The Free Spirit

The City of Peace, 1966 (Part Three)

"Gentle people with flowers in their hair..."

October became November, and another Thanksgiving was spent in London with both my family and Don's parents. Jackie and Phil remained in New York to spend the holiday with Jackie's parents, and Margaret said that Phil and Jackie didn't want to 'constantly drag their baby halfway across the world', to which Don and I exchanged a look of annoyance. Once Thanksgiving passed, it became December, and I was due to tour the western coast of America for three weeks with the Noble Steeds. I kissed my husband and children goodbye until Christmas, which would be spent at home in California, as I would already be in the area, before we head back to London very shortly after the New Year. I had to miss Elton's eighth birthday, but I called him from Las Vegas wishing my sweet little boy a happy birthday. It was maddening to think that my son was already eight years old, but then again, I would be twenty-nine on New Years' Eve.

The Noble Steeds toured only with their three members, and Peter stayed behind with Wilson. Ginger, Murphy and Elton did their protest songs, many of which were written by Ginger and Elton together, and some of which were written by me. I covered some of the songs that I had written for them, as well as singing some of my old hits, and singing some of my new ones. We started out in Los Angeles from the first to the fourth of December, then got the fifth and sixth to ourselves. On the seventh, we travelled to Las Vegas and performed from the eighth (which was my son's birthday - yes, Don and I teased him for turning eight on the eighth) to the eleventh. We then travelled up to San Diego, where we performed from the thirteenth to the sixteenth, and then finally, San Francisco from the nineteenth to the twenty-third.

On the sixth of October, 1966, LSD became illegal to use throughout the United States, perhaps for good reason, but the youth still got their hands on it. The Love Pageant Rally took place the same day, which emphasised 'celebrating transcendental consciousness', or the beauty of being and the beauty of the universe, according to its organiser, Allen Cohen. Hippies were all over San Francisco, and they invited us mod-sixties English foreigners into their tribes and embraced us, inviting us to join their culture. We took LSD, of course, and upon my first experience with LSD, I knew it was the drug that had united Don and I eight years before. Colours swirled around me and sounds seemed muffled, but I was at peace with the world. It was hard not to see the beauty of the universe when it was so colourful and full of activity.

We learned to love from them, and we learned to live. No longer did I don Peter Pan-collared dresses or stockings. Ginger wore bell-bottomed trousers and I found myself drawn to knee-length bohemian dresses, which were both comfortable and beautiful. The hippies tried on my glasses, adoring the style of the circle-rimmed glasses and adopting the style for themselves. I loved everything about San Francisco so much that I wrote a song about the beautiful city that I would come to record in early 1967. That song would become the anthem of the Summer of Love, which was the summer of 1967.

We attended a group orgy as well, of which Ginger and Elton were more interested in than either Murphy or I were. Both Murphy and I were happily married with families waiting for us back home, so we stuck with cannabis and sat on the sidelines. Let me clarify that Ginger and Elton weren't involved with each other in any way, and Ginger made sure of that - as a matter of fact, she was exploring sexual intimacy with a group of women. "I'd always had thoughts that I might be attracted to women, too. I do believe that the celebrations confirmed this," she'd said. We became hippies there in San Francisco, and we preached peace and love at rallies that we were invited to. I was asked to speak on the war, as I was already known among the people as having an antiwar stance, and young boys in the tribe had already been drafted.

"War is not the answer to the growing communist problem in the Far East," I said at a rally on the twenty-first of December. I had notecards with a speech that I had written on them and had read the first sentence, but gave it up entirely, trusting my own experiences more. "Trust me when I say that I know war. I was brought up in a war - raised in a war, and all I have left of my early childhood are memories of loss, of starvation, of destruction, and more. Not many will know this, but despite how I may sound and look English, I am only English by circumstance. I was born into a Romani caravan in Romania - many of you may know my people as gypsies - and at the young age of two and a half, I was imprisoned in a concentration camp in Poland. I had numbers tattooed on my arm, numbers similar to those that are called for the draft. Is that all our boys are to the government? Forget their stories or their pasts, forget what they wanted to be when they left school, forget the families they dreamed of having... forget their names. Like I was to the Nazi regime, these boys are nothing but numbers to the American government. So, my children, teach them to make love, not war. Show those men - those old white men who are sitting safely inside their capitol building and have a comfortable home to go to - that fighting a fire with more fire will only cause the flames to grow."