We’ve done our share of bitching about Summer of Love nostalgia, but the funniest, and best, piece of writing about the media’s treatment of its 40th anniversary belongs to someone who actually participated. Greil Marcus’s column in the current issue of Interview is specifically about Rhino’s new box Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970, though Marcus, as usual, brings the larger picture into focus, cocking an eyebrow at his alma mater, Rolling Stone (though he never mentions it by name). As for the Rhino set, this paragraph sums things up perfectly:

Love Is the Song We Sing brings the whole hoary myth of San Francisco as the last American utopia down to earth. The 77 tracks collected here, recorded between 1965 and 1970, reduce the San Francisco Sound–in the hands of a few, a glorious explosion of musical risk, experiment, discovery, and glamour–to a bunch of local bands making crummy singles. Weak vocals! Rickety rhythms! Bad sound! Hipster posing! I mean, having lived my entire life in the Bay Area, I was there, and a lot of the stuff here I never heard. There are bands here I’ve never heard of–and for good reason.

He goes on to praise specific tracks by the Great Society and the Charlatans from the box, but that’s what downloading is for, right?

Interview [Official site]