Peace, Love and Rock'n Roll

It all started on January 14, 1967, when the Human Be-In event was held in San Francisco at Golden State Park. This event, which received extensive media coverage from nearly every major news outlet, popularized counter-coulter or the “hippie movement” in the United States, leading to the legendary Summer of Love. The California air was blistering but that didn’t stop the thirty thousand hippies who showed up for the music. With their LSD-laced Turkey sandwiches in one hand and their joints in the other, with every breath they took the hippies breathed in the sweet smell of marijuana smoke and danced and sang the weekend away, giving the media and American people an all-out drug exhibition.

Scott McKenzie’s cover of John Phillips’ song, San Francisco, became a huge hit that summer. One lyric “if you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair” especially inspired people. Thousands were traveling to San Francisco, many with flowers decorating their long locks, and distributing flowers. The name “Flower Children” stuck.

Some notable magazines promulgated the hippie movement by publishing articles during this time. One article ran by Time Magazine, was dubbed “The Hippies: The Philosophy of a Subculture”. This article delineated the guidelines for being a hippie. Such guidelines were “Blow the mind of every straight person you can reach” and “Turn them on, if not to drugs, then to beauty, love, honesty, and fun.” Articles like the aforementioned one brought even greater attention to the hippie movement and prompted thousands to travel to San Francisco during the summer of 1967, and it was estimated that almost 100,000 hippies traveled to San Francisco that summer.

The Summer of Love also birthed a new genre of music, acid rock or psychedelic rock. It was very clearly inspired by psychedelic drugs, most notably LSD, and attempted to imitate its mind-altering experience. The Beatles, the