How to read this calendar
This is a dated outline of the main counterculture events of 1967, in the order they happened. It is selective, and it covers events in the United States and Britain that shaped the movement’s public image. Each entry is kept short.
Winter: January to March
14 January: the Human Be-In. A gathering at the Polo Fields in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park brought together poets, musicians, political activists and a large crowd, reportedly in the tens of thousands. Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Timothy Leary spoke or appeared, and Leary’s “turn on, tune in, drop out” became widely known. Bands including the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane played. The event drew national press and made San Francisco the symbolic centre of the scene.
26 March: Easter Be-In in New York. A similar gathering took place in Central Park on Easter Sunday, showing that the format was spreading to the East Coast.
Spring: April and May
15 April: Spring Mobilization. Large antiwar marches took place in New York and San Francisco on the same day, with the New York march reportedly reaching several hundred thousand people by organisers’ estimates, a figure that was disputed. It showed the political side of the youth movement alongside the cultural one.
4 April and 28 April. Martin Luther King Jr gave his Beyond Vietnam speech at Riverside Church in New York on 4 April, and the heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali refused induction into the army on 28 April, in what became a prominent test of the draft.
May. The song “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” written by John Phillips and sung by Scott McKenzie, was released and became a hit, helping to advertise the scene to the wider public.
June: Sgt. Pepper and Monterey
Early June. The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was widely regarded as a landmark of the era.
16 to 18 June: the Monterey International Pop Festival. Held on the Monterey County Fairgrounds in California, it featured Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Otis Redding, The Who, the Mamas and the Papas and Ravi Shankar, among others. For many American listeners it was the first look at several of these acts, and it became a model for later festivals.
Summer: the Summer of Love
June to September. Young people arrived in the Haight-Ashbury district in large numbers, in a season journalists named the Summer of Love. Estimates of how many came vary and should be treated cautiously; contemporary predictions were in the tens of thousands, and local services struggled to cope. Time magazine published a cover story about hippies in July, which broadened the movement’s audience and, in the view of many participants, helped spoil it.
July. Riots in Newark (12 to 17 July) and Detroit (beginning 23 July) were a reminder that the same summer included violent conflict over race and poverty in American cities. They are sometimes left out of accounts of the Summer of Love, but they belong in any honest account of the year.
August. Bonnie and Clyde reached American cinemas. On 27 August, the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein died in London, a shock to the band, which had met the Indian spiritual teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi only days before.
Autumn: October to December
6 October: the Death of Hippie. Residents of the Haight, including members of the Diggers, held a mock funeral for the “hippie” as a media-created stereotype, in protest against the commercialisation and crowding of the neighbourhood. The point was to bury the label, and many participants intended to continue with their lives.
16 to 20 October: Stop the Draft Week. Protesters in Oakland, California, attempted to block the military induction centre in a week of confrontations with police.
21 to 22 October: the March on the Pentagon. Tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in Washington and many crossed the Potomac to the Pentagon. Some demonstrators tried to levitate the building, in a piece of theatre promoted by Abbie Hoffman and others, and the event also involved clashes with troops and military police, with hundreds of arrests. Norman Mailer later wrote about the day in The Armies of the Night.
October. The musical Hair opened off-Broadway in October at the Public Theater in New York.
November. The first issue of Rolling Stone magazine appeared in San Francisco, a sign that the scene was becoming an industry.
December. The Graduate opened in cinemas, with its theme of a young man’s disillusion with his parents’ expectations.
What the calendar shows
Read in order, 1967 begins with a mood of celebration and ends with confrontation and commercialisation. The movement’s high point in publicity came in the first half of the year. By autumn, the Haight was in decline, antiwar protest had become more confrontational, and the language of the counterculture was being used in advertising. The 1968 events that followed, from the Tet Offensive to the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, belong to a different chapter of the story.