In a coat of flowers? 
Just in our hair.
Hijacking away from even my own small sniffle for the era I always wished I’d experienced, but didn’t…
I wonder what ever gave me the image in my head of you being my age?
Weird how that happens, huh?
Your age? Honey, I’ve got shoes older than you! 
Hell, I’ve been at YHS 20 years come Thursday. I’ve gone from bitching about The Man to being The Man. If the Revolution ever gets here, I’ll be one of the first against the wall.
Up against the wall
Up against the wall, mother f…
I was told it was absolutely wonderful. I was told I had a really, really great time in that period.
I do remember, fondly, the music.
You’ve got shoes that are 34?! They should be in a MUSEUM!!
20 years at YHS…Holy smokes. You taught when my husband attended that pristine institution of lower learning. You are so the man!! OWN it BABY!!
And it wasn’t AIDS or even herpes that killed the Sexual Revolution. I seem to remember that the backlash began in the form of the “satanic day school” hysteria sometime around 1975 or so. Now, in the year 2006, instead of living in communal utopias having constant promiscuous sex, we’re arresting people for taking pictures of their children in the bathtub. 
In the summer of '67, I still hadn’t quite moved out of my Audrey Hepburn phase. I listened to the French version of the soundtrack from A Man and A Woman and Stan Getz’s magnificent bossa nova collaboration with Jobim and Gillberto. My days were spent working at a publishing house and some of the nights I shared with the Austrailian biochemist across the hall.
Word of the hipdom and political movements crept in, but it seemed so far away.
That didn’t last; the summer of love arrived a couple of years late.
Here in Tennessee, the movement continued into the 1970’s. And for some the dream didn’t die. “The Farm” outside of Summertown is still there. The population is very small now, but it was quite strong until the 1980’s, I believe.
And you can continue to see the after effects of the movement in many of the resources available today – recycling, Whole Foods, Wild Oats, peace organizations, paternity leave, etc. (I guess it depended upon what your “dream” was.)
Hey, these things are cyclical…
There’ll be another chance…
…
Of course, it’ll be AFTER the Resource Wars solve that little ‘overpopulation problem’, but still…
I was just a kid in the 1960s, but a college student in the late 1970s. I always believed that the 1970s were the peak of 1960s hedonism. There was free love and nobody heard of an STD that wasn’t easily curable. Marijuana use in the U.S. reached its highest level of acceptability, the drug still being illegal, but with criminal sanctions having recently been lifted; it was now just a citation. A proposition for legalization actually made it onto the California ballot in 1973, and garnered the support of (IIRC) 30% or so of the voters.
Musically, though, the era didn’t have the same psychedelic feel of the 60s. IMO there was nobody in the 1970s making music to touch what the best bands of the 1960s had lived and grown through. Mellow singer-songwriters supplanted the electrifying, edgy groups of earlier years, and of course there was no one to touch the Beatles, whose growth during their time as a band nobody could have possibly foreseen in 1962. Harder rock bands persisted but seemed hesitant to let themselves go, instead merely pumping out safe boogie-rock for college kids to dance to. It seemed to me that everyone was afraid of taking on the the hyped-up slang of 1960s, which was already being laughed at–as if everyone was waking up from a bad drug trip and needed to mellow out with anything that wasn’t too intense. I can relate to this, because I once had that unfortunate experience, ca. 1979, and in the morning after, Pablo Cruise sounded good to me.
I bet that’s the first mention Pablo Cruise has had in a while!
There’s two things here. One is that my OP was about the summer of love which was a short, very intense burst of the essence of the sixties, and that feeling didn’t obviously stop dead, but it fairly quickly got diluted into the late sixties and seventies. Plus, I think, we were overloaded; we were worn out by the intensity of the experience.
The other is that I was lucky enough to be in my late teens in the late sixties, so I had that perfect combination of naivety and optimism to allow me to drink deeply of all that was on offer. Cynicism, being jaded, being cautious hadn’t entered my vocabulary yet.
There was a sense of freedom, and of being able to try out anything we wanted, no matter how wild or unlikely it might have seemed. We were invincible!
But of course, we weren’t. (sob)
So, NineToTheSky, did you see the Doors at the Roundhouse? It’s been said it was one of their best concerts ever; at any rate it was the best during their European tour.
Sadly, I didn’t. I really wanted to because I was a big fan, as I was of Jefferson Airplane who were playing with them. I regret missing that.
But I saw the Pink Floyd at UFO in Tottenham Court Road in July '67, and at the Games for May concert in May '67. Another one I missed that I now regret was the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream at Ally Pally. I remember seeing an ad for it in the International Times, and thinking ‘can be bothered staying up all night? Nah…it’s only a concert’. :wally
My first concert was the Beatles in '65 - front row seats! The screaming - what a noise!
I was at a ‘Bag-In’ with John and Yoko at the Royal Albert Hall. John and Yoko climbed in to a giant white sack and wriggled around. It may have been transcendental for them, but it was very boring for us. What livened it up was that the girl next to me took all her clothes off (as you did in those days), and after a bit of a kerfuffel with the ushers, and then the police, we all said we’d take our clothes off unless they left us alone - which they did. One up for the freaks!
I (well, she, I suspect) became the centre page spread in the Daily Mirror next day, and eventually some photos of me holding a flower there were published in a book called Photo Past. I take it out sometimes just to prove to myself that wasn’t just a dream…
yes, yes… the nudity! I forgot to mention the nudity. People were pushing all the boundaries back then. Nowadays, in the States, movie producers are afraid of getting slapped with a box-office squelching NC-17 rating that mainstream film almost never features the nude. I fear also that the immigration into both our countries is heavily skewed to cultures that are quite conservative and will push us even further into retrenchment. I don’t want to make this an immigration debate, but I can’t think about this subject without considering the demographic implications.