What Inspired The Summer Of Love?

Love, sure-but mostly drugs

- James Parker

THE RESPONSIBLE THING TO DO, before I walked into San Francisco’s de Young Museum to check out “The Summer of Love Experience”—the ethical thing, journalistically speaking—would have been to drop acid. To have popped a vintage dose of White Lightning, wandered in there with my ego in dancing splinters and my hindmost brain chambers all throbbingly illuminated, and just let it happen, daddy-o. But no more acid for me, thank you. No more tripping—not since the Great Ontological Destabilization of my mid-20s. These days I value my private pizza slice of reality too much. So I approached this large and many-faceted exhibition not humming in vibrational sympathy, not like a glowing child of the universe, but with the skeptical, half-despairing sobriety that passes for ordinary, unmedicated consciousness in 2017.

Those dirty hippies and their blown minds—why are we thinking about them now? Because the Summer of Love, when the continent decisively tipped and everything in America that wasn’t nailed down went sliding and clattering westward into the foggy bowl of San Francisco, was precisely 50 years ago. Psychedelia, like your correspondent, just hit middle age. So here we are at the beautiful de Young, moving through the 10-room exhibition at that characteristic dazed-survivor museum going pace, surrounded by Jefferson Airplane posters and looming faceless, bell-bottomed mannequins, with light shows flickering and acid rock acidically rocking and Peter Coyote narrating the audio tour in his pleasantly attitudinal veteran’s rasp. Look, over there in that glass case: It’s Jerry Garcia’s “Captain Trips” top hat, a bespoke item decorated with stars and stripes and bearing a large scorch mark, like the Beowulfmanuscript. And look: There’s Janis Joplin’s handbag.