Last Days of Playland-at-the-Beach

Note: This is Part 3 of the Playland Story. It's full of occult hippies and glamorous pop stars and stuff you'll want to read about -- but if you came in late, you might want to start with What Happened to Playland at the Beach? just below.


By the mid-Sixties, Playland at the Beach had lost it's magic, even for me, and certainly for the Whitney family who owned the park. After George Whitney Sr., its entrepreneurial genius and founder, died in 1958, the family business slowly disintegrated in law suits and ill will, with the children -- able people in their own right -- battling their mother who still controlled the park and who finally forced them out of management roles.

If I ever went to Playland, it was late at night, probably with a carload of hippies who had the munchies. The Pie Shop still sold fourteen kinds of pie, and the Hot House next door still sold enchiladas we could eat sitting on the seawall across the highway. Skateland, the roller skating rink across Balboa Street from the Midway held on, and George Whitney's collection of Victorian fortune telling mechanical gypsies, peep shows, steam pianos, and a working toy carnival made entirely out of toothpicks were still on exhibit, but somehow they weren't trippy any more.

Yet, in 1969, as the old world of Playland ebbed, across the street the brave new plant of San Francisco pop culture was sending out a hot tendril.

The Family Dog, the rock dance commune centered around original hippie Chet Helms, lost its lease on their Avalon Ballroom headquarters and moved west, out to the beach, out to a rickety wooden building where generations of San Franciscans had come to eat fried chicken, roller skate, play with their slot cars and now...dance to the Grateful Dead.

Soon longhaired freakos, velvet swathed teen heart throbs, spotty faced boys and undercover narcs were converging on the fog-shrouded building across the street from the kiddie sailboats dripping in the foggy night dew. The guys running the ski-ball concession looked at each other incredulously as Pigpen's blues organ drew the few lingering drunks across the street.

Monday nights acid guru Steven Gaskin was filling the same hall with a kind of revival meeting for hippies called the Monday Night Class. I can't beat Albert Bates description: "Monday Night Class became a weekly pilgrimage of throngs of hippies from up and down the coast, from high schools and university campuses, from army bases and police academies, from mountain communes and Haight Street crash pads. Thousands of people, in various states of consciousness, came with tamborines and diaphanous gowns, love beads and bangles, Dr. Strange cloaks and top hats with feathers. The open-ended discussions ventured into Hermeneutic geometry, Masonic-Rosicrucian mysticism, Ekenkar and the Rolling Stones, but opened with a long, silent meditation and closed with a sense of purpose."

Gaskin was teaching the kids the original Huxley-Alpert-Leary hippie vision of LSD as a life-changing sacrament, not a thrill ride or a Friday night high. Challenging them to change their lives, not just trip. And the continued success of The Farm after nearly forty years implies he was to some degree successful at it.

I could never take him seriously though. Not his fault - but to me he was just good old Steve Gaskin, my hip grad student acquaintance at SF State who had a teaching assistantship in creative writing, I think. I remember when he came back from Mexico absolutely charged with psychedelic adrenalin. The guy had had a life-changing experience down there and he was telling everybody who would listen. But I wouldn't. Like Jesus said, "A prophet is not without honor, except to his old pals." Or something like that. But basically I thought Steven was okay.

But there were all those other guys climbing onstage at the Avalon. OK, I'm not a big swami fan, and my prejudice colors the rest of this picture. I was at the Avalon the night Allen Ginsberg introduced Swami Bhaktivedanta on stage. He was the guy who introduced the Hara Khrisna movement to the West. The two of them chanted Hare Krishna together for a while, and clicked their little bells and Om-ed it. I thought "Hmmmm... is there something in this?". It was interesting. I've still got the poster for that night in a box under my bed along with a lot of other remnants of that life.

Well, it turned out there was something in it. There was macrobiotic food and colon cleansing and kundalini force for the masses and Esalen Human Potential Seminars, Khrisna Consciousness with extra child abuse for no charge, The Children of God, Werner Erhard, transcendental levitation and the whole soggy descent into dopey earnest astrological unreason that has plagued the rest of the twentieth century. Thanks a lot, Allen. Thanks a lot, Chet, for letting that fakir onstage.

Hmm, I seem to be wandering off here. Just to wrap up the obvious, the hard beat Sixties I had entered as a seventeen year old kid were over. Playland would be closed and ripped down in 1972. The Family Dog was going broke. And the soft and goushy, it's-all-about-me Seventies were on us. Help! Run!



Photo 1: Playland's End. September 24, 1972. Photo by Patrushka.
Photo 2: Site of Playland today. Photo by Patrushka.

Chet Helms, Margarita and Me

Let me start by saying Chet had his moment of glory - a long, extended moment - as proprietor and maitre'd of the San Francisco Sound. Along with Bill Graham, he made sure the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Santana, Big Brother and the Holding Company and, of course, Janis Joplin got right to the front tables and smoked the best dope in America.

I knew Chet pretty well in the Haight-Ashbury days, and we stayed in touch for a long time after. Here's a story about what manner of man he was.

At nineteen I fell in love with a beautiful and cruel seventeen year old named Margarita. On our first date she danced naked in the rain. I thought this stuff only happened in books! I'd never met someone up to her style before and I fell hard and passionately. We traveled across America together and when she'd had enough, she just hitched a ride with a trucker to her home town of San Bernadino.

Not to put too fine a point it, Margarita ripped my heart open and drove me insane. But she was worth it! What a girl!

OK, fast forward twenty-eight years. I'm happily married, a salaryman with a big New York career, living in a heartwarming but drafty Victorian in an country-quaint New Jersey town, watching old Bob Hope movies on TV with my daughter Kirstie and generally having a pretty good time of it.

Then, suddenly, I came down with a high fever. A very high fever. My doctor slammed me in the hospital and I began to get delirious. Fever visions. In the night, tossing on my perspiration bed I suddenly found myself to be nineteen years old again. I was standing under a street light across from Margarita's aunt's house on Effie Street in Silver Lake. I saw lights in the house but I was alone and I began to howl. They were long agonizing pain-wracked cries of grief for Margarita, the lost one. I howled to the full silver moon like a broken wolf or a starving coyote. I was astonished to find a gaping wound in my heart covered with the finest of skins. Not one drop of hurt had evaporated in all those twenty-eight years. And I hadn't even noticed it.

When I got to feeling better, I wrote to Chet about my strange experience. He had been around in those days and knew the players. I never heard back from him, but about three weeks later, I did get a letter - from Margarita!

She was a grown up too. Lived up in the Rockies somewhere. Had kids. Still played her flute in the moonlight. She was sorry she had hurt me so bad. She was ashamed of her seventeen year old self.

I was surprised to get her letter. But not all that surprised - I recognized her handwriting right away on the envelope. And I was glad too, because somehow the letter brought some closure that I didn't know I needed.

Margarita had been in San Francisco for the first time in years and she just happened to run into Chet on Market Street and he just happened to have my address in his pocket. So he told her about my letter and gave her my address.

That was Chet through and through. Always right where he needed to be. Always knowing what was going down in all the flats in the Haight. Just had his finger on it. And he still did.

Borrowed the pic of young Chet from Jim McCulloch's blog Stone Bridge. Hope he don't mind.

Third Chorus: The Great Jiminy Cricket Ballroom Rant

Continued from last post...

We're still at the heavenly Avalon Ballroom where Janis Joplin was wailing on Psalm 4. Then Janis' conscience suddenly jumped out in the form of Jiminy Cricket and started berating the hippies and flower children because they're little brats. Now the Pondering Pig feels called upon to deliver some edifying comments...

The trouble with Jiminy Cricket is that, although he often gives good advice, he delivers it in a tut-tut, looking down his nose sort of manner that turns people like Walrus Pemmican off. Walrus is the young guy with the beatific smile and guru shirt who got reamed by Jiminy Cricket in the last post for harboring angry thoughts, and I knew him well. When he went dancing at the Avalon Ballroom with his old lady, as they called girl friends in those far off times, they didn't want to be acceptable to God, they wanted to be free. Walrus wasn't against being acceptable to God, he just didn't know anything about it, and neither did the other kids sitting cross-legged on the ballroom floor. Jiminy Cricket is speaking the truth about the lies and pretensions in their lives, but he's not exactly helping them change their hearts. Check out his next line:

Offer right sacrifices and put your trust in the Lord!

Walrus is thinking, “Offer right sacrifices, and put your trust in the Lord? Well, what happens if I accidentally offer a wrong sacrifice? Will God reject me like he did Cain in the Bible story?” All his rebellious instincts start coming out. But he's just looking for holes – to him, Cain and Abel is a story in a book, and The Lord's full name is The Lord of The Sleepers. Why would he put his trust in that God?”

Sorry if I am shocking anybody, but this guy David who wrote Psalm 4 is not communicating to the kids in the Avalon Ballroom, or any other ballroom in time. He is suggesting Walrus Pemmican obey the rules. Can you imagine? Why? Because I said so!

Any right-thinking rebel needs to understand the purpose of a rule. On the streets Walrus walks everyday he see cars with bumper stickers that read Question Authority and Ignore Alien Orders. In a world where the proper authorities have shown again and again you can't trust them, it's the only sane attitude.

The rules expressed in the Psalms themselves can be life-giving, survival tactics. It's not the rules' problem, the problem is the stuffy enemies of the young who turn them into umbrellas made for whacking.

Like this 'right sacrifice' business. Look, David was saying you'll be all right if you get the best unblemished lamb from your flock and take it down to the temple and offer that to God. That's how they did things in those days. It's got to be your best one, though. One little horrible skin disease and it's right out.

I like David a lot better in Psalm 51, when he says: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” It's the same idea, really, but applicable across the centuies.

For Walrus Pemmican,for instance, freedom brought with it a certain burden of guilt and sorrow. He was trying to live right, he really was, but he kept screwing up. Both he and his girl Suzie Creamcheese were chased by demons they couldn't see. Did they ever chase you?

They were young and beautiful, but there was some skin disease growing on their insides. If Walrus had known the Lord of the Sleepers could actually give him a clean, whole heart and a new, right spirit, and zero demons, he would have jumped...if he could actually feel on the inside like he looked on the outside, he would have offered that new heart to God in a second.

It's like that stiff word repentance. Once I understood it didn't mean some mysterious ritual where you put on a Christian suit, cut your hair short on the back and sides and chat with boring people while eating too many doughnuts, once I understood repentance actually meant accepting God's offer of a new and right spirit, then I was up for it.

Well, that's how the Walrus and his old lady are feeling about Jiminy Cricket's lecture. “Hey man, we're looking, maybe in all the wrong places, for freedom and joy and love and you're giving us rules and regulations. Why should we believe anything you say?” Jiminy's not giving them what they need if they only knew they needed it.

The show is kind of winding down. It's getting late. Chet Helms, the hippie impresario who runs the Avalon, comes out to say goodnight to the hippies, including Walrus Pemmican and Suzie Creamcheese. All year, Chet has been struggling to compete with rival rock impresario Bill Graham for the best bands, the best poster artists, the most joy, the most love and, hopefully, have a few bucks left over.

Bill Graham is raking in the dough over there at the Fillmore. He's a business man, he has stumbled on a money machine and he is very good at turning it. Chet is more about the music and the good times, and although he is charging the same admission and featuring the same great bands, he and the Family Dog collective are just hanging on from show to show.

So Chet smiles his sweet eternal grin and says these words:

There are many who say 'O that we might see some good! Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord! You have put gladness in my heart more than when their grain and wine abound.

Hey, we all need some grain and some wine. Nothing wrong with that. But there's more to life than raking in the bucks. You know what? I'm going with the gladness in my heart.

I will both lie down and sleep in peace; for you alone, O LORD, make me lie down in safety.

Good night, everybody, stay safe! See you next week!

Today, for those of my generation and time and place, Bill Graham is remembered as a hard but decent guy, a good businessman who got rich and in the process helped a lot of talented people get known and established. Chet? Well, go look at his website here.

Chased by demons:
Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose in a Los Angeles hotel in 1970.
The Raelettes – According to the movie Ray, Margie Hendrix died of a heroin overdose in 1973. Hope the others all all doing great.
Mike Bloomfield died of a heroin overdose in San Francisco in 1981
Paul Butterfield died of an alcohol and drugs overdose in 1987
Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash in 1991.
Chet died from hepatitis in 2005.
Elvin Bishop – is still alive and performing, in spite of a devastating family tragedy. Somebody shake his hand.
Jiminy Cricket has returned to Pleasure Island where he continues to explain the rules of proper living to the bad boys who live there.
I heard from Walrus Pemmican not long ago. He is still seeking the farthest island in the farthest sea.

More about Walrus and Janis at Famous People I Never Knew 2: Janis Joplin

Famous People I Never Knew #2: Janis Joplin

(Here's Janis as a normal person, shot by my friend Herb Greene about 1966 and rights owned by him.)
In the Fall of 1966 I was living with a bunch of freaks at 626 Clayton Street, about four doors up from the circus that was San Francisco's Haight Street. I didn't actually want to go to the circus everyday. But Haight Street was home. All my friends were there and where else would I go?

I'd walk down to the corner to get a sandwich or a bran muffin or something and get engulfed in a sea of strangers, kids from LA and Vermont and all points in between, spare-changing like I'd done just a few years before and looking bedraggled and innocent, foolish as lambs.

Where was my nice Haight Street of the year before when you could walk in the red neon fog at midnight and see maybe two or three other freaks on the street? Where I knew everybody and everybody I knew was cool? Where nobody was checking if it was true smoking dried banana peels could get you high.

"Hey, Donovan said so, man..."

The Diggers, a radical, anarchical, poetical offshoot of the San Francisco Mime Troop, were already beginning to give away free food in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle just to bless the sixteen year old runaways a little bit. Somebody had to.

The Pondering Pig is not a cynical pig but he was beginning to wish the newspapers would stop writing about hippies all the time.

And the Summer of Love was still nine months away. Gad!

I split the Clayton Street flat's rent with Melanie Kinkead (I use her real name because I hope someday she will read this and write back, "Here I am - I'm OK!") -- I loved Lamie, so sweet and sad and vulnerable. She affected the ultra-feminine side of hippie dress, with frills and flounces, hair in a tumble of curls, masses of eye shadow, miniskirts with white tights and and possibly even Mary Jane shoes. Or I may be hallucinating here - my memory doesn't really extend to Lamie da Kink's shoes. In any case, think Mary Pickford circa 1915. Mel was the daughter of a San Francisco travel writer and PR guy. Robin and his wife didn't know what to make of their ultrafeminine (can a heterosexual girl be described as effeminate?) daughter. Once they invited me to their swank Pacific Heights flat for dinner and to discuss what could possibly make her tick. I hadn't a clue either. I just loved her like a big dumb older brother. Just not enough to protect her from her fate.

Besides Lamie, we split the rent with Diane W., who was already exploring the joy of putting crystal amphetamine in her arm; Alice, a pleasant plump stranger with a big dog; and some kids in the front - I had no idea who they were -- Teens from LA who were here to drop acid in large quantities and wear striped bell-bottoms. Well, it takes all kinds. I think Way Out Willy and his dog Arthur lived there too.

Alice's major weakness was she let her big black lab shit in the hallway or kitchen or wherever the dog happened to be and then let the dogshit lie on the floor for days until somebody, usually Melanie, cleaned it up. Taking a dog for a walk involved walking, which was often physically impossible.

Kvetch kvetch - what's a little dogshit? "Peace, man. Don't be so uptight."

I think my trouble was I was getting older, and, at 24, I had seen a lot. I had decided to finish school and, with Revolver spilling sitar notes full volume down the hall, I was trying to write a paper on William Wordsworth or somebody. I burned Japanese incense all day and covered the doorway to my room with an Indian print bedspread. I had a daughter lived up the street with her mom. I was hoping to get back together with Linda if we could just stop fighting continuously and every minute.

I thought literary criticism was the world's most stupid activity but a great introduction into the absurdity of life, - hey, just read the book! But I did tend to prefer the company of Will Wordsworth to the kids in the front.

So I wasn't in, like a totally psychedelic place, dig?

Groan. But sometimes Haight Street was still cool. It wasn't the Summer of Love yet and I still could run into cool people whenever I walked out. I suddenly remember talking to Phil Lesh like that one night, so excited about his new life with the Grateful Dead and just boiling over with enthusiasm. Or Chet Helms walking up the street handing out posters for whomever was appearing at the Avalon that weekend and we'd talk briefly about his split with Bill Graham or something.

Or like Janis Joplin. One day I was standing in line at the Hibernia Bank around the corner on Haight Street and there was Janis standing in line a couple of people ahead of me. She was carrying a bag of groceries. I had no impulse to run up saying "Oh Miss Joplin, I just love your ultimate forever take on Take it, Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now Bay-bay." Although I did, and do. I was cool. Cool people stayed cool. It was still just a normal day, even though Big Brother was already the hottest attraction at the Avalon because of her. We were still all just young people sorting out our lives and her way led to an exploding burnout nova death. Bah, humbug. I'd rather remember her standing in line at the bank with her little bag of groceries and all the future ahead.

I was cool but when I got back to the pad, I still said to Melanie, "Hey Mel, guess who was standing in line at the bank with me today - Janis Joplin!"

Whereabouts Unknown

Since it's my birthday, I guess I can write whatever I want to.
So here's a list of some friends I once had who I would like to see again, or at least find out what happened to them.
They were all pals, some for years, some for weeks, when I was young.
In alphabetical order...

Bess Farr, AKA Lisa Farr, AKA Lisa McFadden.
Bob Gill – brother beatnik, peyote brother and card carrying YPSL.
Bob Kaffke – diabetic Communist who rode horseback through Mexico.
Bob Kuehn - SF State peace warrior.
Danny Rifkin - so funny and creative. The first on our scene to notice the Beatles were cool.
David Miller - Carpenter of Walrus and Carpenter.
Don Auclaire - leader of our pack, 311 Judah Street.
Donna Conroy – Tom Conroy’s beautiful wife from Delaware.
Ed Ginsberg - peyote brother and photographer.
Eva Bessie, AKA Eva Wilson - in the Ozarks somewhere last I heard.
George "the Beast" Howell.
Joe Novakovich - Fingerless Joe himself.
Johnny Chance - Saintly drummer who taught me to appreciate the Beach Boys and Paul Whiteman.
Laurie Sarlat - with the Long Island accent, Alan Cohen's consort and Wendy to this lost boy.
Leslie Hipshmann AKA Leslie Van Gelder.
Margarita Bates AKA The Bitch. Unforgettable.
Melanie Kinkead AKA Lamie da Kink - as dear a girl as I ever knew.
Michael Rachoff - friend of years but I lost touch in my wanderings.
Peter Kraemer - the Sopwith Camel
Peter Walters – my boyhood best friend who lived at 47th and Balboa
Peter Weiss –tough kid from Brooklyn who danced with Ann Halprin
Riley Turner - holy tennies street kid from Lowell High School.
Solveig Otvos, AKA Solveig Rimkeit, AKA Ruth Weissinger - the beautiful Latvian. Where are you, Solveig?
Tom Conroy - the North Beach street kid cartoonist

I know where too many of my early friends are today though – in the ground.
Here’s to you, Rodney Albin and Chet Helms and Allen Cohen and Wendy Norins and Tom Hobson and all the rest of you – friends forever.

If any of you ever stop by The Pigsty, let me know, OK?

When I Was Twenty in San Francisco

Golden Gate Park.
August, 1962

There's a guy going to interview me tonight for his book on San Francisco rock impresario Chet Helms. I think the main reason he wants to talk with me is that I'm still here with memory intact. And I knew Chet back at the beginning - 1962, 1963.

So I've been digging around in the backfiles of my mind today turning over events of forty years ago when I was twenty years old in North Beach, twenty-two years old in the Haight-Ashbury, married to Linda Lovely, baby on the way and in my arms.

I can walk down the hallways - look in every room. I can tell you what Allen Cohen was wearing the day Laurie Sarlat blew through the front door of 1736 Page Street into our lives - but I can't tell anyone what any of it meant. Just a collection of images in my mind, some clear, some fuzzy.

Why do I bother? Because I gotta pay my debts, I guess. I wish I knew.

The writer will be calling from California at 7:30 tonight. I'll let you know.

Stomping on Chet Helms

Back in the day, as the current catchword runs, I used to hang with a pal named Chet Helms. In the late Sixties he threw some of the best dance parties ever, and he grew famous, at least to some of my generation.

Chet died of a stroke last summer. He was 63, like me. His friends threw a party for him in Golden Gate Park a few weeks ago. I couldn't make it for transcontinental reasons so I asked our San Francisco correspondent, Gary Parma, to go have a look. Here's his report:

"OK man, here is the actual man in the crowd view of Chet Helms day at Speedway Meadows. It was a clear sunny day, with enough fluffy, pristine clouds to highlight the royal blue sky. Occasionally a caressing breeze blew in from the west (stage) to freshen us in the toasty, afternoon California sun. Since I had taken Creative Writing just before meeting Chet I think it best to use adjectives like lugubrious, importunate and ubiquitous all over this letter so you'll feel the mournful tone of the day.

I parked at the bison paddock. They, at least, seemed unchanged since back in the day. I walked back to Speedway Meadows and started hearing Freedom Highway from more than a mile away. You remember them Chris, their most famous song goes...bha da bum, bha da bum, ka chung, ka chung on a howling lead guitar while the singer repeats “I wanna git ya, I wanna make luv to you, I wanna git ya etc. etc.” I bet our posters would list them as an opener for Sam The Sham or 13th Floor Elevator.
Approaching the crowd, I was seriously struck by how many corporate logos were in evidence. Computer corporations, imported beer corporations, Nike and other apparel corporations all proclaiming the counter culture had succumbed. There is no longer, nor has there been for a long while, an overarching affiliation of “f*** the mainstream thinking on housing, transportation and relationships or God and man and war.”
Though the war at least was roundly rejected by several booths and, objectively speaking, about 20,000 of us at the event. I expected to hear “How do you spell Gulf of Tonkin? W.M.D.!” from the stage, but I was too late for Country Joe.

A guy on a cell headset said “...and there's really a lot of old hippies here.”

As Blue Cheer played I remembered a late night in the Haight-Asbury of '65 when a friend took me to hear an important band rehearsing on the 3rd floor, all stairs packed body to body, only cool people allowed in band's apartment wherein they ululated and thrashed at max volume while people like me knew this was serious and apartment doors were opened so thunder claps of Rock & Roll, punctuated with what sounded like a train crash from a Zola novel, serenaded us till the cool people closed the apartment door and word was passed body to body that we should leave 'cause they were going to “work on some songs.”
But here in Golden Gate Park I saw them again while a placid 10 foot floral goddess, a nondescript 8 foot swan and a silly 8 foot flamingo swayed and danced and compelled us to smile. “Enjoy the here and now” I felt them exude as they wove gracefully through the crowd.

Although I bobbled my head like a rock fan all afternoon, Paul Kantner's group had the best musicianship in evidence. His guitarist and two “chick” singers really were good. One of the girl singers liked Paul a lot and caressed and kissed him in between her doo wop phrases and before and after the songs.

It made sense to me. The whole afternoon felt brimming with meaning. I am still loving my neighbor, I do want to conduct my affairs in a moral manner. What the world needs now is kindness."

Thanks, Parm. I think I'm glad I missed the big Tribal Stomp. Chet's gone and Nike is dancing on his grave. Yet we're the ones buying their hundred fifty dollar sneaks. For another perspective, here's Joel Selvin's report, as published in the SF Chronicle October 31.