Love hurts: The stampede of misfits to the Bay Area, the heavy drugs that were passed, the lack of human services all contributed to the Summer of Love's short-lived celebration. Robert Altman

It seems like hundreds of years and it also seems like not too much time at all," Jerry Garcia was saying in 1976. He was reminiscing about the Summer of Love, the evanescent phenomenon that swept the Bay Area a decade before.

It took shape, certainly, in San Francisco and Berkeley—but also in Palo Alto and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary were experimenting with, and handing out doses of, the hallucinogenic LSD. But that was back in '64 and '65, when the Warlocks, who played at Kesey's parties, hadn't yet renamed themselves the Grateful Dead. When folkies, converted by the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan, embraced rock music. When the first dance concerts were named for either comic characters or drugs: "A Tribute to Dr. Strange," the "Trips Festival."

If you were more inclined toward politics than parties, the societal changes began earlier in the decade, when college students created enclaves of budding activists, protesting against a war in Southeast Asia and for civil rights in the South. In the Bay Area, Berkeley was the hotbed of political activity, sparked by the Free Speech Movement in 1964, and making a joke of UC President Clark Kerr's prediction, in 1959, that the students of "this generation … aren't going to press many grievances …. There aren't going to be any riots."

At San Francisco State, the administration responded to calls for free speech by putting up a redwood stage on the campus quad, available to pretty much anyone who had—or thought they had—something to say. And that's where (in '60s vernacular) I was at. For me, the year was 1965. I'd joined the campus newspaper staff as a reporter—just in time for the Sixties. Against the drab backdrop of the urban college's cookie-cutter buildings, activists stood out— characters such as George Hunter, a designer who dug rock music. He had Beatles-style hair and he'd show up almost every day wearing some kind of Western outfit or a tapered Italian suit with pointy boots, and he'd hit the Tubs, a collection of barracks turned into student government and snack huts, where he'd startle people by cranking up the jukebox and dancing by himself. Later, in the cafeteria, he'd join a table of hipsters and rap about politics, anthropology, dreams, and drugs. His dreams included a rock band, and, although he didn't play music, he put one together: the Charlatans. Hunter, his peers say, was the first dropout. Only he wasn't a dropout. He wasn't even enrolled at SF State.

I wrote an article about Hunter's crowd, and the headline referred to them as "the happy people." They congregated on campus; many of them lived in a friendly, low-rent neighborhood called the Haight-Ashbury, and at night, they could be found at dance concerts put on by Bill Graham and the Family Dog at the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom. My friends and I—all of us into media, music, and the occasional toke of grass—made the scene and got swept up in a swirl of sensations, of innovative light shows on the walls behind the stage, pulsing in time with the music. People painted flowers on each other's faces and bodies. Most of all, they danced, sometimes without partners, often with no style, always with abandon. They spun around to the music of bands like Chocolate Watchband, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and, yes, George Hunter's band, the Charlatans.

The Charlatans had spent part of the summer of '65 in Virginia City, Nevada, at an old Western bar called the Red Dog Saloon, serving as the house band. Hunter had recruited actual musicians, but the Charlatans were better known for dressing up in antique threads and cowboy gear and for carrying guns and marijuana than for their musical performances. Still, they were acknowledged as the first psychedelic band, and when they returned to San Francisco, they were central to the new, hip rock scene.

That scene had become a whirlwind, but it was—by its own design—a two-headed scene. In Berkeley, the main concern centered on politics. For Berkeley activists, what was going on in the Haight seemed trivial. In San Francisco, the acidheads and "flower children" were content, for the most part, to stay apolitical. As Garcia told one interviewer, "We just seek an uncluttered life."

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