Regent Press has released a complete digital recreation of The San Francisco Oracle, the legendary psychedelic underground newspaper published during the Summer of Love. It's all here—the rainbow visions, philosophical musings, street rap and heady poetry. Contact Regent Press, longtime OPEN EXCHANGE lister for purchasing details. Regent can help you publish your book, too.

The Summer of Love usually refers to the summer of 1967, when the so-called "hippie movement" came to full fruition on the streets of San Francisco. Rejecting middle-class morality, disaffected students combined with Beat Generation poets and jazz hipsters to search for meaning and connection. This was to be the liberation of eros and the end of corporate culture. "Free" was the operative word---free food, free love, free dope, free music, free clinics, free universities....

The actual beginning of this "Summer" can be attributed to the Human Be-In that took place in Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967. The first cover of The San Francisco Oracle had proclaimed "A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In." The Human Be-In focused the key ideas of the 1960s counterculture: personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological awareness, consciousness expansion--- a celebration of hippie culture and values. Speakers at the rally included Timothy Leary, who set the tone that afternoon with his famous phrase "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out," Richard Alpert (soon to become the enlightened "Ram Dass"), poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, counterculture comedian Dick Gregory, and activists Lenore Kandel and Jerry Rubin. The outlaw biker gang Hells Angels corralled lost children. A host of local rock bands such as Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, which had been a staple of the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom since February 1966, provided the music.

The Human Be-In was later recalled by its major instigator, Oracle editor Allen Cohen, as a necessary meld that brought together philosophically opposed factions of the current San Francisco-based counterculture: on one side, the Berkeley radicals, who favored militant protests against the government's Vietnam war policies, and, on the other side, the non-political Haight-Ashbury hippies, who urged peaceful protest.

At the Be-In John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas took twenty minutes to write the following lyrics for the song San Francisco:

   "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

   "If you come to San Francisco, summertime will be a love-in there."

Later that summer, thousands of young people from around the nation flocked to the Haight-Ashbury district of the city to join in a popularized version of the hippie experience.

(Source: Wikipedia)

For some of those who came of age in 1967 it is still The Summer of Love. To convey a sense of the optimism and exuberance of these times, we've taken the following excerpts directly from the pages of the The San Francisco Oracle:

I don't know that when we go to church we know exactly what it is that we experience. The question is whether an experience is provided that gives one any of the feelings of unity with one's fellow man, any feelings of openness, safeness, trust, a loving perception of the environment, the beauty of the environment, a chance where a group aof people can get together just to be together in a very good feeling. And anybody who has been there knows that these transcend dances in the common, ordinary sense by such a discriminable degree, and they approach at times a moment of ecstasy. And ecstasy has always been a central experience of every religion.

'The Realist' Takes LSD

[Richard Alpert] talks about a serenity on the West Coast. I get that feeling. I don't know how influenced I've been by his preconception.... The last time I took LSD was Friday, last week, and unlike all the other times, I took it in a very New York situation, a march through the streets, with policemen all around, and from there I went and spoke at a college. I'm not trying to boast, saying, you know, 'I can make the New York subway scene and you can't... (laughter) That'll be the next generation wars: to have a new kind of competition as to who can go into the worst kind of LSD scenes, have contests. The whole point of LSD is that you should get to your kind of attitude, and that you should carry that attitude over with you.

Watts: Well, I think that thus far, the genius of [our movement] is that it has no leadership!
Leary: Exactly!

Watts: That everybody recognizes everybody else.

Ginsberg: Right, except that that's not really entirely so.... There's an organized leadership, say, at such a thing as a Be-In. There is organization; there is community. There are community groups which cooperate, and those community groups are sparked by active people who don't necessarily parade their names in public, but who are capable people... who are capable of ordering sound trucks and distributing thousands of cubes of LSD and getting signs posted....

Leary: I would prefer to call them foci of energy. There's no question. You start the poetry, chanting thing... and I come along with a celebration.

What is very important here is that, besides taking acid, is that people learn the techniques which have been forgotten. That they learn new structures, and new techniques. Like, you just can't go out and grow vegetables, man. You've gotta learn how to do it. Like we've gotta learn to do a lot of things we've forgotten to do....

The ecological conscience is something that has to emerge there, and that's part of what we hope for.... It can be very well argued by some people who have not been thinking very clearly about it, that we could support a larger number of people on this land infinitely. But that's irresponsible and sacrilegious. It's sacrilegious for the simple reason it wipes out too many other animal species which we have no right to wipe out. We have no moral right to upset the ecological balance....

We looked upon that summer as the beginning of a children's crusade that would save America and the world from the ravages of war, and the inner anger that brings it forth, and materialism. We had already identified our lives with the world as a political and social entity, and the planet as a unified environment, an earth household. Love, we believed, would replace fear and small communal groups would replace the patriarchal family and mass alienation.

There was two aspects to the experience of the 60s: the resistance to the war, and the "psychedelic experience," personified as political activists and hippies. "Tripping" was common in every area of society from the wealthy and politically powerful to the arts, and sciences and the media. LSD was trendy, exotic, ecstatic, messianic and dangerous. It promised psychological healing and spiritual transcendence and often delivered. It should be acknowledged that it could also cause pain ("bad trips") and psychotic breaks, and even suicides. Why did so many people take this dangerous voyage? The predominant feeling was that [we] were agents and witnesses of a dawning of a new age. An age in which the warrior spirit, that had vaulted western man to the domination and potential destruction of creation, would be dissolved in the spiritual transcendence of the saint. Ghandi and Martin Luther King were our heroes and we had turned to the rich heritage of Asian mysticism and metaphysics for our inspiration and our practice. We leaped across oceans and through time to pre-Christian mythologies like the American Indian, the Egyptian and the occult and pagan philosophies of Europe. We studied with Buddhists and Indian gurus, native shamans, witches and yogis. We studied the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, Alan Watt's books on Zen Buddhism, and Hermann Hesse's novels. We wouldn't leave the house without consulting the I Ching, or our Tarot cards or our astrological charts.

Were we being naive or superstitious? No.... We were becoming world citizens. Peace and love weren't just slogans but states of mind and experiences that we were living and bearing witness to. We were bringing forth a second Renaissance that would change human culture....