Crybaby’s Birthday Party

One Saturday in 1950, our boss, the shadowy figure known only as ‘Crybaby’, called a meeting of the 47th and Balboa Gang. He disguised it as a simple birthday party.

That’s Crybaby sitting at the head of the table.  You’d think he was throwing a tantrum but he’s just gnashing his teeth.  He always did that after he ate some of Ma Crybaby’s special angel food cake.  His true fiendishness would come out.  Pretty soon it would be, “Bring me the head of Jerry Garcia!”  And then we’d have to do it.   It would take all day,  we’d have to take the streetcar all the way out to the Crocker-Amazon and try to find Jerry and then I’d have to think up some way to get him to give us his head.   And we still had to be home by six o’clock or we’d catch heck! That’s back when Ma Crybaby was experimenting with special recipes.

This is Jimmy Walker, cigarillo dangling from his lips.  ‘Jimmy Coolguy’ we called him.  He’s stoned out of his mind as usual, digging those happening Happy Birthday sounds.  When we were little kids, we were sex fiends together.  Now we were tough gangsters.  Funny how things work out.  If only we hadn’t played doctor with that little girl up the corner that afternoon everything might be different today.  You wouldn’t know it to look at Jimmy, but he’s a dead hand with a BB gun.  A good man to have by your side when the Anza Street Gang shows up.

This sad-looking kid is Gus, Kenny the Pest’s bodyguard.  His one role in life is to stop us from killing Kenny.  It wasn’t much fun cause he didn’t like his little brother either.  Gus wishes he was anywhere else but he doesn’t have anywhere to go because no one wants to be friends with anybody related to Kenny The Pest.

 

This kid with the dopey expression is Kenny.  Kenny was four and so annoying!  We never could ditch him no matter how hard we tried.  We tried to sell him to our allies, the 44th and Balboa Gang, but even they wouldn’t take him.

There we’d be, out fighting our war against civilized society and everything decent, about to crack the ice cream cooler at the Pacific View Market when Larry the owner wasn’t looking when suddenly Kenny would walk in.

“Hi everybody, whatcha doing?  Can I watch?”

“Getoutta here Kenny before we beat you up!”

“Is that ice cream? I want some!”

“Go away! Can’t you see we’re about to pull a job?”

“Huh?”

He’d just look at you with that dopey expression like in the picture.  Wherever we went – there he was, sneaking and sniveling behind us.  How could you commit cool crimes with a four year old always pestering you?  It was so hard being a big kid!  Finally his mother got worried we’d bump him off and told Gus he had to go to the party with Kenny. So all Crybaby’s plans to lure Kenny were for naught.  No wonder he was gnashing his teeth.

Next to Kenny – here’s Chris, the Pestiferous Pig, the demented brains of the gang.  He’s the only one who knows what ‘pestiferous’ means, which proves how smart he is.  He’s clearly gone out of his angel cake laced mind in glee at his foolproof but mad scheme to conquer the universe!  Wait’ll he tells Crybaby!  Wait, maybe this is too big for Crybaby!  Maybe I should rule the universe myself!  Heh Heh Heh Heh Heh Heh

Looking like he’s about to be tommy-gunned by the Anza Street Gang, here’s Peter Walters. We called him Peter Pain because of the suffering he could wreak on our enemies simply by painting rude remarks on their neighborhood’s walls when nobody was looking.  Like “The Anza Street Gang Are A Bunch of Fraidy Cats!” Pestiferous had to help with the spelling usually.  Otherwise he might write ‘Friday Cats’, which wouldn’t really bother them that much.

Peter was our warlike and crafty art designer.  However, at the moment, he is stoned out of his gourd and incapable of moving.  That’s how it was at Crybaby’s meetings.  You’d have a great time, but there was always this nagging feeling that next you’d have to hand over your head.  And how would you explain that to your mother?

But I knew a way to stop Crybaby. He’d never guess it was me.  Heh Heh Heh Heh Heh Heh.  Kenny, come over here a minute.  You wanna make an easy nickel?  Go tell Crybaby’s mother Crybaby just said she was stoopid!

Glamorpusses of the Haight #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 Kraemer 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

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)