Niet Woodstock, maar Monterey was het definiërende moment van de hippiebeweging. Het festival luidde de summer of love van 1967 in en vormde de blauwdruk voor alle latere rockfestivals. De populariteit van het festival en de enorme aandacht die het in de media kreeg, leidde ook tot een volksverhuizing: duizenden jongeren vertrokken met bloemen in het haar naar San Francisco om uit de eerste hand te proeven van de hippiecultuur. Op 17 oktober 1967 werd hippie officieel dood verklaard door de oorspronkelijke scene in Haight-Ashbury, waar men met afgrijzen keek naar het leger bloemenkinderen dat zich op de wijk stortte. Haight-Ashbury was niet in staat een dergelijke invasie op te vangen: binnen de kortste keren werd het kloppende hart van hippiedom gekenmerkt door drugsmisbruik (met de introductie van heroïne), daklozen en een razendsnel stijgend misdaadcijfer. 
MEDIA CREATED THE HIPPIE WITH YOUR HUNGRY CONSENT. BE SOMEBODY. CAREERS ARE TO BE HAD FOR THE ENTERPRISING HIPPIE. The media cast nets, create bags for the identity-hungry to climb in. Your face on TV, your style immortalized without soul in the captions of the Chronicle. NBC says you exist, ergo I am. Narcissism, plebeian vanity. The victim immortalized. Black power, its transcendent threat of white massacre the creation of media-whore obsequious bowers to the public mind which they recreate because they too have nothing to create and the reflections run in perpetual anal circuits and the FREE MAN vomits his images and laughs in the clouds because he is the great evader, the animal who haunts the jungles of image and sees no shadow, only the hunter's gun and knows sahib is too slow and he flexes his strong loins of FREE and is gone again from the nets. They fall on empty air and waft helplessly to the grass.
The Death of Hippie, oktober 1967
She hides in an attic concealed on a shelf
Behind volumes of literature based on herself
And runs across the pages like some tiny elf
Knowing that it’s hard to find
Stuff way back in her mind,
Winds up spending all of her time
Trying to memorize every line
Sweet Lorraine, ah, sweet Lorraine.
Sweet lady of death wants me to die
So she can come sit by my bedside and sigh
And wipe away the tears from all my friends eyes
Then softly she will explain
Just exactly who was to blame
For causing me to go insane
And finally blow out my brain,
Sweet Lorraine, ah, sweet Lorraine.
Well you know that it’s a shame and a pity
You were raised up in the city
And you never learned nothing ‘bout country ways,
Ah, ‘bout country ways.
The joy of life she dresses in black
With celestial secrets engraved in her back
And her face keeps flashing that she’s got the knack,
But you know when you look into her eyes
All she’s learned she’s had to memorize
And the only way you’ll ever get her high
Is to let her do her thing and then watch you die,
Sweet Lorraine, ah, sweet Lorraine.
Now she’s the one who gives us all those magical things
And reads us stories out of the I Ching,
Then she passes out a whole new basket of rings
That when you put on your hand
Makes you one of the Angel Band
And gives you the power to be a man,
But what it does for her you never quite understand
Sweet Lorraine, ah, sweet Lorraine.
Well you know that it’s a shame and a pity
You were raised up in the city
And you never learned nothing ‘bout country ways,
Oh ‘bout country ways, oh ‘bout country ways,
Yeah, about country ways, oh, country ways…
