Sarah Hill on 'A Taste of Summer', BBC Radio 2, Tuesday 9 October 2007, 22.30-23.30
October 2007
Dr Sarah Hill has been central to the preparation and making of a new documentary - 'A Taste of Summer' - being broadcast by BBC Radio 2 on Tuesday 9 October, 22.30-23.30. With funding from the AHRC, she made a research trip to San Francisco in 2005 and recorded over 30 hours of interviews with surviving members of the 1960s Haight community. This first trip was carried out as a pilot study for a larger book project, a cultural history of pop music in San Francisco, 1965-69. Further interviews were carried out in 2007.
Sarah Hill not only transcribed the interviews for the Radio 2 programme but also selected the music, choosing only albums or works recorded or composed in 1967, and only by bands active in the San Francisco 'scene'. She also contributed on air by reading three excerpts from the The City of San Francisco Oracle.
As the Radio 2 website puts it:
'A Taste of Summer marks the anniversary of an extraordinary musical and social flowering, when hundreds of thousands of hippies descended on San Francisco to protest against war and expand their minds.
1967 was the 'Summer of Love', when beatnik folk gave way to hippie rock and Hendrix set his Stratocaster ablaze.
This programme chronicles a community who danced to the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, believing they would still be dancing when the sun rose on a New Age.
Some of them are dancing still.'
Postscript: an excerpt from the programme was subsequently featured on Radio 4's Pick of the Week.