Haight

A neighbourhood of a few thousand people received something like a hundred thousand arrivals in the summer of 1967, most of them broke, and a media apparatus that covered it as a spectacle. The Acid Tests, the Human Be-In, the Dead, Owsley's supply, and the moment it stopped being a scene and became a destination. Shared with our Psychedelics and LSD archives, because it is the same story told from the city's side.

Part of San Francisco

93 moments in this segment.

1. 1964 - Magic Trip - Ken Kesey's Merry Band of Pranksters (trailer). ), The restored footage of the Merry Pranksters' 1964 cross-country bus trip.
2. 1964 - Feature documentary on Kesey's cross-country bus trip. The full film Magic Trip, released in 2011, assembled from the footage Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters shot on their 1964 drive from the West Coast to the East Coast under the influence of LSD. Kesey was by then known as the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. This copy is an unofficial upload rather than a distributor's.
3. 1965 - Ken Kesey (1965) (1 of 4). The novelist (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) whose Merry Pranksters and Acid Tests turned LSD into a public happening. The subject dates from 1965; this photograph was taken in 2016.
4. 1965 - Ken Kesey (1965) (2 of 4). Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (1965). The subject dates from 1965; this photograph was taken in 2018.
5. 1965 - Ken Kesey (1965) (3 of 4). Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (1965). The subject dates from 1965; this photograph was taken in 2009.
6. 1965 - Ken Kesey (1965) (4 of 4). Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (1965). The subject dates from 1965; this photograph was taken in 2021.
7. 1966 - A collector walks through Wes Wilson's non-concert poster work. Music-memorabilia collector Pete Howard, of PosterCentral, narrates a five-minute survey of psychedelic posters Wes Wilson designed in 1966 that were not made to advertise concerts. Wilson's lettering, developed for Fillmore and Avalon dance bills, became the visual signature of the San Francisco scene. The video is a collector's commentary rather than archival footage.
8. 1966 - LSD Love Pageant Rally, Haight-Ashbury - Oct 1966 TV News (archival). LSD Love Pageant Rally, Haight-Ashbury, Oct 1966 TV News (1966).
9. 1966 - The Grateful Dead at an Acid Test - San Francisco 1966 (archival). The Grateful Dead at an Acid Test, San Francisco 1966 (1966).
10. 1966 - How Owsley 'Bear' Stanley's LSD Shaped the Grateful Dead's Sound. 's purest LSD, and engineered the Grateful Dead's sound.
11. 1966 - Neal Cassady Explains the Acid Test - 1966 (archival). Neal Cassady Explains the Acid Test, 1966 (1966).
12. 1966 - Grateful Dead play a full set at the Avalon Ballroom. An audio recording of the Grateful Dead's 19 May 1966 performance at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, running fifteen tracks across nearly an hour. The Avalon was one of the two rooms, with the Fillmore, that anchored the city's dance-concert scene in the mid sixties. The tape is posted by the Grateful Dead Archives channel.
13. 1966 - Acid Test - Pigpen, Ken Babbs & Neal Cassady 1966 (archival). Acid Test, Pigpen, Ken Babbs & Neal Cassady 1966 (1966).
14. 1966 - Grateful Dead stretch out on Viola Lee Blues in San Francisco. A near ten-minute live recording of the Grateful Dead performing Viola Lee Blues in San Francisco, with Bill Kreutzmann on drums and Bob Weir on guitar. The track was issued by Grateful Dead Productions on a collection of live rarities. It captures the extended jamming that defined the band's early hometown ballroom shows.
15. 1966 - Grateful Dead play a Dylan song live in San Francisco. A previously unissued live recording of It's All Over Now Baby Blue, taped in the city and later released on the band's Complete Live Rarities Collection. It catches the group in their earliest years, when they were still shaping a set out of folk and blues material borrowed from other writers.
16. 1966 - Acid Test Graduation - San Francisco 1966 (archival). Acid Test Graduation, San Francisco 1966, The last of Kesey's Acid Tests, October 1966, days before California's LSD ban took effect.
17. 1966 - The Grateful Dead play Cream Puff War at the Fillmore. A recording of the Grateful Dead performing "Cream Puff War" at the Fillmore Auditorium on 3 July 1966, released on the band's official channel. Written by Jerry Garcia, the song was one of the group's earliest originals and was played live only about a dozen times across 1966 and 1967. The Fillmore was the room where the band's San Francisco reputation was made.
18. 1966 - A Mime Troupe benefit poster for the Fillmore Auditorium. PosterCentral examines an original window card for a San Francisco Mime Troupe dance-concert held at the Fillmore Auditorium on 14 January 1966, with Bill Graham promoting and the Grateful Dead on the bill. Collectors know it as the third of the Mime Troupe appeal benefits, though the card itself never says so.
19. 1966 - Filmed record of the Acid Test Graduation ceremony. Twelve minutes of footage shot at Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' Acid Test Graduation, the event staged to mark the end of their public LSD parties. The film is posted to YouTube by an independent uploader rather than a broadcast archive.
20. 1966 - The Diggers hand out free food in Golden Gate Park. Documentary footage of the San Francisco Diggers, the anarchist street collective that cooked and distributed free meals in the park for anyone who turned up. Their free food, free stores and free housing were a practical rebuke to the commercial scene forming around Haight-Ashbury. The clip is excerpted from a documentary about the Summer of Love.
21. 1966 - The LSD Labs That Changed Music - Owsley Stanley & the Grateful Dead
22. 1966 - Ken Kesey: 'The Acid Test' - 1966 (archival). Ken Kesey: 'The Acid Test', 1966 (1966).
23. 1966 - Ken Kesey - Acid Test Graduation Interview 1966 (archival). Ken Kesey, Acid Test Graduation Interview 1966 (1966).
24. 1966 - Acid Test Graduation - Film & Photos 1966 (archival). Acid Test Graduation, Film & Photos 1966 (1966).
25. 1966 - Ken Kesey at the Acid Test Graduation - 1966 (archival). Ken Kesey at the Acid Test Graduation, 1966, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
26. 1966 - Acid Test, Los Angeles. The Watts Acid Test era, when Kesey's Pranksters took the format south.
27. 1966 - Garcia on the Acid Tests. Jerry Garcia describing what the Acid Tests actually were: not concerts, but rooms where the band was one element among many and nobody was in charge.
28. 1967 - Human Be-In 1967. CHECK OUT THE "HIGH DEFINITION' VERSION OF THIS VIDEO: The Human Be-In gathering at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park took place January 14, 1967. Allen Ginsberg & Timothy Leary showed up along with thousands of sympathizers. I was a student at UC, Berkeley at the tim
29. 1967 - The Grateful Dead play a street show in Haight-Ashbury. The band performs Dancing in the Street outdoors in Haight-Ashbury, filmed for a CBS evening news segment on the neighbourhood. Partway through, the reporter's voice turns to the dangers said to await young people drawn into the scene, which is the frame the network put around the music.
30. 1967 - Hippies Gather on Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco 1967 (archival). Hippies Gather on Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco 1967 (1967).
31. 1967 - The Grateful Dead play Viola Lee Blues at Monterey Pop. Nearly nine minutes of the Grateful Dead performing Viola Lee Blues at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967. The festival drew the San Francisco bands out of their home ballrooms and put them in front of a national audience. This copy was posted by a private uploader rather than a broadcaster.
32. 1967 - Human Be-In - Golden Gate Park, January 14 1967 (archival). Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park, January 14 1967 (1967).
33. 1967 - The Haight-Ashbury - 1967 TV News Reports (archival). The Haight-Ashbury, 1967 TV News Reports (1967).
34. 1967 - Haight-Ashbury 1967 (1967). The San Francisco district that became the capital of the hippie movement (1967). The subject dates from 1967; this photograph was taken in 2015.
35. 1967 - Newsreel reporter among the hippies of the flower-power summer. A British Pathé item on the 1967 hippie scene, with a presenter walking viewers through the music, the dress and the street life of the moment. In a piece of newsreel self-parody, one of Pathé's own cameramen is dressed up as a hippie on camera. The tone is that of a light magazine segment rather than reportage.
36. 1967 - Summer of Love (1967) (1 of 4). The summer of 1967, when a hundred thousand young people converged on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury (1967).
37. 1967 - ITN reporter walks Haight-Ashbury before the Summer of Love. John Edwards filed this report from the district for ITN in April 1967, as the neighbourhood was becoming the centre of the emerging hippie movement. It was recorded just ahead of the summer in which around a hundred thousand people converged on Haight-Ashbury from across the country.
38. 1967 - Summer of Love (1967) (2 of 4). The summer of 1967, when a hundred thousand young people converged on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury (1967).
39. 1967 - Home Movies of 1967 Hippies in San Francisco (archival). Home Movies of 1967 Hippies in San Francisco (1967).
40. 1967 - Hippies parade through the streets of Haight-Ashbury. Forty-four seconds of unedited film of a hippie parade in the Haight-Ashbury district, held by the historical footage library Footage Farm. The reel is an untouched historical document rather than a finished newsreel, distributed for research use. Haight-Ashbury was the centre of the 1967 counterculture influx.
41. 1967 - The Human Be-In fills Golden Gate Park. A short HistoryPod film on the gathering staged in Golden Gate Park on 14 January 1967, billed by its counterculture organisers as a "Gathering of the Tribes". It was conceived to draw the emerging hippie movement and political activists into a single audience, and it set the stage for the Haight-Ashbury summer that followed.
42. 1967 - Newsreel footage of a hippie be-in crowd. Thirty-three seconds of 1967 newsreel and stock footage of a hippie be-in gathering, filmed in Seattle. Be-ins spread across the West Coast that year after the model set in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. The clip is distributed by the stock library PublicDomainFootage.
43. 1967 - Summer of Love 1967 - KTVU Fox 2 (archival). Summer of Love 1967, KTVU Fox 2 (1967).
44. 1967 - The Human Be-In (1967). The "Gathering of the Tribes" in Golden Gate Park, January 1967, the counterculture's coming-out. The subject dates from 1967; this photograph was taken in 2013.
45. 1967 - The Human Be-In (1967). The "Gathering of the Tribes" in Golden Gate Park, January 1967, the counterculture's coming-out (1967).
46. 1967 - Remembering San Francisco's Summer of Love. 1967, when a hundred thousand young people converged on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury.
47. 1967 - PBS trailer for a documentary on the Summer of Love. A thirty-second promotion for the American Experience film about the thousands of young people who travelled to the Haight-Ashbury district in 1967. The trailer's own framing is that many arrived to find the scene they had come for was already dissolving.
48. 1967 - Young arrivals crowd into Haight-Ashbury for the hippie summer. The opening chapter of the PBS American Experience documentary Summer of Love, following the thousands of young people who travelled to San Francisco from across the country in 1967. The programme's argument is that many arrived to find the scene they had come for was already breaking up.
49. 1967 - Human Be-In - Polo Field, Golden Gate Park, Jan 14 1967 (archival). Human Be-In, Polo Field, Golden Gate Park, Jan 14 1967 (1967).
50. 1967 - Summer of Love (1967) (3 of 4). The summer of 1967, when a hundred thousand young people converged on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury (1967). The subject dates from 1967; this photograph was taken in 2003.
51. 1967 - Haight-Ashbury 1967 (1967). The San Francisco district that became the capital of the hippie movement.
52. 1967 - CBC documentary on the city that summer. The Way it Was, a feature-length documentary made by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It records San Francisco during the months when the counterculture drew national attention, filmed by an outside broadcaster covering the scene as it peaked.
53. 1967 - The Complete Summer of Love Story - Both Sides (documentary). The Complete Summer of Love Story, Both Sides (1967).
54. 1967 - The Grateful Dead play Viola Lee Blues at the Human Be-In. Footage of the Grateful Dead performing Viola Lee Blues on the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park at the Human Be-In. The gathering drew a large crowd to the park and is generally treated as the event that announced the Haight-Ashbury scene to the wider country, months before the summer that followed.
55. 1967 - San Francisco During the Summer of Love - 1967 (archival). San Francisco During the Summer of Love, 1967 (1967).
56. 1967 - Human Be-In 1967 - Golden Gate Park, San Francisco (archival). Human Be-In 1967, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, The "Gathering of the Tribes" in Golden Gate Park, January 1967, where Leary first said "turn on, tune in, drop out".
57. 1967 - Human Be-In - Full Program, Golden Gate Park, Jan 14 1967 (archival). Human Be-In, Full Program, Golden Gate Park, Jan 14 1967 (1967).
58. 1967 - Summer of Love: The Psychedelic Revolution of 1967 (documentary). Summer of Love: The Psychedelic Revolution of 1967 (1967).
59. 1967 - 1967 Human Be-In - Rare San Francisco Film (archival). 1967 Human Be-In, Rare San Francisco Film (1967).
60. 1967 - Looking Back at the Summer of Love - KPIX/CBS Bay Area (archival). Looking Back at the Summer of Love, KPIX/CBS Bay Area (1967).
61. 1967 - Summer of Love (1967) (4 of 4). The summer of 1967, when a hundred thousand young people converged on San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury (1967).
62. 1967 - News report on hippie life and drug dealing in Haight-Ashbury. A short newsreel item filed in November 1967 on the Haight-Ashbury scene, focusing on undercover dealers working the neighbourhood's drug market. It comes from the AP Archive, the newsfilm library of the Associated Press. The footage runs under a minute and dates from the months just after the Summer of Love.
63. 1967 - The Human Be-In - Short Film 1967 (archival). The Human Be-In, Short Film 1967 (1967).
64. 1967 - Rick Griffin and the poster era. The Fillmore and Avalon posters, lettering deliberately pushed to the edge of legibility, on the reasonable assumption the reader had taken something.
65. 1967 - Haight-Ashbury reports back. News from the Haight in 1967, by which point California had already banned LSD and the neighbourhood had become the story.
66. 1967 - HISTORY OF HAIGHT ASHBURY-SUMMER OF LOVE-1967. ’t as peaceful as some perceived. My being one of them. A friend and I had stolen my parent’s check book and was
67. 1967 - 1967 - The Summer of Love | Free Documentary History. 1967 - The Summer of Love | History Documentary Watch '1968 - Year of War, Turmoil & Beyond' here: In 1967 an expressive, colourful musical force painted a backdrop of social change, fashion, love, turmoil and war. The world remembers the Summer of Love in 1967 as one
68. 1967 - Haight Ashbury 1967 Summer of Love Hippies San Francisco KRON 2003. 1960s Haight Ashbury San Francisco 1967 Summer of Love Documentary My Library: Pt 1 Pt 2
69. 1968 - Nine minutes of Haight-Ashbury hippie street life on film. Archive footage from the Kinolibrary collection covering the Haight-Ashbury counterculture at street level in the late 1960s. The reel runs about nine minutes and shows the neighbourhood as an everyday community rather than a news event.
70. 1968 - The Grateful Dead perform from a flatbed truck on Haight Street. Sixteen-millimetre footage of the band playing on the back of a flatbed truck parked on Haight Street, with sound recorded on the day by Steve Brown. The same reel includes a Peace and Freedom gathering in Golden Gate Park and street scenes from downtown San Francisco.
71. 1968 - Moby Grape onstage under the Joshua Light Show. Silent 16mm footage of the San Francisco band Moby Grape playing the Fillmore East in 1968, shot from the stage by lighting designer Joshua White. White's projections are visible behind the group, and Bill Graham's hall was the East Coast counterpart to his San Francisco Fillmore. Preserved by the Historic Films Stock Footage Archive.
72. 1968 - Liquid light projections behind a rock stage. Footage of Joshua's Lights performing a liquid light show at the Fillmore East in 1968, held by the Historic Films Stock Footage Archive. Projected oil, dye and colour washes of this kind were a fixture of Bill Graham's Fillmore rooms on both coasts, turning the concert hall itself into part of the performance. The clip runs about seven minutes.
73. 1969 - The Grateful Dead (1969) (1 of 4). the Grateful Dead (1969). The subject dates from 1969; this photograph was taken in 2019.
74. 1969 - The Grateful Dead (1969) (2 of 4). the Grateful Dead (1969). The subject dates from 1969; this photograph was taken in 2016.
75. 1969 - Joshua Light Show Staff in the Fillmore East Studio - 1969 (archival). Joshua Light Show Staff in the Fillmore East Studio, 1969 (1969).
76. 1969 - The Grateful Dead (1969) (3 of 4). The house band of the Acid Tests, whose live improvisation became the sound of the psychedelic scene. The subject dates from 1969; this photograph was taken in 2016.
77. 1969 - Joshua's Lights run a liquid light show behind a band. Stock footage of the projection troupe at work at the Fillmore East, held by the Historic Films archive. Liquid light shows pumped coloured oils and dyes between glass plates in front of a lamp, an effect pioneered around the San Francisco ballrooms and carried east with the Fillmore name.
78. 1969 - The Grateful Dead (1969) (4 of 4). the Grateful Dead (1969). The subject dates from 1969; this photograph was taken in 2016.
79. 1969 - Aoxomoxoa. Griffin's Grateful Dead artwork, and a title that reads the same in both directions.
80. 1988 - British ravers dancing through the night in the late eighties. An extended reel of archive footage from the late-1980s UK rave scene, the period known as the second summer of love. Running over half an hour, it is raw source material rather than an edited programme. Held by the Kinolibrary archive film collection as clip reference DT3.
81. 1988 - The Second Summer of Love. Twenty years after the first: acid house, warehouse parties, and a British moral panic that produced its own legislation. The chemistry had changed but the shape of the reaction had not.
82. 1989 - Crowd dancing at the Energy rave at Effingham. A short Kinolibrary archive clip panning across dancers at an outdoor acid house event held at Effingham in 1989. British ravers borrowed the phrase Summer of Love from San Francisco two decades earlier to describe that season.
83. 1989 - Dancers at a daytime acid house rave. Archive film of a daylight rave from 1989, the second summer of love, when acid house moved British youth culture out of clubs and into fields and warehouses. The footage is held by the Kinolibrary archive film collection and is catalogued as reference DT2.
84. 1992 - The rave/ecstasy era (1992) (1 of 4). The late-1980s Second Summer of Love, when MDMA and acid house filled warehouses across Britain (1992). The subject dates from 1992; this photograph was taken in 2024.
85. 1992 - The rave/ecstasy era (1992) (2 of 4). The late-1980s Second Summer of Love, when MDMA and acid house filled warehouses across Britain (1992). The subject dates from 1992; this photograph was taken in 2008.
86. 1992 - The rave/ecstasy era (1992) (3 of 4). The late-1980s Second Summer of Love, when MDMA and acid house filled warehouses across Britain (1992). The subject dates from 1992; this photograph was taken in 2015.
87. 1992 - The rave/ecstasy era (1992) (4 of 4). The late-1980s Second Summer of Love, when MDMA and acid house filled warehouses across Britain. The subject dates from 1992; this photograph was taken in 2015.
88. 1995 - Alexander Shulgin, 1995: His Lab Near San Francisco
89. 2012 - Documentary on the Diggers and their free city. A feature-length film, originally released in French as Les Diggers de San Francisco, by Celine Deransart, Alice Gaillard and Jean-Pierre Ziren. It traces the anarchist street collective that ran free food, free stores and free performances in Haight-Ashbury during the late nineteen sixties.
90. 2014 - Bear. Owsley Stanley, the Dead's soundman, who made the LSD that supplied the entire San Francisco scene and built the sound system it was heard on. His product was famously and unusually pure.
91. 2016 - The blotter museum the DEA has not raided. Mark McCloud's San Francisco collection of thousands of sheets of blotter art, legally fraught, since much of it is or was active.
92. 2018 - Video essay on the Grateful Dead's approach to live performance. An analytical piece from the music channel Polyphonic, published in 2018, arguing that the Grateful Dead reshaped how live music was played, amplified and circulated. The band formed in the Bay Area and grew out of the same San Francisco scene that produced the Fillmore ballrooms. Roughly eight and a half minutes long.
93. 2023 - Garcia on Wolfe. Jerry Garcia on The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe's 1968 account of Kesey's bus, the book that fixed the era's image for everyone who wasn't there.