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.)

Luminaries of the Haight-Ashbury #1

Eva, Colin, Theanna & Wes Wilson. Taken at their Lagunitas, Marin County home, circa 1970.   Photo by Harlan Floyd.

Wes, of course, is the founder of rock poster art.  Not literally, - the first San Francisco rock poster was created by Mike Ferguson and George Hunter of The Charlatans to advertise their mid-1965 gig at the Red Dog Saloon.  But Wes’ wraparound lettering set the tone for an entire generation of psychedelic poster designers,  His ideas can still be heard echoing through the design canyon today…

Back in the mid-Seventies Wes and Eva decided to do the back-to-the-land thing, and, unlike most, they made a success of it.  Today, when he’s not rounding up the cattle, Wes practices his art out in the barn - now his studio.  Get the full story at Wes’ website: www.wes-wilson.com It’s full of interesting reminiscences about the sixties as well as his more current work.

Eva , a luminary in her own right, eventually went back to school, earned her Ph.D and today practices in Missouri as a clinical psychologist.  Together since the mid-Sixties, Wes and Eva are a true Haight-Ashbury success story.  Way to go, guys.

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.

Kurt Cobain Starring as Walrus Pemmican

I’ve been perfectly content here in my little pigpen in the north, gazing out the window at the little robinses pulling their worms and typing away at chapter 38 of the Longest Novel Ever Written, The Syndicate of Eternal Friendship. Trouble is my no good pals from the Twelfth Street Gang keep throwing pebbles at my window. They want me to come out and show them card tricks.

So, in an effort to quench their card trick ardor, I’ve agreed to post a post. And since I can’t think of anything much beyond the Syndicate of Eternal Friendship, here is a bit of casting for the movie version of the novel:

Kurt Cobain as Walrus

Walrus Pemmican (not his real name, of course) is an All-American kid, except he’s Canadian, from Salt Spring Island off the coast of Vancouver. His folks run a little resort up there, and he grew up teaching sailing and sea kayacking to the guests and lifeguarding for them during the summers. Gulf Islands Consolidated High School won the provincial basketball title both years Walrus played forward for them. When he was sixteen, he rebuilt a 1950 500cc Norton and roared up and down the logging roads of the island for something to do. After graduation, his folks sent him to his Dad’s alma mater, Reed College in Portland. He lasted two years before dropping out to thumb back and forth across America seeking the meaning of life. In November of 1964, he landed in San Francisco’s burgeoning Haight-Ashbury district, where he has lived for the last four months with a group of friends known to local freaks as The Syndicate of Eternal Friendship. When you’re 22, four months is plenty long enough to form eternal friendships.

Images From Alton Kelley’s Pen

It’s hard to know exactly what Alton Kelley did all those years. It’s not that he wasn’t productive. He was wonderfully so. But nearly all of his most famous work - the Grateful Dead’s skeleton and roses logo, the Zig-Zag man, were done in collaboration with his long-time partner Stanley Mouse. Together with contemporaries Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, and Rick Griffin (and scores of nearly forgotten others) , they visually defined a way of being.

Which notes did Mick write? Which notes did Keith contribute? What about John and Paul? It’s same with Kelley and Mouse. Maybe they remember, except Al is gone.

Here are some Kelley-Mouse images from the summer of 1966. They’re from my personal collection. I’m putting them up in their yellowed glory, keystoning and all - just as I shot them.

I don’t know who owns the copyright to the images, but these photographs of the posters were created by me.

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Farewell, Al Kelley

Sad news, Pig People. Alton Kelly, creator of so many of the posters that defined my generation’s style, passed away at his home this morning.

Fare you well, master. Say hello to Chet Helms and Allen Cohen and Rick Griffin and all the rest of the heroes when you get to their big party in the Elysian Fields. Just turn right at the rainbow till you see some pearly gates. Then look for the Baby Jesus.

When you see him, don’t be afraid.

Ask him to shut your mouth and open your mind forever.

Back In The Haight-Ashbury Again

Readers of my ongoing story, The Syndicate of Eternal Friendship, available only by asking to be on my special mailing list, must sometimes wonder about the story’s veracity. I mean, how likely is it someone invented a radio that picks up signals from forty years in the past? Or a transmitter that allows The Syndicate to communicate with a fifteen year old disc jockey living in the year 1927? On the face of it, I have to admit, we have some credibility issues.

Yet, every word is true. Every word! I wasn’t actually there myself of course, but I’ve interviewed both Sylvie Potemkin and Paulie Ratskiwatsky many times and I always made careful notes afterwards. When I could still see my notebook. If only I could talk with Walrus Pemmican too, but I just can’t find him. Nobody can. It’s like he was sucked up in a cyclone and blown all the way to Oz. Maybe he’s living in a hut in a forest somewhere in the kingdom of the Winkies. Well, even without his testimony, I have evidence. Incontrovertible evidence, which I now present for the first time. Step right up. Admission 10 cents.

To gather this evidence, I hitchhiked across the wild steppes of Oregon all the way to San Francisco, slept out in the rain in abandoned pigsties, made friends with the Rogue River Rustlers who let me sleep under their porch, bunked in virginal youth hostels with young Ostrogoths and Franks, all with one intent and one intent only - to get to San Francisco to convince you, gentle reader, of the absolute truth of every wild claim, no matter how outlandish.

I now present, for the first time ever, actual photographs of the very locations where The Syndicate of Eternal Friendship takes place. If these don’t convince you, then you are a hard case indeed, and probably eat boiled owl…

Here is the fabled intersection of Page and Clayton, the geographical center of the story’s universe. Half a block north lies the Hancock house. Someday there’ll be a plaque. And half a block west you’ll find the bay-windowed, asbestos-shingled, anonymous-looking flat where the Syndicate of Eternal Friendship began their incredible adventure.

Here’s where Tosh stood knocking, waiting for someone to answer the door, on that morning that changed their lives forever.

Half a block north on Clayton you’ll find the Hancock home and the dumpster where Paulie and Walrus first found the time radio. You can see where Margaret had her attic studio there at the top of the building. Ken and Don, the gay landlords who bought the place from the Hancock estate, sold it in 1981. Now, in 2008, it’s being remodeled back into a single family home. How likely is that, oh mocker? I wonder if there’s anything else still hiding under the floorboards of the attic?

Looks like they’re converting the garden apartment where the old man with the Siamese cat lived into a garage…

Here is the Childrens’ Playground in Golden Gate Park, where Walrus and Tosh first met. Kismet, I guess. It was six o’clock in the morning. Walrus was trying to wake up the chickens in their little chicken house while Tosh watched in amazement from atop her carousel horse. They didn’t do things like this at home in St. John’s Wood. If you look closely you can still see the columns of the merry-go round peeking through the trees.

And here is the very chicken house, a little larger than in 1965 and it no longer houses chickens, of course. Other than that, you must admit there really is a chicken house right where they said it was.

Finally, compelling, incontrovertible evidence! Here is the exact tree that Howie Morris climbed like the great apes after he accidentally and innocently absorbed a megadose of 100% pure, pharmaceutical grade, Sandoz-manufactured, lysergic acid diethylamide. In the crook of this very tree, in the rain, he gibbered and shivered, attracting a small crowd of neighborhood toughs in the process, who urged him on to greater heights. The police had to call the fire department to get him down. After which they put him in the back seat of their patrol car and hauled him off to the bughouse.

Of course the tree was a little smaller then.

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.