One season, not a year
The Summer of Love was a single season. It is usually dated to the summer of 1967, with the build-up beginning at the Human Be-In in January and the scene starting to fall apart by that autumn. Calling it a “year” stretches the facts, though the art that came with it had been developing since 1965 and carried on into 1968.
The bands are only half the story. The other half is what people saw: the posters on the walls, the colours moving behind the musicians, and the newspaper that tried to put the whole scene on a page.
The poster artists
Posters advertised dances at the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom, and they quickly became a recognisable style. Several artists are associated with the form, among them Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley.
Wes Wilson is usually credited with the most distinctive lettering. His letters swell, bend and fill their shapes so completely that the words almost dissolve into the background. A viewer had to work to read a Wilson poster, and that slowness was part of the appeal. The style owed something to Art Nouveau and to the turn-of-the-century Vienna Secession, whose posters Wilson and others studied. He did much of his early work for the Fillmore.
Rick Griffin came from Southern California surf culture and brought a more cartoon-influenced hand. His images mixed eyeballs, wings, skulls and lettering that looked half gothic, half hot-rod. He became closely linked with the Dead’s imagery and later with underground comics.
The other artists contributed their own variations. Victor Moscoso used clashing colours that made the eye vibrate, while Mouse and Kelley often combined Victorian engravings with bold lettering. The posters were printed in large numbers and were cheap, meant to be pinned up and thrown away. Their value as collectables came later.
Liquid light shows
Behind the bands, many ballrooms projected moving colour onto screens and walls. The most characteristic form was the “liquid” light show. Operators placed coloured oils and water between glass dishes or lenses on an overhead projector, then moved them in time with the music so that blobs of colour seemed to swell and break apart on the screen. Slides, film loops and strobe effects were added.
Bill Ham is often credited as an early pioneer of the technique in the mid-1960s, and groups such as the Brotherhood of Light and the Holy See worked in the Bay Area. The idea was not limited to San Francisco: Andy Warhol’s multimedia events with the Velvet Underground in New York used projections in a different, harder-edged way. Light shows were closely tied to the experience of psychedelic drugs, but even a sober audience could find them absorbing. They helped make a concert feel like an environment rather than a performance, a notion that later carried over into large arena rock shows.
The Oracle
The San Francisco Oracle was the Haight’s best-known underground paper. The first issue appeared in September 1966, and about a dozen issues came out before it closed in early 1968. It was edited largely by Allen Cohen and associated with Michael Bowen, who helped organise the Human Be-In.
What set the Oracle apart was its appearance. It was printed in several colours, with ink colours blended in smooth rainbow gradients across the page, and its layouts mixed hand lettering, engravings, poems and religious or mystical imagery. Some pages were hard to read and clearly meant as images. It carried news of the neighbourhood, but it was also an art object, and its approach influenced other titles in the American underground press. By contrast, Rolling Stone magazine, which began publishing in San Francisco in November 1967, took a quite different route, with a conventional layout and a focus on reporting.
Why the look mattered
Taken together, posters, projections and print gave the scene an identity that outsiders could recognise at a glance. The swirling letters and saturated colours spread to record sleeves, clothing and advertising within a couple of years, in what became a widely imitated look of psychedelic prints. That commercial afterlife was in some ways a sign of success and in others a loss: the style that had marked a small community soon sold products to everyone.
The artists themselves were mostly working professionals, paid per job. Their work was both an expression of the scene and a way to promote it, and the line between the two is hard to draw.