I wasn’t born then (no, really) but the summer of 1967 came to be known as the “Summer of Love.” This was when young people looking for a new social experience descended in droves to San Francisco, especially the Haight-Ashbury district and gave birth to the hippie counterculture movement. It was a time for free sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. No one embodied that time better than bad girl rocker Janis Joplin. Joplin and a bunch of other rock stars of the time including guitar legend Jimi Hendrix and incomparable beauty Grace Slick lived near Haight-Ashbury. Even today, you can see the remnants of those hippie days while strolling down the district with its motley collection of tattoo parlors, bong selling joints, and tie-dye clothing shops.
In today’s Journal, frequent hunter and washed-up rocker Ted Nugent opines [subscription] that this time should be re-classified as the summer of drugs. The Motor City Madman has choice words for the likes of Joplin: “I often wonder what musical peaks they could have climbed had they not gagged to death on their own vomit.” He also weighs in on what the hippies did to themselves: “Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.”
Soulless rock music? For someone who mostly delivered crappy music, the Nuge shouldn’t be the one judging that. Drugs or not, the music of Joplin and co still incites passions in every rock music fan. It’d be easy for me to dig up a nice performance by Joplin on youtube to accompany this post but instead, I’ll leave you with one of the best covers of Joplin’s songs ever performed: by soul wunderkind Joss Stone and a bald but fabulous Melissa Etheridge at the 2005 Grammy Awards.
