It was the place to be, he was told. So in 1966, he packed up his guitar and sped off to the Bay Area with his band The Jaywalkers to see about a gig.
The four-piece group had been playing a steady job in the summers at Sun Valley, even providing the music for a Kennedy family gathering at a Christmas party alongside Henry Mancini.
“It was a blast, an absolute blast,” said Barry. “I'd never played for that many people.”
Barry and Loli were hardly hippies. With a young child in tow, they didn't fit the profile of the shiftless, kooky youths who were beginning to flood the area that summer. Barry was there to play music - and he played many a concert in San Francisco from 1966-1969, with such bands as The Jaywalkers, Melvin Q. Watchpocket and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
But something began rubbing off on the young couple, and it was a communal magnetism that the flowering hippie movement provided.
“My whole outlook changed on the war when I went to San Francisco,” said Barry. “My whole outlook changed on what the government does when I went to San Francisco.”
San Francisco's Summer of Love, 40 years old now, changed a lot of things. It brought the hippies out of obscurity and introduced them in a big way to the public. Who could ignore hundreds of thousands of people in one place? The hippies made their mark with fashions and ideas that were viewed by many as subversive, with ideologies that poked two fingers in the eyes of 1950s conformity, with drugs and music - and ultimately a self-absorption that would eventually destroy the movement.
For the Waldens - who today own Hooked on Java, an espresso stand on South Higgins - the infestation of hard drugs, panhandling and violence began the unraveling as the Summer of Love turned into the Summer of Indulgence, and all that flowery philosophy began to be subsumed by messy masses looking for drugs and a handout.
“People had heard what was going on, and they were just coming in droves,” said Loli.
“And they weren't coming together,” added Barry. “They were just coming to get what they could.”
By the time the Summer of Love ended, America had grown tired of the violence and the self-importance. But the hippie ethic was forever placed in its consciousness, and survives to this day in so many aspects of American culture and political life.
Barry Walden, a guitarist whose band shared the stage with Jefferson Airplane, now owns Hooked on Java on South Higgins.
Courtesy photo
Morgan Modine was a young actor on the streets of Los Angeles, hitting the pavement and getting bit acting parts when the flower bug bit.
A Missoula attorney for the last quarter-century, Modine was also a young activist and actor in the mid-1960s, and “pretty active” in the peace movement when he was part of a protest turned violent in Los Angeles, witnessing baton-wielding police smack around him some of his fellow protesters.
“It was shocking, because it was so out of the ordinary,” said Modine. “It started out people singing ‘Kumbaya,' and it turned into ‘Oh my God.' ”
Modine and some friends had heard about a place where the hippies were welcomed, not beaten. So in the summer of 1967, they jumped in a truck and drove all night to San Francisco.
“We were exhausted but exhilarated,” he said. “The atmosphere was totally different. The whole town was out, and there were bands ... Big Brother and Holding Company was playing in the back of a truck, just like you see in the movies. ... It was ultimately the opposite of what L.A. was. Hippies were slipping flowers into the barrel of an officer's rifle, and they were cool with it. It was totally nonviolent.”
Modine and his friends spent three days in the San Francisco sun, “tripping out with people in the park” and taking in the scene - but all the time feeling more like tourists than part of any mass movement. Forty years later, it's hard for Modine to believe that people are still talking about the Summer of Love.
“It was just sort of a rolling thing, and it got bigger and bigger,” he said. “It gathered momentum. I never would have pictured what I would be doing 40 years later. It would never have crossed my mind.”
One thing that the Summer of Love gave Modine was a sense not only of his own freedom, but the responsibilities that came with it.
“I was more or less just doing what I could do, and I had some ideas about what I enjoyed doing,” he said. “But we were freer. I was free to get up, go to San Francisco, crash. But eventually I came to the conclusion a number of years later that show business wasn't going to be my thing, that there were too many 50-year-old cab drivers who were waiting for their break.”
Modine eventually left for the University of Utah, where he met his Montana-raised wife, and then attended law school at UM.
Sue Thompson had a bird's-eye view of the hippies. Her apartment on Haight Street in San Francisco - and block or two down from the corner of Haight and Ashbury - gave her a perfect view of a revolution in the making.
“I was an outsider looking in,” said Thompson, the 14-year owner of Bagels on Broadway in Missoula, who was at the time a physical therapy student at the University of California-San Francisco. “Right across the street was a park, and people were literally in their white robes with flowers in their hair. We were studying our anatomy and physiology, and thinking, ‘What in the hell is this all about?' ”
An odd question for someone actually living in the Haight-Ashbury district to be asking that summer, to be sure.
But Thompson, married to a military man, never felt a real connection to the flowering hippie movement, “which is why I'm embarrassed to tell this story.”
“These people were just milling around, to me without a purpose in life,” said Thompson. “I had a goal, and that was to get my degree and get the hell out of school.”
Still, she has vivid memories of the Mamas and the Papas wafting through her window, and of watching the nascent flower-power movement gain momentum right under her nose.
It may be pointless to try to compare the America of today with the America of 1967.
But in some ways, the situations are similar. We are fighting an increasingly unpopular war led by a highly unpopular president. Today's youth, like those of 40 years ago, enjoy every material advantage their parents gave them - and moreso.
What's different today?
Ask the people who were there that Summer of Love, and one word comes to mind: Draft.
There is no draft today, of course, and that above everything fueled the rage of the generation as they saw tens of thousands of people dying, and their friend sent off to fight a war they hated.
“(The war) is not reaching across all lines,” said Modine. “You're not being yanked out of situations where they're saying, ‘Jamie, sorry, you're leaving the Missoulian and you're going to Vietnam.' ”
Loli Walden agrees.
“If there was a draft, you'd be darn right they'd be on the street,” she said. “I think you'd see a huge movement if you had people who didn't want to be in the military getting drafted. If they tried to take my grandson, there'd be a big movement on my part.”
Another difference is the computer age. Today's youth have a million connections right at their fingertips, and they don't need to hit the streets or publish radical newspapers to be heard.
“It's just the way that people express themselves now,” said Modine. “With computers, you've got access to YouTube, the Internet, to articles. The communication is so much greater, that many young people don't feel they have to go out and march on the street to be heard.”
While our collective conscience may be being slowly washed of the memories of the hippie movement and the Summer of Love that so defined it, there is a very positive detritus from that era that has survived in American culture.
It was the hippie movement that challenged the bland conformity of the 1950s, that thrust the women's rights movement into the American mainstream. Through its emphasis on inclusiveness and diversity - even if it bordered on self-righteous at times - the hippie movement paved the way for gay rights and a greater accountability for what the government does.
Yes, it failed to bring down capitalism, as many of its adherents tried to do. But in the end, America proved that it liked its capitalism but could eat the cake of diversity too.
That left-right “culture war” those hippies started in the Summer of Love actually brought about a “libertarian consensus” in American life, argues Brink Lindsey in his book, “The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture.”
Such a war has left in its wake a culture that still loves its families, its God and its work ethic, “tempered by a broad-minded tolerance of the country's diversity and a deep humility about telling others how they should live,” he wrote.
Now if even part of that can be chalked up to the hippies who gathered that hot summer in the City by the Bay, then maybe we owe them a flower or two.
Reach Jamie Kelly at 523-5254 or at jkelly@missoulian.com.
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