from the LP After Bathing at Baxters, RCA Records, 1967“Find a way to need someone, and the sunshine will set you free…” A mighty supplication for all ages & times, Paul Kantner’s musical commemoration to San Francisco’s first Human Be-In festival plays out like an epitaph to fresh ideals long-since abandoned; the Be-In was long before Woodstock, before Monterrey even, so I can scarcely imagine the impact of all those hippies realizing they weren’t alone, thus forming a de-facto tribe of freaks and freethinkers, over 20,000 strong. Our world needs this song’s philosophy more than ever before, and I don’t just mean the “…acid, incense & balloons…” of which they speak---I’m talking about the long-lost concept of ‘power to the people’. All the different groups who banded together back then have become so splintered and unwilling to ask for help from one another that the very notion of this song now feels untenable to most; in the meantime, “…when your head is feeling fine, you can ride inside our car; I will give you caps of blue and silver sunlight for your hair…”
