I was born in San Francisco, and I lived very close to Golden Gate Park and the Haight/Ashbury district, so I grew up believing that the City was a...
I was born in San Francisco, and I lived very close to Golden Gate Park and the Haight/Ashbury district, so I grew up believing that the City was a wonderland of colors and dogs and strange barefooted people who smiled a lot. My parents absolutely detested and feared the hippies and the Haight, and I was banned from going anywhere near there — even my favorite comic-book store — because my dad was certain that LSD was flooding all over the sidewalks (didn't TIME magazine say so?), and it would be absorbed by my Converse and transform me into a zoned-out loser. Or, perhaps worse, a long-haired musician —like those girly Beatles weirdos who ruined his weekly Ed Sullivan Show routine a few years back, and caused a bunch of other freaks to perform on the show since then that caused him to stop watching old Ed entirely.
But just as the Beatles appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 had changed me — and our family and a whole planet of families — the San Francisco Summer of Love in 1967 cemented what a beautiful, alluring, and powerful force this exciting new community of young musicians, artists, writers, social warriors, and free thinkers was becoming.
It wasn’t really my world — I was too young — but I was brought into its wake by almost unfathomable luck: The older brother of a school friend actually liked taking his kid brother and I along with him to hear the bands at the Fillmore West, Avalon Ballroom, Straight Theater, Winterland, Longshoreman’s Hall, and Golden Gate Park. Looking back, I think he may have realized that gorgeous barefoot girls tended to surround him whenever we were around, because we were cute