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January 1967 seemed to be a time of possibility. There was a feeling of a revolution of consciousness. The idea that if you free your mind the rest will follow. It was a year of hope. Hope for peace and hope for a better world.
LSD was legal in the US for 8 months. The summer of love was the start of the music led flower power philosophy that was spreading around the world. Peace, (free) love and music. Flower children left their parents and their lives back home in search of something better happening somewhere else.
1967 was the turning point where young people stopped, opened their eyes and started questioning and protesting against the Vietnam war. The hippie movement had to be an escape from reality because there was a horrible fear of being drafted.
The festival was planned 7 weeks earlier by record producer Lou Adler and the popular band, The Mamas and the Papas. Although there had been several small music festivals earlier that year, Monterey was the first widely promoted rock festival in the world. Rock stars like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were not well known names at the time and this festival shot them to stardom.
With 50,000 in attendance it would set a template for large scale hippie festivals- Woodstock being the most famous.
Drawn in by the city's new counterculture, people arrived in numbers great enough to cause a crisis. There were people who were coming just for the drugs, not coming for a spiritual awakening. Thousands were coming from all over the country and the result was trouble. The once popular scene of peace, love and music had quickly turned into a hopeless mess. The local hippies wanted to signal “the death of the hippie” and had a mock funeral procession for "the hippies" in San Francisco in October 1967.The local hippies felt like animals at a zoo and they wanted to signal that this was the end of it, to stay where you are, bring the revolution to where you live, and don’t come to San Francisco because it’s over and done with.
It inspired a generation to question authority, embrace diversity, and strive for a more peaceful world. Ideas set loose on mainstream American culture. The ideals of the summer of love continue to resonate today, reminding us of the power of peace, love, and music.