Human Be-In Essay Example
"I don't like the word 'hippies'," Allen Ginsberg once told the San Francisco Chronicle. "I don't like the word 'squares' either. We are all human beings." While Ginsberg's comment may today sound naive at best, in 1967 this philosophy of universal love and fraternity was the engine behind a groundbreaking event that would set off the Summer of Love and forever change the course of the sixties: the Human Be-In.
Indeed, if we remember the main goal was to reassemble the several countercultural "tribes" (and even some establishment heads that found themselves there by curiosity or mistake), it's safe to say the Be-In was nothing if not successful. As an unprecedented—and to some extent, irreplicable—spirit of camaraderie took over the event, the stars appeared to finally bring in the much promised Aquarian Age of spirituality and brotherhood of men. Suddenly, everything seemed possible.
The Human Be-In took place on January 14th 1967 in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, kickstarting a dizzying year for hippie counterculture and marking the definite point when it became utterly and irreversibly global. But this collective epiphany also meant the last breath of innocence of a euphoric utopia, as its instant propagation would eventually dictate the inevitable commodification of a dream.
The announcement came on the fifth issue of the San Francisco Oracle, which had by then become the local underground bible and whose credit with the Beautiful People remounted to the Love Pageant Rally the previous October. The effective call to action urged a "gathering of the tribes," and the various psychedelic flyers and posters circulating promised "flutes... Ginsberg... Leary... chimes... Ferlinghetti... incense... Rubin..." as well as "all SF bands." This mixture of rock concert, spiritual performance, and direct action corresponded to the very definition of a "Human Be-In": a celebration of humanist values through performative action, reminiscent of the increasingly popular sit-ins.
Although San Francisco had always been a notable Mecca for poets, artists, and bohemians, it had nevertheless managed to remain relatively untainted by the system, appearing to resist the exploitation that occurs whenever the market spots a capitalizable trend. So it comes as no surprise that the event was praised by its spontaneity, with the "happening" nature of art and life at its center: "The Human Be-In was one of the great spontaneous honest-to-God collective celebrations of the late twentieth century," The Beatles' press officer Derek Taylor later reminisced in It Was Twenty Years Ago Today. "The aim: to be. That was all. That was enough."
The turnout, however, exceeded any possible expectations. Organizers had envisaged an attendance of around one thousand people, when actual numbers ended up oscillating between 20,000 and 30,000. Despite a practically inexistent planning, the event produced a series of legendary moments that would forever become engraved in our collective memory whenever we think about the sixties, like Timothy Leary's "Tune in, turn on, drop out" speech or Allen Ginsberg's Hare Krishna chanting.
Mingling with the hippie crowd were also The Doors, who had just released their debut album and were doing a two-weekend residency at the Fillmore. After an initial cold reception typical of L.A. groups playing in the Bay Area, San Francisco eventually warmed up to them—though not enough to recruit the band for the Be-In concerts, which were assured by the city's so-called Big Four: Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Country Joe & The Fish. A notable absence came from Big Brother & the Holding Company, even if the "White Lightning" LSD that Owsley Stanley had produced especially for the event made some swear they heard Janis Joplin's voice.
But more important, perhaps, was the role the Human Be-In ended up having in propagating this alternative lifestyle on an international level. Standing as the metaphorical threshold between a "before" and an "after" in San Francisco's counterculture, the event is often regarded as the moment that unleashed it all: "the Human Be-In opened the dance floor," Marie Campistron later wrote in French magazine L'Obs.
The immediate consequence was the euphoric unfolding of the Summer of Love, which happened through a series of seemingly organic triggers that attracted the youth (and media) of the world to San Francisco like a crowd of hypnotizing sirens. By the time Scott McKenzie's trademark hymn "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers in your Hair)" came out in May, the city had already been transformed into counterculture's own fascinating vortex, with most arrivals installing themselves in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, where rents had become ridiculously cheap due to a freeway project scare.
But the sudden public awareness the Be-In produced also meant an imminent commodification of its ideals: "The market saw these revolutionaries could be put in a safe pen and given their consumer goods," English poet Jeff Nuttall is cited as saying in Barney Hoskyns's Hotel California. "And this happened in '67, just as it seemed that we'd won."
Soon enough the hippies were being treated like circus curiosities, with "hippie bus tours" providing tourists with an "hip" insight into their world, while a series of exploitation films like Hallucination Generation, The Love Ins, or The Trip disseminated a stereotypical image of the acid scene, showcasing how a psychedelic tag attached to anything vaguely "groovy" resulted in a successful marketing manoeuvre. The city's new population didn't please everybody either: Ronald Reagan, who had just been elected governor of California, would famously mock the hippie crowd by saying they "looked like Tarzan, walked like Jane, and smelled like Cheetah."
The publicity and hype weren't all bad, though. The visibility brought about by the Be-In was fundamental in accelerating the exportation of the San Francisco sound, which quickly overcame its underground status and became a crucial element of the rock explosion that came after the British Invasion. Monterey Pop, for example, seemed to have been dreamed as a sort of a mashup between Newport Folk and the Human Be-In, following the structure of the former and the spirit of the latter. And by positioning itself as a prelude to Woodstock, the festival showed how the recognition of the hippie culture on a global scale could be traced back to the communal and celebratory spirit of the Be-In.
"If the story had stopped there, it wouldn't have been much more than an episode of the legends of the avant-garde," Benôit Duteurtre later commented in French newspaper Le Figaro, underlining the Be-In's significance as a turning point in countercultural history. In fact, it's rather impressive that an endeavour lasting a mere five to six hours could create such a resounding echo that endures to this day as a bittersweet reminder of the last moment a certain purity stood at the core of a peace-driven revolution.
The impractical poetics of 1967 in general and the Human Be-In in particular may in 2022 ring as a distant memory, especially if we look at what remains of the hippie dream. But by 5pm of that January afternoon, as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder "chanted the night" and the crowd was asked to "face the sun and move towards it," they would prove enough to warm up a whole summer—and, for a second there, it felt they could even last for a lifetime. 1967 was that kind of year.
