Rockument-Rise and Fall of the Haight-Ashbury

The Rise and Fall
of the
Haight-Ashbury

As the sixties ended, Janis Joplin dropped out. In the nineties, Jerry Garcia knocked on heaven's door. Both were unwilling icons of the hippie era, cultural ambassadors of good will from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury to places like the Tonight Show, The Dick Cavett Show, the Playboy Mansion, Wall Street, Monterey Pop, Altamont, Carnaby Street, Amsterdam, the slow train across Canada, the ballrooms across the U.S., and ultimately, the pearly gates.

From 1964 to 1968, there swelled a gigantic wave of cultural and political change that swept first San Francisco, then the whole United States, and then the world. What was fermenting in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco was a powerful brew that would ultimately stop a war.

Play Haight-Ashbury CD-ROM movie trailer

As any history book will tell you, the Haight's popularity grew as the Beat Generation (inspired by Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, etc.) in San Francisco was dying out. Many of the beats crossed over, but a younger generation attracted to the bohemia of the Beat Generation gravitated to the Haight-Ashbury district, where the rents were cheap. Many were students at nearby University of San Francisco, UCSF, and S.F. State University. Others were musicians, philosophers, artists, poets, apartment-dwellers, panhandlers, and even future CEOs of companies such as Pepsi, the Gap, Smith-Hawken, Lotus, and Rolling Stone magazine.

While the Haight-Ashbury eventually became known as the center for hippies, acid, and acid rock music, it was also the center of many artistic efforts, including painting, poetry, performance art, comics, posters, and literature of all kinds. The San Francisco Oracle, true to its name, was one of the first underground papers and the first psychedelic newspaper, and it spread the word of change throughout the hip community.

"The Summer of Love was the peak of the Haight Ashbury experience," wrote founding editor Allen Cohen in his essay on the Summer of Love. "Over 100,000 youth came to the Haight. Hoards of reporters, movie makers, FBI agents, undercover police, drug addicts, provocateurs, Mafioso and about 100,000 more tourists to watch them all followed in their wake."

Excerpt from the Haight-Ashbury CD-ROM

Raechel Donahue, the First Lady of San Francisco FM rock radio (audio)

Raechel Donahue on the Haight-Ashbury's art and literature (audio)

Raechel Donahue on the Oracle and the community (audio)

Excerpt from the Haight-Ashbury CD-ROM

Human Be-In

The various youth movements came together in one particular event, the Human Be-In in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, in January of 1967. Allen Cohen, co-founder and one of the editors of the S.F. Oracle, was one of the organizers of this event, billed as The Gathering of the Tribes, in a "union of love and activism." This event is still celebrated today, in the form of the Digital Be-In.

Allen Cohen, editor of the Oracle, listing the bands that played at the Human Be-In (audio)

Allen Cohen describes the impact of the Human Be-In (audio)

Timothy Leary's speech at the Human Be-In (audio)

Timothy Leary at the Human Be-In (video)

Excerpt from the Haight-Ashbury CD-ROM

At the first Human Be-In, the San Francisco bands played, including Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Poets Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Lenore Kandel read, chanted and sang. Timothy Leary gave his most memorable speech, telling everyone to "turn on, tune in, and drop out!"

Video Excerpt on Happenings and the Human Be-In, from "It Was 20 Years Ago Today" directed and narrated by John Sheppard, researched by Colin Bell (with Derek Taylor), and produced by Rod Caird, Simon Albury and John Sheppard for Granada Television (see Rockument's San Francisco 1960s playlist on YouTube):

Timothy Leary was one of many important speakers of that special day, in which the free speech and radical left movements of Berkeley, represented by Jerry Rubin, combined with the lifestyle, poetry, arts, and music of the hippies, represented by Michael Bowen and Allen Cohen, and forged bonds with the Diggers, who were the social conscience and backbone of the Haight, while the Grateful Dead played "Morning Dew".

Video Excerpt on Vietnam Resistance, Allen Cohen, the S.F. Oracle, the Grateful Dead, and the Death of Hippie from "It Was 20 Years Ago Today" documentary, directed and narrated by John Sheppard, researched by Colin Bell (with Derek Taylor), and produced by Rod Caird, Simon Albury and John Sheppard for Granada Television (see Rockument's San Francisco 1960s playlist on YouTube):

Haight-Ashbury Music and Poster Art

The music of the Haight-Ashbury is special for me. I grew up in the Sixties, and some of these artists and musicians were my heroes, in the true meaning of the term. They stuck their necks out and risked everything to bring us this music.

The Haight-Ashbury's music scene thrived and continues to shine like a beacon of the psychedelic age, as everyone now knows the music of the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Quicksilver, the Steve Miller Band, and friends from Berkeley including Creedence Clearwater Revival and Country Joe and the Fish, and many other lesser-known but amazingly talented bands. And just about all of them owe their existence to the legendary, nearly-forgotten, first acid-rock-western band, the Charlatans. The first rock poster was drawn by George Hunter and Mike Ferguson of the Charlatans for their shows at the Red Dog Saloon. Wes Wilson, a printer and artist, developed many of the motifs of the early posters along with Alton Kelley, Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin.

Many of the poster artists cranked out poster and handbill designs quickly for hastily-scheduled concerts at the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms. And yet, despite (or perhaps due to) the quick work and druggy atmosphere, the poster art of this period represented the pinnacle of 20th Century poster art, and the innovations inspired a cascade of rock posters and concert handbills produced all over the country by many brilliant artists.

Interview Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead in the Haight-Ashbury, 1967 (CBS News)

Since 1965, the Grateful Dead has been a focal point for acidheads and fringe lunatics, including geniuses, both inside and outside the counterculture. As the Warlocks, the band played up and down the Peninsula south of S.F. and became the main attraction in a series of Acid Tests put on by Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, featuring Neal Cassady. The Acid Tests evolved into the Trips Festival, and the Warlocks changed their name to the Grateful Dead. Over its career spanning three decades, the Dead would extend its repertoire to include many different musical idioms, and would bring its wild carnival and entourage to cities across America and Europe, but throughout it all, the band's music would remain rooted in what was eventually called the "San Francisco Sound".

Full Video: The Hippie Temptation (CBS News): CBS TV Documentary about the Grateful Dead and the growing hippie scene in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, narrated by Harry Reasoner (see Rockument's San Francisco 1960s playlist on YouTube):

As the Dead honed their chops playing R&B cover tunes and old-timey jug band and folk songs bracketing wild jazz-inspired improvisational excursions involving feedback and heavy air, the Haight-Ashbury grew around them as a community of like-minded freaks. The Dead at the time of Anthem of the Sun and Live Dead was somewhat bipolar, mixing esoteric jazz-inspired improvisational runs with solid but spaced-out R&B dance music.

Amazon.com: Anthem of the Sun
iTunes: Anthem of the Sun

The Dead's sound, fury, and majesty, and its synchronicity with the psychedelic experience, is encapsulated in one hastily assembled album released in 1968, Anthem of the Sun. Mixing live performances and studio sessions together into a sound collage, the Dead invented a new vocabulary for polyrhythmic psychedelic jamming. "We used to believe that every place we played was church," said Phil Lesh to David Gans, host of a syndicated radio show about the Dead. "But the core of followers is not the reason it feels like church; it's that other thing, 'it' [inspiration, grace, transcendence]." [McNally, Dennis; A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead]

Excerpt of "The Other One" by the Grateful Dead (audio)

Jerry Garcia on the Haight-Ashbury experimental lifestyle (audio)

The Dead released Live Dead in 1969, and it would turn out to be among the great live albums of the history of popular music. Taken from shows in January, 1969 at the Avalon Ballroom and February at the Fillmore West, in S.F., the album presents the band's first transcendental jam sequence, "Dark Star" -- "St. Stephen" -- "The Eleven" -- "Turn On Your Lovelight".

Amazon.com: Live Dead
iTunes: Live Dead

The version of "Dark Star" (Garcia/Hunter) on Live Dead has been a touchstone for enlightenment, a catalyst for mind expansion, and a host of other exuberant descriptions for a spiritual experience that can't be adequately described. There is no doubt that L.S.D. provided a catalyst for this experience, but the music took it from one level, where you were just a puddle of convoluted imagination, to another level altogether. Some say it takes years of study to achieve the same effect.

At the close of the Sixties, the Dead expanded their repertoire with more lyrical songs that frequently used card games as metaphors and gambling as an allegorical depiction of survival in our culture and times. It was a long strange trip, on a road for wandering souls, where bandits might steal your face right off your head, where the wolf, "600 pounds of sin" is leaning at your window, and all you can do is invite him in. But there was always a code of ethics expressed in the songs, a spirituality you could "believe if you need it, if you don't just pass it on," a lifestyle that helps you survive in a place where "one man gathers what another man spills."

Acid Test Graduation

Right before the Haight district succumbed to overpopulation, rip-offs, heroin and speed epidemics, and rapists, the original pioneers of the lifestyle bade the Haight-Ashbury a sort of farewell party, the Acid Test Graduation, sponsored by the Pranksters and presided over by Ken Kesey.

Many people from the original Haight-Ashbury community, including Kesey, moved up to the northwestern region of the U.S., many settling in Oregon and Northern California. Others fled to the calm deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. Many others dug deeper into the urban landscape or hopped over to Berkeley.

Ken Kesey talks to the press about the Acid Test Graduation (audio)

Ken Kesey meets the press concerning the Acid Test Graduation (video)

The Impact of the Summer of Love

Allen Cohen wrote it best in his essay on the Summer of Love:

"The predominant feeling among the Hippies from about 1965 through the summer of '67 was that they were agents and witnesses of a dawning of a new age. An age in which the warrior spirit, that had vaulted western man to the domination and potential destruction of creation, would be dissolved in the spiritual transcendence of the saint. Ghandi and Martin Luther King were our heroes and we had turned to the rich heritage of Asian mysticism and metaphysics for our inspiration and our practice. We leaped across oceans and through time to pre-Christian mythologies like the American Indian, the Egyptian and the occult and pagan philosophies of Europe. We studied with Buddhists and Indian gurus, native shamans, witches and yogis. We turned from Aristotelian and Christian dualism to the four pronged logic of Vedanta philosophy. We studied the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, Alan Watt's books on Zen Buddhism, and Hermann Hesse's novels, especially Siddhartha. We wouldn't leave the house without consulting the I Ching, or our Tarot cards or our astrological charts."

"Were we being naive or superstitious? No, I think this was the most important and long lasting aspect of the 60s despite the backlash of the 80s. It was the beginning of a renaissance in thought and culture similar to the Renaissance that brought Greek and Roman images and ideas back to Europe in the middle ages. Ideas that eventually led to the end of the domination of the Catholic Church, the rise of the nation state, the rebirth of democracy and the development of science."

The efforts of the pioneers in the Haight-Ashbury to create an enlightened community took about two years, from 1964-66, to reach the flashpoint, and during those years the music reached an artistic high point. But the Summer of Love in 1967 lasted only a few months, and by the end, overcrowding and the negative reaction of police and the San Francisco city government combined to make life in the Haight miserable for everyone.

Still, the taste for enlightenment had left a lasting impression on the minds and hearts of those who participated in the "hippie scene" either in the Haight or in far-flung communities that sprouted from Be-Ins and the cover stories in popular magazines. The experience, like L.S.D., reached a peak, then subsided, leaving everyone bewildered and changed for life.

Video Excerpt on the Jagger-Richards Bust, Mick Jagger Interview, Chet Helms, Paul McCartney, and Peter Coyote, from "It Was 20 Years Ago Today" documentary, directed and narrated by John Sheppard, researched by Colin Bell (with Derek Taylor), and produced by Rod Caird, Simon Albury and John Sheppard for Granada Television (see Rockument's San Francisco 1960s playlist on YouTube):

Selected Bibliography:

Gans, David; Conversations with the Dead: Dead: The Grateful Dead Interview Book (Da Capo Press, Cambridge MA), 1991, 2002.

Grushkin, Paul, et. al.; Grateful Dead: The Official Book of the Deadheads (Quill, NYC), 1983.

Harrison, Hank; The Dead (Celestial Arts, Millbrae CA), 1980.

Jackson, Blair; Grateful Dead: The Music Never Stopped (Delilah/Putnam, New York, NY), 1983.

McNally, Dennis; A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (Broadway Books, NYC), 2002.

Perry, Charles; The Haight-Ashbury: A History (Wenner Books, NY), reprint edition Sept. 1, 2005

Scully, Rock, with David Dalton; Living With the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead (Little, Brown, Boston MA).

Wolfe, Tom; The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Bantam, NYC), reprint edition October 5, 1999.

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