withering send-ups included on Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only In It For The Money (1967), whose cover pastiches the Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper, perhaps the most withering of all is a song called ‘Flower Punk’, with its lines about ‘Hey punk, where you going with that button on your shirt?/I’m going to the love-in to sit and play my bongos in the dirt.’
‘Flower Punk’ ends with a monologue in which its spaced-out protagonist, avid to go ‘down to ‘Frisco and join a psychedelic band’ wonders how he’ll spend the royalties that will doubtless accrue to him when their record gets on the charts (‘No, I’ll buy a Harley Davidson’ etc).
But the suspicion that the Summer of 1967, while attracting a great deal of genuine utopian fervor, was also a smokescreen for large numbers of bandwagon-jumpers who would ultimately prove to be quite as materialistic as the society they began by condemning, went well beyond Frank Zappa. To examine the beliefs and later careers of some of the countercultural heroes of the late 1960s is an instructive business, if only because most of them turn out not to have held the views with which they were widely credited or not to have thought through the positions that their records took up.
Take, for example, one of the Summer of Love’s most successful set of spokesmen, the Jefferson Airplane. The Airplane’s songs, most of them written by Paul Kantner and/or Marty Balin, virtually seethe with anti-materialistic and world-changing sentiment. ‘We Can Be Together’ contains the lines ‘All your private property is/Target for your enemy/And your enemy is we’, while the rallying cry ‘Volunteers of America’ urges its listeners to ‘Look what’s happening out in the streets/Got a revolution, got to revolution.’
Looking back on the era from the vantage point of the early 2000s, other band members were more sceptical. ‘I don’t think there was tremendous deep thought about the situation’ bassist Jack Casady recalled, while guitarist Jorma Kaukonen reckoned songwriter Kantner to be ‘very politically naïve…I suspect that neither one of us really knew very much about what was going on.’
Other rock icons of the era merely harbored opinions that radical youth would have deeply distrusted, had they known that they existed. William Rees-Mogg, editor of the Times newspaper, who was commissioned to interview the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger for the British television programme World in Action a few days before George Harrison arrived in San Francisco, was somewhat taken aback to discover not a left-leaning communalist but ‘a rightwing libertarian…straight John Stuart Mill.’
The same point could be made of the Beatles’ John Lennon, co-author of 1967’s single most influential song, the era-defining ‘All You Need is Love.’ To be sure, Lennon enjoyed a militant early 1970s phase, when he was nearly kept out of the US as a subversive, but he reacted to the political turmoil of 1967/8 by writing ‘Revolution’ (‘But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow’) and spent the last few years of his life happily buying up real estate in Manhattan’s Dakota Building which he inhabited with his wife, Yoko Ono.
As for the music in which the ideological underpinnings of the Summer of Love found expression, this, by the end of the 1960s, had been presented with a stark choice. Either it could remain self-consciously low-key, communal and self-sustaining, or it could ally itself with big business. With a few gallant exceptions, who attempted to stay true to their original ideals, it chose the latter.
In fact, the corporate rock and roll that came to dominate the western music scene from the early 1970s onwards may be seen as libertarian capitalism in one of its purest forms, in which every sinew is stretched in identifying a product and shaping it for public consumption, marketing and distributing it in such a way as to achieve maximum returns, harnessing the power of an economic system designed to facilitate its success.
As Neal Schon of the multi-platinum ‘70s group Journey once put it: ‘You start a business in America and America works with you. We’re a trucking business as well as light and sound, and we’re into real estate.’ None of this, naturally, is to mock the bygone radicals who went on to make such a killing from consumer capitalism – Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols promoting butter (or most recently Brexit) or Iggy Pop featuring in car adverts.
Livings need to made, and how many rock stars have access to the average CEO’s index-linked pension? But to look back on the Summer of Love is instantly to become aware of a cultural movement that was warped and commercialized almost before it started, that rapidly metamorphosed into the thing it began by wanting to defy, and could hardly be accused of betraying its ideals because it barely possessed any in the first place.
In the end, it took not much more than the bat of an eye before ‘All You Need Is Love’ turned into ‘All You Need Is Cash.’
