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San Francisco was the new magnet for teenagers. Gray Line added hippie neighborhoods to its San Francisco bus tours, and the folks from Ohio and Iowa looked out to see the world of freaks. San Francisco’s new world order became fodder for Johnny Carson’s monologues and the punch lines of stand-up comics. The pop world regarded the hippie world with fascination and occasionally revulsion. Figuring there was money in them-there hippies, the pop world sought to embrace and co-opt the milieu. In the summer 1967, the Cowsills, a clean-cut mom and her kids (models for television’s soon-to-be Partridge family), released a song steeped in the watered-down world of free love. “The Rain, the Park and Other Things” was written by Artie Kornfeld, former car song collaborator of Jan Berry and Brian Wilson, and seemed to hit all the high points of the time. The infectious chorus of “I love the flower girl” brought a diluted G-rated sense of San Francisco into the homes of teenagers across the country.
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