Scott McKenzie – San Francisco – Monterey 1967 (live)

John Phillips wrote it in one night to keep the peace at a festival, and it sent a generation streaming toward a city that couldn’t hold them all.

Scott McKenzie watched thousands of young people take his record literally, pack up, and head for San Francisco with flowers in their hair, and it unsettled him. He called it frightening — a collective, restless hunt for something none of them could name. He had sung a song asking them to come, and they had come, by the thousands, into a city with nowhere near enough room. For a man who had spent his career shying from exactly this kind of attention, being the voice that summoned the Summer of Love was a strange and heavy thing to carry.

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“San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” was written by John Phillips, the leader of the Mamas and the Papas and McKenzie’s friend since their teens. The two had sung together in the Journeymen years earlier, and when Phillips built the Mamas and the Papas he asked McKenzie to join. McKenzie said no — he wanted to see whether he could make it alone, and doubted he could handle the pressure of a group. So when Phillips needed a voice for a specific job in the spring of 1967, he called the friend who had turned him down. The job was partly diplomatic: Phillips and producer Lou Adler were organizing the Monterey International Pop Festival, and city authorities were nervous about a flood of young people descending on Northern California. A gentle, welcoming song might set the right tone.

They cut it in April 1967 in Los Angeles, the first record released on Adler’s new Ode label. Phillips played guitar and brought in the Wrecking Crew, the city’s top session players — Joe Osborn on bass, Hal Blaine on drums, Larry Knechtel on keyboards. The arrangement was soft, unhurried, built entirely around McKenzie’s warm, floating tenor. Released on May 13, 1967, it climbed to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, held off the top only by the Association’s “Windy,” and went all the way to No. 1 in Britain for four weeks and across much of Europe. It eventually sold more than seven million copies worldwide.

A promotional single that outgrew its purpose

The song was designed as a tool and became a defining record of its moment. Phillips had written it to smooth the way for a festival; instead it turned into the sound of an entire migration, drawing young people toward Haight-Ashbury in what became one of the largest internal movements of people the country had seen. It was played on pirate radio in Britain, later became a rallying song during the 1968 Prague Spring, and turned up decades on in films looking to summon 1967 in a single melody. McKenzie, meanwhile, never had another hit near its size. He charted once more with Phillips’s “Like an Old Time Movie,” then largely stepped back from a spotlight he had never fully wanted.

Monterey, and Cass Elliot’s introduction

The performance on this page comes from the festival the song was written to serve. On June 18, 1967, the closing day of the Monterey International Pop Festival, the Mamas and the Papas took the stage as the final act. During their set, Cass Elliot introduced a special guest, telling the crowd he had one of the most beautiful voices around. Dressed simply, McKenzie stepped out with John Phillips accompanying him on guitar and sang “San Francisco” — by several accounts his first time performing it live — before the group closed the festival with “Dancing in the Street.” D.A. Pennebaker’s cameras were rolling, capturing it for the film Monterey Pop, which helped fix that weekend as the moment the counterculture stepped fully into view. McKenzie died in 2012, but the footage keeps him exactly where the song placed him: at the center of a summer he sang into being and never quite made peace with.