The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 34,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 13 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
In the Spring of 1962 I was hanging out in San Francisco’s North Beach with my girl friend Linda Lovely and the raffish denizens of the Hot Dog Palace, fabled hangout for meth freaks, junkies, beat wannabes, angel-headed hipsters, posers and hosers, also known as the Ant Palace or the Meth Palace – maybe it was grim, cold, florescent, unsanitary, but it was really really cheap. We spare-changed tourists and dropped by the parish hall at St. Peter and Paul’s Church opposite Washington Square for a free hardboiled egg sandwich (it actually was a hard-boiled egg, still in the shell, between two hunks of French bread, wrapped in newspaper like fish n chips.)
My pal George the Beast had snagged a job as night clerk at the Hotel Dante, next door to topless pioneer Carol Doda’s club The Condor. The Dante was not like hotels of today with chocolates on the pillow and turndown service. The Dante was a Sam Spade dusty dim lit hallway hotel where real men in fedoras and revolvers in shoulder holsters thought existential thoughts while staring at the bare lamp bulb screwed above their broken single bed. Outside flowed Columbus Avenue, with its million stories of hardluck dames and babyfaced gunzels, and Ambrose Bierce shooting it out with Bret Harte as foghorns groaned and cats cried in the night.
So one day George says to us “Hey, you want to see Neal Cassady’s room?”
“Well…duh!” I sez to George, using an anachronism since no one had yet realized ‘duh’ could be a catch phrase.
Cassady was just out of San Quentin. He had been busted for possession of marijuana and sacked away in Q since 1958. Back in those days, a guy could go to prison for years if a cop stuck his hand in your coat pocket and found a joint.
Even in 1962 Neal Cassady was a legend – he was the Dean Moriarity of On The Road, and of course we wanted to be within the glamor circle of his greatness, a real legendary member of the real beat generation. He wasn’t anything like me and Linda Lovely and George the Beast, not quite sure who we were, wanting to be real beatniks and looking like real beatniks, but actually twenty years old and acting a lot like kids who had memorized Howl and thought Dharma Bums was a treatise on right living.
This was about four in the afternoon, nothing was happening in the “lobby” of the Dante – a narrow space beyond the front door with stairs leading up and George behind the counter grinning like a bodhisattva with his gold earring gleaming. So George leads us up the stairs to the second floor and down the dark passage to an even darker doorway on the right hand side.
“There it is – that’s Neal Cassady’s room”.
I could feel the beat emanations exuding through the door. Was he behind it writing long mad letters to his famous pals? Was he out looking for another joint to put in his pocket? I’ll never know. We waited around for lightning to strike and when it didn’t we looked at each other and shuffled and finally went back down to the lobby and laughed and joked until George got his dinner break. Then we walked down to Huey Looey Gooey’s and ordered three big bowls of seaweed soup.
One night in December 1961, Leslie Hipshman and I were driving across the city at the rainbow’s end in my beat-up Studebaker Lark. We weren’t on a date of course. Dates were uncool. It was just an ordinary Wednesday night in San Francisco and for some reason lost in the mist we were hanging together.
The night was cold and crisp – not crisp like eastern autumn nights when the leaves are falling, but crisp in clarity, the light exact, deep-focus, like it gets in San Francisco after a December rain and a windy afternoon. There was nothing left in the sky but clear sea air flowing over the downtown stockbroker’s offices, the Fillmore conk salons, and the desolate streetcar tracks of the Sunset district.
We weren’t supposed to be together. Leslie was going with Don Auclair, the leader of our peacenik brotherhood. Against my will, I was ending a painful love affair with a seventeen year old beauty from Riverside, Carmen O’Shaugnessy. But neither of them were in the car. There was just Leslie and me cruising through the clear eternal night at the rainbow’s end listening to somebody singing how he didn’t like his mother-in-law and wondering what to do with ourselves.
I knew what I wanted to do, of course. I wanted to park somewhere and hold Leslie tight. Leslie waves beat against me like radio signals. They came in clear as the air: “I’m young, I’m beautiful, my skin is like satin and my hair is shiny black. I’m very, very delicious. And I like you too.”
But…you had to let these things take their course. Forcing yourself on someone was uncool and could lead to an unfortunate outcome. Besides, I didn’t have designs on Leslie. We were just together, that’s all. She couldn’t help owning a powerful radio transmitter any more than I could help having a receiver that worked really well.
Leslie and I had never spent time alone with each other before. Once we’d walked to the corner store together to buy Bugler cigarette tobacco. So we did what self-respecting young freaks did in the winter of 1961 when they weren’t on a date – we headed for the wasted remains of North Beach. The era of the beatniks was over and the era of the hippies hadn’t begun, yet we knew we were as happening as the beats had been. We just hadn’t had a chance to show it yet. We were drawn like moths to the flame. But the flame had burned out.
Upper Grant Avenue, scene of epic cultural battles when Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books stood trial for publishing a dirty poem called Howl, where Officer Bigarini had arrested beatnik chicks for wearing sandals in public, where poets like Bob Kaufman and Gregory Corso and of course Ginsberg had broken free from writing airy martini-driven university puzzles like professors required me to study in English 101 and instead shouted visions of backyard greentree cemetery dawns on street corners or riding the Muni or standing in the smoke filled Coffee Gallery declaiming while Jack Kerouac ran to the deli for more dago red. Upper Grant Avenue in its quiet desolation was our link to the mighty heroes of old, whom we would never admit we sought to emulate. We were just going to get something to eat and look for our friend George The Beast.
George was the biggest beatnik we knew. Of course, since I was nineteen and Leslie was seventeen, we didn’t know too many. I was pretending to go to college at San Francisco State and Leslie was still at Lowell High School, but George – George was living the full-bore life. With his army fatigue jacket and single gold earring, his hypothetical parrot on his shoulder, and his magic to make everybody laugh with joy at anything, George was the dog who trotted freely in the streets. Maybe he wasn’t up there with Ginsberg and Corso yet, but hey, those guys were in their thirties already and George hadn’t hit twenty. Meanwhile, he slept where he could and cultivated acquaintance with the rotters, pimps, poets and crystal merchants who congregated in the Hot Dog Palace after midnight.
We found a place to park on Commercial Street jammed between a vegetable truck and a red zone. Out the door lay the land of tong wars and Fu Man Chu, of sweat shop lights glimmering behind curtains in the night, of dripping dried chickens and squirming fish in the butcher shop windows – Chinatown, the penultimate scene for San Francisco romance and I was walking though it with a beautiful unknown continent beside me. Before us lay the tiled stairs that lead to the coolest of Chinatown’s cheapest restaurants, Huey Gooey Looey, where the beat elite meet to eat.
Ah, where are the cheap Chinese restaurants of yesteryear? While you’re looking it up, I’ll tell you where Hooey Gooey Looie is. It’s buried under the weight of Chinatown international credit. It’s a bank. Even the steps leading to its florescent lit, subterranean depths are gone. Like George Bailey had never been born. Like Mister Potter had won. Like I imagined the whole thing. (Don’t worry too much about it – there are plenty of new ones.)
But in the winter of 1961 and for many years thereafter, Huey Gooey Louie’s was the restaurant of choice. Nowhere were the waiters as surly and the chances of meeting someone you knew as likely as at Huey Dewey Louie.
We slid into a red vinyl booth, ordered fried wontons with sweet and sour sauce, and leaned back, maybe wondering who that person was sitting across the table. I’d moved into the peacenik flat at 311 Judah Street a month before to live at the nerve center of our scene, and Leslie had come with the territory. Leslie was involved in some minor way with Don Auclair, the big dog of our little scene. Don was a couple years older than me, he was tall, he was brave and bold, he rode a Triumph Bonneville, he’d walked from LA to San Francisco on a famous peace march and been arrested along the way. He knew all kind of ways to get high using legal substances like lighter fluid. He was a player and I was a beginner. It didn’t matter that he had a gentle spirit and a sweet smile, he still intimidated me. But I would never let it show, of course. To see Leslie and her pals Riley and Teresa ensconced on Don’s mattress playing guitar, listening to Joan Baez or Ray Charles, was as normal as looking to see if anyone had done the dishes yet.
One other thing I should mention about Leslie. She happened to have IT, as they used to say about twenties movie star Clara Bow. She wasn’t exceptionally beautiful. She didn’t attempt to be sexy or provocative. But something about her made young guys like me turn their heads to see her walk by. Perfume emanated from her that you couldn’t smell, but it smelled good anyway.
Now here we were at Huey Louie Gooey’s, leaning back, waiting for the wontons, waiting for the world to end, waiting for our lives to begin, and talking about the inconsequentialities of the day. Some friends in the peace movement were going to drive across the country over Christmas break. We were going to march in front of the White House waving placards and chanting and not eating anything for twenty-four hours and being non-violent about it but still making a little mark against death from the skies. We knew it was hopeless. But we couldn’t just sit there.
Leslie couldn’t go but I thought I would. Then we moved on to Joanie Baez, whom we loved, and Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Her father collected jazz records; she’d grown up listening to the greats. She even knew about the Dixieland guys from long ago. That was cool. I liked a girl who stood up for something, even if it only Dixieland jazz.
I don’t think I had noticed before how intelligent she was, how full of brimming life, eager to experience the full range of human possibility. Restless, reckless, a little crazy. I just took it for granted — we were all like that. We didn’t talk about it. And of course I noticed her shining black hair cut in a dutch boy bob. Of course I noticed how she filled her bulky-knit blue sweater against the booth’s red vinyl. Her easy laugh. Even her slightly crooked teeth were cute. Why couldn’t I be in love with her instead of the braided, insane wild child who teased and tortured me, driving me insane too, but my craziness was to want her more and more. Leslie was reckless, but in a different way – I felt easy and comfortable with her.
Like every other restaurant in Chinatown in 1961, Huey specialized in Cantonese delicacies. Besides fried wontons they offered pork fried rice, cashew chicken, seaweed soup with little pink shrimps swimming through kelp beds in the bowl. I’m sure they had more authentic food over on the Chinese side of the menu, but for for Leslie and me, fried wontons were still pretty exotic. After the meal, I splurged and treated her to Hooey Dewey Gooie’s signature culinary delight: shivering, quivering, glistening almond pudding with a nut in the center and a canned mandarin orange slice and a fortune cookie on the side. We took bites from the gelatinous substance in our bowls as Leslie told me about her life as a hip high school kid. It wasn’t a lot different than my own life as a high school hippie in San Mateo, the suburb where I’d learned to hate suburbs.
On weekend nights, Leslie told me she’d get home by curfew, make a show of going to bed early, brush her teeth, flush the toilet, yawn, then make a body shape from pillows under the blankets and quietly sneak out to meet her beat wannabe friends. No one had a car – so they walked through the city, down to Market Street, or over Russian Hill to North Beach. There they patrolled its back allies to see if any big beat parties were still going on. Maybe one day they’d catch Jack Kerouac running out to the late night deli on Broadway for even more dago red. But they never saw him. Maybe they saw his shadow once.
We were all under his shadow.
Next we headed for Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s great information station for the underground world – City Lights Books. By now we were comfortable with each other and enjoying the night. Finding George the Beast became a handy reason for wandering around the best neighborhood in the best city on the best coast.
Shig was at the counter as usual, leafing doubtfully through some baggy poet’s self-published tome. We checked for George upstairs and down, and poked around the poetry section. I leafed through the new issue of Sing Out! to see if it had the plastic record to hear how the songs sounded if you couldn’t read music. Two months before, high on peyote, I had listened to Joanie Baez sing The Great Silkie on one of those acetate pull-outs, listened to her over and over until it was inscribed in my consciousness. I wanted another one of those little records if I could find it.
George wasn’t anywhere around, so we browsed until we were bored, then crossed Broadway to check the Hot Dog Palace.
The Hog Dog Palace, fabled hangout for meth freaks, junkies, beat wannabes, angel-headed hipsters, posers and hosers, also known as the Ant Palace or the Meth Palace – maybe it was grim, cold, florescent, unsanitary, but it was really really cheap. From its fly-specked windows you could see everything and everybody making it down Columbus Avenue or even Upper Grant if you snuck up the back stairs and peered through the glass door. The Hot Dog Palace stood on the site of Pandora’s Box, which in its day had been a genuine pseudo-beatnik sandwich shop where they served Zen Soup to sip while wearing zen slippers and pretending to read Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen. It was kicks, man, kicks! And they kept getting harder to find.
George wasn’t there either, but I saw Pat Lofthouse scribbling cartoons in his sketchbook with a Rapidograph like he always did. And I saw Gypsy Boots, a street hustler who made his living doing things with other men I didn’t want to imagine. Gypsy was shoveling quarters into the jukebox like they were slugs. Maybe they were. I guess he was in the mood for Bright Lights, Big City, because we heard it three times in the ten minutes we strolled from table to table.
Looking for George was getting boring. We decided to walk on up Grant Avenue. There were no more hangouts up that way unless you were over twenty-one. I wondered if Bria was in the Anxious Asp. She was the first Lesbian kid I knew I knew, and she could pass for twenty-one. She was usually drinking in the gay Asp or somewhere nearby.
The question in my mind was – should I take Leslie’s hand? Were we at that point? I wanted to. I liked her. But…well…I didn’t want to look uncool in her eyes. Cool people didn’t hold hands while they walked along. That was it. Unfair, but true. The rules were the rules.
The moon rose, silvery and full, its mysterious light rolling past us as we hiked towards Greenwich Street. At the corner we passed the laundromat that had been Pierre DeLattre’s Bread and Wine Mission, where poetry and bongos and Jesus and hipsters, made for each other really, had touched and kissed and sadly parted. The moonlight glimmered on the laundromat’s red neon sign 15 CENTS WASH. 10 CENTS DRY. We kept going. Pierre didn’t live there any more.
Such a beautiful night. Why not walk on up the hill, all the way to Coit Tower, the floodlit phallus that pierces the skyline for fifty miles on a night like this. None of the city’s Manhattan style high-rises had been built yet and the City still looked Renaissance, magical, from up there. Let’s go look again.
We turned right up Greenwich. The street was lined with pastel colored narrow flats climbing in the moonlight like in some Italian hilltown, Verona maybe, where Mercutio was stabbed by the Jets while Romeo screamed. Maybe Mardou Fox had lived in one of those flats when Kerouac mourned for her in The Subterraneans. Years later I learned Jack moved his story from Greenwich Village to North Beach because his publisher said it would sell better. Oh, protect yourself, angel of no harm, you who’ve never and could never harm and crack another innocent in its shell and thin veiled pain…the inventor of spontaneous bop prosody had shifted locales at the advice of his marketing director. He’d done it so smoothly I never even wondered.
At the top of Greenwich a narrow staircase leads into the trees. We climbed on through the spooky city park darkness. Did I touch her? Our spirits were beginning to touch, just a little. Spidery tendrils of…what? Friendship? Understanding? Whatever it was, we were wrapped in it, and it was nice. The tendril webs were going to prove strong enough to link us across the continent as we tossed through squalling marriages, and stayed strong enough to urge me to to keep her letters for nearly fifty years. I’m not sure those spiderweb tendrils have a name, but they wrapped round us like ectoplasm. They weren’t named romantic love, and surely not just friendship — you don’t want to hold a friend tight in the moonlight. But whatever it was it felt good. I had enough problems with passion at the moment. Who needed more?
We eventually emerged into a clearing beneath the great illuminated tower, its white stone turned golden by the floodlights. A half dozen couples like us and several melancholy gents perhaps looking for same wandered hither and thither in the moonlight. Leslie and I sat on the damp grass and looked out over the city at the rainbow’s end sparkling crystalline in the December night.
The ramparts of the Shell Building lit in blue-green shimmers, the parapets of the Russ Building flooded with gold shimmers, they beaconed over the Renaissance city like Doge’s towers, papal towers, Aztec towers, Inca towers – over the great city that sprang from the sand dunes on the far Pacific shore. And we were sprung too. Aw, Frisco – how’d you get to be so blessed?
You probably didn’t know native-born San Francisco kids can be just as manic about the town as any fresh arrival from Dubuque. On a crystal December night from the top of Telegraph hill we could feel somehow we’d been accidentally born in the perfect place.
Leslie said, “City’s sure beautiful tonight.”
I said, “Yeah…”
I didn’t mention the other nights I’d sat here, usually with Ricky and Parm, my high school pals, occasionally with a girl. Leslie didn’t go into her past either. The light descended upon us and into us. I had no plans beyond loving this night, this city, this sweet girl beside me – all in pretty much the same way. Generalized and without any particular future.
We thought we knew what we wanted. Leslie wanted to be free from sitting in rows waiting for the bell to ring, free from her mother’s plans for some wrong future, free to go where she wanted, to find out who she was, who she could be.
I was already free to be blown wherever the wind blew me, if not free from the chains of the skyway. What I wanted was someone to love forever with the freedom of complete equals. Someone who would want to go see where Mercutio got stabbed that starlit night. An adventurer comrade who would also be beautiful and very very hot.
It was eight years before I got her. And she came with kids and responsibilities. I had a lot of growing to do.
We sat there a long time, talking quietly and then not talking at all. Maybe this moment was what we really wanted.
Eventually though, the damp seeped its way through our jeans. It was a week night, anyway. Leslie needed to be home by ten-thirty.
When we hit Greenwich Street again, Les decided to run. She wasn’t really in that much of a hurry. Screw curfew. But the hill was so steep and we were so full of moonlight that when she took off I peeled out after her, catching up and grabbing her hand like we were kids or young lovers in a New Wave movie, running and laughing and trying to go yet faster but stay in step. Cats looked up from their garbage can in surprise. The old man walking his poodle turned to see more of this beautiful girl and the freak with the Buddy Holly glasses trying to beat each other to Grant Avenue. We careened around the corner onto Grant laughing breathless and didn’t stop until we passed the Coffee Gallery where we hugged each other as drunks shouted encouragement out the door and tossed quarters.
We kept going now just walking past The Fox and Hound where we could hear Jorma Kaukonen playing Delta blues inside on his slide guitar. Back past the Hot Dog Palace — through the window we saw George the Beast standing at the counter jawing with Fast Walker. But the night was coming to an end.
Aw, there’d be other nights. Hundreds and thousands of other nights in the city of our hearts where the fog never lifts and the moonlight never ends and the wind blows always bright and clean. George wasn’t going anywhere and we’d be young forever.
We drove across the City again over Russian Hill down past Van Ness and out through the Fillmore to Leslie’s mother’s flat on Baker Street. Miles was blowing Freddie the Freeloader on the radio and the night was sacred.
I double parked of in front of Mom’s place so Leslie could jump out but she didn’t jump out. I didn’t want her to jump out. We were illuminated, bright and I took her in my arms and we kissed. We took a long time. We could have kissed forever as far as I was concerned. But then it was over and she did jump out and in though the door and she did look back at me before diving through, Hi Mom! I drove back to 311 Judah levitated one foot off the front seat.
Did we fall in love and live happily ever after?
Did we save up together to go find where Mercutio was stabbed?
Or did the wild child Carmen O’Shaugnessy finally break up with me forever and
then did I finally completely disintegrate and catch mononucleosis and go home to recuperate in the suburbs and
there did I meet a girl at a party in Burlingame and
didn’t we split for Pacific Grove three days later and
didn’t she get pregnant that summer and
didn’t we marry and live together in love and misery and
didn’t Leslie run off to New York with Peter Van Gelder when she turned eighteen and
didn’t she get pregnant too and
didn’t she give up her son for adoption but find him again years later as
I found Leslie’s letters again in a dusty box and put them on the blog and
didn’t we meet each other again one time more when we’re old?
Would it have been better if we had found George the Beast and gone off to his hotel room and smoked pot all night? Or if Leslie had caught a cold and stayed home?
What does this scanty story mean, anyway? Why go sit under the moon observing a city with no clouds when you could be making money, lots of money? For that matter,
What is the meaning of life? I have no idea of course, but it might have something to do with the little tendrils that might creep out in the moonlight. Sometimes they grow into strong cables like the ones between Patrushka and me. Tested and true, no matter what. And sometimes they never grow beyond a tentative little spiderweb. But either way – they’re the best things God gave us poor humans.
Photo credits:Coit Tower Moon: Dan Heller Photography; Chinatown restaurant: Dizzy Atmosphere’s Photostream; North Beach Hangout: Jerry Stoll from I Am A Lover copyright 1961
For a long time I thought the Pondering Pig might be sort of like King Arthur. If I looked, eventually I’d find him in a cave over in Cornwall somewhere, thinking deep thoughts for two thousand years, and then he would come out and explain everything to everyone, including the whereabouts of the cheese.
So I waited around until one day it occurred to me he might just be taking a very long afternoon nap up on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, while his readers waited hopefully, and those snooty little dwarfs pitched their bowling balls down the mountainside.
So I decided to go looking for him.
It didn’t take long. I knew all his haunts from the old days. I figured he’d be over on the west side of the mountain, where it’s sunny and breezy and you can look out over the Pacific as you doze off. But he wasn’t around anyplace, so I wandered up Bootjack Creek toward Laurel Dell and those jolly camping spots above the fog line.
Being as it was a warm day, I sort of sat down to think some deep thoughts myself, and, when I awoke, I distinctly heard the sound of typing nearby. Somebody was using an old-fashioned manual typewriter and was going blue blazes, except for the occasional shout of "Oh Fiddle!"
Ponderpig has built a little cabin in a clearing up there, or, more likely, he moved into one that happened to be available, and he is up there even now, working on everything he always wanted to write. He’s writing longer pieces that won’t fit on the blog, and, as I figured, they will finally explain everything about everything to everybody.
While I was sitting there he knocked off 11,000 words about his old friend Solveig Rimkeit, and her adventures in the American South during the freedom rider era, and how she hitchhiked across America in 1962 and how Piggo used to sit around and eat pickles with her when he wasn’t moaning on and on about his mean girl friend, Carmen O’Shaugnessy.
He actually gave me a copy. I have it here in front of me and I’ve been wondering who might publish it, because it explains exactly what it was like to be young in San Francisco in 1962. Pig calls it "Solveig Hitches Home."
Then he showed me the novel he’s been working on. It’s about three Haight-Ashbury kids in 1965 who find an old-fashioned kitchen radio in a dumpster at the corner of Page and Clayton Streets and when they turn it on to see if it works, well, the results are unexpected, to say the least.
I scanned it while the Pig was out rooting up his dinner. It’s already 35 chapters long and it’s funny and exciting and really deep, but the Pig said I couldn’t tell anybody about the details until he’s finished it.
So he is actually working on a lot of projects, none of which he is yet is ready to publish. The next time I go up to Mt. Tam, I will ask him if I can post a few pages from “Solveig Hitches Home,” so you guys can take a peek at it.
Oh, that reminds me. He also asked me to say thanks to his readers, who continue to log thousands of views each month at his site, even though it has been untouched by porcine hands for quite a while. And a special thanks to all the fans of Grace Slick, who refuse to believe that was really Linda Ronstadt up there with the Jefferson Airplane at Woodstock.
You know what burns me up about life? That we get old and die, that’s what. I’m ready for eternity right now!
I’m ready to go hang out with my Dad some more. I’m NOT ready to go visit his stupid grave. I want to have more fun watching him do his soft shoe routine and hear him grumbling behind the typewriter in a hurry to get his newspaper column out before the deadline. Dad was lively! You know what I mean?
Here I just discovered this great singer, Ivie Anderson, bursting with life and youth and exuberance and great chops and I want to go see her and tell her how great she is. But you know where she is? In the ground somewhere. Dust and ashes.
Do you think this is fair?
If I tell you she sang lead with Duke Ellington’s orchestra back in the Thirties, you’ll go, “Oh, some boring old singer. Let’s go see The Buggers instead.” And her youth and talent and wonderfulness is invalidated because she’s in the ground and forgotten like dust on my living room floor that I ought to sweep up.
I don’t like this!
I want to go to heaven right now, please! This is not a death wish, by the way. The world is full of cool people I love now. And I’m ready for more adventures. It’s just that I want to hang with Ivie Anderson and my Dad. And my pal Rodney Albin who died of stomach cancer in the Eighties and my brother Noel who turned me on to rhythm and blues before he got smashed at the age of 19. I want us all to be together NOW!
Botheration!
Actually, I don’t know quite where Patrushka found these artifacts. They were somewhere in her box of youth, put away when she was an eighteen year old refugee from San Gabriel and the Sopwith Camel was about as cool as cool as cool as it was possible to get in the untrammeled San Francisco of 1966…
I would have said as groovy as groovy as groovy as you could possibly be but you would have thought I mocked them, which I could never do, old Hump gone to the moon…
“Would you like some of my tangerine?” Inevitable, when I hear that famous Sopwith Camel line, that I should see their lead singer, Peter Kraemer, strolling out the door of the SF State Commons with his main man Chris Latham beside him and he’s looking for Lori Haymann because he’s got a mad crush on her and he’s eating something small and orange as he walks. It’s a warm October day in 1962 1963 1964 1965 at San Francisco State and the folkies are sitting on the grass on the right hand side if you’re coming out the door with their guitars and mandolins and dulcimers and five-string banjos and their House of the Rising Sun and no one has yet got the idea to start a rock band, and the bearded peaceniks are setting up a blue felt-covered table next to the Young Americans for Crewcuts where they can harangue each other in peace while the Cost Plus peasant-skirted and sandaled angel girls of my youth admire and accept Peter’s tangerine or possibly mock him and look for someone with a pomegranate, but in the most fetching way ah ah Roseanne Forest, Eva Bessie, Lucy Lewis, Robin McGill, Shauna Pope, Bess Farr, Natasha Someone thanks for dropping by my vision I wish you were all still here today on this planet to mock us more and let Peter peel an entire tangerine for you.
Ah ah to be “one of the Bay Area’s most exciting new rock groups…setting attendance records at the Matrix that surpassed the Jefferson Airplane, the Greatful (sic) Dead and even Quicksilver Messenger Service.” And now “approaching their first recording session” with New York folkie producer Eric Jacobsen looking for a quick hit, which he found in Peter’s uniquely friendly voice and Martin Beard’s well-constructed, funny bass solo. And, of course, the vibes from a sunny October afternoon on the San Francisco State lawn. Hello Hello charted at #26 on Billboards’ Top 40 Hits of 1966, right behind Gene Pitney’s long-forgotten Backstage. Kama Sutra records sold them as five zany but safe guys with clean hair and kazoos, hugging silly absurdist trees like the Monkees did. They went along with the gag, who wouldn’t? In 1966, the idea was hits, lots of hits like The Lovin’ Spoonful, like The Mama and The Papas. There was no model yet for any other kind of rock band. The only thing the Camel did was wrong was to stay out of the charts too long. Before Hello Hello, Sopwith Camel was one of the top attractions on the San Francisco ballroom circuit, after Hello Hello, they basically disappeared for the moon. A shame, really, because the band got better and better. For a free listen , check out their 1972 album, The Miraculous Hump Returns From The Moon at the Sopwith Camel website.
So now it’s 2010. The honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hill, so I fell asleep in a dell high up on San Bruno Mountain and there amongst the nodding garter snakes and elfin butterflies I dreamt a sleeping giant, the 21st Century Sopwith Camel was trundling towards San Francisco to be born yet again.
P.S. Actually, I made up that last part. Last November, I was paying no attention whatever to the great white roaring city below but idling with dog and pipe when a note came fluttering on the back of an endangered butterfly. It was from the unextinct Sopwith Camel itself:
Oink,
We had a great debut with new lineup at J. Tony Serra’s Halloween party in the Great American Music Hall, lights and sound and all. Martin Beard, original bassist & self from the ballroom days, and Mike McKevitt, and Bruce Slesinger, with whom I’ve played occasionally for years. Mike and i were in a big avant garde blues band around Y2K; Bruce was the drummer for "The Dead Kennedy’s." We are very modern, nice and loud and psychedelic and now we need a gig.
…Jes’ so’s y’know this is the best version of the band yet; I’m so happy to be avant the garde again; the prospect of playing the retro circuit was giving me the creeps. If anyone in your extended sty is or knows an agent or manager who might like to book a modern band with an aging name—Peter Kraemer
San Francisco, you brittle old tattered whore city like elderly Zsa Zsa Gabor with real diamonds, you still put on a glittering front for your customers seen from the Bay on Sausalito Ferry approaching you at nightfall.
What is that far off roar I heard but hopeful schemers at Montgomery Street cocktail party of insane tearing? I heard you all from far out on the Bay coasting past the Rock, I heard crowds of young millionaires in black Italian hipster clothes clutching leather handbags filled with dreary dream money and heartless hope as Bentleys passed into the fog.
Down on Broadway I saw hard barkers under hard lights with hard faces, heard hard DVD porn blow-out specials 8 hours for $19.95. I saw Zsa Zsa decayed to tits and ass displayed at bargain rates and free looks encouraged under the glare as washed up out of time hippies huddled on Kearney Street stairs waiting for this night to pass with one guitar but no one who could play.
I heard fast-talking North Beach restaurant shills, pasta shills, pasta shills, who long ago took down their pants for one thousand dollars now they hustle tourists through the door for cold cold calamari at bargain rates on the cold sidewalks of North Beach today above the Scarbary Coast.
Over Russian Hill on Polk Street I heard hard nightmare laughter spewing from open bar doors while hard homeless wretches echoed same hard haw haw jiving, dancing and paper bag drinks on the curb and puddles of vomit spread along the sidewalk turning pink in the dawn.
Oh city of toilet paper wads under the eucalyptus and sodden doughnut boxes in the bus stop shelter, city of drunken wakes for departed neighborhood libraries, city of rotting art under the mudslide, of shameful ignorant laughter in the starving night.
I love you so much, old whore.
In the summer of 1964 I was leading a double life in a cavernous Victorian flat at the corner of Golden Gate and Octavia in the antediluvian City by the San Francisco Bay.
By day I appeared to be an earnest, bespectacled college student with longish hair and a beard, trying to catch up at San Francisco State’s summer session. By night I was a screaming Beatlemaniac, free dancing to “Can’t Buy Me Love” with the unbuyable Linda Lovely, learning Beatles harmony parts for pothead jollity, rolling more joints and swallowing more grim Red Mountain burgundy as the moon peered down at her dancing and sleeping children of the Fillmore District.
The mutation happened quickly. When Linda and I moved into that flat in late spring, we ascended the long stairs for the first time to the sound of Janos Starker’s take on Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. The mood was serenely floating icebergs in the northern sea. 
Cool was all. At parties, guys danced little hip barely perceivable movements with slight toebend and careful handtouch and cool smiling into some beauty’s eyes with smooth seduction.
Don Brasher (or was it Brazier?) sat in his room reading Rainer Maria Rilke by candlelight, a glass of Spanish sherry by his side, his pipe of bohemian sunload ready to carry him to deeper intunement with the German meister, while his other German meister, Johan Sebastian, was ascending to old heights of calm untouched forever chills.
Down on the corner under the streetlight young spade guys were singing The Temps in four part harmony and drinking from a paper bag and laughing at something we didn’t know.
Rock and roll, rhythm and blues, oh yeah, that was long ago and far away in another world. I listened to it in the car because I’d listened to it the car since I was fourteen and there was nothing else on except Sunday mornings when the black Oakland churches gave out Hammond organ zeal. Or the Spanish language station where I tried to understand what the mariachi guys were singing. So I knew about Love Me Do and I Want To Hold Your Hand but so what?
I saw The Beatles on the 6:00 news one night at my parents’ house in San Mateo and thought they looked pretty cool with their long hair and wise mouths, but so what?
We found out What in late August. My photographer friend Bill Laird, an ultimate Bohemian with sad transparent Scottish face, green corduroy sports coat frayed at pocket and long straggly Chinese black beard told me he and his old lady had seen A Hard Day’s Night and they had stayed to see it again and I had to see it too.
The Beatles were not what I thought they were.
So, incredulous but not wanting to miss anything, Linda and I got stoned and braved the SRO crowds of teenagers at a Saturday matinee at the Metro Theater on Union Street. It was true about the non-stop screaming that made it impossible to hear the songs, but…but…I had to agree…these guys were so cool!
By the moment, early on, when they make their first escape on the train, hide out in a mail car, and John whips out his harmonica and cuts into Love Me Do and Ringo is playing on a little trap set that somehow materialized among the mail bags and London birds wearing John Lennon caps are popping into gleeful existence laughing and joyful, my heart and mind were ready to be won over. Their pothead humor was unmistakable. We knew they HAD to be heads like us. We shared their secret from the get go.
And A Hard Day’s Night was in black and white, too. So cool, like the hippest movies always had been and ever would be.
The next day I went down to Woolworth’s on Market Street, and bought the soundtrack LP. Hippies were trekking down there from all over the Western Addition and the Mission. And that is how the old bohemian world came to its end, in a matter of weeks, in San Francisco, how John Coltrane was moved to the middle of the record stack and The Beatles, then The Rolling Stones, then The Kinks took their place at the lead and a new era began, the era of the dance concerts and the rise of the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and The Holding Company and The Grateful Dead – the great acid rock San Francisco bands. Pop culture was interesting for a moment at last.
Here is a clip from the San Francisco Chronicle of that momentous summer so long ago, a record of Ringo’s impromptu visit to the San Francisco Airport on June 13, 1964, when I couldn’t have cared less…
Ringo Stops By—Near Riot
By Larry Fields
Exactly two hours after San Francisco was jarred by a mild earthquake yesterday it got an after-shock. A really big one.
Shaggy Ringo Starr, en route to join the other Beatles in Australia, landed at San Francisco international Airport at 7:42 P. M. to change planes.
He was greeted by 800 shrieking, singing, swooning, crying teenage fans. One 16-year-old girl was so thrilled at the sight of her idol that she fainted.
Ringo’s Pan American World Airways flight was three hours late. But the delay only heightened the enthusiasm of his adoring admirers.
They spent the time listening to radio reports of his expected arrival time, comparing notes on how much they loved him, and singing:
"We love you, Ringo, yes we do.
"We love you, Ringo, we’ll be true."
Forty San Mateo County deputy sheriffs and airport security officers were on hand to try to control the yelling teenagers, but they weren’t certain they could handle the hazardous assignment.
Plans were made to sneak the drummer — who was traveling under the name R.. Starkey–into a private room and keep him away from his fans.
The teenagers, who threatened a reporter who said he wasn’t convinced that Ringo was something of a deity, said they would quote tear up unquote the airport if couldn’t see their darling.
And when their darling’s plane finally landed, a tremendous shout went up and police lines strained to keep the hysterical fans from pouring onto the runway.
WARY
Ringo’s blue eyes squinted apprehensively as he was rushed into a private conference room to meet the press.
"I loved them," he said of the screaming fans, "as long as the police don’t let them catch me."
Ringo, very short and thin, speaks much as he sings. And newsmen had difficulty understanding him.
He wore a tight black suit, a striped lavender shirt, shiny black boots, four gold rings, a gold bracelet, a gold watch and gold-and-ebony cufflinks.
TONSILLITIS
He said he thought he had recovered from the recent attack of tonsillitis which prevented him from starting the Australian tour with the rest of the group.
Only once did he lose his composure. A reporter asked him a question and called him "John."
"Who is this guy?" Ringo asked, quote doesn’t he know my name isn’t John?"
Ringo said he was looking forward to playing the Cow Palace in August and said: "I hope they won’t get let any cows in."
GIFTS
He was introduced to the presidents of two of his local fan clubs, who presented him gifts. Then he was lugged into the crowded lobby where he waved at his fans.
They waved back. They screamed. They cried.
One girl touched him as he passed, then wept as she stared at her palm and said: "My hand is numb. I can’t feel my hand."
Other girls surrounded her and kissed the hand that touched the Ringo.
Then he was whisked to his plane but the girls continued crying and shouting.
"I’m crying because he’s a darling." Sniffed Jeanette Ford, 14, of San Mateo. "He is more than I expected. I didn’t used to like him. But he’s my favorite now."
Beatup Victorian Fillmore District flat copyright 1980 Dizzy Atmosphere. Existential alienation from 1961 film Last Year At Marianbad
Look, I’m just a talking pig and I don’t always understand humans. They puzzle me. For instance, yesterday I began to wonder why we Americans are willing to go so massively into dept so we can support our gigantic army.
The government likes to call it “The Department of Defense” so I asked myself, who do they exactly defend us from? Is it the gigantic Chinese army across the Pacific just itching to invade Hawaii? Unlikely, I thought. We’re China’s best customers. They already own a gazillion dollars worth of US bonds, why would they want wreck their cash cow?
I thought back to when I was a little pig and people were always scanning the skies for Soviet bombers bearing H-bombs to drop on my poor fearful head. Could the million-strong Russian Army be waiting its chance to send out the bombers again, or roll their tanks across Europe? Well, maybe. I agree you got to keep an eye on those guys, but you don’t hear too much about that particular fear at the moment.
We certainly don’t need an big army to protect us from terrorists. The whole idea behind terrorism is to terrorize people, not attack gigantic armies. Terrorism is about having one of their guys scare the bejeezus out of us with a bomb or a machine gun or poison. Stopping the Al Qaeda and its friends is a big issue, but I don’t see how driving the debt deeper by maintaining a gigantic army is going to do one little thing to stop them. I can’t see how burning and tearing Afghanistan is going to do anything except create more terrorists. Terrorists sneak around, that’s what they do. If you bomb them out of AfghanaPak they’ll scurry off to Yemen. When you bomb them out of Yemen, they’ll sneak off to Brixton. It’s what terrorists do. Brixton’s in South London, by the way. The Clash used to sing about it in relevant songs like Guns On The Roof and Safe European Home.
This list on Wikipedia shows five armies in the world with over a million soldiers: the US, China, Russia, North Korea, and India. None of these other countries, unpleasant as they may be, have military bases strung all around the world. Or, to my knowledge, strung anywhere except within their own countries. If we’re drowning in debt, why do we need them if they don’t?
I’m not talking about NATO bases. Those are a joint arrangement. If all the other countries are paying their fair share and we still worry about those Russkies jumping into Europe whenever they feel like it, then fine. Same with Japan. If they are begging for us to protect them from the Chinese and North Koreans, and they are paying the freight, then fine. But what about all these other bases, for instance: List of United States Army installations in Germany. What’s the point?
Well, one thought occurred to me. Maybe Americans are cursed with some kind of misguided patriotism that wants America to be the number one country so bad we are willing to do anything, go to any level of debt, to pretend it’s still true and it’s going to be true forever.
The only thing we don’t want to do is pay for it. Do Americans pay by sweating to make sure all our kids get the best education in the world, bar none? A next generation ready to take on any challenge the future throws at us? Do we honor entrepreneurs who come up with products and businesses that will lead America through the next century? Would any any politician dream of saying, “We have the biggest, best military in the world and from here on we will pay for it without going into debt. Whatever it costs, we’ll pay as we go even though it means big big tax increases.”
Crazy, isn’t it? Have a glance at this Feb 1 story from Slate:
Then check out this neat chart from the NY Times:
And, finally, check out this guy…
It seems like liberals, conservatives, Democrats and Republicans should be able to get together on this. It seems so obvious to this pig unless, 1) our leaders have already been compromised or 2) we are all so hopelessly filled with dreams and demagoguery that we can’t see the facts when they stare us in the face.
But hey, I’m just a pig. Maybe I’m missing something.
Big Brother guitarist James Gurley’s demise in mid-December got me thinking about the Haight-Ashbury again, that world that so dominated my early life and still follows me today like a puppy that refuses to become a dog. What gets me, when I let my mind roll back, is not the music, not the LSD, not the teenyboppers dancing topless in the Panhandle, no – it’s my horrible optimism, the shiny beckoning utopian vision grinning like The Joker. I believed a new age was coming where we would live in love, in harmony, in peace, in the country. No one would have to work unless they wanted to, and there’d be apples cheery red in every orchard.
I wasn’t the only fool on the hill. Remember the Beatles?
All you need is love. Love is all you need.
In the beginning I misunderstood, but now I’ve got it – the Word is good. Say the Word and you’ll be free.
You think they wrote that with cynical commercialism? They didn’t. They picked it up out of the zeitgeist, just like I did.
Here’s a page from my address book of those days. See the guy on the bottom left under the green ink smear? Jerry Sealund.
Jerry was a go getter. A high energy guy. Had a vision for the future and got the bread together to open the first health food store in the Haight-Ashbury. I forget the store’s name because we all called called it Blind Jerry’s.
Yeah, Jerry and his wife Ethel were born both blind. That’s how I got to know Jerry in 1963. San Francisco State hired readers for their blind students and I got the gig for Jerry. I used to go over to their house off Market Street, read Albert Camus out loud for a few chapters, then Jerry and I would drive around and get stoned. Jerry didn’t want Ethel to know about his pot smoking activities. It was still the early days.
Jerry was an optimist, you know? It didn’t occur to him that being the blind proprietor of a retail establishment might present problems of a shoplifting nature. We original hippie were all friends, we had high ideals, no one would rip off a blind guy, right? Did anybody notice the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem? I didn’t.
How could we be so naive? We weren’t in a cult, we had no charismatic leader. Tim Leary was good for a laugh, that’s all. If there were enemies, they came from the straight world — the fuzz, LBJ, television. Acid had opened the frontiers of our consciousness and let in the white light that would guide us to bliss and the knowledge of how to truly love each other.
But Blind Jerry’s health food store got nibbled and chewed and shoplifted into oblivion in three years. In his history of the Haight-Ashbury, Charles Perry says Jerry was robbed twelve times in eleven months.
Are we humans inherently good until civilization corrupts us, like the Romantics thought? Or are we inherently evil, as Christianity teaches?
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
That’s what it comes down to, and I’m voting with the Christians. We see our best chance and take it. Raping the weak, robbing blind guys, smacking little kids around, punching and bleeding and stealing from people who can’t fight back, that’s the human way, that’s our potential and I wish it wasn’t. It makes my stomach hurt.
We’re smart, but not smart enough. We love but we don’t love enough. We hate terrorists and child molesters and Republicans and Obama and Sarah Palin and climate deniers and global warming kooks and we never notice they are just us in another form, with another history.
If you’re a cynic, congratulations. I wish my skin was a little thicker.
* * * * *
My archivist assistant, The Pondering Chicken, asked me to put in a little note about the other names in the address book scan. For the record, Jim Smirchich was a photographer in those days. Later he moved to Oregon where he learned to make the most beautiful handmade beads you ever saw. http://www.smircich.com/index.html
Melinda Scotten, Melinda Scotten. Hmm, did I meet her at a party? Must have been a short friendship.
Stephany Sunshine of Cosmos City blew in and out of my life like the original flower child. I wrote a song about her that began
“Pretty little, pretty little Stephany,
Now your head’s been opened and it’s my oh my,
The thought’s you’re thinkin’ seem mighty strange to me…”
She deserves a post of her own.
Skip Shimmin eventually became a recording engineer and worked for Fantasy records, I think. Maybe Skip is out there somewhere and can tell us.
My New Year’s resolution was if I can’t say anything nice, then I won’t say anything at all. But don’t worry, I’ll be back one of these days, more fun than a barrel of monkeys!
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