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This being Memorial Day Weekend, the customary beginning of
what American society seems to accept as Summer, even though it's over
three weeks before the actual solstice, I've been thinking quite a bit
this week about a particular summer four decades ago. So has the San
Francisco Chronicle, which ran a week-long series of features by Joel
Selvin about the "Summer of Love" that made the corner of Haight and
Ashbury Streets in San Francisco a household phrase throughout the
world. It is ironic that the Chronicle, or the San Francisco Examiner or
Oakland Tribune for that matter, would find much about the "Summer of
Love" to be nostalgic for, considering how critical all three papers
were of it while it was actually taking place in 1967. There /was/ a
reason why the most popular newspaper in the Haight-Ashbury district
that year was the Berkeley Barb.
There were two hit records that year that particularly touched upon the
idyllic image of the female hippie, in blue jeans, long flowing hair and
flower behind the ear. One of them was released that summer, but it
didn't relate itself to Haight-Ashbury per se. That was "Twelve Thirty
(Young Girls are Coming to The Canyon)" by The Mamas & The Papas, the
canyon specified being Laurel Canyon, the area of Los Angeles where the
group members shared a house when they started their recording career a
couple of years earlier. The other was merely recorded that summer but
not released on record until the autumn, reaching #1 on the Cash Box
singles chart the week of November 25, inbetween the Strawberry Alarm
Clock's "Incense and Peppermints" and The Monkees' "Daydream Believer."
The song was titled "Rain, The Park and Other Things," and the group
performing it was a family band, teenagers and their mom, called The
Cowsills.
The record gave the Cowsills quite a career for a couple of years. They
were at one point the best-selling act on the M-G-M Records label, ahead
of The Animals, Roy Orbison and Herman's Hermits, among other big stars
of the decade. The Cowsills popped up on a ton of variety and talk shows
-- Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, eventually
their own NBC special. They did commercials for the American Dairy
Association, and cut the opening theme tune for one of ABC's biggest hit
comedies of the period, "Love American Style." Eventually, on the covers
of 16 and Tiger Beat magazines, the Cowsill boys replaced previous
attractions The Monkees and Sajid Khan, the co-star of the movie and TV
series "Maya," should you have forgotten him in the last 40 years.
Within three years, however, the career burnt out. The rock snobs who
dumped on The Monkees for being hyped by 16 and Tiger Beat magazines
began doing the same to The Cowsills for much the same reason. It didn't
matter that The Cowsills indeed played their own instruments on the
records and The Monkees, at least in the beginning, didn't; they were
getting tarred with the same broad brush as being disposable pop
musicians pumping out disposable pop music. Even their own record label,
M-G-M, tossed them out on their collective backside in one of the most
cynical acts of business ever perpetrated in Hollywood. The
newly-appointed head of the company, the politically conservative Mike
Curb, decided he wanted to rid M-G-M of the so-called "drug music" that
the company made money with only a couple of years before. So they
dropped such acts as The Ultimate Spinach (claiming the band's name was
a code name for marijuana), The Mothers of Invention (led by the
distinctly anti-drug Frank Zappa) and, citing their 1968 hit single "We
Can Fly" as an allegedly drug-influenced title, The Cowsills. Validity
be damned, it was a simple way for Curb to cut the dead wood from the
roster and buy political brownie points in the process. Curb was
congratulated by Vice President Spiro Agnew, then on his own
anti-counterculture campaign, and when Walter Cronkite reported it all
on the "CBS Evening News," one of the two song titles he cited in the
story was "We Can Fly." The Cowsills managed to get another record deal,
this time with London Records, but the damage was done. 16 and Tiger
Beat moved on to Curb's new M-G-M protégés, The Osmonds, and the TV
series based in part on The Cowsills, "The Partridge Family," and its
star, David Cassidy.
Cut forward to New Orleans, December 28, 2005. A badly decomposed body
washed ashore at the Chartres Street Wharf. It was that of Barry
Cowsill, the group's bass player. He and his sister Susan Cowsill had
both been living in New Orleans for several years when Hurricane Katrina
hit. Susan and her husband, musician Russ Broussard, survived the storm
but their home and belongings were destroyed. Barry was determined to
have drowned in the flooding of New Orleans.
Perhaps, if you feel a little nostalgic for the Summer of Love in the
next few weeks, this story of one of the thousands of lives taken by
Katrina will lead you to reflect on the snobbish concept of disposable
popular culture. You may find that the culture, and the people creating
it, aren't as disposable as you used to think.
I'm King Daevid MacKenzie.
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