Allen Ginsberg (left),  Maretta Greer (center) and Gary Snyder (right) read poetry and chant a mantra to peace at the Human Be-In.

Timothy Leary advocated turning on, tuning in and dropping out. He had come a long way from his days as a professor at UC Berkeley and as a lecturer at Harvard.

The crowd was estimated to be between 15,000 and 30,000. It was the biggest gathering of long-hairs and rabble-rousers at the time.

Lenore Kandel read her erotic love poems from "The Love Book" to the crowd's delight.

Charlie Brown was considered by many to be a wandering folk singer and mystic. Here he smokes a ritual peace pipe.

Allen Ginsberg holds a child on the stage of the Human Be-In

A bomb casing became a maypole. It was the Human Be-In approach to turning swords into ploughshares.

Jerry was inspired by the crowd, and the crowd was inspired by him. The ethos of the time: no barriers between audience and artist.

Pig Pen (aka Ron McKenna) in a plaintiff mood.

Jorma didn't need sunglasses. It was a somewhat overcast day.

Human Be-In

In January 1967, the Human Be-In was for some of us an early jump on San Francisco's Summer of Love. The mix of poetry, pot, music and antiwar speeches felt natural. Dancing around a bomb casing -- a cultural rejection of LBJ's war on Vietnam -- was the easy part. The political rejection proved to be more difficult and more dangerous. The Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane delivered free music to the lucky 15,000 souls who attended. Learn more from the 50th anniversary website of the California Historical Society. Read my comments.