What were the sixties like for you where you lived at the time?

Being born in 1970, I can only live vicariously through you guys....

Any folks live in SF during the 'time'?

Anyone get a chance to go to a Human Be-in? A love in? See 'Hair' on Broadway? Get the crabs and become a rock and roll manager (Thankya Frank Zappa :) )? Take to the streets after the Prague Spring?

I was born in '60, but I had older sisters who were right in the thick of it all.

It was really interesting here -- three smells that bring me right back -- pot, patchouli, and body oder. :D

There was never NOT music going on. There was free music all over the place, many local parks would have bands play on the weekends. There were also art shows galore -- my family would go down after church on Sunday to the local park to see the art and listen to the bands. Hippies were everywhere, not just the Haight.

My sisters saw The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles, "Hair", The Monkees and a whole bunch of other artists. Politics was heating up -- my sister took part in the SF State sit-in, and wore a black arm band to class to protest the war. The Black Panthers were a very big part of Bay Area life -- I remember reading the newspapers and watching the local news coverage of them -- they seemed so scary back then, but I would probably be marching with them today. One of the most memorable sounds for me is that of the 21 gun salutes that went on daily from the Presidio -- I lived at the complete other end of the City but I could still hear them. :(

I remember vividly seeing "2001" at a downtown theatre -- I was 8 and it bored the crap out of me -- when the light show started, every hippie fired up right there in the theatre to enjoy the show! :D I hate "2001" and the smell of pot to this day.

Local TV was so interesting because you could see interviews with the artists/comedians/musicians who were playing town during the "arts" coverage. Everybody came to SF, I mean EVERYBODY.

The Haight was the place every family member visiting from out of town wanted to see. It was colorful as hell -- the clothing, the art, the advertising -- all incredibly bright and vivid. The Airplane lived right across the street from the park -- you could drive by their house any ol' time and sometimes you would catch glimpses of them comning or going. I remember The Gap store on Haight -- so very different than the highly commercialized chain it is today.

Another happening place was Broadway -- they had the nudy clubs (Carol Doda rocked!) but also had all the hot clubs (The Hungry I and The Purple Onion) and good music. That place was packed on weekends -- In the film "Bullett" with Steve McQueen there is a scene where he is walking Broadway at night -- it was exactly like that. At the start of Broadway they had a go-go dancer in an elevated glass cage -- it was sooo exotic! -- I always wanted to be her. :)

I consider myself incredibly lucky to have grown up here at that time. It impacted my life in so many good ways.

at least, it did when I lived in SF, in the end of the nineties (my decade!)

Not nearly as hip as back in the day though. :( At least Vesuvios is still there and fabulous. :hi:

Again, I was in my late teens/early twenties about then...pure ID, not much else.

The Palladium! :D I was really more a Fab Mab and The Farm girl. And The Flaming Groovies at The Berkeley Square, Chris Isaak as the house band at Nightbreak. Dancing at The I Beam. Ah, good times....

The 60s and 80s were just a blast here -- the 90s not so much. :( It is pretty gross here these days -- the yuppification has all but killed everything cool about the City. :cry:

Yeah, prices went up. But there was always the Mission. There was always the Haight. And there was always the Richmond.

I remember going to Spike and Mike festivals in the city loaded on shrooms with wifey....good times good times...

the 90s were dull as dirt in comparison. :D Which should let you know just how cool the 60s and 80s were here!

And as I understood it, it was the last bastion of anything Non-Reagan...

From Hula Hoops and Duck and Cover, through the beat movement and the Civil Rights movement to the Hippies to watching the Castro turn from a working class, blue collar, Irish Catholic community to the gay capitol of the world, until I finally started making enough Money to become a Marin county Yuppie.

My very first rock concert was the Stones at the Cow Palace. The first warm up band that no one had ever heard of was a group called The Jefferson Airplane followed by that rock legend, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. We sat in the eighth row. Tickets were Eight bucks. My last rock concert was the Stones at Altimont. My first apartment was two blocks from the Fillmore West and if I never see another rock concert for the rest of my life, it will be too soon.

My best friend in high school (Mission) was a kid named Jessie Westlake. His father printed most of the posters for the Avalon and Fillmore. We would sneak into his printshop and print, get this, business cards.

I made Alice B. Toklas brownies for 2001 so you didn't smell me.

I remember when Big Brother was a garage band.

One of the best things was F.M. radio before corporate Amerika destroyed it. Real cutting edge stuff.

Anyway, too many memories both good and bad so I will leave you with this, the sex was great!

That was fun.

BTW, the TV shows were a lot better

Sitting, vacant and desolate...

And several underground radio stations. It was a pretty cool time..

:boring:

Everything happened somewhere else.

of the music and like listening to 60's stations.

Not much I'm particularly proud of. DOB 3/11/1954, so
I vividly remember events from 1961 forward, if you
catch my drift.

:cry:

Politically, my parents and grandparents were
FDR Democrats. A bit racist, unfortunately, as
were most white Alabamians at the time. Wallace
country, after all.

Florida was great back then.

I remember the first interstates here. We used 'highways' before that. Tampa, Miami and Orlando all very cool back then.

We could ride our bikes all day on country roads. No prob. Worked at horse stables while in 4th grade with real cowboys.

My dad took us to all the old Florida attractions. Many of them gone now. And were always on the water, at the beaches on the rivers and lakes. Water skiing was kind of big then.

He got brand new company cars every few years. And I sat in the driveway, behind the steering wheel, wishing I could drive them.

Saw Kennedy speak in Tampa just days before they got him.

Remember the first rockets from the Cape and watched live when they stepped on the moon.

My 5th and 6th grade friends were in bands and would imitate the Beatles and the Stones.

A girl kissed me in the 5th grade and I was beside myself for months.

All our appliances and household items lasted for years and years. Phones, refrigerators, tv's... all of it bomb-proof.

We drank Boone's Farm wine for a buzz in high school, then beer, then pot.

I grew up in the thick of the muscle car era. Had a '70 Duster 340... royal blue - 12 tickets in one year.

Grew up with the same 6 or 7 families from mid 60's to mid 80's. Any mom could tell all the kids what to do, and they had to listen. Mom's stayed home mostly.

Saw the riots in Chicago on tv as well as Viet Nam. Didn't know what to make of any of it.

High school was great. Had just two girl friends. The music was so good. Zeppelin and Eagles and Elton John. And southern rock wasn't so bad then. Really liked Robin Trower.

We went to all the concerts. Dozens and dozens all through the 70's. Still have the ticket stubs. Anywhere from $5, $10, $15 a piece. Never more than that.

Went through all the weird clothes (high heels like Elton John) and all the weird haircuts (the shag) and other funky cultural oddities. Of course, the original bell bottoms too.

Still go to my class reunions. 35th coming up next summer. Our group was close.

Started traveling in the 80's and haven't stopped since. When you're from Florida, the rest of the country and the world looks pretty interesting.

Life did seem pretty cool back then. I miss some of that. But it helped shape who I am today, and I wouldn't have changed one dang thing about it all.

Either I grew up, everything shrank, or a combo of the two.

then high school in Albuquerque, then the last three years of the 60s getting my eyes opened in SoCal. Jefferson Airplane, Hair (not on Broadway, though), Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen, the Flying Jib (a bar in Manhattan Beach). Driving to San Jose, going through wine country and stopping at wineries for 'samples'; driving back down the coast and gorging ourselves in Solvang. Going to the midnight showing of '2001' after binging on Red Mountain wine, and the only seats left were in the middle of the front row. . . I'm kind of amazed that I can actually remember any of it.


---

For me, it was "HR Puffinstuff", "The Banana Splits Show", "The Monkees", and all those other shows that were obviously created under the influence of psychedelic substances...

It was pretty fun to grow up in the '60s. :)

Just finished art school. Wasted on drugs & alcohol from 67 to 1980 when I went insane for 10 years...lol.

nothing happening where i lived so we drove to chicago or madison just about every other weekend.

Can't help you there.

I grew up in a liberal college town that led me down the path to decadence.

and went to Woodstock.

Saw a bunch of rock concerts pre-Woodstock, before rock became big commercial stadium concerts.

and was not too far away from Kent State, and the aftermath.

went to art school, and my classmates became the Talking Heads.

in a playpen so no recollections.

As a young kid, I didn't realize what the big deal was with desegregation busing. I just knew that some people hated it.

Once we were all mixed together in the same schools, we quickly learned that there was no difference between people with different colored skin, despite what we'd been taught.

I still remember the crushing poverty that a lot of black families ( and some white ) had to endure though...seeing shacks that looked like they should barely be standing and the folks who had no other option but to live in them.

Mississippi was as far away as you could get from the counterculture, but we still got to hear the Beatles on the radio.

I remember hearing "Eleanor Rigby" on the radio for the first time, and thinking to myself just how sad a song it was.

once when I went to visit him in 1994 or so. I didn't even know they have hills in Missouri.

And I saw living conditions I couldn't even take in. This was no more than an hour away from Kansas City.

that's all I can add. I loved almost every minute of it.

My mom moved us down from San Francisco to Silicon Valley when the valley was going from apricots to tech and we landed in a subdivision where all my friends' dads were in the space program. It was wild.

So, home was this neighborhood with no public square and quietly slogging through making nuclear families work. Oh, and all white.

Blasts of MLK via the teevee which became colorized at about this time. And then, they shot Bobby.

I wasn't old enough to "be in" but the fall out from all of that social upheaval changed our lives forever. I was old enough to see my mother weep for MLK and for RFK. In a strange way, the assassinations felt like all our nuke drills weren't wasted. Our teachers told us to prepare for something really bad and, there it was.

in a small town in Southern Illinois. My father was a minister so life was pretty strictly religious. I quit school at fifteen, went to work in a factory when I was seventeen...the same year that JFK was assassinated. Saw Oswald killed live on a Sunday morning. That was 1963 to me. When I was sixteen I went with my sister to NC and saw the conditions in the south for myself. Prejudice was bad where I came from but it was more open in the south. Very learning lesson for me.

At eighteen I went into full rebellion mode against my father and religion, which meant I wrote angry poems against his prejudice and religion's hypocrisy. It was like a silent rebellion. ;) Watched the race riots, marches and other events on tv. Saw the escalation of the Vietnam war on tv. I basically had no life just a lot of questions and anger.

In the later part of the sixties there came about the death of Robert Kennedy, Martin L. King and my mother. My father quickly remarried and I was free to be young (delayed teenager in my twenties) and rebel openly. Those were hard years, 1968-1969. Would never want to relive them. The seventies were better for me because I was more my own person and I went to NYC.

Edited to add: The highlight of the sixties was the Beetles. George Harrison's sister lived in my home town and I (along with most of the town) saw him when he visited her before the group got big. I was a big Beetle fan along with a lot of the protest folk music and other protest singers. Thought I would someday be somebody.

so many legendary groups at the peak of their creative powers; even brilliant one hit wonders that still stand up today. But ugly, violent times too. The beatings and killings of civil rights workers, JFK ,Bobby, MLK, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton; the senseless slaughter in Vietnam, the brutal Russian repression in Czechoslovakia..... And through it all, the naive but beautiful belief that we "freaks" were really on to something so deep and profound that if the rest of the world would just listen to us ( and we were naive enough to think they would) a whole new way of looking at the world and at humanity could be achieved. I still have a hard time looking at film and still pictures of my generation back then. Such genuine idealism; (you could see it in the sweetness and gentleness in our faces), that we could effect such a massive, good and decent change in the world that the grownups couldn't possibly fail to see the goodness and rightness of it, and join or at least support us; their children.... 40 years later, I remain stunned at the angry, violent resistance we encountered... ( and am stunned and saddened when I see even a few Duers dismissively and condescendingly denigrate the decency of the "hippies" and "boomers" and what so many of us tried earnestly to do, thereby playing right into the hands of the rightwing, in whose interest it is to dismiss what we tried to accomplish)...

And not a lot has changed, LOL. But when I was a young kid, seven or eight, I spent spring break in Florida with my aunt, uncle and cousin. My uncle drove. We went through Georgia and the car got pretty dirty, red clay, my uncle said. So we stopped at a car wash.

It was run by an older couple who were very nice to us, two little blonde girls, remember that they gave us pens with the name of the car wash on them.

But I could read, my cousin was only five, and I saw something that really confused me. There were rest rooms at that car wash, three of them, very curious to a kid who lived in New York. There were three doors. The blue one said "Men," the pink one said "Ladies" and the yellow one said the word "Colored." This was something that I'd never seen or heard before, so I asked about it.

I don't remember clearly, since it was so long ago, but I do remember that not only didn't I get an answer, something I wasn't used to, but I could tell that my question made everyone uncomfortable and I was supposed to shut up.

I never did get an answer to my question, but the reaction of the adults disturbed me, so it stuck in my mind. Maybe my aunt and uncle forgot, or maybe this wasn't something that they wanted to get into with a young child, but the reaction I got caused it to stuck in my young mind. It wasn't until many years later, probably when "Eyes on the Prize" came out, that I finally understood...

My aunt and uncle are gone now and I regret never bringing it up with them as an adult. Knowing them, they were probably as shocked as I am now, looking back. It was 1961. Those may have been the times, but I didn't get it, and I still don't... ;(

in another band till early 68, spent the rest of the 60's in the army, one year of that in the hospital. It was not so great in the army, certainly not in the hospital.

When I got out it was the 70's already, everything was fucked up.

mark

earn money for college (yes I was what was known as a nerd)so I was working long hours at low wages when some of my cohorts were heading off to Woodstock in the summer of '69. Not many opportunities for a serious hippy lifestyle as a teenager in the Alabama part of Pennsylvania.

(ages 4-14) with the luxury of being in a relatively safe and secure environment. I was very lucky. Of course the pain of losing JFK, MLK and RFK was huge-but I wouldn't trade the culture (especially the music) for anything. There was something about righting wrongs that seemed to be in the conscienceness back then that is sorely missing now. again, I may just be delusional-but I can't blame drugs.

The sixties hadn't quite hit suburban Cleveland. I do remember riding around in the back of some neighbor's truck w/ a bunch of kids, making a peace sign and saying what I thought was "peas!"

We moved to the Bay Area and I did get an eyeful of major hippyness going down in San Francisco.

But I didn't hate hippies.
I was ALL into the free love thing.
:-)

Mostly I remember the music and the fact that I did not get to go to Woodstock, although two of my childhood friends did.

I was 15 in 1967. There were lots of garage bands and we would travel in a VW van to go to the "battle of the bands" competitions in local venues. There was a "go-go" club a mile from my home called the "Electric Banana" and some of my friends played there frequently. We had swim clubs in my town and every week during the summer, a club would host a party for the teens (live music and free pizza).

There was also a weekly coffee house hosted by the YWCA in my town another good chance to hear live music and hang out with your friends.

We would go into Pittsburgh on a Friday or Saturday night and drive around Shadyside ( a neighborhood near the Univ. of Pittsburgh)and go into the head shop and just hang out on the sidewalk. Or else hang out in someone's basement and listen to music and dance.

In my recollection, the 60s of popular culture didn't start till about 1965 and didn't fully hit nationwide public consciousness until 1967.

Look at the pictures of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement: all the men students are in suits, all the women students are in dresses. They look as if they walked off the set of Mad Men.

Look at their counterparts four years later, in full hippie mode.

The change was astoundingly rapid, and looking back, I believe that the Nixon backlash was the result of adults suffering severe future shock.

I was in a small town till 1962 and an outer suburb of Minneapolis till graduating from high school in 1968. In terms of lifestyle, the 1960s felt like a continuation of the 1950s. We had strict rules in school, including dress codes, and although there was a lot of sex going on, judging by the number of pregnancies and shotgun weddings, it was all hush-hush. If anyone was using drugs, I never heard of it. The daring kids smoked tobacco cigarettes in the rest rooms and drank in cars or at parties where no parents were present. All but a few kids attended some kind of church. Most mothers stayed home all day, but even working class families owned at least a modest house and a secondhand car. We still had white working class gangs. The one in my town was called the Venturis, and they would go to Minneapolis to rumble with the Baldies, who shaved their heads, or the Animals, who filed their teeth. Knives and baseball bats only, please.

The only way we participated in the stereotypical 1960s culture was through music and dancing and wearing our hair straight and long. Clothes were conservative: boys in chinos and shirts with buttons (as per school rules, which forbade both jeans and shirts without buttons) and girls in skirts and poor boy sweaters or shifts or jumpers without waists, with either nylons (pantyhose were new and expensive, the equivalent of $10 a pair today) or lightweight knee-highs.

Politically, though, it was a different story. We had something that is lacking today: hope and confidence. It felt that life was getting better in every possible way, not only materially, but also in the sense of more justice and equality.

Life opened up a bit once I entered college, but since I attended a Lutheran college in Minnesota, life was still more conservative than in Berkeley or New York. We got our first co-ed dorm in 1971, the same year we had our first anti-war protest. Only the theater majors used illegal drugs. Drinking one's self into a stupor was the mainstream form of rebellion.