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Anniversary recalls the days of summer love and hippies
Truth be told, the odor could be that of the great unwashed, the 100,000 or so young people who made San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury section their home for the summer of 1967. Since they didn't have jobs, chances are, the tie-dye shirt they wore coming into town was the same shirt they wore when they left about three months later.
Hard to believe, 40 years on, that it was only 100,000 kids who decided to "turn on, tune in and drop out" that summer. Of course, a lot of young people were doing those identical things throughout the country, but San Francisco was the icon of the era. Western Pennsylvania was definitely not.
I was a high school graduate headed to college that summer - the perfect representative of a Summer-Of-Lover - but you'd be hard pressed to pick me out of a crowd. Like about everyone else of that age, I had shoulder-length hair, John Lennon glasses (they weren't called that back then) and listened to the radio constantly. We were collectively called hippies, although even then I wasn't quite sure how the Maynard G. Krebs beatnik persona had morphed into a hippie overnight.
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If the "turning on" and "dropping out" didn't pan out, the "tuning in" part has survived the four decades. The music of the mid-'60s has perservered and eloquently captures the brief, shining moment that was the summer of '67 with "All You Need is Love," "Somebody To Love," "Light My Fire" and especially "San Francisco (Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)."
That's not the whole story, though, at least not in Western Pennsylvania.
At the height of that summer, I began my first gig on a Pittsburgh college radio station. And, yes, we played those records. But we also were playing songs by the Monkees, the Happenings, the Turtles and Tommy James and the Shondells, acts that would make Grace Slick sick. The country's most popular song that summer was indeed by a California band - the Association - a lilting, easy-listening dittie called "Windy." Certain disc jockeys proclaimed the song was really about drugs and sex, but those same DJs said the same thing about "Up, Up and Away" and "Ding Dong the Witch the Dead," two other hits that summer.
I'd like to say that when local college students first heard "Light My Fire," they burned their bras and draft cards, tossed pop music 45s into a bonfire and destroyed their AM radios. But it didn't happen like that. Having been there, I can assure you that, in these parts, Motown (Smokey Robinson, the Supremes and the Temptations) still ruled in 1967. But we mixed in the "hippie" and "bubblegum" music, too, because we played the hits - all of them. If you look at the national charts from that summer, it certainly appears there were a lot more Pittsburgh than Haight-Asbury tastes around the country.
I distinctly remember a rather heated radio station argument over whether we should play any tracks from "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." It's not that the Beatles weren't popular, or that the album wasn't up to the band's standards. But - gasp! - Capitol Records and the band had decided not to release a single (45 rpm) from the album. And in 1967, radio played singles. Only singles. Because we were training to be professional disc jockeys, we decided to act like professionals and not play anything from the album. Thankfully, one of the local "professional" stations, KQV, finally began playing "When I'm 64" and so we did, too. No doubt, we played "Respect" and "Mirage" on either side of that song, though, just to make sure we didn't lose listeners.
So in that "Summer of Love" we didn't change America, we didn't even change Pittsburgh. But we did play an album cut.
And, 40 years later, that's worth remembering.
