Without needing to make too broad a generalization, it’s protected to say that Saturday Night Submit learners probably didn’t beneathstand a lot about what was occurring in San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Or they didn’t, at the least, till the magazineazine ran “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion’s simultaneous report from and obituary for the drug-fueled searcher scene that had shaped round Haight-Ashbury. Fairly possibly her single most vastly recognized piece of writing, the piece relates her encounters each direct and indirect with participants within the counterculture each obscure and prominent.
That latter group consists of no much less a San Francisco hippie institution than the Grateful Lifeless, Didion’s interview with whom didn’t make it into the ultimate piece. However over close toly six many years since then, its kindscript has remained amongst her papers, and it was latestly discovered in Didion and John Gregory Dunne’s literary archive on the New York Public Library by Didion biographer Timothy Denevi. Simply days in the past, music journalist Jeff Weiss posted the 1967 text online, describing it “as a landmark early interview with the band directly after the discharge of their self-titled debut album, however earlier than national stardom swept them on the Golden Street to unlimited devotion and drug consumption.”
In a way, the members themselves occupied the attention of the countercultural storm. “I advised the Lifeless I used to be striveing to figure out what was occurring,” Didion writes, “and one in all them mentioned ‘Once you discover out, inform us.’ ” Primeics of discussion embody the venues they dislike (Los Angeles’ Cheetah, as an example, the place “there was a computer, eachfactor was professionalgrammed”), their resentment for the Council for a Summer of Love’s makes an attempt to organize the burgeoning scene, the ongoing deterioration of that scene (“a small and professionalductive creative factor” whose energy eventually enticeed “all these people in some lame bag or another”), their loathing of the then-new radio hit “San Francisco (Be Positive to Put on Movementers in Your Hair),” and the remorsedesk temporary absence of Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (“easily our most photogenic member”).
It was round this similar time that the Lifeless had been additionally interconsidered by CBS TV information for “The Hippie Temptation,” previously featured here on Open Culture, a segment on the popularity and dangers of LSD. The placeas they got here off in that contextual content as denizens of the belly of the beast, if reasonably articulate ones, they appear positively straight (within the parlance of the time) compared with a lot of the other interviewees in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”: the disoriented groupies, the aggressively enlightened bohemian blowhards, the infamous five-year-old on acid in “Excessive Kindergarten.” It’s no surprise that the Lifeless impressed one of many few finaling transferments to return out of that headily utopian period, thanks partially to its very peripatetic kindmuch lessness and lack of a political professionalgram. As Jefferson Airaircraft’s Paul Kantner have a tendencyed to recall, for a couple of weeks there in 1966, eachfactor was perfect — however Joan Didion turned up in 1967. Learn her lost interview with the Grateful Dead here.
Related content:
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“The Hippie Temptation”: An Angst-Ridden CBS TV Show Warns of the Risks of LSD (1967)
The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grateful Dead (1970)
Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013
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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the writer of the newsletter Books on Cities in addition to the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social webwork formerly referred to as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
