Summer of Love
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Summer of Love refers to the summer of 1967, and particularly to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where thousands of young people from all over the world loosely and freely united for a new social experience. As a result, the hippie counterculture movement came into public awareness.
The beginning of the Summer of Love has popularly been attributed to the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park on January 14 of that year.
John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas took twenty minutes to write the following lyrics for the song San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair):
If you're going to San Francisco,
be sure to wear some flowers in your hair...
If you come to San Francisco,
Summertime will be a love-in there.
Scott McKenzie's rendition of the song was released in May, 1967. The song was designed originally to promote the June, 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, the world's first major rock festival, which was attended by over 200,000 people. "San Francisco" became an instant hit (#4 in the United States, #1 in Europe) and quickly transcended its original purpose.
During the Summer of Love, as many as 100,000 young people from around the world flocked to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Berkeley and other San Francisco Bay Area cities to join in a popularized version of the hippie experience.[1] When these newly recruited Flower Children returned home at the end of summer, they brought new styles, ideas and behaviors to most major cities in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
The phrase "Summer of Love" (or, more accurately, the "Second Summer of Love") is sometimes used (particularly in the UK) to refer to the summers of 1988 and 1989 and the rise of Acid House music and rave culture.
