Digital Vertigo by Andrew Keen

Author:Andrew Keen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2011-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

The Love-In

By 1967, the people of San Francisco had replaced their gray flannel suits with rainbow-colored clothes and psychedelic scarves. By 1967, love had usurped scientific management as the metric of human value. By 1967, the cornucopia of hidden discontent had been substituted by a cornucopia of transparent desire. And, by 1967, tens of thousands of San Franciscans had, like poor Scottie Ferguson, fallen in love with something that didn’t really exist.

“Ifyou re going to San Francisco, be sure to wearsomeflowers in your hair” sang Scott McKenzie in mid-June 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival. The song was called “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)” and John Philips, the lyricist of the Mamas and Papas and one of the organizers of the festival, had written it especially for McKenzie to be debuted at Monterey.

Rather than a single song, however, Monterey debuted an entire epoch. Like Fairchild Semiconductor, the three-day Monterey Pop Festival – with its social focus of bringing together many different musicians and a large, diverse audience of strangers – was the first of its kind. Just as the company founded by the Traitorous Eight would spawn larger chip companies like Intel and AMD, so Monterey would inspire larger social music festivals like Woodstock and Altamont. And just as Fairchild Semiconductor was more than another high-tech company, so the Monterey Pop Festival was more than just another musical event.

In mid-June 1967, a crowd of at least 50,000 – some estimate as many as 100,000 – intimate strangers, had come down the northern Californian coast to Monterey, a Spanish colonial town not far from the old mission of San Luis Bautista where Hitchcock filmed the suicide scenes in Vertigo. They came, some with flowers in their hair, for the festival, not only to hear Scott McKenzie, Jimmy Hendrix and Janis Joplin, the Who, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Grateful Dead, but also to celebrate a fresh flowering of togetherness that appeared to signify a new beginning, a second chance for America and the world to unite together as friends.

“If you’re going to San Francisco, you’re gonna meet some gentle people there,” Scott McKenzie sang at Monterey. “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)” both created and reflected the Zeitgeist of the age. It became an instant number one hit around the world, selling more than 7 million copies and emerging as the anthem of social togetherness for the sixties’ counterculture.

It was indeed the promise of meeting people that drew so many thousands of people to Monterey in June 1967. As much as a music concert, the three-day event was a social experiment in sharing, in bringing people together through music, in transforming strangers into friends. At Monterey, there was a breakdown of the rigid fifties boundaries between public and private life and, as a consequence, the creation of a new transparent public space designed to create intimacy amongst strangers. The children of 1967 even invented language for this kind of social orgy: they called it a “love-in.

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