COVER STORY

L.A. felt the love of the summer of '67 too

It wasn't all blooming up north. Jim Morrison, the Byrds, Neil Young and other greats made the Sunset Strip a must-stop.

By Geoff Boucher
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
August 2, 2007

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.

"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."

"Venice was getting interesting; it had a leftover beatnik spirit to it that made it ready to catch this new scene coming in, so it was turning hippie in '67," says Manzarek. "Things were everywhere, though. Elysian Park had love-ins -- that was fun -- and Laurel Canyon had these kids like bands of gypsies. The center of it all, music-wise, though, of course, was the Whisky."

The Whisky a Go-Go, the Galaxy, the London Fog, Gazzari's, the Crescendo, the Interlude, the Trip; these were some of the clubs of the era where the scene met crowds of kids streaming into town from all points east to find the soundtrack to this tradition-shaking new youth culture. The music was an electrified extension of a folk sound popularized by the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas, but darker, more psychedelic sounds were percolating up thanks to bands such as Love and the Doors.

There were culture clashes aplenty. Older Angelenos were appalled by the scruffy bands of youngsters and trippy vagabonds invading the Strip. The police weren't far behind. In early 1967, Buffalo Springfield had released "For What It's Worth," the pulsing, ominous single that became an anthem for the turbulent decade -- the lyrics "Stop, hey, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down" became shorthand for young people's anxieties about authority and the Vietnam War -- but the true topic was closer to home. Springfield's Stephen Stills wrote the lyric "field day for the heat" about a clash between cops and kids over the closure of the Strip's Pandora's Box club; the lyrics may have felt national, but it was tailored to L.A. first.

The friction is memorable, but so, according to Manzarek, are the Summer of Love's gentler generational encounters. He points to established L.A. institutions such as Barney's Beanery and Canter's, which were serving a strange and shaggy new generation that was taking L.A. from its "Dragnet" persona toward something that would be caricatured by "The Mod Squad." "After 2 a.m., everyone would pile into Canter's, one of the best Jewish delicatessens in town, because it was open all night and it had great pastrami and corned beef on rye," Manzarek says. "I remember rolling in there late one night and seeing Frank Zappa at a table with Captain Beefheart. Now these were high-desert guys, from Lancaster and out there, and they were like the insane, mad-monk squadrons that Tom Wolfe wrote about. We talked and they couldn't have been nicer. The waitresses who had been there for decades were unfazed by this band of gypsies that came from the Sunset Strip every night. That was Los Angeles at that moment."

David Houston, co-owner today of Barney's Beanery, said anyone wanting to bask in that infamous summer can still do it simply by inspecting the wonderfully dank corners of his storied bar. "You can see and feel the past here, which is one of the reasons so many writers still come and drink here. That's why Quentin Tarantino and Johnny Depp and others come through the door." The place began in the 1920s (it's L.A.'s third oldest restaurant), and although Clark Gable and Mae West dined there, the real historical draw for most patrons and tourists today is that such fabled 1960s clientele as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin -- who scrawled graffiti on a wall and on another night threw a bottle at Morrison -- hung out at Barney's. "The Doors' offices were across the street, and our rehearsal hall, where we would eventually record 'L.A. Woman,' was downstairs," Manzarek says. "Jim hung out at Barney's a lot. That was one of his favorite places. There were so many great places in L.A. But there still are and there always have been. It's hard to remember them all."

That may be the reason for San Francisco's "ownership" of the Summer of Love. That city not only took on much of the counterculture persona it still wears like a wonderful consignment-shop jacket, it also documented it well. Rolling Stone started in San Francisco in the heat of 1967, and the literature and underground comics of the Bay Area have frozen that moment in memory in a singular way.

Maybe it's just that L.A. doesn't need that summer as much. The Dead are still the most Grateful in San Francisco, for instance, but our city has had plenty of signature bands since the Doors closed with Morrison's death. L.A., says Mintz, moves too quickly to be frozen in memory. "That is the history of Los Angeles. The 1960s happened here in ways that they happened everywhere else, but then they also happened in ways that did not happen everywhere else."

Oh, by the way, that song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" was a product of L.A. It was written by John Phillips, of the Mamas and the Papas, right here, during the Summer of Love.

geoff.boucher@latimes.com
 

(thanks, Joe)