Kids, if you take nothing else away from this well of boob tubery, remember this: Once a counterculture movement gets coverage in the mainstream press, consider it to be dead and mouldering in the grave.
Don’t try to jump into it. Don’t chase it. You’ll only incite disdain and sadness in those who started it and probably be disappointed by what you find.
Watch “American Experience,” “Summer of Love” (9 p.m., KCTS/9) if you doubt that idea. Something that began as remarkably apart from society ended up being sucked in and ruined by the mainstream, and is so far gone that only shadows of it live on through clothing fads and in the parking lot of Phish shows.
“Summer of Love” chronicles all the reasons that thousands of young people were drawn to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in the Summer of 1967. It isn’t the first to paint a watercolor of that summer, of course. But part of what makes it stand out is the way it blows apart the commonly held idea that this point in time represents the apex of the hippie movement.
If anything, it represented the death of it.
But “Summer of Love” is no gloomy PBS historical account. Yeah, you have your flower children spinning, bearded guys smoking joints and that famous footage of Timothy Leary with daisies tucked into his ears telling the crowd at the Human Be-In, the precursor to the titular season, to “turn on, tune in and drop out.”
Beyond that spins a colorful portrait in full psychedelic swirl, bolstered by accounts from a wide range of figures including actor Peter Coyote, journalist William Hedgepeth and old school hippie Phil Morningstar, all explaining why the Be-In represented everything for which the hippie movement originally stood.
The film also gives time to long time residents of the Haight whose lives were disrupted when their neighborhood was taken over. And you’ll see comical by-products of the era, including a glimpse of a bus tour that drove wide-eyed tourists through the area, providing them with pamphlet of slang words and their translations.
That was before the darker times, when the youth surge crowding San Francisco’s streets overwhelmed the neighborhood, taxed resources to the limit and ended up being a gathering place for runaways and college student poseurs who just wanted to score drugs. In large part, this is the legacy of that era that endures today.
This corner of the snapshot doesn’t overpower the way in which “Summer of Love” explains the movement’s aim to create a peaceful utopia, where everyone would share equally and willingly and capitalism would no longer rule life. Those concepts seems so innocent, naive, silly and beautiful all at once. And in the wreckage of that summer, it might even look like an impossibility.
Even so, “Summer of Love” also makes a person wish that a similar, powerful optimism served to drive young people today. You can’t help but grin when one woman, fed up with how slow the changes promised by civil rights were rolling out, explained her motivation for heading westward to find the promise of everything Haight-Ashbury represented.
“I was young,” she said. “I wanted heaven now.”