Pubdate: Sun, 20 May 2007
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2007 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: John Leland

WELCOME BACK, STARSHINE

THE Summer of Love, by most accounts, began on Jan. 14, 1967, with a 
gathering known as the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San 
Francisco, and ended on Oct. 6, with the Death of Hippie march, a 
mock funeral staged in Haight-Ashbury to tell aspiring flower 
children to stay home.

Forty years later the children are at it again, only older and more 
institutional this time. The Whitney Museum of American Art is noting 
the anniversary with "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era," 
opening Thursday. The Public Theater, which formed that summer with 
"Hair," is staging a hippie-friendly season of Shakespeare in the 
Park, with "Romeo and Juliet" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as well 
as a concert performance of "Hair" in September. Jefferson Starship, 
Quicksilver Messenger Service and other bands will renew the faith in 
July at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, where their younger selves 
performed at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival.

But the wild cards are in places like Zieglersville, Pa., where a 
three-day Session Summer of Love beer celebration will feature a 
mini-firkin fest; or at the Palms Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas, 
where the Rain nightclub will hold a three-night rave event called 
Summer of Love, the Love-In, billed as an "all-out sensory assault." 
If just thinking about these events leaves you tired, you can head to 
Starbucks for a 40th anniversary Monterey Pop CD set. (And if, like 
the squares of old, you need help with the lingo, a firkin is one 
sixth of a hogshead.)

The flowers may have faded, and rents in the Haight may have gone 
through the roof, but the Summer of Love brand continues to extend. 
Instead of aging gracefully into kitsch, it has solidified into canon.

"Why are we fascinated now?" asked Jann Wenner, 61, the editor and 
publisher of Rolling Stone, which will publish a Summer of Love 
double issue in June. "It's our youth for a great number of people, 
especially those of us who now control things."

In recent political campaigns, claim on the era's legacy has swung 
largely to conservative debunkers, who hold up the Summer of Love as 
an exercise in liberal self-absorption and a touchstone of moral 
decline. Now, with the nation again in an unpopular war, utopian 
voices are coming out again, softer in their politics but no less 
determined in their exceptionalism.

"Much about that summer, looking back, seems incredibly foolish and 
narcissistic and grandiose," said Oskar Eustis, 48, the artistic 
director of the Public Theater who was 9 in 1967 and whose parents 
took him to a demonstration at which protesters tried to levitate the 
Pentagon. "But it's not crazy to remember that we stopped the war, and we did."

In contrast to the first time around, this summer's activities will 
be spectator events, not participatory ones, replaying the Summer of 
Love as something you watch, not something you do. There will be 
comfortable seating and refreshments. And though there will likely be 
references to the current war, the art will still be fighting the 
last one, reflecting the songs and sensibilities not of the Iraq 
grunts' generation but of their parents'.

Which raises some questions: Is it possible to extract the Summer of 
Love from the distorting filter of narcissism? Or is that narcissism 
the essence of the brand, as revisionists and advertisers would have 
it? Economists use the term "survivorship bias" to describe the 
recollection of past moments by what has survived into the present, 
filtering out whatever elements did not bear fruit. For the Summer of 
Love what has survived is the music and industry it created, the 
fascination with youth culture, the now generic images of gentle 
hippies and a swirl of pretty colors that has found its home in the 
language of advertising. Some of the less institutional elements, 
like the Haight's Free Store, voluntary sweep-ins, free food-ins, the 
free health clinic and the Death of Hippie, have receded from the narrative.

Without these the Summer of Love has survived as a simple story: For 
a magical few months tens of thousands of young people left home for 
San Francisco, where they gave the nation new sounds, new pleasures 
and new styles. In went adolescent idealism and creative energy; out 
came a lifetime of ads for cars, Pepsi and retirement plans.

This story has endured so tenaciously because it played out in the 
media in real time, with a level of stage management that was as 
forward-looking as the music. To "drop out" in 1967, as Timothy Leary 
urged the crowd at the Human Be-In, meant to emerge from obscurity 
and drop in -- into a media spectacle that fascinated the country and 
a media economy that would replace manufacturing as the heartbeat of America.

 From the start the season had an official governing body, the 
Council for the Summer of Love; a hit theme song, Scott McKenzie's 
"San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)", written and 
produced by the organizers of the Monterey festival; and a television 
deal, when a young ABC executive named Barry Diller bought the rights 
to Monterey for a never-realized Movie of the Week. The council came 
up with the name Summer of Love to put a positive spin on events that 
were often portrayed negatively in the press. Almost as soon as the 
hippies hit Golden Gate Park, sightseeing companies offered guided 
bus tours of the Haight, providing tourists a look at the hairy new 
wrinkle in humanity. As a 1967 manifesto from the Death of Hippie 
proclaimed, "Media created the hippie with your hungry consent."

In this year's Summer of Love it will be clear who are the performers 
and who the spectators, where art ends and life begins. Even if you 
sing along to "Good Morning Starshine" or crash on the sidewalk 
outside the Whitney, you're still there to honor someone else's show. 
It ends when you walk out the door. If the first Summer of Love was 
about the shared exploration of possibility, conducted in the public 
eye, the anniversary demonstrates the accrued authority of the 
institutions that make this watching possible.

These institutions have not always served the art, said Christoph 
Grunenberg, curator of the Whitney's "Summer of Love" exhibition for 
the Tate Liverpool gallery, where it began in 2005. Instead, he said, 
they've enabled "a rather superficial consumption of a retro 
aesthetic, which doesn't take into consideration the motives behind 
it, the desire for liberation.

"The utopian impulse of the period is missing," he said.

The exhibition includes underground magazines, psychedelic light 
shows, album covers and posters and films of concerts, as well as 
paintings and sculptures from the '60s and early '70s. It's "the 
first serious art-historical evaluation, as opposed to something that 
has been looked at as quote unquote just popular culture," said 
Henriette Huldisch, the assistant curator in charge of installing the 
exhibition.

Mr. Grunenberg, 44, said the art has been "a victim of its own 
success at the time and tainted by its association to drug culture, 
music culture, fashion and design.

"It was unusual in that it aspired to the level of mass culture," he 
added, "and that's the cause of the suspicion that comes to 
psychedelic art. Can the light shows at a Jimi Hendrix show be art?"

Yet there were other narratives within the Summer of Love. Once the 
masses started to arrive in the Haight, some pioneers left the city 
for greener pastures. By late summer LSD gave way to speed and 
utopian seekers to ill-prepared teenage runaways, children who could 
not take care of themselves. "Most people see the Summer of Love in 
very happy terms," said Brad Abramson, vice president of production 
and programming for VH1 and an executive producer of the channel's 
"Monterey 40," a documentary about the 1967 pop festival that will be 
broadcast beginning June 16. "One thing that struck me was finding 
out what a mess it turns out to be. By the end of the summer speed 
freaks were catching and eating cats."

Mr. Wenner, who started Rolling Stone in San Francisco that fall, 
sees this narrative as a sideshow to the essence of the Summer of 
Love. For him the survivorship bias has allowed the substantive 
elements of the day to emerge from the confusion and hype. "I was 
skeptical of this invasion of the Haight-Ashbury, 
wear-flowers-in-your-hair stuff," he said. "The grungy, 
sleeping-on-the-floor-in-a-sleeping-bag lifestyle was not for me. The 
drugs were, and the music was, and the peace and love was. But the 
grungy lifestyle, which was very limited to kids coming in from out 
of town, was not for me."

The sunnier side will be on display at this year's Monterey Summer of 
Love Festival, where tribute bands, dressed up like Jimi Hendrix or 
the Byrds, will share the stage with some performers from the 
original festival, a three-day charity concert that included Hendrix, 
Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and others. Concertgoers this year 
will get Big Brother and the Holding Company without Joplin, and 
Carlton Poward performing as Hendrix: proof that nostalgia can 
conquer even death. But the commercial and canonical imperatives will 
be familiar.

A goal for the first Monterey festival was to prove that rock music 
was "an art form in the same way jazz was," said the record producer 
Lou Adler, 73, one of the organizers. "It was still looked on as a 
trend, two and a half minutes and you're out. So the idea was to do a 
festival in the same place that there was a jazz festival and a folk 
festival; that seemed to validate it."

But from the start there was distrust between the organizers, who 
came from the Los Angeles music business, and the more underground 
groups, said Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, who helped 
organize the event. "There definitely was that feeling from the San 
Francisco musicians that the Los Angeles groups were the commercial 
groups, and they were the real heart and soul," she said. "I think 
they were just jealous because we were making the money. The whole 
point, I thought, was to make hit records."

In the end of course both sides won: the industry because it sold the 
ethos of the underground and the hip bands through the growth of the 
business. The '60s culture blossomed not at the expense of its 
commercial tendencies but through them. The branding of the Summer of 
Love is not a corruption of the original moment but an impulse that 
was there all along.

Like any brand, Summer of Love nostalgia champions its own 
brandedness, or exceptionalism, separating itself to an exaggerated 
extent from what came before or after. In this separation the past is 
seen as a purer image of the present, shorn of vulgarity and invested 
with possibility. The past points to a more utopian future than the 
one it actually became.

Mr. Eustis of the Public Theater said he hoped to invoke the 
utopianism of 1967 without simply playing to nostalgia that runs on 
the desire to forget, not to remember. "Nostalgia is a corrupting 
emotion," he said. "You're imagining a lack of contradiction in the 
past. You're imagining something that wasn't true. It's a longing to 
be a child again, to have magical thinking about the world."

But he added that nostalgia could also have a "progressive aspect" 
that pushes people to think forward rather than back, to "remember 
that you can imagine a world that is different, where money didn't 
determine value, where competition wasn't the nature of human relations.

"That imagination can be powerful," he continued. "The dream is real. 
The negative aspect of nostalgia is when we want that feeling that 
everything is possible, but we don't want to do anything about it. 
That's just narcissistic. That's longing to feel important again. 
Baby boomers are very good at that."

For Michael Hirschorn, 43, executive vice president for original 
programming and production at VH1, which has built a business on the 
synthesis of youth culture and branding, the first order of business 
is to recover the music from the trappings. The channel's Monterey 
documentary, he promised, will be about that music, not peace and 
love. "The '60s always felt hokey and lame to me, so smug and 
self-important," he said. "Seeing this footage now, maybe the '60s 
and the Summer of Love can be reclaimed from its own advocates."

In the meantime issues of the underground magazine Oracle will be in 
the Whitney, and Quicksilver Messenger Service will be back at 
Monterey. And of course mini-firkins will be in Zieglersville. But 
this year's pilgrims will find less reassessment, in the sense of 
discovering something new, than the impossible promise of recapturing the old.

And with luck they will find some good music and art, along with more 
kitsch than anyone seems to want to acknowledge. To celebrate that, 
there's Stanley Donen's 1967 classic "Bedazzled," with Dudley Moore 
and Peter Cook. It's newly out on DVD, and it's a trip. 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake