Somehow, the war years liberalized American society: the postwar generation of authors in America were a lot more anti-authoritarian, a lot more provocative. Alan Ginsberg’s Howl and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch were both censored for their supposed obscenity, and both authors influenced their next generation, themselves forged out of a war in Vietnam. For that generation, the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco became ground zero for migrating hippies and bohemians in what became The Summer of Love.

On this day, June 10, in 1967, some 15,000 twenty-somethings descended on the 4,000 seat Sidney B. Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre on the inaugural day of the two-day Fantasy Faire and Magic Mountain Music Festival. This was the first of a series of San Francisco concerts that would come to define the Summer of Love.

The iconic event of the Summer of Love would come a week later, at the Monterey International Pop Festival, but the Fatnasy Faire was the first ever outdoor rock concert, featuring an eclectic range of musicians and musical styles. A lot of it focused on psychedelic rock, explored later by seminal bands like Pink Floyd and the Beatles.