{"id":741501,"date":"2026-08-18T04:22:22","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T04:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/741501\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T04:22:22","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T04:22:22","slug":"san-fran-67-summer-of-drugs-sex-grateful-dead-and-jefferson-airplane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/741501\/","title":{"rendered":"San Fran ’67: Summer of drugs, sex, Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Making<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ Herb Greene \/ RCA Victor<\/p>\n

Tue 18 August 2026 0:30, UK <\/p>\n

\u201cWe would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life,\u201d Jerry Garcia<\/a> said during an impromptu press conference in 1967, \u201cA simple life. A good life\u201d.<\/p>\n

A day earlier, the Grateful Dead had been busted by the cops for pot possession, with Bob Weir, Ron \u2018Pigpen\u2019 McKernan, and several members of the band\u2019s management taken into custody. Garcia hadn\u2019t been at their communal home at 710 Ashbury Street during the raid, but as a show of solidarity, he decided to invite the press there the next day to defend not merely the Dead\u2019s recreational drug taking, but their entire worldview. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re thinking about is a peaceful planet,\u201d he explained, \u201cWe\u2019re not thinking about power. We\u2019re not thinking about revolution or war or any of that\u2026 [We\u2019re thinking] about moving the whole human race ahead a step.\u201d<\/p>\n

By most accounts, though, the San Francisco hippie dream that had culminated in the \u2018Summer of Love\u2019 earlier that year wasn\u2019t based so much on progress, in the technological or political sense, but in a rejection of modernity in many ways. <\/p>\n

Free love, psychedelics, Eastern philosophy, and the old-fashioned trading of goods and services, rather than a reliance on cash-based capitalism, were at the core of the movement, along with plenty of New Age mysticism about the Age of Aquarius. The Timothy Leary slogan of \u201cturning on and dropping out\u201d<\/a> relied on a big presumption, however, that the young people of America would all adopt this new lifestyle for high-minded reasons, when in reality, even a lot of the poets, artists, and bands leading the scene were just young people with a typically selfish motivation to have fun.<\/p>\n

\"What<\/a>Credit: Far Out \/ AP News<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the time we were all just kind of hanging out and doing what we did,\u201d Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick told Life magazine in 2015, \u201cmaking music, taking drugs, screwing each other, having a good time, because there is nothing quite as wonderful as being in your 20s in the \u201960s. There was no Aids. Anything you got, a sexually transmitted disease, could be cured. I know because I got them. I went in the hospital for four days once, a bunch of IVs and stuff, and then you get out, and you\u2019re OK.\u201d<\/p>\n

Slick first met the Grateful Dead in 1965 when she was still singing in her first San Francisco band, The Great Society. She was already 26 by this point, hardly a wide-eyed teenager, but she\u2019d fully embraced the communal experiment of the San Francisco music scene, where a lot of the bands lived together and happily fraternised with one another, sharing instruments, food, drugs, beds, and partners. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was this kinda pleasant free-for-all for what we called ourselves: \u2018freaks\u2019,\u201d Slick said, \u201cYou know, because we were freaks compared to the straight nation\u201d.<\/p>\n

Slick was recruited to become the new vocalist for the Jefferson Airplane in 1966<\/a>, and after scoring big hits with \u2018White Rabbit\u2019 and \u2018Somebody To Love\u2019, the band invested in its own answer to the Grateful Dead\u2019s house, collectively buying an old 17-bedroom mansion with massive Greek columns, located at 2400 Fulton Street across from Golden Gate Park. Incredibly, they would continue to own the place for the next 18 years, but it was the parties of the late \u201860s, frequented by everyone from the Dead to the Doors to Janis Joplin, that became the stuff of legend.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe top floor of the Big House looked like a salon from a fancy turn-of-the-century house of ill repute,\u201d Slick wrote in her 1998 memoir, Somebody to Love, \u201cLots of small rooms (for getting a quickie?) around a central area (which one of these girls would you like?) and one large bedroom (for the Madam?), where Paul [Kantner] took up residence. From Home of Tramps to [opera singer] Enrico Caruso\u2019s residing there on the night of the big earthquake of 1906, the Big House had seen it all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Slick, who admitted to sleeping with all of her bandmates aside from Marty Balin, saw no need to draw any lines when it came to the movement of various drugs through the house, either. One local cocaine dealer, in fact, was allowed to take residence in the house\u2019s basement, where he set up an \u2018office\u2019 to serve the band\u2019s needs as both a handyman and mind-expander. This included the installation of two \u201cjumbo-sized\u201d nitrous oxide tanks. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe members of the band would go down there from time to time and sit in a circle on the floor around the big blue metal totems,\u201d Slick recalled, \u201cwhile our road manager, John Scheer, adjusted the six-spigot contraption on the top that allowed a group of people to get high, all at the same time. The laughing gas made us dizzy enough to pass out, so staying on the floor was a less painful way of enjoying the experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Jefferson<\/a>Credit: Far Out \/ Alamy<\/p>\n

There were other, less classically hippie-ish ways to pass the time with their friends, including outdoor barbecues with the Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, in which the various musicians would take turns firing guns at nearby trees or wooden police barriers. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe were deaf for about a week. So you know that\u2019s really stupid, when you\u2019re a musician, to deafen yourself\u201d, Slick mused sagely. She also once pulled her gun on an unsuspecting David Crosby, who\u2019d wandered into the Airplane house one night and was mistaken for an intruder. Fortunately, she recognised him just before nearly pulling the trigger.<\/p>\n

There were plenty of contradictions in how the Airplane, the Dead, and the other successful San Francisco bands handled their fame; promoting a world of minimalism and naturalism while also living to extreme interpersonal and financial excess on a regular basis. More than 50 years later, though, the eventual failure of the Haight-Ashbury hippie dream<\/a> is far less interesting to people than the elements that created it. <\/p>\n

In the past century, arguably no other peaceful effort to fully rewire the values of Western society has managed to recruit as many young people as this movement did between 1967 and 1969, and it remains an interesting source of civic pride in San Francisco, despite the fact that the local press barely covered the Haight-Ashbury bands when they were actually making their mark.<\/p>\n

As longtime San Francisco music critic Joel Selvin told SF Gate <\/a>in 2023, \u201cThe [San Francisco] Chronicle, outside of [critic and Rolling Stone co-founder] Ralph Gleason, ignored the rock scene entirely. There are no photos, no coverage of anything. It was kids, you know, underground radio. It meant nothing to the mainstream media.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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