Flowers, Peace and Love

The iconic center of the Flower Power movement was the Haight Ashbury district in San Francisco, California.  By the mid-1960s, the area, marked by the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets, had become a focal point for psychedelic rock music.  Musicians and bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin all lived a short distance from the famous intersection.  During the 1967 Summer of Love, thousands of hippies gathered there.  A July 7, 1967, Time magazine cover story on The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture, and an August CBS News television report on The Hippie Temptation as well as other major media interest exposed the hippie subculture to national attention and popularized the Flower Power movement across the country and around the world. Inspired by the Beats of the 1950s, who had flourished in the North Beach area of San Francisco, those who gathered in Haight-Ashbury in 1967 were an eclectic group.  They rejected the material values of modern life; there was an emphasis on sharing and community.  A few were interested in politics; others focused on art (music, painting, poetry in particular) or religious and meditative movements.  All were eager to integrate new ideas and insights into daily life, both public and private,

The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people converged on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, initiating a major cultural and political shift.  Although hippies also gathered in major cities across the U.S., Canada and Europe, San Francisco remained the epicenter of the social earthquake that would come to be known as the Hippie Revolution.  Like its sister enclave of Greenwich Village, the city became even more of a melting pot of politics, music, drugs, creativity, and the total lack of sexual and social inhibition than it already was.  As the hippie counterculture movement came farther and farther forward into public awareness, the activities centered therein became a defining moment of the 1960s, causing numerous ordinary citizens to begin questioning everything and anything about them and their environment as a result. The term Summer of Love originated with the formation of the Council for the Summer of Love in the spring of 1967 as response to the convergence of young people on the Haight-Ashbury district.  The Council was composed of The Family Dog (a local commune of hippies), The Straight Theatre, The Diggers (a radical community-action group of activists and Improvisational actors), The San Francisco Oracle, and approximately twenty-five other people, who sought to alleviate some of the problems anticipated from the influx of people expected in the summer.  The Council also supported the Free Clinic and organized housing, food, sanitation, music and arts, along with maintaining coordination with local churches and other social groups to fill in as needed, a practice that continues today.

John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas wrote the song San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair) for his friend Scott McKenzie.  It served well to promote both the Monterey Pop Festival that Phillips was helping to organise, and to popularise the flower children of San Francisco, who came to epitomise the hippy dream.  Released on May 13, 1967, the song was an instant hit.  By the week ending July 1, 1967, it reached the number four spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States, where it remained for four consecutive weeks.  Meanwhile, the song rose to number one in the United Kingdom and most of Europe.  The single is purported to have sold over 7 million copies worldwide.

If you're going to San Francisco Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair If you're going to San Francisco You're gonna meet some gentle people there For those who come to San Francisco Summertime will be a love-in there In the streets of San Francisco Gentle people with flowers in their hair All across the nation such a strange vibration People in motion There's a whole generation with a new explanation People in motion people in motion For those who come to San Francisco Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair If you come to San Francisco Summertime will be a love-in there

Wanderin' Spirit
March, 2014
"Flowers, Peace & Love"

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