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Wistful over lost dreams at Summer of Love fest
09/02/2007 9:08 PM, Reuters
Some of the biggest musical stars
of the 1960s counterculture gathered in San Francisco on Sunday
for a concert to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Summer
of Love, yet backstage many voiced disappointment about the
era's unfulfilled ideals.
The Summer of Love of 1967 made San Francisco a magnet for
youth who wanted to experiment with sex, drugs, rock and roll
and an alternative hippie lifestyle.
"We thought, this is it, we're going to change the world,
actually we're going to become the Christian world of love,"
Ray Manzarek, 68, keyboardist for The Doors, told Reuters. "Of
course, it didn't happen. Here we are 40 years later and we are
still at war."
"It was a great disappointment," said Manzarek, who
attended the famed San Francisco January 1967 "Human Be-In,"
credited with drawing young people to the city, with Doors
singer Jim Morrison and other bandmates.
The '60s lived again as Manzarek, Jefferson Starship and
other legends performed, thousands of fans donned tie-die
shirts and bell bottom pants and the smell of marijuana wafted
through the air. Two women wandered through the crowd in Golden
Gate Park offering free hugs.
In keeping with the spirit of those times, the concert was
free.
'I FEEL BETRAYED'
In the 1960s, many in the counterculture felt they could
change the world by removing societal constraints and ending
the Vietnam War.
Fito De La Parra, drummer for the band Canned Heat, said
his generation never lived up to its ideals.
"On the whole, I feel betrayed," he said backstage after
playing before what organizers estimated was 40,000 fans. "I
feel that a lot of the ideals that we held valuable in the
1960s were betrayed by their own people, by their own hippies.
Many of them betrayed themselves because they went for the
buck, and they became rich yuppies and Republicans."
Barry Melton, best known by his nickname "The Fish" and his
partnership with Country Joe McDonald, said the 1960s social
movements deserve credit for advancing issues such as women's
and gay rights and environmental consciousness, but the youth
of the day went overboard with drugs.
"There are things I cringe about," said Melton, now a
public defender criminal lawyer. "For one thing we had an
absolute benign attitude about drugs that was pretty naive. We
made some significant mistakes."
Manzarek said unrestrained use of drugs proved a disaster.
"Excessive was Jim Morrison dying of alcohol poisoning,
Jimi Hendrix dying in his own vomit," he said.
The inability to achieve unending love and friendship was
evidenced by the many bands long since broken up, often
acrimoniously.
James Gurley, 67, played with Big Brother and the Holding
Company, whose lead singer Janis Joplin died of a drug
overdose. For the past decade Gurley said he had not spoken
with his fellow band guitarist after a falling out.
"I expected we'd all be friends later," he said. "My
disappointment is in myself. My assessments were off base; I
mis-assessed human nature."
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