That’s what Timothy Leary exhorts the crowd at the Human Be-In, a protest of sorts over a new law signed in October 1966 by Gov. Pat Brown making LSD illegal. Encourages Leary:
“Drop out of high school. Drop out of college. Drop out of graduate school. Drop out of junior executive. Drop out of senior executive.”
Billed in the underground newspaper San Francisco Oracle as a “Gathering of the Tribes,” the Human Be-In is both a pun and a playful riff on the sit-ins occurring on campuses around the country to protest the Vietnam war and discrimination. The event draws between 20,000 and 30,000 questioners of authority to Golden Gate Park’s Polo Field. Many engage in civil disobedience of the new law. Media coverage of the Be-In offers mainstream America its first sustained look at the counterculture and establishes Haight-Ashbury as unofficial Freak World Headquarters. The coverage also contributes to the flood of students-on-break that fuel the same year’s Summer of Love. As Leary says in a later interview, the Be-In also offers the counterculture its first chance to see how big it is.
San Francisco bands Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and The Grateful Dead perform. Beat Poet Allen Ginsburg sits cross-legged on stage in flowing white robe chanting mantras while clinking finger cymbals. Also among the attendees are poet Gary Snyder, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Richard Alpert, who becomes Ram Dass and writes the influential Be Here Now in 1971. The Hells Angels provide more benign security than they do two years later at Altamont.