Mural, Bolinas, California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Paul McCartney heard rumors of the wild goings-on in the Haight and visited on April 4, 1967. At the Fillmore Auditorium, he listened to a rehearsal by the Jefferson Airplane. At Marty Balin’s and Jack Casady’s apartment and along with his girlfriend at the time, Jane Asher, he played an acetate (a type of phonograph) of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s” album, which would be released later that year. Thousands of others flocked to the Haight, once a largely Black neighborhood, for the music, the drugs, and the revolution that was promoted by the Diggers, who named themselves after 17th century English dissidents. Gerard Winstanley and his Digger comrades aimed to turn the world upside down would probably have felt at home in the Haight in 1967 when the great American counterculture was “busy being born” to borrow the words from Bob Dylan’s ballad “It’s All Right, Ma (I’m only bleeding).”

How counter was the counterculture? And if you were alive then and there how counter was your own personal culture? Not sure? You might be able to decide on your own when the Counterculture Museum opens this spring on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in the neighborhood where hippies and their friends reigned supreme for about two years in the late 1960s.

Then disaster struck. Bad drugs. Bad health. Bad cops. Paradise rarely lasts long, not for Diggers or hippies. But the melodies from that time and place have played on and on. Dozens of books have been written about that era including Charles Perry’s brilliant The Haight Ashbury that comes with an introduction by Grateful Dead member Bob Weir who says, “We weren’t all stoned all the time. But we were all artists, musicians, and freaks all the time.”

The Haight staged a comeback in the 1990s, largely because of the efforts of gay men. Today it is a vital San Francisco neighborhood with Amoeba, a gigantic record store, Gus’s, an excellent grocery, two cannabis dispensaries, a post office, a few decent cafes and restaurants, and dozens of shops and boutiques selling tie-dyed T-shirts, hoodies and sneakers. It also attracts a great many tourists who want to imbibe the magic of the hippie era, buy rolling papers, roaches, posters and R. Crumb Comic books.

Estelle and Jerry Cimino, a husband and wife team and the founders of the Counterculture Museum—they are also the founders of the Beat Museum in North Beach —plan to give as much if not more space to the anti-war and civil rights movements as they do to the “youth culture” of the Sixties that created communes, staged rock festivals, made marijuana a commodity, and went on overland journeys to India to seek gurus in ashrams.

That decision to blend the movement and the counterculture might surprise and even shock veterans and historians of the Sixties. After all, they were two separate entities from about 1967 to 1972. In those heady days, Yippies tangled with members of SDS, Abbie Hoffman battled Tom Hayden of the Red Family and Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, who once called Abbie “a thorn in her side.” Abbie called her “Bernie” much to her distress. At the time, the rivalries and clashes seemed as significant as the divisions in 1917 and 1918 between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks or those........

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