The Summer of Love, 1967

We’re going way back to 1967.

On the 25th of June that year, the Beatles sang “All You Need Is Love” live on the first global satellite broadcast, to something like four hundred million people at once. It was that kind of summer. In a few months the Youngbloods asked everybody to get together and love one another right now, Buffalo Springfield stopped to look at what was going down, Jefferson Airplane wanted somebody to love, and the Mamas and the Papas went dreamin’ of California on a winter’s day. Sixty years later we are all still singing it.

That’s the pitch, really. You don’t have to be taught this music. Some of you were there. Some of you got it from a parent’s record collection, or a movie, or a car radio on a long drive, and you know every word without ever deciding to learn them. So we print the lyrics in the program and we expect to hear you.

Our kids take “The 59th Street Bridge Song,” because slowing down and feelin’ groovy is genuinely good advice. The teens get “I’m a Believer.” Our upper voices take “For What It’s Worth” and our lower voices “She’s a Rainbow.” Along the way there’s Janis Joplin, “Paint It, Black,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing,” the Turtles, and the Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band.” We finish where every good afternoon finishes, dancing in the street.

Bring the grandparents who remember it and the kids who don’t yet know they know it.