Once Again, If I Dare,
On The Summer Of Love, 1967 -To Be Young
Was Very Heaven-Out Of The Blue- Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s
Worth”-NPR’s “American Anthem” series
By Seth Garth
This is a link to an American Anthem segment on the famous
Buffalo Springfield song For What It’s
Worth which became, well, an anti-Vietnam War anthem although it did not
start out that way:
https://www.npr.org/2019/02/20/693790065/buffalo-springfield-for-what-its-worth-american-anthem
A couple of years ago
back in 2017 Growing Up Absurd In The
1950s and its’ sister and associated publications commemorated what seemed
like a 24/7/365 non-stop 50th anniversary tribute to the Summer of
Love, 1967. Although it would in the end cost the prime mover of that
commemoration Allan Jackson his job as site manager (he has since come back as
a contributing editor) that extensive coverage made sense to a lot of the older
writers at this publication. Under the guidance of the late then free spirit
and still missed Pete Markin a number of us from the old working-class Acre
section of North Adamsville south of Boston out to San Francisco that year.
That town, and especially Golden Gate Park and the Haight-Ashbury section, was
the epicenter of what was something like the beginning of a cultural revolution
among certain segments of the young.
Those events in San
Francisco (and Big Sur and Todos el Mundo south of that town) were written
about extensively by those still standing from those days. There is therefore
no reason to drag those writings out of storage here. What is important to note
is that San Francisco was by no means the only place on the West Coast (and
eventually in certain clots across the country) where the young alienated or
just looking for something different congregated to form youth nation. Los
Angeles, as the link above details, was also a hotbed of such activities. It
was there that the legendary group Buffalo Springfield learned to fly and where
Steven Sills wrote what would become a youth and anti-war anthem For What It Is Worth. To parse a line
from the English poet Wordsworth-“to be young was very heaven.”
(The younger writers here
who has either no clue or no interest in the Summer of Love, 1967 had to check
with parents or grandparents about what they remembered if anything of those
times. They would wind up rebelling against having to write about those times.
That led to the show-down that sent Jackson into exile.)
