CAROLYN GARCIA (MOUNTAIN GIRL), currently living in Oregon. THEN: She was Merry Prankster Ken Kesey's girlfriend when she met Jerry Garcia, but she was soon living on the top floor of 710 Ashbury with the Grateful Dead guitarist.
We were living at 710 Ashbury Street and just kind of aghast at the amount of people that showed up down on Haight Street every day. It was just incredible numbers of just sort of loose, roaming, very young people. Summer was foggy that year, so people were kind of cold and uncomfortable.
It was sort of like a farmer unloading a truckload of onions. Once the onions start to move, there's no stopping them. That's kind of how it felt, was that the streets were just filling up with people, vegetables yearning to be free. They came there to change. It was that West Coast phenomenon. People came there to change their lives. And it puts a lot of responsibility on the neighborhood, and on the city. It got edgy a lot of times.
We can blame the media. Media came to the Haight Ashbury in late 1966 and spring of '67 and were busily promoting the phenomenon of sort of a youth culture phenomenon in the Haight Ashbury. It was just barely there by the time the media got hold of it.
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People wanted to have an alternative to whatever American culture was telling them they had to do at that time. In 1967, the Vietnam war had been going on, there was the draft. There was a lot of unemployment. People needed something else to look at. I think between folk music and beatniks and Black Panthers and the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, there was a lot of questioning and unrest going on, mental unrest. People weren't satisfied with the status quo thinking and wanted to grow up to be something different.
I see remnants of that movement everywhere. It's sort of like the nuts in Ben and Jerry's ice cream; it's so thoroughly mixed in, we sort of expect it. The nice thing is that eccentricity is no longer so foreign. We've embraced diversity in a lot of ways in this country. I do think it's done us a tremendous service. It's also institutionalized a lot of the thinking that was beginning to emerge in the summer of Love; non-violence, peace movement, Buddhist leaning, sort of catch phrase stuff. All of that stuff has just become part of our common, everyday diet. I'm very happy for that. I feel like I get understood better.
I think that a lot of it is about having given ourselves permission to be weird. We gave ourselves permission. We also gave other people permission to be weird. Try to think outside of the box of convention. I think that's been terribly useful. As far as the drug culture is concerned, I think that's been terribly useful as well in promoting inventiveness in the arts.
-- Joel Selvin