40th Anniversary Summer of Love Concert by Michael Ernest

The 40th Summer of Love Concert was held Sunday, the day before Labor Day. There had been another concert in the park planned mid-August with an intriguing lineup of its own but it was cancelled over a fight about the use of the "Summer of Love" name.
The Summer of Love show was a colossal achievement in organization. Lasting eight hours, the bill listed 63 participants, either bands, speakers or others such as the Native American tribes who performed the pre-ceremony blessing. It meant very little down time on the stage and performances were kept short. A few bands into the show it became clear that the format was leading to something unexpected - the bands were kicking it out. Three songs and off meant every song was tight. Ask any band to just rehearse three or four songs and getting them to slam is a near certainty, even for those whom playing out has become rare. For still seasoned pros like the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Taj Mahal or the Alameda All-Stars, Greg Allman's backing band, it was an easy feat. The bonus was that, for many near-retired musicians, this was their biggest gig of the year. And, despite the gray hair, that gave it an energy any other indie rock festival would die for. Even the often-touring Jefferson Starship hadn't sounded so good in years.
Some of the groups were organized for the show. Members of the Steve Miller Band and the Doobie Brothers played with other projects. Barry "The Fish" Melton took the stage with a French guitar player, Stephen Missri, whose heavily effect-oriented distorted rhythms gave the crowd some psychadelic Hendrix moments. Melton's former partner, Country Joe McDonald also played. Ray Manzarek of the Doors showed up performing a psychedelic/jazz/rock set with poet Michael McClure, ironically once dubbed the role model for Jim Morrison. It was one of the highlights, Manzarek seeming to direct the other musicians as to the song structure changes as they went and all making them flawlessly. While the Starship's set was the clear favorite, the musical peak followed shortly after with Squid B. Vicious playing Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love with Cathy Richardson on vocals. Richardson earlier in the summer had played a free show at Amoeba Records fronting Big Brother and the Holding Company. Stepping in for Janis Joplin is setting oneself up for a near-certain fall but Richardson had left the crowd stunned. She repeated the performance doing a similar singer in Robert Plant, truly capturing the mood of the day by reaching deep for the final Lo-o-o-o-o-ve. She is clearly one of San Francisco's newest musical treasures. Above all, on a near-perfect day the stage looked great, adorned with flowers that matched the t-dyed backdrops.
The following week at the same location, Michael Franti's Ninth Annual Power to the Peaceful Concert, featuring Spearhead and the Indigo Girls, made for a nice encore. The week after the opera would invade Hippy Hill for a free performance. It was the three-day Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in October though which ended the year's music in the park. Another free show, it is set up for those crossover groups that might attract newcomers to country. T-Bone Burnett and Steve Earle, both featuring electronic beat artists on stage, as well as Emmylou Harris were highlights in a full-on all-star lineup.
It was during the Summer of Love Concert though that it became apparent what so many - 40,000 estimated - were really there to celebrate. The original Summer of Love was simply a good year, or at least an optimistic one. And the human race doesn't get many of those. If nothing else, it harkened back to the point just before many believe America verged off onto the wrong path, when the human race could have gone in a different direction and did not. Exactly which direction is open to debate but for just a few months, seen in the renaissance of the music and the ideas, emerging somehow as society was being turned inside out, the world seemed to be in focus to them.
But the Summer of Love hardly belonged to the Baby Boomers. Many of them may identify it as being a part of their generation's history but most were never actually a part of it. Over the past 40 years, the generation as whole did not change the world for the better. The country has becoming increasingly dominated by corporations, those working in such jobs the ones with health insurance, the others often left to scramble for it. The division between rich and poor has widened and the environment, an issue even then, clearly worsened. The Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, founded in 1967, still exists but unfortunately is an anomaly. Overburdened, in October of this year, it closed its walk-in clinic and stopped taking new patients. No, to find the Summer of Love spirit one instead needs to look inside a certain type of people - the artists, the musicians, those searching for a better way to live - who still exist throughout society though they too often are forced to take a more difficult path through life. It never belonged to an age group. In 1967, their numbers just came together in one place - Haight Ashbury.