Sunday Afternoon at the Oldies: Scott McKenzie, San Francisco, Summer of Love

Bending to popular demand, here is some more about the Summer of Love, now 50 years in the past. A re-do and clean-up of an entry from five years ago.

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Nostalgia time again.  Scott McKenzie, famous for the 1967 anthem "San Francisco" penned by John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas, died at 73 in 2012.  Gen-X-er Mick LaSalle gets it exactly right in his commentary:

The thing about that song is that . . . however naive and even sanctimonious it might be, it is so clearly a true expression of a mindset, of a vision, of a moment in time, of a generation, of an aspiration that, even if it is singing about a San Francisco that never happened and a dream that never came true and never really had a chance of coming true, and that had only a scant relationship with reality . . . it’s a precious thing.  It’s a document of a moment, but more than that, a perfect poetic expression of that moment.

It was not MY youth, but I can recognize in that song and in the purity of McKenzie’s vocal something that is as unmistakably honest, in its way, as Gershwin playing the piano, or Fred Astaire dancing, or Artie Shaw playing the clarinet.  It is youth finding itself in the world and saying the most beautiful thing it can think of saying at that particular moment. You can’t laugh that away.  You have to treasure that.  Really, you have to love it.

Speaking of the Mamas and Papas, here are some of my favorites:  Dedicated to the One I Love (1967), a cover almost as good as the Shirelles original.  But it is hard to touch the Shirelles.

[Correction: H. Fisher in a comment points out that the "5" Royales did it first, in 1957. Or at least before the Shirelles. Some of these songs go back a long way.]

Twelve Thirty.  Creeque Alley with great video. California Dreamin'.

And then there's Eric Burdon and the Animals, San Franciscan Nights from '67.

The so-called Summer of Love transpired 50 years ago. (Some of my reminiscences of the Monterey Pop Festival of that same summer of '67 are reported here.) Ted Nugent, the guru of kill and grill, and a rocker singularly without musical merit in my humble opinion,  offers some rather intemperate reflections in a Wall Street Journal piece, The Summer of Drugs. Excerpts:

The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

[. . .]

While I salute and commend the political and cultural activism of the 1960s that fueled the civil rights movement, other than that, the decade is barren of any positive cultural or social impact. Honest people will remember 1967 for what it truly was.

Although I am not inclined to disagree too strenuously with Nugent's indictment, especially when it comes to drug-fueled self-destruction, Nugent misses much that was positive in those days. For one thing, there was the amazing musical creativity of the period, as represented by Dylan and the Beatles above all. The summer of '67 saw the debut of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP of the lads from Liverpool. This creativity stood in stark contrast to the vapidity of '50s popular music. Has there been anything before or since in popular music that has come up the level of the best of Dylan? That is what we call a rhetorical question.

Perhaps I should give an example of '50s vapidity. How about Perry Como, Magic Moments? It came out in 1960, I believe, the last year of the 1950s. Of course, songs like this were also found aplenty in the '60s. My point, however, is that they were not characteristic of the '60s as they were of the prior decades in American popular music. Ours was a music of engagement, not escape.  A good example is Phil Ochs' There But for Fortune.

The '60s also offered welcome relief from the dreary materialism and social conformism of the '50s. My generation saw through the emptiness of a life devoted to social oneupsmanship, status-seeking, and the piling up of consumer goods. We were an idealistic generation. We wanted something more out of life than job security in suburbia. (Frank Zappa: "Do your job, do it right! Life's a ball, TV tonight!")

We were seekers and questers, though there is no denying that some of us were suckers for charlatans and pied pipers like Timothy Leary. We took on the Big Questions, even if we did so via dubious popularizers such as Alan Watts. We questioned the half-hearted pieties and platitudes and hypocrisies of our elders. Some of the questioning was puerile and dangerously utopian, but at least we were questioning. We wanted life and we wanted it in abundance in rebellion against the deadness we perceived around us. We experimented with psychedelics to open the doors of perception, not to get loaded. 

(Trivia questions: name the title of the book to which I allude with 'doors of perception,' its author, his place of residence in later life, and the Los Angeles band that took its name from the title.)

We were a destructive generation as well, a fact documented in Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s. But the picture Nugent paints is onesided. Here is Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" which was one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement. It is a great version by Alanis Morissette and uploaded to YouTube by our very own London Ed.

Or give a listen to the Youngblood's Get Together.  This song captures the positive spirit of the '60s, a spirit not much in evidence nowadays. 

Comments

[Bob]

The world they built and crafted is a nightmare and sinking compared to the old world that they so righteously fought to change, dismantle and impose progress upon for the better.

[H Fisher]

Dedicated to the One I Love was originally recorded by the 5 Royales: https://youtu.be/y335E8mfBAU

A little before your time perhaps Bill.

[BV]

Right you are! I learned something. I added a correction above.

[sally shoaf]

HOw funny, that Youngblood's song "Get Together" was the song I was singing in my head while I wrote that comment earlier today on your post about the Monterey Pop Festival .....GTMA i guess....

....This piece is spot on my friend .....gawd, we were all so earnest, and so naive !....and a lot of us were very very stoned ....

[sally shoaf]

I forgot to say thank you for digging this little gem out of your archives for me ....never get tired of talking about music ....or tired of writing about it either ....unless it's dinner time and I just pulled a pizza out of the oven !

[BV]

You are very welcome, Sal.