A Letter From Leslie OnThe Road - 1962

Leslie H. was a sister in our little San Francisco band of dirty Peaceniks. I lost touch with her years ago so I can't ask her for permission to print this letter to me. But it's a document well worth sharing - it seems to me a brilliant picture of The Life, as we baby beatniks conceived it in that long ago year of 1962.

I don't have much left from that era, but God is gracious, and left me this letter. How can I not share it with you? That it still exists is a minor miracle.

Leslie is eighteen and on the road with Peter, her lover (they married later, a true-love match.) She's living the life we loved. The long hitch-hiking journeys, the drugs, a bit of the world-weary feeling I associate with those unpsychedelicized times, the uncapitalized sentences, the eternal ongoing planning of adventures to come. And of course - the literate self-awareness and ability to express herself well on paper.

Together they make up the essence of my times, kiddos - welcome to the winter of 1962. The day I received it the snows were beginning to fall over Long Island and the first winter rains were pouring into the sewers of Lily Alley, San Francisco.

I've added a few links to references that may be obscure today.

christopher christopher christopher

how happy i am to get your lawn letter--i'm childishly delighted and even overjoyed. here for the last couple of days i had been, not homesick, but kind of surprised and sad at being 3000 miles away from anyone who really knew how i function. (this is the result of being bored silly and therefore starting to take it out on peter, but trying not to, because he really doesn't react well to threats of leaving or not sleeping with him at all.)

all this culminated last night with peter pouring chocolate milk shake on my head and i throwing my newly acquired enovid out the car window. i cried myself to sleep thinking of the past with the help of three seconal. but all is slightly better this morning--peter and i woke up early and talked and made love. so i have made him his breakfast, listened to e power biggs playing bach's royal instrument (the organ), finished sanding, oiling, stringing, and tuning our new guitar--we took off all the mexican finish and wanted to leave it like that and oil it, but we ended up some how putting mahogany varnish on it--, and teaching myself bach's minuet in g major on the piano and guitar.

a new thing for me--a snow storm the other night. if i had been younger or marguerita i would have run outside in it naked. now the snow has been here for two days and it is melting and looking a bit soiled.

we have been here for three weeks and i haven't yet seen new york city, which is why i think we hitched out here. i can't really remember why we came anymore except it has something to do with rolexin and the president and me and peter and new york/and cuba and kruschev and bombs

once i had a job for two weeks where i had to type all day.

i could tell you what happened to us hitch hiking and the people we met and what they said but it is not really very interesting or xxxxxx

(typing fades and gets scratchy-looking)

What is wrong with the fucking typewriter?

(she switches to pencil)

i will use a drafting pencil for want of a pen.

(she switches to blue ink)

i found a pen - i don't like it

(this time she switches to black ink with bold point)

here is a fountainpen. i'll use this.

anyway my point was that before i started i thought that hitch hiking to new york would be a great adventure and it wasn't at all just mostly cold and boring. i have lost all my faith in jack kerouac.

we did meet some wonderful people in madison, wisconsin. They were students and mostly hippies but some cool - not cool really, but sweet. peter and i set out to close the university of wisconsin by turning everyone on to rolaxin (romilar there) i was introduced to everyone as the high priestess of romilar. we were staying with two great friends of peter's - sam and john. one night we were all high and someone knocked on the door. john answered it and a man asked - do you have any cockroaches. sam told him - yes, but they're on our side.

the night before we left i got into a drinking contest with peter. i lost miserably. it's the first time i've ever been drunk. i vaguely remember crying for two hours about my abortion - peter was very sweet and says i really wasn't too bad. i also somehow cut off a large section of big toe. i am now firmly convinced that pot is so much better for teen-agers than booze.

i don't want to write on and on and bore you. so i will shortly close.

how are you and linda and expected baby? and working, being responsible, etc.

everyone there except peter's mother thinks we're married. address any future mail accordingly. i even have a woolworth's golden wedding band ($1.00, without tax) i am also maybe pregnant, which is fine with both of us. peter is a very fine person to have babies from.

we have plans. we will be back in san francisco by april (by way of virginia, etc.) and then peter and i will get jobs (if i am not pregnant, i will) save money until june. take a bus to mexico city - some odd $60 dollars (both) and go to mexico city college. my parents will support me - i will support peter. will have baby in mid-August and let a maid take care of him ($15 a month). i want so much to learn things! i mean, at college - therefore a maid for the baby. i am going to see all the art galleries and museums in new york (while peter works - he may be able to get a job as an artist's model for 7.50 an hour). i am going to learn to really cook - no instant anything. and find a place to practice piano, and look at new york and maybe sew pregnant clothes. - why do i always plan things?

anyway write to me - maybe often. i need it. are you kidding about the naval? tell me about it.

have you seen or heard of riley, teresa, and george. do you have addresses of the first two?

very much love to you - and i will think about you.

[this letter started out fine but it bogs at the end and is incoherent - i'm sorry]

leslie

One More Once for The Summer of Love

Writer and itinerant hipster Greg Hoffman just sent up a few photos he snapped at the Summer Of Love 40th Anniversary Celebration in Golden Gate Park Sunday before last. I put them up without further comment on how old everybody is and how long ago 1967 was. Survival must count for something.

THE AMAZING CHARLATANS ONE MORE TIME.

Unless you were hanging around San Francisco in the mid-Sixties, you've probably never heard of The Charlatans. But they had their moment. The very first Haight-Ashbury band - and the standard bearers of psychedelicized rock and roll. They never had any hits, it's a wonder they recorded at all. George, the leader, the guy in the straw hat, couldn't play an instrument. But he had a great fashion sense and designed the band for the pop world that ruled before guys like Jimi Hendrix and James Gurley changed the rules.Here's a picture of them circa 1966:

THE CHARLATANS IN THEIR HEYDAY

When The Charlatans were having a good night, they were the best dance band on the circuit. And, in the early days, the psychedelic ballrooms were all about dancing.

JAMES GURLEY AND FRIENDS

Actually, the beauty is James' wife, Margaret and the itinerant hipster with the press pass is Greg Hoffman. For a year or so, Jim Gurley (as he was known then) was king. As lead guitarist for Big Brother and The Holding Company, he went further out then anyone had gone before. I thought he was inspired and I knew what was good in those days. Street legend said that Gurley learned to play lead guitar by sitting in a room on Pine Street for weeks on end listening to and copying John Coltrane solos. Not note for note - but in the spirit. You can hear his work on Janis' best album, Cheap Thrills, and decide for yourself.

Here's Jim as Haight-Ashbury pinup:

WHEN GURLEY WAS GOLDEN

No disrespect. This Bob Seideman photo became a popular poster and could be seen in kitchens and bedrooms across the Haight-Ashbury for at least a year.

SUMMER OF LOVE 40TH ANNIVERSARY

September 2, 2007
San Francisco

San Francisco Chronicle's story:Summer of Love bands and fans jam in Golden Gate Park.
Relix Magazine's story: Old Hippies Come Out of the Woods for Summer of Love 40th.
More photos of the anniversary party from Clara Bellino.

Secrets of A Semi-Fiction Writer

In case you haven't noticed, The Pondering Pig has been writing fiction lately. Or something impersonating fiction. Or something completely different. Actually, he's not quite sure what he is writing because so far he has been a ponderer, not an imaginer. He didn't really set out to write a novel or a serial. He just thought it would be interesting to add dialog and create some little illustrative scenes of his life as an original hippie in San Francisco back before the world knew about such things.

But as soon as I gave them some lines, my characters started acting uppity. Like Walrus Pemmican, for instance. As soon as he sat down in Sylvie's room I could tell he was pissed off about something, and was just itching to pick a fight with Paulie. And Paulie got carried away and imagined the Syndicate of Eternal Friendship should corner the Haight-Ashbury retail marijuana market. The real Paulie never said that!

It was too absurd. In the Haight, of course, we all just wanted to be flower children and wear flowers in our hair and listen to Donovan records, and suddenly these guys are shouting at each other and plotting dreams of empire and acting like crooks! And poor Allen Cohen.

Allen was a real person, a poet and the founder of the San Francisco Oracle, one of the first and most influential of the underground newspapers of our era. We shared a flat in the City for about a year and I got to know him well. Yet I found I couldn't give him any lines because I was afraid if I did he would start acting like a crook too! He was a man of respect in our neighborhood. And I don't want to dishonor his memory. So he ended up just sitting on the mattress waiting for his cue - which doesn't come.

You start changing people's names and creating dialog for them and suddenly anything can happen. The police may break down the door any second and the Syndicate of Eternal Friendship will have to run out the back. Or the girl on the merry-go-round might turn out to be a messenger from God. Or an Indian princess in disguise who's seeking the Lost Ruby of Khalimar. And maybe Walrus Pemmican is actually a real walrus! Just a very skinny one who lives in the Haight-Ashbury.

What I found is you start giving people dialog and new clothes to wear and pretty soon they don't like any of it and want to choose their own costumes. Flowers in my hair? Forgeddaboudit.

And then there's names. Real living people can sue you for libel if they start abusing children and robbing banks in your story. So I realized I'd better change everybody's names before I'm subpoenaed.

Now I've got a new set of problems. Take Howie, for instance. He's a minor character so far -- you probably forgot about him already. So far, he's just one of the guys who bought the marijuana and brought it back to 1736 Page. But you never know. The first time he opens his mouth he wants to know all about Machine Gun Kelly!

So my first inspiration was to call him 'Howie Kalishnikoff'. Has a certain drama to it, sort of like 'Sylvia Potemkin'. Then I thought - why not change his first name too - to, uh, 'Lennie'. Sounds like Howie, except it's Lennie. How about 'Lennie Kalishnikoff'? Trouble is, the reader is going to expect exciting things from a guy with a name like that. Is he a walking time bomb? Seething behind that smiling mask? Ready to go off like an AK-47? Or maybe he lives for his 'gun'?

Nah. And besides, Kalishnikoff is too hard to spell. I'd be looking it up all the time.

OK, then I thought, well - the guy I'm basing this character on had one of the most common surnames. Maybe a nice, ordinary name would work. So I looked up America's most common last names. Here's a good one: White. Number 14.

How about 'Willie White'? Nice alliteration - but he sounds too much like a bluesman from the Mississippi Delta. Blind Willie White. Recorded one earthshaking session in 1928. Then he disappeared into the night and my character is his kid! Except he doesn't know it! He thinks he can't even play the kazoo! What do you think?

Nah.

Onward - well, the 16th most popular name is Martin. So how about 'Mel Martin'? Yeah, that's it! Mel Martin! He's a smooth lounge singer from Vegas who's on the run from the Mafia because he was making love to Duh Capo's beautiful wife and Mickey Duh Mouse caught them in the linen closet. Now he's hiding out at 1736 Page pretending to be an original hippie.

Nah. I think my character is more of a 'Howie Morris'. Just an ordinary pussycat of a name to hide an extraordinary person.

On the other hand, maybe I should give up the whole thing and write history, plain and simple. With footnotes, like this:

Chap 3, p.47: According to Ronald Palaver (op cit. p. 38), a gang of evil hippies once lived at 1736 Page Street. After cornering the Haight-Ashbury marijuana market they kidnapped Patty Hearst and insisted she go to college. Later, the FBI shot them down like dogs. Except for Walrus Pemmican, who remains missing to this day.

So much simpler.

Sylvia's Garden

I'm not sure poetry and blogging mix. I know when I'm reading other people's blogs they have about fifteen seconds to grab me. Hey, I'm a busy man. You've got to rivet me to my chair or I'll be running off to see what Aprilbaby said today.

But poetry doesn't work that way. Oh, I know - there's the occasional Milk of the Bayou, a poem that smacks you in the face like a cold fish (think Sylvester the Cat here) and there you are, transported into a Roadrunner cartoon when you meant to spend quality time catching up on the G8 conference.

But regular poetry works slower. She's shy. You've got to court her. You've got to print out that poem and take it into the garden and sit under a tree with a glass of lemonade and all the time in the world. Let the words trickle down like beads of moisture on your lemonade glass until they start to mean something.

Well, who has time for that? Might not hurt to try, though.

Hey, stay with me another twenty seconds already. I rummaged around and found Allen Cohen's memorial poem for Sylvie, the one I referenced the other day in Before the Storm Hit (read it first for perspective if you haven't already)....

I got a funny feeling this morning, finding it in my back files and looking back towards the San Francisco of my youth - those years that created me. Am I the only one of my time and place left with memory intact? Why am I still here when so many who shared that youth have gone down to Davy Jones' Locker? There must be others left - but where are they? I want to call Allen Cohen to talk about 1736 Page and after -- but he's nowhere to be found. He's down waiting for the Ferryman.

Sometimes I feel like I'm marooned on a distant planet somewhere at the edge of the Milky Way - sending out little digital signals. Is anybody there? Is there anybody else out there? Oh well, guess I'd better go build up the fire...

By the way, Sylvia wasn't the dear girl's birth name. I changed it to protect her innocence.

THE GARDEN
Elegy for Sylvia, August 26, 1994
by Allen Cohen

It is the hot night of our lives.
Our bodies limp in their misuse.
Our souls though, that inner body,
statelier than mansions, gardens
lush and orderly with serene ponds
and tropical thickets.

Many beings and so much bitterness and beauty
inhabit our labyrinthine souls.
We have tended and grown each plant.
Nurtured each being that has entered there.
There are many secret places
that no one has yet seen,
some we have yet to explore.
Everyday we are adding
gorgeous flowering plants
and making new paths
and silent spaces.

And I think of you dear heart
and your wondrous pained soul.
How it ached and yet made room
for so many to find nourishment there!
In my memory I see you at 16 or 17
with an unearthly beauty, as if there
were four or five angels within you,
each pulling and lifting you
in a different direction
with each awkward breathless step.
It was a deep and mournful joyousness
that lived within you, strange
(I don't think I romanticize here)
how every man wanted you
in order to heal their broken souls.

And you were a hippie maiden of the wind
until you finally settled in your body
and it began to corrupt your innocence
and the pain and the escape from pain
drove the angels of youth out
leaving you alone and empty.
Your destiny to reinvent your soul
To climb the ladder of light again
to let the air and rain
water the growing Eden within you.
With each act and thought
a deep compassion grew.
When such beauty born
and beauty reborn
departs our shattered world,
a vast mysterious crater
is created in the mind.
We look down into it
remembering you, looking
for the gardens of you,
stretching to reach across
the mystery of your departure.


Photos by Patrushka, except the fish.

What Happened To The Haight-Ashbury?

You want to know what really happened in the Haight-Ashbury from 1964 to 1967? Good - then read this: Love and Haight, in today's Observer Music Monthly. It's really quite good. The first time I have ever read something semi-accurate in the major media.

Kaffke Of The Comsymps

Of all the freaks who congregated at the second table left of the front door of San Francisco State's Commons, the most unique was a pugnacious little guy named Bob Kaffke (Koff-key). If there ever was a man born to be investigated by the FBI, Kaffke was he. He had a one-track mind and that track was non-stop revolutionary socialism. And at our table he had a congenial, or at least non-judgmental audience.

The Commons was not a village green where the the peasants kept sheep at night, but rather a big noisy cafeteria filled with cigarette smoke and students of every variety smoking them. Jocks, business majors, drama majors, art students, blacks, Asians, sorority sisters - every group had a corner and one, two, three tables that were theirs and nobody else sat at them. Unless it was raining or something.

After the student strike in 1968, President S.I. Hayakawa tore the building down, making the pithy comment: "The Commons breeds revolution." Replaced it with the Student Union - lots of little rooms where groups stay isolated. But in its day, the Commons was the intellectual and cultural ignition point for everything that was Happening in San Francisco. Don't let those Berkeley people tell you anything different. Plus you could get a bowl of chili with extra soda crackers for thirty-five cents.

Funny to think of us all after so long. The peacenik table in those early years -- '61, '62, '63. We were lit majors, polly sigh majors, philosophy majors and biology majors, mostly dressed in beat war surplus peacoats or field jackets and scruffy beards or Cost Plus Guatemalan peasant skirts with handmade sandals and maybe a wool flannel stadium coat- (the kind that had toggles and leather loops instead of buttons) against the foggy San Francisco afternoon. Plus more young guys who didn't attend classes at all, but took the M car out to State to hang in the Commons and eat chili. Future founder of the Family Dog Chet Helms was one regular visitor.

Vietnam was just a worry in the left wing weeklies. The Freedom Rides were beginning but their struggle seemed far away in the south somewhere. Ban the Bomb: that was the issue of the day. The government had restarted atmospheric testing of H-Bombs at their Nevada test site. Radioactive clouds were drifting over the little cowtowns of the west and heading for Vegas. Doctors found Strontium-90 in middle class American mother's milk. "Perfectly harmless," said the middle class American fathers in Washington.

Then there was Cuba. Fidel Castro was nationalizing all the American-owned sugar plantations and the US was unhappy about it. Kennedy decided to embargo all trade between the US and Cuba, import or export. That would hurt the Cubans good. Still, there are limits to pain. According to legend, Kennedy purchased 5000 Cuban cigars for his personal use immediately before ordering the embargo. (It's still in place after nearly fifty years - did it work?)

The cold war was full bore. Commies! Fidel was a Commie, get it? Now those evil Svengalis were were only ninety miles away. Anything could happen! And most likely, anything included an American invasion of Cuba followed by a rain of nuclear warheads and the end of civilization. That's how I figured it.

Redbaiting was also full bore. Complaining about the imminent possibility of nuclear rain was tantamount to admitting you were a communist in some people's minds. A fellow-traveler. One of those students the evil Svengalis liked to dupe! A Comsymp! I was sure that J. Edgar Hoover had my picture in his files.

Yet what had I done? I was an English major, but I preferred to spend my afternoons singing folk music on the lawn in front of The Commons like a peacock spreading his plumage. Calling all girls - look, a beautiful, sensitive poetic folksinger come to serenade you. Come, sit down beside me. But death was lurking in the clouds. Maybe we'd better sit inside.

In my simplicity, it seemed to me if a country wanted to be communist, they should be able to do whatever they want. It's their country. And, in 1962, it looked very much like we were about to invade Cuba and take 'em down. I thought it was a classic case of the big schoolyard bully pushing his weight around, and this cocky little one foot tall midget Fidel Castro lighting another cigar and blowing smoke in the bully's face just before he got creamed. So we would listen to Kaffke's tirades with tolerance and a certain measure of agreement.

He was not the centerpiece of our table by any means. But he had a ferocious intensity and a lack of humor that placed him apart. His one subject was humorless dead ahead radical socialist politics. Unilateral versus bilateral disarmament. Pacifism. Conspiracy. Bay of Pigs. FBI agents under your bed. Always serious, never getting the joke, always dead set on his fixed idea - some vague revolution sometime somewhere that would lead to world peace and kindness and gentle lambs. Except first a big satisfying bloody revolution.

It's not like I thought revolution was a bad idea, but Cuba was a long way away man, and I had gotten my girlfriend pregnant during the summer. Now we were married and making each other's lives miserable, and the future looked like death coming in a little apartment. The Commons was my lifeline to the cool world. I needed it bad. The little lambs would have to wait till I got off work. For me, Kaffke was part of the entertainment.

I wondered about the guy though. Sometimes he'd drop teasers about his past - he'd fought in Korea and received a Purple Heart. He'd been a boxer, fought under the name Ruby, and someone had put him in a novel.

He was diabetic - I saw his syringe and little vials of insulin in a kit he always carried with him. Yet in spite of the disease he had ridden horseback through Mexico from San Blas up to Tepic and beyond, camping out in the jungle and the banana plantations.

OK, maybe he was cool after all. Because THAT was cool.

He'd been married a couple of times and had a daughter - 13 or 14. The idea of one of us having a teenager astonished me. I was thinking about my own little kid to come. What will it be like to have a kid? I imagined us living in Greenwich Village and having lunch at a sidewalk cafe. She was ten in my daydream and I was a famous young novelist. No wife in sight! Or maybe I'd be a big English professor at San Francisco State and own an imposing house in the hills near Buena Vista Park and there she is getting on the 43 Roosevelt bus -- off to the Conservatory of Music for her violin lesson.

Kaffke was a spectre of my personal nightmare, I think. What if I got to be thirty-five and I still was living with my parents and had nothing better to do than take the streetcar out to State and sit in the Commons all day. The horror!

Castro loomed large in Kaffke's cosmology. One day he got into an argument with a passing Business major. I remember him saying emphatically, "Castro...he is a Saint!" Caught me up, because a day or two before Kaffke was defending his Catholic faith and described himself as a true believer. No, he was a Fidelista first and last in the years I knew him. Cuba Si! Yanqui No! He showed us an incoherent document he had written attacking the American embargo on Cuba, and I began to wonder if he had a screw loose. That would explain things! Yet, although he never graduated he told us he had over 150 units to his credit. That's a lot of incoherent but passing term papers. No, he wasn't crazy in that way. Just mad - really mad inside.

One time Kaffke disappeared and we heard he had a job teaching high school in Angel's Camp, a little town up in the Gold Rush country. Math or civics or something. He lasted about four months, then one morning there he was, back at the table. As an exercise in civic responsibility, Bob had his students write letters to Kennedy criticizing his Cuba policy. The town fathers gave him 24 hours to get out of town.

What motivated a guy like that? I've often wondered. Was he making a principled protest against American colonial attitudes? Was he seeking personal glory? Was he just trying to make a buck? How did he support his daughter? Did he go down to the FBI office and report on the gossip around the Peacenik's table?

I knew J. Edgar Hoover was convinced we were a threat to the American way! What a laugh! We couldn't even get to our next class on time. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley - which really kicked off the massive student protest phase of the Sixties, was still a couple years away.

I knew plenty of Communists, older guys who would come out to campus and make speeches about class struggle sometimes. They had gnarled up little minds with one fixed idea, an obsession with a worker-ruled economy that just didn't fit the world I saw growing around me. They were just part of the entertainment. The chances of being duped by them were zero. But Kaffke was a generation older than me. Maybe they still made sense to him.

I wasn't surprised when Kaffke hit the front page of the paper on July 1, 1963. He was giving an exclusive telephone interview from Havana. My journal for the day simply notes: "So Kaffke and Lorie (Cantrell) actually made it. They're in Cuba, by way of Paris and The Prague. He's described as 'a 35 year old art student from S.F. State'. He's an art student? He's thirty-five?" They were staying at the "luxurious" Hotel Riviera, guests, along with 57 other students, of Fidel Castro. The students were on a "fact-finding mission", checking out for themselves if Castro had horns. I think they decided he didn't. The article didn't mention who paid for their tickets.

Photo Credits:
Bob Kaffke photo: Days of Rage (Memoirs of the Sixties)
J. Edgar Hoover; Women Strike For Peace Picketers - Library of Congress
Castro & Khruschev: AP
Peace Symbol: No Nukes North
Hands Off Cuba: Mary Ferrell Foundation

Did Anyone Get Out of Here Alive?

Gosh, here it is my birthday again. Sixty-five!

I can't believe it. Me? Eligible for Medicare? You've got to be kidding. I never thought I'd make it to thirty and here I've outlived Kerouac by eighteen years...

Must be the love of a good woman.

Anyway, last year on my birthday I put up the following list, in alphabetical order, of friends of my youth (I've added more detail this year). They're all people I knew and loved but who were lost in the swirl of the hurricane. Most are still lost, but some were found last year. Maybe this year I'll find some more...

Bess Farr, AKA Lisa Farr, AKA Lisa McFadden. Dear friend and troublemaker, we were friends throughout the Sixties. The last time I saw her, she dosed me with MDA at a party. I wasn't mad at her - I was just fed up with the life I was leading. But I've always felt like I deserted her when she was in trouble. And I wish I hadn't. You okay, Bess?

Bob Gill – brother beatnik, peyote brother and card carrying YPSL. In my mind's eye, he's up on the barricades somewhere waving his ancient rifle defiantly and the Nationalists are closing in.

Bob Kaffke – diabetic Communist who rode horseback through Mexico. News: Bob is gone. Died of pneumonia in 1983 on a houseboat in the San Francisco Bay. Leo Sadorf found this link put up by his son...

Bob Kuehn - Another of the SF State peace warriors. Ban the Bomb!

Danny Rifkin - so funny and creative. The first on our scene besides me to notice the Beatles were Something New. And he laughed at my poetry (that was good, not bad). News: Danny's still out there hitting it. I found this article about him in the San Francisco Chronicle.

David Miller - Carpenter of Walrus and Carpenter. My singing partner and best friend till I betrayed him. Last time I talked to him he called to say good-bye. He was moving to Tennessee. Funny how I still miss him after all these years.

Don Auclaire - leader of our pack, the Dirty Peaceniks, 311 Judah Street, San Francisco.

Donna Conroy – Tom Conroy’s beautiful beat street wife from the Delaware horse country. Tom spent half his time fighting off the pimps who wanted to sign her up. Last time I saw here she was great with child.

Ed Ginsberg - comic peyote brother, photographer and a great heart. News: Someone told me this year he is living in Budapest.

Eva Bessie - Bess' best friend, daughter of Hollywood Ten screenwriter Alvah Bessie. She was immortalized on two beautiful Fillmore posters done by her husband Wes. Still living in the Ozarks somewhere last I heard.

George "the Beast" Howell. A legend in his own time. A friend ran into him ten or fifteen years ago in the rugged mountains of Northern California up by the Oregon border. He was on a buying trip looking for high quality virgin wool. Something about Persian rugs. He'd picked it up living in Asia.

Joe Novakovich - Fingerless Joe himself. He had warped fingers due to a birth defect, yet became a masterful autoharp player and stalwart of the San Francisco folk scene.

Johnny Chance - Saintly drummer for The Final Solution and first guy on our scene to notice the Beach Boys were cool. Funnier and smarter than anyone, yet he dressed like a Catholic schoolboy. He joined the Moonies and I never saw no more.

Laurie Sarlat - with the Long Island accent, poet Allen Cohen's consort and Wendy to this lost boy. She left town with a guy I didn't know and I never saw her again. Allen told me years later she'd joined a cult.

Leslie Hipshmann AKA Leslie Van Gelder. Most beautiful and sweetest of the teenaged hangers-on at 311 Judah (funny, I was a teenager myself!). She split for New York and I never saw her again. Leslie, I still have the letters you wrote me from the East Village.

Margarita Bates AKA The Bitch. Unforgettable. News: An anonymous tipster wrote to tell me she is alive and where she is living. Thank you.

Melanie Kinkead AKA Lamie da Kink - as dear a girl as I ever knew. I wrote about her in Famous People I Never Knew #2: Janis Joplin. News: I am back in touch with Mel thanks to the blog and she is still just as funny, and still the best.

Michael Rachoff - Page Street friend of years but we lost touch in my wanderings.

Peter Kraemer - Virgina City filmmaker and leader of the Sopwith Camel - the first San Francisco band to hit the charts.

Peter Walters – my boyhood best friend who lived at 47th and Balboa. Peter didn't care if I was sick in bed much of my childhood. He'd always come by and play games and make puzzles and draw battleships with me in bed and him sitting in a chair beside me. What a great kid!

Peter Weiss –tough kid from the Bronx who danced with Ann Halprin's Dancer's Workshop. Last time I saw Peter he and his girlfriend were heading for Japan.

Riley Turner - holy tennies street kid from Lowell High School. I wrote about him in Song For Relay Tornfoot

Solveig Otvos, AKA Solveig Rimkeit, AKA Ruth Weissinger - the beautiful Latvian. Where are you, Solveig? I still hear you laugh in my dreams.

Tom Conroy - the North Beach street kid cartoonist who got me busted in Oakland. Tom dealt in Prince Valiant and Flash Gordon comic strips and could spot newspaper insulation in every blowndown ghetto redevelopment Victorian we broke and entered.

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.

I have a lifetime of stories to tell just about these guys. There they are through my window: young and sunburnt and storm-tossed - the best of the best, the San Francisco kiddos of the pre-invasion Sixties - my generation.

Sally Go Round The Roses or At The Langley Porter Neurasthenic Day School, 1964.

"The roses they won't hurt you...the roses they won't hurt you."

What were The Jaynettes singing about anyway? It was the hottest song on our scene up at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Day Care Center for Mind-Blown Freaks, Hysterical Teenagers and Proto-Hippies, and that included me, Peter B. and Loretta W. We'd play that weird kids song, Sally Go Round The Roses, over and over. That and Buffy Sainte-Marie singing "I'll reel and I'll fall and I'll rise on Co-dine"

It was September, 1964. I was in the bughouse after finding myself hanging by my thumbs out the bay window of our flat on Golden Gate Avenue, Hayes Valley, San Francisco. Laughing.

It hadn't been such a bad summer, really. For one thing, A Hard Day's Night came out, and everyone I knew was busily revising their opinions about rock n roll. The Beatles were, you know - far out! Actually though, I'm not sure we were saying "Far Out!" yet in the summer of 1964. But we definitely would not have said they were "Totally cool!". 'Totally' was still the province of as yet unheard of Valley Girls.

Maybe we said the Beatles were hip to the jive! Hep to the haps! I will go look in my 1964 journals. Meanwhile...

Top 40 was the steady background noise on our totally cool underground midnight hi-fi radios just like on every other young person's radio in America - squares and coolguys, beatniks, accountants, soldiers, FBI agents, we all listened to the same 40 songs over and over. That was all there was, except for KJAZ and KIBE, our jazz and classical stations, and KDIA, the r&b station across the bay in Oakland. In San Francisco, Top 40 was KYA, the Boss of the Bay, and the hippest DJ was Russ "The Moose" Syracuse, who had the midnight to dawn slot.

Oh sorry, I digress. I was plugging Hard Day's Night. The Beatles had been around all year but it was the movie that changed everything among the hippies.

I didn't know quite what to make of it when Bill Laird, my bearded beatnik photographer friend, told me I HAD to see A Hard Day's Night. A teenager movie? Well, OK...But as soon as the Beatles split into the baggage car and started singing "I Should Have Known Better" and John whipped out his harmonica and all the little birds were grinning in the boxcar too - Linda Lovely and Bill and Muttsie and I were all hooked, dazzled, thrilled. We stayed to watch it three times.

Hey, they were the Fab Four, and they were just as cool as we were! How could that have happened?

The Beatles blew into our lives and nearly took over. I dreamed I was friends with John and Paul. The 1964 presidential election was coming up - and on our bay window we posted a sign, RINGO FOR PRESIDENT. I bought a Beatles fan magazine. We cut out the photos and got stoned and made Beatles collages. The sound track from Hard Day's Night never stopped. Even Bach's Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, my previous favorite record, was gathering dust. We all listened to Russ the Moose with fresh ears. Even Peter and Gordon sounded cool. They were English! They had Beatle cuts!

"I don't care what they say, I won't stay in a world without love..."

Another song I was mad about, now forgotten, was Shirley Ellis' "Let's Get Down To The Real Nitty-Gritty." Oh man, I can still hear those horns in my head doing their downslide. They thrilled my insides.

"Some people know about it, some don't."

I guess I know about it, I thought as I hung out the window by my fingernail fragments. Enough of grim reality. Enough of suffering. I'm shutting my mind off as of this moment. Here I go! Into the great eternal Now! Yes!

Having made my decision I climbed back in through the bay window and waited expectantly for the Great Now to appear. What would it look like to live with no past to remember, no future to groan over? No future left or past. The Zen moment. Ah! An apple! Shall I touch its blistery skin?

So, the next day I'm sitting cross-legged in Washington Square, North Beach, talking to an older friend about my newfound decision to eliminate the negative, discard the past and refute the future. I'd forgotten Chuck was studying to be a psychiatrist. And that he had a part-time job in the same office as my Dad.

Next thing I knew it was Thorazine and "Sally, don't you go downtown." I was in the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, the bughouse, with Peter B., later one of the founding Diggers, also having a momentary lapse of judgment, and Loretta W., the first dyke I ever knew.

Hey, if I called her gay -- that would be an anachronism too. In September 1964, the sexes were divided into straights, dykes (butch or femme) and fags. And I was totally blind to the offensive, dehumanizing implications of those words. Peter B., on the other hand, saw them perfectly clearly. I was a little in awe of him. He had a lofty intelligence. He stood on the sidelines, thinking, smiling ironically. He was a Ponderer.

Anyway, Loretta and Peter and I were pals. After a hard day at the bughouse, Peter and I would adjourn to a Divisadero Street r&b bar for a quick shot of red-eye. I studied his words, his facial expressions and his half-smiles. I wanted some of that east coast hipster cool, too.

Loretta taught me all about committing suicide and how it might get you into Langley Porter. She was older than me - at least thirty - and had had a sad awakening in the shower with her Marin County ex-lover.

"Saddest thing in the whole wide world - see your baby with another girl."

Loretta looked just like George Harrison. Pixie cut. Rail thin. Blue jeans, scuffed tennies and a man's dress shirt with the tails hanging out. Screwy as a loon but much funnier than a loon. We played badminton together and went roller skating together and laughed at each other's cracks in group therapy. We drove to LA over Christmas and slept at her other ex-lover's house in Coldwater Canyon. There was nobody home so we drank the lady's scotch and looked out over the LA lights and played the brand new Beatles '65 continuously and non-stop. And had a fine time, just the two of us.

"Oh dear what can I do - Baby's in Black and I'm feeling blue, tell me oh what can I do?."

Peter never laughed. He was New York sardonic. But he was funny too. And he saw deeper than me or Loretta. We were sad clowns but he saw the truth about the corruption of the world. Or at least he had thought about it, while Loretta and I were more thinking about the Beatles and the ouch inside our respective hearts. When we felt anything at all. Which was hard to do when you're loaded on Thorazine.

I gave up on the Thorazine after a couple of weeks. Decided I'd rather suffer than feel nothing. Than I checked out and moved to the Haight-Ashbury, not ready to face my future, but definitely ready to get into my present. Seems like all the hippies were migrating into that neighborhood - and that's where I wanted to be too. Knowing the Beatles were coming along with me. I never saw Loretta no more. But Loretta, if you're out there, thanks for being my pal when I really needed a pal. I never have forgotten you.

Langley Porter pic from their web site.
Hard Day's Night LP cover from Blogcritics Magazine
Sally Go Round The Roses 45 from Head Heritage.
Nitty Gritty 45 from my collection
Baby's In Black from Beatles Sheet Music

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.

Song for Relay Tornfoot

Relay, if you are still on this planet
And bones not moldering with Wyatt Earp's in a Colma graveyard,
If you are still scuffling the streets of the Fillmore
In toebrokethough stained tennis shoes and
not chained in a state institution somewhere,
If your first-born child knows your face and thinks of you at all or even if she don't, here is a song for you, sad-eyed leper.

First saw you barefoot, cross legged, eighteen, Lowell High School drop-out, Don Baudelaire's new sidekick - you walked for peace together LA to San Francisco in the long ago 1962 you were arrested went to jail it was all the same to you. Before your intelligence was sucked from you like you juice from an orange.

You and Don lounging cool on our ratty mattress, bare except for Margarita's unraveling Mexican blanket, dirty red and yellow. Baudelaire laughing as usual, heavy black rimmed glasses coming down his nose, spare black mustache crinkling up. You're heroes to us, weary warriors of nonviolence.

Yes you were beautiful that morning surrounded by hippie girls, Relay, they loved you and made much of you – Teresa Sweetness, red haired, freckled, seventeen, wife of Mike Squaredoff, stuffy, square, and doctrinaire - saving to move to Yugoslavia to be free of the capitalist system. Teresa just wanted to be free of her mother.

And Leslie Chapman cozy between you and Baudelaire. She's Don's girl friend, straight black hair, satin skin, also seventeen. She lives with her rich mother in Pacific Heights but goes off balling with Don on his motorcycle.

Leslie, sweeter than Sweetness, brought over her Bob Dylan album. Nobody's ever heard of him. "His voice is so scratchy and nice," she says, "he doesn't sound smooth like a singer."

Relay, you sprawled there smiling, quiet, what were you thinking? In with these peacenik hippies, and hippies are white, all but you. You're part of this scene of socialist politics and blue workshirts and Sing Out! Magazine, and pot smoking, beat poetry, and Miles Davis. What brought you to peace marches and demonstrations and this dusty mattress?

The four of you so young and cool and free as I look back on you from 2006 - your long sunny, moony youth still ahead of you. No pain or suicide or madness is evident as you pass the gallon jug of Val Vin burgundy from hand to hand.

Relay, two years later when I was out you hit on my wife. Me -- your friend. I was pissed when she told me but you were too sad to stay angry with.

You had a blue sweater color of the sky - I could always see you coming through the fog. I'd be home lonely reading comic books, cutting out magazine pictures for collages, wondering what the fuck, with baby daughter napping in the bedroom. We'd get high and laugh and listen to Lighting Hopkins records, then you'd leave me - stoned and alone.

Relay in blue sweater and torn shoes, you had a wife too - sandy blonde beat girl who stuck by you and had your child. I came by to see you in your little madras bedspread one room pad on Fillmore Street but you were gone to score. She was alone and large with child. I felt sorry for her, only white girl on the block, vulnerable and you out to cop. But she was tough and capable and took care of both of you in the lowdown Fillmore pads you lived in - none for long.

Relay, one blue day in 1964 we drove down to Big Sur in my liver colored Studebaker Lark. Wandering back roads looking for a place to camp we met Ferlinghetti in a field - like a sage from the older world, like an Elder from Olympus in the fields of Big Sur. We camped by a stream and smoked pot as the sun went down on trembling creek waters. We all believed that summer 1964 you could get high smoking scotch broom - and we spent an afternoon in the fields of broom by the roadside picking and dodging bees. The smell of it -- if only it had worked - angel Pacific glory.

We stopped at Big Sur Hot Springs (later Esalen Institute for new age wisdom gestalt therapy). Mimi Baez was singing at crowded party Big Sur hippies congregating in smoky dark dim kerosene light, surely after making art all day, wonderful paintings and poetry and novels. Such I still believed was the life of Bohemians. You didn't think so. We waited for sister Joan to come, but she never did

We crashed at a cabin up a canyon, park car at head of canyon and trudged up to it in the mooney dark. One room, no water, bare boards, blonde Viking woman's home to drink Red Mountain burgundy and smoke scotch broom blossoms in the night, hippies on the floor snoring as we toked.

Relay, you got heavier into drugs, heroin I suppose though I don't know and I moved to the Haight-Ashbury. I didn't see you any more except once flitting down a back street looking for a phantom fix - sad specter of the streets.

Last time I saw you was in 1975 on Haight Street. I was crossing the street going into Rodney Albin's guitar shop and you appeared, losteyed. I was dressed in brown you thought I was driving truck for United Parcel congratulated me on getting a well paying gig. We shook hands in the gutter at the corner of Haight and Masonic and you disappeared into the traffic. Disappeared into the traffic like you'd never been there at all. You didn't have the sweater anymore.

My Own personal History of the San Francisco Underground 1961-65

All the famous hippies emerged from Woody Guthrie workshirts like butterflies on May 14, 1965.

Except of course for one who
saw the old sun rising
golden gleaming intriguing from the
freight car door. He stepped out
of the box car
into the light,
and
wished all the rest of us
a merry good night.

R.I.P.
Gary Marxon
1943-1963

Photo by permission Cyberhobo

My Own personal History of the Haight-Ashbury

Steeped in Fillmore sorrow,
in the sad Panhandle,
in the cold bleak light of afternoon,
beneath the fog of Stanyan Street,
I thought I saw the sun too.

But it was only Melanie Kinkead high on acid in her
gauzy yellow,
little girl dress
her white tights with a hole in the knee.

She smiled at me as she waltzed by
past the dogshit playground, into the grayness. Then more fog.

Summer 1966.

Gidget and Mimi Farina, Big Sur, 1964

Help! I have barricaded myself into my house. Outside, crowds are shouting for more Gidget. More Moondoggie. More beach parties and more Coors Beer in tan cans. And put in more surf boards – those big ones, like Moondoggie used.

Now I have to make good on my promise to write about those strange and magical beings when what I really want to do is sit here like a three toed sloth and listen to Joan Baez singing Sweet Sir Galahad again. Didn't she ever sing Surfer Girl?

The trouble is I'm a beatnik pig. I never drank Coors Beer in tan cans. When I went to the beach, I went to San Francisco's North Beach, 'where there isn't any water and Big Daddy ain't your fadder', as the old song says.

What, you've never heard that song? It was very big on Sacramento Street in 1962. Beatniks in peacoats would sing it in unison as they strode through the swirling fog and damp and snailed down the steps into the Ant Palace for another night under the fluorescents watching Officer Bigarini rousting less fortunate beatniks on Columbus Avenue outside the Ant Palace door.

What did we know from Gidget? I went to the movies to see the divine Marie Dubois get shot by that stupid crook in the snow at the end of Shoot The Piano Player.

What? You've never heard of that movie? It was very big with ratty student scruff in 1962 as we huddled in our peacoats against the fog and damp of ocean air Irving Street on the way to the Surf Theater to see it for the 81st time.

Sometimes we'd get tired of watching Marie Dubois get shot again so we'd go see Jean Paul Belmondo get shot down in the street like a dog at the end of Breathless because of that traitorous turncoat American itchy bitchy blonde Jean Seberg. Who actually looked a little like Gidget.

Is this clear? Will the lynch mob of admirers outside please go away? Let's talk about somebody cool instead, like Mimi Farina.

What? You've never heard of Mimi Farina? She was very big in the cold plastered kitchens of incandescent Haight-Ashbury flats. Reflections in a Crystal Wind was the name of the LP she put out with her beatnik poet husband who got smashed on his motorcycle in 1966 just when things were really peaking. I can hear it now ringing in my ears along with Donovan's Sunshine Superman and Country Joe and the Fish's first album. That was about it for music in our commune the Fall of 1966 thanks to my insufferable roommates the Gunderson twins. Interrupted my studies of the Goldberg Variations, but what could I do? I know. Smoke more dope.

Richard Farina left behind his legacy novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me which I still haven't read. It's been right up there on my must-read list since 1966. First I have to get through Dune. And The Fellowship of the Ring. That will take me forever. Richard will just have to wait.

Mimi's legend was huge. I won't even mention that she was Joan Baez's little sister. So demeaning to a great lady who went on to found Bread and Roses, the group that brings top music acts to prisons and hospitals and orphanages. She ran it till she died young of cancer a few years ago.

Those Baez girls – unbelievable how they affected all of us. Like there were some people out there who were like us except higher and more beautiful and more noble and could sing better. And knew Bob Dylan.

I saw Mimi perform at a party in Big Sur once. In 1964, when she was about nineteen. Now that I think about it, David Crosby was there too and he was just one more pretty good Big Sur folksinger. But Mimi! There was this air of expectation in the smoke dark rooms of Big Sur Hot Springs. Mimi was coming! Her legend, her mystique was already rife. Joanie's little sister, she just had to buck up under her big sister's Queen of the Folksingers aura. Mimi's actual singing is a blank to me, I'm afraid. I just see her in a pool of saintly angelic light, the scruffy crowd of vikings and timber beasts and grunge artists all hushed and dragging on their Camels as her pure voice sang Cripple Creek or something.

That night we drove to the back of a nearby canyon and hiked up to Crazy Mary's streamside cabin in the redwoods. It was the summer that word swept though the Underground – smoking Scotch Broom flowers could get you high. Riley Turner and I were in Big Sur to test this hypotheses. We asked somebody what Scotch Broom looked like, then we picked the little yellow flowers all afternoon, stuffed them in a corncob pipe and inhaled deeply. We passed the pipe around to other experimenters. We went outside the cabin to look up through the redwoods at the starry post-Mimi Farina night sky. They glittered no more brightly than before.

Do you feel anything, man?

Maybe. I think I might be feeling something. Give me some more of that.

Or else we would have to drink more Coors beer in tan cans like the surfers did. Actually, beatniks never drank anything stronger than Val-Vin Burgundy $1.99 a gallon.

One more thing, the night before, camping in a field back from Highway 1, we saw Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his girl friend walking through the field. He was wearing a wide brimmed hat and speaking to her of ineffable, wonderful things that we could never know.

What? You've never heard of Lawrence Ferlinghetti?

Special thanks to everyone who unknowingly lent me the pictures in this post. Permission applied for:
SurfnHula, The web's best source of collectible Hawaiiana and surfboards
Gary Schwartz, Art Historian
World Cinema
The Richard & Mimi Fariña Fan Site

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

Second Chorus: Jiminy Cricket, Janis and the Heavenly Blues Band

Continued from yesterday...

The Pondering Pig is reporting from the Heavenly Avalon Ballroom, where Janis Joplin, backed by The Raelettes and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, is wailing on Psalm Four. They're up to the second chorus, which goes like this:

But know that the Lord has set apart the faithful for himself; the LORD hears when I call to him.
When you are disturbed, do not sin; ponder it on your beds, and be silent. Selah

Wait a minute, folks. There's a commotion up front. Let me try to get a clearer view. A little guy has climbed onstage and is taking the mike from Janis Joplin. Let's see if I can make it out. Wait - it appears to be...the actual voice of Janis Joplin's conscience! And he looks just like Jiminy Cricket! OK, Janis is looking surprized but she's going to listen too.

"But know that the LORD has set apart the faithful for himself... The Lord hears when I call to him. Too bad for you, girl. He don't talk to you no more cause you're so vain Carly Simon wrote a song about you."

The Rent-a-cops are looking at each other wondering what to do. Should they let him keep whacking her with that little umbrella? After all, he IS Janis' conscience. Or should they carry him offstage? Meanwhile, Jiminy keeps going.

"What you doin' up here screamin' at God like that? When you are disturbed, do not sin; ponder it on your beds, and be silent. And that goes for all of you out in the audience, too! How do you deal with your anger? You look so cute in your love beads and Indian headbands but I can see what goes on in your hearts. You think I can't? Like you there in front with the guru shirt and the beatific smile. You found out your girl is sleeping with your best friend and when you're on your bed you're pondering bashing in the windows of his car with a baseball bat! Grow up! Revenge just adds to the suffering in this world.

"And what about you, Suzie Creamcheese with your long straight hair and granny glasses and paisley minidress? Everything's so groovy but God sets the faithful apart for himself. Who or what are you faithful to? Grooviness?"

Man, this cricket is a drag. Somebody get the hook! He's bringing the whole show down. Who would have thought Janis had a conscience!

Selah!

Selah means the band's got to blow, but, like the security guys, they're looking at each other like 'what do we do now?' Paul Butterfield throws out some tentative harp licks based on Sonny Boy Wiliamson's Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide and it kind of works. Mike and Elvin pick up the tune but they continue to throw puzzled looks at each other. Like 'I thought we were playing Answer me when I call O God!”'

Continued next post.

Some Parenthetical Thoughts for Paula

What a pondickerment! Our blogging pal Paula (I Remember…one of the best blogs on the net if you enjoy well-written insight into the misery of being young) wants to borrow some Willa Cather books so she can find out what I'm obsessing about.

Sad to say, what’s left of my books are in a storage shed twenty miles away (closer than they have been in a couple years). I do have a couple of Cather's books with me, but it's because I bought them at the Willa Cather Bookstore in Red Cloud, in June and I’m still reading them. So I guess it's the library for you, my girl.

Let's see. Perhaps it's best to start with My Antonia. It's one of those books that the school systems of America have taken over and intend to squeeze all joy from as soon as possible, so read it soon. In spite of the school system, it remains the best novel ever written about being young in the raw country (Well, Huck Finn is up there too. Can I have two best novels about being young in the raw country ever written?).

In my day they did the same thing to Ivanhoe and Ethan Frome. Ripped them to shreds so bored teenagers (who wanted to watch Gunsmoke, chew bubblegum, listen to Gene Vincent sing Be Bob A Lula She’s My Baby, and go on a chickie run off the cliff in a stolen car like James Dean) could be transformed into sensitive, caring adults who discussed imagery, symbolism and character motivation over gin and tonic at the neighbor’s patio party. Can you believe that in the 1950s those two obscurities (Ivanhoe and Ethan Frome – look ‘em up) were still considered "impotent works of literature”?

As some of you may suspect, I was an English major - not that I wanted to teach or anything. I just liked learning about the way people thought at different times of history. Wordsworth and Coleridge were cool poets. Reading them seemed no stranger to me than reading Alan Ginsberg or Gregory Corso or Richard Brautigan. (look them up too) The new guys were just a little easier to understand. I even liked Percy Shelley, although I couldn't make head nor tails of his poems.

As I walked around the Haight-Ashbury in 1966, romantic rebellion made perfect sense. We were doing the same thing, just less talented at it. We could drink the laudanum all right, but I couldn’t find anyone writing the equivalent of "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a mighty pleasure dome decree..."

Someday I'm going to drag out my journals from the period (also in storage twenty miles away) and subject you to some genuine San Francisco Haight-Ashbury poems, written by a certified long-haired freako. Just ask Lamie de Kink, who drops by here from time to time when she's not running her beatnik clothing shop on Ebay.

Here's one from memory, actually the lyrics to a song called The Song of the Murderer:

Well, let me tell you the truth
just like I heard it from Ruth
she said she's going to stop the clock
she tried -- she couldn't stop it.

She's going to try it again
I wish I knew when
because if it is true
than you and I
had better be friends.

The chance won't come again, friend
it won't come again, friend

Then there’a musical part that goes dump-da-dump-da-dum. That's the first two verses. Note the hippie obsession with peace and love and ominous concern about the future to come.

Yow. There’s more too...Here's the bridge...

Could she beguile it by running?
and should we believe what she said?
what if she dropped it?
maybe she stopped it?
what if she lied about it?
what if it's just playing dead?

Let's see. Dead. Fred. Bed. Tread. Hmmmm...

Or perhaps you'd like Ode To Summer better. It was in waltz time.

"As I sit in town watching the riots beginning
I dream of the meadow we used to climb up to in Spain.
Hey hey
There's no meadow here today."

Or maybe even Ain't No More Bodhisattvas. Here's a snatch from it, all I can remember this foggy morning on the Central California coast...

"And now we are two hundred million people climbing walls
cramming down our garbage cans with broken Barbie dolls
gleaming with a multicolored evanescent sheen
and every single one of us wants to be a human being."

That's how we hippies talked, you know. Ask Foghorn Leghorn. He was there too. Probably trying to score some more Owsley acid in some dive on Page Street. (actually, I know nothing of Mr. Leghorn's past. He is a man of mythic mystery, my favorite kind. He may have been a saintly wandering truth seeker who touched nothing stronger than green tea)

Well, Paula, that's about it for today. I hope this was of some help in your literary quest. I’ve always enjoyed explaining literature to earnest young students. If anyone would like another lesson in literary criticism, please apply at the Pigsty. We are open late.

Famous People I Never Knew #3: Jerry Garcia (Part 1)

Today Nathan Zakheim is an art conservator in LA, world renowned, and bald. But in 1963 Nathan was the biggest leftie folksinger (maybe second biggest) at San Francisco State, bold and brave, with mounds of curly black hair and red cheeks of kibbutz health and a curly black beard. Nathan dressed the part too – like he'd just stepped out of a 1930s WPA work camp and was about to grab a freight across America to go to the big Wobbly meeting in Tacoma. Not that it was an affectation, you understand. I dressed exactly the same way.

So did everybody in the Underground (except for a local named Ale Ekstrom, who dressed like a nineteenth century tar and played sea shanties on his concertina). Nathan was the face of folk music to me – a guy in a red check shirt and an acoustic guitar and a bold attitude singing out signals of destruction from the Underground.

At this late date, I don't have Nathan's set list in front of me, but I'm pretty sure he sang Old Left songs about the galvanic labor struggles of fifty, sixty years before. Stuff like I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night (Joe Hill was a labor organizer who got shot for his trouble) and You Can't Fool Me, I'm Stickin' to the Union and Solidarity Forever, the Union Makes Us Strong. He might have also sung the beautiful Russian folk anthem Meadowlands.

“Meadowlands, Meadowlands, meadows green and fields in blossom,
Merrily greet the plucky heroes, heroes of the Soviet Republic”...or something like that for fourteen verses.

Hey, I'm not talking politics. Who knew about politics? My politics began in rage because someone was about to drop an H-Bomb on my head and ended with carrying Ban The Bomb! (you bastards) on a placard at demonstrations. I know when I sang Meadowlands every verse was meant to be a comic dada snowball thrown to knock off the proper pillbox hat of uptight materialist sleeping SQUARE America and its weird right-wing defenders - the Christian Ant-Communist Crusade, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and, of course, George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party mates.

Nathan lived in a the dust and cold squalor of a big Victorian flat on Divisadero Street with a dangerous pyrotechnical wizard named Edmund, a kid from LA named Al and my friend Rodney Albin, luthier, harpsichord builder, folk musician and greathearted brother of my heart forever, though he would laugh to hear it.

On a day in early Spring, 1963, Linda Lovely and I picked up Rodney and Nathan in our little liver-colored Studebaker Lark – we were driving up to Rodney's big house party at his uncle's summer place on the Russian River north of San Francisco. Apple blossoms brushed across the windshield as we turned down the little dirt road to the Sebastapol farmhouse where Nathan's father, the great Thirties muralist Bernard Zakheim, lived and worked. His murals illuminated many of San Francisco's civic buildings of the Thirties, most notably Coit Tower, and we were a little in awe of meeting him. Grey-bearded and smiling, Bernard came out into the orchard to greet us. He served us tea and we smiled gratefully. He paid the most attention to Linda.

As we drove on raindrops glistered in the sky like in a Thirties children's picture book or a Grant Wood painting or a Bernard Zakheim mural of a little brown car in purple light painted from high above the two lane highway ribbon and workbooted children inside the car actually listening to rock and roll on the radio in spite of their folk genuinity. We turned right at Occidental and crossed the dripping spring valley and tawny hills into the redwood forest that edged out from the river where the light dims and the air smells damp, musty and poignant.

The light fades fast in the redwoods. I switched on the headlights as we looked for the private road up through the redwoods to the big dank and mildewed summer vacation house, except it's now early spring. Inside the house, ghostly in the ascending mist, lights are welcoming and someone is tuning a banjo, someone else has got the wood stove going and someone else has set four big jugs of Val-Vin Burgundy, $1.99 a gallon, on the trestle table, and yet someone else is working on the spaghetti and French bread and salad, and everything's happening in the kitchen, the only warm room.

The proto-hippies are starting to arriving now in force -- San Francisco State folkniks and Palo Alto folkies and a few hangers on like me, unsure of who I am, because I love this scene but I hate this music!

Continued tomorrow. (I know - where's Jerry? Hold on a bit - he's coming. One day at a time)