Excursion #5 • Flower 🌸 Power • 1967
Welcome Back
This, our 5th adventure in the Pop Time Machine, will have us landing in the year 1967.
Leaving right now for:
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Excursion 5
Summer of Love 1967
Surviving the Counter Culture
To recap, this blog is all about music and pop culture, with the little twist that the goal is to virtually retro travel through space and time. 🚀 (With a little help from our Friends...).
Flower Power. 🌺🌸🌺 This little two word slogan has come to capture the 1960s counter culture movement. The term originated in Berkeley at first as an anti-war phrase which supported peaceful, pacifist, non-violent protest, using flowers as a symbol of love.
But the slogan soon came to characterize the broader hippie movement, encompassing the counter culture of drugs, psychedelic music and art. Those who identify with this flower power pop culture are referred to as flower children. Flowers represent peace and love.
The flower children are for peaceful protest (in contrast to the militant groups such as the SDS, Black Panthers, and the Weatherman). Flower children identify with the peaceful protests advocated by Dr. Martin Luther King. From here, the language of peace, love and flowers become a national and then an international movement. But clearly the iconic capital city of flower power is San Francisco.
San Francisco invited and hosted the Summer of Love gathering in it’s Haight-Asbury district during the Summer of 1967. Hundreds of thousands came. From that epicenter emanated out a wave of quaking psychedelic energy that seemed to sweep the world for some 2 or 3 years. However it did not last. It’s been said that the “love & peace” ended in Altamont. A murder at the Altamont Rock Festival in California during a Rolling Stones set in late December 1969 ended the 60s with a loss of innocence for the “Love Generation.” But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
To Berkeley and to the Haight-Asbury district of San Francisco, “hippies” come from all over the country. The psychedelic pop music scene emerges there. LSD and other hallucinogenic, mind-altering drugs are glamorized as tools for liberation and self realization. This obviously presents serious problems of drug abuse and addiction later on. But in 1967 it is all groovy and far out. It is a pleasant escape from the reality of the scary world in which baby boomers have grown up. In this period of time (1967-1970) something happened to the psyche of the baby boomer generation.
Imagine you’ve somehow traveled back in time today in this PopTimeMachine from the Fall of 2020 to the Summer of 1967. Try to take in the feel of all that is happening in the world around you. I am just a kid, and though I’ve been once to San Francisco with my family, I only view the hippie happenings mostly from a distance. Or reading paradies and spoofs about them in Mad Magazine.
I remember playing a tape of a new Beatles album, Sgt. Pepper, when it first came out, and doing a double-take at the time, thinking they had sold me the wrong tape. This isn’t the Beatles, I thought. Ah, but it was! Things had changed. It was a season of change - the 1960s. If you think about it, or interact with people here in this 60s world, you might start to realize that people are pretty anxious - internally divided. The word dissociation, though usually used by psychologists to refer ta a severe personality disorder, now seems to apply in a unique way to the masses of people.
The Psychology & Philosophy of Dissociation
(Why the psychedelic movement didn’t work): One writer, Henri Nouwen (in The Wounded Healer) calls modern, contemporary man the “Nuclear Man.” The Nuclear Man has grown up with the stark irony that he greatly benefits from the amazing technology of modern life. Yet the realization is self-evident that this same technology might now actually destroy his world. Hence this nuclear man doesn’t just experience a normal fear of the future, but a fear that there potentially will be no future.
No other previous generation has faced this dark, sobering prospect - that the world could actually be destroyed in a matter of 30 minutes. The Cold War and the prospect of global thermonuclear Armageddon, is a harsh reality. It hangs in the air. Boomers had experienced the trauma of the Cuban missile crisis, in which they were trained to shelter under their desks at school to protect them from an atomic blast (as if it would). No one can really process this kind of information. So for this new generation there comes to be something of a disconnect with the past, and now a despair about the future. There is only Now. In this year 1967 the answer proposed by Dr. Timothy Leary is turn on, tune in, and drop out. Now. He became the guru of LSD, and the mentor for millions searching for meaning.
There has emerged a dissociation with past and future. Nouwen further explains that there seem to be two responses to this paralysis of dissociation: (1) Mysticism (an inward focus), and (2) Revolution (an outward focus). Interestingly, we see both of these coping reactions converge in 1967 San Francisco.
In San Francisco (and of course other cities as well), LSD and other hallucinogenics become a sort of secular, but mystical attempt to find one’s self or core, or maybe to even find God. Combined with a growing number of Eastern religion influences and cults, there emerges a contemplative response to the dissociation, the “Nuclear Man” trauma, seeking to find the answers from within. In time this will prove to be bankrupt because the introspection still comes full circle to the experience of trauma. It still ends in paralysis and that dissociation. The real world remains unchanged.
The other “outward” approach to the inner trauma spawns revolutionaries manifesting a sort of convulsive reaction to being nuclear man (more the Berkeley side of town). This degenerates quickly into wanton violence and criminal abuse of innocent people, who now have new layers of trauma and woundedness. Still, this yields little resolution, only hurt and great anxiety. No solutions, only convulsions, destructive behavior.
So, in 1967...what does all of this have to do with music? Well, it turns out it has a lot to do with it. The era of psychedelic art and music grew out of this flower child counter culture.
It is difficult to write out an authorized list of “Flower Power” bands and musical artists. But I have created my playlist on Spotify (see link below). Others have attempted similar lists.
It was a feeling of love and hope and peace that young people in the late 60’s voiced almost universally through much of top 40 music in that period. The bands that I identify with the flower child, love generation/peace movement include bands like The Mamas and Papa’s, The Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Donovan, Sonny and Cher, Simon and Garfunkel, The Grateful Dead, The Doors, The 5th Dimension, Steppenwolf, Iron Butterfly, Tommy James and the Shondells, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, The Youngbloods, The Zombies, The Strawberry Alarm Clock, and even many others.
Their emphasis varies a lot from just “feelin groovy” pop sounds, to intense “born to be wild” declarations. But Dylan’s anthem rings through it all - the times they are a-changin.
But did real change come?
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Finally, underlying the groovy pop culture, philosophical shifts have taken a toll on this decade. Postmodernism and a sort of Post-Christian drift in the Western world have now peaked in 1967-68. A cultural revolution exacerbates the sense of confusion and ultimately despair. Neither the “inward” mysticism nor the “outward” convulsions of radicals provide a true inner integration of self.
There still remains isolation and alienation. Compassion for one another must become the true source of authority and of change. It seems perhaps that neither the establishment nor the counter culture ever figured that out.
In 1978, Time magazine did a cover issue asking the question “Where have all the “Flowers” gone?” As it turns out 10 years later, the flower children had grown up and the longing for love and inner peace had gone unmet. It lost its momentum. The hippies had become yuppies. They had to get real jobs to pay for their BMWs and SUVs. Nothing really changed. The dissociation was disguised, no longer by hallucinogens and narcotics, but now by affluence. The legacy of Flower Power sadly seems to have degenerated into self-indulgence and immediate gratification. Left behind was a nostalgia for the excitement of the 60s, and some great leftover music. But real hope remained unrealized.
Thus this flower child counter culture will eventually implode and die. It will burn itself out. Open social permissiveness gives way to deviant behavior and growing sexual assault. Drugs lead to an epidemic of addiction and death from overdose. The loss of innocence no longer feels like a liberation, but rather an imprisonment. It feels indulgent and narcissistic. This leaves then a deeper cut, a deeper despair, an unresolved hunger, an uncalmed anxiety. By 1970 and 1971, the counter culture is dead on arrival.
But at least there was and is the amazing music of the age.
At least we have that.
And as you enjoy the music, maybe take stock of your own sense of wholeness. Do you know your own sense of self, your purpose, a clear inner core with a heart of love? Do you lead and serve with the authority that comes from compassion? Or is it all about you?
Well, our little venture to the age of Aquarius has come to an end. We must make our way back to the current stream of things. Reality. They say reality is the leading cause of stress!
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NEXT TIME...
If you come back and check out our next excursion, we will be returning once again to the 1970s to focus on a super band. Michael Jackson’s Thriller LP was the best selling album of all time for nearly 4 decades, that is until 2 years ago, 2018. At that time, it was surpassed by this (unnamed) band’s 1970s record album. Next time, we’ll time travel back to see what that’s all about....
That’s next time... See you then.
Before you go, check out a few videos below:
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A Video is worth a thousand words:
Enjoy a few performances below of the Flower Power artists and musicians who had a part in the movement to help change the world in the late 1960s:
Beatles: All You Need is Love • 1967 (This footage was broadcast live via satellite to an estimated worldwide audience of 400 million)
Beatles: Revolution
Mamas and the Papas: California Dreamin’
Jefferson Airplane: Somebody to Love
(This performance was filmed at Woodstock)
Jefferson Airplane • White Rabbit
Tommy James & The Shondells: Crystal Blue Persuasion
Three Dog Night: Easy to be Hard
Donovan: Catch the Wind
Steppenwolf: Born To Be Wild & Magic Carpet Ride on The Ed Sullivan Show
Scott McKenzie: San Francisco
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Check out this Spotify Playlist of songs, “60s Flower Power” 🌺🌸:
Until next time....
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