Oh, You Haight-Ashbury Girls…#2: Lori Helms

Ah, Lori Hayman Helms.  So beautiful she was.  And probably still is.

Lori was Chet Helm’s wife, but he got all the glory.  Chet was the outgoing, easygoing impresario with the Texas accent who founded Big Brother and the Holding Company, then went on to pioneer the weekly rock dances at the Avalon Ballroom.  Without Chet and the Family Dog, the Haight-Ashbury as we remember it never would have happened.  So Chet got all the press, all the glory.  Lori got nothing but grief.

I remember their big wedding bash in December, 1965.  Chet rented a hall in the Mission somewhere and everybody was there in their finest thrift store finery.  What a scene! My date Linda Lovely wore the black beaded flapper dress I’d scored for her at a thrift shop in Virginia City.   I knew only my belted maroon velvet smoking jacket, my striped bell bottoms - wool, very classy - my high collared, mod navy blue shirt with its tiny white flowers scattered in every direction, my long flowing Pondering Pig locks and, of course, my shiny black Beatle boots, de rigueur in the era, only these could match the splendor of the occasion.

The hippies’ own rock band, The Charlatans, were on form that night, playing the most danceable rock ‘n roll in the City That Knows How, and all the hippies were sweatin’ it out on the dance floor.  I ran into my pal Peter Kramer and he introduced me to his new guitar-playing friend Terry MacNeil. They were writing songs together and getting ready to start a band called the Sopwith Camel.   Peter had never sang a note in his life as far as I remember  - he was an aspiring filmmaker - but why should that stop him?  He was clever, he wrote funny lyrics and, hey, George Hunter, leader of The Charlatans, couldn’t even play an instrument.  He’d taken up autoharp so he could hold something onstage.  This was 1965, man.  Possibility was rife!

What a party! Chet was floating, pot was smoking, pigs were dancing, punch was drinking - where was Lori?

I hope she was smiling.

Lori was a sweetheart and as beautiful as Jean Shrimpton (for those who came in late, The Shrimp was the most famous English Supermodel of the era) but watching Lori was like watching a living Antonioni film -  quiet, with big lost eyes. She was hurting inside, even I could see that - but what it was I never knew. She kept her heart hidden. Lori wasn’t unique - it’s funny how many gorgeous bohemians I knew with hearts like that  - the Valium generation.

Oh, one more little memory - about eight months earlier I moved into a two-story flat on Page Street. Chet and Lori were living in the attic, the nicest room in the house, and Chet was running the place.   What I particularly remember was their cat - a fat tortoiseshell named Hecate. Hecate - the goddess of witchcraft, right? Appropriate for a cat. And you could also pronounce it, “Heah, kitty.”

I’ve heard vaguely that today Lori is a Shakespearean scholar of some renown. I wouldn’t know, I haven’t seen the kid in forty years. God bless her - and that goes for all you Haight-Ashbury girls.

Photo by Marilyn Jones McGrew

Babes of The Haight-Ashbury #1

We’re starting a new series on The Pig today, but I’m not sure what to call it yet.  We will be featuring  photos of the remarkably lovely women who graced the streets of the Haight-Ashbury in those halcyon days of yore.  (The above is not one of the babes, by the way.  That’s Pigpen.  We asked him to stand in for the babes until we find a name for the real Babes, and he reluctantly agreed.  Which explains his expression.)

With the Pondering Pig as your guide, we’ll revisit those charming fashion dissenters of the mid-Sixties - before the fashion pundits taught everyone what was truly psychedelic and what was not.  Here’s a psychedelic fashion pundit now:  “Paisley!  Paisley is  SO psychedelic - look at all those swirling things that look like cells of consciousness expanding.  Swirling things that look like brain cells are so now! But you must never wear checks - they’re…absolutely…square!”

Plus, our Babes will be topped with the finest Swiss treble cream milk chocolate and served on a bed of cherry surprise.

What shall we name this new series?  I like Babes of the Haight-Ashbury. It’s classic, you know?  It’s the  word that never went away, just as current today as it was 150 years ago.  It leads to lovely adjectives like “Babe-a-licious”  In fact maybe we should call the series “Babe-a-licious Babes of the Haight-Ashbury.” Or is that too Wayne’s World?

The only problem with the word is - it’s slightly offensive.  I can already see my in-box piled high with notes from irate women shouting, “You only love me for my body!”

So, how about “Belles of The Haight-Ashbury”?  That’s not offensive in the least.  Trouble is it sounds like rich girls wearing muffs while they ice skate in Central Park in 1892.

Twentieth Century Foxes? Nah. Too LA.

Piglet of the Month?

How about “Slum Goddesses of the Haight-Ashbury”?  Allen Cohen, editor of the super-psycho-spirito-conscious-o-turnon-o-San Francisco Oracle, actually considered this name for an Oracle series. It comes from  the song “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side” by the seminal anti-psychedelic pychedelic group, The Fugs, and I’ve read the Village Voice actually ran a series by that name.  So it’s got the period flavor.  But the fact that Allen ultimately nixed the idea gives it an aura of failure, certainly not appropriate for the Pondering Pig.

I’m running out of ideas.  So I need help.  Please improve on my suggestions with comments below by next week or we’re going with “Babe-a-licious Babes of the Haight”, okay?

Photos of lovely Haight-Ashbury maidens (matrons okay too) may be sent to ponderingpig@yahoo.com.  My Assistant, The Pondering Chicken,  will start tabulating this afternoon! Stay tuned.

(Photo of Pigpen by the dependable Herbie Greene and swiped from his Book of the Dead.)

The Sad Story of Everpresent Anxiety

Continued from last time…

Back in ‘66  me and a couple of pals got this idea for a power trio.  Nobody was doing power trios then, I guess because nobody was good enough - but not being good enough didn’t stop us!  No way!  I practiced up on fife,  Jascha figured out how to play fiddle and of course Prackers held down keyboards.  After a few weeks, we were rockin’.  Unlike most of the bands of that era, we were so hot we didn’t even need drums.  Jerry Garcia used to always say he was going to drop by to jam with us one of these days.  So that’s how we knew we were good.

I liked it when we practiced.  Pretty soon the police would be breaking down the door and it got really exciting.  Plus the free publicity!

We decided to call ourselves Everpresent Anxiety.  Jascha was into this Kirkegaard thing so each of us took one of his books and wrote songs out of them.  I worked out Fear and Trembling - did a Chuck Berry thing with it with some folk-rock mixed in.  Did you ever read Fear and Trembling?  It’s really long! Truth is I couldn’t remember all the words, so when I got stuck I would just wail on Tra La La!  Tra la la! Really spontaneous, you know?

The high point was our version of Is There Such a Thing as Teleological Suspension of the Ethical? Oh, our friends all told us it couldn’t be done, the teenyboppers wouldn’t get it, and on and on, but we just took that as a challenge.  It was a time of experimentation, new frontiers,  breaking the boundaries - and we were breaking Kirkegaard!  Philosophy Rock!

Finally we were ready.  We took the bus down to the Avalon to audition.  We started off with one of our strongest numbers, Sickness Unto Death, and Chet Helms said he thought we had something.  Maybe we should all go home and rest.  But finally he came around.  He said if we stuck to Rolling Stones covers we could have a Sunday afternoon slot.  The only thing was - the name had to go.

“What’s wrong with Everpresent Anxiety, Chet?  It’s perfect for our new sound.”

“Yeah, but it sounds too much like Everpresent Fullness. “

“So?”

“They’re a band!  They playing on the same bill with the Sir Douglas Quintet next week.  That’s their name!”

We couldn’t believe it.  How dare they!  Probably from LA too!  We rode the bus back to the Haight shaking our heads.  Why would anyone name a band after a digestive problem?

But Practical thought maybe bands named after digestive problems would be the new thing and we should have one too.  Prakky always had good ideas so we worked on it.

Jascha said, “Well, how about Duodenal Ulcer?  That’s a digestive problem.”  Prac thought about it while we transferred to the Haight Street bus.  Pretty soon he said it was good but he thought Peptic Ulcer would be even better.  Sounded peppier, you know?

Me:  “Ulcers Schmulzers.  Lets call ourselves Heartburn!  It’s got everything!  Romantic desolation, rage against the system and digestive problems all in one!”

But we never could agree so after a couple of weeks we gave up and just called ourselves The Three Pigs.

I think it was the name, but maybe hippies just weren’t ready for three guys wearing sailor suit jackets and no pants.  Our big Sunday afternoon tryout fell apart.  The hippies didn’t even want to hear Teleological Suspension.  They just kept shouting Off The Pigs! Off The Pigs!  It was a debacle.

Finally, we fought back.  Improvised an incredible Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?, chanting the final Tra la la  Tra la la like we were Vanilla Fudge.  Show them!  Chet finally had to cut the power and the rent-a-cops led us off stage in handcuffs.  It was so embarrassing!

I don’t know.  We tried to regroup, and we got a few gigs around the Bay Area, mostly playing nursery schools and zoos.  Finally we threw in the towel and went back to building houses out of sticks and things.  All because of Everpresent Fullness.

I Remember Love

Did you ever look at an old rock poster and wonder who the acts advertised actually were?  Like this one for instance…

Some ugly looking poster, huh?  Actually it’s a handbill, but that’s no excuse.

Love.  Rock scholars and sixties people will recognize the name right away. They were from LA, came up to San Francisco from time to time to try to break into our In Crowd,  and finally went on to rock and roll glory with their 1967 album, Forever Changes. It’s a great album. In fact, it’s the best of all the American takes on Sergeant Pepper, and possibly the only successful take ever (The Rolling Stones’ shot at it, Their Satanic Majesty’s Request was grim- their biggest mistake of the sixties).  But Forever Changes is pretty damn good.  I listened to it regularly until my turntable gave up and I gave all my LPs away - oh whadda fool!

Even their early single, My Little Red Book, deserves a three-decker rock and roll cake.  It blasted pure rock and roll fervor at a time when the music was getting just a little too flabby for my taste.   I downloaded the song from Itunes just now to check and, yes, it’s still drives like a 1966 Batmobile.   But in 1966 to my piggy ears they were just another okay band from LA.  Let them entertain us if they choose, but never shall they be invited into our superior society, he sniffed with snout held high.

At the time of this concert, Love’s first album was in the stores.  It was regularly seen in Haight-Ashbury collections because, unlike the  the Jefferson Airplane’s boring first album was and the Grateful Dead’s first outing - which, not to put too fine a point on it, stunk, Love’s first wasn’t half bad.

But who in heck was Everpresent Fullness?  Therein lies a story…

Next: The Pig’s Sad Story

A Birthday Party in the Haight-Ashbury, 1967

By 1967, the original hippies were already raising their kids in the Haight. Here’s documentary proof. While the Summer of Love was going bonkers on Haight Street, two blocks away Bill and Barbara Laird were cutting cake and dishing out cherry vanilla ice cream for their four year old’s birthday bash. That’s the Pondering Pig wondering what’s become of his shoes while his erstwhile wife Linda Lovely decides whether to stick him with her fork. The blondie in the flowered dress with her back to the camera is our daughter Jenny - already four years old.

It’s Too Late, She’s Gone

Yesterday I learned Beth died. The beautiful girl whose strings are tied into my heart as fast today as they were the last time I saw her in 1968. My sad girl, my wicked girl, a friend who was a lot like me. Somehow I always thought I’d see her again one day and she’d tell me she was all right. She had come through. But she never did.

I first met Beth at San Francisco State in the fall of 1961. I was new on the scene and didn’t know anybody yet. I’d just transferred to State after a season of traveling in Mexico and New York. One night in October or thereabouts I went to an all-night vigil for peace outside the Commons, the schools’ poor attempt at a student union. I brought my Mexican guitar and sang Pretty Polly and We Shall Overcome and There Once Was A Union Maid through the night as the frat boys taunted us and threw eggs. By morning I knew all the peaceniks, the people who became my comrades for next few years, Solveig Otvos, Don Auclaire, Peter Weiss, Bob Kuehn, Eva Bessie, Peter Kraemer, Margarita Bates…and Beth.

Beth didn’t notice I existed, of course. Isn’t that how these stories start? Maybe she smiled at me once, I’m not sure. It wasn’t till months later I realized she was nearly blind without her glasses, which she refused to wear and she probably couldn’t see me.

Somebody invited me to a party on Clayton Steet that weekend, and Beth was there. Some haunting quality in her face drew me towards her. It must been her face because we’d never spoken. To me she was a charming, Audrey Hepburned sort of long-haired, brunette, eighteen or nineteen, mildly pre-Raphaelite, the kind of girl we called ‘woodsie-nymphsie.’ She had a big crush on a pink-cheeked, black bearded young radical named Steve something. She looked longingly at him, I looked longingly at her, and I sang “Oh my love, I’ve hungered for your touch a long lonely time” with great feeling. The party got real quiet. I had a good voice in those days and I knew how to sing.

Well, Beth and I never got together in the way you’re expecting, because Margarita got in the way. Margarita Bates. For now, let me just say she was peerless, I hungered for her magical presence, and Beth disappeared in her shadow - except she didn’t really. Instead, the oddest thing happened. Beth and I became friends.

As my love affair with Margarita proceeded from horror to horror, I found solace with Beth. She understood. She listened. She cared about me. As we got to know each other better, I discovered we also shared sensibilities. We both liked the same books, the same films, the same foggy streets, and we shared the same sliced up feeling inside.

As the sixties slowly burned down to the stub, I was never far from Beth. We spent days together wandering North Beach, drinking coffee in The Enigma or The Hot Dog Palace, playing Desafinado over and over on the juke box, sharing intimate secrets or just gossiping about mutual friends. I called her Ivich, after the character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roads To Freedom trilogy.

Late one afternoon in 1962 we were hanging out in Solveig’s place on Page Street. Solveig wasn’t home from work yet and there were just the two of us, listening to the Modern Jazz Quartet on Solveig’s record player. The late afternoon light faded away until there was only the light spreading from the little kitchen. You can guess what happened. Our buried longing for each other took over, and we lay together on the couch in the darkness until Solveig got home.

I felt horribly guilty, because I was married to somebody else, who was pregnant with my child. Cheating on my wife was the last thing I wanted to do, I thought. Turned out I was wrong. We never touched each other again. But I couldn’t keep away from Beth. I loved her.

Funny, I never considered that spending so much time with another woman was a form of cheating.

Beth was never cool, never a freak. She got her BA in English in the requisite four years, married an earnest young carpenter, settled down in an apartment on Downey Street and got a big dumb Afghan dog. She grew fat. She was unhappy. She was a bore. She didn’t go to the concerts or listen to the bands. But I couldn’t keep away from here for long, she was too deep a part of my life. Their apartment was a regular stop on my rounds of the Haight-Ashbury. Her husband got me work on his remodeling crew. By 1967 though, we had lost touch. Our lives had finally diverged too far. It was around then they moved home to Marin County.

OK, my first wife and I eventually split up and by mid-1968 I was living in the Eureka Valley neighborhood. The Haight had become a threadbare circus. The Hell’s Angels and meth freaks were taking over and the original hippies had mostly moved on.

But one morning I was over there for some reason, and standing and laughing on the street with a group of freaks I’d never seen before - I saw Beth. She was thin again. She was extroverted. She was merry. She was delighted to see me. She introduced me to her new friends and I was polite but I could see right away they were creeps, and they gave me the creeps. OK, I admit it. I was a complete snob in those days. Only the original hippies were cool. Everyone else please show your hip credentials before I’ll speak to you. But I knew a creep when I saw one, and they looked like creeps to me. Speed freaks.

We exchanged phone numbers and Beth (who by now was calling herself Lenore) invited me to a party at her house in Marin that weekend. I was playing guitar and singing with Hugh Harris at the time and suggested he come with me so we could try out our new set at the party. Saturday night we drove across the Golden Gate Bridge in Hugh’s VW bug, and soon we were somewhere deep in the redwood sided streets of Corte Madera.

‘Lenore’ met me at the door in a transparent gown with a drink in her hand. Her new friends were eating and drinking and grinning at me, showing off their missing teeth. Scott, Lenore’s husband, was kept busy running out for more beer. While he was gone, Lenore made laughing, snide comments about him. His earnest, straight-forward self was comedy material to her new crowd. There were no other women at the party.

I got the creeps big time and withdrew into myself. Hugh and I played some tunes, I talked with Scott a little bit, and we left early. On the drive back to the City, I realized we’d been dosed with MDA, the “love drug”. It must have been in the punch.

The high itself was nice, pleasant. It wasn’t that. It’s that she hadn’t told me. It was her little joke, a mischievous joke on me.

That was it. I wrote Beth out of life. She shouldn’t have done that. She broke my trust. And I didn’t dig her new friends.

I’ve never forgotten that night, and the knowledge I knew my dear girl was in trouble and I just wrote her off. Why didn’t I say something? Beat her up? Ask her what the fuck she was doing? Listen to her like she’d listened to me. Cared about her. Been there for her.

I was such a hippie. No interference. That’s cool, man. Good-bye.

I looked for her half-heartedly over the years. She’d moved. Changed her name. Who knew? But I always thought one day I’d see her again. And her face has haunted me these long years.

The other day Greg Hoffman mentioned he was going to interview Wes Wilson for his new book. Wes is the artist who basically created the psychedelic dance poster in his early work for the Fillmore and Avalon Ballrooms. I remembered his wife had been Beth’s best friend in those early days at State, so I asked Greg to see if Eva knew what become of her. Last night Greg called me. She’s laying in the ground these fifteen years. From uterine cancer. I’ll never see her no more. It’s too late, she’s gone.

One More Once for The Summer of Love

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

THE AMAZING CHARLATANS ONE MORE TIME.

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

THE CHARLATANS IN THEIR HEYDAY

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

JAMES GURLEY AND FRIENDS

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

WHEN GURLEY WAS GOLDEN

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

SUMMER OF LOVE 40TH ANNIVERSARY

September 2, 2007
San Francisco

More photos of the anniversary party from Clara Bellino.

San Francisco Chronicle’s story:Summer of Love bands and fans jam in Golden Gate Park.
Relix Magazine’s story: Old Hippies Come Out of the Woods for Summer of Love 40th.

Secrets of A Semi-Fiction Writer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nah.

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

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

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

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

So much simpler.

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

“The roses they won’t hurt you…the roses they won’t hurt you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t care what they say, I won’t stay in a world without love…”

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

“Some people know about it, some don’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Days of Playland-at-the-Beach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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