Remembering the turmoil of the Summer of Love, and music

Bill Knight column for Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, 8-14, 15 or 16

Fifty years ago, I was 17 going on 18 and, like most of my peers, was feeling frustrated at being unable to fully participate in the “Summer of Love,” and reeling from social changes affecting the whole nation with delight, dread or both.

I escaped some in rock ‘n’ roll (reeling and rocking, I guess), playing organ for a local band that performed a lot of three-chord tunes – “Good Thing” and “Wild Thing,” “Louie Louie” and “Hang on Sloopy,” “Twist and Shout” and tunes by the Rolling Stones and the Animals (“We Gotta Get Out of This Place” was a favorite) – at Extension buildings, community centers and school dances.

I also enjoyed radio and records with more private enthusiasm. There were great reasons, like these Number-1 hits from that year: the Monkees’ “I’m A Believer,” the Buckinghams’ “Kind of a Drag,” the Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday,” the Beatles’ “Penny Lane,” the Turtles’ “Happy Together,” the Rascals’ “Groovin’,” the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love,” Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermint,” the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer,” and the Beatles’ “Hello Goodbye.”

The world seemed to present that hello-goodbye dilemma, the swirling turmoil of change, good and bad, that took our breath away, both inspiring and suffocating us.

Ten phenomena from ‘67 remain in my memory as vividly as any hurting or healing, any fine or foul fragrance, any first-hand experience or observation:

* The aforementioned Summer of Love overwhelmed California, but there was a coast-to-coast rise of hippies (Danny Goldberg’s new book “In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea” is recommended).
* Unprecedented race riots burned in 100+ cities, including Chicago, New York and Pittsburgh, the worst being Detroit and Newark, N.J.
* NASA’s seemingly infalliable space program was brought down to Earth that January when three astronauts perished in a launch-pad fire at Cape Kennedy. Yet later that year, 63 nations (including the United States and the Soviet Union) signed a treaty agreeing to prohibit nuclear weapons in space and pledging to never make territorial claims on the Moon or other planets.
* The federal government seemed increasingly fraught, led by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who that winter proposed a 10-percent income-tax surcharge to finance the Vietnam War, which Congress OK’d that June.
* The Vietnam War itself started fragmenting the country. Republican stalwart George Romney returned from an earlier visit there saying he’d endured the military’s “greatest brainwashing anyone can get” about why the United States was involved, how the war was going, and prospects for peace. The first massive anti-war demonstrations occurred that spring, in New York and San Francisco.
* Heavyweight champion and global hero Muhammad Ali was indicted for refusing to be inducted into the Army.
* Legendary poet, biographer, musician and journalist Carl Sandburg, a Galesburg native, died at his North Carolina home at age 89.
* That October, the U.S. Supreme Court seated its first African-American justice, the towering Thurgood Marshall, and weeks later African-American candidates were elected to state legislatures in Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia for the first time since post-Civil War Reconstruction, also winning mayoral contests in Cleveland and Gary, Ind.
* In a landmark decision that June, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned laws prohibiting interracial marriage in “Loving v. Virginia,” appealed there after Richard Loving (a white man) and his wife Mildred ( a black woman) had been sentenced to prison for marrying. Such race-based restrictions were ruled unconstitutional.
* The country’s population in November topped 200 million for the first time. (It’s now more than 343 million.)

Of course, every year has similar touchstones for each generation, I suppose, so 17 year olds now hopefully will someday share nostalgic recollections of the Trump administration, North Korea and climate change; smartphones and cars needing drivers; gradual improvements in the pay gap between men and women; comic John Oliver, “Hamilton” and streaming tunes (that few older than 30 know); and breakthroughs, such as researchers finding out how to pull water out of thin air with a solar-powered device and scientists’ discovery of Earth-size planets 39 light-years away.

I hope so. It will be a challenge; Earth and the times need some luck.

So I still sometimes retreat to rock ‘n’ roll, like 1967’s protest songs such as Elvis’ “If I Can Dream,” or Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” plus Aaron Neville’s “Tell It Like It Is” and Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools,” and uplifting numbers “Up, Up and Away” by the 5th Dimension and the Who’s “I Can See for Miles.”

I can see for years.

[PICTURED: Graphic from quirkyberkeley.com.]