Diggers mandala.

Love and Haight
In 1967 San Francisco was the world capital of the hippie revolution, a melting pot of music, sex, art and politics. Forty years on, Ed Vulliamy meets the survivors of its Summer of Love to find out if the dream lives on.

Ed Vulliamy
Sunday May 20, 2007
The Observer

‘Give us an F!’ shouts Country Joe. ‘F!’ they reply, then U, C, K, as is the custom. ‘What’s that spell?’ demands Joe. ‘FUCK!’ they retort. And Country Joe McDonald duly strums the opening chords to the most celebrated anthem to come out the San Francisco Summer of Love four decades ago, broadcast to the world from the stage at Woodstock two years later. In fact, ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag’ by Country Joe and the Fish had been first performed to a huge crowd in jovial jug-band fashion at an anti-war demonstration in Oakland in October 1965, and now the audience duly joins in again: ‘And it’s 1-2-3, what are we fighting for?/ Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn / Next stop is Vietnam …’
But this is not San Francisco in 1967, this is Anna’s Jazz Island, a cosy club in Berkeley, on a Saturday night late last April – Country Joe in his mid-sixties and many in the audience not much younger, apart from a few children, including Joe’s son, in charge of the merchandise table selling ‘Fuck Bush’ badges for a dollar. But the occasion is charged with passion and humour – a tribute night to Joe’s main inspiration, Woody Guthrie; just one of the multifarious influences that flowed like tributaries into the river, the phenomenon of music, psychedelic drugs, politics, anti-politics, art, sex, rebellion, celebration, squalor and calamity that rushed through the Haight Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco 40 years ago to reach what was for some the revolution’s climax, and for others its nadir and moment of dissipation during the Summer of Love in 1967.

It had begun as a subdued explosion, really, in the early 1960s, when a new generation of bohemians began to adapt and mutate the culture of the ‘Beats’ – Jack Kerouac et al – which had installed itself on North Beach during the late 1950s. A singular city on America’s edge, San Francisco had a singular history of counterculture, and while the convergence of rebellions, energies and experiments of the early Sixties erupted variously in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and across Europe, San Francisco would go its own way.

From 1964 to 1967, in and around the cheap Victorian housing of Haight Ashbury, a student quarter, something akin to what Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead calls a ‘little renaissance’ occurred, with still incalculable repercussions. ‘Ripple in still water/ Where there is no pebble tossed/ Nor wind to blow’, as the Dead song went. Except that there was a wind – a gale of ideas, music, appearance and lifestyle which would leave its indelible mark on Western society, and beyond. The drugs began with pure LSD initially manufactured by the CIA but documented and famously ‘tested’ by Ken Kesey. A core of Haight Ashbury bands played with each other, for each other, for free and at Chet Helms’s Avalon Ballroom and Bill Graham’s Fillmore. At their core were the Charlatans, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding company (with Janis Joplin) – leaving Country Joe and the Fish, and the Sparrows (later Steppenwolf), slightly to one, political, side. Artists illustrated the sound: Stanley Mouse, Rick Griffin, and others. Revolutionary activists, the Diggers, propelled by Peter Coyote, Emmett Grogan and others, endeavoured to demonstrate a new way of reorganising (or dis-organising) a society without money, often working with and as street theatre and the famed ‘Mime Troupe’. And there was a ‘look’: tie-dye came only later; costume was a pastiche, often mutating Edwardian and Victorian fashion, gleaned from various thrift shops. And these are only some of the things that those who made it happen remember …

Earlier during the day of the gig at Anna’s Jazz Island, Country Joe sits in his modest home in Berkeley, pictures of himself at Woodstock on the wall, and discusses what he calls ‘the Aquarian Age’. McDonald has a direct manner, like benign sandpaper. He comes, he says, ‘from a slightly different background to the rest. My grandmother was a communist, my grandmother was a Zionist, and my father was an Oklahoma farm boy. I grew up learning about the Depression, the dust bowl and the Holocaust, and I’d been in the military, so had some idea of the military as part of the working class. I didn’t like Elvis, played classical trombone and grew up with folk music.’ Joe produces a 10-CD set of protest songs he bought second-hand recently, and observes: ‘But there aren’t many jokes in there. I love this music, but was delighted to become a hippie.’

‘The folk, the politics, the civil rights movement – we brought all that into the mix. Some people were in Haight Ashbury just for the fun and games. Others over here in Berkeley wanted to be Bolsheviks. I was from a Bolsheviky family, but wanted to have fun too, freestyle. So we brought a political message wrapped up in a psychedelic package.’ Asked to describe what actually happened, McDonald replies: ‘It’s untranslatable, really. The only metaphor I can think of right now is map-making. For centuries, the greatest minds thought the earth was flat. And when someone comes along and says it’s round, there’s always going to be a guy with a map store full of flat maps saying “this is going to be bad news” – he’s going to have to keep saying: “no it’s not, it’s flat!” But we found that it was round, and that was a secret language that the flat-earth people like Donald Rumsfeld and – what’s that man’s name? … Jack Straw – will never understand. They’ll call us crackpots for saying the earth is round, and we’ll take that as a compliment.

‘It was also an equaliser – something for all the people in the world, against fascism of any kind, be it the Bush administration, Tony Blair or the communist politburo. You know, some things are hard-sell: like war in Vietnam or Iraq, and fundamentalist religion – you have to keep going on and on about it all the time. But how hard is it to sell peace, love and rock’n’roll? I’m not an advocate of getting stoned – any more – so let’s say it’s like offering someone a cool beer on a sunny day. Who’s going to say “Oh no, not that stuff” – hey, they’re going to say “that’s nice, I’ll take a barrel of that.”‘ I ask McDonald about the photograph of him playing with Jerry Garcia. ‘I was never a Dead Head,’ he replies. ‘I mean, they weren’t only non-political, they were anti-political. But hey, the music …’

The road winds uphill from the untroubled town of Mill Valley, through the idyll of Marin County, the scent of eucalyptus, bright flowers and shafts of sunlight through the branches of redwood trees, to the maze of pinewood construction that has been home to Bob ‘Ace’ Weir, rhythm guitarist and songwriter for the Grateful Dead, since 1973, and whence he takes his current band, Ratdog, on the road. Hispanic employees sweep the driveway, and their women arrive to do domestic work.

Over time, the Dead have become the biggest, most visible outcome of the Haight Ashbury renaissance. Words like ‘cult’ or ‘phenomenon’ don’t work – only the music tells the story. But we’ll try, and Bob Weir duly appears – baggy trousers, barefoot. The chairs in his studio have no legs, so we sit cross-legged on the floor to talk. There are statues of Shiva and Buddhist symbols on textiles among the guitars – things of beauty. ‘Oh, we found the classical spiritual practices later,’ says Weir. He has an intense stare and speaks with a deep, singing voice. ‘Haight Ashbury,’ he says, ‘was a ghetto of bohemians who wanted to do anything – and we did, but I don’t think it has happened since. Yes, there was LSD. But Haight Ashbury was not about drugs. It was about exploration, finding new way of expression, being aware of one’s existence.’ In contrast to what he saw as the political ideologues, ‘we wanted everyone to be their own leader. Ideology never meets reality with any grace.’

Just as painters prefer talking about light and colour to discourse about ‘what they are saying’, so Weir’s eyes light up when talking not about ‘the scene’ but music itself. ‘We were folk musicians unable to resist the array of electric guitars in the front of the music store where we were working, and the possibilities, tonally. There was also classical music and jazz, Stravinsky and Coltrane. Let’s say the ultimate goal was to find something like the first movement of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, but free-form. What we would do is take LSD and work around, say, a two-step programme; find a key, open up a room of possibilities and explore them. There was a thread to it all, and the idea was to find the thread. I’m still trying to get to that ultimate goal, and occasionally we came close, and still do as Ratdog – doing something heaven wants you to do. And when it happens, everyone in the audience knows. It’s palpable.’ Weir reaches out, opens a box of Skoal Bandit chewing tobacco, and puts a pouch in his mouth.

He is refreshingly scathing about the ‘cult’ of the Dead. ‘The only other person it happened to was Dylan,’ he says, ‘that notion that we are up to more than we are actually up to. I think a lot of that perception takes, well, a chemical form. The only reason Jerry Garcia got into hard drugs is because he couldn’t leave his hotel room.’ We discuss a couple of examples. The Dead’s chronicler and publicist since 1980, Dennis McNally, writes in his book about a line in the solitary anthem ‘Black Muddy River’: ‘When it seems like the night will last for ever’. Some Dead Heads, he notes with disdain, take this melancholy reflection as an instruction to keep the party going. Weir cites Casey Jones (‘Driving that train / High on cocaine’). ‘People don’t realise,’ he says, ‘that this is a cautionary tale about cocaine.’ And he starts half-singing (which is rather thrilling): ‘”Got two eyes, but you still don’t see / Come round the bend, you know it’s the end / The fireman screams and the engine just gleams.” You know,’ says Weir, ‘it all gets very annoying, being misunderstood.’

‘And yet,’ says Weir’s neighbour and friend, Peter Coyote, who co-founded the anarchist ‘Digger’ movement in Haight Ashbury, ‘the Dead never did anything to remove a product from the market which by doing so may have diminished the cult. It’s true that the Dead were the most familial of all the bands, but when Bob Weir accuses the Diggers of being ideological, he belies the Dead’s participation in the mass culture of the late 20th century, which had a very pronounced ideology. We actually had no ideology – we were about practice.’ Then Coyote smiles: he and Bob had dinner only the other night. ‘Hey, we’re on the same side. What the fuck.’

The then editor of Oz magazine in London, Richard Neville, opened Playpower, his memoir of the 1960s, by recalling a visit to London by ‘Pete the Coyote’ and a group of San Francisco Hell’s Angels. Neville quotes Coyote predicting that ‘the digital computer is easing us into the electronic/automotive age just as the steam engine pivoted us into the industrial revolution. In those days it was gin. Kids were suckled on it, societies campaigned against it. Now it’s acid. LSD is for us what gin was for the Victorians.’

Coyote, now an actor – as he was when he first came to Haight Ashbury – also lives in a sprawling, wonderful home in Mill Valley. His handsome face oozes a curious mix of insatiable curiosity and inner calm, perhaps reflecting an entwinement between his Buddhist faith and anarchist past. Best known for playing the ruthless DA in Jagged Edge and the alien-loving government agent in ET, he has made countless appearances on hit US TV shows.

The Digger movement, named after the English 17th-century revolutionaries, was, as Coyote writes in his memoir: ‘an anarchistic experiment dedicated to creating and clarifying distinctions between society’s business-as-usual and our own imaginings of what-it-might be.’ Such an enterprise involved ‘new forms of creative expression’ charged with political content, and led to performances by the Mime Troupe – a ‘Commedia Del’Arte of life-actors’, as they called themselves – and spectacles and direct action in pursuit of a ‘Free City’. There was free food, a free bakery, a ‘Death of Money’ parade with a dollar sign on the side of a coffin – ‘things with a message that cannot be misunderstood,’ Coyote says in conversation. ‘The Diggers were a highly evolved art project. We never pretended to be a viable political ideology.

‘You have a vision, and you make it real by doing it,’ he says. ‘I was and am still happy to be called an anarchist, so long as it is understood – which it usually is not – that anarchism does not mean anarchy. It is a method of devolved social organisation. And although none of our political aims were achieved – ending racism, imperialism, capitalism – almost all of the cultural and social agenda has become mainstream: environmentalism, women’s rights, organic food … well, if not mainstream, then sufficiently present to create tension where before there was no tension. A situation in which people like Dick Cheney have to stumble over their own lies.’

Coyote took his ideas into mainstream America by becoming a member of the California State Arts Council in 1975, and then its chairman. In this role, he revolutionised the state budget, urging Governor Jerry Brown to increase Arts Council funding from $1m to $20m, upping the grants to orchestras and opera houses, by way of appeasement to ‘get the arts into jails, schools, places where theatre, poetry and things had just never been’.

The Summer of Love had an empress, and her name was Janis Joplin. She is no longer with us, but those in her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, are very much so, such as Sam Andrew, guitarist, with his ready smile, who has come to sit quietly at the Aroma coffee shop in San Rafael, Marin County, to read a Renaissance text in Italian and paint his canvasses. Afterwards, he says, he will go back home, ‘drink some vodka and practise my guitar’.

Child of an airforce family, Andrew studied at the Sorbonne, and came to San Francisco to ‘play folk and blues with Country Joe … It’s hard to say why it happened when it did. What’s important, though, is that it was non-verbal and in technicolour.’ Big Brother, formed with Pete Albin on bass, needed a singer, says Andrew. And Chet Helms of the Avalon remembered a girl he had met in Texas. ‘”Why don’t you hook up” he suggested, “and see if you get along?” Janis,’ sighs Andrew, ‘was the most talented person on the scene. But why is it always the same? Edith Piaf. Billie Holiday. The drugs, the drink, the wrong man – all this passion, at a cost of self-destruction?

With the Summer of Love, says Andrew, came the decay, for all that the music, ironically, embarked on its recorded journey around the world. ‘Yes, of course, we all got record contracts,’ he says, ‘but whatever it was, it was over, that moment of grace. There was the Monterey Pop festival in June, and all the kids came up to fill the Haight. With them, the vultures moved in. What we had done was commercialised. People moved in who wanted to make a buck out of it all, especially the drugs. Hard drugs arrived – speed, meth, cocaine, heroin. The drugs became tiring and boring. And free love? Women were raped – it became a perversion of what it had been before.’

Sam Andrew is so agreeable to be around that recollections give way to conversation about present passions, such as the show he has produced Love, Janis, based upon her letters, and for which he auditions the band that play his own. ‘I couldn’t get into any of the bands I put together,’ he jokes. He also wants to talk about his passion for Italian literature, and after our interview, we maintain a gratifying correspondence in the language we both love, which he reads and writes fluently. We discuss, too, his ‘Notes for a Play’, on which he is working, and which Andrew wants to be his direct voice of recollection, rather than our chat. Here are some extracts, with their portraits of Janis and Kandinsky-esque connections between colour and music:

Janis used to ride around town on a Vespa. She loves Edith Piaf. I remember an afternoon in 1963 when Piaf died, she listened to ‘Non, Je ne regrette rien’ over and over. ‘Let me put it on just one more time, just one last time’… (Janis) knows how to laugh. She’s funnier than 10 people … [Country] Joe and Janis used to have violent arguments about politics. He couldn’t understand that it was political of her just to stand on the stage. She mistrusted the politically inclined.

‘That was the time,’ Andrew had said in conversation, ‘when we lived our lives as musicians rather than people with a career in music. Ourselves, the Dead, Airplane and Quicksilver. We in Big Brother wanted to be Indians, tribal, while Quicksilver wanted to be the cowboys, with their boots, carrying rifles around.’

‘You’ll know which house belongs to the Native American,’ come the directions. ‘It’s the one with the hulk of a car kinda propped up and auto parts all piled up and big dogs’ – which it is. Gary Duncan – half Pawnee, quarter Cherokee – was guitarist for arguably the most pioneering band of them all, Quicksilver Messenger Service. His house is elevated above his garage and looks like Pandora’s box, full of statues, plants and what he calls ‘junk’, just up the hill from the gangland-gunland of Richmond, overlooking San Francisco. ‘It’s dangerous around here and I’ve got the bullet wound to prove it,’ he says, showing his wrist and telling some chilling story about crossfire and a ricochet.

On the back of the first and definitive Quicksilver album, Duncan has a fresh, boy-angel’s face, carrying his baby daughter. Now, he is the salty dog of rock’n’roll (literally: he has sailed the Atlantic and the Pacific) – black leather, white beard, pulling on his pipe, shotgun beside his bed (he loves, and loves to talk about, guns). We sit on toolboxes and sip Guinness in the sun, as he recalls how it all began for him, in Oklahoma, then working in the canneries of California’s fruit-growing plains – Steinbeck for real. There was time in prison for possession of marijuana, but Duncan secured ‘good money for suits and driving around with show girls’ playing casinos in Vegas before coming to San Francisco, hooking up with David Freiberg and the late John Cipollina to form Quicksilver. By which time, he says, ‘the Beatles had screwed it up for any rock’n’roll musician and something else had to happen, there had to be another sound’. Which there was, before even the Dead: Quicksilver’s symphonic epic ‘The Fool’ being the first taste. ‘It must have been the longest piece ever made, at the time,’ broods Duncan; ‘the result of a lot of LSD and, well, influences. I didn’t actually listen to much rock’n’roll, I preferred jazz and Ravel.’

Duncan was married, ‘because it was a parole violation to be alone with a woman who was not your mother, sister or wife’. Between 1965 and 1967, ‘we did everything we wanted. We played with the Dead and the Airplane every weekend. That was the time: you wouldn’t have known it was going on, you couldn’t see it – but if you knew the right address, you’d find the right people.’

Then came the Human Be-In in January 1967. ‘I was with David Freiberg, and we saw more and more people. And I said to David, “This is the end of it.” And it was. ABC News, NBC News, then all the kids came for the Summer of Love, and all I saw were victims. Kids getting hooked on drugs, the wrong kind of drugs, people coming in to exploit it all.’

Duncan reached the point, he says, ‘when I was lying. If you’re not playing with your heart in it, you are lying to the audience.’ And so began a remarkable life, ‘hanging with the Hell’s Angels – you know, I don’t think there’s really a brotherhood between musicians, but there is with the Angels. They can be dangerous and I’ve got a detached retina to prove it, but if they take you in, and they did, they’ll stay with you until the end.’

Duncan became a longshoreman and able-bodied seaman. He bought a schooner in Malta and sailed it across the Atlantic, through the canal up to San Francisco, then across the Pacific, regretfully having to part with it ‘for financial reasons’. He read Umberto Eco and about his passion for metaphysics in preparation for a book of his own, about the occult. He raced hot-rod cars, ‘fixed up hundreds of motorcycles and cars’ – then, with Freiberg and others, re-formed Quicksilver Messenger Service, ‘wanting to record music this time, engineer it, produce it. I’ve got hundreds of hours now, I listen, and think, This is really good. Better than some of the shit we were playing back then.’

As the sun rises over the precipitous streets of SanFrancisco’s North Beach, just before 7am, there is a truly wonderful scene: corporation men spray the sidewalk while a gathering of bearded folk sip espressos at Caffe Trieste on the corner of Vallejo and Grant streets. And into this huddle, saluting many of them, arrives a man with long grey hair beneath a beret, jacket and scarf against the cold of early morning but no socks and slipper-like shoes. He calls this corner ‘the centre of the universe’. This is Paul Kantner, engine behind the first superstars of Haight Ashbury, Jefferson Airplane. He lights an unfiltered Camel, the first of about eight he will devour over the next 90 minutes. ‘One cigarette closer to Jesus!’ he laughs. ‘I’m not going to give up the few things I enjoy. Might as well die of something I like.’

‘I tried living in Marin County,’ he spits. ‘It was like that island in the Iliad where everyone is so fucking happy all the time – it was like an old-age home; couldn’t take it.

‘I was brought up a Catholic but lucky enough to have been educated by the Christian Brothers,’ he says, ‘who gave me books on the forbidden list: Tom Sawyer, Lady Chatterley …’ which, he proceeds, primed him well for what was to follow. But important things happened in between, as Kantner immersed himself in folk music – while science fiction ‘opened my mind to what was beyond the possible’. And above all, the assassination of John F Kennedy: ‘That did it. It turned around my belief in the political process – that a man like that could be killed by the then equivalent of Cheney-like assholes. It was a case of “Fuck you, exit, stage left.”‘

In 1963, ‘I bought a Fender re-verb amplifier and took LSD during the same week.’ By 1965, ‘in San Francisco,’ says Kantner, ‘the music was just another thing to do at the concert. Sometimes it was the least interesting thing – everything was exploding: a challenge to the establishment: DON’T TRUST THESE PEOPLE. There was a nexus of intelligent people: costume had changed, there was this window between the invention of the contraceptive pill – God bless it – and contagious diseases … People call it hedonism, but it wasn’t. It was: “We will break your laws at our leisure.” For me it was political. And the band got irritated by this – they were like the Dead, just musicians. They didn’t want all this revolutionary shit.’

A police officer joins us and asks Kantner: ‘Did you see that Summer of Love thing on TV last night?’ No, replies Kantner, he didn’t. I wonder if the officer knows who he is talking to. ‘Sure, I know officer McLaughlin,’ says Kantner, ‘he’s a good boy.’ We carry on talking about the impact of what happened in Haight Ashbury. ‘Obviously it was limited to a degree,’ says Kantner. ‘There is something about the malevolent greed of Cheney and his kind that is almost as dangerous as fascism – I mean, at least Hitler had a cause! But we’re still there, saying “Get out of your fucking SUV! Put down that cell phone!” A good idea is a virus, it catches and spreads like a virus, and,’ says Kantner, ‘you are not going to be able to un-ring the bell! Thank you for your time.’ And off he goes into the morning, cigarette in hand.

Psychedelia was intended to be seen as well as heard and felt, and high above the rolling hills and vineyards of Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, lives Stanley Mouse, who, along with others, painted, printed, airbrushed and immortalised the Haight Ashbury years into a series of images – concert posters for the Avalon or Fillmore, and album covers. Above all, Mouse was the man who, in 1966, designed the ‘skeleton and roses’, hallmark of the Grateful Dead, on posters, covers and the mind’s eye of generations.
He is a quiet, mischievous man with keen eyes, like, well, a mouse. And he produces what gets called the first ‘Skull and Roses’ poster, then places another, new painting alongside it. It is called ‘Fairy in the Woods’: a beautiful muse, naked but for a gossamer scarf and the roses that drift down her body and cover her pudenda. Like most of the work on the walls of his magical studio, it is highly erotic in that ethereal way that the pre-Raphaelites Mouse admires were sexual. ‘There you have it. The original skeleton is female, and it’s like a timewarp of 40 years. Look, I’ve put skin on her, but she’s still covered in roses.’ The original poster came about, he says, ‘when we went to the library looking for something that was grateful and dead. And we found this, by the Englishman Edmund Sullivan. It was perfect – we simply coloured in the roses and added the lettering.’

Mouse, like his friend, the late Rick Griffin, also left his inimitable typefaces, the ‘rolling lettering’ that characterised Haight Ashbury as much as any guitar riff. ‘Look at a typeface from the Forties or Fifties,’ he says. ‘It’s bold and intended to be read in seconds. Well, we wanted something that took a little figuring out, so you could have your own little mini-trip, reading what was written.’

Mouse’s new, erotic, paintings become more and more copious as one wanders the studio and house; he appears to live quite a good life. One painting is especially striking. It shows a skeleton wearing a suit and fedora playing a pedal steel guitar in a room at the back of which a door is ajar, revealing a woman on her knees, administering to a seated man all of whom we see are legs akimbo on the side of a bed. ‘I wonder if I can show this stuff around here – it’s all so peachy and holistic,’ says Mouse, surprisingly, for a man at the centre of the psychedelic whirlwind. ‘I have a Victorian sensibility. That is to say, when things are clamped down upon openly, they happen more vigorously in the undergrowth, a bit like in Salt Lake City’.

‘I finally got to Florence in 2000,’ says Mouse, ‘and realised that a quarter of my brain had been empty, reserved for the Italian Renaissance, then filled up. I like to think we had a mini-Renaissance here.’ Yet, for the 30th anniversary of 1967, Mouse produced a poster called ‘Bummer of Love’ showing a copulating couple on Haight Street, him spliffing away, her shooting up in the thigh. ‘Everyone was pissed off,’ recalls Mouse. ‘It wasn’t respectful or nostalgic enough. But I can’t stand all this revisiting; you can’t go on having your 21st birthday over and over. People don’t understand why I slam it all. It was interesting until all the crazies started hitching to San Francisco and all the hard drugs came in. I mean, Summer of Love? “Hey, let’s go to San Francisco and fuck all the hippie chicks!” I remember arriving in San Francisco after taking some pure lysergic acid, and someone giving me a tab of Owsley’s stuff. “How do you like it, man,” they asked. I said: “It’s horrible.”‘

Owsley himself, the LSD scientist and keeper to the gates to the open mind, replied thus, from Australia, to The Observer’s request for an interview: ‘I do not do interviews for publication with people I don’t already know and trust, and I never do them over the phone, or for free.’

The writer Joan Didion dispatched, in 1968, a counter-current to the euphoria over Haight Ashbury, entitled ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’. It was a chronicle of squalor, lost teenagers sought by frantic parents, rape dressed up as ‘free love’ and complete mindlessness on drugs. ‘The room is overheated and the girl on the floor is sick,’ runs one passage. ‘Deadeye says she has been sleeping for 24 hours now. “Lemme ask you something,” he says. “You want some grass?”. I say I have to be moving on. “You want it,” Deadhead says. “It’s yours.” Couples shrug at the notion that their other half is ‘balling’ whosoever; a ‘scrubbed blonde’ 17-year-old is looking for her 14-year-old brother so as to ‘turn him on’ to STP, the latest chemical trip and ‘some kid with braces on his teeth is boasting that he got the last of the STP from Mr O himself – Mr Owsley.’

One band, though, stood notably apart from – above, indeed – all this. Itinerant, but based in San Francisco for those formative years of 1965-’67, they were called the Sparrows. Then, during ’67, they changed their name to Steppenwolf, and soon after left the Bay to become the founding fathers of heavy rock. Their new name was appropriately inspired by Herman Hesse’s novel, since ‘the Wolf’ himself, John Kay, was born in what became East Germany, his father killed on the Russian front. His mother smuggled herself and her son to West Germany in 1948; 10 years later they emigrated to Canada, and in 1965, the Sparrows arrived in San Francisco.

Kay the wolfman howls ‘Born to be Wild’ – soundtrack to Easy Rider and anthem of America’s freeway outlaws – but turns out to speak with a firm courtesy and marked command of the English language, offering such counsel as: ‘I think you may be well pleased by spending a couple of evenings with this book …’ He has kept his lean, rock’n’roll-seasoned good looks, behind sunglasses (in a Jagger-esque way, though Kay could hardly be a more different person).

Although best known for ‘Born to be Wild’, it was a rock oratorio called ‘Monster’ that came to define the band and its distance from the Summer of Love out of which it came. The song is rock’s first epic narrative poem, a searing, scathing history of America, driven not-by anti-Americanism but by a profound sense of patriotism betrayed, for all Kay’s origins, which speaks from the country’s riven soul, and cuts to the heat of the dichotomous patriotism spawned by 1967.

‘I am an American by choice,’ says Kay, who grew up in the shadow of the Second World War and the Cold War. During the early 1960s, he immersed himself, he says, in ‘the folk music of this country: the Delta Blues, Cajun music, songs of the prison gangs’, which he would borrow from a library in Buffalo, New York. ‘I saw the great Son House,’ he says, ‘and then we thought, Let’s apply this sound to the here and now. To the civil rights movement, to what is happening in Vietnam. And the Wolf duly became part of all that.

‘San Francisco at that time,’ says Kay, ‘proved that music could be a positive force in the world. But I felt outside that whole flower power “trip” thing; maybe because I was me, or maybe because I had grown up in Germany watching cinema newsreels about the 1953 uprising in East Berlin, and Hungary in 1956, and that was my world. The hippie dream was just a little too unrealistic and cut off for me – I needed to be connected to the world and the political world. Around the Fillmore was a poor and black neighbourhood, and I didn’t feel able to say, “I reject everything you have been working hard for all your lives.”‘

Other things set Steppenwolf apart: the aggression of the sound itself and not least the song about drug-dealing, ‘The Pusher’, of which Kay says now: ‘When I look at today’s world of meth labs and tragic consequences – internal displacement in Colombia and the opium fields of Afghanistan and the havoc they wreak – I do think of “The Pusher” [‘God damn the Pusher man,’ it rails] as a justified statement.’ Steppenwolf’s sound was different from the others: what Kay calls ‘our somewhat aggressive and raw persona. But when people ask me, “Are you the founders of metal and rock?”, I recall only that we were too busy to ask ourselves that question. We were working musicians. We wanted music to be a power beyond entertainment, and were lucky that we could record a gold hit like “Born to be Wild”, which enabled us to then go on to record something more dangerous like “Monster”.’ By the time the Wolf, unforgettably, reached the Royal Albert Hall in 1970, ‘Monster’ was the anthem of the age. ‘The GIs were playing it out in Vietnam,’ says Kay.

This year, based in Vancouver but on a valedictory tour, ‘Monster’ is the kernel of Steppenwolf’s set, with its line ‘Now we’re fighting that war over there/ No matter who’s the winner we can’t pay the cost/ Yes, there’s a Monster on the loose/ It’s put our heads into the noose …’ Kay says: ‘That the song has grown to become even more apposite now than it was when I wrote it. It was my wife who first said: “That song needs to be heard again,” and the more that war in Iraq drags on, the more audiences respond. But even during the years between, I often got letters from people like a lawyer in Mississippi who told me the song inspired in him a sense of duty to speak out and defend the common people. Teachers tell me they play “Monster” to interest kids, who otherwise glaze over, in the real history of their country.

‘The Wolf,’ says Kay, ‘is still howling against a world which is over-medicated, stressed out and under-informed because it is dictated to by “infotainment” news media which have become Bush’s propaganda channels.’ In addition, Kay and his wife run a foundation called Mauekay (their combined names) which supports carefully chosen human rights and environmentalist causes around the world. ‘It’s the thought that I can put a few ducats in the direction of achieving something, rather than concentrating on what has not been achieved that keep me from the abyss. I operate on the dictum of the young South African Aids victim, Nkosi Johnson: “Do all you can, with what you have in the time you have in the place you are”‘.

Haight Street now is a mix of victims and resistance. Most of the original hippies have gone. I remember giving a ride to a man in Oregon during the mid-Eighties, to his village, where the gardens were cluttered with totem poles and Kesey-style VW microbuses, and everyone was ‘ex-Haight’. I stayed a night or two, and was told about a plan by someone nearby to run tourist buses for people to see where the Summer of Love had gone. ‘He got shot, and it took the FBI a month to find the body,’ my companion explained. But a few survivors remain on Haight, with their tie-dye, beards and begging bowls. Harleys still fart through, revving away. Most of the pan-handlers are young, however, come as though on a pilgrimage. People like Rusty Philips from the Appalachians, ‘for the ride and to hang out where the Dead were. Nearest thing to God, man [wince, Bob Weir]. Hey, you want some weed?’ It’s how to pay the fare. Missie Watson from Shreveport, Louisiana, is openly in flight from ‘my fucking mother and my father who does what he likes with both of us, which I can tell you is not at all pretty’. Her hair matted, her face pierced, Missie begs for a buck, ‘for a high, for whatever’. ‘I have a feeling,’ Paul Kantner had said, ‘that the kids on Haight are fleeing a harsher life than before.’

Two decades ago, Haight Street had emerged from being a very dangerous place to become a memorial to the Summer of Love 20 years ago. Now, it is a memorial to the Summer of Love 40 years ago. The ubiquitous muggers now largely gone, many things that have not changed have remained the same for the better. There is no sign of a Borders bookshop, but the anarchist collective bookshop remains – selling bumper stickers saying ‘Fuck War’ and T-shirts featuring pictures of armed Native Americans and reading: ‘Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism since 1492’ – and the excellent, capacious and independent Booksmith store remains. The Haight Merchants Association is a robust body which saw off Gap when it tried to make inroads, and there is no sign of Starbucks, nor will there be. Instead, there is Coffee to the People, walls lined with portraits of Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Sub-commandante Marcos of the Mexian Zapatistas and Lithuanian-American anarchist Emma Goldman. In this way, Haight is a unique, chain-free, American high street. But none of the formative figures of San Francisco’s renaissance hang around Haight any more. They have better places to go.

The tangerine sun sets, and dusk wraps the bay, visible from what must be the world’s most beautiful – and beautifully located – sports stadium, new home to the San Francisco Giants baseball team. The necklace of lights along the Bay Bridge flickers and the matter in hand is whether Barry Bonds will overtake Hank Aaron’s all-time record of 755 home runs. At the bottom of the fourth inning against Colorado, Barry hits another, taking his total to 743. My kind host, Barry Melton, gives me a double high-five, as well he might; only eight homers to go. Melton is Chief Public Defender for Yolo County, north of here, and President of the California Association of Public Defenders, some 4,000 of them; in other words, one of the state’s top heavyweight lawyers. He is especially pleased, quite apart from Bonds’s homer, having just won an important case against the District Attorney seeking civil injunctions against ‘alleged gang members’ ability to gather. ‘The injunction raised enormous constitutional questions; they’re trying to make it that any Mexican-American kid wearing a bandana is a gang member,’ fumes Melton. But what has all this do with the Summer of Love?

Well, Barry Melton was once better known as ‘The Fish’ – as in Country Joe, the other half of the band. It’s hard to believe that the self-assured, genial tough-guy attorney-cum-baseball fanatic is the man who looks like Merlin on LSD on the cover of ‘Fixin’-to-Die Rag’ – but he is.

‘I always wanted to be a lawyer,’ explains Melton. ‘It was my parents who wanted me to be a musician and told me to pick up a guitar. They were communists, and wanted me to grow up to be Pete Seeger. I enrolled as a law student on a correspondence course long after all that – it cost me $1,000 and took me three years, and I was admitted to the bar in 1982.’

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Melton came west in 1955, his father hounded by the McCarthy purges and helped by an uncle to find a job in California. ‘Only every time he got one, the FBI would show up, and he’s be out of it, drifting again.’ A ‘child of the old left’, Melton says he ‘had to find some way to rebel’, and first took LSD at the age of 14. Travelling across America three years later, he ‘heard that something was going in San Francisco, that it was the centre of the storm’. By the time of his 18th birthday, Melton had met Country Joe, six years his senior, ‘who had been in the military and certainly had not been taking LSD … I was the wild child. Joe wanted the songs to last three minutes, but I made sure to hijack them in the middle so they lasted at least 20 minutes … Yes, it was political… this is the most left-wing city in the United States – it goes back to the gold rush, the labour movement, the 1950s, the Beats. It’s the ethos of the place.’

Melton has not stopped playing; he still tours, not least with our companion along for the baseball, Steve Ashman, who plays bass and shows pictures of his vast collection of baseball memorabilia. Melton also runs an office of lawyers, often dealing with Death Row cases. ‘I am counsel of record for 10,000 cases a year,’ he says, ‘and I have a capital offence case right now. So far as I’m concerned, they are trying to kill people, this is the front line and what I do is a matter of life and death.

‘And all that we were doing in the Sixties is why I do what I do now,’ says The Fish/Melton. ‘It’s “because” of all that, not “despite”. There was no safety net then, and there’s no safety net now. That’s why I like all these goths and kids with tattoos, bandanas and dreadlocks. Come on, 90 per cent of the kids who dress like that are not in gangs, it’s just a “fuck you” thing. It’s like us having long hair was a “fuck you” thing, and what I do now trying to keep people off Death Row is a “fuck you” thing. And oh, give my best to Joe when you see him.’

Country Joe has finished singing Woody Guthrie songs at Anna’s Jazz Island, and performed a new, scathing number about Iraq called ‘Support the Troops’. Then it comes, the Fish’s “fuck you”: ‘Give us an F!’ – only Joe changes the lyrics this last time around: ‘1-2-3, What are we fighting for? / Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn/ Next stop is … Iran.’