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Country Joe flashes back to Summer of Love
A counterculture legend revisits haunts where it all went down in '67
 | MSNBC.com video |
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Country Joe recalls Summer of Love Forty years later, musician Country Joe McDonald reflects on the Summer of Love, a time that filled the air with anti-war slogans and police sirens as much as it did with good vibrations and pot smoke. MSNBC.com |
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 | Country Joe recalls Summer of Love Musician Country Joe McDonald visits sites around San Francisco, the epicenter of 1967's Summer of Love. MSNBC.com |
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Forty years after the Summer of Love launched him toward legendary status as the political conscience of the Woodstock Nation, he shivers a bit beneath the thin ceiling of fog that hangs over his North Berkeley neighborhood. “I hate this,” he says, pulling up the collar of his jeans jacket and stamping his feet lightly on the sidewalk.
The occasional spell of chilly weather is one of the few things he has found to dislike about the Bay Area since he showed up in 1965. Too late to be a beatnik, he became a hippie instead, forming Country Joe and the Fish and immortalizing himself as the angry cheerleader who wrote and performed the protest song that got half a million American kids to scream the F-word in unison out of exasperation over the Vietnam War.
He was everywhere in 1967, singing at the “Human Be-In” that ushered in the so-called Summer of Love; leading thousands of marchers to a giant war protest; playing the historic Monterey Pop Festival; strolling the Haight with girlfriend Janis Joplin; appearing dozens of times at Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom.
The decades passed and Joe stayed, raising five kids and supporting a variety of political causes. But music was always No. 1, first folk, then psychedelic rock, and now back to folk with a Woody Guthrie tribute show and his own new anti-war song. How fitting that this hippie son of communist sympathizers — he was named for Josef Stalin — has become rock ’n’ roll’s ultimate working man, a headliner who never made bank but always did what he saw as the right thing.
‘Are you sure it was here?’
On this mid-May morning, he has agreed to lead a tour of ground-zero locations from the year that proved such a pivotal point in American history and culture, a time that filled the air with anti-war slogans and police sirens as much as it did with good vibrations and pot smoke.
First stop: the vast Polo Fields in the middle of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, site of the Human Be-In held Jan. 14, 1967. The free “gathering of the tribes” drew tens of thousands of flower children and focused national media attention on the hippie phenomenon, with its evolving lifestyle of rock music, marijuana, LSD, shaggy hair, casual sex, communal living and Eastern philosophy.
Revisiting the venue for the first time in 40 years, Country Joe is stunned at its size. The sun has burned the morning fog away, but the air is still brisk as he surveys the giant oval crater, guarded by towering eucalyptus trees and cawing crows: “This is huge. This doesn’t jibe with my memory at all. Are you sure it was here?”
Indeed it was, he realizes, getting his bearings. Here was where they parked the flatbed truck that served as the stage for poets Alan Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Lenore Kandel, as well as political activist Jerry Rubin. Over there was where LSD manufacturer Owsley Stanley parachuted into the event while the drug’s most famous promoter, Timothy Leary, advised attendees to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Joe recalls the innocent, almost giddy anticipation he and his band mates felt over the event. “We got up early, and I remember painting my face, painting a design on my face, because that's something I did at that particular time, to be a psychedelic hippie. … We ingested the right chemicals so we'd be in the right frame of mind for the event, which was kind of a common thing, you know, to do at the time.”
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