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

Where Are the Liverpool Invasion Three?

Sorry I haven’t been around today. I’ve been out shopping. Up and down Main Street with my shopping bag looking for a skull. I needed one so I can go up in my pear tree and meditate on the transitoriness of life. St. Francis thought highly of the practice so I thought I should try it.

Well, I finally found one and it’s pretty nice. It was in the back at the Dollar Store. In fact, there was a whole box of them. I think the Pirates of the Caribbean ride must have been overstocked. But I like it fine. It glows in the dark too, which could come in handy in the pear tree if I’m up there at night or if I want to play a joke on the neighbors. And it has a lid I can take off and put things inside.

So far it hasn’t worked out too well though. I try to meditate on memento mori, like my blogger friend Paula says, but my visions come out more like besame mucho. Instead of the yawning pit, I keep having visions of tiny Snickers bars. And little Butterfingers.

Anyway, while I was out shopping, I got to thinking about the Liverpool Invasion Three. You might not remember them but they were pretty big in 1965. They even played my high school once. I still have Nigel Twist’s autograph somewhere.

Those guys had some interesting songs. Of course there was their big hit, Just A Bit of Fun, but in a way their famous “answer songs” were even more interesting. Like when the Righteous Brothers had their hit, You Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, the LI3 came out with Hey, I Found Your Lovin’ Feeling (You Left It On The Counter At The Market.)

Come to think of it, I guess it wasn’t as clever as I thought it was at the time.

Maybe they were more of a cult thing. They never got really big, like, say, Herman’s Hermits or Freddy And The Dreamers. But they were big in San Mateo, where I grew up. With their high pointy collars and skinny black ties and winklepicker boots — it was like they brought Carnaby Street right to my hometown. Ziggy, Ignatz and Nigel – I wonder where you are today?

At the time I actually had a friend Ignatz who lived down the street from me. It was uncanny how much he looked like Ignatz Loverman from the Liverpool Invasion Three. But he was a San Mateo kid like me. Plain old Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki. Kids made fun of him on the schoolbus. But sometimes when he’d been using his pimple cream, in a certain light with a Beatle wig on he could almost be one of them. It made me wonder but I never asked him about it. I think he must have wanted to be just like Iggy though, cause sometimes I would catch him practicing talking with a Liverpool accent. And he would go in his garage for hours and practice all Iggy’s famous bass runs. It’s too bad that when the LI3 played our Grad Night, poor Ignatz didn’t show up. He was so shy.

Well, life is strange, eh? Today Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki owns the Family Pharmacy at 3rd and B Streets. He’s real big in the Rotary Club too. As for Iggy Loverman, he just disappeared forever like so many great musicians of the past. Someday I’d like to find those guys but I guess it’ll never happen. The good die young, they say…

What Happened To Playland-at-the-Beach?

Is it true all good things must finally come to an end? It was certainly true for Playland at the Beach, the great amusement park that once promenaded along the western coast of San Francisco, out by the edge of Golden Gate Park. In its heyday in the Twenties, Thirties, Forties, even into the late Fifties, the place rocked with kids and young people and sailors and fun – and they measured their cost in nickels. San Franciscans didn’t need a car to get there because Playland was at the end of a couple of streetcar lines, as amusement parks usually were in the early twentieth century.

A traveler climbing aboard the B car heading downtown late on a weekend afternoon in the 1950s might find himself surrounded by packed-in black families from the Fillmore District. They were heading home tired, cranky and sandyfooted after a terrific cotton candy and enchiladas day. Latino families from the Mission, Irish and Italian families from the Richmond and Sunset districts, city teenagers mixed with teens from San Bruno all the way to San Mateo twenty miles down the brand new Bayshore Freeway, they were were hotfooting down the Midway, looking for fun, looking for thrills, looking for girls. On sunny days in September, Ocean Beach itself, across the Great Highway, was packed with families on blankets listening to big black portable radios or dabbling their toes in the ferociously cold surf. As Bugsy said to Shifty back in 1957, “I want to stick around while I get my kicks!”

I don’t know what happened, but parks like Playland were closing all over the country. Perhaps the opening of the original Disneyland in 1955 had something to do with it. Week after week Walt Disney used his television show, conveniently named Disneyland, to flog the wonders and delights of his new Magic Kingdom. Maybe the traditional family-oriented park at the edge of the big city was looking a little tawdry and old fashioned. Most young people had access to cars now. They could drive to big modern theme parks like Great America, the Bay Area’s first. It was (and is) just off the Bayshore Freeway, and, unlike Playland way out at the edge of a labyrinthine city, is easily accessible by millions of Bay Area families.

Besides, by the 1950s, the blue collar and middle-class families that formed Playland’s primary market were leaving the City in droves, off to their new martinis and togetherness playgrounds in the suburbs. But let’s not talk about that sorrowful day in 1954 when the moving van arrived at our beautiful San Francisco house on 47th Avenue two blocks from the vast, fogbound, eternal Pacific ocean and trucked the furniture to our new, open floor plan, wall to wall windows and a patio, subdivision miracle stranded on a mudflat on the San Francisco Bay. It’s too traumatic. I think I’ve been trying to get back home my whole life.

The young urban professionals who took their places, filling the swinging Tony Bennett bars on Union Street, were not likely to suggest a date night at Playland riding the Wild Mouse.

More tomorrow.
Photo of Playland, 1958 by my brother Gary.

Baby Beatniks Go To College

In September 1959 it was still hot in San Jose, like it is everywhere across California that time of year. I was eating lunch at Walgreen’s Drugs with Louise Picchi, a luscious brunette from San Mateo High, same as me (I was from San Mateo High, not a luscious brunette. Thought I should make that clear). In those late days of summer all the freshmen kids from San Mateo huddled together for a few weeks, like polliwogs in an eddy of the creek that ran through the culvert. Louie was going to be a drama major and I knew her through my actor pal Ricky Shapero. We had almost nothing in common except familiarity and comfort, and that was plenty. Besides, from my side, she was a major fox. Normally not in my baby faced league.

Hey Louie. I can see your face so clear. Are you still eighteen somewhere in this universe? Still so killer beautiful, still so full of high spirits and joy?

We sat side by side at Walgreen’s steaming lunch counter perspiring and laughing about our horrible registration experiences. Root beer in Coke glasses with two straws and tuna fish sandwiches with a little scoop of potato salad on half a lettuce leaf. I wasn’t feeling beat today, I was trying out Joe College.

San Jose State was great for trying out that role. It had its share of concrete buildings designed by the Corps of Engineers for maximum boxy cheapness, but it also had, so unusual for a California state college campus – Tower Hall, a vine encrusted brick building from seventy years before. It was right out of a nineteen thirties hubba hubba college movie. To my eager young eyes it breathed a perfume of another world I wanted to be a part of. Poetry and great novels and people devoting their minds to thinking about big important things. You could walk down the ivy crawling cloister in the heat and hear droning professor flies lecturing on aerodynamics or Virgil or bonehead English grammar like it was still the 1920s and I could be wearing a tight sweater and bell-bottom pants and be the cat’s meow. That was me, creating the universe around me as I walked through it, but most guys preferred to wear Butchwax flattops, chinos, little plastic pocket protectors in their madras shirts and slide rules in their pocket protectors and walk down Seventh Street to the cafeteria in tough engineering student gangs.

It was a different time, the fall of 1959 – for one thing, girls still went to college to get their MRS degree. They didn’t think it was a joke. They majored in Home Ec or PE or possibly Elementary Ed and waited for the magic to happen and good luck and God bless ‘em.

There’s a gaggle of college girls coming now. Note their tight plaid skirts and white blouses, and one is wearing a sleeveless dress with petticoats underneath in spite of the heat. Actually, they’re kind of cute. And is their lipstick red! They’re on their way to the cafeteria to listen to ‘Running Bear loved little White Dove’ on the juke box. Then Paul Anka is going to sing ‘Hold me in your arms Bay-bey Maybe you and I will fall in love.’ Or some other song that would send me running for the door.

The cafeteria was much better about 4:00 PM when it was nearly empty. Then I could put on Oscar Peterson playing ‘Round About Midnight. Yes, one cool thing about 1959 was that jazz and rock and roll could share the jukebox comfortably together. Like inside my head. And I could drink coffee and read poetry and feel cool.

Louie wasn’t a gumsnapper like those girls walking down the street. She was my friend and those other girls weren’t, so even if she didn’t really like jazz or know anything about Jack Kerouac, she was still cool.

Yesterday we both stood in snaky lines in the headache sun for hours waiting to get our registration packets after all the sophomores, juniors and seniors were handed theirs. They were already inside the gym having fun racing from table to table signing up for classes. Once all the classes were full, then they let the freshmen in.

But we had won out in the end. We had some classes, even if they were not exactly what we had in mind. I had even got into English Comp 3A, required of and dreaded by freshman English majors. We were registered college students.

We had new homes too. Louie moved into the girl’s dorms and I checked into a boarding house on South Twelfth. Of course we would never see each other’s rooms. She could welcome me into her dorm lobby with all the other girls and their dates but not one step further. And Mrs. O’Reilly would have had a heart attack if a girl had knocked on her front door asking to see one of the guys. Unheard of. The adult world knew what young people would get up to if they ever had a chance to be alone and they were going to make damn sure they never were!

Of course no one considered what two guys might get up to if left alone in their rooms. This was 1959! ‘Gay’ meant ‘cheerful’. Of course there were homos and queers out there somewhere, but they didn’t go to San Jose State. I thought they were probably all middle aged guys who lived in San Francisco’s Polk Gulch.

My roomie was a big older guy who was majoring in Police Science. He didn’t smile much. His Dad was chief of police of one of the San Joaquin Valley farm towns. I might creep back at three a.m. from some horrible drunken debauch to find him still up studying. We didn’t have much to talk about but one Sunday he invited me to go with him to a Baptist church he attended way out in Los Gatos. And I, with great nonchalance, thought “what the hell…”

I didn’t know what to expect. My parents, when they went to church at all, were more of the polite and proper Episcopal persuasion. For me, church happened in gothic stone buildings that should be in an Agatha Christie mystery, with bald guys in white surplices who handed out the communion wafer at the altar rail with real wine in a little shot glass, and it was all steeped in a thousand years of ritual and was peaceful and soothing and kind of spiritual in a funny way. I’d never been to a Baptist church.

Not that I wasn’t worldly. By seventeen I was pretty damn sophisticated. I knew the score, man. Why, in high school I had written a poem that began:

Man is lost on a moor
Blind and deaf and lost on a moor.

ha ha! Let us laugh and be gay in the face of this bitter, tragic joke of life! Then I would light my pipe and stride gloomily into the mist. Keeping careful watch out for the Hound of the Baskervilles.

But I’d never been to a Baptist church. So we drove out to Los Gatos and before I knew it the preacher had launched into his sermon about why Caryl Chessman should be executed. This was a major case at the time and awareness of it had even dribbled down to apolitical seventeen year old kids like me. Chessman was supposedly the notorious “Red Light Bandit” who had robbed and raped women in LA many years before. After eleven years, he was still on Death Row in San Quentin but time was running out for him. Even for proponents of capital punishment the case was unsettling because Chessman hadn’t actually killed anyone. Read the Wikipedia article here if you’re interested.

I gathered that the preacher thought Chessman should be executed because he had violated God’s law and God was a real stickler for punishing anybody who disobeyed him. The pastor went right through the Old Testament pointing our how this kind of miscreant was stoned and this other kind was supposed to be because she helped her husband in a fight by grabbing the bad guy’s balls and squeezing real hard. Well, maybe he didn’t actually mention that one. Not proper. Even young guys like me who disobeyed their parents were stoned and pretty soon my blood was running cold and I was getting mad. What kind of God did these people believe in? And how can I get out of here without causing a scene?

I figured, “Well this guy is a preacher so he must know what he’s talking about. But if the Bible really says things like that than it’s just one more proof that God isn’t real because if there really is a God no way would he say things like that.”

We drove home in cool silence.

It didn’t take too long for the Joe College thing to wear off. The kids I was meeting were so square! There must be some cool people here somewhere! At breakfast in the boarding house I shared the table with a history major who smoked a pipe, an accounting guy who took electric guitar lessons, an engineering major who made jokes about the way I ate my fried egg, a business guy who was pledging a frat, and, one bright light — a coolguy from the San Fernando Valley who just wanted to get back to LA as soon as he could and marry his girl friend.

Dick would tell us hilarious stories about his high school scene at San Fernando Valley High and how he had taken Annette Funicello to his prom and I never could tell what was true and what he was making up but he made me laugh my head off and, unfortunately, that has always been my key criteria for people I want to hang out with.

Dick was from a show business family. His father wrote “You Never Miss Your Water Till The Well Runs Dry”. He said it as if I should be impressed. He was engaged to a honey blonde he talked to in the phone booth up at the corner every night. I used to walk up with him and watch him through the glass and wish I had a girl friend.

Once afterwards we walked downtown to see the new Sandra Dee flick “Gidget.” Dick claimed he knew most of the surfer actors in the flick, and maybe he did. Dick wasn’t a pathological liar – he was a great story-teller and he never let truth get in the way of a good story. I learned a lot from him! And besides, what did I care if he knew all those guys. I knew Moondoggie himself. (For anybody younger than 64 – Moondoggie was the surfer dude that Gidget falls in love with in the movie of the same name.) He was played by Jimmy Darren and Jimmy Darren had performed at San Mateo High’s 1959 Grad Night. And I’d said “Hi Jimmy!” So there.

Dick lasted one semester. He just wanted to get home to that honey babe as fast as he could. Sometimes I wonder if he got into show business like his father. I looked his name up on IMDB the other day. There is a guy with his name who directed porn movies in the seventies. Could it be him? Did he stay married to the beautiful honey blonde girl he was so in love with? Did they live in a big house in the San Fernando Valley and did he go off to work directing hot sex scenes all day? Then come home and read his kids a bedtime story? It’s slightly possible.

The Bus Ride Home

In September 1959, seventeen years old, I said goodbye to Ma and my beatnik friends back home and left San Mateo for the carefree life of an English major at San Jose State College. I was going to be a writer when I grew up. A novelist, like Jack Kerouac. My plan was to hitchhike everywhere, love all the longhaired beatnik girls, grow up, live in Greenwich Village and write about everything that happened to me. You must admit it’s not a bad plan. I’d do what I wanted to do anyway and make a living from my pen.

I never wondered if I’d be happy. Happiness was impossible. Not part of the equation.

One cold night on the Greyhound heading back up the Peninsula to San Mateo for the weekend, I was thinking about my friend Way Out Willy, who was sleeping in Bear Mattson’s car because he got into a shouting match with his parents and they threw him out.

I wanted to write about stuff like that too. Where is the love? What if I was on a long bus journey – like this creeping thirty miles up the El Camino to San Mateo, but I’d been on the road for weeks and weeks and I was burnt out, gone, exhausted in heart and soul. What if I was dragging my weary ass back to my home town even though my parents were dead or something, but a heartsick homesickness compelled me across the snowy continent. I knew when I got to my best friend Way Out’s house (hmm, I’d have to call him something else) I would be welcomed like a son, received into the warmth of his family, be fed and a have real bed to sleep in. I’d be home again and safe to heal.

So, in my story dream the Greyhound grumbled to a stop at the little B Street bus depot on that rainy Christmas night and I limped through darkened and shuttered downtown streets. Just the odd Santa Claus statuette in a shop window illuminating my backpack and my worn beat seventeen year old face. I stumbled up through the shuttered mansions of Hillsborough and on into the redwood subdivisions high on the jolly Christmas rainy hillside. And there were the diamond pinpoints of the Peninsula below. I hobbled up Crestview Drive and just as I approached, still hidden by the night, I hear angry voices. There’s Way Out’s father at the front door and he’s shouting at Willy and Willy is just standing there taking it. He heaves Willy’s paintings and sculptures into the rain and keeps shouting and there they lie in the wet grass with little drips from the acacia tree onto his portrait of our friend Gypsy Girl. Little rain drips on her dark cheeks. The door slams shut, leaving Way Out standing in the rain in his Levis and red windbreaker. In the rain night ice night Rebel Without A Cause night star-filled air.

“Hey man.”

“Hey Pig.”

That was the real truth. I had to tell that story. Just the kids. Lost and loose on the suburban sorrowful Crestview Drive of time. I thought I could write stories like that.

************************************************************************

The only trouble with writing was you had to sit at a typewriter for a long time every day. How fun is that? And then you had to sweat and sweat until you got an idea. And then you actually had to write sentences that communicated something more than ‘cats ate rats’. And then words on the page sounded stupid when you read it to yourself out loud and you had to throw the whole thing out and start over. All that work for nothing.

I wasn’t really reconciled to it. Then there was the part where you walked around and wouldn’t talk to anybody and people thought you were sulking but you were just trying to get it together in your mind. The right place in my head. Where is it? It was there yesterday!

Writing is still like that. When the spirit is in me, writing is the funnest thing. I make myself laugh and I work myself up into fits and I am amazed to see little scenes come to life. Wow! And then there’s the part where you groan and have to chain yourself to the seat because nothing will come. At least in the days of typewriters you had to work for your distractions. Now the whole Internet is out there to distract us hapless writers.

But you know what? For better or worse, I was made and molded and formed to do this. It’s in my blood. Funny. Now I’m 64. And this is still what I want to do when I grow up. I hope I get to.

Baby Beatniks in “Yet Another Reason Not To Smoke”

One night in the summer of 1960 the Baby Beatniks are driving around San Mateo in Bear Matson’s lowered ‘49 Merc, wondering what to do with the night. For beatniks, they look suspiciously like four normal eighteen year old guys. Radio’s on, they’re being treated to yet another encore of ‘Aleey-Oop-Shoop He’s The King Of the Jungle Jive’, and the streets are deserted. Parma from the back shouts Hey Willy, change the stupid station, will you? but the other Top 40 provider is spewing up sickening Teen Angel:

What was it you were looking for
that took your life that night?
They said they found my high school ring
clutched in your fingers tight.

Quick, Way Out Willy (named two years before from the song Willie and the Hand Jive) turns back to the King of Jungle Jive.

Kids, this was the dark night of rock and roll. All the heart-pounding soul, the glorious chromatics of doo-wop, all gone. Elvis was in the Army, Buddy Holly was smashed, Jerry Lee Lewis was in jail, Little Richard had become a preacher. The Beatles were four years in the future. Instead we had promoters trying to move product, and squeamishness, mawkishness and white bread had won the day. There were no FM car radios yet, so no cool jazz was available to beatniks cruising through the American summer night.

The American summer nights of 1960…the Baby Beatniks got home just before dawn, having gone nowhere and done nothing. Roaming and roaming, looking for a party, looking for someone to buy them beer, driving up to the City and walking around North Beach Telegraph Hill Chinatown, back in San Mateo rambling from Curt’s house to Mickey’s house to Buzzy’s house to see what was up, but nothing ever was. Making up songs (often obscene, always funny) and making each other laugh. And just really digging being together. Pals, you know? They weren’t bored at all. In fact, it was a perfect life.

On this particular night, it’s still early, before midnight. Rounding the corner from Palm Avenue onto Ninth, Toot (that what the Babies called The Pondering Pig in those days. His last name Newton got shortened to Newt, which was misheard by somebody as Toot, which was funnier, so it stuck) ) he asks Matson if he can “borrow” a smoke. Bear hands it over and Toot puts a match to it.

Unfortunatly, Toot’s forgotten he has a piece of surgical cotton in his nose. He’s been having trouble with nosebleeds. In fact he had the problem vein cauterized that afternoon. The doc told him to leave the cotton in overnight.

So, when he lights the Camel up, his nose lights up too. The Baby Beats turn and stare. Is this a trick to get their attention, to get more laffs? A fire on Toot’s nose! If so, it works pretty good.

Toot though is, like, “I don’t think this is funny, okay?” There is a big pink welt where his skin used to be.

Parma suggests it might be wise to get Toot to Emergency before gangrene sets in. So the Merc rumbles to life again. They roar around the corner onto the El Camino heading north towards the hospital — for about fifty feet. Then the big car sputters and comes to a dead stop. They’re out of gas.

After a hasty conference, they all decide the best plan is to push the Merc seven blocks to the Chevron station up on Second.

I did eventually get to the hospital – pushing that big Merc nearly the whole way. Fortunately, we had a dollar between us for three gallons of gas. Oh yeah, I had to call my mother again…”Mom, I’m at the emergency hospital. But I’m okay! Really! It’s only a second degree burn!”

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.

Pigs Gotta Dance

Been trying to write more about my Dad. There he comes before me in joie de vie vision doing a soft shoe in our living room in San Mateo, California to Toot Toot Toosie Goodbye. Then Mom comes into my vision and they spin a smart fox trot around the living room.

Here’s what Dad taught me:
A dancing pig always always beats a philosopher.
Work should be fun even though it is work.
It’s fun being famous and we should all strive for it.
Trivial, inconsequential, who cares? The thing is to get out tomorrow’s column (I never believed him on this point.)
Here’s what’s important: to dance and sing and play a squawky violin and write and tell stories and laugh in great snoots and spill your glass of wine with every sweeping gesture at the dinner table.
And I know it’s true.
But I find tears falling on my keyboard and I can’t write anymore.

Why do we grieve?