Dead & Company fans missed out on some extra party favors this weekend after San Francisco police say they caught a Philadelphia man with about 100 nitrous oxide tanks and balloons near Golden Gate Park Saturday night.

They don't call it hippy crack for nothing!

As KRON4 reports, around 11 p.m., officers patrolling near Fulton Street and 35th Avenue — close to Spreckels Lake on the park’s northern side — spotted an open trailer with a man inside. As they approached, officers say they noticed numerous metal tanks suspected to be filled with nitrous oxide.

The man, identified as 32-year-old Thomas Siderio of Philadelphia, was arrested on the spot. As KPIX reports, police seized roughly 100 tanks along with several balloons and towed the trailer as evidence.

Siderio was booked into San Francisco County Jail on suspicion of distributing nitrous oxide and possessing it with intent to ingest for intoxication. The case remains under investigation.

As KTVU reports, the San Francisco Police Department said officers would continue patrolling all areas of Golden Gate Park and surrounding neighborhoods to keep the ongoing 60th anniversary concert series safe for everyone.

Image: Corinne Poleij/Getty Images

A confluence of factors, including heightened fears and risks of wildfires in a national forest that has seen several devastating ones in recent years, led to an outsized response from local and federal authorities to the arrival of the Rainbow Family campout this year.

The hippies just want to be left alone in peace, man. But that is not how it was in Plumas National Forest, and in the communities of Janesville and Beckwourth, where separate responses by law enforcement and by the US Forest Service, as well as loud hostility from local residents in late June and early July led to a much smaller-than-usual gathering of around 1,800 Rainbows.

A hand-painted sign at the encampment proclaims, like they do at the Burning Man gates, "Welcome Home." But welcome they were not this year, when the annual hippie campout, which can swell to upwards of 10,000 people and was even larger in earlier times, arrived first to an area near Antelope Lake, outside of Janesville.

As was first reported in mid-June, the Rainbows, who often give little or no warning of their arrival, made their plans known to come to this part of Plumas National Forest. The gathering was met with pushback from local tribes as well as the local sheriff, with warnings going out to residents about criminal activity which can sometimes accompany the campouts.

These are mostly peaceful gatherings with roots going back to the original hippie movement, and the July 4th timing of the campout dates back to 1972 and the Antiwar Movement, marking a kind of protest for peace amid the height of the Vietnam War.

Over the years, the gathering has moved around to different national forests in different states, but without any central organizing body, the Rainbow Family likes to operate as if this is just a spontaneous affair and not an "event," and they never seek permits.

This has at times cost money to local communities for cleanup, though a spokesperson for the Forest Service has said that a contingent of Rainbows typically stick around to assist with the cleanup themselves.

Still, gatherings of thousands of people tend to have an impact on the environment, and these campouts usually involve kitchen setups with wood-burning and propane stoves, as well as "shitters" that are dug into the earth and shared by the group.

A threat of fines from the Forst Service and an official closing of the area where the initial 500 campers were setting up in late June led the group to relocate to an area near Beckwourth in Plumas County. The move happened amid a Red Flag Warning in the county from the National Weather Service, which would have made any outdoor fires illegal.

As the Chronicle reports, the new location, in an area that recently burned in a wildfire — the 105,000-acre Beckwourth Complex fires in 2021 — was thought to be less fire-prone.

The first location was also met with a planned car blockade by local residents, who eventually stood down. And at both locations, there was a heavy presence of law enforcement that left a bad taste for many Rainbows — and kept many from showing up at all, as the Chronicle reports.

"Honestly, I’ve never seen so many law enforcement officers in a single location in my entire life," said Bay Area resident Chris Bair who was returning for his first campout since 2007, speaking to the Chronicle. He drove up from Lafayette, got pulled over near the campsite for driving 21 miles per hour in a 15-mph zone, and tells the paper, "When I left, I was the most paranoid I’ve ever been, and I’ve got nothing to be paranoid about."

Another camper from Oregon, Fern Rose, who attended the gathering with her husband and children, tells the Chronicle, "We represent something that doesn’t align with most people. It’s not OK to be racist. It’s not OK to hate brown, Black and yellow people. But it’s OK to hate hippies?"

The pushback and law enforcement attention this year in California is not unique for recent years, and not unique to California. But this was the first time that the group was officially ordered out of a national forest area.

As one regular participant who's been attending Rainbow Family gatherings since he was a child, 36-year-old Adam Buxbaum, told the LA Times last month, such negative attention is having an impact on what really is meant to be just an innocent, peaceful occasion. "A lot of people have quit coming to the gatherings permanently because they’re tired of being searched and harassed every single year," Buxbaum said.

Previously: Rainbow Family Gathering Ordered Out of National Forest For First Time, Threatened With Fines

Top image: Hippies forming a Supper Circle at a 2004 Rainbow Family gathering. Supper Circles like this one are formed to pray and give thanks before eating meals. Photo by Tristan Savatier/Getty Images

It's not all peace, love, and mushroom tea in the Plumas National Forest, with around 500 members of the Rainbow Family gathering five miles north of Antelope Lake, and federal authorities are trying to kick them out.

As we reported last week, the annual Rainbow Family campout is headed for an area in Plumas National Forest, and as many as 10,000 campers were expected to descend on the remote area by July 4th. The unorganized band of hippies, who have kept the campout tradition going for over 50 years, typically don't inform localities that they're coming until maybe just days before, and they choose a different national forest to camp in each year.

The sheriff in Plumas County was none too pleased about the impending invasion, and a lot of warnings went out to locals about traffic and potential crime. And the traffic in the area was only going to be exacerbated at a time when thousands of people were also headed to nearby Quincy for the High Sierra Music Festival.

But now, as local station KOLO reports, officials overseeing Plumas National Forest have issued a closure order for the area where the campout is taking place. And this appears to be the first time that national forest officials have taken this step with the Rainbows.

"The Forest is concerned about the 500 plus individuals already dispersed camping in a concentrated area," said Plumas National Forest Supervisor Chris Carlton in a statement. "We are always willing to work with any organization or group interested recreating on the national forest. There are existing and projected impacts on natural and cultural resources and other authorized uses. Our priority is maintaining public health and safety and the appropriate stewardship of public lands and natural resources."

The order came amid a Red Flag Warning that was issued Wednesday for Plumas National Forest due to high winds and increased wildfire risk.

According to the order, campers were given 48 hours to vacate the area, and anyone arriving or refusing to leave could face fines of up to $5,000 and up to six months of jail time. Only residents and those with special-use authorization permits will be allowed in the area.

Hilary Markin, a spokesperson for the National Forest Service, tells the Chronicle, "We have the order in place — we are planning to enforce that order."

Lassen County Supervisor Jason Ingram gave a statement as well, saying, "As I’ve said from the beginning, my concerns with this gathering were always the illegality aspect, the increased fire risk this would have created, the environmental impact, and the blatant disrespect shown to our local tribes. Events are fine, but not events that blatantly disregard the law and endanger our land and community fire safety."

Ingram added, speaking to constituents and law enforcement, "I believe this is the first Rainbow gathering event to be shut down, and you all had a hand in that."

As reported last week, four tribes in the region, the Mountain Maidu, Paiute, Pit River, and Washoe, all wrote to the Rainbow Family — hand-delivering a letter to some representative anyway — urging them to choose a different location for their gathering.

Since 1972, the loose-knit The Rainbow Family of Living Light has been coming together for the Fourth of July on National Forest Land. They had their 50th anniversary gathering two years ago where the first one had taken place, in the Arapaho National Forest in Colorado. Markin, the national forest spokesperson, at that time spoke to the Denver Post and said that the group tended to be respectful, and many stay behind after the camp disperses to aid in the cleanup effort.

Previously: The Rainbow Family Gathering Is Happening In a Northern California Forest and Locals Are Freaking Out

Photo courtesy of Plumas County

An area north of Antelope Lake in Plumas National Forest is going to play host to around 10,000 unwashed hippies next month, and area residents and the local sheriff are sounding alarm bells and wondering what kind of mess they'll be cleaning up.

The Rainbow Family gathering is an annual event that moves around to different national forest sites each year. And because it has no central organizing body or leadership, the group never calls itself an organized event — and therefore doesn't seek permits or get porta-potties for the 5,000 to 10,000 people who typically show up.

It's basically an enormous campout that happens around the Fourth of July, with a fair amount of pot smoked and drum circles formed. But the group has sometimes had a reputation for leaving behind a fair amount of trash.

For this reason, and because there will likely be a lot of traffic on roads that aren't built for it, the Plumas County Sheriff's Office put out a press release warning residents of the coming invasion — which is going to overlap with the High Sierra Music Festival happening in Quincy, about 45 miles away from the campout.

"The Rainbow Family Gathering, known for attracting large crowds, has historically refused to complete the required permits for their event. We anticipate the arrival of 5,000-10,000 attendees by July 4th," the sheriff's office says in its release. "This influx will create substantial challenges, including environmental impact, and public safety issues."

The sheriff is warning residents about "illegal or socially unacceptable behavior," which it lists as including drug and alcohol abuse, confrontations with locals, and public nudity.

"Attendees are known to set up extensive infrastructure, including welcome tents, camping areas, outdoor kitchens, and health care zones," the sheriff's office says. "There have been significant challenges during previous gatherings, including increased criminal activity, environmental damage, and abandoned vehicles."

The sheriff further warned residents to plan for excessive traffic on rural roads, and to "Ensure your cars and homes are locked at all times to prevent theft and unauthorized access."

This panic may all be overblown, however the human waste issue probably can't be overstated. The camps typically dig their own latrine trenches, referred to as "shitters," which are treated each day with lime and campfire ash (per Wikipedia), with new ones dug each day. However depending on the size of the camp, this seems like it could get pretty nasty — and there was a reported outbreak of dysentery at one 1987 gathering.

Speaking to the LA Times, Adam Buxbaum, 36, who has been a lifelong Rainbow Family attendee since he was a baby, pushes back on the idea that anyone should be worried about their arrival, or that public nudity should be talked about as some "malicious" thing.

"We believe in letting people express themselves as long as they’re not harming their neighbors," he tells the LAT. "The Rainbow Gathering is the legacy of the original hippies."

Buxbaum further explains, "It's a community. We go there on paper — and it’s the truth — to pray for peace on the Fourth of July. That’s primary, but secondarily, we go there to spend time with all of our dearest friends and family once a year."

The very first Rainbow Family gathering happened in the Arapaho National Forest in Colorado in 1972, and some years' gatherings have drawn 30,000 people.

The lack of organization and the hippie nature of the gatherings has both attracted unsavory characters over the years, and led to unintended costs for local communities and the Forest Service. Montana newspaper The Missoulian reported in 2013 that the Rainbow Family gathering that year cost the Forest Service $573,000.

"It’s similar to Burning Man, but these guys here are just a little dirtier," says Robert Joseph, vice chairman of the Susanville Indian Rancheria, speaking to the SF Chronicle. "They kind of leave a trail [of trash] when they come to these places."

Representing four tribes who live in the region — the Mountain Maidu, Paiute, Pit River and Washoe — Joseph tells the Chronicle he hand-delivered a letter to the Rainbow Family asking them to reconsider their location choice this year, but it appears to have been ignored.

Some years, the location selection isn't told to the Forest Service until a few days before the gathering occurs.

The Plumas County Sheriff's Office, local police departments, and National Park Police say they plan to have a significant presence in the area in order to minimize negative impacts. But Buxbaum tells the LA Times that the gatherings are dwindling in part because participants are getting tired of all the cops.

"A lot of people have quit coming to the gatherings permanently because they’re tired of being searched and harassed every single year," he says.

As for the cleanup costs, it's not necessarily true that the group just moves in and then leaves without any care for the environment. Following the gathering, it is traditional that some of the Rainbow attendees stay behind to aid in the cleanup effort.

Hilary Markin, a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service, told the Denver Post after the 2022 gathering in Colorado, "Some rainbows stay on site after the gathering is over to work with our team to clean up. In our experience, yes, many rainbows stay after to help us clean up, and we expect it to be no different this year.”

Top image: Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Sygma via Getty Images

We won't get to see the total solar eclipse here in the Bay Area, but it will be visible through a swath of northern Oregon, and at least one local man wants to use this event to its fullest cosmic advantage: He wants to have sex with a woman and conceive a child at the moment of the eclipse. In Oregon.

In a post to Craigslist (obviously), the 40-year-old Martinez man insists, with no awareness of how racist it sounds, that he's a "caucasian male from Europe" and his "heritage is strong and pure." Also, "My looks, instincts, knowledge and strength is 100% pure and 100% lethal."

Lethal, huh? Anyway, he's looking for a "worthy female with strong genes, beauty and smarts" to join him in experiencing "the totality" with "simultaneous orgasms." Also, he has a grand idea, perhaps one that came to him while not exactly sober that "we will conceive a child that will be on the next level of human evolution."

And it gets grosser! "We will make love together, with me and my penis directed towards the sun. Everything will be aligned in the local universe. Both of our cosmic orgasmic energy will be aligned with the planets. In a brief moment of ecstasy, we will understand everything, and together, create a new universe. Full of love..."

But here's the funniest part: "You must like cats. Drugs are OK. Nitrous Oxide while we climax and experience totality and conception, is OK with me."

So I guess the cat will be along for the ride in whatever disgusting RV this guy has for making this trip?

As The Oregonian points out, after chuckling about this ad, conception doesn't happen right at the moment of orgasm, and can actually take anywhere from a few hours to five days after sex to occur. So it's a nice dream, but not exactly one that's scientifically possible, this eclipse baby.

Now you can go back to calming down your astrologically inclined friends who think the eclipse is going to cause a nuclear war or whatever.

Everything all summer long in SF continues to officially be "hippie" themed because it's the 50th anniversary of the famed Summer of Love — and if you haven't been already you should be wearing flowers in your hair and remembering it fondly.

PBS's American Experience: Summer of Love offers a look not only at the gorgeous and stoned hippies basking in the Golden Gate Park sun, but also of the uptight bespeckled squares who've paid for a tour to gawk at them, and the angry middle class San Franciscans who were getting squeezed off of sidewalks and busses.

The Summer of Love, while a defining moment for our city, was also kind of a nightmare just because of the sheer influx of humanity. As one talking head in the doc puts it, "It got ugly. And the original people who came there for peace and love left."

And as one San Francisco marm describes the hippies, "I don't like their morals... I don't like to look at them. I don't like the sound of their voices or the filthy words they use."

But some people arrived in San Francisco not to participate in any be-ins, but just to take in the show. In the cued-up clip above, a 1967 Gray Line bus tour went so far as to offer bemused patrons a hippie slang dictionary and leisurely drive down Haight Street before swinging them back to earth with a visit to the Japanese Tea Garden.

PBS will re-air The Summer of Love on Tuesday, July 25 at 8 p.m., but the full documentary (which first aired a decade ago, in 2007) can be seen below via YouTube.

Fun fact: My uncle was a tunic-clad Summer of Love hippie and claims his friends used to hold giant mirrors up as the tour busses passed so tourists could see the real freaks — themselves.

h/t: Time

Related: What Was The Summer Of Love?: An Explainer As 50th Anniversary Celebrations Ramp Up

After rejecting numerous proposals from a producer that really, really wanted to throw a free Golden Gate Park concert celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love, the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department will throw a free Golden Gate Park concert celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love.

Ouch!

The Chronicle reports that Rec and Parks plans to hold "The Surrealistic Summer Solstice" on June 21:

The Surrealistic Summer Solstice boasts it will feature members of the Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Chambers Brothers, as well as "over 40 legendary musicians" in a jam that builds to a lighting of the Conservatory of Flowers in mandalas of psychedelic color.

Perhaps sounding defensive, Phil Ginsburg, the director of Rec and Parks clarified, "This is fundamentally a light installation where we are going to have music."

It sounds a bit like Ginsberg is purposefully downplaying the planned musical "four-hour jam" aspect of this LIGHT SHOW for the benefit of bummed-out promoter Boots Hughston. Houghton has spent months and months trying to get the city to approve his permits for a free concert in the park. First Hughston wanted to throw the concert on June 4 at the Polo Fields. Then the city told him to scale it down and do it August 27 at the smaller Sharon Meadow. So Hughston got the ball rolling on that event until the city told him to forget it all together.

Hughston didn't even know about the LIGHT SHOW until the Chronicle contacted him for a quote. Ouch again! Former and constant mayoral candidate Angela Alioto has offered to represent Hughston should he wish to engage in a battle over a summer all about love with the City and County of San Francisco.

"Basically, they are trying to steal our event," said Hughston.

The city's free LIGHT SHOW will take place starting at 6:30 p.m. in front of the Conservatory of Flowers and attendees are asked to register on Eventbrite. The lighting of the Conservatory, which will take place at 9:15 p.m., was designed by Ben Davis of Illuminate — the organization that brought us the Bay Lights.

"Boots is someone who lived the Summer of Love, who breathed it and should be allowed to have his day in the park," said Alioto, the Gloria Allred of San Francisco.

Musicians performing at the LIGHT SHOW include members of Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver, Hot Tuna, and the guy that sings, "Spirit in the Sky."

Related: Rec And Park Commission Denies Appeal For Summer Of Love 50th Anniversary Concert

When people talk about "the 60s" in San Francisco, they're talking about a period from January 1967 to December 1969 — just three short years that would nonetheless forever reshape the population of the city and our image in the eyes of the rest of the world. San Francisco, during that brief period, starting with the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967, became one of the main epicenters of hippiedom, and arguably its spiritual heart, serving as the birthplace of multiple bands that would go on to shape the music of the era, and draw crowds at another defining event of the 60s, Woodstock. As the city prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, i.e. the spring and summer of '67, here's a bit of history, and a quick roundup of anniversary celebrations planned so far.

An anniversary of the Human Be-In was already celebrated back in January where it happened, on the Polo Field of Golden Gate Park, and it was billed at the time as a "gathering of the tribes" which also served as a rally in protest of a new state law banning the use of LSD which had just taken effect. That was the day that psychedelic drug champion Timothy Leary coined the famous phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out," and the play on the term "sit-in" would go on to inspire everything from "love-ins" and "teach-ins" to the sketch comedy TV show Laugh-In, which premiered a year later.

Allen Ginsberg took to the stage to chant mantras, Beat poets Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti all read poems, and Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company all performed for a crowd of 20,000 to 30,000 people, the first such major gathering to define the burgeoning counterculture — something that historians argue began with disaffected students at SF State, UC Berkeley, and City College of San Francisco, all of whom had already been reading Ginsberg and Kerouac and gathering in the Haight-Ashbury (where cheap, run-down housing was abundant) and at music venues like the Fillmore.

As David Talbot says in Season of the Witch, which opens with the Human Be-In, Paul Kantor of Jefferson Airplane may have summed it up best: "The difference between San Francisco and Berkeley was that Berkeley complained about a lot of things. Rather than complaining about things, we San Franciscans formed an alternative reality to live in. And for some reason, we got away with it. San Francisco became somewhere you did things rather than protesting about them."

The Haight became a mecca for runaways and rebellious youth from around the country, in part because of the publicity of the Be-In, and in the spring of 1967 several local groups formed the Council for the Summer of Love to address the influx of young people, organizing housing, food, and helping form the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which was founded that June. Hunter S. Thompson started covering the "Hashbury" neighborhood, as he called it, for the New York Times Magazine, and by the time schools and universities let out for the summer, San Francisco was crawling with unwashed hippie kids with no real plan except to get here.

Also helping the pilgrimage along was the instant hit, released to the radio in May 1967, "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" by Scott McKenzie. The song was actually written by McKenzie's friend John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, declaring "summertime will be a love-in there," and it became nothing short of a siren song for all those tens of thousands of kids, and what became the Summer of Love.

That fall, exhausted by too much publicity and too many newcomers, some locals staged a mock funeral for the Summer of Love in Buena Vista Park, publicized as "The Death of the Hippie," on October 6, 1967.

Anniversary Commemorations and Events

"Hippie Modernism" Exhibit in Berkeley
Potentially the best commemorative exhibit of the era just opened at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive a few weeks ago. Running through May 21, it's billed as a "comprehensive exploration of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and its impact on global art, architecture, and design." This includes a program of short films playing daily.

deYoung Museum Exhibit
Opening April 8 is "Summer of Love: Art, Fashion and Rock & Roll," an exhibit at the deYoung featuring clothing, rock posters, photographs, ephemera, light shows, avant-garde films, and more from the era — a total of 150 items from the museum's permanent collection.

Bus Shelter Posters
Along Market Street you may begin noticing a series of posters that were commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission from 60s-centric Los Angeles artist commemorating the Summer of Love with images taken from photographs taken here that year, including one of a Vietnam War protest, and one of a Hell's Angel at the Human Be-In.

A Night With Janis Joplin
Closing out the season at the American Conservatory Theater, and opening on June 7, will be A Night With Janis Joplin, a jukebox musical of sorts that premiered on Broadway in 2014 and played for four months there. It's billed as a "musical journey celebrating Janis and her biggest musical influences — icons like Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Odetta, Nina Simone, and Bessie Smith." Find tickets for that here.

50th Anniversary Concert
In recent days we've been following the fight to get this concert off the ground, which is planned for June 4 on the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park. Promoter Boots Hughston ran afoul of the Rec and Park folks, and so he's now stepped down, but he and others claim that the thing is still on, even though it's unclear what the lineup is, or if it can still get a permit. Stay tuned.

California Historical Society Exhibit
Opening May 12 is "On the Road to the Summer of Love," an exhibit of photographs and ephemera curated by Grateful Dead historian and author Dennis McNally, on view until September 10th at the Society's headquarters at 678 Mission Street.

LGBT Hippie Exhibit
A small exhibit in the front gallery of the GLBT Historical Society's 18th Street museum opens April 7 and is called "Lavender-Tinted Glasses: A Groovy Gay Look At the Summer of Love."

Jimi Hendrix Exhibit
"Summer of Love: Jimi Hendrix" opens April 26 at the Museum of the African Diaspora at 685 Mission Street, and describes the great guitarist's rise to fame beginning at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.

How Weird Street Faire
The oddball springtime SoMa street fair this year, on May 7, will be using 1967 as its theme, dubbing this year's event "Summer of Weird." It's also the fest's 18th anniversary, and as they say, "Join us as we gather the tribes once again to celebrate peace, dance in the streets, be inspired by art, shop exotic stores, make new friends and greet old ones, generate waves of joy, and expand our consciousness."

Public Library Exhibit
At the Jewett Gallery at the Main Library you'll find the "50th Anniversary of Love and Haight," an exhibit of images and literature from the era.

You know what they say about cats. They don't have owners: Just staff.

Well, in San Francisco fashion, Butters the cat —whom Mashable calls "a beloved staple... of Haight Ashbury" — has a social media manager.

If you like this throw back pick PLEASE like for more pics soon

A photo posted by ButtersTheKitKat (@officialbuttersthekitkat) on Jan 20, 2016 at 12:34am PST

That would be Johnny Fogarty, who wants to promote Butters, whose voice he adopts for the cat's Instagram account, to social media stardom. Their lofty goal is surpassing even Grumpy Cat.

New friend Theo From New York....

A photo posted by ButtersTheKitKat (@officialbuttersthekitkat) on Dec 20, 2015 at 2:11pm PST

One hiccup along the way: according to Fogarty writing as Butters, "My nuts were making me so crazy that i started ATTACKING and bitting dad as well as anyone that got in my way. Soo now iv got my nuts up for sale to pay for the vet bills..."

ONE OF A KIND BUTTERS NUTS IN A JAR 😼😼 OFFICIALLY UP FOR AUCTION JUST DROP DAD A MESSAGE WITH OFFER IF INTERESTED!!!...

A photo posted by ButtersTheKitKat (@officialbuttersthekitkat) on Jan 10, 2016 at 4:55pm PST

Crazy fucking hippies.

A lot of you have likely never seen Janis Joplin perform a number onstage, live or on video, because most of you are under the age of 70 and have little use for concert documentaries from the 1970s. But a new doc captures that special magic of Janis performing onstage like Otis Redding on a third hit of blotter (and/or rambling onstage like Jim Morrison on a third sheet of blotter). That film is called Janis: Little Girl Blue, and it opens in Bay Area theaters today with a special 7 p.m. screening tonight at The Roxie with Big Brother and the Holding Company drummer David Getz doing a Q&A with Ben Fong-Torres.

“The film is so special because it really does give you one last Janis concert,” director Amy Berg told SFist. Berg was nominated for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar in 2007 with Deliver Us From Evil and has the fortune of beating the Amy Adams Janis Joplin biopic to the screen.

An eight-year labor of love, this documentary features Cat Power reading some of Joplin's most revealing personal letters, as well as home movies of Janis in her toddlerhood, images from her teenage scrapbook and lots of never-seen-before concert footage. There's also an unearthed picture of Janis showing her boobs that you will never, ever forget.

The most goosebump-inducing footage is of late-1960s San Francisco, an era when Haight St. hood rats were often nationally respected pop stars. Bob Weir and Pigpen turn up to lend commentary, and Country Joe McDonald tells the story of that one time Janis accidentally did 68 hits of acid. Yes, 68.

"People have come up to me and said they felt like the film has given them a sense of what it used to be like in the Haight-Ashbury and North Beach," Ms. Berg said.

Janis: Little Girl Blue also painfully chronicles Janis’ meth and heroin addictions, and the conflict over leaving her original band because she was bigger than them.

“Janis Joplin is one of the most influential women in rock and roll,” Berg said’. “Janis was an influence to me and to many women I know just because she was so ballsy and she kicked doors open for women to pursue their own dreams.”

Previously: Janis Joplin Forever Stamps To Debut At Outside Lands

“Peace in San Francisco” arguably started with a conch shell blast and Hare Krishna chanting at the "Human Be-In" on the Polo Grounds of Golden Gate Park. In this rare footage of the seminal hippie event in 1967, you’ll find plenty of LSD dance moves and absolutely no drones.

Here, at the beginning of the Summer of Love, about 30,000 free spirits showed up to take in music from The Dead, food from The Diggers, and poetry from Allen Ginsberg, who rhapsodizes about dinosaurs at about the 5:30 mark.

The lengthy video document, which must have been taken with some kind of black-and-white GoPro, comes to us from openculture.com via Hoodline.

The "Be-In" was advertised in the first edition of the counter culture zine of record, the San Francisco Oracle, and might well represent the high-water mark of San Francisco hip(pie).

Proving that point, let's juxtapose this recent video of modern-day hippie action in the park, sent in to SFist by a local tipster. This one shows the current generation of homeless dreamers and stoners, who got to sit around the other day and mock the police after a plainclothes officer parked his car on a boulder. Couldn't they at least learn to play some non-western instruments?

Of the former event, Ginsberg said “This is really it, and it is all perfect.” Well guys, this is really it in 2014, and it is all pretty boring.

Phish fans (you may know some... I do) have been abuzz with the news that the band repeatedly encouraged the Seattle Seahawks and their fans to adopt their song "Wilson" as a chant and theme song every time Quarterback Russell Wilson took to the field. NFL Films did a little video about it. Now, some fans have put together a petition to try to get Phish to play at Candlestick Park, before it gets torn down, "as a gesture of good will for the Niners' loss to the Seahawks."

The whole "Wilson" thing, as it turns out, seems to be an elaborate practical joke by Phish frontman Trey Anastasio, a lifelong New York Jets fan. He was allegedly pissed that third-round draft pick Russell Wilson helped to beat his beloved Jets, and decided to try to get the team to adopt this song which, as true Phish fans all know, is a song about an evil, hateful character. (Wilson is, in the lore of the song, an evil dictator who enslaves an entire race of people.) The band rightly assumed that the Seahawks would be none the wiser.

Some of the lyrics, and the refrain:

When we had that meeting, over down near Game(hendge) Wilson, King of Prussia, I lay this hate on you Wilson, Duke of Lizards I beg it all trune for you

You got me back thinkin' that you're the worst one
I must inquire, Wilson
Can you still have fun?

Below, a performance of the song back in 2010 at the Berkeley Greek Theater.

[Change.org]

The official motor vehicle of UC Santa Cruz. Shot by Bhautik Joshi.

Of course. Why not, Humboldt. Why not. (Photo by Travis Jensen.)

Burning Man first started out as an indie festival at Baker Beach in 1986. Years later, in 1990, before many of you were born, the festival moved to the desert. The following footage -- "Burning Man with one porta-potty," as the uploader describes it -- shows a calmer, quieter time at the party now known as Burning Man.

Laughing Squid has more:

In September 1990, Bob G. captured this Super 8mm film footage of San Francisco Cacophony Society’s Zone Trip #4-"Bad Day at Black Rock"- the event more commonly known now as Burning Man. 1990 was the first year it was held out at Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

And now, classic Burning Man: