L.A. felt the love of the summer of '67 too
COVER STORY
It wasn't all blooming up north. Jim Morrison, the Byrds, Neil Young and other greats made the Sunset Strip a must-stop.
Maybe it was the flowers in their hair.
San Francisco enjoys tremendous cultural traction on our collective memory lane when it comes to the Summer of Love, that swirling season currently celebrating its 40th anniversary. But what about Los Angeles? Haight-Ashbury wasn't the only California street marker that mattered. There was also a history-making strand called the Sunset Strip.
Summer of Love: An article about the Summer of Love in Thursday's Calendar Weekend said that John Phillips wrote the song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" during the summer of 1967. The song was actually written earlier and debuted on the national charts that May. The article also said that Elliot Mintz was a radio host on KPCC-FM; he was a host on KPPC-FM. In addition, a photo of the band Buffalo Springfield gave the wrong identification for one of the band members. Bruce Palmer was pictured second from right, not Jim Fielder.
"The Strip, that was a major center for music of the day, with the Byrds and the Doors and the Buffalo Springfield," says Lou Adler, the music producer and impresario. "In San Francisco, things were exploding and everything was new. It all happened at once. But in Los Angeles, it had been building for a while, so it was more gradual. It wasn't observed in the same way. The scene here was so well-connected with the entertainment industry too, that it was not as jolting to observers."
True, the only visible seasonal change in Los Angeles is the arrival of a new entertainment trend, so even a youth culture revolution could blend in. Still, the summer of 1967 is a time of landmark memories, and not just for the gigs on the Strip where Jim Morrison, Neil Young and Arthur Lee were each reshaping the idea of what a rock star should look and sound like. There was the life in the canyons, where music, art, poetry and hedonism mixed in a bucolic dream state.
Elliot Mintz, then a young, bright and bracing radio host on KPCC-FM, which was entering its glory years, remembers how the Strip was the lightning-rod center of music for the city but the canyons were a seismograph for the latest push forward in art, poetry and political thought. "Laurel Canyon was a place unto itself, a village and community, the West Coast counterpoint to Greenwich Village. When someone felt that Laurel was getting too crowded and the scene was moving away from them, they went to Topanga, they migrated," Mintz says. "It was like the Wild West there, and you lived like a pioneer. That's where you went if you wanted to truly drop out and if you wanted to embrace the forward edge of where these societal changes seemed to be going."
The changes were evident in many places. Venice Beach was taking on a strange new vibe, remembers Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist for the Doors, the iconic L.A. band that had the No. 1 song on the charts 40 years ago this week with the decadent "Light My Fire."
