6. The Summer of Haight
Made Into a Monster: An Outrageous History of Rock Chapter 6
In the early spring of 1967, while Hendrix was making a legend of himself in the UK and experiencing the delights of British girls, the Doors and I rented a house in Haight-Asbury in the Bay Area of San Francisco, a couple of doors down from Jerry Garcia’s place, which later became known as the Grateful Dead House.
This neighbourly proximity was useful if we ever ran out of milk, sugar, tea bags, bread, lentils, amp leads, guitar strings, plectrums, peyote buttons, LSD blotters, magic ‘shroom dust, nutmeg or weed. I had my own room in the attic of the Doors House but was often away on business, flying around the USA or back and forth to the UK, taking care of other acts I was helping to bring on, chief among them Jimi Hendrix and Bobby Goldsboro.
Money talks and when you are getting the VIP treatment and don’t have to hang around in airports, when the Learjet is always fuelled and ready, it is amazing how quickly you can get about this little old globe of ours. Flying was a chance to get some kip, just about the only chance in those hazy, crazy days, and I’ve spent much of my life waking up thousands of miles from where I went to sleep.
I needed to get Hendrix a major American appearance, so that he could become a legend there too, so I was pleased contacts in Frisco started talking about setting up a major outdoor concert at Monterey County Fairgrounds, not too far down the coast from Frisco.
Outdoor concerts were a radical new idea made possible by better electricity generators and some bright sparky inventing the extension lead. Music was released from stuffy auditoriums out into the sunshine, the rain and the mud.
Extend the outdoor concert over a long weekend, encourage lots of silly, bohemian, communal activities on the periphery of the throbbing musical heart, particularly anything involving yoga, Indian head massage, face painting, taiko drumming, juggling and soap bubbles, make sure there is ample overpriced food and drink available, insufficient sanitation and a poorly enforced no-drugs policy, and you’ve got yourself a rock festival.
Monterey, 16-18 June 1967, has a reputation for being the first ever rock festival, but actually it was the second. The Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival took place on Mount Tamalpais, California, the week before Monterey. A person who can truthfully say they were at Monterey has very good hippie credentials, a person who can truthfully say they were at Magic Mountain has excellent hippie credentials, but a person who can say they were at both is quite simply a hippie god.
I was at Magic Mountain with the Doors and at Monterey making sure Hendrix took his rightful place in rock’s pantheon alongside Jefferson Airplane, the Who, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Otis Redding, The Mamas & the Papas, The Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel and Ravi Shankar, who blew the stoned crowd away with a nine hour performance on his large Indian banjo.
Monterey is almost as famous for who didn’t appear as who did, not that everyone who you might think ought to have appeared could have appeared as there just wasn’t time, room backstage or dollars to pay their expenses. The Beach Boys had helped set up the event but were a no-show on stage in the end as Carl Wilson was dodging the draft and Brian Wilson had a hissy fit about the crowd being more interested in British acid rock groups, even though most of the acts that performed were American.
Dylan was still recovering from a recent motorcycle accident, and in his usual stubborn manner, Berry Gordy Jr. refused to allow any Motown acts to appear, thus curtailing any major association in people’s minds between Motown and the Summer of Love. Dionne Warwick unwisely decided that a gig she had booked performing for stiffs at the Fairmont Hotel in Nob Hill, Frisco, was more important for her career than playing Monterey.
Most notable by their absence from Monterey were the Doors, especially as they had been at Magic Mountain not too many miles away only the week before, were riding high in the US charts with ‘Light My Fire’ and were the quintessential purveyors of far-out, late sixties, Californian acid-cool.
Some rock anoraks and professors of pop have argued it was my doing. That the Doors were the only act who could possibly have upstaged Hendrix, or at least monopolised the festival publicity, so I wanted them kept apart. The truth is less controversial, having nothing to do with my association with Hendrix and my efforts to break him big in America, and everything to do with Morrison’s unruly character and penchant for hallucinogenics.
To be fair, Magic Mountain was the better festival. The weather was great throughout the Summer of Love but it was particularly fantastic that mythical weekend. Clear and sunny in the high mountain air, but not too hot. It was truly beautiful up there on top of that magic peak. An intimate, not too large crowd, who had been bussed up the closed Panoramic Highway from Mill Valley, rubbed shoulders in peace and harmony with legendary musicians from Canned Heat to the Chocolate Watchband. The altitude meant that everyone was off their heads with oxygen starvation long before the tabs, pills and grass kicked in.
That weekend I really believed in the hippie dream. Believed that it was possible for people to inhabit a perpetual paradise of laying around on sunny mountain tops listening to great music, with boring, square stuff like contraception, paid employment, the economy, engineering, belief in the need for sustainable sanitation, all relegated to mere errors of an uncool, unenlightened past.
Love, music and LSD would be all humankind would ever need from now on. Love, music and LSD would be everything. Together they would do everything, including all the chores. Together they would take us to the promised land and keep us there, so long as the electricity supply held out.
The Doors performed a great set that ended with six encores of ‘Light My Fire’ and half an encore of ‘Alabama Song’ before Morrison dived off stage and was carried over the heads of the crowd to the whisky bar at the back. Jim got so totally wasted that afternoon and evening on whisky, weed, LSD, oxygen starvation and various psychotropic plants worshipped by indigenous peoples, that he finally dissolved into thin air like the Cheshire Cat, or at least that’s what those who were with him said happened.
One way or another, Jim vanished on Magic Mountain during the height of the festival. Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore were still looking for him a week later when they were supposed to be performing at Monterey. They eventually found him in the mountain shack of an ancient American Indian brujo, naked, stirring magic mushroom soup with his cock while reading a draft copy of Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.
Magic Mountain kick-started the Summer of Love in style and Monterey was a superb follow up. To promote the Monterey event John Phillips of the Mamas & Papas wrote ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’ for moustachioed Philip Wallach Blondheim III, better known as folk singer Scott McKenzie.
McKenzie’s lilting, evocative performance of ‘San Francisco’ immediately became a generational anthem, a call to restive youth all across the vast nation of America to abandon Hicksville, get themselves in motion and head to San Francisco for the love-in there, resourced only with blind optimism and flowers in their hair, flowers that generally wilted long before the youth reached the borders of California.
What curious, bored, restless, horny kid, fired up by the prospect of a West Coast love-in, the promise of a strange vibration and a new explanation of everything, could resist this call to arms, or rather this call to lay down arms and refuse to fight in the Vietnam War. Nam had gotten so crazy that it made McKenzie’s beautiful sentiment, his absurd evocation of a Californian utopia, a sunny, seaside idyll of gentle people hanging out on the streets of San Francisco with flowers in their hair and nothing in their pockets, sound positively rational.
It is easy to be cynical but at first, during the early summer of 1967, the scene in Haight-Ashbury and the wider Bay Area was genuinely totally cool and groovy. The kids who came early on were decent and polite, they really were looking for a new explanation, a better future where the social injustices they’d just learnt about at school and were blaming on their powerless, small-town, hard working parents, no longer existed. An end to war, hunger, government and work, it wasn’t much to ask. The good, bohemian people of Haight-Ashbury, who shared their idealism and believed in the same impractical dream, welcomed them in, found them rooms, fed them, clothed them and sold then good shit at cost price.
The Doors House soon got filled to the brim with guests. I had several gorgeous, if slightly grimy and odorous hippie chicks kipping on the floor of my attic room. I exacted no price for my hospitality towards them, but as one of Morrison’s entourage, a disciple of the Lizard King himself, they were keen to please me.
They adorned my room with flowers from the goldmine that was the Haight-Ashbury florist, lit patchouli josticks, brought me steaming bowls of lentil soup and pestered me to give them free lessons in tantric yoga and free love while smearing my private parts with tiger balm. How could I refuse, this was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and it was only right that love and generosity should flow like a silken stream from the cup of the water-bearer Ganymede.
We christened the vast, super-king-size water bed I had installed The Crystal Ship and we floated together on it through long, drowsy, stoned afternoons to the sound of the Incredible String Band and Frank Sinatra, enclosing each other in the gentle rain of our free love, our unwashed, au naturel bodies giving off an odour of incense and damp hay. The mirror on the ceiling reflected back an imagine reminiscent of Klimt’s ‘The Virgins’, but as LSD taught us, appearances can be deceptive.
We would stir in the early evening and watch the hazy sun sinking in the sea while sharing a large communal bowl of lentil soup, brown rice, flax seeds and Jerry Garcia’s home-baked wholemeal bread. We would throw on our flower power shirts and harem pants, that we never thought to wash even before the water supply became intermittent, and drift out into the heart of Haight in our love beads and braided wristbands, tripping along on our filthy bare feet to discover what was happening at the latest happening or love-in.
If there is one thing I’ve learnt in my long career it’s that most things that start of good become victims of their own success. This is certainly true of many rock stars I’ve known, who tread that well worn path from youthful optimism and creativity, to superstardom, to a little something to keep them going after the gig, to repeated visits to rehab, to choking to death on their own vomit in the penthouse of a Las Vegas hotel while attempting to snort cocaine from the thighs of a bevy of high-class call girls. Rock ‘n’ roll suicide sounds like ‘the way to go’ but I assure you it isn’t.
Like a spoilt rock star on the road to excess, the Summer of Love certainly became a victim of its own success. Like any great party or destination that is too widely publicised it got ruined by sheer weight of numbers placing unbearable strain on finite resources. By the late summer of ‘67 hundreds of thousands of unprovisioned, unresourceful, unhinged hippies had descended on Haight-Ashbury. There was nowhere left to put them up, there was not enough food to share around and the water supply and the sewers simply couldn’t cope.
Haight began to resemble a Third World refugee camp, only less organised. A migrant camp in the grip of a major public health crisis. Those that didn’t contract pneumonia from sleeping rough, malnutrition and smoking too much weed, became riddled with one or more of the sexually transmitted diseases that throughout human history have been given away free with unprotected free love, or paid-for love for that matter: gonorrhoea, genital herpes, genital warts, chlamydia, syphilis, hepatitis A to Z, bubonic plague, ebola and motaba.
The flowers and patchouli oil were no longer enough to hide the rancid stench of body odour: a mixture of dried excrement from un-wiped asses (obviously toilet paper ran out), cold sweat from bad gear and rotting flesh from dirty needles, untreated cuts and rampant STDs. Locals who were not hippies, who had nonetheless been tolerant in a broadly liberal, anti-Republican, anti-Vietnam War kind of way, secretly began to consider calling in the US Air Force to cleanse the place with a napalm strike. ‘Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that.’
Worst of all, the LSD and weed began to run out, meaning everyone was in imminent danger of finally tuning into Reality FM and realising what a load of bollocks it all was and what a shithole Haight-Ashbury had become.
The LSD and weed was replaced by filthy base-speed and dirty brown heroin cut with strychnine and nuclear waste, and for the first time ever the Doors and I had to get tight with our quality, personal stash. I imported what LSD and weed my contacts could lay their hands on and made a mint doing it as prices rocketed, but the Summer of Love had caused a national recreational drugs shortage, from New York to LA, from LA to New York.
As the number of people at the Summer of Love party increased exponentially so did the number of badass, unsavoury characters who turned up in Haight to cruise the strip and prey upon the middle-class naivety of the hippies, particularly the hordes of kindly hippie girls who knew nothing about the evils of the real world, didn’t want to know, and were therefore destined to learn the hard way.
With increasing desperation, through increasingly strained smiles, the hippies still tried to push the whole love everyone, help everyone, trust everyone vibe for all it was worth, in the vain hope that being unbearably nice all the time would solve every mounting problem.
But the hippies were now trying to sell that hopeful, idealistic vision to the likes of charismatic cult leader, psychopath and singer-songwriter, Charles Manson, who was intent upon recruiting them into his notorious Manson Family and brainwashing and abusing them into committing mass murder in the name of peace and racial purity.
In truth, the hippies didn’t need Manson to prey upon them, they got pretty good at doing that to each other. In the push for social equality, racial equality and drugs equality (everyone having the same amount of free, good quality stash) they forgot about sexual equality. The hypocrisy of free everything, including free love, was that it became an excuse, a justification, for the exploitation of women.
Stoned, gullible hippie chicks, keen to please everyone and say yes to everything, were passed around like sexual spliffs among largely white, largely middle-class, male-chauvinist hippie blokes keen to keep the patriarchy of their despised fathers alive despite their new-age, egalitarian, anarcho-syndicalist bullshit. When the hippie chicks weren’t being shagged ragged by all and sundry in the name of a brighter, fairer future for humankind, they were making herbal tea and rolling joints for smug, bearded-wonder hippie pricks who sat around strumming mandolins as they discussed how to end the Vietnam War, further the cause of the civil rights movement and overthrow capitalism.
It was even worse out in the agrarian hippie communes where lazy, arrogant, heavily bearded, often naked, predatory hippie men, who saw themselves as cult-leaders and visionaries, demanded that their shared womenfolk singlehandedly rear the hippie babies that inevitably appeared while also toiling in the fields and woods digging ditches, chopping logs, making pots, whittling spoons and growing organic vegetables without the aid of artificial fertilisers. As my good friend, the radical feminist Robin Morgan wrote in 1970 in ‘Goodbye to All That’, her explosive attack on the ‘male-left’:
Goodbye to Hip culture and the so-called Sexual Revolution, which has functioned toward women’s freedom as did the Reconstruction toward former slaves—reinstituting oppression by another name.
Was I as bad as these hippie male-chauvinists you may ask? Well, I never made my girls do anything they didn’t want to do, and around me, with my considerable wealth and resources, there was no hard labour and ample contraception.
Above all, I wasn’t a hypocrite, as I never really bought into the credulous hippie dream anyway. I just loved the way those guys partied. Growing your own vegetables on a non-commercial basis, unless society and the farming industry has collapsed, is for sad twats, and anyone who thinks that humankind will ever live together in peace and harmony is a bad student of history and a worse student of human nature. Not least, I prefer down to Earth builder’s tea to all that herbal and Earl Grey crap.
By October 1967, the Diggers, who believed that all property is theft and that if everything is free then nobody has to work for a living, declared ‘the Death of Hippie’, holding a funeral in Haight in honour of its demise. Hippies were to be replaced by Yippies, members of the Youth International Party, a radically youth-orientated and countercultural revolutionary offshoot of the free speech, anti-war, anti-money and legalise marijuana movements.
The Diggers politics was based on very selective, very stoned readings of Marxism for Morons by the young peace campaigner, revolutionary, terrorist sympathiser and VSO youth worker, Jeremy Corbyn. They were, however, right about one thing, that Hip culture, particularly in Haight, had become a clichéd freak show.
Hip culture had become a tourist attraction. Middle America was driving into Haight for the weekend in their station wagons to view the hippies as though they were animals in a zoo. Tourists could buy fake hippie beards at the head shops and boutiques on Haight Street along with all the other by now mass-produced, made in Hong Kong, hippie paraphernalia. The parody-hippies started to look more like hippies than the real hippies, who now mostly looked like what they mostly were, hobos, winos and junkies.
The Doors and I had a serious, private meeting, where only coffee and cigarette consumption was allowed. We made a unanimous decision to get the hell out of Haight. The only good drugs around were ours, Garcia’s home-baked wholemeal bread wasn’t what it used to be, the water supply was intermittent and an outbreak of cholera seemed imminent. Above all, Haight was no longer cool, and the Doors just had to be where it was cool.
So, with cold, sudden fury we quit our house in Haight, leaving it to the Yippies, paying their rent until the end of the year. We quit those strange days in Frisco, before they destroyed our casual joys, and headed south along the Pacific coast, back to the Doors traditional base of LA where the guys immediately started working on their third album, Waiting for the Sun.
It was a smart move. By the late summer of 1968 the first track on that album, ‘Hello, I love You’ was top of the US Singles Chart. It was the perfect million-selling launch pad for the Doors conquest of the UK in early September and their legendary all-night gigs alongside Jefferson Airplane at London’s Roundhouse, 6-7 September, where once more Jim got his king snake out to rapturous applause.