Haight, the birthplace of flower power, the hippie movement, peace and love, tie-dye and bell bottoms… At the legendary corner of Haight and Ashbury, a Ben & Jerry’s store… Peace and love and gentrification.
Nevertheless, a few brave hippies remain. How these guys survived the eighties, I will never know. Music stores, thrift shops, upper-scale skating shops, bookstores, tattoo parlors, pizza places, “Tibetan artifacts” shops, … Most of what’s left of the hippie times are beautiful murals, the pungent smell of weed, rude homeless people yelling at tourists who seem too engrossed in their phones and a dedicated hill full of bongo-playing dumbasses in Golden Gate Park.
Nonetheless, it’s a pretty sweet place to hang out at for an afternoon, if you’re not deadass invested in the hippie movement and don’t really care about witnessing its complete recuperation by corporate America and pathetic few attempts at persisting. Oh yeah, for a sympathetic approach to hippy-ism, please contact 18-yo me, that chick was a hardass flower power believer. I am not.
There are a few curiosities to check out: in the same street, the former houses of the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, queen of the lost girls. A house Jimi Hendrix stayed at once in the middle of his Purple Haze phase, which is now a very ugly smoke shop. I buy a book on anarchism from a disapproving clerk at the Bound Together Anarchist Book Collective.
Just as I was leaving, a tune catches my ear. In front of the music shop, a dude with a guitar is singing. In French.
Ghost of Mandooks’ past, are you there? I gave him serious thumbs up and a fiver before I hopped on the N Line back toward Downtown.
SONG CREDITS: Pas Pareil – Tryo