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Joel Selvin

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Summer of Love: Ths Inside Story of LSD, Rock & Roll, Free Love and High Time in the Wild West Paperback – September 7, 1999

by Joel Selvin (Author)

4.7 26 ratings

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In the late 1060s and early 1970s, the West Coast, particularly San Francisco, was the epicenter of rock music. Culled from more than 200 interviews with all the major players, including Jerry Garcia, Grace Slick, David Crosby, and Steve Miller, Summer of Love is the definitive book about the Psychedelic Era. Selvin provides an uncensored look at the acid-laced jam sessions, bacchanal parties, crimes of passion, run-ins with ruthless promoters and lawmen, overdoses, rivalries, deaths, and, of course, the music. Filled with never-before-told stories of The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Janis Joplin, Country Joe and the Fish, Creedance Clearwater Revival, and non-musicians like Bill Graham and Ken Kesey, this book presents an unforgettable, kaleidoscopic portrait of a crucial era in American music.

Print length

392 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Cooper Square Press
Publication date

September 7, 1999
Dimensions

6.26 x 0.85 x 8.94 inches
ISBN-10

0815410190
ISBN-13

978-0815410195
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Selvin spins out stories like an acid-age papa unraveling counterculture legends around the old electronic campfire. Warm, human, knowing and funny, this is no flashback-it's a trip. (Dave Marsh, Senior Editor, Rolling Stone)

[A] defining rock-culture book-if you want to know what it was really like to live in the Sixties, this is the one to read. (Stephen King)

A front row seat to some of pop music's most mythical moments. (Interview)

If you want to know how the San Francisco music scene developed, Joel tells you. (Jerry Garcia)

[This book] vividly portrays an era teeming with creative ferment, acid high jinks, pre-AIDS promiscuity… and connects us to the trippy, tragic temperament of a heady time. (Rolling Stone)

About the Author

Joel Selvin, pop music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle since 1972, is the author of Ricky Nelson and Monterey Pop. He lives in San Francisco.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cooper Square Press (September 7, 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 392 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0815410190
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0815410195
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.26 x 0.85 x 8.94 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,262,680 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,538 in Rock Music (Books)
- #8,157 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences
- #19,221 in Music Theory, Composition & Performance (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.7 26 ratings

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4.7 out of 5

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KKor3216

Groovy!

Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2011

Verified Purchase

If you are interested in the 60's San Francisco era and the bands that evolved, this is great reading. The documentation and the short synopsis of the events, bands, music and players at the end make this a wonderful reference. Bought used at a very good price with fast and reasonable shipping.

3 people found this helpful

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Goldbracelet

Great book, really brings you into a unique time ...

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2017

Verified Purchase

Great book, really brings you into a unique time in history and provides an insider's knowledge and understanding of what happened and why it changed the world.

One person found this helpful

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Ray H. Lein

I really enjoyed this book

Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2014

Verified Purchase

I really enjoyed this book,as all those 60's San Francisco bands were the ones i loved in those far out times.

2 people found this helpful

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anonymously

A GREAT BOOK BY A NATIONAL TREASURE

Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2000

Joel Selvin is a great reporter and a great writer who was on the scene and knows this story better than anybody. I'd recommend this book to anybody -- even to people who don't like rock and roll.

5 people found this helpful

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Gavin B.

The Summer of Love That Never Happened

Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2003

Verified Purchase

"Summer of Love" may have been a bit over the top with it's tabloid style coverage of the rise and fall of the San Francisco music scene, but it was a fun read. Author Joel Selvin does have his facts straight and seldom misspeaks on this insider's account of bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Selvin devotes a fair amount of coverage of the Bill Graham organization and the Family Dog, the primary promoters of live music in the old ballrooms of San Francisco. That coverage is justified because it is doubtful that this music would have found a national audience without the vibrant live music scene in the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms. And it is all there: Quicksilver's obsession with firearms; the Lovin' Spoonful's narking out on the manager of the improv group, the Committee; Janice Joplin's turbulent love life; Marty Balin's courageous attempts to diffuse the violence at Altamont, the internal bickering of the Grateful Dead which lead them to serve "walking papers" to Pig Pen and Bob Weir for not having enough musical talent, and Bill Graham's fisticuffs with just about anyone who disagreed with him. If you loved the music of Haight-Ashbury, you will enjoy "Summer of Love." Oh by the way, the expression "summer of love" was just a media label for the San Francisco music phenomena and I think some of the other critics have taken the book title too literally.

23 people found this helpful

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Caryn Matter

My copy of Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD

Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2017

Verified Purchase

My copy of Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock...etc arrived on time, and in good condition. The delivery and condition of the book met my expectations.

The book is well-written, and is a thorough picture of this San Francisco neighborhood during 1967. If you want to have a better understanding of what was good and bad about the Summer of Love, start with this book.

2 people found this helpful

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Jomo Mojo

In-depth detail about rock but not much about anything else

Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2003

This book is an engaging, densely detailed history of San Francisco rock-'n'-roll from 1965 to 1971. It opens with the Charlatans giving birth to San Francisco rock and ends with the death of poor ol' Pigpen.
Selvin writes in great detail about how bands formed, learned (or didn't learn) how to deal with the music business, and broke up. It's a tell-all about who slept with who, the types of drugs each musician used and where and when they OD'ed, and the details of their recording contracts. To hear Selvin tell it, Janis Joplin bedded just about every male rocker in the business-- except for Jerry Lee Lewis: she got into a fistfight with him! Bill Graham's monstrous ego gets full play, until you get sick of reading about his temper tantrums and underhanded dealing.
But the book's title is misleading, for a couple reasons. For one thing, the summer of 1967 is completely absent from the book! The chronology jumps from spring to fall and ignores the summer altogether. Perhaps this was Selvin trying to emphasize his stark assertion in the book's first sentence: "The Summer of Love never really happened." But why he would deliberately omit the central scene of the whole saga is incomprehensible.
The other thing lacking in this book is a sense of the whole Zeitgeist of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene. The book has a focus on nothing but rock-'n'-roll music. Any mention of any other cultural aspects of hippie life, like folk music, the Human Be-In, the flower children, the communal Diggers, the arts and crafts, the antiwar movement, the Eastern mysticism, the wider scope of everything that went into the Haight scene, gets no mention except insofar as it directly relates to the story of the rock-'n'-roll bands. This is a book specifically about music, not about all the many things that went into making San Francisco the hippie mecca.
Rock-'n'-roll was of course a central feature of the scene, and deserves a book all its own like this one. It just isn't the last word on it, as the title seems to promise. It doesn't give the reader a feel for the complete Haight-Ashbury experience. An accurate title would be "Rock Music in San Francisco, 1965-1971", or more accurately, "Rock Music in the Bay Area, 1965-1971."
But it does give plenty of information about the unique personalities that made all that amazing music, how they developed their sound, the personal and professional pitfalls they encountered. It shows their development from naive groups of young people beginning by playing in cafes and garages and eventually hitting the big time, bringing their local little music scene, where everyone knew everyone else, onto the world stage.

33 people found this helpful

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C. Saunders

WHERE THE HECK IS THE CHAPTER ON THE SUMMER OF LOVE?

Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2012

This is absolutely NUTS! He writes a book called SUMMER OF LOVE, then when he gets to it, HE SKIPS RIGHT OVER IT and jumps from spring to fall with NO CHAPTERS AT ALL ON THE SUMMER OF LOVE. That is correct...NOT ONE CHAPTER. Did he fall asleep like Rip Van Winkle for the entire summer so he couldn't write about it? I wanted to SCREAM when I realized what he did. Astounding! And frustrating!

4 people found this helpful

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