In 1967, Sgt. Pepper told the band to play, and with that, many people still say the Beatles produced the best rock album of all time. Mind-blowing, long-haired rock and roll wasn’t the only musical thing happening that year, but if all you know is the reductive, exploitative gloss that’s been spread thickly over “San Francisco, 1967,” perhaps that complex historical moment has ossified into a tied-dyed greatest hits compilation with a few seconds of black-and-white Vietnam war footage as the bonus track. Perhaps the Haight-Ashbury is nothing but a tour-bus destination (just as it was in the Summer of Love) where you can still pay homage to “Jerry.”
All the nostalgia for The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Country Joe, and so on gives painful short shrift to all the other intersections of music, culture, and politics that were happening at the moment. So let’s look back to 1967 with a few musical choices that open the window a bit wider to air out the smell of patchouli. We are, in fact, are starting with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but the song might surprise you.
“She’s Leaving Home,” The Beatles. As a little kid in the 1970s listening to my parents’ mono LP of “Pepper,” much of it was too abstract for me. Talking kites? Tangerine trees? Billy Shears? What the heck? But “She’s Leaving Home” —I got that. A youngster slips away, leaves a note behind, and the parents, befuddled, are devastated. They’re crass and out of touch (“We gave her everything money could buy”), but the elegiac song, written from the parents’ point of view, also provided a nod of sympathy. While there’s mention of freedom, the song, with its claustrophobic strings, guilty-conscience voices of the parents, and creepy reference to “meeting a man from the motor trade,” has barely a whiff of liberation.
“(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher,” Jackie Wilson. The writer and Merry Prankster Paul Krassner had a telling quote in the Chronicle’s 40th anniversary look back at the Summer of Love: The sex and drugs and rock and roll were great, “but at the core of the counterculture was a spiritual revolution.” Hippies — that is, mainly white kids — were grabbing at anything for that spirituality, if indeed they were interested in it at all.
Meanwhile, black American artists continued to build a mountain of popular music with a spiritual bedrock. Released in 1967, Wilson’s “Higher and Higher” might have been the pinnacle. It has all the makings of a church shout — Wilson’s ecstatic swoops and falsetto, the frenetic tambourine beat, the call and response — but the passion (“quench my desire”) is directed to a “one in a million girl.”
It’s the perfect union of sacred and profane that the Summer of Love in so many ways could only wish upon. There is no coincidence in the fact that one artist who flourished then and survived to make thoughtful (and spiritual) music into his old age, Van Morrison, had one of his biggest hits with “Jackie Wilson Said” — on an album that was recorded in San Francisco.
The Velvet Underground and Nico. Barely anyone bought this album when it came out in 1967. But as Brian Eno famously said, “Everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” Lou Reed’s stories of trannies, sex dungeons, and heroin were a million miles away from Haight Street that summer, but also just around the corner. As has been well documented, the dirty grind of speed and heroin would soon turn the Haight into a burnout zone. (Those of us who grew up there felt it well into the 1970s.) Meanwhile, leather and kink became just as much part of the San Francisco counterculture as free love and acid. Shiny boots of leather, indeed.
Billy Strayhorn died in 1967. An openly gay black man, Strayhorn helped Duke Ellington make some of the most profound, complex, and radical music of the 20th century, or any century. But in 1967, the freaky youth were about as hip to orchestrated jazz as they were to J. Edgar Hoover. (The music establishment was trying to have it both ways: Grammies for Record of the Year and Album of the Year went to Frank Sinatra, but Song of the Year went to Lennon and McCartney for “Michelle.”) Like jazz players Sun Ra and John Coltrane, who also died in 1967, Ellington’s orchestra was also exploring some of the outer edges: film-noir soundtracks, suites to capture sights and sounds of foreign lands, and a trio of sacred concerts, the first of which debuted in SF’s Grace Cathedral.
Fast-forward 50 years: One of San Francisco’s prolific, thoughtful jazz players is composer and bassist Marcus Shelby, who is inspired by Ellington. Without Strayhorn, there would have been no Sir Duke.
The Graduate soundtrack, Simon & Garfunkel. The scenes of Dustin Hoffman driving across the Bay Bridge, ever more desperate and confused within his bizarre love triangle, make no bones about the perfect setting for this parable of generational clash. (“Plastics” is the famous career advice he gets at his graduation party; his parents’ generation in the person of his fiancee’s mother is also screwing him — -literally!)
“Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.” DiMaggio, of course, was a San Francisco native son. He was also of another generation, supper clubs and Sinatra, Brylcreem and broads. The songs are iconic (“The Sounds of Silence,” “Mrs. Robinson”) but for full impact they need the context of the film, especially at the end when the crazy kids do their crazy thing then ride off breathless on a bus.
Slowly, in their long stares, we realize that they realize what they’ve just done. This is no “Feelin’ Groovy.”
“Cease to Exist,” Charles Manson. Manson was in the Haight for the Summer of Love, writing songs and recruiting women for the so-called Family. The gruesome 1969 murders they committed, scrawling “Helter Skelter” on the walls in their victims’ blood, were the filthy bookend of the decade, and as with the murder of a Rolling Stones fan at the Altamont concert the same year, a foul mirror held up to the Summer of Love. Manson’s music became an historical footnote, but it also serves as a final ironic coda, of sorts: The blissed-out captains of sunny California pop, the Beach Boys, covered Manson’s “Cease to Exist” on a B-side in 1968, changing the feel of it and the title to “Never Learn Not to Love.”
The encyclopedic musical knowledge of Paul Bonanos and David Katznelson contributed to this article.
Alex Lash is the editor in chief of The Frisc and, because he went to Dudley Stone Elementary School on Haight Street, was often called a “deadly stoner.” By his parents.
