Coming Down: The End of the Psychedelic era...
Excerpt from The Psychedelic Rock Files

Some would say the end came with the closing days of the Summer of Love with the Death of a Hippie march and the closing of the Psychedelic shop. Others would say it came when Woodstock changed the face of concert promotion. Others will point to the disaster of Altamont and the death of the spirit of the counter-culture movement. Clearly each of these events played a part in the demise of the whole psychedelic movement. 

If we look at the San Francisco or West Coast scene as representative of the genre in general a number of issues came to a head early that predicted the demise of the genre. The most obvious is the commercialization of psychedelia. By the end of 1967, those who had been involved with forging the movement gained a new perspective. The Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, “By the time the press had found San Francisco and declared the Summer of Love, the scene was over. Those of us who’d grown up in it got out. One reason in particular was bathtub methedrine. I knew plenty of musicians who were screwed up by methedrine. They lost their teeth; they lost their sense of humour. Some of them turned to crime. It did a nasty number on a lot of people, because methedrine had a nasty comedown and many users turned to heroine.” The cases of more serious narcotic abuse in the wake of the sixties experimentation with psychedelics are plentiful and continue to haunt us to this day. But there were other elements that had changed.

One of the central reasons the psychedelic communities in both San Francisco and London grew was because they were part of the local community. This has already been discussed earlier, but as the musicians grew in stature they began to be removed from that local community. Soon they were stars and in the eyes of some even more than that. Country Joe’s Barry Melton observes, “When the media was looking to package the whole phenomena, the musicians got singled out for better treatment.” So while all of the other aspects of the communal experience were generally ignored the musicians became the focus. The dancing had stopped. The participatory nature of events stopped. The audience began to stand and stare. The dance-concerts became simply concerts. Bob Weir observes, “It became concerts and at that point personalities started to emerge. Of course the star-maker machinery was more than happy to lend its weight there.” Lastly there was the touring. While the communities thrived on having local heroes, especially heroes who were a part of the community, by 1968 many of those heroes had moved out of those local neighborhoods. Some had moved out to the country but virtually all of them were now spending more and more time on extensive tours that are a part of the star maker machinery. Country Joe McDonald interviewed in 1997 reflected on the changing times, “By 1968 everyone had left the Bay Area and discovered the horror of the road. Work, that’s what happened – work and work and work and work. It took creativity and smashed it to pieces. Then came contracts – one record every six months – and then one-nighters and airplanes. We thought the world was as big as the Bay Area, and we found out it was gigantic.” The pitfalls of selling one’s soul can be told over and over again but it always comes with the same results. 

The music industry changed during the sixties. The people changed as well. We’ll explore this aspect of the era in more detail later. For better and for worse, the music industry grew up and so did the counter-culture generation. A number of insightful, retrospective and reflective observations on the psychedelic sixties era are found on the videotape series, the History of Rock ‘n’ Roll. David Crosby who was instrumental in driving the psychedelic movement into the spotlight with his involvement in the Byrds and Crosby Stills and Nash, had this to say, “We were right about civil rights, we were right in that love is better than hate, we were right in that peace is better than war…ah, we, it turns out weren’t right about drugs.” In a similar tone looking back on what the sixties had wrought, Joni Mitchell offered her assessment on the changing sexual mores of the era, “The free sexuality was an interesting experiment that failed.” And perhaps Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane summed it up best with the comment, “For two weeks in the middle of 1967, Summer – it was perfect!"