Linda Lovely’s Journal – January 1966.

Voices from the Haight #2

The original Linda Lovely has given me permission to post portions from her letters and journals of the Haight-Ashbury period. The photo above was taken about a week before these entries begin…

January 1, 1966 Saturday

Last night was cold and frosted.  I kept trying to get into the bathtub – always someone wanting to use the toilet.  Cold water and cramps and Rolling Stones full volume.  Menthol cigarettes, my trip for the new year, velvets and bangs and opera hose.

Cold, icy Haight Street.  Michael, Diane, Chris and me four abreast to Psychedelic Bookstore.  Books and every record the hip society demands and the proper splashy paintings and the proper Ravi Shankar music.  And paisley.  This is a year for paisley…proper paisley.

Party on Fillmore Street.  Sunset Strip cellar.  Micheal’s face pulling and pinching together tight.  He tolerates the place, puts on a front of enjoying himself.  Diane with a baggy camel coat knife eyes everyone through her glasses with one lens gone.  Plastic turned up frames and missing one lens she darts her eyes about never missing anything chewing on wisps of metallic hair.  She appears frumpy to me all night, the coat, the shoulder strap leather bag, the low heels and glasses and her face never is consistent with the rest of her.  Her face defys you to come to any conclusions whatsoever about her.  She dares everyone to judge her at all.  She is without expression most of the time.  You never know what she might be thinking.

Then to the Matrix and watched the Charlatans, George Hunter dancing and springing about the stage looking like the devil himself.

January 10 Monday

Flu.  True humor begins when a man ceases to take himself seriously. (Pablo – Steppenwolf)

Nightime

Chris brought me a canvas.  I have been begging for oils and canvas for months.  Now – why do I panic?  It frightens me just to think of painting on that huge black empty space.

January 16, Sunday

A delightful Golden Gate Park day and inside De Young Museum I go.  Lost in the paneled rooms and stained glass windows and Saint Peter statues – everything so old – I for the first time Wow I really believed.  Comprehended the time, the years, medevil religious feeling was there and I let it take me for hours (just a visual and down in the stomach between my ribs trip.) A feeling of hushed reverence for everything I saw.  And for everything I saw – a window or tapestry – there was music in my mind to go with it.  And a castle or German sitting room or candle burning church.

This final ability for involvement is due to grass, I am sure – the involvement with sun shining through an 18th century chandelier, just digging it for the longest time is like on grass crawling inside a string quartet or Beatles music, nothing else exists and so whatever I am concentrating on I feel, see and am wholly and completely.  To do this on will or spontaneously is a great thing to me.  You know, I’ve always been too hung up with me before to even begin to go beyond to anything else.  Even a movie.  I gave so little attention to in the pre-days, the dog days.

Awareness of self first always but not to stay on that trip for 20 years.  Aware of self, dig self, work with self – then jump out of self and be free.

Glamorpusses of the Haight #4: Linda Lovely

Photos of the 1966 era Linda Lovely are few and hard to come by. But, I found this rare snapshot  taken at my sister’s house, Thanksgiving Day of that year.  In my obsessive quest to display the babes of the Haight-Ashbury, how can I ignore Linda Cartwright Newton, my main sixties squeeze, mother of my first child and bane of my life? Of course, should you ask her about our stormy marriage, she might argue I was the bane of her life. You never know.  Women are so perverse!

Linda and I spent more time apart than together in those crazy years, which is why she so rarely intrudes into these calm and serene recollections.  But, in the day, it was not so.

You must admit, she is an authentic glamor puss.  Linda has dressed conservatively for this family occasion.  And why shouldn’t she?  Look at my father, to her right – he’s comfortable wearing a business suit and a dress shirt tightly buttoned at the collar.  Yet his only plan for the day is to relax at his daughter’s house, trade comic insults with his son-in-law’s father, drink martinis and eat turkey.

The Pig, of course, shows no such social inhibitions.   Just out of camera range  he is clowning for the children in velvets, lace and cherry-red wax lips.

Detectives, if you look closely at Linda’s ensemble, you will notice that telltale sign of sin and debauchery in the Haight-Ashbury: beads! Hand-strung beads! They’re always a giveaway, fellow detectives. They can hide their drugs, but they can never hide their beads. It’s in their genetic code!

(For those who complain I never display the sixties beauty of my glorious Russian princess bride Patrushka…good things come to those who wait, ok?)

You wanna hear something strange?  Today, forty years after that tempestuous age, Linda Lovely and Patrushka are the best of friends.  I have nowhere to hide!  I ask you, is this right?

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.

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)

Famous People I Never Knew #2: Janis Joplin

(Here’s Janis as a normal person, shot by my friend Herb Greene about 1966 and rights owned by him.)
In the Fall of 1966 I was living with a bunch of freaks at 626 Clayton Street, about four doors up from the circus that was San Francisco’s Haight Street. I didn’t actually want to go to the circus everyday. But Haight Street was home. All my friends were there and where else would I go?

I’d walk down to the corner to get a sandwich or a bran muffin or something and get engulfed in a sea of strangers, kids from LA and Vermont and all points in between, spare-changing like I’d done just a few years before and looking bedraggled and innocent, foolish as lambs.

Where was my nice Haight Street of the year before when you could walk in the red neon fog at midnight and see maybe two or three other freaks on the street? Where I knew everybody and everybody I knew was cool? Where nobody was checking if it was true smoking dried banana peels could get you high.

“Hey, Donovan said so, man…”

The Diggers, a radical, anarchical, poetical offshoot of the San Francisco Mime Troop, were already beginning to give away free food in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle just to bless the sixteen year old runaways a little bit. Somebody had to.

The Pondering Pig is not a cynical pig but he was beginning to wish the newspapers would stop writing about hippies all the time.

And the Summer of Love was still nine months away. Gad!

I split the Clayton Street flat’s rent with Melanie Kinkead (I use her real name because I hope someday she will read this and write back, “Here I am – I’m OK!”) — I loved Lanie, so sweet and sad and vulnerable. She affected the ultra-feminine side of hippie dress, with frills and flounces, hair in a tumble of curls, masses of eye shadow, miniskirts with white tights and and possibly even Mary Jane shoes. Or I may be hallucinating here – my memory doesn’t really extend to Lanie da Kink’s shoes. In any case, think Mary Pickford circa 1915. Mel was the daughter of a San Francisco travel writer and PR guy. Robin and his wife didn’t know what to make of their ultrafeminine (can a heterosexual girl be described as effeminate?) daughter. Once they invited me to their swank Pacific Heights flat for dinner and to discuss what could possibly make her tick. I hadn’t a clue either. I just loved her like a big dumb older brother. Just not enough to protect her from her fate.

Besides Lanie, we split the rent with Diane W., who was already exploring the joy of putting crystal amphetamine in her arm; Alice, a pleasant plump stranger with a big dog; and some kids in the front – I had no idea who they were — Teens from LA who were here to drop acid in large quantities and wear striped bell-bottoms. Well, it takes all kinds. I think Way Out Willy and his dog Arthur lived there too.

Alice’s major weakness was she let her big black lab shit in the hallway or kitchen or wherever the dog happened to be and then let the dogshit lie on the floor for days until somebody, usually Melanie, cleaned it up. Taking a dog for a walk involved walking, which was often physically impossible.

Kvetch kvetch – what’s a little dogshit? “Peace, man. Don’t be so uptight.”

I think my trouble was I was getting older, and, at 24, I had seen a lot. I had decided to finish school and, with Revolver spilling sitar notes full volume down the hall, I was trying to write a paper on William Wordsworth or somebody. I burned Japanese incense all day and covered the doorway to my room with an Indian print bedspread. I had a daughter lived up the street with her mom. I was hoping to get back together with Linda if we could just stop fighting continuously and every minute.

I thought literary criticism was the world’s most stupid activity but a great introduction into the absurdity of life, – hey, just read the book! But I did tend to prefer the company of Will Wordsworth to the kids in the front.

So I wasn’t in, like a totally psychedelic place, dig?

Groan. But sometimes Haight Street was still cool. It wasn’t the Summer of Love yet and I still could run into cool people whenever I walked out. I suddenly remember talking to Phil Lesh like that one night, so excited about his new life with the Grateful Dead and just boiling over with enthusiasm. Or Chet Helms walking up the street handing out posters for whomever was appearing at the Avalon that weekend and we’d talk briefly about his split with Bill Graham or something.

Or like Janis Joplin. One day I was standing in line at the Hibernia Bank around the corner on Haight Street and there was Janis standing in line a couple of people ahead of me. She was carrying a bag of groceries. I had no impulse to run up saying “Oh Miss Joplin, I just love your ultimate forever take on Take it, Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now Bay-bay.” Although I did, and do. I was cool. Cool people stayed cool. It was still just a normal day, even though Big Brother was already the hottest attraction at the Avalon because of her. We were still all just young people sorting out our lives and her way led to an exploding burnout nova death. Bah, humbug. I’d rather remember her standing in line at the bank with her little bag of groceries and all the future ahead.

I was cool but when I got back to the pad, I still said to Melanie, “Hey Mel, guess who was standing in line at the bank with me today – Janis Joplin!”

Three Girls Barefoot; Last Day of 1969

Since we’re visiting the Sixties this week, I thought I’d post this little poem I found in a box of Walrus Pemmican’s stuff…(photo by Patrushka)

On the last day of December
in 1969
three hippie girls stood far on a hillside
to watch the old sun sink.
Their beads rustled and their long hair flew
in the cold Pacific wind.
It chopped right through their velvets too
and chilled their warm young breasts.

The night came on.
They made their way back along the trail to the cabin.
A yellow light came from the window.
Inside a baby cried.
Three hippie girls hurried faster.
Their paisley dresses brushed against the poison oak.

In the doorway the youngest lit a joint.

In the wind,
in the dark,
on the hillside,
two hippie girls’ eyes turned red.
The third, inside, was already nursing her child.