#human be-in

[constantly-in-a-state-of-change]

A young woman named Andrea Morgenstern dances in the crowd during a Queen’s Park love-in on July 1, 1967. Photo: Jeff Goode/Toronto Star via Getty Images

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[rockhistory105]

Lecture 10: This is fascinating 8mm film footage from the Human Be-In, held at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967. The Be-In, with its mix of bands and countercultural luminaries such as Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg, was an early prototype of the rock festivals held across the United States in the second half of the 1960s. It also anticipated the massive Summer of Love later in the year in the Bay Area.

[rocknroll105]

Lecture 10: This is fascinating 8mm film footage from the Human Be-In, held at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967. The Be-In, with its mix of bands and countercultural luminaries such as Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg, was an early prototype of the rock festivals held across the United States in the second half of the 1960s. It also anticipated the massive Summer of Love later in the year in the Bay Area.

[auskultu]

[popculturerelapse]

The Human Be-In

[auskultu]

The Beginning Is the Human Be-In

uncredited writer, Berkeley Barb, 6 January 1967

Would you believe Timothy Leary and Mario Savio? Allen Ginsberg and Jack Weinberg? Lao - tzu and Spartacus? It’s happening. Berkeley political activists are going to join San Francisco’s hippies in a love feast that will, hopefully, wipe out the last remnants of mutual skepticism and suspicion. 

The thing is called A Gathering of the Tribes, a Pow Wow and Peace Dance, a Human Be-In. It will happen at the Polo Grounds in SF on Saturday the 14th. 

The two radical scenes are for the first time beginning to look at each other more closely. What both see is that both are under a big impersonal stick called The Establishment. So they’re going to stand up together in what both hope to be a new and strong harmony. 

The Golden Gate Park Grounds will hold fifty thousand people, and an endless number of sounds, scents, and sights. Beads, bells, flutes, incense, flags, symbols, cymbals, drums, feathers, flowers. And words. Words kept short. Words painting a picture of a free, loving society to come. In homes on both sides of the Bay while this was being shaped from a dream to a reality, the basic problem was whether to play the word game. The San Franciscans didn’t want to play that game any more; it doesn’t work, they said, and the non-verbal modes of expression tell it where it’s at. The Berkeleyans wanted to play that game because that’s where the rest of society plays; that’s the only way, they said, to get through to most people. The hip wondered aloud whether the politicos would make the Gathering a haranguing rally. The politicos wondered aloud whether the hip would all happily turn on and any social message would be lost. They solved it. The Human Be-In is the message. It will say, "We’re here, together, free, alive, creative, and this is the way the whole world will be when it’s ours.’’ 

Music sounds will come from the Grateful Dead, the Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and others. Word sounds will come from Dick Gregory, LenoreKandel, Jerry Rubin, Richard Alpert, Stu Albert, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Mario Savio, Timothy Leary, Jack Weinberg, and others. Mostly in person-to-person talk not from platforms. 

As a spokesman for the San Franciscans says it, “A new concert of human relations being developed within the youthful underground must emerge, become conscious and be shared so that a Revolution of form can be filled with a Renaissance of compassion, awareness and love in the Revelation of the unity of all mankind.’’ 

The beginning is the Human Be-In.

[auskultu]

Footage from the Human Be-in, January 14, 1967.