We’ve all heard the Legend of the Hippie. How in the mythical area of Haight-Ashbury in the wonderland of San Francisco in the year of our Lord 1967 there was the “Summer of Love.” Where young people with flowers in their hair flocked to the City by the Bay for an idyllic era of peace, love, flowers, good vibes, great music, free love, and strong pot.
But the reality is that by mid-year 1967, San Francisco was being overrun by pilgrims from around the world who heeded the call of this utopia from the media and clarion calls like Scott McKenzie’s single “San Francisco.”
Too many kids at once with nowhere to go, nothing to eat, and only vague ideas of what they were looking for ended up essentially living on the streets and in Golden Gate Park. And plenty a doe-eyed and fair-haired maidens from the Midwest were taken advantage of by unscrupulous characters and self-styled gurus. Hard drugs had also moved in.
Still, as a cultural and social dream—one honestly pursued by many—it’s one of the more unique chapters in American history.
But the Hippies didn’t just spring up from seed or create the counterculture. The groundwork was lain for them by beatniks, free-thinkers, and creative types of all sorts not just in the city, but in places like Los Angeles, New York, and London.
Cultural historian and former Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally was there for it all. And he puts it all into perspective in The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties (416 pp., $32.50, Da Capo Books).
McNally’s narrative begins after the end of World War II when many began to question the status quo in the U.S. along with the country’s self-styled championship of exceptionalism. And it was the artists who led the way.
Writers, poets, visual artists, dancers, filmmakers and—most importantly—musicians where testing boundaries with experimental works that sometimes disgusted the old guard but supercharged the young. Street theater groups like the Diggers staged controversial and politically-charged plays and performance pieces in the streets and parks.
Works like Jack Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical novel On the Road or Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl challenged norms and opened minds, helping to birth Beatnik culture. A culture that, though easily stereotyped or poked at with the image of the black-bereted bongo player with a soul patch opining “Dig that crazy beat, man!” really represented something new.
McNally’s telling is an at-times dizzying array of names raining down on the page, and does a fine job of distilling the important players and works with mini-bios and Wikipedia-style summations. But it’s all here conveniently in one place, and McNally shows the thread that connects the seemingly disparate elements, even across the continent and ocean.
Even more than the music of San Francisco unlocking this new door—new sounds emanating from bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, McNally pegs one thing that really transformed the hippie scene to another level: The arrival of LSD.
“The various elements that would combine to create the community that would be the Haight-Ashbury in 1966, 1967, and after had floated up into a social solution that awaited a catalyst. A new vision of freedom, a more open sexuality, a refusal to bow down to the implicit portions of the American identity—all that was in place. One thing was left,” McNally writes.
“Among all the cultural elements that combined to create the Haight-Ashbury and the national and international counterculture, no experience had a greater impact than ingesting LSD.”
At times, McNally does get a little dreamy-eyed himself about his subject. And words of criticism or dissent to counter the counterculture are few. But in The Last Great Dream, he gives readers a magical mystery tour on a magic bus to a destination, with a focus on how the road there was built in the first place.
