A strange vibration

Among the many curiosities revealed in this book, few are more startling than the fact that at the height of the so called ‘summer of love’ in 1967 the British historian Arnold Toynbee, on a visit to San Francisco, made his way to the Haight-Ashbury district — hippy central — to catch a concert by one of the Bay Area’s most popular bands, Quicksilver Messenger Service. Just what Toynbee, who was 78 at the time, made of the group’s epic exercise in free form, psychedelic improvisation, ‘The Fool’, Goldberg does not mention. But he does tell us that elsewhere in the Haight, at around the same time, Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev were being busted at a party where pot was being smoked, and that Nureyev ‘performed a jeté into the back of a police van’.

By then the Haight, as the district was known, was to all intents and purposes finished. Hippies had been the subject of a cover story in Time magazine, and the Haight was fast being populated by teenage runaways, panhandlers, drug dealers and assorted charlatans, a human zoo for gawping tourists in Gray Line buses, pausing only to buy ‘Love Burgers’ from an enterprising merchant.

The summer of love was giving way to the winter of exploitation. In October 1967, a group of community ‘elders’ organised a mock funeral procession through the Haight to mark the passing of ‘Hippie, devoted son of the media’, suggesting that from now on the acceptable term would be ‘free men’. It would never catch on.

San Francisco, flowers in your hair, free love — it all seems as remote and unreal as a fever-dream.

Danny Goldberg was a teenager in the 1960s, growing up in New York in a liberal Jewish family. He was exposed to drugs and student radicalism, became a rock journalist, then a record executive and the manager of Nirvana.