Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Websett's Podcast. My
Speaker 1: guest today is Dennis McNally, who has a new book,
Speaker 1: The Last Great Dream, How Bohemians became Hippies and created
Speaker 1: the Sixties. Dennis, why this book?
Speaker 2: Why now?
Speaker 3: I find myself, you know, in my age as apparently
Speaker 3: the self appointed historian of the counterculture in America since
Speaker 3: World War Two. I did books on Kerouac and The
Speaker 3: Grateful Dead and the sort of the deeper background of
Speaker 3: it all, and then I sort of paused, and in
Speaker 3: twenty sixteen I was invited to curate a photo show
Speaker 3: about the Summer of Love for the California Historical Society.
Speaker 3: Every museum in the Bay Area was going wild over,
Speaker 3: you know, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love.
Speaker 3: So I started on that. I started with the beats
Speaker 3: and sort of started poking around. It was it was
Speaker 3: it was a treasure hunt, really, and it was great fun.
Speaker 3: And after a few months I went, this is a book.
Speaker 3: This is the origins of the sixties, of what we
Speaker 3: think of as the sixties, which is in considerable part
Speaker 3: starts starts in the Haye Ashbury. Although it has kindred
Speaker 3: spirits in many places, specifically la New York and London,
Speaker 3: which is what I studied.
Speaker 2: Okay, some of the similar vintages you but many people
Speaker 2: were not alive at the sixties. What do people not
Speaker 2: get about how the sixties really were?
Speaker 3: The media, you know, there's a fascinating article by a
Speaker 3: guy named Hendrik Hertzberg, who would turn out to be
Speaker 3: the writer for The New Yorker and a very distinguished guy,
Speaker 3: and he probably he was a beat reporter for Newsweek
Speaker 3: in the late sixties, and he the went to the
Speaker 3: Haye Ashbury quite early, and for whatever reason, it's a
Speaker 3: brilliant article. And if news We could actually run it
Speaker 3: instead of what they ended up doing, because of course
Speaker 3: different people write, and he was just a traveling reporter,
Speaker 3: they would have had the best thing ever written about
Speaker 3: the hate. Because what happened was the media after the
Speaker 3: BN which exploded the whole story with an enormous turnout
Speaker 3: in Golden Gate Park in January of sixty seven. The
Speaker 3: media descended on the hate, and unfortunately, these are people
Speaker 3: who basically couldn't see past what they saw, which was flowers,
Speaker 3: unusual people, stoned people, and they couldn't see the basically
Speaker 3: spiritual and anti material aspects of that culture and how
Speaker 3: it had all sort of ended up in the music.
Speaker 3: And all they knew was these people were weird and
Speaker 3: they didn't understand them, and that's the way they wrote
Speaker 3: about them. And that's really lasted many years. I teach
Speaker 3: a high occasionally go and lecture high school class that
Speaker 3: focuses on the sixties. And the point I keep trying
Speaker 3: to make to these students, because they're fascinated with the sixties.
Speaker 3: Now a few of them, you know, have hippie parents
Speaker 3: or just you know, some fascination with like the music
Speaker 3: little you know, young deadheads for instance. But what I
Speaker 3: keep trying to emphasize with them is, in my opinion
Speaker 3: that the reason they're interested in the sixties is that
Speaker 3: it's never gone away the issues that were raised, whether
Speaker 3: it's organic food or Asian studies or sexual you know,
Speaker 3: the whole idea of the gentle male hippie, which evolved
Speaker 3: into gay liberal into a welcoming gays to San Francisco
Speaker 3: in the seventies. And you know, now with the issue
Speaker 3: is trans people, what we have actually is, you know,
Speaker 3: an exact reversal of those values with the values of
Speaker 3: the president administration, which you have to remember. One of
Speaker 3: the side effects of the Hayde Ashbury and the free
Speaker 3: speech movement and the Wats rebellion was the election of
Speaker 3: Ronald Reagan as governor in nineteen sixty six and then
Speaker 3: president in nineteen eighty. And from Reagan to Trump is
Speaker 3: you know, pretty much a direct line of resistance to
Speaker 3: the sixties. That's really, you know, to some extent, what
Speaker 3: it's about.
Speaker 2: Okay, what was in the water in California? Why did
Speaker 2: this started in California?
Speaker 3: San Francisco is the only city in America. New Orleans
Speaker 3: is slightly different for the reason that it was a
Speaker 3: colonial city and it's just different. But San Francisco is
Speaker 3: the only cities evolved as economic institutions. You know, people
Speaker 3: come together and they do business. But San Francisco as
Speaker 3: a city was created by frankly, slightly crazy people who
Speaker 3: were not fitting in with their world on the East Coast,
Speaker 3: or in Chile or in China, and they came to
Speaker 3: San Francisco on a gamble and they were gambling on gold,
Speaker 3: of course, and it left this ethos that even though
Speaker 3: you know, it became a city and it had a
Speaker 3: conventional political structure and churches and normal you know, superficial
Speaker 3: normal things. But it left a heritage of tolerance for
Speaker 3: craziness that is unique in American in American cities, the
Speaker 3: example being a man named Emperor Norton. Norton had been, uh,
Speaker 3: went crazy basically after he went busted in the stock market,
Speaker 3: and he dubbed himself Emperor Norton and then proceeded to
Speaker 3: print up Emperor Norton banknotes. Now, you know, every city
Speaker 3: has its crazies, and and you know there's no great
Speaker 3: surprise in that. But what is different about San Francisco
Speaker 3: was that the bartenders and the restaurant people in San
Speaker 3: Francisco accepted these clearly not real dollars and fed him
Speaker 3: out of admiration for his craziness. That's the only way
Speaker 3: I can explain it. And and that's just something that's
Speaker 3: always been a little part of San Francis.
Speaker 2: When did Emperor Norton live.
Speaker 3: In the eighteen sixties and seventies.
Speaker 2: Okay, eighteen sixties, seventies, the beginning of the century, there's
Speaker 2: an earthquake. You're saying that this ethos pre dates all
Speaker 2: of this, It really starts around the time of the
Speaker 2: gold Rush.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, it's just you know, there's a quote in my
Speaker 3: book from Robert Duncan, one of the poets I studied,
Speaker 3: that talks about San Francisco is the Western edge of dreams.
Speaker 3: You know, it's you start talking about geography, and it
Speaker 3: gets a little mystical, and some people get very nervous.
Speaker 3: But the fact is that San Francisco, you know, so
Speaker 3: called Western civilization, which were theoretically least part of starts
Speaker 3: in generally around Europe, Europe and the Middle East, and
Speaker 3: proceeds west, and it gets across America, and it gets
Speaker 3: to the Pacific, and it, you know, stops in the sense,
Speaker 3: and San Francisco was the edge, and in fact, from
Speaker 3: the beginning looked west to Asia just as almost just
Speaker 3: as much as it did back east to you know,
Speaker 3: Boston and New York and the centers of American so
Speaker 3: called civilization.
Speaker 2: Okay, you talked about the roots being in San Francisco,
Speaker 2: Los Angeles, in New York. Let's stay in California for
Speaker 2: a second. What was going on in Los Angeles?
Speaker 3: Los Angeless is somewhat different from San Francisco. As I say,
Speaker 3: the tolerance for crazy, well, it came out different, and
Speaker 3: Los Angeles unusually did not have this big tradition. I
Speaker 3: mean it was founded by Roman Catholic priests, of course,
Speaker 3: and then around the turn of the century and heading
Speaker 3: toward the era when Hollywood sort of brought many people
Speaker 3: to Los Angeles, it did not have that tradition. But
Speaker 3: what it did have, and I don't particularly have an
Speaker 3: explanation for it, is an openness to unusual religions, so
Speaker 3: that theosophy prospered there. They brought in I've just gone
Speaker 3: blank on his name. Do to Christian Murdy, who they
Speaker 3: decided was the new Jesus. He said, nah, I'm just
Speaker 3: a teacher. But stayed in Los Angeles and they're all kinds,
Speaker 3: you know, esoteric occult astrology. Joseph Campbell, the great historian
Speaker 3: of art, came to San Francisco, I mean Los Angeles
Speaker 3: in the thirties and was bemoaning the fact that everybody
Speaker 3: in Los Angeles seemed to be into astrology, which he
Speaker 3: regarded with some reserve, shall we say. And you know,
Speaker 3: so there was this this receptiveness and then what happened eventually, Uh,
Speaker 3: and the most interesting for me, other than for instance,
Speaker 3: the the the music world, which Los Angeles contributed John
Speaker 3: Cage to the world. And uh, but the the main
Speaker 3: line of cultural transference was in art. Los Angeles immediately
Speaker 3: immediately became in a narrow way. I mean, it wasn't
Speaker 3: like it was in the Los Angeles times. But the
Speaker 3: fact is that that modern art, uh and abstract expressionism
Speaker 3: and then later pop art, you know, it just came
Speaker 3: straight out of Los Angeles. Andie Warhol's first show was
Speaker 3: in Los Angeles, and there was a receptiveness to to
Speaker 3: experimental art that Los Angeles, Uh, you know gave really
Speaker 3: gave the United States.
Speaker 2: Now you talk about third point of the triangle in
Speaker 2: New York. How does New York figure into your sixties thesis?
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, New York was the capital of freethinking in America,
Speaker 3: at least since Walt Whitman, you know, held court at Fafts,
Speaker 3: which was this bar in the Bowery, which is to say,
Speaker 3: just on the edge of Greenwich Village. And for whatever reason,
Speaker 3: Greenwich Village became the home of freethinking from really the beginning,
Speaker 3: in particular the beginning of the twentieth century and through
Speaker 3: what they call it the introduction of modernism in American
Speaker 3: art and literature, and there was the Masses and Robert
Speaker 3: Eastman and all kinds of things. Mabel Dodge Lewin was
Speaker 3: doing peyote in the village in nineteen teens before she
Speaker 3: and d Lawrence moved out to uh to Santa Fe
Speaker 3: or Taos, I should say, and you know, there's there's
Speaker 3: always been this, you know, froth the the hippie specific
Speaker 3: hippie thing was tricked to me. The the catalyst, the
Speaker 3: trigger of it was LSD.
Speaker 2: But before before, before you get there, okay, so we
Speaker 2: have the landscape, the ground is tilled with all of
Speaker 2: this craziness, insight, astrology, different thinking. When does it start
Speaker 2: to Germany? You know, you talk about Norton in the
Speaker 2: eighteen sixties. When did these things start to flower? Is
Speaker 2: it all as we say, post war, post World War two?
Speaker 2: Is it before that? When does it start to coalesce?
Speaker 2: We not coalesced. When did it start to germinate?
Speaker 3: Well, that's a very good question. I would say it
Speaker 3: started to germinate again in the introduction of the modern
Speaker 3: to an openness, to a culture that was not explicitly
Speaker 3: Christian for instance, that was you know that anticipated a
Speaker 3: certain looseness and freedom that runs into the rest of
Speaker 3: the twentieth century. By the you know, one of the elements,
Speaker 3: for instance, in an important element ethical element in the
Speaker 3: scene of Greenwich Village was Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers,
Speaker 3: and that started in the thirties, for instance, again as
Speaker 3: a conscious communal attempt. She had started out as a
Speaker 3: left wing socialist and then decided that it just it
Speaker 3: lacked soul. She adopted Catholicism, but was concerned that the
Speaker 3: Church did not have enough social concerns for you know,
Speaker 3: the the less privileged, and created the Catholic Workers, which
Speaker 3: had a real impact in the Greenish village, particularly in
Speaker 3: their pacifism. But yet so it germinates in various strands.
Speaker 3: Before World War Two, but you have this devastating depression
Speaker 3: which you know, people generally speaking it was more important
Speaker 3: to survive than to try and create something new in
Speaker 3: many ways during the thirties. Then you have this complete
Speaker 3: unified effort during World War two in which everyone whether
Speaker 3: it was women going to you know, work in factories
Speaker 3: or boy scouts collecting newspapers for you know, recycling dribes.
Speaker 3: Everyone was rationed sugar and meat and tires and whatnot.
Speaker 3: So you have this unified effort against fascism. And then
Speaker 3: what happens is we get to the end of World
Speaker 3: War Two and we should be you know cha la lah,
Speaker 3: a happy day, except that we're immediately in a Cold War.
Speaker 3: And the problem with the Cold War is that a
Speaker 3: lot of Americans said, wait a minute, you know, we
Speaker 3: fought this war. We deserve you know, we deserve a win.
Speaker 3: What is this with, you know, continuing yet another war.
Speaker 3: And the problem is that rather than accept that, hey,
Speaker 3: eighteen million Soviet people died in that war, you know,
Speaker 3: they have their reasons for doing what they're doing. There
Speaker 3: was a large trend towards blaming internal flaws in the
Speaker 3: American resistance, which is to say, the Roosevelt administration, and
Speaker 3: they called it communism. They say, oh, there must be communists,
Speaker 3: there must be a We all know now that sometimes
Speaker 3: people will grab a conspiracy theory as a more satisfying
Speaker 3: answer to why things are the way they are, rather
Speaker 3: than saying, well, the objective forces of history look at this.
Speaker 3: Of course they're you know, going to resist the Soviets.
Speaker 3: So anyway, you end up with what we call McCarthyism.
Speaker 3: Except it was a great deal more than than Joe McCarthy,
Speaker 3: and uh so there's this incredible repression and and uh,
Speaker 3: you know, intolerance of any deviating viewpoint, in particular sexual.
Speaker 3: I mean, a great deal of the of the the
Speaker 3: government attacks on on, you know, so called investigating so
Speaker 3: called disloyal people ended up being about gay people and
Speaker 3: about anybody. That nudism was considered subversive. And it literally
Speaker 3: it's in the law that Eisenhower passed or his executive order.
Speaker 3: So and then on top of all that, you have
Speaker 3: this incredible burst again after the depression of prosperity during
Speaker 3: the fifties, and everybody's you know, gobbling up their prosperity,
Speaker 3: and you know, you can't blame them, but the price
Speaker 3: of that prosperity was silence. You know, don't don't push it,
Speaker 3: don't challenge things. I was interviewing Michael McClure, the beat poet,
Speaker 3: and I said, you know, why did on the Road howl?
Speaker 3: But howl in a more rarefied way, because it's one
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty people heard it. First. On the Road
Speaker 3: was this best seller, and you know, a whole raft
Speaker 3: of people, starting with Janis Joplin, David Bowie, Bob Dylan
Speaker 3: and Jerry Garcia just as examples of sixties. We people
Speaker 3: we associate with sixties read Kerouac and went, yes, this
Speaker 3: is a world I want to be part of. And
Speaker 3: it was basically about spiritual freedom, about looseness, about exploring
Speaker 3: rather than conforming. And it had this incredible impact. So
Speaker 3: I interviewed Michael mclaur and I said, why did this
Speaker 3: book have such a powerful influence. I read it and
Speaker 3: I like it and it's important to me. But and
Speaker 3: he just looked at me. I was young, and he
Speaker 3: looked at me and he said, Dennis, did you live
Speaker 3: in the fifties? And I said, well, you know, I
Speaker 3: was ten when they ended, so I kind of sort
Speaker 3: of but not. And he went, well, if you had,
Speaker 3: you'd understand why. It just it was radical, and you know,
Speaker 3: it was denounced by the right, and it had the
Speaker 3: extraordinary good fortune of having its first great review, its
Speaker 3: first review, you it's important review done not by the
Speaker 3: main critic of the New York Times, a guy named
Speaker 3: Orville Prescott, nicknamed Prissy, who would have lunched it, and
Speaker 3: instead by a young editor who was very interested in
Speaker 3: this stuff named Gilbert milsted it's one of the discovering
Speaker 3: him was one of the the uh the great successes
Speaker 3: of my research on Kerouac, because nobody had talked to
Speaker 3: him before, and that was you know that he was
Speaker 3: open to it, and he wrote a review that that
Speaker 3: said that On the Road was the fifties version of
Speaker 3: The Sun Also Rises, and you know it's never stopped
Speaker 3: since God only knows how many copies it'd sold.
Speaker 2: Okay, in your book, you talk about the poets Kenneth
Speaker 2: rex Roth, Lawrence Ferlingetti. How does that end up in
Speaker 2: San France, Cisco, and how does that Germany?
Speaker 3: If you decide that you're going to be a poet
Speaker 3: and you're not at an academic institution, you right away
Speaker 3: put yourself outside normal culture because you're not going to
Speaker 3: make any money and you're going to have to, you know,
Speaker 3: find a way to preserve your voice. Rex Roth, I
Speaker 3: start the book, you know, when I was doing that
Speaker 3: photo curation, I had started with the obvious, which was
Speaker 3: how and which was in nineteen fifty five. But how
Speaker 3: and Allen Ginsberg, who was of course an import from
Speaker 3: New York, along with Grolengetty, all came into San Francisco
Speaker 3: in the mid fifties that had already had a really
Speaker 3: thriving poetry scene. It was sort of led because he
Speaker 3: literally had he had salons classes in two things, poetry
Speaker 3: and anarchism, various flavors of anarchism, and anarchism not as
Speaker 3: throwing rocks or bombs or whatever, but anarchism as in
Speaker 3: freedom of thought. And that, you know, that's rex Roft's
Speaker 3: fundamental connection. So when I went to start the book
Speaker 3: as a book, I decided that the connection of rex
Speaker 3: Roth and Robert Duncan, who was raised by theosophists and
Speaker 3: occultists and various you know, mystic, very mystical family, he
Speaker 3: brought in again an openness to shall we say, the mysterious,
Speaker 3: and together they generated a scene that quickly included Philip Lamontilla.
Speaker 3: It was very interesting pairing because of course Duncan was
Speaker 3: very gay, to the extent that he had literally outed
Speaker 3: himself in nineteen forty four, which is remarkable, ended up,
Speaker 3: which resulted in him being basically completely ignored by the
Speaker 3: Eastern literary establishment for the rest of his life. That
Speaker 3: that's just simply seemed seemed to revolt people on the
Speaker 3: East Coast. It didn't bother anybody in San Francisco. Interestingly,
Speaker 3: Rexcroft was you know, occasionally periodically homophobic, and somehow it
Speaker 3: didn't matter to him at any rate. They together, they
Speaker 3: sort of stirred up this interest in in poetry that
Speaker 3: led to you know, many other poets, James Brown and
Speaker 3: Helen Adam and all kinds of people, and there was
Speaker 3: this very active poetry scene and it was all about poetry,
Speaker 3: to oversimplify, but poetry that came from the heart, that
Speaker 3: was that was individual, individually focused. At that point, the
Speaker 3: the new critics that dominated American poetry, mostly from the
Speaker 3: East Coast, basically prized uh, precision, irony, distance, lack of emotion,
Speaker 3: all the kinds of things that San Franciscans, the San
Speaker 3: Francisco poets said now and among other things, it was
Speaker 3: in San Francisco was poetry made to be read out
Speaker 3: loud and performed, and they, you know, poetry readings became
Speaker 3: a standard feature of San Francisco poetry. That message or
Speaker 3: that you know, that that that practice that the poets developed, spread,
Speaker 3: among other things, to the students at what was then
Speaker 3: called the California School of Fine Arts and later the
Speaker 3: San Francisco Art Institute and students there in particular, started
Speaker 3: as the fifties went along, spreading that message in their
Speaker 3: own lives. The classic example of that is a guy
Speaker 3: named Wally Hedrick. Wally Hedrick was a student at CSFA
Speaker 3: and then eventually taught there and became a very distinguished
Speaker 3: assemblage what they called funk Art that was, you know,
Speaker 3: associated was the beat painting or in his case, metalwork
Speaker 3: version of poetry in nineteen fifty eight. To skip ahead,
Speaker 3: but really, in some ways the crux of my whole book,
Speaker 3: you know, you can talk about it is he's teaching.
Speaker 3: Wally is teaching at the Institute what was going to
Speaker 3: become the Institute Saturday class to high school students, and
Speaker 3: one of his students was a young man named Jerry Garcia.
Speaker 3: And one of the things that Wally did in his
Speaker 3: classes was play acoustic blues like Big Bill Brunsi and such,
Speaker 3: which resulted in Jerry Garcia. When he got an accordion
Speaker 3: for his birthday that year, Piston moaned and cried and
Speaker 3: told his mother, no, no, no, it has to be a guitar,
Speaker 3: and you know it, and there he went for the
Speaker 3: rest of his life. But at the same time, he
Speaker 3: and his buddies said, because remember this is nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 3: this is you know, current bestseller, front page news and
Speaker 3: top of the bestseller list. He said, what is this
Speaker 3: beat thing? You know we keep reading about it. And
Speaker 3: Wally replied, you're a beat. Go down a City Lights,
Speaker 3: get this book and you know, on the road and
Speaker 3: you know you'll see. And he did, and it was
Speaker 3: his bible for the really for the rest of his life.
Speaker 3: His role model, carok was his role model. Which is
Speaker 3: why thirty years later or twenty years later, whenever it
Speaker 3: was that I popped up, I sent him a copy
Speaker 3: of my biography of Kdillac and he eventually turned to
Speaker 3: me and said, why don't you do us? And I said,
Speaker 3: good idea. And that led me into the next stage.
Speaker 3: I had already sort of been adet head, and that
Speaker 3: led me to this next stage after the Beats, which
Speaker 3: was hippies and the Grateful Dead.
Speaker 2: Okay, you mentioned City Lights, which opens in nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: three in Los Angeles. There are issues with the government
Speaker 2: and there are riots downtown. If you were not downtown
Speaker 2: and there wasn't a newspaper, you would have no idea
Speaker 2: this was happening. When City lights opened to what did
Speaker 2: we was the general population aware of this? And was
Speaker 2: Jerry Garcia just lucky he was in the right place
Speaker 2: at the right time taking this class or was this
Speaker 2: in the water such that other people were flowering at
Speaker 2: the same time.
Speaker 3: It was kind of in the water, but it was
Speaker 3: also you know, luck, but not just look, Jerry Garcia
Speaker 3: was consciously sort of skeptical of the conventional culture and
Speaker 3: as a paint again, as a paint if you identify
Speaker 3: yourself as an artist, poet or artist paint or whatever,
Speaker 3: you automatic you automatically, you know, challenge conventional norms. I mean,
Speaker 3: you know, you're you're you're looking for a different path.
Speaker 3: And he he Uh so it wasn't just luck that
Speaker 3: he popped up in that in that classroom. Uh, but uh,
Speaker 3: it was important, of course that that Fri Lnghetti who
Speaker 3: took over city lights from a guy named Peter Martin
Speaker 3: and made it what it was that you know, he
Speaker 3: he got he was a trained poet. I mean he
Speaker 3: had gone to he had gotten his doctorate at the
Speaker 3: Sorbonne after World War Two on the GI Bill, and uh,
Speaker 3: he gets he wants to live in a city that
Speaker 3: that has some soul. That's that's what he said. And
Speaker 3: he took it through the train to San Francisco and
Speaker 3: immediately went Yes, he said, he found again a poetry
Speaker 3: culture that was what he said, provincial but liberating. And
Speaker 3: he created a clubhouse, you know, a social gathering like
Speaker 3: the Beats or or you know, any hippies later needs
Speaker 3: physical institutions to get, you know, to gather around. And
Speaker 3: for for the Beats, it was city lights and then
Speaker 3: a bar called The Place on Grant Avenue, and things flowered,
Speaker 3: people connected, and you know, how people find these directions
Speaker 3: these paths is one of those eternal questions that you
Speaker 3: have to ask each individual. And unfortunately nobody was going
Speaker 3: around saying, so why are you here in those days.
Speaker 3: It's a pity. Speaking as a historian, I would have
Speaker 3: loved to have come across that research.
Speaker 2: But okay, you mentioned, let's get back to LSD. How
Speaker 2: does LSD start and permeate the culture and why in
Speaker 2: San Francisco.
Speaker 3: The first introduction in any significant way into American culture
Speaker 3: of psychedelics, and it was originally psilocybin, and which is
Speaker 3: a derivative from peyote, but you know, so organic in
Speaker 3: that sense, versus LSD, which is sort of you know,
Speaker 3: laboratory created was of course from la and that was
Speaker 3: Aldos Huxley's The Doors of Perception. Aldus Huxley had left
Speaker 3: England fleeing World War two and come to Los Angeles
Speaker 3: for two reasons. One was that openness to alternative religion,
Speaker 3: which he was quite aware of, and he studied with
Speaker 3: Vedanta and a lot of stuff like that, and also
Speaker 3: the weather. Frankly, you know, it's a pleasant change from
Speaker 3: from London. And eventually but he was, you know, again
Speaker 3: an omnivorous seeker. And he read an article by a
Speaker 3: guy named Humphrey Osmond who was doing very sane, sober
Speaker 3: research on the effect of psychedelics and alcoholism in edmund
Speaker 3: Don't ask me why, but Edmonton, Canada, and he wrote
Speaker 3: an article. Huxley read it and said, you know, at
Speaker 3: that time they largely called psychedelics, and in particular when
Speaker 3: they got to LSD, uh psychoto neumenic which means imitating schizophrenia,
Speaker 3: that they thought it duplicated when people tripping were duplicating schizophrenia.
Speaker 3: And Osmond said, no, no, no, you know that that's
Speaker 3: probably not fair. How about psychedelic and he created the
Speaker 3: term psychedelic, which means mind manifesting. You know, whatever's there
Speaker 3: is gonna, you know, be shown to you in the
Speaker 3: course of your your experience. And Ousley said, I mean,
Speaker 3: Huxley said, bring it. And OsmAnd came to Los Angeles
Speaker 3: for a conference and brought some mescaline with him, which
Speaker 3: is psilocybin, and he took it, and being Huxley immediately
Speaker 3: wrote a small book about it called The Doors of Perception,
Speaker 3: which is really the first sort of message and to
Speaker 3: anybody he's sort of exploring these sorts of issues in
Speaker 3: America that there's this thing. Now. During the fifties, the
Speaker 3: use of CIA was largely controlled by the CIA. They
Speaker 3: had a program and this is not conspiracy theory, you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's it's well documented history. They had thought that
Speaker 3: it might be a really good truth stroke, which turned
Speaker 3: out not to be. So, you know, you it revealed
Speaker 3: all you could never figure out what, you know, what
Speaker 3: was literal and what was you know, imaginary. But they
Speaker 3: there were experimenters, and they used to a combinate a
Speaker 3: network of psychologists and various strange people, a lot of
Speaker 3: strange people that grafted themselves onto the psychedelic earliest psychedelic.
Speaker 3: There was a guy named Captain L. Hubbard, who, among
Speaker 3: other things, turned on some you know, was was involved
Speaker 3: with introducing LSD to Henry Luce. Okay, Henry Luce was
Speaker 3: the owner of Time magazine, a very you know, big deal,
Speaker 3: and he and his wife they lost their daughter and
Speaker 3: in her sorrow missus Luce Claire Claire Booth Loose reached
Speaker 3: out to various people, including one of Huxley's friends, Gerald Hurd,
Speaker 3: and tried psychedelics so, you know, many times as grief
Speaker 3: therapy basically, and I think it worked for Loose did
Speaker 3: it once? It ended up meaning that psychedelics was covered
Speaker 3: for a long time rather favorably by Time and Life.
Speaker 3: There were very positive articles about including one great article
Speaker 3: about Carry Grant addressing his alcoholism with with psychedelics. So
Speaker 3: you know, this is one of the again one of
Speaker 3: the weird threads that that that introduced it to people.
Speaker 3: The reason it had and in particular in a big
Speaker 3: time way in the San Francisco area, was the work
Speaker 3: of a fellow named Owsley Stanley. Owsley Stanley was a
Speaker 3: It was a fascinating character, brilliant and also in my opinion,
Speaker 3: probably on the autism spectrum, because his relationships with people
Speaker 3: were always fraught. But but he got interested and ended
Speaker 3: up making five million hits of LSD, very strong hits
Speaker 3: on my Dad, so that the scene, the San Francisco,
Speaker 3: you know, summer Lolove scene, so called the hippie scene,
Speaker 3: had fuel. In other words, there were people. There are
Speaker 3: a lot of people, you know, through the fifties, artists
Speaker 3: of all stripes, theater and ants and whatnot, but in
Speaker 3: particular in the Bay Area, but elsewhere, and they all
Speaker 3: are experimenting and they get to LSD and whatever else
Speaker 3: you say about LSD, and you can say a lot
Speaker 3: people have. The fact is that if you've taken LSD,
Speaker 3: you realize, to quote Jerry Garcia, that it reveals that
Speaker 3: there's a lot more going on in life in reality.
Speaker 3: Then you've been taught that it has many layers and
Speaker 3: many possibilities, and it's all much more interesting. It can
Speaker 3: be frightening, it can be whatever. But there's more there
Speaker 3: than just being told, well, you know, live your life,
Speaker 3: you're gonna die, you know, make babies and be normal
Speaker 3: quote unquote. And LSD was a key to exploration.
Speaker 2: Let's just stay with Jerry Garcia for Mario so called
Speaker 2: Captain Tripps. He starts with LSD, but has his life ensues.
Speaker 2: He ends up being hooked on Heroin. Where is the connection,
Speaker 2: if any, between LSD and on that journey for Jerry.
Speaker 3: Garcia, well, psychedelics, whether it was pot which is a
Speaker 3: very mild psychedelic and LSD opened him up to, you know,
Speaker 3: many things, including opening his his playing, which was based
Speaker 3: on improvisation, into you know, an entire musical world. His
Speaker 3: problem and was that, unfortunately, among other things, he became
Speaker 3: deified to the point where, uh, when you're stuck in
Speaker 3: your hotel room for an entire tour because you literally
Speaker 3: can't take a walk, you can't you can't go to
Speaker 3: the museum. You know, you're in New York and you
Speaker 3: can't go to the Museum of Modern Art because you're
Speaker 3: gonna get blombed on eventually, and lots of other stuff.
Speaker 3: I could go, you know, great length, but unresolved issues
Speaker 3: from his childhood ended up fighting depression, which which he
Speaker 3: would never acknowledge and which people never saw because he
Speaker 3: was an unusual guy in that even depressed, he was
Speaker 3: endlessly curious about the outside world. He would talk with
Speaker 3: strangers and people that you would ordinarily go you know eh,
Speaker 3: or interviews, which is why people love to interview, because
Speaker 3: he did not do merchandising. He wanted to have a conversation,
Speaker 3: which frankly, you know people from Rolling Stone would go, wow,
Speaker 3: he just wants to talk. I once, as the grateful
Speaker 3: that's publicist. I once started. I begged him to promote
Speaker 3: a side issue something he'd done with David Grisman. I
Speaker 3: think to this interview he was doing with Rolling Stone,
Speaker 3: and you know, there's one paragraph on half a paragraph
Speaker 3: and there's this long passage about Jerry's daughter then daughter,
Speaker 3: three year old daughter, and I was about ready to
Speaker 3: just read the Riot Act to the editor who had
Speaker 3: done the interview, and he said, listen. I tried, and
Speaker 3: I realized he was telling the truth. I tried to
Speaker 3: ask him about the music. He just wanted to talk
Speaker 3: about his fascination with you know, what was going on
Speaker 3: in his daughter's mind as he was growing up. Well,
Speaker 3: that's that's Jerry. But unfortunately, as I say, unacknowledged depression.
Speaker 3: He's self medicated and that you know, he he was
Speaker 3: anti authoritarian, so he wouldn't go to a doctor. So
Speaker 3: he chose something.
Speaker 2: Okay, Jerry is obviously not here, but inside relevant of
Speaker 2: what he verbalized, he was testifying about the powers of LSD.
Speaker 2: Was he convincing themselves there were other powers of insight
Speaker 2: in the other drugs he ultimately gravitated to. Or would
Speaker 2: he admit really, at his core this was self medication?
Speaker 3: Oh? I think you know? He yes, he would admit it.
Speaker 3: A friend of his, John McIntyre, had been with the
Speaker 3: band and that had gone away and had come back
Speaker 3: and saw Jerry, I want to say, in the early
Speaker 3: middle eighties, at which time he was already pretty well addicted,
Speaker 3: and John said how are you? And Jerry said, well,
Speaker 3: mostly I'm just becoming a junkie. He knew what was
Speaker 3: going on, he he you know, he uh, he could
Speaker 3: acknowledge it. But you know, he once said that it
Speaker 3: wasn't that he could be ornery about things like his
Speaker 3: personal space. You know, people tried to, oh, Jerry, you're
Speaker 3: hurting yourself, and you know this is more than once.
Speaker 3: Many deadheads come up to me or you know, anybody
Speaker 3: associated with the band and said, why didn't you save him?
Speaker 3: And my response is, have you ever you know, known
Speaker 3: someone deeply addicted, and you know, until they're ready to
Speaker 3: confront this, it ain't gonna work. And it didn't.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's go back to LSD. You know, LSD is
Speaker 2: not illegal till a certain point in the sixties. Honestly,
Speaker 2: stan Lee makes his doses. Is this a small qude
Speaker 2: of people, or is when does LSD start to spread?
Speaker 2: You know, the country at large was a number of
Speaker 2: years behind San Francisco, but certainly from sixty to sixty
Speaker 2: four to sixty five, the rest of the country was oblivious.
Speaker 2: It was almost to hangover the fifties. What was going
Speaker 2: on in San Francisco.
Speaker 3: Well, there was, certainly there was a community. There's a
Speaker 3: community of seekers, of people that were comfortable. There was
Speaker 3: a place called the Tape Music Center, which opened its
Speaker 3: main thing in nineteen sixty three. Now what made it
Speaker 3: interesting This was electronic composers a guy named Mortzebotnik, Pauline
Speaker 3: Oliverro's and Ramon Sender. And they're producing music that is
Speaker 3: not popular, I mean in the capital pre popular sense.
Speaker 3: It's you know, bleeps and blurbs and very you know,
Speaker 3: very limited market. It had a much greater influence than
Speaker 3: it had any business doing because among other things. When
Speaker 3: they opened, they had this building. They rented this building
Speaker 3: and very near the Hate. It was part of the
Speaker 3: transition from of Bohemia or whatever you want to call it,
Speaker 3: from North Beach to the Hate. But they included in
Speaker 3: their building KPFA, which was sort of a voice of
Speaker 3: cultural descent in the Bay Area, very unusual in America
Speaker 3: when it started in the fifties and through the sixties,
Speaker 3: and the Anhelprint Dance Workshop, which was again a very
Speaker 3: revolutionary new approach to dance, very very much in line
Speaker 3: with what else was going on, but for dance. And
Speaker 3: they started spinning off all these cultural fusions where you'd
Speaker 3: have events which combine art and dance and theater and
Speaker 3: music and whatnot. And one of these, for instance, took
Speaker 3: place one of the spinoffs at one of the aligned
Speaker 3: groups was called the Mime Troop, and the Mime Troop
Speaker 3: had a setup at a church on Cap Street in
Speaker 3: the Mission District of San Francisco, and they did this
Speaker 3: benefit for a guy who got arrested for pot and
Speaker 3: it combined all those things. One of the musicians was
Speaker 3: a young man, an unknown named Phil Lesh and as
Speaker 3: he later wrote, he didn't really know you know why
Speaker 3: he was I mean, he was there because it was fun,
Speaker 3: but he didn't exactly know what they were doing, whether
Speaker 3: they were just trying to you know, apati that has
Speaker 3: smacked the bourgeois or what. He just knew that it
Speaker 3: was incredible fun and that it led into improvisation, which
Speaker 3: two years later he leaving the musical familiar that he
Speaker 3: had been in, which was either big banjazz or neo
Speaker 3: classical modernist stuff, and started playing improvisational music with Jerry Garcia.
Speaker 3: But you know, that stuff just sort of flowers in
Speaker 3: the early sixties, and these are the kind of people that,
Speaker 3: when said you should try this, it's amazing experience, they did.
Speaker 3: The thing about the Hayde Ashbury was that it took
Speaker 3: what were the anti mainstream opinions of the artists, the
Speaker 3: avant garde artists of the fifties, and combined it with
Speaker 3: the music. And what had also happened in parallel was
Speaker 3: the folk scene, which is overtly political and had always
Speaker 3: been again associated with what had started out as the
Speaker 3: IWW and was now would he Guthrie and through the
Speaker 3: fifties as they gently left wing mode and all these
Speaker 3: folkies here are the Beatles yet another major influence, and
Speaker 3: start and go, No, this rock and roll thing sounds
Speaker 3: like fun. And they started playing rock and roll in
Speaker 3: in particular in San Francisco and for instance in La
Speaker 3: with the Birds, and in folk rock in New York
Speaker 3: City with the Love and Spoonful and so forth. And
Speaker 3: the end result is and then they encounter LSD by
Speaker 3: and large in just about that order, and they start
Speaker 3: creating an improvisational not always improvisational. The Jefferson Airplane, which
Speaker 3: was by far the more influential of the bands at
Speaker 3: that point. Then you certainly more than the Grateful Dead
Speaker 3: used only you know, certain elements of improvisation, and they
Speaker 3: were actually much more well for starters. They could sing,
Speaker 3: unlike the Dead in the early days. And the end
Speaker 3: result was you have this this fusion of message and mode,
Speaker 3: namely psychedelic rock, and it all comes together in San
Speaker 3: in particular the Birds triggered you know, mirrored it or
Speaker 3: started it really in some ways in at Zero's where
Speaker 3: again they combined dancing LSD some LCA. I don't know
Speaker 3: how much. It is very clear. There's a great article
Speaker 3: in the Free Press which was, by the way, the
Speaker 3: first way that people in La had to sort of
Speaker 3: connect with each other in that you know, Milliere, but
Speaker 3: this guy and right now I'm going blank on his name,
Speaker 3: but the guy who wrote the article, it clearly clearly
Speaker 3: had done LSD. And I suspect some of the people
Speaker 3: in the audience at Zero's had because again, you know,
Speaker 3: nobody was concealing anything in in San Francisco, and everybody
Speaker 3: in San Francisco knows somebody in Los Angeles, so there
Speaker 3: was there was already a flow, and the end result
Speaker 3: is the so called Summer of love.
Speaker 2: Wait, wait, before we get to the Summer of a
Speaker 2: hold on a second. Yeah, you have the mind true benefit. Okay,
Speaker 2: obviously if you're hipped to that world, you know about it. Really,
Speaker 2: by the seventies, every city has a local free rag
Speaker 2: where it has all the listings. If I'm living in
Speaker 2: San Francisco in the early sixties, am I aware? They say?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there's a San Francisco My troop not interested,
Speaker 2: but I know it's there, or is it? Nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: six sixty seven? Also, this was happening right under my nose.
Speaker 2: I had no idea.
Speaker 3: No, the mind troop had, you know, the benefit for
Speaker 3: the Mine Troop, which was in November of sixty five
Speaker 3: for starters, they had been arrested for performing without a
Speaker 3: license in the parks. They had gotten their permits. They
Speaker 3: had permits for forty nine shows all over the city.
Speaker 3: And then one of the one of the supervisors, not supervisors,
Speaker 3: but the members of the Park and Rec Commission said no, no, no,
Speaker 3: they're vulgar. We can't allow this. After what he saw
Speaker 3: the first performance. Then they went no, we're canceling. Well,
Speaker 3: this is called freedom of speech, and in fact that's
Speaker 3: what the judge decided not terribly long thereafter. So they
Speaker 3: went to the park, didn't set up a stage because
Speaker 3: that would have violated their lack of permit. But Ronnie Davis,
Speaker 3: the leader of the Mine Troope, said, you know, in
Speaker 3: the usual introduction, ladies and gentlemen and the Mime Troop
Speaker 3: of San Francisco presents of us, and they really immediately
Speaker 3: just for talking, they busted it. So it's in the paper,
Speaker 3: so you know, if you're if you're you know, again,
Speaker 3: it's sort of in the air in San Francisco who
Speaker 3: they are. But the San Francisco scene in a way,
Speaker 3: for instance, the Los Angeles to the best of my knowledge,
Speaker 3: didn't have other than the Freak, which you know is
Speaker 3: a very important connector. But in San Francisco it was
Speaker 3: in the daily paper because the San Francisco Chronicle had
Speaker 3: two people that covered the emerging counterculture from the fifties,
Speaker 3: namely a guy named Tom Albright, who was the art
Speaker 3: critic and very sympathetic to Wally Hedrick and all the rest,
Speaker 3: and a very important guy named Ralph Gleeson. Ralph Gleeson
Speaker 3: had been was a jazz started out as a jazz critic.
Speaker 3: He was the first daily first jazz critic, regular jazz
Speaker 3: critic at a daily American newspapers. I have read. I
Speaker 3: assume it's correct, but he's open to all kinds of music.
Speaker 3: So in the fall of nineteen sixty five, these four
Speaker 3: people who call themselves the Family Dog went to meet
Speaker 3: with him and told him that they were going to
Speaker 3: put on some shows and that the reason to that
Speaker 3: point rock and roll had been produced at the Cow Palace,
Speaker 3: and there were the sort of standard rock and roll
Speaker 3: shows of the era where you had ten bands that
Speaker 3: each played five songs, and you couldn't dance. You're getting arrested.
Speaker 3: People were getting arrested if they danced, and as Luria Castell,
Speaker 3: the kind of the leader of the dog said, you
Speaker 3: know the only problem is that they can't dance. We're
Speaker 3: going to have a show where everybody can dance. You know,
Speaker 3: there's not going to be any problems, which was quite correct.
Speaker 3: And they started shows in as I say, in the fall,
Speaker 3: and Gleeson was all over it. So it didn't you know,
Speaker 3: you didn't have to be hip. You didn't have to
Speaker 3: be you know. All you had to do is read
Speaker 3: the daily paper and read Ralph Gleeson, and he told
Speaker 3: you where to including the mind Troop benefit and other
Speaker 3: benefits there were three. In fact, he covered it all,
Speaker 3: so all you had to do is read the paper.
Speaker 3: So it was a lot easier because of Gleeson. Uh,
Speaker 3: this kind of information dissemination was much easier than almost
Speaker 3: anywhere else.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's do some cleanup work. You talk about the
Speaker 2: migration from North Beach to the heat.
Speaker 3: Why and when The departure from from North Beach, of course,
Speaker 3: was obviously a cause of two things. One was there
Speaker 3: was an influx influx of tourists thronging Grand Avenue, and
Speaker 3: you know, sometimes dumb young young guys who get you know,
Speaker 3: sloshed and looked for trouble. At least one cop who
Speaker 3: hated interracial couples and harassed some of the poets who
Speaker 3: were in interracial couples, and just in general, rents went
Speaker 3: up and it just you know, North Beach sort of
Speaker 3: lost its luster. The interesting thing about the Hate was,
Speaker 3: first it was it had been a student neighborhood since
Speaker 3: the early fifties. San Francisco State University was originally at
Speaker 3: the located at the corner of Hate and Laguna, one
Speaker 3: end the east end of Hate Street, so it became
Speaker 3: you know, people were attending it. They lived in the Hate,
Speaker 3: which had been a very elegant neighborhood through the thirties,
Speaker 3: but in the third the Depression, it was cut off.
Speaker 3: These really magnificent buildings were cut up into apartments, very
Speaker 3: pretty expensive apartments. In fifty four, I don't know when
Speaker 3: they started there, frankly, maybe the thirties even, but in
Speaker 3: fifty four they moved to the current location, which is
Speaker 3: out in a residential neighborhood called the Sunset Far Away,
Speaker 3: but fortunately a straight streetcar ride to the Hate, so
Speaker 3: it stayed a student neighborhood. The other important thing was that,
Speaker 3: in their magnificent ignorance, the Dwight Eisenhower created the National
Speaker 3: Defense Highway Act and the engineers started building interstate freeways,
Speaker 3: which was fine in between say San Francisco and Reno,
Speaker 3: but they planned on doing having nine of them criss
Speaker 3: crossing San Francisco, dividing the city into little boxes. Fortunately,
Speaker 3: the supervisors resisted all but of it, and the last
Speaker 3: two were the last. The last one to be rejected
Speaker 3: was going to run straight up the Haye Ashbury neighborhood
Speaker 3: through Golden Gate Park so that you get to the
Speaker 3: Golden Gate Bridge faster. Locals were not having it, and fortunately,
Speaker 3: by March of sixty six it was rejected as you know,
Speaker 3: not not being useful. The result, however, had been that
Speaker 3: property values in the Hatue were like rock bottom, so
Speaker 3: it made it a very inexpensive neighborhood. As I say,
Speaker 3: uh the uh. The Tape Music Center sort of brought
Speaker 3: a lot of adventurous souls into an area with like
Speaker 3: literally one block off Hate Street and bit by bit
Speaker 3: and there was some other There's a place a coffee
Speaker 3: house called the Blue Uni Corn, which again brought but
Speaker 3: The fundamental reason was it was cheap. I mean you
Speaker 3: can to get you know, some friends and end up
Speaker 3: paying twenty or thirty dollars a month a person to
Speaker 3: live in the hate and this gives you you know,
Speaker 3: most people can scavenge together that much money even then,
Speaker 3: and you could live there. And that was the journal,
Speaker 3: you know, the nucleus of what became this psychedelic neighborhood.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's go from sixty to sixty five, sixty five,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of change before that. Jerry Garcia is
Speaker 2: influenced by the yard scene. He is not the only one.
Speaker 2: You have Jerry Garcia and a jug band, you have
Speaker 2: Dan Hicks. What's going on musically then.
Speaker 3: Well, again, primarily before the Beatles, it was what you
Speaker 3: call folk. Jerry had, as I say, heard Big Bill
Speaker 3: Brunsey and gotten started studying the blues and just generally
Speaker 3: that also he actually played some early early rock and roll,
Speaker 3: which again was African American music modified by country music
Speaker 3: and creating this new new genre. But various things, as
Speaker 3: we all know, happened. You know, little Richard uh got religion,
Speaker 3: Chuck Barry, you know, Elvis went into the army, Chuck
Speaker 3: Barry got arrested. So the end result was this phenomenon
Speaker 3: called folk music, in which which had been sort of
Speaker 3: around but not you know, focused on, and a a
Speaker 3: sort of sanitized version, namely, the Kingston Trio made a
Speaker 3: hit and people got interested and they and people like
Speaker 3: Jerry got interested in not just you know, in Kingston Trio,
Speaker 3: but in all the varieties of American music, whether it
Speaker 3: was Cajun or you know, Elizabeth Cotton or you know,
Speaker 3: you name it, and he started studying that and then
Speaker 3: eventually he encountered what in some ways was his greatest love,
Speaker 3: which was bluegrass music and specifically the bluegrass banjo. And
Speaker 3: so he went off in, you know, in this highly
Speaker 3: demanding technical Uh there was a very strong folks sing
Speaker 3: in Berkeley that was a little more you know, sort
Speaker 3: of laid back. You know. Bluegrass is actually is not
Speaker 3: a folk music. It's a professional music created by professional musicians,
Speaker 3: and it's demanding and it's it's it's challenging to play.
Speaker 3: And he was into that. But the Berkeley people, they
Speaker 3: created a band called the Crabgrassers to make gentle fun
Speaker 3: of bluegrass because they felt it was all too too technical,
Speaker 3: too demanding, and to to to seeking virtueos of virtual
Speaker 3: rather than the community spirit of folk music. At any rate,
Speaker 3: he wasn't the only one. David Freiberg was a part
Speaker 3: of a folk duo called David and Michaela and eventually
Speaker 3: he fell in with low company like John Chippolina and
Speaker 3: they created Quicksilver Messenger Service and on and on, and
Speaker 3: Paul Cantner was a folkyu and Marty Ballen spotted him
Speaker 3: and said, you look right, you want to join a band.
Speaker 3: And you know, Jerry garcia Is, just after he had
Speaker 3: started playing electric music with what was then the Warlocks
Speaker 3: and would become the Grateful deb ran into his buddy,
Speaker 3: another blues guitarist by the name of Jorma Caalcanan, and
Speaker 3: Ormas says, you know, it's amazingly I'm in this electric band,
Speaker 3: and Jerry said that's funny, so am I And you
Speaker 3: know you Ormis was of course the Jefferson Airplane. So
Speaker 3: you have this span of musicians, almost all of them
Speaker 3: from folk roots. And as I say, then they can
Speaker 3: encounter first the Beatles and then in many cases LSD
Speaker 3: and things change.
Speaker 2: Okay, talking about the heat. As the sixties continue to
Speaker 2: play out, we have the hippies. The image is people
Speaker 2: who are essentially living on nothing. They're not violent. You
Speaker 2: have Emmic Grogan and the diggers providing food. When does
Speaker 2: that lifestyle start and why?
Speaker 3: Well, in some ways it's sort of had always been
Speaker 3: a you know, the idea of anti materialism, you know,
Speaker 3: started with throw you know, frankly, that's what my third
Speaker 3: books about is. You know, the background, the roots. You know,
Speaker 3: there's no there's no plan this this stuff. You know,
Speaker 3: nobody was saying, ah, we'll start, you know, to some extent,
Speaker 3: you know, it just happened. The hay Ashbury was San
Speaker 3: Francisco had a certain level of tolerance which made it,
Speaker 3: which encouraged it to happen there. It has a connection
Speaker 3: to nature that for instance New York, with all due respect,
Speaker 3: doesn't you know, you just don't feel the world of
Speaker 3: nature when you're in Tompkins Square Park and there is
Speaker 3: some kind of connection. And I won't go too far
Speaker 3: with this, but between appreciation for nature and the psychedelic experience, well,
Speaker 3: you know, it's one thing to be on h Street
Speaker 3: and you know you're really high and down the end
Speaker 3: of the block is Golden Gate Park and you know,
Speaker 3: you want to go experience nature there it is or
Speaker 3: quite close by an accessible marine county and tam and
Speaker 3: all this good stuff, unlike New York, which is you
Speaker 3: know which sort of you had to fight the fact
Speaker 3: that there's eight million people all around you. So you know,
Speaker 3: it's so at any rate, it coalesces in the hate
Speaker 3: just because just because it was it was, it was cheap,
Speaker 3: it was it was fun and for the year in
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty six at least it worked like a charm.
Speaker 2: Okay, So in nineteen sixty six, how many of these
Speaker 2: people were just living with cheap rent, working somewhere doing something,
Speaker 2: And how many were hippies, which people in that era
Speaker 2: might label free loaders or you know, hangers on in
Speaker 2: that era, how big an element was.
Speaker 3: That well, you know, even hippies had to work occasionally.
Speaker 3: The classic example is Danny Rifkin, who was one of
Speaker 3: the first managers of The Grateful Dad. He was the
Speaker 3: guy who managed, He was the house manager. Sure, here's
Speaker 3: an example. He was the house manager at seven to
Speaker 3: ten Ashbury Street, which later became the home of The
Speaker 3: Grateful Dad, and you know, sort of a legendary place.
Speaker 3: So he was getting his rent free. He was working
Speaker 3: very part time at the post office, and you know,
Speaker 3: so if you work, you could work ten hours a
Speaker 3: week or you know, at some dull mail sorting job
Speaker 3: and spend the rest of the time being happy. So
Speaker 3: you know that's not to say I mean freeloaders, no,
Speaker 3: you know not, I mean people found a way to
Speaker 3: live on the margin and have the time. You know.
Speaker 3: My personal favorite slogan is time is more important than money,
Speaker 3: because you know, time can buy you money, but you know,
Speaker 3: money can't really buy you time. And the the you know,
Speaker 3: and that was certainly Rifkins you know philosophy. Then he
Speaker 3: lived modestly and as a result could spend most of
Speaker 3: his time doing you know what he chose, and that was,
Speaker 3: among other things, to later to become the Dead's manager.
Speaker 3: An unmanageable bunch, but there you go. It worked for him.
Speaker 3: And so the people that were coming to the hay
Speaker 3: again were almost all, you know, having an affinity for
Speaker 3: living on the outside of the standard world. The neighborhood
Speaker 3: became identified as hippie simply because well it started with
Speaker 3: a lady named Peggy Caserta. Peggy Caserta was I happened
Speaker 3: to be a lesbian, was what was then called a
Speaker 3: stewardess for Delta Airlines, and then I think she worked
Speaker 3: in the you know as anyway, she came to San Francisco,
Speaker 3: fell in love with the city, and eventually opened Narsitica.
Speaker 3: Narsitica was named after one of Sappho who was you know,
Speaker 3: sort of the not role model, what's the word, the
Speaker 3: icon of lesbian culture, and Asitica was one of her lovers.
Speaker 3: And she opened this clothing store in nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 3: Actually it was sort of a mod store and it
Speaker 3: sold mod fashions. Then she took LSD and it became
Speaker 3: a psychedelic store. The Grateful Dead model for her not
Speaker 3: very good looking models by and large, but you know,
Speaker 3: she took what she could get her best. Her best
Speaker 3: customer was Marty Ballen, who was probably the most stylish
Speaker 3: guy in the hate and he kept her going and she,
Speaker 3: among other things, helped introduce bell bottom jeans to America
Speaker 3: because her all of her male friends were wearing boots
Speaker 3: and they needed, you know, none stove pipe jeans to
Speaker 3: get them over their boots. The fact. And then shortly
Speaker 3: thereafter there were a lot of other stores, including the
Speaker 3: psychedelic shop, which were these two brothers, Ron and Jay Felon,
Speaker 3: who decided, you know, what we need is a store
Speaker 3: where you can go learn how to take a good trip,
Speaker 3: to prepare yourself, that it's an important activity. And they bought.
Speaker 3: They sold books, obviously, they sold Huxley, they sold Archie
Speaker 3: Shep and you know avant garde jazz, John Coltrane, of
Speaker 3: course music and you know all the chachkes that what
Speaker 3: we think of as being part of hippie culture, incense
Speaker 3: and decorations and such. And it happened, and you know,
Speaker 3: more stores came.
Speaker 2: There was Okay, to what degree was there a migration
Speaker 2: and what was the motivation prior to nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 2: the BN in the Summer of Love, people like Janis Joplin,
Speaker 2: How did they get the memo? And what drove them
Speaker 2: to San Francisco.
Speaker 3: Janie, There's an easy answer to that, which is she
Speaker 3: read about on the road in time. She was already
Speaker 3: not your average Port Arthur's person because she had glombed
Speaker 3: onto the blues early in her teens. She heard I
Speaker 3: think she heard Elvis Costello, Elvis Presley doing Jailhouse Rock. No,
Speaker 3: not Jailhouse rock Big Mama Thornton's song a Humdog, and
Speaker 3: then she went to Big Mama Thornton and she was
Speaker 3: hooked on the blues. So that made her a very
Speaker 3: unusual person. And she was from this factory town or
Speaker 3: oil refinery town in Texas called Port Arthur. And then
Speaker 3: she read about on the Road in time somehow managed
Speaker 3: to get a copy of the book. I don't think
Speaker 3: they sold a lot of copies in Port Arthur and
Speaker 3: said this is it. I'm a beat Nick. And again
Speaker 3: it was her bible. Dan Hicks of Dan you know
Speaker 3: Dan Hicks and the Hot Legs said that, you know,
Speaker 3: I met her as in her first visit to San Francisco,
Speaker 3: because it was obviously in on the road to San
Speaker 3: Francisco was where it was at. So she headed out
Speaker 3: to San Francisco, didn't do very well. She was a
Speaker 3: folky by then, but didn't didn't hit as it were,
Speaker 3: and but what's his name? Hicks describes meeting her as
Speaker 3: this big, tough, lesbian beatnick and she, you know, Janie
Speaker 3: got around who's clearly by but at any rate, but yeah,
Speaker 3: it was on the road that taught her that. And
Speaker 3: it was the scene in the fifties, for instance, the
Speaker 3: one of the essential fountains of alternative culture was a
Speaker 3: place called the Black Mountain College, which was actually in
Speaker 3: North Carolina, but it was where almost all of the
Speaker 3: avant garde artists on the East many of the avant
Speaker 3: garde artists and poets of the East Coast, starting with
Speaker 3: John Cage and Joseph Alberts and all these people taught
Speaker 3: and their students heard about San Francisco, That's all I
Speaker 3: can say. And they migrated, and one of them was
Speaker 3: became the bartender at the place, and another was a
Speaker 3: woman who was not really so much part of that scene,
Speaker 3: but was an important artist in San Francisco by the
Speaker 3: name of Ruth Osawa, who did these sculptures that are just,
Speaker 3: you know, a marvel. At any rate, The fact is
Speaker 3: that if you wanted to know, you found out.
Speaker 2: Okay, what is the antecedents of the ben? How does
Speaker 2: the ben happen?
Speaker 3: In?
Speaker 2: What is the BN experience?
Speaker 3: So Haye Ashbury in nineteen sixty six, as I say,
Speaker 3: was pretty low key. Nobody was paying any you know,
Speaker 3: neither the police nor city fathers were paying particular attention
Speaker 3: to it. It was just this funky neighborhood where oddly
Speaker 3: dressed people had started to emerge, very colorful, but you know,
Speaker 3: nobody paid much attention to them. One of the institutions
Speaker 3: that flowered in the fall of sixty six was The Oracle,
Speaker 3: which was the local what you would definitely call the
Speaker 3: hippie newspaper, mystical involved with a lot of astrology and
Speaker 3: a lot of you know, mystical painting and third eye
Speaker 3: and you know, the sort of explorative stuff, and obviously
Speaker 3: very much connected to LSD. It was run by a poet,
Speaker 3: you know, what would you expect and and uh, the leader,
Speaker 3: the art director of the the Oracle was a guy
Speaker 3: named Michael Bowen, who again came out of that mystical tradition.
Speaker 3: And I might add, just to throw in a curveball,
Speaker 3: that his his role model. Oh god, I'm forgetting his name,
Speaker 3: but is a man John somebody or other who lived
Speaker 3: in Mexico and whose brother in law was an important
Speaker 3: figure in the CIA. And they are all these what
Speaker 3: I regard is fairly daffy conspiracy theories that say that,
Speaker 3: you know, the whole of the sixties was just a
Speaker 3: function of you know, it was actually a CIA front.
Speaker 3: Now I think that's incorrect, And I don't think Jerry
Speaker 3: Garcia was running for anybody or any of those guys.
Speaker 3: The fact that the CIA had introduced LSD to America
Speaker 3: is a fact. But after that, frankly, I think they
Speaker 3: lost control. And you know, individuals did what individuals do.
Speaker 3: But at any rate, Bowen and others they had. On
Speaker 3: October sixth, nineteen sixty six, LSD became illegal in California,
Speaker 3: and the people at the Oracle, being profound, profoundly anti negativity,
Speaker 3: announced that they would instead of resisting, instead of protests,
Speaker 3: they would simply celebrate, celebrate the joy of the day.
Speaker 3: So on October sixth, nineteen sixty six, they got the
Speaker 3: Grateful Dead and I think the airplane to come down
Speaker 3: and play on flatbed trucks set up in the Panhandle.
Speaker 3: The panhandles, this long, thin extension of Golden Gate Park.
Speaker 3: It's like one block wide. It's between two big streets.
Speaker 3: But literally they threw electric cords over from a second
Speaker 3: floor apartment to the trees in the Panhandle to power
Speaker 3: you could do it then with simple you know, extension cords,
Speaker 3: the equipment and the bands played. It was called the
Speaker 3: Love Pageant Rally. And two thousand people showed up and
Speaker 3: had a wonderful time. So this germinated, and eventually the
Speaker 3: people at the Oracle and the others said, let's let's
Speaker 3: have a bigger celebration. Let's get you know, all the
Speaker 3: people that are connected with us, which included, among other things,
Speaker 3: all the people very political Berkeley people, and generally speaking
Speaker 3: historians say, oh, the Berkeleys are political, and the Hippies
Speaker 3: were a political and no connection. Well, no, the Berkeley
Speaker 3: smoke pod, the hippies were certainly not for the war.
Speaker 3: They may be a little less active, but the fact
Speaker 3: is that there's a great deal more shared than antagonistic
Speaker 3: book between them. Michael Rossman, who wrote a wonderful book
Speaker 3: called The Wedding Within the War and was very much
Speaker 3: part of the free speech movement, called the Hayte Ashbury
Speaker 3: our mark one ghetto. That it was that they were
Speaker 3: kindred and they decided to have a party and celebrate. Now,
Speaker 3: you know, nothing wrong with that. Day to day life
Speaker 3: in the hate was kind of a celebration. What they
Speaker 3: did not expect and what I don't think anybody could have,
Speaker 3: especially San Francisco Police Department, was that somewhere between thirty
Speaker 3: and fifty thousand people showed up, and you had the poets,
Speaker 3: the beat poets who were their mentors, read and then
Speaker 3: you had rock and roll and it was this marvelous
Speaker 3: day that celebrated nothing in particular except let's have a
Speaker 3: good time. One of the Berkeley politicos, a guy, the
Speaker 3: guy who produced Country Joe and the Fish, said that
Speaker 3: there was a great opportunity to rally the people and
Speaker 3: they blew it. And you know, most of the people
Speaker 3: that were there would say, nah, you know, I had
Speaker 3: a wonderful time, and you know, it was kind of
Speaker 3: a perfect day. But the problem, of course with the
Speaker 3: b N was can't conceal fifty thousand people. When I
Speaker 3: say that the police department ignored it, that's because the
Speaker 3: entire security. Think about this now, the entire security police
Speaker 3: security for this event. We're two mounted patrolmen horse patrolman looking,
Speaker 3: you know, down on thirty forty fifty thousand people. And
Speaker 3: the lady came up to them and said, officer, you
Speaker 3: have to help me. I've lost my child and you know,
Speaker 3: I don't know how to find them. And they and
Speaker 3: the cops said, lady, we can't go down there. They're
Speaker 3: smoking pot, go to the stage, ask them to make
Speaker 3: an announcement. They'll find you know, you'll find your child.
Speaker 3: It won't be a prog And of course that's the
Speaker 3: way it worked out. I might add that they then
Speaker 3: messed up their perfect record by arresting about one hundred
Speaker 3: kids when they were walking after the event and they're
Speaker 3: walking home down h Street, and they were started arrest
Speaker 3: people for obstructing traffic. But anyway, on the whole, you know,
Speaker 3: it came out of nowhere, and that's sort of proof
Speaker 3: about how much out of nowhere it came. But it
Speaker 3: was never going to be nowhere after that, because then
Speaker 3: you have a flood of media from all over the
Speaker 3: country descending on the hate. You know, what's going on here.
Speaker 3: And as I say, they basically just didn't have a
Speaker 3: clue as to what was underlying what was going on.
Speaker 3: All they saw was literally what they could see.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's at this point from the outside, you can
Speaker 2: tell us the real story that people start to come
Speaker 2: from all over the country in sixty seven is the
Speaker 2: summer of love. At this point, the I mean I'm
Speaker 2: living outside San Francisco, I mean the other coast. People
Speaker 2: were aware of something. I really didn't know what was
Speaker 2: going on until really the year after. So my point
Speaker 2: is was sixty seven flowers and fun and when did
Speaker 2: it start to go downhill? Overrun? With people coming?
Speaker 3: It started to go downhill, you know, by March or April,
Speaker 3: everybody in San Francisco again with the eruption of media coverage.
Speaker 3: The people in San Francisco, including the diggers, were aware
Speaker 3: that new people, more people would become, particularly after school
Speaker 3: got out, high school kids, college kids in other words,
Speaker 3: people with very little money and you know, very young
Speaker 3: and not a lot of emotional or occupational resources. The
Speaker 3: people that had been in the hate in sixty six
Speaker 3: were all, generally speaking, mostly in their twenties. They did something.
Speaker 3: They they found, you know, they they they, as I say,
Speaker 3: lived lived on the margins, but clearly knew how to
Speaker 3: you know, how to get by by the summer you had.
Speaker 3: And nobody knows how many could have been as many
Speaker 3: as one hundred thousand people came to San Francisco and
Speaker 3: they basically came in and they said, feed me, find
Speaker 3: me a place to sleep. They were you know, mostly dependent,
Speaker 3: I'm not you know, they were seekers and and and
Speaker 3: you know, bless them, but it flooded a very small
Speaker 3: neighborhood and pretty much destroyed almost immediately the so called
Speaker 3: good vibes, not so called they were there were very
Speaker 3: legitimately good vibes. But with this kind of overload, uh it.
Speaker 3: You know, the diggers. There was a wonderful institution called
Speaker 3: All Saints Church that and the neighborhood in general did
Speaker 3: their very best to take care of these newcomers. But
Speaker 3: it was, you know, it was dysfunctional. It was simply
Speaker 3: it was too many people and too much at once.
Speaker 3: So the reason, frankly, and I'll freely confess to cheating,
Speaker 3: which is the reason my book ends with the Monterey
Speaker 3: Pop Festival, is that this is the high point discounting
Speaker 3: the anxiety of the spring, the legend of the Summer
Speaker 3: of Love, which when they first asked me to do
Speaker 3: that photo, showice that you realize that the Summer of
Speaker 3: Love was in fact the fall of sixty six, because
Speaker 3: a that's when San Francisco has its best weather, and
Speaker 3: b you know, it was, as I say, low key
Speaker 3: and under the radar.
Speaker 2: The peak.
Speaker 3: The image that people have of the Summer of Love
Speaker 3: is sort of be a tific young pe people with
Speaker 3: flowers in their hair, listening to you know, fabulous music,
Speaker 3: tripping their socks off, and being as peaceful and benign
Speaker 3: as you could ever imagine. And at Monterey this was
Speaker 3: the truth. There were seven thousand seats in the arena
Speaker 3: at Monterey that could actually listen directly to the music,
Speaker 3: although you could hear it all around. There were probably
Speaker 3: twenty five thousand people hippies at Monterey, and nothing bad happened.
Speaker 3: I mean the police, I can't imagine what was going
Speaker 3: on Friday afternoon. This ran Friday, Satday, Sunday. And Bob Marinello,
Speaker 3: I think his name is Bob Marinello, the police chief
Speaker 3: of Monterey. I can't imagine what was going through his
Speaker 3: mind as the floods of people arrived. And if they
Speaker 3: had wanted to, you know, create trouble, they could have.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, simply by numbers. I just got
Speaker 3: this most wonderful story just the other day, and now
Speaker 3: I'm trying to remember who it was that told me.
Speaker 3: She's an Asian woman and she was telling me about
Speaker 3: her mother who lived near the Monterey Fairgrounds and who
Speaker 3: you know, didn't know what was going on, knew nothing
Speaker 3: about the festival. All she knew was that on Friday
Speaker 3: there were a couple of hippies that were like sleeping
Speaker 3: on her lawn and she just sort of went, oh,
Speaker 3: you know, never mind, I'm not going to get involved
Speaker 3: with it. And on Saturday they were like several they
Speaker 3: were sleeping under her house, you know, they were all
Speaker 3: over the place, and she's basically calling her daughter saying,
Speaker 3: what the hell is going on, and her daughter's trying
Speaker 3: to explain it to her. And then on Sunday they
Speaker 3: already all these people sleeping on her lawn and vanished,
Speaker 3: and she went, oh, okay, well at least it was temper,
Speaker 3: no harm done. The fact is, and it's my my
Speaker 3: favorite picture in my book is the peacefulness of what
Speaker 3: happened in Monterey when it you know, it just could
Speaker 3: have been a disaster. Was There's a marvelous picture of
Speaker 3: a police officer. They the organizers had put orchids on
Speaker 3: the seats of all the seats in the arena, and uh,
Speaker 3: this this there's a picture of this police officer, motorcycle officer,
Speaker 3: stringing orchids on the that he had picked up on
Speaker 3: the aerial of his motorcycle, smiling, you know, it's just
Speaker 3: completely unbusy, and he's just fooling with flowers, which is
Speaker 3: you know, of course, the way we'd all like in
Speaker 3: a mass gathering for the police to you know, feel
Speaker 3: that there are no stress, no need to to come
Speaker 3: up with attitude. And that's you know, that sort of
Speaker 3: the magic of Monterey, and frankly, that's why I decided
Speaker 3: to end it, because everything after Monterey gets more complicated.
Speaker 3: As I say, the Hate stops being fun city and
Speaker 3: becomes among other things, the police department changed Hate Street
Speaker 3: into a one way street and put up crime lights
Speaker 3: these you know, really ugly yellow It looked like it
Speaker 3: looked like the outskirts of the Berlin Wall or something,
Speaker 3: and made it as unattractive as possible. And given you know,
Speaker 3: the thousands of people that were just sort of wandering
Speaker 3: around and didn't quite know where to go, you know,
Speaker 3: it became less than charming. So what happened really in
Speaker 3: many ways is that things simply dispersed. They went out
Speaker 3: into the country, California country, so that you have even
Speaker 3: more people up in the Humboldt down in Carmel and
Speaker 3: you know, all the way around, or they went back
Speaker 3: and you know took up in in on the East
Speaker 3: coast wherever, or the Midwest. My favorite example of all that.
Speaker 3: And one of the things that that you know is
Speaker 3: really I think really significant about what The important thing
Speaker 3: to remember about the hate is it had very I
Speaker 3: think it had very little impact politically. There was a
Speaker 3: certain it certainly benefited the anti war movement, but other
Speaker 3: than that, not so much politically. Culturally, however, endless elements
Speaker 3: of what happened in the hate are still part of
Speaker 3: our lives today. That's one of the reasons why what
Speaker 3: I tell these these high school kids that are interested is,
Speaker 3: you know, none of this has went away. The fact
Speaker 3: that the hated Ashbury sort of created and advertised the
Speaker 3: gentle male hippie, which was one of the archetypes I think,
Speaker 3: led to things like uptons and promote a promotion of
Speaker 3: gay liberation, which you know, the next decade you had
Speaker 3: the influx the created gay neighborhoods in San Francisco, and
Speaker 3: now we're dealing with with an administration that wants to
Speaker 3: deny the existence of trans people. You know, the wars
Speaker 3: go on part I mean organic food sam The experience
Speaker 3: of LSD led people in the hate to be very
Speaker 3: sensitive to things like like sugar and artificial food and
Speaker 3: things like you know, plastic clothing, polyestic clothing, that sort
Speaker 3: of thing. And you know, now organic food is a
Speaker 3: forty billion dollar a year industry. One of the people
Speaker 3: who was critical in all that was a guy named
Speaker 3: Roger Hilliard. Roger Hilliard was the was one of of
Speaker 3: the light show artists at the Avalon Ballroom with a
Speaker 3: guy named Ben bean Meter and eventually he and a
Speaker 3: guy named Hawken Stephen Hawkin. No, I'm thinking of the
Speaker 3: physicist Ah Paul hawk anyway, who later with Smith and
Speaker 3: Hawkin the fairly famous store chain of supplies. But in
Speaker 3: the seventies they went east and near Boston they created
Speaker 3: erewon E E R E W h O N, which
Speaker 3: was a major influence on the wholesaling as it were,
Speaker 3: organic food and such things all across America. And you know, now, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, one of the sources, one of the primary
Speaker 3: sources of organic food is the Midwest because they noticed
Speaker 3: the poisons, you know as much as we do, so uh,
Speaker 3: you know, and it goes on. I mean, there's my
Speaker 3: favorite example of all this actually, and again it's not
Speaker 3: overt there's a marvelous book that I recommend to everybody
Speaker 3: called What the Dormouse Said. What the Dormouse Said is
Speaker 3: a history of Silicon Valley and LSD. It's by a
Speaker 3: guy named John Markoff, who covered Silicon Valley for the
Speaker 3: New York Times for years and had, you know, did
Speaker 3: a really excellent book about the connection between LSD and
Speaker 3: the people who created the personal computer. Now there's a
Speaker 3: reason why Silicon Valley where the individual home computer happened
Speaker 3: in Silicon Valley rather than say, near Mit. And that's
Speaker 3: because there was a guy who created the Institute for
Speaker 3: not Advanced Studies. I'm mixing it up with somebody, but
Speaker 3: at any rate started distributing this is when it was
Speaker 3: still legal LSD to all these engineers in the Silicon Valley,
Speaker 3: and some of them were part of the Homebrew Computing Club,
Speaker 3: among them Steven Jobs and Steve Wasney, and they went
Speaker 3: on and again. This is clearly influenced by Ellis Date
Speaker 3: with Apple, and you know, there you have it. That's
Speaker 3: an essential part of American culture today. Obviously, now I'm
Speaker 3: not saying it. You know, it only exists because of
Speaker 3: the psychedelic connection, but it's influence.
Speaker 2: Okay, So in the spring of sixty seven you have
Speaker 2: Scott mckenz who the hit if You're Going to San Francisco,
Speaker 2: and the Jeffery Souperent Airplane breakthrough with their first album
Speaker 2: with Gray Slick, their second album, Somebody to Love to
Speaker 2: What do you believe that drove people to San Francisco?
Speaker 3: Not so much Summer Somebody Loved. I mean, it was
Speaker 3: a it was a song that brought people to pay
Speaker 3: attention to to the airplane. But the song that came
Speaker 3: out of the hate that brought everyone to the Summer
Speaker 3: of Love was White Rabbit. White Rabbit. To this day
Speaker 3: is this very very potent song. It's it's mysterious, it's inviting,
Speaker 3: it's seductive, and it's also misunderstood because, among other things,
Speaker 3: the the you know, the final chorus is feed your head,
Speaker 3: and uh, Grace Slick sincerely intended that as a way
Speaker 3: of you know, growing, not just stuffing drugs in your head,
Speaker 3: but learning and art, music and very you know whatever,
Speaker 3: but grow. And people heard that and it was the
Speaker 3: first message to you know, young people listening to the
Speaker 3: radio that was pure. That is to say, it wasn't
Speaker 3: modulated by the media. It was just what the air
Speaker 3: what the airplane thought, and it you know, it worked.
Speaker 3: McKenzie saw. I attended a lecture by Lou Adler. Okay,
Speaker 3: so what happened with Monterey where the roots of Monterey
Speaker 3: was in the fall of sixty six, there were a
Speaker 3: number of clubs, music clubs on the Sunset Strip where
Speaker 3: there was about a mile long strip of many clubs,
Speaker 3: and the kids thronged the clubs fair enough, and local
Speaker 3: business owners didn't you know. It created traffic jams. There's LA.
Speaker 3: Well that's a new thing in La, traffic jams. But anyway,
Speaker 3: they they have acted and in the fall of sixty six,
Speaker 3: Ronald Reagan, Conservative is elected governor. So the LAPD decides
Speaker 3: to kind of crack down on all this traffic and
Speaker 3: they start arresting people and these kids don't appreciate it
Speaker 3: and resist, not violently. Any violence was the cops, but
Speaker 3: they so they were called the Censet Strip riots. Well,
Speaker 3: you know, again, it's easy to call the riots. These
Speaker 3: were nineteen year olds sitting down on the street and
Speaker 3: getting arrested, and people in the rock scene, in particular
Speaker 3: the manager of the Birds and Derek Taylor, who was
Speaker 3: the publicist for the Birds, who had been the publicist
Speaker 3: for the Beatles that was kind of a charismatic figure
Speaker 3: in LA and others created a campaign, you know, to
Speaker 3: resid that, to resist the idea that these kids were
Speaker 3: causing riots. And they had a benefit in February, and
Speaker 3: then they decided to plan another benefit, a bigger show
Speaker 3: in Monterey in June. Louis, I mean they go, the
Speaker 3: organizers go to the sort of reigning king and queen
Speaker 3: of rock and roll in LA at that moment, rock
Speaker 3: and roll but music, John and Michelle Phillips of Mamas
Speaker 3: and the Pappas, who were tremendously popular, and they loved
Speaker 3: the idea, and they said, no, let's turn it into
Speaker 3: a benefit. The only person that was paid at Monterey
Speaker 3: was Robbie Shankark because they had signed his contract early
Speaker 3: and earliest and they had, you know, they acknowledged it. Otherwise,
Speaker 3: they bought out that people who had invested the early
Speaker 3: money and went to work and they created the festival.
Speaker 3: Now I had the pleasure of listening to or talk
Speaker 3: about all this and among other things, for what it's worth,
Speaker 3: he denied the idea that the Scott McKenzie song written
Speaker 3: by John Phillips was kind of an advertisement for Monterey Pop.
Speaker 3: It's the only time he spoke that I went, I don't, well,
Speaker 3: I just it's kind of too perfect an invitation a promo.
Speaker 3: You know, really, you know, really you didn't that didn't
Speaker 3: occur to you because you certainly engaged when that came out.
Speaker 3: They were engaged with the creation of Monterey Leave it,
Speaker 3: you know, leave that as it as it is. Certainly
Speaker 3: that song had that impact of attracting, you know, more
Speaker 3: people to San Francisco and in particular to the festival.
Speaker 3: So what happened was very quickly they they realize that
Speaker 3: what they're really doing, what they're really going to be
Speaker 3: doing at Monterey's celebrating psychedelic music. That's their their advertising
Speaker 3: is about, you know, bring bring bells, bring flowers, you know,
Speaker 3: be a hippie. And they run into a problem because,
Speaker 3: among other things, The Grateful the Grateful Dead and other
Speaker 3: bands from San Francisco are very very puristic and they
Speaker 3: wanted to be free, and it's like, well, you know,
Speaker 3: how do how do we pay for the stage? And
Speaker 3: long story short, this wonderful, weird thing happened, which was
Speaker 3: one of the they had a board which included people
Speaker 3: like Smokey Robinson and Paul Simon, and because of Derek Taylor,
Speaker 3: Paul McCartney McCartney. After they finished recording Uh Sergeant Pepper,
Speaker 3: he took a brief vacation, went to l A was
Speaker 3: hanging out with Derek and started telling them about this
Speaker 3: fantastic new music, new musician in London by the name
Speaker 3: of Amy Hendricks. So they go okay, and they already
Speaker 3: had thought about the who. And then there is this
Speaker 3: friction with the San Francisco bands, who are, as I say,
Speaker 3: are very puristic and very suspicious, just inherently suspicious of
Speaker 3: Lou Adler and John Phillips. And what happens is John
Speaker 3: gets Paul Simon, who is also on the board and
Speaker 3: who the hippies are a fond of because he had
Speaker 3: written a song called Feeling Groovy. I know this sounds
Speaker 3: maybe even a little ridiculous, but they trusted Paul because
Speaker 3: of that song. And Paul literally comes to San Francisco
Speaker 3: and talks with everybody and as as Rock Scully wrote
Speaker 3: in his memoir, and Paul convinced them that, you know,
Speaker 3: it was too good idea, an idea to pass up.
Speaker 3: Go So they went, and of course the airplane among others.
Speaker 3: The Grateful Dead had the wonderful experience of playing in
Speaker 3: between The Who their American debut virtually American debut, and
Speaker 3: Jimmy Hendrix's American debut, which means actually one of the
Speaker 3: critics said that some of the guitar playing in the
Speaker 3: Grateful Dead set was some of the best in the
Speaker 3: in the weekend, he for whatever reason did not really
Speaker 3: dig Hendricks. But of course, as I have written several times,
Speaker 3: who would remember, you know, between those two two sets,
Speaker 3: it was, you know, very minor. But what happened at
Speaker 3: Monterey was well a number of things. I listed four heroes,
Speaker 3: four or five heroes. The first hero was the audience, which,
Speaker 3: as I said, was overwhelming and yet you know all
Speaker 3: that you could ask from an audience. The second was
Speaker 3: Janis Joplin and Big Brother, Who's again was one of
Speaker 3: those purest. In the last little while before the event,
Speaker 3: John Adler had made a deal with d H. D
Speaker 3: a pennamaker who had done the just released Don't Look Back,
Speaker 3: which was the documentary about Dylan brilliant, brilliant movie, and
Speaker 3: asked him to shoot, well, you know that smells movies money,
Speaker 3: and the San Francisco bands were all saying, no, we
Speaker 3: won't be in the movie, and the grateful Dad never worked.
Speaker 3: The Airplane was managed by Bill Graham, who was a
Speaker 3: little smarter, and he said, be in the movie. So
Speaker 3: the air the Big Brother, which was managed by a
Speaker 3: guy named Julius Carpen who was an ex prankster and
Speaker 3: as purest as anybody else. They they do their set,
Speaker 3: they ripped the place apart. I mean, you know, Janie
Speaker 3: is just Jannish Dooplin, and nobody had heard of them
Speaker 3: outside of San Francisco at that point. They hadn't released
Speaker 3: an album, and it was just shocked to the a
Speaker 3: pleasant shock to the system. They come off the stage
Speaker 3: and Pennebaker is like begging them to be in the movie.
Speaker 3: And of course the cameras were down when they were
Speaker 3: when they did the set. So Albert Grossman, who's after all,
Speaker 3: Bob Dylan's manager Capital you know all Caps, says you know.
Speaker 3: They go to him and they say, you know, should
Speaker 3: we be in the movie, And Albert says, be in
Speaker 3: the movie. It'll do you good. And so they overrule
Speaker 3: their manager and they get a second set on Sunday,
Speaker 3: evening and rip up the place again and that's that's
Speaker 3: boom one uh and and it's a set boom too,
Speaker 3: and it's a you know, it's an enormous flash the airplane.
Speaker 3: And it's really interesting. Even even Grace Slick, who was
Speaker 3: among the more critical people on the planet and who
Speaker 3: rarely raved about her own performance or the band's performance,
Speaker 3: was just ecstatic that day. It just connected. It was magic.
Speaker 3: And so that's boom two three, boom four is And
Speaker 3: I might add that the number one song at the
Speaker 3: time of Monterey Pop was Aretha Franklin's Respect and standing
Speaker 3: in for Her and jam and all of the incredible
Speaker 3: black music of that period, whether it was motown or
Speaker 3: in this case Stacks. Vote is Otis read it again,
Speaker 3: a guy that most you know, not so many white
Speaker 3: people are so terribly afraid of, and otis redding Kills.
Speaker 3: And that's boom whatever it is. And finally the two
Speaker 3: final which is the Who which played on Sunday Night
Speaker 3: and the Dead which and then Jimmy Hendricks and there's
Speaker 3: a wonderful story about that that I found, which was that, yeah,
Speaker 3: the Gravel that were not the only people that played
Speaker 3: on LSD and Jimmy. Jimmy Hendricks was certainly a great fan.
Speaker 3: And he Ousley is there and he's passing out to
Speaker 3: these incredibly strong doses of LSD and Jimmy takes a handful.
Speaker 3: I mean the guy. The witness said at least three
Speaker 3: or four, I mean, you know, and he's like, he
Speaker 3: goes down. He's just crumpled in the corner. He looks like,
Speaker 3: you know, dirty laundry. And his time on stage comes
Speaker 3: and two crew members come up, pick him up, walk
Speaker 3: him out, and as he hits the stage, he turns
Speaker 3: into Jimmy Hendrix. You know, God only knows, and rips
Speaker 3: the place apart. As you know. It's just it's one
Speaker 3: of the more extraordinary introductions of a talent. This is
Speaker 3: his first significant show in America and it's the beginning
Speaker 3: of what was a all too short, you know, genius
Speaker 3: genius career. I might add that the mamas and the
Speaker 3: papas closed the show, and I don't know how many
Speaker 3: I've always wondered how many people stayed in their seats
Speaker 3: to wait for them after Jimmy, because you know, how
Speaker 3: do you follow that? You know, you can't. That's one
Speaker 3: of the reasons by the way that the who preceded
Speaker 3: them because Pete Townsend had seen Jimmy Hendrix in London
Speaker 3: and did not want to follow it, and so they
Speaker 3: flipped a coin and Pete won and said, no, we'll
Speaker 3: go first. We'll do fine. Now you do your thing.
Speaker 2: Okay. To what degree does an underground alternative universe still exist?
Speaker 2: Into what degree is it or not in San Francisco.
Speaker 3: When you're talking about today twenty twenty five. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't know if there's an underground universe.
Speaker 2: There is.
Speaker 3: As I say, so many of the issues of the
Speaker 3: sixties that came into prominence in the sixties, there are
Speaker 3: issues that go way way back. Alternative viewpoints about America.
Speaker 3: Is it a universe? I don't know. It's a collection
Speaker 3: of ideas that many, many people hold on to. I mean,
Speaker 3: we have a putting it politely and extremely extremely conservative administration,
Speaker 3: and all the numbers say that it's not a universal
Speaker 3: viewpoint by any means. It acts like it's a universal viewpoint.
Speaker 3: It ignores alternative viewpoints, it represses alternative viewpoints, which is
Speaker 3: the shocking and Unamerican thing about it. But you know,
Speaker 3: most people don't think that, you know, all immigrants are
Speaker 3: evil and should be immediately evicted, etc. I could make
Speaker 3: a list, a long, long list, so as I say,
Speaker 3: other than for instance, dead heads, who are very real,
Speaker 3: very you know, quite a lot of them, and many
Speaker 3: of them, you know, we're not born when Jerry Garcia died.
Speaker 3: And yet I've talked with a lot of them, and
Speaker 3: they basically they get I mean, you know, they get
Speaker 3: what the Grateful deads stand for. They don't know much
Speaker 3: about the history of the Grateful Dead, but they definitely
Speaker 3: got to read my book. But they they absolutely grasp
Speaker 3: the notion of community, of peacefulness, of you know, standing
Speaker 3: against racism, and uh, you know it's it's it's not
Speaker 3: like it's gone at the moment. You know, the other side,
Speaker 3: if that's the way it is, is getting you know,
Speaker 3: has all the power and is getting a lot more
Speaker 3: pr but it's not, you know, it's not everybody.
Speaker 2: Okay, music drove the culture in this era. Let's just
Speaker 2: even say the whole decade was that a moment in
Speaker 2: time and many stars aligned. You know, how do you
Speaker 2: do it with radio? I don't want to go through
Speaker 2: a whole litany now. You say the ideas remain, Is
Speaker 2: it that we don't have the right music speaking to
Speaker 2: these ideas, or is it that was a moment. In
Speaker 2: that moment may or may not return, but it's not
Speaker 2: happening now.
Speaker 3: I'd say the latter that that that was, it was
Speaker 3: an extraordinary moment. You're absolutely right.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: You know, music became the convey the container for all
Speaker 3: those values, going back to rex Roth and Duncan, the
Speaker 3: values again of non violence and and just generally of
Speaker 3: of a freedom of thought and sensuality and so forth.
Speaker 3: And it connected with LSDA, connected with with rock and roll,
Speaker 3: connected with volume. There's something about LSD and volume that link.
Speaker 3: I'm I'm not a scientist, but uh. And as you say,
Speaker 3: music was the binding agent for my general our generation.
Speaker 3: That is this, you know, the mid late sixties and
Speaker 3: into the well into the seventies, and eventually, as all
Speaker 3: things must, it loses its juice. It became a little
Speaker 3: artificial what they called arena rock, which is, you know,
Speaker 3: among other things, not improvisational. It's it's it's showbiz theater,
Speaker 3: which for many, you know, was great, but it did
Speaker 3: not have quite the purity of the earlier efforts. And
Speaker 3: then there's a reaction to it and it's called punk
Speaker 3: and you know, not unreasonable and very anti virtuosic, among
Speaker 3: other things. And yes, I think that, among other things,
Speaker 3: in addition to being the container rock music galvanized all
Speaker 3: that stuff into sex, drugs and rock and roll that
Speaker 3: people really, you know, that that was a motivating force
Speaker 3: for a whole bunch of people, including me. Now I
Speaker 3: might add that because I was in the backwoods of
Speaker 3: Maine in high school, graduating in sixty seven, and then
Speaker 3: college in upstate New York, I missed all of it,
Speaker 3: which is apparently why I spent the last fifty years
Speaker 3: researching it, researching these stories, because you know, I wasn't
Speaker 3: there for the party. But you know, I do think
Speaker 3: that that the music did galvanize things, united people and
Speaker 3: whatever you say about current music. And I have you know,
Speaker 3: great respect for Taylor Sweat, for instance, it's not overtly
Speaker 3: at least certainly about an alternative culture, although she's certainly
Speaker 3: not worshiping it at the feet of the current current reality.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what's your favorite Grateful Dead album?
Speaker 3: Probably Live Dead.
Speaker 2: Which lead with the original Live Dead, the one before
Speaker 2: Working Man's Dead.
Speaker 3: Right exactly. The Live Dead was a you know, a
Speaker 3: live album. It's the first I believe sixteen track live albums,
Speaker 3: so it has you know, extraordinary sound and it's them
Speaker 3: at their most experimental and highly improvisational. I mean there
Speaker 3: are songs that go on for you know, thirty minutes
Speaker 3: with one minute of singing and twenty nine minutes of improvisation,
Speaker 3: and you know, that's sort of my my fave. There's
Speaker 3: a second album that they did that I really really love,
Speaker 3: and it's in part because it was the classic Grateful Dead,
Speaker 3: you know, weird. They finally took a year off and
Speaker 3: during their vacation in nineteen seventy five, they recorded this.
Speaker 3: They started recording this album very slow, you know, kind
Speaker 3: of just with They went into the studio with nothing.
Speaker 3: They just started seeing what was there and it's called
Speaker 3: Blues for Allah and some wonderful stuff there. And then,
Speaker 3: in classic Grateful Dead fashion, they had gotten into it.
Speaker 3: They had some marvelous material. And then their record company,
Speaker 3: which at the time was themselves, basically their record company
Speaker 3: guy comes to them and says, we have to have
Speaker 3: the album. In three weeks we signed a contract. Blah
Speaker 3: blah blah, which is a typical Grateful Dead business, you know,
Speaker 3: very bad business decision they made a lot of If
Speaker 3: they'd spent three more months, that album might be remembered
Speaker 3: very differently. But you know that's them, Okay.
Speaker 2: In the gatefold cover of Live Dead, it's the Grateful
Speaker 2: Dead playing in a street. What is the background in
Speaker 2: story of that photo.
Speaker 3: It's a marvelous photo. It's by Jim Marshall, who's the
Speaker 3: great photographer, one of the great photographers ever and certainly
Speaker 3: a great photographer of the San Francisco scene. It's on
Speaker 3: H Street and this is in the spring I want
Speaker 3: to say, of sixty if I recall correctly, of sixty eight.
Speaker 3: Actually so, it's a slightly old, a year old picture.
Speaker 3: And what happened was that in the fall of sixty seven,
Speaker 3: two horrible things happened. One was that briefly gray Lines,
Speaker 3: the tourist bus people created what they call the Hippie Hop,
Speaker 3: which was a bus tour of the hate, which is,
Speaker 3: you know, you can imagine being in the Grateful Dead,
Speaker 3: and way up to and on your left is a
Speaker 3: is the home of the Grateful Oh my god. In addition,
Speaker 3: in October, after the visitors of the summer sort of
Speaker 3: you know, slowed down the San Francisco Police Department raided
Speaker 3: a number of homes, one of which was the Bedful
Speaker 3: deads for pot in the city and the bust among
Speaker 3: other you know, persuaded the dead that maybe it was
Speaker 3: time to leave the hate. I might add that the
Speaker 3: two people that they the band member, they were arrested.
Speaker 3: Everybody that was in the house, which was mostly non
Speaker 3: band members. There were two people that were in the
Speaker 3: house that were band members. Didn't smoke pot, pig pan
Speaker 3: and bob wear, but leave it be. They also missed
Speaker 3: a kilo that was in the kitchen cabinet, but they
Speaker 3: did find one hundred dollars bill in somebody's desk, which
Speaker 3: amazingly was was not there the next day. And so,
Speaker 3: as I say, they decided, you know, may maybe it's
Speaker 3: time to go. And bit by bit the band members
Speaker 3: start going to Marin and you know, h no longer
Speaker 3: living communally, and you know, that's fine, but they wanted
Speaker 3: to say goodbye. So they plot and uh, the word
Speaker 3: goes out underground that they're going to play on such
Speaker 3: and such a date, and with the cooperation of a
Speaker 3: cop that knew them and that they liked, the city
Speaker 3: had blocked off the street because just generally it was
Speaker 3: going to be a block party, and suddenly from two
Speaker 3: different directions they pull in flatbed trucks loaded with their
Speaker 3: gear and start playing. And of course there's that marvelous
Speaker 3: picture of you know, people as far as the eye
Speaker 3: can see down h Street, the tops of every house
Speaker 3: that looked down, you know, the windows and whatnot, and
Speaker 3: it's it's it's a it's a celebration, and it's a
Speaker 3: goodbye and worked like a charm.
Speaker 2: And what is the personal best grateful dead show that
Speaker 2: you were actually at.
Speaker 3: I don't know about a whole show. You know, for me,
Speaker 3: the most enthralled and just mind blown at the virtuosity
Speaker 3: that I ever heard was a show I'm gonna be
Speaker 3: such a dead hit here on I want to say
Speaker 3: June thirtieth, nineteen seventy four, which was the wall of sound,
Speaker 3: which had something to do with it because it was
Speaker 3: listening to it was an extraordinary experience, even though I
Speaker 3: was inside. And they ended the first set with a
Speaker 3: forty five minute jam of playing in the band into
Speaker 3: Uncle John's band into playing in the band, and I
Speaker 3: just my jaw dropped almost I mean, you know, my
Speaker 3: jaw dropped a fair number of times. The first time
Speaker 3: I heard Dark Star, you know, blah blah blah, but
Speaker 3: this was just so sustained. It was just so they
Speaker 3: were so on top of it that, you know, yeah,
Speaker 3: go good, you know. And I haven't listened to it since,
Speaker 3: I don't think, but at any rate, I would recommend
Speaker 3: that anybody if you want to hear Grateful Dad at
Speaker 3: what I think, for what it's worth, is there some
Speaker 3: of their finest that would be the moment.
Speaker 2: Okay, I've been talking to Dennis McNally, whose new book
Speaker 2: is The Last Great Dream. He talks about the music
Speaker 2: in San Francisco, but the roots of music and hippie
Speaker 2: dumb and hate Ashbury. Dennis, I want to thank you
Speaker 2: so much for taking this time with my audience.
Speaker 3: My pleasure. I've been you know, I've been reading your
Speaker 3: your stuff for a very long time and enjoying it.
Speaker 3: Somebody asked me what your names first started getting around,
Speaker 3: and somebody says, have you been reading left sets? And
Speaker 3: I said, yeah, he's you know, he's pointing out that
Speaker 3: the record companies don't have a clue. Gee. We knew that,
Speaker 3: but you know, somebody said it.
Speaker 2: And on that note, we're needed for today till next time.
Speaker 2: This is Bob left sex