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And in this sleepy neighborhood beatnik types didn’t have to worry about police harassment, which had become routine in North Beach. San Francisco State College had been located on lower Haight Street until the early 1950s, and a few scattered student or teacher households remained, giving the neighborhood a mildly boho air even before the migration from North Beach began. Because rents were cheap and the area was one quick trolley ride to the new SF State, Haight-Ashbury began filling up with students, graduates, dropouts and even some faculty.

The department made periodic inspections of recipients’ households, and he remembers that on those occasions everyone “extraneous to the legal definition of ‘single family’ would disappear so that the welfare workers would always discover . . ”20 On the whole, these middle-class white kids worried not about whether they’d find jobs, but rather about how they could best avoid them. The people of the Haight were partly driven to drop out by the “junk”— but also by a vast sense of spiritual and emotional emptiness.

Off came the corsages. Shoes were coming off. Guys were ripping off their ties. They went nuts. It was one of the greatest feelings I ever had. It was like the turning of America in a way. We went out and played everywhere and did that. ”120 Certainly Janis Joplin saw herself as a cultural provocateur. “Kids from the Midwest, their whole fucking thing is to sit in row Q47 and be still . . It’s never occurred to them that they could not go in the army. You know, it’s a thing I do . . If you can get them once, man, get them standing up when they should be sitting down, sweaty when they should be decorous .