Frank Zappa, characteristically ahead of his time, created a bitter satire about the Summer of Love and hippie movements while the rest of America was just tuning in to the music. The classic album, "We're Only In It For The Money" was released on March 4th, 1968.
As Michael J. Kramer put it:
The Summer of Love was precisely when the trickle of freaks forming bohemian enclaves in the post-Beat, post-folk revival period of the mid-1960s gave way to a torrent of hippies. Something false was overtaking the challenges to postwar American life that the freaks mounted. A substitution was underway, a bill of goods for the goods themselves. While The Beatles believed you could simply get by with a little help from your friends, Zappa sang, “what’s there to live for / who needs the peace corps?” He did not mean the overseas government program, but rather the legions of young people fleeing to places such as San Francisco. For Zappa, the hype of the Summer of Love was such that now, as he sardonically put it in his lyrics: “Every town must have a place where phony hippies meet / psychedelic dungeons popping up on every street.”First I’ll buy some beads
And then perhaps a leather band
To go around my head
Some feathers and bells
And a book of Indian lore
I will ask the Chamber Of Commerce
How to get to Haight Street
And smoke an awful lot of dope
I will wander around barefoot
I will have a psychedelic gleam in my eye at all times
I will love everyone
I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street
Sources:
"The Negative Dialectics of the Summer of Love: Frank Zappa’s We’re Only In It For the Money," By Michael J. Kramer. (2 Aug 2017)
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