Odetta Done Gone

Odetta died in New York City on Tuesday.  That big, rich, powerful voice will thrill us live no more.  She was a mighty rod and an inspiration.  She could turn simple words into an epic declaration of insufferable injustice and give us some spirit to fight it. She made me want to sing the big kind of folk music.  May sweet Jesus ease her passage.  Her like won’t be seen again.

Another man done gone
Another man done gone
Another man done gone
From the country farm
Another man done gone.

He had a long chain on
He had a long chain on
He had a long chain on
From the country farm
Another man done gone.

I didn’t know his name
I didn’t know his name
I didn’t know his name
They did him just the same
Another man done gone.

Here’s the link to her obituary in the Los Angeles Times:

Odetta Holmes dies at 77; folk singer championed black history, civil rights

Thanks to If Charlie Parker was a Gunslinger, Ther’d Be A Whole Lot of Dead Copycats for the heads up and photo.

Luminaries of the Haight-Ashbury: Rodney Albin

Part I: The Folk Years

I guess of all the friends I had back then, in the halcyon days of my hippie youth,  Rodney Albin is the guy I miss the most.  When he died of stomach cancer in 1984, still a young  man, I felt like I was losing my brother all over again.

He was a pal, you know? Guys like him are hard to come by.

Well, so tell us about him, Pig.

Like so many of my erstwhile folknik hippie commie friends of the early sixties, I met Rodney kind of like this…

Late one morning in, I suppose, the Fall of 1962, I exited San Francisco State’s HLL building, where the boring part of my initiation into high Western culture took place, and ambled across the lawn towards the  Commons to get coffee and see what was up.  Despite its medieval sounding name, four legged sheep were not pastured in the Commons, nor did peasants, other than us, trudge there every morning to work their land.  The Commons was a big cafeteria in the center of campus, and everything of consequence that happened to me in those years took place inside its doors at the second table on the left.  Or on the lawn directly in front.  That’s it in the center of the picture, as it looked in 1960.  Who could guess a square building like that would become a cauldron of sixties counterculture?

On this particular morning, I happened to notice a new folkie sitting cross-legged on the lawn, surrounded by the regulars and passing around a dulcimer he had just built.  He was a tall gangly kind of folknik, just transferred in from the College of San Mateo, a junior college on the Peninsula.  He was wearing bright red trousers, a stove-piped hat and tails, and he was playing The Battle of New Orleans on his fiddle.  No.  Wait a minute.  That’s got to be my imagination.  The top hat and tails didn’t come until later.  OK, he was dressed like a normal person.  It was his dulcimer that was extraordinary.

Interested in dulcimers myself, I forgot about the coffee (never easy to do)  and squeezed into the circle.  That dulcimer was pretty cool, all right.  Shaped like Jayne Mansfield with soft flowing curves and strummed with a sea gull feather, you could tune it to any interesting modal scale you might be in the mood for, brush its strings with that quill, and there you were,  mournful and lost in the holler, sounding like you’d been born in Viper, Kentucky instead of San Francisco.  I started in on an improvised, sea gull strummed Pretty Polly, and pretty soon I was hooked.  The Commons fled and there I was in some longago fog shrouded mountain glen, watching some no-goodnik do in Pretty Polly while the pretty little birdies mourned.  It sounded like magic, and Rodney had created the damn thing out of a piece of spruce.

I got to know Rodney after a while and discovered he was from the next holler over.  My holler was called San Mateo and his they called Belmont.  He and his younger brother Peter were still living with their parents in an upper middle class shack in the Belmont hills.  I also discovered that Rodney wasn’t the new guy – I was.  He was well-known in folk circles up and down the Peninsula and across the Bay in Berkeley.  He’d masterminded the folk music festival at the College of San Mateo where young Jerry Garcia made his debut to an unappreciative audience of frat rats.  Rodney and George ‘The Beast’ Howell had opened the Boar’s Head the preceding summer, a folk-oriented coffeehouse in the loft above the book store in San Carlos where George worked.  Garcia and the other Palo Alto folkniks regularly showed up there to jam into the weekend nights.

I started dropping in to see Rodney when I was down that way.  On my first visit, he showed me the six string balalaika he’d built out of orange crate wood.   It was his first sort of crude try at building an instrument.  He was way beyond now of course. He’d already finished a viol de gamba, and now he was building a harpsichord on his bedroom floor.  Its parts spread hither and thither across the  carpet; tools, a reel to reel tape recorder and an unmade bed filled the rest.  He used the tape machine to record performances at the Boar’s Head.  Apparently some of these tapes still exist and are passed from hand to hand in Deadhead circles.   They would include: Garcia, Ron McKernan, David Nelson, Rodneys’s brother Peter of course, and other less talented performers who went on to become teachers and bureaucrats and accountants – but still played pretty good.

Rodney opened a whole new world to me.  Before Rod, folk music meant Joan Baez manning the barricades while Pete Seeger fired his musket at the Pentagon.  It meant peace marches, sit-ins and and drinking cheap dago red at parties while somebody plunked out ‘Twelve Gates To the City, Hallelujah’ on a nylon string guitar.  But these friends of Rodney’s were…dedicated.  They played bluegrass and old-timey stuff, They listened to Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers on scratchy 78s.  Was Charlie from Greenwich Village or Boston?  I wasn’t sure.  They sang about chickens loose in the barnyard squawk squawk and subjects like that.  Who could figure?  But, hey – I liked Rodney so I listened and tried to understand.  I just didn’t see how “Boil That Cabbage Down” would save the world from nuclear destruction.

Peter Albin was already a more accomplished musician, although still in high school.  He could wail on Bile That Cabbage Down but he could also play Mississippi Delta slide guitar riffs, and,  what really impressed me — he knew some Chuck Berry stuff.  I know I was supposed to have outgrown this teenaged foolishness, but tell my ears that!

There was something about Rodney, his gentle spirit, his brilliant mind and his dry sense of humor, that drew me to him.  I liked hanging out with him, and so did most everyone else in our circle. Later I learned there were circles like that all up and down the Peninsula.

Rodney was kind of funny looking.  He had a classic beanpole shape, gawky you might say, you might even say gawky and sniffy.  He was born to play comedy roles, and he worked it.  The first time I saw him (as opposed to meeting him) was the preceding spring when he was still attending the College of San Mateo.  I knew some CSM kids in a school production of Twelfth Night, and I went see one of them, Dick Shapero,  play Malvolio.  Dick was an experienced actor and knew how to get laughs,  but when Rodney as Sir Andrew Aguecheek entered stage right, Dick had to give up.   Rodney didn’t say anything.  He just stood there in his Elizabethan get-up, awkward, gawky, rubbing his nose, looking around as if he couldn’t quite remember his lines. The audience slowly began to titter and he built the moment into a the play’s biggest laugh.  He worked that role successfully for the next twenty years.

(I KNOW this isn’t Twelfth night, ok?  I don’t have a photo of Twelfth Night and I need a photo here.  So here is the same company’s Pygmalion, produced a few months later)

A few days after Rodney passed his dulcimer around, I was sitting on the grass trying to impress some proto-hippie chicks by  playing “I’m a  whinin’ Boy, don’t deny my name” on my Mexican folk guitar.  I was using a two-fingered picking style I’d made up.  Like crab pincers, my thumb kept the rhythm while my index finger picked out the melody.  It was pretty primitive.  If I hadn’t been a soulful singer, the chicks would have walked.  As it was, they were listening all right, but they weren’t idolizing me like they should.  What could I do?

When it was Rodney’s turn to do a song, he launched into ‘Freight Train, Freight Train Going So Fast’, singing in a thin nasal voice like an elderly gent from Viper, Kentucky.  I thought his singing could use some help, but, man, he had that Elizabeth Cotton style finger-picking right down!  His thumb was rocking between the bass strings and he syncopated the melody just like the old girl herself!  Actually, I’d never heard of Elizabeth Cotton before, but whoever she was, I wanted to play like that too.  But three fingers!  How could anybody ever make so many fingers work together?  Maybe I should stick to my authentically primitive crabstyle.

But Rodney encouraged me.  He showed me the moves over and over till I started to get them.  I went back to my apartment and drove my wife mad singing the silly holy thing over and over with my thumb rocking and fingers trying to syncopate it right, “Please don’t tell them what train I’m on so they won’t know where I’ve gone.”

Linda was thinking, ‘When’s that train leaving?”

Come Christmas, Linda, in a moment of madness, gave me a mandolin.  She’d found it in a Third Street pawn shop and bought it for $20.  I was thrilled.  It’s just – how did you play one of these things?  I loved messing around with instruments and could sort of play a lot them, all by ear and without much skill.  I asked Rodney if he knew how to play one and it turned out he did.  He showed me how to hold a pick and how to play a simple tune called Liberty.  After I mastered that he taught me a more complicated minstrel song called “Colored Aristocracy.” After that, I didn’t need any more lessons.  I knew four chords and could pick two songs.  I was ready to roll!

I didn’t know it yet but I was about to take my place in the Albin Brothers’ amorphous shape-shifting band, The Liberty Hill Aristocrats.  One night, Rodney said they were going to play the Top of The Tangent in Palo Alto and they needed somebody on mandolin.  I was a mandolin player!  So next night, with some trepidation,  I got up on the little stage, playing with the likes of Jerry Garcia and Peter Albin and David Nelson – real masters of their instruments.  Rodney didn’t care if I only knew four chords.  He even let me sing one, I think it was Little Birdie.  – he liked to include people, and that included The Pondering Pig.  You had to love a guy like that.  I did.

That was Rodney, he got people going, he included them, even if it affected the professionalism of the music.   He had his priority list, and friends were higher up than professionalism.  Me too.

COMING SOON: THE  STORY OF 1090 PAGE STREET

Photo credits: Rodney, CSM Play: Pig’s files – photographer unknown, SF State campus: SF Pub Lib

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.

Famous People I Never Knew #3: Jerry Garcia (part 2)

Back in the redwood forest, people have settled in, dinner is over, and guys start tuning up their  instruments. Nice, beautiful Martins and Gibsons and the occasional Stella. OK, I’m a little jealous. I have an old Mexican nylon string and, as a full-time student with a baby on the way, the chances of saving up for one of those charmers is nil. Still, I’ve never seen so many really nice instruments before.

Now a big smiley Palo Alto kid with short hair and square clothes starts the night off by accompanying himself with very good Skruggs style banjo while singing “The Hit Parade of Love”. The what?

On the Hit Parade of Love I know I’ll never stop,
I’ve got a long long ways to go before I reach the top
But if I ever get there, I’ll really have it made,
Cause then I will be number one on the Lover’s Hit Parade

Should I laugh? This isn’t Masters of War! This isn’t I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night. This isn’t even By the Banks of the Oh-hi-o. This is just silly!

But I can’t laugh. I wouldn’t be laughing with this guy, who’s grinning and clearly knows how silly the song is and doesn’t care a bit, I’d be laughing at him.

I couldn’t grok it – my soul was formed for tragedy. I’m a meloncholiac. I love the blues, I love John Coltrane. La Boheme knocks me out. I love pathos and warfare in music – but this was goofy! The songs were like that a lot that night…

There’s a beautiful, beautiful field
Far away in a land that is fair
Happy landings to you, Amelia Earhart
Farewell, first lady of the air

And

Don’t send my boy to prison
For that would drive me mad
Remember I’m a widow
And I’m pleading for my lad

All sung with perfect irony I think, but I wasn’t sure – I just couldn’t grok it.

For me folk music was a way to be popular at parties and meet girls, just like Richie Valens songs had been a few years earlier. I was a strong singer, but my guitar skills in those days were rudimentary. These guys from Palo Alto were serious – they were mastering their instruments. They practiced by copying 1920s Charlie Poole 78s note for note. And the concept of guys playing popular music together on stringed instruments was actually going to be quite useful later on.

David Nelson was there that night – the perfect example (not Ozzie and Harriet! The David Nelson of New Riders of the Purple Sage and a long, distinguished music career). He was already a legend , the best flat picker in Palo Alto. Clean as Doc Watson they said. Plus he had a quiet introverted mysterious hipness that I admired.

But, truth be told – I thought bluegrass was ugly. All those broken glass harmonies and a thin tenor singing reedy through his nose. Why were cool people listening to this bright tinkly, very white music?

This was a minority opinion of course, and I had to hop on the bus or stay on the curb. And I wanted to be on the bus. So I got Rodney to teach me Elizabeth Cotton style finger picking and I would sit in our apartment afternoons trying to get my thumb to rock back and forth like Rodney’s did. I kept wanting to swing it, and you had to have a steady metronome thumbbeat to make the syncopation sound right.

Soon I was sitting in with his band, the Liberty Hill Aristocrats, playing rhythm on the mandolin. I only knew three mandolin chords, but Rodney let me play anyway. He was a born encourager, may I be as good as Rodney that way someday. Like I said, my strong point was singing, I had a soulful tenor full of heart and soul emerging from my own suffering and madness. Girls listened, at least the soulful ones. I sang the Greenbriar Boys song Little Birdie with a lot of power and emotion – but it wasn’t exactly what was wanted down at the Top of the Tangent, the Palo Alto club where folk music went down. I just wasn’t quite in sync. I wonder how Pigpen (Jerry Garcia’s Grateful Dead mate) felt during those years.

I met Ron McKernan (Pigpen) once during those years. Linda Lovely and our new baby Jennifer and I were camping with a bunch of freaks on a hill above the 1963 Monterey Folk Festival. Ron was playing blues harp at the campfire, and I joined right in – I knew all those Jimmy Reed songs he was playing because we’d listened to the same radio station. We had instant musical communication and a great red wine drunken evening. I had no problem at all groking his music.

Like Ron, I spent my high school years listening to KWBR, the rhythm and blues station beaming across the San Francisco Bay to Eisenhower Republican San Mateo from the city of Oakland, where, as I was reminded after nearly every song, you could buy a complete furniture room group for $99 at Furniture Discount Warehouse for no money down and ten dollars a month – and when in 1958 Bobbie Blue Bland first shouted

“She used to call me Bobby, Little Boy Blue, B-O-B-B-Y!, BAH BEE!!”

the hairs on the back on neck stood up and screeched. Same thing when James Brown and the Famous Flames came on singing

“Please Please Pleeze Darlin’ PLEEZE Don’t Go!!!”

Lying in my San Mateo suburban bedroom at midnight I groked somebody expressing in his terrified lostness spirit what I felt in my own terrified lost heart – heartbreak – heartbreak and rage, but about what? I didn’t know about what.

The other greatness in 1950s R&B was what they call today doo-wop. It had no special name then. In between commercials for the the Furniture Discount Warehouse we could hear the latest sides from the smooth Spaniels or The Turbans so beautiful and rich and hovering in the air. It made driving around stupid ugly San Mateo with its class divisions and crickity post-WWII Shoreview stucco emptiness after school worth it– those smooth sorrowful major and minor sevenths harmony.

I used to fantasize about learning how to play electric guitar like BB King or Elmore James, that sound, that sound that spoke my ache, what it was, what life really was – I felt like if I could do that I could get some peace, but unlike Mike Bloomfield, for me it seemed just impossible, a life lived in bars in West Oakland – me, a little wimpy kid with thick glasses and a heart murmur and a brother killed in a car crash. Unconceivable, I couldn’t grok that either.

But back in the 1963 future it was a great party anyway. The rain poured and we stayed warm around the stove and played lots of music and I joined in on the high harmonies. Linda disappeared as chicks were supposed to do, I guess it was boring to listen to a bunch of semi-good bluegrass musicians if you weren’t making the music yourself.

There was one Palo Alto guy at the house party besides David Nelson who was more than semi-good. His name was Jerry Garcia. Slender, goateed, with a cowboy hat and a five-string banjo, I could tell he was seriously good although I knew nothing about banjo music and wanted to know less. He played with complete technical confidence, then he put his banjo down and picked up his guitar and did the same thing, and then he put the guitar down and picked up the fiddle and did the same thing. He was so far out of my league, I couldn’t grok it. And that was okay.

The next morning Linda and I struggled out of our sleeping bags and went to find warmth and coffee. By the stove, I listened to a couple of Palo Alto folkies feeling so sorry for Jerry and his practicing obsession. It went something like this:

“Poor Jerry, when we get out of college we’ll get good jobs and move on to the serious world of law and order while poor Jerry – what does he have to look forward to? – traveling from Bakersfield to Fresno playing in country and western bars the rest of his life. What a dead end. Poor Jerry”.

Maybe that’s what I didn’t like about bluegrass-style folk music. Guys like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continued in Famous People I Never Knew: Jerry Garcia Part 2. (I know – where’s Jerry? Hold on a bit – he’s coming. One day at a time)