Summers Of Love

From Haight-Ashbury to Hendrix, famed photographer Baron Wolman highlights three years in music and cultural history

These images come from my book Happy Daze: The Summers of Love, which brings together my archive of photographs from three years of cultural history. In 1967, I was living in San Francisco, earning a living as a photojournalist. San Francisco was the center of a new and exciting scene – I loved it!

Young people were flocking to the Bay Area bringing a sense of liberation, freedom and colorful style with them. New bands were making an impact, and everyone was doing his or her thing on their own terms, living a free-form, ‘free’ life. From the Summer of Love in 1967 to Woodstock in 1969, I was Rolling Stone magazine’s first chief photographer and had a unique, front-row pass to the enchanting end of the 1960s.

All the photographs in the book were taken during the late ’60s, a few for Rolling Stone, some for our book, Festival, and some were taken wandering around the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where I lived at the time.