Summer of Love

Bobby was in Kenneth's film.

He lived with Kenneth in the summer of love.

they famously fell out because everyone fell out with anger.

And then Bobby goes down to LA and through a bunch of machinations, he basically kind of sort of ends up a member of the Manson family.

on anger, most of it's atrocious.

My buddy, William E. Jones, people can get it for free.

He wrote a really good essay that's online about anger called He Brought a Swastika to the Summer of Love.

That's a great essay.

it, there was this such wonderful energy at that time.

I mean, if you have to think about, uh, the Summer of Love and the human bein', and then you have to think about how half a million people showed up peacefully in a, in a place like, you know, Woodstock and were able to have that experience, which seems impossible today, right, Cam? Like, we-

Mm.

They tried to do a 50th anniversary for Woodstock, and they literally couldn't because they couldn't ensure an event where they didn't know how many people were going to show up.

Thought it was just absolute nonsense.

1967 was the Summer of Love, wasn't it?

Mm-hmm.

There was a lot of this type of stuff around in the Summer of Love, wasn't there? 'Cause I was looking at the charts.

This was kept off number one by Engelbert Humperdinck's The Last Waltz, which doesn't scream Summer of Love, does it? And then you look at the other people that were in the charts in the autumn of 1967, and it's like Val Doonican, and Des O'Connor, and Gene Pitney, and Cliff Richard in his not cool Cliff Richard, in his The Day I Met Marie Cliff Richard sort of phase and stuff.

So the charts is full of this crooner-ish- ... sort of cabaret.

And you know, we are on the cusp of Radio 1, aren't we? So it's still easy-listening radio, which is why I assume that a lot of this was popular and stuff.

Then Patrick Cowley does this early '83 remix right when high energy was starting to become established as a genre.

It was very sort of-- It's like the '60s had just happened.

It was about a decade after the, you know, 12 or 13 years after the Summer of Love.

So, you know, I'm having that experience, and this is all seeming crazy to me, and I'm looking for a place to land, uh, emotionally, spiritually, in every way.

Um, and my mother put me in a Catholic school, and that felt like finally I hit some, you know, some foundation, um, because it just, it seemed normal to me.

Oh, sure.

I mean, you know, as ever, but I think especially in times of great foment like that, I mean, and let's face it, this was also, 67 was the Summer of Love, but all that activity built in 66 that then was branded as the Summer of Love in 67.

So, you know, everybody was... especially out on the West Coast, but also in New York, you know.

There were a lot of drugs, there was a lot of, you know, LSD was legal for the first part of the year and was being distributed rapidly in the clubs.

So not like in America where you already have got the Billboard Hot 100 and then you've got the Soul chart, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera.

So if you take The Loving Spoonful, it was number one in the US, and you can understand why because it kind of feels very – kind of getting ready for the Summer of Love and all that kind of San Francisco thing.

In the UK, it was number six, seven or eight, depending upon which chart you wish to check.

So I'm going to go down the middle and go number seven.