Haven't you ever been to a Love-In?
when Gary Usher signed the Firesign Theatre to Columbia Records
The D.A. Pennebaker film Monterey Pop is famous for its documentation of several seminal performances at the June 1967 festival: Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Otis Redding, and above all Janis Joplin (Pennebaker also caught Cass Elliott’s ecstatic reaction to Joplin). Joplin’s band Big Brother and the Holding Company was one of several acts signed by a major label at or immediately the festival, thus confirming — as Pennebaker’s film also did — that the dawn of the Summer of Love was also the dawn of the modern record industry, now reorganized around rock music and the long-playing record album.
I hadn’t seen the film for many years but watched it again recently, looking for a glimpse of the Firesign Theatre’s Phil Proctor, who attended the festival as a correspondent, phoning in periodic reports to his colleagues at LA’s big market AM pop station KRLA. Watching from this ultra-niche context, I was struck by the first words spoken in the film:
Haven't you ever been to a Love-In? God! I think it's gonna be like Easter and Christmas and New Year's and your birthday all together, you know? Hearing all the different bands, you know?
Love-In was a term invented only a few months earlier by the future Firesign member Peter Bergman, on the airwaves of his overnight radio program Radio Free Oz. Radio Free Oz had premiered in July 1966 (on what had hitherto been dead air) on LA’s low wattage Pacifica station KPFK-FM. Within a few short months the program had become such a sensation as to merit Bergman an entry —
Peter Bergman, guru; conducts mystic, India oriented radio show in Los Angeles
— in the “Who’s Who of the Underground” chapter of Ruth Bronsteen’s Hippy’s Handbook, a cash-in paperback that was itself evidence (on the one hand) of the speed with which the counterculture would be commodified, and (on the other) of the surprisingly wide range of things that could be considered the hippy underground in early 1967. Radio Free Oz played music, but it contained many other things as well — poetry, audience phone-ins, astrology readings, and put-ons improvised with his engineer Phil Austin, as well as and KPFK mainstay David Ossman. Such heterogeneity was evident in the cheesy paperback, too; its sixty other entries included Ali Akbar Khan, Kenneth Anger, Joan Baez, The Doors, the Fugs, Richard Fariña, Barbara Garson, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, the MC5, Jonas Mekas, John Sinclair, Sun Ra, and Frank Zappa.
Bergman had attended the Human Be-In in San Francisco on January 14, and returned to the airwaves in LA openly musing about a mass gathering in LA — the Love-In, which took place on Easter Sunday in Elysian Park.1
The Human Be-In had drawn more than 20,000 people to Golden Gate Park, and appears to have resembled later rock festivals like Monterey: the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Blue Cheer, and Quicksilver Messenger Service all performed on an impressive stage with sound produced by the Family Dog. With the exception of Blue Cheer, all of those bands would play at Monterey too.
But though overtly inspired by the SF event, the Love-In was a different kind of gathering. None of the leading LA bands — the Byrds, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, Buffalo Springfield, Love, the Monkees, the Doors — performed at the Love-In, despite the fact that the Byrds’ manager Jim Dickson helped to organize it, and despite (or maybe in part because) LA remained for now the creative center of international pop music, as well as its institutional center. The Elysian Park Love-In bands performed from a much smaller stage that they effectively shared with attendees. They included the Turtles (coming off the success of “Happy Together”), the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, Rainy Daze, and New Generation. None of those bands would play at Monterey.
The difference between the two mass gatherings could be also seen by its coverage in the underground Los Angeles Free Press, which included the following “Love-In Inventory” as its cover story
One tepee inhabited by Peter Bergman and crowd. One large papier-mache ankh […] Very Medieval in content with the banners, pennants, different encampments. Clothes mostly in Renaissance Faire style with some embellishments. Hardly any commercial selling — a few left-wing papers and thoughts of Mao Tse Tung (little red books, 75c.).2
and is evident in the documentary film that best preserves the Love-In’s memory, Les Blank’s God Respects Us When We Work, but Loves Us When We Dance:
Whereas Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop would numerous cameras and multitracked synchronous sound to document the festival’s dozens of performances (judiciously interspersing these with crowd shots or hippies smoking in sleeping bags), God Respects Us When We Work is an experimental film that is far more interested in the activities and interactions of the attendees than in the musical performances.3 That ethos extends also to Blank’s acknowledgment of the Love-In’s instigator, Peter Bergman, who passes through the film at its exact midway point, a cameo lasting only a few seconds.
Within two weeks of the Love-In, Bergman was approached by the Columbia producer Gary Usher about the possibility of recording either a Radio Free Oz or Love-In novelty album. In all likelihood, this record would have resembled The Astrology Album, one of Usher’s recent projects for Columbia, an album in twelve parts, narrated in part by Phil Austin, that featured hokey far-out interviews with LA musicians Usher had produced in the last year (David Crosby, Chad and Jeremy, Peanut Butter Conspiracy).
Bergman made a counterproposal. Instead of a cash-in novelty record, how about taking a flier on a new project called the Firesign Theatre? The fact that Usher — then Columbia’s only West Coast staff producer — consented says much both about the largesse of the major labels, and about the fluidity of the recording industry in the spring of 1967. Bergman, Austin, Proctor, and Ossman spent the next several months with Usher, recording the first Firesign Theatre album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, which would be released in January 1968. Though it would be inconceivable outside of the record industry’s turn toward the album and to youth culture, it is also born of the improvised participatory culture of the first Love-In.
I’ll have more to say about Gary Usher, and about the ominously-mentioned Renaissance Faire, in future posts. But it’s worth pursuing one further utopian strand from the Love-In concept. By the end of 1967, the meaning of “Love-In” would be close to what it is today: a hokey signifier of the counterculture, and an index of how easily it would become commodified.
But before this transpired, a few short days after the Elysian Park Love-In, a twenty-six year-old poet named John Sinclair — representing an organization variously titled the Detroit Artist’s Workshop or Trans-Love Energies Unlimited — obtained a license for a Love-In on Detroit’s Belle Isle.
Held on April 30, the Belle Isle Love-In would resemble its Elysian Park namesake much more than it would the Human Be-In or Monterey Pop Festival. Unlike any of those events, however, the Detroit Love-In concluded with “the arrest of a motorcyclist [which] encouraged taunting and rock throwing [and led to] a full-scale riot, with numerous arrests, ostensibly for ‘damaging police vehicles.’”4 This outcome, followed by five day-long Detroit Uprising in July, compelled Sinclair toward confrontational political activism, as expressed in his later founding of the Ann Arbor Sun, his stewardship of the MC5, and, in November 1968, the formation of the White Panther Party. This is a less explored trajectory for the Love-In, one in which the improvisatory practices in LA would find other forms of ecstatic fervor. I exchanged genial emails with Sinclair as I was finishing my book, just before his death in April 2024. The Firesign Theatre had an unusually avid following in Detroit and Ann Arbor.
Both concepts appropriated the language of mid sixties political actions opposing segregation [sit-ins] and the Vietnam War [teach-ins].
John Wilcock, “A Love-In Inventory,” Los Angeles Free Press (31 March 1967): 1.
The full movie can be streamed on the Criterion channel.
Jeff A. Hale, “The White Panthers’ ‘Total Assault on the Culture,’” Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002) 134.
I missed this post earlier and was really happy to see mention of John Sinclair and the MC5 at the end of it. Taking on the name "Trans-Love Energies Unlimited" may have been an application of the line "Fly Trans Love Airways, get you there on time," from the song "Fat Angel" (1966) by Donovan, also rendered (more?) psychedelically by Jefferson Airplane on the album "Bless its Pointed Little Head" (1969). The link to the airways is apparent in this description of the Trans-Love enterprise as "recorded" by Sinclair in the Sun and sounding a bit like a free-form FM broadcast: https://aadl.org/node/192488 Sinclair's closing poem (after reference to Coltrane's "Welcome") echoes Molly Bloom and, therefore also, the conclusion of side one of How Can You be in Two Places at Once....
I'd be interested to know how much events like this influenced those in London like the '14 Hour Technicolor Dream'