Summer of Love: 1967 and the Psychedelic Revolution

Summer of Love: 1967 and the Psychedelic Revolution

Standing in the shadows of love, I’m getting ready for the heartaches to come. Can’t you see me standing in the shadows of love? I’m getting ready for the heartaches to come. I wanna run, but there’s nowhere to go Cause heartaches will follow me, I know Without your love, the love I need It’s the beginning of Because you’re taking away all my reasons for living When you pushed aside all the love I’ve been giving Now wait a minute, you’re standing in the shadows of love Cause I’m the best to get better You know,
with Sgt. Pepper and the Summer of Love and the expression of young people and all of these things really made 1967 just an incredibly powerful year. 67 for me was an absolutely crucial year. I think we thought this was a party you couldn’t see any end to it in 67. You didn’t want it to end. It did have to do with bad news. that sense that you could change things. And young people felt they could, and in fact did. London at that time was, it had a little possibility. You were coming out of a period when there was no possibility. This was the first period when you could actually transcend class, and you know, music, art,
fashion was one of the ways in which people did that. When the truth is found. Giant protests. were not even so much the soldiers as their mothers. Because what the hell is my boy doing in Vietnam? Do you want somebody to love? Don’t you need somebody? The promises of the great society have been shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam. You my enemy, my enemy is the white people, not Vietcongs or Chalmers or Japanese. He refused to step forward. He was sentenced to five years in jail. They stripped his title. He gave young people the guts to come out against the war. Give me a ticket for an airplane Ain’t got time to take a fast train Lonely days are gone, I’m a-going home My baby used to hold me a letter The more I hear that song, it is a masterpiece. It does not It doesn’t have a coda. It doesn’t have a riff. It is a blues song. It is a pop song. It is a jazz song. It is a folk song. 1967 for me was the big fight for free radio. They call it the summer of love, but I missed out on two-thirds of it because I was living the life of a sailor on a pirate ship on Radio Caravan. The thing about the scene and the summer of love itself, which was a phenomenon, it was a moment, it was the greatest flash mob in history. London was the hit centre of the universe in terms of bands, fashion and experimentation. There were so many great clubs to choose from. There was the Bagger Nails Club, there was a speakeasy where all the groups used to go. Cromwellian Club was a big favourite, so we just used to head for the clubs. I mean one of the things I did on my week off was I went I went to the UFO in Tottenham Court Road. go down into this basement and there was all these really weird light shows. This is where Joe Boyd, the American Svengali producer, would book bands like the Soft Machine and Pink Floyd and they’d perform and there’d be these light shows. And a lot of LSD would be ingested. And it was really the sort of flowering of the beautiful people. And I think there was a period when UFO was at its height, there was this feeling that anything was possible. It was the first manifestation in, certainly in central London, of that ethos which became known as the kind of Summer of Love. I mean I was going to France, you know kids go to Thailand, you know South America now, but going to France is as big a trip in those days. There were an interesting group of English people there and one of them’s parents My parents bought a house on the harbour of Saint-Tropez. Of course, Saint-Tropez was nothing there, it was just a small fishing port. The first day we were there we saw Brigitte Bardot with a leopard on a chain walking through the street and we thought we’d gone to heaven and died. We thought it cannot get better than this. Sprint into springtime with the Mustang Sport Sprint Sale at your Ford dealers. Those days guys had cars, you know,
he’s big. I mean, everybody loved the Mustang. I mean,
if you got one, your dad had money. So the guys would show off by driving up in these red, engine red Ford Mustangs. Three new ways to take the Mustang pledge. Her choice? The Mustang hardtop, which is hard to top. An optional full-width seat with center armrest. And so we were all, us girls, were trying to find guys who had Mustangs because… In the summertime, we could drive with the hood down by the lake. So I think it was the feeling of going to the prom and going with the guy I wanted to go with. Although I was quite bookish, so in a sense I wasn’t. I only appealed to the intellectuals and the strange boys, you know,
the really, the radicals, you know, people you… Who wouldn’t have a Mustang because it was like not on to own anything. And these guys were like, I’m gonna go live in a commune. I’m like not gonna have a job. And my father would say, get him out of here. 30 old rivers must you keep rolling, flowing into the night. People so busy, make me feel dizzy. I’ve always thought Ray Davis is a kind of brilliant character and the Kings were always extraordinary, they were always on their own. You know, they were kind of, yes you could fit them into sort of… …be in other things, but actually they were very much on their own. I thought they were quintessentially British. Every day I look at the world from my window This, ladies and gentlemen, is London. Swinging London, it’s been called. It’s the chilliest evening time What a nice sunset time Up in Church Street, Kensington, which we used to go to a lot, there was Bus Stop and there was Bieber, and they were amazing. Clothes were hanging around and the lights were on. were dark and there were bits of jewelry and scarves and these these wonderful colors these aubergines and quite a lot of pinks if I remember rightly fairly some acid colors I think we broke a lot of zips in that Bieber trying things on a lot of them were very small but it was great fun it was just like nowhere he’d shopped before ever and it was completely brilliant when Mary Quant invades new realms of fashion bright young girls are interested and so is the national press. Mary Quant had a boutique on the King’s Road. Mary Quant’s clothes were expensive, they weren’t cheap. But very, very important, very revolutionary. The miniskirt was the most famous thing. It also became a celebrity in her own right. Suddenly there’s this idea that there’s a kind of meeting point between fashion and music and art. I wore miniskirts, even though my mother… I mean, my mother would say to me, Don’t go out looking like. that and I guess she must have been terrified you know because to her I didn’t have any clothes on. I take looks like Twiggy girls are annotating Twiggy. How did Twiggy strike you? Very refreshing. And her clothes? Adorable. She was extraordinary looking I mean she you know I there was nothing that ever looked like Twiggy before. She was a working-class shop girl. She was kind of otherworldly, you know, but she was a gammon. She was quite boyish-looking. I used to have a Saturday job at a hairdresser’s where my sister worked and Justin’s brother worked. My parents were like, no,
you’re supposed to have hair and it’s bouffant and it’s puffed out like that and you aren’t going around with your hair cut short and big eyes and looking like… Our super-annuated five-year-old, which is what Twiggy looked like, when we think, you think back on it now. Taylor. Firebird is a stallion. Brando. You disgust me. Elizabeth Taylor. Have you ever been collared and dragged out into the street and thrashed by a naked woman? Marlon Brando. I swear I’ll do! Reflections in a golden eye. We had tons of movie star magazines. I mean,
it was all about Liz and the hair. The eyes, the lipstick. Reflections in a Golden Eye stars the Elizabeth Taylor who showed the world what a woman really is. I grew up in Chicago when the Playboy Mansion was there and Hugh Hefner had starred the whole bunny thing. So that was also a look. It’s the hair, hair,
hair, tits out to there, lips, and be a Bond girl. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? Bond is back. And then you add on top of it, being a black woman, so we had to sort of recalibrate that through our own experience and our own kind of examples, which would have been the Supremes and Diana Ross, basically. I mean,
Supremes were actually a black girl, hot, incredible group who could really sing. And Berry Gordy just kept ironing them out, ironing them out, you know, ruffling the sheets, pressing them, pushing them down, throwing bleach on them. This is really a show tune, you know,
you can hear it, you can definitely hear this on Broadway and in nightclubs and everything else, but it’s kind of, it’s celebrating the new hip culture, the new hip young culture, you know,
the happening. In 1967… Prime Minister Harold Wilson applied for UK entry into the European Economic Community. Nasser celebrated Surveyor 3, the first unmanned lander on the Moon. You couldn’t not be a Marvin Gaye fan. The talent of people that came out of Motown, there’s never been anything. Anything to touch that anywhere in the world seems. You don’t have to worry, cause baby there ain’t lonely love. Ain’t nobody going home. Tamla was very much part of the music I loved, but with that pop infusion. And I just thought this is the most incredible music. White people felt comfortable singing soul-ish type songs, and black people felt… Comfortable singing more pop. So it was starting to, because the Supremes were starting to sing pop, The Temptations were starting to sing pop, and so right before the 70s when everything switched around. But this was so, you could see this starting to open up. At this point we are going to leave Golden Gate Park to go into… The Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco. If you’re going to San Francisco I would say that the last 18 months have seen a tremendous increase of the so-called hippies. In America, the young people were beginning to rebel against their 50s-style parents. It just wasn’t cool to be concerned about college or a profession. Suddenly, these things called hippies emerged, you know, and they were… you know,
they just, they weren’t conforming. I think maybe especially shocking were the guys who, when you look back on it now, were taking on a lot of feminine values. The philosophy that they brought with them and that was engendered right in that place was that everything would be free. It was a mini utopia. It completely freaked out so many American families. They just couldn’t deal with it. when they had kids. Kids who suddenly wore weird clothes or let their hair grow long, came back from college looking strange or with a weird-looking boyfriend or girlfriend or something like that. People got locked up, you know, because the parents could not handle the idea that everything they worked for to establish their toehold in the American dream. He’s being thrown away by their son who was joining the three kids and jumping in the VW van and going to Kate Ashbury. There is no family so busy but that it can come together in the evening for a dinner date which will give its members something to look back upon with happiness. Somebody who came to Britain, I noticed long-haired people I knew and kids with earrings, gold earrings and shoulder-length hair. Going home and having a drink with their dad in the pub who had a short hair cut and it was very relaxed. Once parents didn’t read I mean they might have objected but they were more accommodating I think because they didn’t perceive it in the same way as the Americans did. They didn’t perceive it as a threat at all they just thought oh it’s a phase he’s going through. This is this is the teenage years you know and he wants to express himself. It’s all too beautiful. It’s all too beautiful. But the difference about 67 and I think the thing that makes it Such a unique year and a year that still to this day gets right-wing politicians steam coming out of their ears, you know, they feel it’s like that’s where everything went wrong, is because of LSD. And I mean drugs has to be mentioned as being a part of it because people’s consciousness was expanded by, you know,
marijuana and to a certain extent LSD. Paul,
how often have you taken LSD? About four times. I don’t know what everyone’s so angry about. You know,
when Paul McCartney acknowledged taking it, it was blown up in all the newspapers. Shock, horror. You know, they busted the stones and there was a huge trial. And there was a feeling of alarm among the powers that be that things were getting out of control, that young people were going off in a dangerous direction which nobody could understand. And it did have to do with drugs, but it also had to do with dress, it had to do with music, and most importantly, it did have to do with that sense that you could change things. And young people felt they could, and in fact did. They all come out to… 1967 for me was the big fight for free radio. You know,
they call it the summer of love, but I missed out on two-thirds of it because I was living the life of a sailor on a pirate ship on Radio Caravan. Caroline, the sound of the nation Caroline, the sound of the land Caroline, the sound of the nation Caroline I was already in the media by then and I’d been introduced to a guy called Ronan O’Reilly who had this revolutionary idea of blasting out pop music from a ship in international waters which already sounded very glamorous. I defy anybody, I mean anybody of my generation. We were avid listeners to Radio Caroline. Forget BBC, that was old people stuff. So it was the only place you could actually hear all this new music. Of course we all had our little transistors, radios, that were another wonderful thing that you could have because you had portable music. I’d listen to Radio Caroline on that and it would come and go. It was like the waves breaking sometimes and then, you know, but you stuck with it because you admired them. They were doing something for us, it felt, against them. You know,
in America you had thousands of commercial stations, we didn’t have any in this country. We only had the BBC, who had this idea of what was good for us and what we should hear and more importantly, what we’re not supposed to hear. People like Johnny Walker, you know, great, great DJs. And they would mix the stuff up, you know, Sam and Dave and Arthur Connolly followed by, I don’t know, Cream or something, you know,
they didn’t sort of separate it out because it was all great music and it was all happening at the time. And he would do something which I thought was very romantic. He would ask the listeners to park their cars on the coastline and flash their headlines out to sea so he could see them. I always thought that was a… I think the whole of, to me, radio,
it’s a very romantic thing. I mean,
they were huge. Numbers of records that may not have been hits at all. Groups and artists we may not have heard of, were it not for pirate radio. There were huge marches. Thousands of teenagers would descend on Trafalgar Square. There was a massive campaign to save the pirates. Because the government threatened to bring in the law, the Marine Offenses Act, which would become legal just a minute past midnight on the 14th of August 1967. Radio Carolina was the only station that said, we’re going to defy the government and keep on broadcasting. I think so many of these things which were played out very playfully in Britain, with fashion, with demonstrations, with rebellion, and were kind of amusing, and they were entertaining, and they made for very lively arts. Music, fashion, design, scene. In America, they were deadly serious and they were much more threatening to the status quo and much… …more unsettling to authority and the stakes seem to be much higher. The promises of the Great Society have been shut down on the battlefields of Vietnam. You know what Johnson called the Great Society? It was meant to be great for everyone. It wasn’t meant to just be great for the middle-aged generation who’d survived the Second World War, gone through that. It was meant to be great for their children too. And yet you had this entire generation who… …were threatened by the war, they could have been drafted, they had that hanging over them, and it didn’t make any sense to them. It wasn’t this noble fight that World War II was. Giant protests were not only, not even so much the soldiers as their mothers. Because what the hell is my boy doing in Vietnam? Television news was full of the latest in the region. No real surprise that those songs were a kind of dreaming and searching for a faith that things would get better. We didn’t know the suffering that the soldiers on our side went through. We didn’t know what they had inflicted as well on the vehicle. We didn’t know any of those things. We just knew that we were being sent to war by… old guys. Were there any Americans who thought the Americans were going to win the war? So what are you doing in the jungle? I still remember his name. His name was Richard Penniman. He was like the class, I guess, clown and always happy. And he went to Vietnam, and he stepped on a landmine, and he was killed. And it resonated through our school. When you think about how many thousands of young American lives were sacrificed for that war, and really, what was it all about? We had no say in it at all. Just for us, a bunch of old people who were saying, you gotta go. If you didn’t want to go, you either went to jail like Muhammad Ali or you went to Canada. The thing about Ali was that he was very articulate. So in spite of the fact that he was threatened with actually five years imprisonment, which is what he could have been for refusing the draft, he gave very impassioned and very articulate speech as to why he wouldn’t fight and didn’t want to fight because he did not regard the North Vietnamese and the… Viet Cong is his enemy. You my enemy. My enemy is the white people, not Viet Congs, or Chinese, or Japanese. That’s all.
Just no comment on boxing, religion, induction. No comments on the weather, nothing. He refused to step forward. He was sentenced to five years in jail. They stripped his title. While he was waiting for the Supreme Court to decide his case, he spent his time going to colleges, talked all over the country. He gave young people The guts to come out against the war. I remember Muhammad Ali said, no Viet Cong ever called me a nigger, so why am I gonna go and fight him? I’m not gonna fight him. So they took away his belt, his status, and he got convicted. I think 67 was the turning point where huge swaths of America went, wait a minute. What are we doing? You know, Muhammad Ali opened their eyes. What have we got against these Vietnamese? Why are we killing them? And also he was a great athlete. He was very beautiful as well. So,
you know, all of these things sort of welded together. Because we were little kids, he was in his prime, he was fighting, and he won every fight. So he would, you know,
if you’re a little child and you’re sitting there and some guy comes around the ring and says, I told him alive I’m gonna get him in five and then you get him in five. You’re sitting there as a little kid going yeah you know so he meant an awful lot to us and his point of view is very important to us. The Vietnam War was a huge shadow over which every young man faced you know you could be drafted and it’s absolutely terrifying so I think that the the the hippie movement was a huge product of that certainly that was the golden age. of the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury scene. And for that brief period, it was a kind of, it seemed like a sort of wonderland, but I think the wonderland was tempered by the fact that it was, it had to be escapist because there was such a horrible fear of Vietnam. On the one level, you can talk about all the social changes, sexual revolution, anti-war protests and everything, but meanwhile… Huge business was being done with the sale of LPs. The album was a statement. Before it would be that you’d write your hit single and then you’d do a bunch of blues songs live. And now it got to the point where bands were writing enough material to fill in the entire album and making their own statements. And so, you know,
the album, the artwork, the sleeve notes, the lyric sheet, all that stuff, it became very, very important. We’d all gather and sit around the stereo and listen to the whole album in silence. There was obviously a certain amount of competition, you know,
who’d get the album first, whatever happened to be next, you know,
the new Jimi Hendrix album. Chesh Chandra of The Animals had seen him play in America, he said I’ll be your manager, brought him to the UK, got him on track records which was the Who’s label. By all accounts, as soon as he arrived, he was an absolute sensation. He played in front of Eric Clapton and Eric Clapton said, right,
that’s it, it’s over. There’s nobody like this. He played in front of Pete Townshend, couldn’t believe it. And so all these guitar gods had suddenly had to sort of doff their cap to this incredible guy. And he developed here. So early songs like Hey Joe, the first album Are You Experienced, all these things. It was developed in Britain. So Jimmy Hendrix was kind of introduced to the superstars straight away because everyone wanted to figure out this incredible talent he had with guitar. I mean, you know,
you could have regarded him as a threat because he was so much better than everybody else. I heard you shot your woman down, you shot her down now. Hey,
hey, Joe,
what’s up? Being a DJ at Radio Caroline, we do these Radio Caroline disco nights on land. We did one at the Wimbledon Palais. Another one was the Chislehurst Caves. They put a little stage in there, the disco system, and they had a stage with a PA and bands used to play. And in fact, Jimi Hendrix played his first ever gig. I think I’m right in saying it, in the Chiselhurst Caves. Groovin’
on a Sunday afternoon. I used to go to the skating rink a lot, and groovin’ was what you skated to. So you put your skates on, and then they would put groovin’ on. And it was a good thing, you could glide in your skates, and if you had a boyfriend you could do like these two things to groove in. It was all deeply corny. But it was a good skating song so it was really nice. Young Rascals are a great American band and they came up with a record called Groovin’. Groovin’ on a Sunday afternoon. What a perfect pop record that was. The Beatles had achieved huge success with Sgt Pepper and were now caught up in the emotion of the time and how to achieve spirituality. It meant catching a train to Bangor, North Wales. And at Wimbledon, the BBC made the first UK-coloured TV transmission. I’ve got an announcement to make. It’s about Sir. Well sir, we’d all like to thank you very much for everything you’ve done for us and we’d like to give you a little present to remember us by. Go on Babs. You mean Miss Pag. Babs! Go on Babs! The time has come for closing books and long last looks must end. And as I leave, I know that I am leaving my best friend. Interesting enough, the song that topped the charts in 1967, 7.
was Lulu, To Serve With Love, which came from the score of this film of the same name. It was a small Sidney Poitier film, partly because it was filmed in London. So it wouldn’t have been, it wasn’t a huge, huge mainstream film, but the song was. To get to Billboard Top 100, or to be in the number one, that means everybody was buying you. Not just people who had been to Lulu’s music, everybody was buying this. Sidney Poitier had Unbelievable year in 1967. He made To Serve With Love, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and In The Heat Of The Night. In the heat of the night Be sure of yourself, ain’t you,
Virgil? Virgil,
that’s a funny name for a nigga boy that comes from Philadelphia. What do they call you up there? They call me Mr. Tibbs. Mr. Tibbs! Well,
Mr. Wood,
take Mr. Tibbs, take him down to the depot, and I mean boy like now! To see in the heat of the night about a racist Southern cop, a redneck, having to deal with this very educated black man who comes down and solves the crime, and he has to work with this guy who’s like educated 3,000 times above. Anything Rod Steiger could be. It was a big movie. It was a big movie. You can get! James Brown invented everything. Let me just say that. Even before he was born, he invented stuff. Nobody has touched cold sweat. They have people who have attempted to touch cold sweat. There have been people who have come close to cold sweat. That was the mothership. That was the… They’re the foundation record. You cannot underestimate the significance of James Brown. Who invented funk? Was it Sly Stone? Was it James Brown? I think it’s James Brown. Intriguingly enough, although there was this movement towards peace and love and understanding, it coincided with quite a lot of international conflicts. The Six-Day War began in Israel, which again was a fairly unpleasant period. The Six-Day War was a huge headline news and obviously you were aware of the impact it was going to have on changing the borders and politics in the Middle East. Again, I mean we weren’t really that politically involved but you knew this was obviously a momentous event really. Israel was extremely important for us. I think the Six-Day War began to change that a bit because Israel began to take territory and that was something that went against our own idea of what Israel was and we were caught up in Vietnam too. Every black kid on planet Earth loves Stevie and I was made to love her. It was just beautiful. It was a song you danced to at your prom. It was the song of the summer. It was a great, great… great song. This
was the Ed Sullivan show, and that was the big showcase, like Saturday Night at the Palladium. It was massive. If you got on that show, you cracked open everything. And Ed Sullivan was like this this waxwork who had been around for sort of like 50 years and he would come out and he’d go, no, it’s the doors. They said they wanted to take out the line about getting. high Jim Morrison said yeah okay we’ll do that and then when it came to the live show he sang about getting high fantastic I think the doors are very symbolic of the darkness that was at the heart of the most interesting American film The music of 1967. It was a demarcation, and it was an indication of the demarcation of our youth. The whole thing that we’ve been brought up in, and the whole thing we’ve been brought up to respect, it was over, Each night before you go to bed, my baby Mothers and the Puppets were another band that captured the whole California vibe. Their harmonies were marvellous, classic. I mean,
they were like the Beach Boys with girls. I mean, who didn’t want to go to California because of California Dreaming? Who, you couldn’t not want to go there. I was desperate to get there. I was desperate to go to Rontorell. way. Golden hooked up the Monterey Pop Festival with a little help from the Mamas and Papas. Well,
this is John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, and I’d like to talk to Dionne. I had no idea that the Monterey Pop Festival was going to happen, but I wished I could have been there. to see Otis Redding. I mean, one of my big idols, one of my heroes of the 1960s was Otis Redding. To stop now For him to go to Monterey was really what catapulted Otis Redding to becoming as famous as he did. Otis Redding In my mind, I think probably is the greatest soul singer of all time. I just love his voice It was the year he did did Monterey and it was the year he did I’ve Been Loving You Too Long at Monterey Which is again one of the most beautiful songs Please don’t make me stop So I think Otis, you know, absolutely integral to the story of 1967, not least because it was still quite a segregated time and Otis had the foresight to cross over into the predominantly white hippie culture. People try to put us down I said it’s just because we’re down They say you look awful The showmanship, the flair, I mean British groups all had this sense of showmanship Whereas Americans were like seriously playing the blues solo And in a way the first… manifestation of this was Monterey, when all these groups that were sort of legendary in America, because they were famous in Britain, were brought for the first time. I see people walking by Dressed in their colourful clothes But the Animals were, they were a raw British blues band who got involved in the early days of the American hippie scene. Blue,
blue, blue I could not foresee this thing ever happening to you It was so competitive, really. The groups, they’d be real friends. when they met each other, but my word, they didn’t try to outdo each other. I made this documentary about Jimi Hendrix and I have Pete Townshend talking about backstage at Monterey, where basically Hendrix says, I’m not going to follow you guys, you’re too good on stage. And Townshend says, well,
I’m not following you, you’re way better than us. And finally, Hendrix says, well,
look, I’m warning you, if I follow you, I’m going to to pull out all the stops. And so the Who go on stage, and Townsend, you know, smashes his guitar. And the Americans had never seen anything like it. And then out comes Hendrix. And the climax of his set burns his guitar on stage. . In a way, Monterey, you see so many things being presented to the mass American audience for the first time. You know,
this English flamboyance in the form of The Who, this transatlantic weird blend of Hendrix and the show, and Otis and Janice. I mean, all of these together in one place in one weekend in 1967. It was amazing. I won’t tell me why, cause everything goes Janis Joplin was completely wild. You know, she’d come through Austin, Texas. She had been, you know, been in trouble at school various ways, and then she shored up at San Francisco and had the most incredible voice of, you know, kind of the best, the best blues voice you’re gonna find in a white woman. These three days in June were a synthesis of all that was music of 1967. And I want to love you, I want to love you for so long. The importance of the music, because it was so central to the culture, I’d say it was the most important art form in Britain and America at the time, is that it galvanised and unified people and made people feel hopeful and positive and capable of dealing with whatever was being thrown their way, which in America, the big thing was Vietnam. and in In Britain, the big thing was breaking away from the former war generation. Set me free,
I don’t you pray. Head out my life,
I don’t you pray. It was about a class thing and a social thing. And you could break through and do what you dreamed of doing without having had a very privileged background. Suddenly there was a whole turnabout and aristocrats wanted… To employ working-class people because of the Beatles, because of the Stones, because of that whole movement. You know,
in that period, the 60s, there was a feeling that we could do anything. If you were young and you had ambition and you had drive, you could get out there and do whatever you wanted. It gave us all a moment in the sun to think that maybe, just maybe, if we did this and not that, then things would be a lot better. It was all about love. And it’s a shame now, people are kind of shy and embarrassed to talk about love. But then it became known as the summer of love. You really don’t want me to keep me hanging on. If we want to talk about 1967, we have to talk about Jefferson Airplane. We have to talk about White Rabbit, Masterpiece. White Rabbit is a movie, it’s a novel, it’s an opera. It is the darkness that was about to come. One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small Jefferson Airplane were very much a product of the politics of the time. They were a strident, revolutionary band born of the hate Ashbury scene. And even when you have songs like Somebody to Love and White Rabbit there’s an edge of darkness there. I mean a lot of people didn’t, I think, realise what White Rabbit was about. Otherwise it wouldn’t have got airplay. We didn’t know that the madness was coming, a lot of madness was coming down. We didn’t know that. But Grace Slick and the airplane actually told us, in so many ways, that there was a dark side to this. And it was the other side of the summer of love. It was the other side. She said it was coming. They said it was coming. And it came. Despite the administration’s against the war, the U.S. military continued the bombing of Vietnam, and civil rights battles would escalate to cities across America. We will not tolerate lawlessness. Murder and arson have nothing to do with civil rights.

In 1967, a vibrant and dynamic wave of music captured the spirit of an era marked by transformation, style, passion, unrest, and conflict. That unforgettable year became known as the Summer of Love—a time when an extraordinary burst of creativity and cultural expression reshaped the musical and social landscape across the UK and the USA.
Director: Lyndy Saville