Country Joe flashes back to Summer of Love 

The Be-In to end all
To Joe, it was simply a big party. “I don't think that people who participate in those watershed events that become historical touchstones and landmarks, I don't think people think to themselves at all … ‘Wow, the world is never going to forget this, I'm right here at this historical event,’” he said. “… I was lucky, you know, lucky to be there, I guess.  It was a historical moment, and it was great, it was fun.”

The Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead played at the Be-In, but contrary to some published accounts, Joe insists, the Fish did not. Instead, he says, he sang the chorus of one song with an acoustic trio called New Age.

Inaccurate news coverage of some parts of the ’60s and the romanticizing of other parts are common, Joe has found over the years. “The truth isn’t always entertaining and the media is in the entertainment business,” he says. “History has kind of smooshed it all into one TV show.”

The memories of the participants aren’t exactly flawless either, he notes. He recalls a recent reunion tour with the Fish in which band members agreed they had not played on the “free stage” at the Monterey Pop Festival only to be asked a short time later by a fan to autograph a photograph of them rocking that very venue. And shown a list of his Fish and solo gigs from 1967, he is again shocked. Where he expected to see 30 or 40 dates, he sees more than 120. “Jesus Christ! We worked our ass off!”

Joe gained much of his work ethic and insights about performing from Janis Joplin, one of his best friends and his lover during much of the Summer of Love. It’s Joplin, felled in 1970 by booze and dope, whom he misses most from those years, he says, standing outside an apartment they shared on Lyon Street in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district.

‘We were incompatible as lovers’
“We were incompatible as lovers, really,” he says. “There wasn't a lot of sizzle going on, but we were good friends. We were both Capricorns, and had that leadership, take-charge thing going for us, and we got along really well.  I do miss her; she's probably the one person from that time, in ’67, that I really wish was around today so I could compare notes with her.

“She was very professional,” Joe says. “She liked to rehearse a lot, liked the structure of it and to plan the shows. She's the person that taught me that nine songs were a set. And generally that's the rule.”

They did not make music together or with musicians outside their own bands. “Janis and I had the same feeling about jamming; I'm not really a person that jams with people. She wasn't either.”

They did do a lot of walking together, Joe recalls, leading the way to the epicenter of the Haight at its intersection with Ashbury. Joplin had a little dog named George “and we would walk with George up to the Haight, and then we would walk down the Haight, and we'd see Freewheelin' Frank (a well-known figure in the Hell’s Angels), or Myra, Janis' old girlfriend, who had a new young girlfriend at the time, I can't remember her name, and we would talk, and Janis would get maybe a beer or something, and we'd walk up to Golden Gate Park to Hippie Hill, and it was very casual and a lot of fun. It was a community feeling, and very relaxed.”

Today, the area has long since gentrified into a neighborhood where prices for the ornately painted Victorians, once rented by the room for $25 a month to the flower children, reach well above $1 million. The commercial strip on Haight is one big tourist attraction where you can buy everything from hookahs to headbands. Hippie chic is a profitable industry, for some.

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