All you needed was love, Jimi, Noel, Scobie, Lester and Reform

It was the summer of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Joel, two sterling chaps who may otherwise not have had a great deal in common. It was the summer of Sgt. Pepper and Captain Marcos Lemos, of daisy-chains and Damascus, of free love and Be Friendly. Fifty years ago the good vibrations of the Summer of Love infused the world with peace, psychedelia and psilocybin, while racing had Piggott, Petingo and Pia to keep the mood mellow. Somehow, somewhere, everybody got their kicks.

The racing scene of 1967 would be essentially familiar to today's enthusiasts, if a little less technologically advanced, a little less businesslike, a little less all round really. The Summer of Love, however, was strictly of its time – a state of being, a state of consciousness (or unconsciousness), a statement. It is as difficult to locate the birth of such a febrile movement as it is to try to catch the wind, man, but for the calendar's sake we should attempt to pin it down.

Perhaps it was on January 14, when the Human Be-In took place in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and 30,000 people listened to Timothy Leary telling them to turn on, tune in, and drop out. January is not summer, though, and it might be better if we designated it as happening during the first week of April, when the term was used for the first time through the formation of the Council for the Summer of Love, in response to an influx of young people to the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco.