Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / Haight-Ashbury: The Epicenter Of 60s Counterculture [Episode 294]

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Haight-Ashbury: The Epicenter Of 60s Counterculture [Episode 294] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

0:00
Speaker 1: This episode of Booked on Rock. The story of the
0:02
Speaker 1: first psychedelic neighborhood, the Hate Ashbury counter culture movement of
0:07
Speaker 1: the sixties, How it began, the many whose belief built it,
0:10
Speaker 1: and its lasting impact. Almost six decades later, We're totally
0:14
Speaker 1: boomed rock and roll.
0:17
Speaker 2: I mean, I'll leave you. You're reading. Little Hands says
0:19
Speaker 2: it's time to rock and roll. Roll up.
0:22
Speaker 1: I totally booked. Welcome back everyone to Booked on Rock.
0:30
Speaker 1: A'm Eric Sanitch. I am very excited to have this
0:32
Speaker 1: guest on the podcast for the first time. He's an author,
0:36
Speaker 1: he's a historian, he's a music publicist. Dennis McNally. His
0:39
Speaker 1: books include On Highway sixty one, Music Race and the
0:42
Speaker 1: Evolution of Cultural Freedom, A Long Strange Trip, The Inside
0:46
Speaker 1: History of the Grateful Dead and Desolate Angel Jack Kerouac,
0:49
Speaker 1: The Beat Generation in America. His brand new book is
0:52
Speaker 1: titled The Last Great Dream. How Bohemians became Hippies and
0:55
Speaker 1: created the Sixties. Dennis, Welcome to the podcast. To be here,
1:00
Speaker 1: so to get the complete story of the San Francisco
1:04
Speaker 1: Hate Ashbury scene, as you would call it, the world's
1:08
Speaker 1: first psychedelic neighborhood, we got to look back as far
1:11
Speaker 1: as the mid forties. The book starts with the San
1:13
Speaker 1: Francisco poetry renaissance, so let's start there talk about the
1:17
Speaker 1: importance of poetry to the counterculture movement and the influence
1:20
Speaker 1: poets like Kenneth rex Roth and Robert Duncan had.
1:24
Speaker 2: Of course, many people know that Allen Ginsburg first read
1:27
Speaker 2: Howell in San Francisco in nineteen fifty five, and that
1:31
Speaker 2: sort of has taken the headlines as it were. Well,
1:35
Speaker 2: what many people don't realize is that, of course there
1:38
Speaker 2: was a really active poetry scene in San Francisco that
1:44
Speaker 2: people just really got involved with, many and many more
1:48
Speaker 2: than the two people I'm about to talk about, but
1:50
Speaker 2: you know, they were sort of the leaders and the starters.
1:53
Speaker 2: Kenneth rex Roth was a very good poet in particular,
1:57
Speaker 2: though he was a leader in both teaching the idea
2:00
Speaker 2: that poetry should sort of come from a heart, which
2:03
Speaker 2: was very different from what was going on on the
2:05
Speaker 2: East Coast at the time, which was a lot more
2:08
Speaker 2: measured and you know, irony and precision and not very inspirational.
2:14
Speaker 2: He was an avocate, it was basically an anarchist in
2:19
Speaker 2: a philosophical way, what they called personal politics in which
2:23
Speaker 2: the personal is the political, so that you engage in
2:26
Speaker 2: politics from a moral rather than an ideological perspective. And
2:31
Speaker 2: that really was the root of the sort of bohemian
2:35
Speaker 2: or countercultural scene in San Francisco starting really then Sam
2:40
Speaker 2: Sisco always had a certain air of looseness about it,
2:43
Speaker 2: going back to the fact that it wasn't set up
2:45
Speaker 2: as a business thing, which is what most cities are
2:48
Speaker 2: they start out doing business. It was started by a
2:51
Speaker 2: bunch of crazy people who didn't fit in where they
2:53
Speaker 2: lived and charged off to find gold, and it sort
2:57
Speaker 2: of it had room for crazy in a way that
3:01
Speaker 2: most cities don't. So there was Rex Roth, who, as
3:04
Speaker 2: I say, was quite political, and then his partner in crime,
3:08
Speaker 2: and it was very interesting because he was at least
3:10
Speaker 2: periodically homophobic. But his partner was a guy named Robert
3:14
Speaker 2: Duncan who was very gay and to the point where
3:17
Speaker 2: he had actually come out in nineteen forty two, which
3:20
Speaker 2: frankly is you know, think about how remarkable that was.
3:23
Speaker 2: It was one reason why he's never ever gotten any
3:27
Speaker 2: kind of do again from the East Coast critics who
3:29
Speaker 2: they wrote him off. So anyway, he came out of
3:32
Speaker 2: this very mystical occult oriented family. Literally they were doing
3:37
Speaker 2: Rosicrucians and the Kabbala and you know, all kinds of
3:41
Speaker 2: occult stuff, which it added a level of mysticism to
3:45
Speaker 2: the mix that rex Roths started. The first people that
3:49
Speaker 2: were autside from the poet who gathered around them. The
3:53
Speaker 2: first people that I can identify as being you know,
3:56
Speaker 2: they're outside of young poets were the students at the
4:00
Speaker 2: San Francisco Art Institute, which was a remarkable place. When
4:06
Speaker 2: you think about the GI Bill, of course, you think
4:07
Speaker 2: about guys being able to buy homes and get better,
4:11
Speaker 2: you know, go to college and get better jobs. But
4:14
Speaker 2: some of those that wanted to go to art school
4:17
Speaker 2: after you know, five years of being in the army
4:19
Speaker 2: or whatever and you know, enduring what you had to endure,
4:23
Speaker 2: and they were great students. The new president of the school,
4:26
Speaker 2: I decided to leave the studios open all night so
4:30
Speaker 2: people could come and paint when they wanted. And that's
4:33
Speaker 2: sort of evidence of a wonderful atmosphere. And they picked
4:36
Speaker 2: up on basically the ideology of bohemia, which is simply
4:41
Speaker 2: that art comes before dollars and cents.
4:44
Speaker 1: That's the California School of Fine Arts.
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Speaker 2: It was that yes, I'm sorry. Later it later changed
4:50
Speaker 2: its name to the San Francisco Art Institute. It was
4:53
Speaker 2: the California School of Fine Arts CSFA, and it was
4:57
Speaker 2: a fantastic place and it produced a lot of in
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Speaker 2: artists and interesting citizens.
5:03
Speaker 1: Getting into chapter three is titled Los Angeles and the
5:07
Speaker 1: emigrat I was so fascinated with the story of Alvis
5:10
Speaker 1: Huxley's study of psychedelic drugs. This is where explore the
5:14
Speaker 1: subject of LSD and how it influenced the hate Ashbury neighborhood.
5:17
Speaker 1: Huxley is famous for his novel Brave New World from
5:19
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty two, but he later wrote The Doors of
5:21
Speaker 1: Perception in nineteen fifty four, which explored his experiences with LSD.
5:25
Speaker 1: Jim Morrison named The Doors after it. What inspired this,
5:28
Speaker 1: as you write esoteric pursuit and what were his findings
5:32
Speaker 1: after trying it?
5:34
Speaker 2: Huxley was, you know, sort of a cosmic explorer of
5:38
Speaker 2: everything at that point, you know, he had written these
5:41
Speaker 2: novels critical of the way England's social theories were going.
5:47
Speaker 2: He became a pacifist and he and some friends fleeing
5:50
Speaker 2: World War Two, Frankly left England and came to Los Angeles,
5:55
Speaker 2: partly for the sunshine, you know, and partly just to
5:59
Speaker 2: they latched onto something that's very interesting about the Los
6:03
Speaker 2: Angeles in contrast to San Francisco, which was for whatever reason,
6:08
Speaker 2: Los Angeles was from the very very earliest, going back
6:12
Speaker 2: almost to the turn of the century, a warm landing
6:15
Speaker 2: place for unusual religious phenomena. The theosophists Girdschev so forth
6:22
Speaker 2: Vedanta and they were around that. But his spiritual searches were,
6:28
Speaker 2: you know, in every direction, and eventually, actually I will
6:33
Speaker 2: you know, in a very minor correction. First he found psilocybin,
6:37
Speaker 2: which is derived from organic mushrooms. Later what he wrote
6:41
Speaker 2: Dorst Perception about was actually psilocybin. Okay, he had well,
6:46
Speaker 2: to quote a you know, every almost every hippie. He
6:49
Speaker 2: had a great trip. As he said, he had contacted this.
6:53
Speaker 2: There was a professor named Humphrey Osmond in Canada who
6:57
Speaker 2: was using LSD to treat alcoholism, which I might add,
7:01
Speaker 2: now fifty years later, there's a lot of interest in
7:04
Speaker 2: just that, not elate psilocybin at that time, but he
7:08
Speaker 2: was interested in it as a medicinal thing. And Huxley
7:12
Speaker 2: being infinitely curious wrote him and said let's talk. So
7:17
Speaker 2: the guy came to a meeting in LA and brought
7:19
Speaker 2: some and gave him some, and as he said, he
7:23
Speaker 2: was seeing what flowers looked like on the first day
7:26
Speaker 2: of creation. I just, I might add, I just got
7:29
Speaker 2: really not attacked. But you know, I got a very
7:32
Speaker 2: very bad review from the Wall Street Journal because I don't,
7:36
Speaker 2: apparently to them, emphasize the risks of LSD, And there
7:40
Speaker 2: are definitely risks for some. For most people, out of
7:44
Speaker 2: you know, a million trips, all but a thousand, probably
7:49
Speaker 2: people experience them, come back and go. That's interesting because
7:53
Speaker 2: the one thing carry Grant to Harry Grant took it
7:57
Speaker 2: for his alcoholism, so did the guy who honed to
8:00
Speaker 2: Henry Luce and his wife, Claire Boothloose, who were very
8:03
Speaker 2: conservative people. Henry only did it once. Claire did it
8:06
Speaker 2: several times because her daughter died and in her grief
8:09
Speaker 2: she was looking for answers. And the one thing to
8:13
Speaker 2: court Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, the one thing
8:15
Speaker 2: that you could absolutely guarantee. I think I can say
8:20
Speaker 2: this about LSD is after you've taken it, you realize
8:25
Speaker 2: that there's more going on. Than your day to day reality.
8:30
Speaker 2: Maybe good, it may be bad, you know, but they
8:32
Speaker 2: just there's more. And that's what basically to boil down
8:38
Speaker 2: a brilliant man one hundred and fifty page essay into
8:40
Speaker 2: short is there's more going on here, And that was
8:45
Speaker 2: the textbook that young people in the mid and late
8:49
Speaker 2: fifties started picking up on. At that time, of course,
8:53
Speaker 2: the LSD was controlled by a CIA program. This is
8:58
Speaker 2: not conspiracy theory. Is this, you know, really well documented stuff,
9:02
Speaker 2: and they were convinced that they could use it as
9:04
Speaker 2: a truth serum. Turns out, yeah, not so much. It was,
9:09
Speaker 2: you know, but in the interval it spread gradually, eventually
9:15
Speaker 2: getting well, among other things, to Henry Luce, who put
9:19
Speaker 2: several articles in Time magazine and Life Magazine, including a
9:23
Speaker 2: big story about the magic mushrooms of Mexico and a
9:27
Speaker 2: kurandera there named Maria I'm forgetting the last name apologized
9:32
Speaker 2: and people started picking up on this, and eventually a
9:36
Speaker 2: guy named Tim Leary, who was a bored, sort of
9:40
Speaker 2: disappointed psychologist, got fascinated with this stuff, then progressed LSD
9:45
Speaker 2: and among other things, basically he was convinced they were
9:50
Speaker 2: about to change the world, which may have been true,
9:52
Speaker 2: but his techniques it's stuff I don't you know. I'm
9:56
Speaker 2: not a big Leary fan. He well, he wrecked. Yeah,
10:01
Speaker 2: he drew a lot of attention, made it look cute
10:05
Speaker 2: and funny, and created cute slogans like turn on, tune in,
10:10
Speaker 2: and drop out. Yeah yeah, And you know he did
10:14
Speaker 2: that speaking to the New York Advertising Club, and it
10:18
Speaker 2: was like, you know, what he and what most people
10:21
Speaker 2: who get into psychedelic see is a certain spiritual component,
10:26
Speaker 2: and what he was talking about wasn't spiritual at all.
10:29
Speaker 2: Among other things, he started talking about having you know,
10:31
Speaker 2: ten thousand orgasms and or I'm exaggerating, but you know,
10:35
Speaker 2: the sexual possibilities. And at any rate, my opinion doesn't.
10:40
Speaker 1: Mean yeah, was he trying to commercialize it.
10:42
Speaker 2: He was trying to get attention. As far as I
10:44
Speaker 2: can tell, No, I don't think it was that so much.
10:49
Speaker 2: It was just this sort of loose show busy approach
10:56
Speaker 2: to things instead of being you know. One of the
10:59
Speaker 2: other things things that came out of that experiment was
11:02
Speaker 2: his associate Richard Albert, who wrote a really brilliant, serious
11:06
Speaker 2: book about psychedelics and reality called Be Here Now and
11:12
Speaker 2: I'd recommend going in that direction, you know. I mean
11:15
Speaker 2: there's a lot of laughs behind LSD. There's no denying that.
11:19
Speaker 2: But that's not the only approach.
11:22
Speaker 1: They talked about that with Manson, that he used LSD
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Speaker 1: on the young women, that the vulnerable young women. He
11:29
Speaker 1: have them take LSD when he was giving his speeches.
11:33
Speaker 2: Or his absolutely and he was a monster.
11:37
Speaker 1: Well, there are stories about him being connected to the CIA.
11:40
Speaker 1: There's one author I really.
11:42
Speaker 2: You know, Charles Mann was you know, some sandwiches, shy
11:47
Speaker 2: of a full picnic. Even the CIA would take one
11:51
Speaker 2: look at him and go exactly, not somebody in control exactly.
11:56
Speaker 2: I mean he was known around. He was in San
11:58
Speaker 2: Fransco briefly, and people just most of the people you
12:01
Speaker 2: talked to there who met him, he creeped them out.
12:04
Speaker 2: He unfortunately, the the you know, squeaky and the young
12:09
Speaker 2: girls that he got to were manipulable, and he was
12:14
Speaker 2: a great manipulator.
12:15
Speaker 1: Go back to the fifties and the radio station KPFA,
12:19
Speaker 1: you called the most significant gift of the conscientious objector
12:23
Speaker 1: world to Bay Area culture. This seemed to be a
12:25
Speaker 1: great refuge from not just mainstream radio, but mainstream culture.
12:31
Speaker 2: KPFA. The idea was that it was going to be
12:33
Speaker 2: to promote pacifism, what it ended up being because there
12:39
Speaker 2: wasn't a large pacifist audience. And you know, at this
12:43
Speaker 2: point they're in between the official pacifist or not pacifist,
12:49
Speaker 2: but basically the left wing in America, which at that
12:52
Speaker 2: point was mostly kind of stalinist. It was due, I mean,
12:56
Speaker 2: you know, you just it was very difficult to cope
12:59
Speaker 2: with that and the standard American culture. So what they
13:04
Speaker 2: did was bring variety to American culture, a variety that
13:09
Speaker 2: was you have to remember after a depression and a
13:12
Speaker 2: war and a Cold War, the level of conformity and
13:16
Speaker 2: repression in the mid fifties in America was phenomenal. I
13:21
Speaker 2: did an interview with Michael McClure, who was one of
13:24
Speaker 2: the Beat poets, friend of Caroacs, and I said, this
13:27
Speaker 2: was my first name, one of my first big interviews,
13:29
Speaker 2: And I said to them, why did On the Road
13:33
Speaker 2: Jack Carrowac's book have such an amazing impact? I mean,
13:37
Speaker 2: young people, everybody that you can think of in the sixties,
13:41
Speaker 2: from from Dylan to David Bowie to Jerry Garcia to
13:45
Speaker 2: Jenis Joplin, all of them read Caroac and went shazam,
13:50
Speaker 2: you know, And I said, but what you know, why
13:53
Speaker 2: why did I have said? And he just sort of
13:55
Speaker 2: looked at me and he said, Dennis, were you around
13:58
Speaker 2: in the fifties. I said, well, I was ten when
14:00
Speaker 2: it end inside, you know. He said, it was such
14:03
Speaker 2: a startling burst of energy and of sympathy for the spiritual.
14:09
Speaker 2: It wasn't obvious. You had to sort of see that,
14:12
Speaker 2: but it was there and it's what turned people on.
14:18
Speaker 1: Booked on rock podcasts will be back after this.
14:21
Speaker 2: There will be an intermission.
14:24
Speaker 1: KPFA doesn't really get mentioned all that much again, No, KMPX,
14:28
Speaker 1: Tom donnahue, that's the famous radio station, counterculture station San
14:33
Speaker 1: Francisco from the late sixties. But I didn't realize KPFA.
14:37
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's an important radio station.
14:39
Speaker 2: It's a very important history of radio.
14:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was FM, right, It was an FM only.
14:43
Speaker 2: With FM because they couldn't afford to get into the AM.
14:47
Speaker 2: You know, the AM at that point AM was was
14:50
Speaker 2: much bigger and and people, you know, they just couldn't
14:54
Speaker 2: have they couldn't break in on getting a license, so
14:57
Speaker 2: they started small at FM. And what they they did
15:00
Speaker 2: was bring alternative culture, so they brought For instance, Alan
15:04
Speaker 2: Watts did a show on a KPFA for twenty years
15:07
Speaker 2: talking about Buddhism and Zen and another world. Rex Roth
15:13
Speaker 2: did a show about left wing politics and Buddhism. As
15:17
Speaker 2: a matter of fact, Pauline Kale developed her writing her
15:20
Speaker 2: Chops as a movie critic and ended up going to
15:24
Speaker 2: New Yorker and being the best movie critic in American
15:27
Speaker 2: history or among the great movie critics of American history.
15:31
Speaker 2: So there was all this stuff and music that you
15:34
Speaker 2: couldn't get anywhere else, serious music, whether it was classical
15:38
Speaker 2: or jazz or whatever.
15:40
Speaker 1: Has there ever been a documentary on KPFA or a
15:43
Speaker 1: book on KPF a.
15:45
Speaker 2: Book, And if you go to the bibliography of my book,
15:50
Speaker 2: I could dig it up for you. Yeah, there's a
15:53
Speaker 2: very good book about KPFA.
15:55
Speaker 1: I'd like to read it. Yeah, And Ginsburg read Howell on.
16:00
Speaker 2: Yes. Yes, it was just a place where there was
16:04
Speaker 2: some freedom, cultural freedom to talk about things. There was
16:08
Speaker 2: this unusual guy named Heimi DiAngelo who came to California
16:13
Speaker 2: just in time for the earthquake in nineteen oh six
16:15
Speaker 2: and decided he was going to be a cowboy, and
16:18
Speaker 2: he ended up opening the first ranch, one of the
16:20
Speaker 2: first ranches in Big Sur which is this fantastically beautiful
16:24
Speaker 2: area south of San Francisco. He later became a scholar
16:28
Speaker 2: of Native American languages and linguistics, and just before he died,
16:34
Speaker 2: they recorded him telling he had written a bunch of
16:37
Speaker 2: Native American stories which were real. I mean, you know,
16:41
Speaker 2: he was a folklorst, a legitimate folklorist, and they decided
16:45
Speaker 2: that this would make something good for kids because they
16:47
Speaker 2: were like kind of kids' stories. Well, you know, you
16:50
Speaker 2: weren't getting that on KMPX or any other normal radio station.
16:54
Speaker 2: And there was a richness to KPFA that only in
16:57
Speaker 2: San Francisco. And this is the time when I happened
17:01
Speaker 2: to watch good Night and Good Luck just the other day,
17:04
Speaker 2: which is it's now on Broadway, this George Clooney play
17:07
Speaker 2: about Edward R. Murrow.
17:09
Speaker 1: I heard about this. They're going to be running it
17:11
Speaker 1: live on CNN.
17:12
Speaker 2: And I urge you to watch it. It's it's He's wonderful,
17:16
Speaker 2: And you know, Murrow was what I mean, wonderfully brave
17:20
Speaker 2: taking on McCarthy in the same way that anybody who
17:25
Speaker 2: stands up to Trump now, I mean it's very the
17:28
Speaker 2: parallels are a little thick, But the point is that
17:31
Speaker 2: it was such a repressive time and KPFA was like
17:35
Speaker 2: this beacon of light in the wilderness.
17:38
Speaker 1: And that poem Howel, for those not familiar with that
17:41
Speaker 1: by Allen Ginsburg, basically celebrates the lives every lives that
17:45
Speaker 1: fell outside considered mainstream.
17:48
Speaker 2: Exactly. I saw the best minds of my generation, and
17:50
Speaker 2: he listed and he literally started going through all the
17:53
Speaker 2: people he knew had been hurt, had ended up in
17:57
Speaker 2: the inlondey bin and you know whatever, and an attack
18:01
Speaker 2: on what he called Moloch, which was the ancient Hebrew
18:05
Speaker 2: eater of souls. What happened was he took some peyote,
18:10
Speaker 2: and he was in this apartment on nob Hill in
18:13
Speaker 2: San Francisco that looked down on this hotel. But still
18:16
Speaker 2: there and up near the top are these two odd windows.
18:20
Speaker 2: I have never never I should go up there, like,
18:23
Speaker 2: you know what are those windows too? Because they seem sealed,
18:26
Speaker 2: But anyway, they looked like to him, in his state
18:30
Speaker 2: of inebriation, they looked like the eyes of Moloch. And
18:34
Speaker 2: then about three months later he sat down at a
18:36
Speaker 2: typewriter and started writing this poem about the howl and
18:40
Speaker 2: Moloch and a lot of other stuff, and it's again,
18:43
Speaker 2: it's a call for spirituality in America at a time
18:48
Speaker 2: when there really didn't seem to be any and it
18:51
Speaker 2: had well, it had a number of things. One is
18:53
Speaker 2: it is a brilliant poem and it really moves poetically.
18:58
Speaker 2: The other was that it had the greatest publicist in
19:01
Speaker 2: the history of poetry, namely the captain of the Juvenile
19:04
Speaker 2: Squad in San Francisco, goy named Hanrahan, who decided to
19:08
Speaker 2: arrest the publisher, Lawrence fur Laghetti and his bookstore clerk
19:12
Speaker 2: Shig Morale for obscenity because there's some dirty words in
19:16
Speaker 2: this poem. Well, as the Supreme Court had long said,
19:20
Speaker 2: redeeming social value is a reason to justify such things.
19:25
Speaker 2: And the judge immediately went this is bs and threw
19:28
Speaker 2: it out. But the point is everybody wants to see
19:31
Speaker 2: what the dirty words are, and it was tremendous publicity
19:35
Speaker 2: for Howell and Frankly, I would love to know that
19:39
Speaker 2: sales figures now, but I bet you they're still pretty good.
19:42
Speaker 2: And that's fifty years ago. But it's a landmark, combined
19:46
Speaker 2: with Ginsburg's friend Caro X on the road. Suddenly, the
19:50
Speaker 2: young people of America, along with rock and roll and
19:53
Speaker 2: then along with folk music, which was itself very political,
19:57
Speaker 2: they started opening up to other possibilities.
20:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's where you see as you read the book,
20:02
Speaker 1: you start seeing everything coming together. If we get to
20:04
Speaker 1: the mid to late sixties. Ginsburg, by the way, he was,
20:07
Speaker 1: wasn't he the guy that was after he took the
20:10
Speaker 1: peyote he goes the next day he decided, he was like,
20:13
Speaker 1: we're going an office job and quit it. And he
20:16
Speaker 1: said to his therapist, I'm going to do something. You
20:18
Speaker 1: can think it's crazy. And the therapist is what is
20:21
Speaker 1: in He says, I'm just gonna quit my job and
20:23
Speaker 1: I'm just going to write about mankind and the human spirit,
20:27
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera. And the therapist is like, good
20:30
Speaker 1: for you.
20:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, the go for it, he said, was why
20:34
Speaker 2: don't you?
20:34
Speaker 1: Why don't you?
20:35
Speaker 2: He gave him permission and that was that was a
20:37
Speaker 2: lovely thing.
20:38
Speaker 1: Yeah. He was from the East Coast initially and moved
20:41
Speaker 1: to San Francisco in fifty four.
20:43
Speaker 2: And that was when he found his persona and he
20:46
Speaker 2: trails around this book from then to to the end
20:50
Speaker 2: of the book, because, among other things, he and the
20:53
Speaker 2: other beat poets were very much part of the biggest
20:56
Speaker 2: hippie thing, which was the being the human being in
21:00
Speaker 2: Golden Gate Park, which, as I say, evolved first the
21:03
Speaker 2: poets and then the rock bands, which sort of makes
21:06
Speaker 2: clear the connection of the progression of people going from
21:11
Speaker 2: beat to hippie.
21:13
Speaker 1: Let's talk about Caroacximore, his nineteen fifty seven novel On
21:16
Speaker 1: the Road. It's about a young man traveling across America
21:19
Speaker 1: with his friend to better understand himself in the world.
21:22
Speaker 1: It depicts unconventional lifestyles and challenged societal norms. A high
21:27
Speaker 1: school arts student at California School of Fine Arts named
21:30
Speaker 1: Jerry Garcia picked up a copy of the book at
21:33
Speaker 1: the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. It's a
21:35
Speaker 1: literary landmark and played a big role in championing progressive
21:39
Speaker 1: and experimental literature. I'm a huge Jerry fan, huge grateful
21:42
Speaker 1: Dead fans. I'm fascinated with this. Jerry would follow the
21:46
Speaker 1: path of Keak and guitars the rest of his life.
21:49
Speaker 1: What was it about Kahak Do you think that really
21:52
Speaker 1: influenced Jerry? So profoundly.
21:54
Speaker 2: Well, let's go back a little bit. It's nineteen fifty eight.
21:58
Speaker 2: The book's still on the Best Settle list. He's sixteen,
22:01
Speaker 2: and he's taking art classes at CSFA from a guy
22:04
Speaker 2: named Wally Hedrick. Kind of my entire book is contained
22:08
Speaker 2: in a nutshell in this one story. So Wally, who
22:13
Speaker 2: is a very well known beat part of the beat
22:16
Speaker 2: painting scene, art scene, graphic arts scene in San Francisco,
22:21
Speaker 2: is teaching weekend classes and Jerry, among other things, he
22:25
Speaker 2: starts playing acoustic blues like Big Bill Brunsey while they're painting,
22:30
Speaker 2: which is why Jerry, when his mother gave him an accordion,
22:34
Speaker 2: said no, I want a guitar, which started him on
22:37
Speaker 2: his life path because that was his life and meditation
22:41
Speaker 2: from then on. Banjo's too, but you know, guitar. And
22:45
Speaker 2: then they say to Wally, as I say, is a
22:48
Speaker 2: well known beat what is this beat thing? You know?
22:50
Speaker 2: What is everybody talking about? Because, as I say, it's
22:53
Speaker 2: front page news at that point, and he says, you
22:56
Speaker 2: guys are beat. Go down the city lights. Get this book,
23:00
Speaker 2: you'll see. And it was Jerry's bible for the rest
23:03
Speaker 2: of his life. And it just the code is simply
23:07
Speaker 2: the idea is, pursue the spiritual, pursue love, pursue art,
23:13
Speaker 2: don't worry too much about how much money you make
23:15
Speaker 2: or you know, so forth and so on. And Jerry
23:19
Speaker 2: believed that till the day he died, and it affected
23:22
Speaker 2: me because I'm teen years later, I sent him a
23:26
Speaker 2: copy of my biography of Carouac, and you know, I
23:29
Speaker 2: think I did an okay job, but when I met
23:32
Speaker 2: him he got very enthusiastic, you know. And as I say,
23:35
Speaker 2: I did okay, but it was because of who it
23:39
Speaker 2: was about, because Kerouac was his role model, his hero,
23:44
Speaker 2: and there was this energy there and the spirituality that
23:47
Speaker 2: Jerry completely got. And after a little while he said,
23:52
Speaker 2: why don't you do us, Why don't you write a
23:53
Speaker 2: book about us, the Grateful Dead? And I said, darn
23:57
Speaker 2: fine idea, and that's I started that. Eventually I became
24:01
Speaker 2: their publicist, at which point I had to like set
24:03
Speaker 2: it aside for another ten years, you know, because you
24:07
Speaker 2: can't be a publicist and a biographer at the same time.
24:10
Speaker 2: It's just it's not kosher. So I, you know, worked
24:12
Speaker 2: with them for a long time, and then after Jerry died,
24:15
Speaker 2: eventually I published the book Wow.
24:17
Speaker 1: So as a publicist for the Grateful Dead, I'm so
24:20
Speaker 1: curious as to your approach because this wasn't like being
24:23
Speaker 1: a publicist for your average, regular, everyday rock and roll band.
24:29
Speaker 2: I had. In some ways, I had the easiest job
24:31
Speaker 2: in the world. This is a band. You know, almost
24:35
Speaker 2: any any person who hires a publicist keeps saying, you know,
24:38
Speaker 2: get me publicity, get me publicity, and these guys went,
24:41
Speaker 2: I don't. I'll tell you what my training. So I
24:44
Speaker 2: got hired because the guy who had been publicist had
24:48
Speaker 2: gone away for his health, and the receptionist said, what
24:51
Speaker 2: are we going to do about publicity? Nobody returns their
24:53
Speaker 2: calls and they're annoying me. Jerry said, get me down.
24:56
Speaker 2: He to do it. He knows that stuff. Stuff was
24:59
Speaker 2: not the word he use. But I'll be good, he said.
25:02
Speaker 2: Send him up to my house and I'll you know,
25:04
Speaker 2: I'll tell him what he needs to know. So I
25:06
Speaker 2: sit down and he says, okay, first, we don't suck
25:10
Speaker 2: up to the press. And I swear to God, I
25:12
Speaker 2: think I might have written it down, but it don't
25:15
Speaker 2: suck up. And then he said, eh, that's enough. Here,
25:17
Speaker 2: smoke this and we hung after the acting him. That
25:21
Speaker 2: was my complete training. Eventually, I pointed out, I pointed
25:26
Speaker 2: out to them, by the middle eighties, I'm middle thirties,
25:30
Speaker 2: there's a lot of deadheads who had been in college
25:33
Speaker 2: like in nineteen the late sixties and early seventies, who
25:37
Speaker 2: by the eighties are now in positions of responsibility at newspapers,
25:41
Speaker 2: at the media. Newspapers and TV. They want to cover
25:44
Speaker 2: the grateful dead, and you know they want to come. Well,
25:49
Speaker 2: the Grayvil had always kept things in the house. I said,
25:52
Speaker 2: I should be on the road to keep these people
25:55
Speaker 2: out of your hair. And that's what it boiled down to.
25:57
Speaker 2: I went out to, among other things, protect the photographers
26:02
Speaker 2: from the crew who were not always kind, and they
26:05
Speaker 2: just generally make it seamless. And that's what I did
26:09
Speaker 2: for the next fifteen years. As I pointed out, if
26:12
Speaker 2: you're like Dylan and won't let them in, well that's
26:15
Speaker 2: one thing. But if you're the grateful dead and you
26:17
Speaker 2: don't let the press, you know, the TV, and what
26:20
Speaker 2: they're gonna do, not because they want to mess with you,
26:23
Speaker 2: but because they have to have a story. You know,
26:25
Speaker 2: it's a story. You're a story. Now by the mid eighties.
26:28
Speaker 2: You are a definite story. You know, you come to
26:31
Speaker 2: town and you see a bunch of tightie you go,
26:33
Speaker 2: Grateful dead must be in town. I literally had friends
26:36
Speaker 2: do that and test it and find out, yep, I
26:39
Speaker 2: was in the room next door to him in the
26:41
Speaker 2: best hotel in Seattle as a matter of fact. But
26:44
Speaker 2: they're gonna go to the parking lot and they're gonna
26:46
Speaker 2: see kids committing its demeanors, maybe even felonies involving drugs
26:54
Speaker 2: or even beer, and they're gonna get footage of that. Well,
27:00
Speaker 2: if you let them in and they shoot the band
27:02
Speaker 2: playing music with pretty lights, that's what they're going to use,
27:06
Speaker 2: because these are people who are not looking to hurt.
27:10
Speaker 2: And we did fine with the exception of after our
27:15
Speaker 2: big hit, which was called Touch of Gray, the only
27:18
Speaker 2: time a Grateful that had a top ten hit. The
27:20
Speaker 2: problem was that a lot of kids who hadn't most
27:22
Speaker 2: people who had become dead as to that point, had
27:26
Speaker 2: been brought up by maybe an elder sibling or just
27:29
Speaker 2: an elder friend, and they learned lessons about how you
27:33
Speaker 2: act and how you behaved, as well as listening to
27:36
Speaker 2: the music, all of which involved remembering that you know,
27:40
Speaker 2: you're sort of like traveling gypsies, and you need you
27:42
Speaker 2: needed to keep a smart profile and that work. But
27:46
Speaker 2: when these kids came, what they did was they said, oh, well,
27:49
Speaker 2: i'll go to the show anyway, maybe I'll get in,
27:51
Speaker 2: and then they get to the parking lot and they'd
27:53
Speaker 2: see a all out party, which you know, any nineteen
27:57
Speaker 2: twenty year old is like whoa. And we ended up
28:01
Speaker 2: having thousands of people without tickets outside our show, which
28:04
Speaker 2: we struggled with really until the day Jerry died.
28:07
Speaker 1: Actually it never oh yeah, it just got bigger and bigger. Well,
28:10
Speaker 1: your quote is so perfect in that documentary, what a long,
28:15
Speaker 1: strange trip it's been. It's in the first episode. A
28:18
Speaker 1: lot of distractions there, and I think I know what
28:20
Speaker 1: you meant. But the media would focus on a lot
28:22
Speaker 1: of the things like the tied I shirts and whatever,
28:26
Speaker 1: all these different things. But you get past that and
28:28
Speaker 1: there's a richness in that music and it envelops you,
28:31
Speaker 1: as it does with myself and my older brother and
28:34
Speaker 1: I'm looking at it, Jerry, picture Jerry right here, and
28:37
Speaker 1: there is a richness to that music that once you're
28:40
Speaker 1: in it's just you feel that there's that warmth of it,
28:44
Speaker 1: and you just never want to believe.
28:47
Speaker 2: The Grateful did two things. First, they weren't a rock band.
28:51
Speaker 2: They were a jazz band, an improvisational jazz band that
28:54
Speaker 2: happened to use rock instruments and rock song structures. But
28:59
Speaker 2: they the improvisation was.
29:02
Speaker 1: Everything collective improvisation.
29:06
Speaker 2: That's right. And improvisation is like jumping off a cliff.
29:11
Speaker 2: You can land on the ground on the rocks and
29:14
Speaker 2: you know, and it's called a train wreck in music
29:17
Speaker 2: to speak, or sometimes you fly, and the Grateful Head
29:20
Speaker 2: flew often enough the audience went along for the ride,
29:23
Speaker 2: and that was the magic that you know, that brought
29:26
Speaker 2: them in. The Other was that they actively fostered although
29:31
Speaker 2: it was the Deadheads that created it. As Jerry, who's
29:34
Speaker 2: always ready to duck responsibility, it's not my fault. You
29:40
Speaker 2: guys are deadheads because you're dead heads because you chose that.
29:43
Speaker 2: But the point is that they created a community and
29:46
Speaker 2: the Deadheads embraced that. I never saw I am trying.
29:51
Speaker 2: The only time I ever objected to anyone's behavior inside
29:57
Speaker 2: a concert was an unusual woman whose name I won't share,
30:02
Speaker 2: who would nigh like a horse. She'd sort of jump
30:06
Speaker 2: up and down and neigh very loudly, and she was
30:10
Speaker 2: standing right in front of me, and at intermission, I
30:13
Speaker 2: looked at her and I said, listen, it was the
30:15
Speaker 2: only time I've ever had to do this. I went
30:17
Speaker 2: to a thousand shows, mostly because they paid me to
30:21
Speaker 2: and I mean, you know, I was able to do
30:23
Speaker 2: that because I was paid. And I finally broke down
30:26
Speaker 2: and said, I'm sorry, You're just gonna have to go
30:29
Speaker 2: somewhere else. You know, you're ruining the show. You're louder
30:33
Speaker 2: than the band. This just is not acceptable. The one
30:36
Speaker 2: thing you can't do is interfere with somebody else's trip.
30:39
Speaker 2: And she went and said something mean to me, but
30:43
Speaker 2: you know, left and the entire section around me started applauding. Okay,
30:48
Speaker 2: I wasn't the only one bumming out because of her.
30:50
Speaker 2: So that was as I say, I went to a
30:54
Speaker 2: lot of shows, and that was the only time I
30:56
Speaker 2: ever felt compelled to complain about anybody.
31:00
Speaker 1: Booked on rock Podcasts will be back after this.
31:03
Speaker 2: We'll take a break.
31:07
Speaker 1: One last question before we move on and get back
31:09
Speaker 1: to the book. But Jerry Garcia, is he the person
31:12
Speaker 1: that he appears to be? Fun loving, sweet guy? Humble,
31:18
Speaker 1: big kid, because.
31:19
Speaker 2: Just I mean he was all those things and more
31:24
Speaker 2: and a lot more.
31:25
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, intelligent, among other.
31:27
Speaker 2: Things, say, you know, incredibly intelligent, empathic, very curious about
31:32
Speaker 2: other people. That's why people love to do interviews with him,
31:34
Speaker 2: because they were conversations and not him selling merchandise, which
31:39
Speaker 2: is what most rock and roll interviews are about. And
31:42
Speaker 2: also very sensitive. And when he lost, for instance, his
31:46
Speaker 2: ability on the road to take a walk because people
31:51
Speaker 2: would be hitting on him, or go to a museum,
31:56
Speaker 2: didtoh that hurt? You know, it was just it was
31:58
Speaker 2: too much. And that's why eventually he turned to you know,
32:02
Speaker 2: self medicating himself with various drugs. And I might add
32:06
Speaker 2: but remember what he died of was a heart attack
32:09
Speaker 2: because he didn't take care of himself because he just
32:13
Speaker 2: he didn't want to, you know, and he just sort
32:15
Speaker 2: of put his foot down. So everybody, every guy over forty,
32:19
Speaker 2: has to realize that you've got to, you know, at
32:21
Speaker 2: least watch you diet a little and exercise a little.
32:25
Speaker 2: And you know, he tried, and occasionally he'd try and
32:28
Speaker 2: then he sluff off.
32:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, his fascination with Frankenstein, what an interesting guy.
32:33
Speaker 2: Well, you know, it brought him in touch with a
32:36
Speaker 2: whole new world. That was his first movie. You know,
32:38
Speaker 2: it was a great story. I heard from the American
32:42
Speaker 2: Movie Channel had a show called The Movie That Changed
32:44
Speaker 2: My Life. And he was diabetic and this is in
32:48
Speaker 2: the last year of his life, and he was like
32:51
Speaker 2: down and he wouldn't be running around yelling at people,
32:55
Speaker 2: but you know, he'd have a little dark cloud er
32:57
Speaker 2: on his head and you just you'd say hi and
32:59
Speaker 2: then shut up. I mean, but then I you know,
33:01
Speaker 2: I got this request from them, and I said, I
33:04
Speaker 2: went in to see him and I said, I think
33:07
Speaker 2: I've got one for you, and he said, okay, and
33:10
Speaker 2: I told him and he immediately started doing the interview.
33:13
Speaker 2: He just the whole that experience of introducing him to
33:18
Speaker 2: this whole other world was just one of the favorite
33:21
Speaker 2: memories of his life.
33:22
Speaker 1: There was the emergence of rock and roll in England
33:24
Speaker 1: around nineteen sixty four, but around that time in San Francisco,
33:28
Speaker 1: folk music is prominent. In fact, you write about how
33:30
Speaker 1: many of the later San Francisco musicians like Jerry Garcia
33:33
Speaker 1: got there start playing folk music. But folk initially sprang
33:36
Speaker 1: up in Los Angeles and eventually it would lead to
33:39
Speaker 1: the genre known as folk rock. The Birds play a
33:43
Speaker 1: huge role here.
33:44
Speaker 2: You know. There's a fascinating article by a rock critic
33:47
Speaker 2: in the Los Angeles Free Press which describes the Birds
33:51
Speaker 2: a scene when the Birds were playing at zero their
33:54
Speaker 2: first big run, and clearly this guy had been psyched.
33:59
Speaker 2: Hellas you can't read the article without assuming that. And
34:03
Speaker 2: he's attributing to that to the audience, which in sixty
34:06
Speaker 2: five is pretty early to outside of the Bay Area,
34:09
Speaker 2: because the guy was making the LSD was in the
34:11
Speaker 2: Bay Area. But all I can say is the Birds,
34:15
Speaker 2: and of course eight Miles High gave major hints of
34:18
Speaker 2: all that, although in the end, as the improvisation to
34:23
Speaker 2: the you know, all the way out to the End
34:25
Speaker 2: of the Universe became the calling card of the Bay Area.
34:29
Speaker 1: Dennis McNally's the author of The Last Great Dream, How
34:31
Speaker 1: Bohemians became Hippies and created the Sixties. Let's talk about
34:35
Speaker 1: Jefferson Airplane. Now in the year in nineteen sixty five,
34:38
Speaker 1: an important year in hate Ashbury history. This is when
34:41
Speaker 1: Jefferson Airplane forms.
34:42
Speaker 2: They formed again as a folk kind of a folk rock.
34:46
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know necessarily yeah, I would say.
34:50
Speaker 2: By then, certainly Marty Ballen, who formed the band, had
34:54
Speaker 2: heard the Birds and was picking up on that vibe,
34:57
Speaker 2: and so he started this folk rock band with Paul Canner.
35:01
Speaker 2: He spotted Paul Canner also playing folk, and they said,
35:04
Speaker 2: let's start a band. You know, post Beatles, every folk.
35:07
Speaker 2: He said, Hm, this rock and roll stuff looks like
35:09
Speaker 2: fun and everybody's you know, they started forming sort of
35:14
Speaker 2: rock bands. But what was important with the Airplane, frankly
35:18
Speaker 2: and their musical quality was Canner had a friend by
35:21
Speaker 2: the name of Jorma Calcanan who was a great guitarist,
35:25
Speaker 2: and eventually Yorma called in his buddy Jack Cassidy, who
35:29
Speaker 2: was a great, great bass player, so that Jefferson Airplane
35:34
Speaker 2: had more guts, shall we say, than your average folk
35:37
Speaker 2: rock band. And eventually, of course, with Gray Slick, they
35:41
Speaker 2: created the first sort of the psychedelic message that came
35:46
Speaker 2: out of San Francisco and hit all of America. And
35:49
Speaker 2: it was straight because at that point the coverage by
35:52
Speaker 2: the media was the media just didn't get what was
35:56
Speaker 2: going on. You were talking about the TV people earlier, well,
35:59
Speaker 2: it was worsenineteen sixty seven, when you have all these
36:02
Speaker 2: very straight reporters who have you know, all they see
36:06
Speaker 2: is kids experiencing voluntary poverty, getting high, having fun, talking
36:11
Speaker 2: about love, and not caring about what they're supposed to
36:15
Speaker 2: care about, which is, you know, money and achievement. And
36:18
Speaker 2: the reporters just didn't get that. The one message that
36:22
Speaker 2: did come out was in the spring white Rabbit flooded
36:27
Speaker 2: the country and as Gray Slick will tell you, the
36:30
Speaker 2: last lines feed your Head, Feed your Head wasn't just
36:33
Speaker 2: about drugs. It was all the ways you can feed
36:36
Speaker 2: your head, and it was about literature, and it was
36:39
Speaker 2: about other music and so forth and so on. It
36:41
Speaker 2: was a universal message. Granted the kids leap to other conclusions.
36:47
Speaker 2: And that's one of the reasons why everybody wanted to
36:49
Speaker 2: come to San Francisco in the summer of sixty seven.
36:51
Speaker 1: January twenty second, nineteen sixty six, the Trip Festival in
36:54
Speaker 1: San Francisco talk about that and its impact.
36:57
Speaker 2: So in the fall of sixty five, Ken Keasey of
37:01
Speaker 2: the so called Mary Pranksters, had written a brilliant, brilliant
37:04
Speaker 2: book called One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest did fantastically
37:09
Speaker 2: wrote a second book and decided to celebrate it, as
37:13
Speaker 2: it were, by taking a bus full of his buddies,
37:16
Speaker 2: the great bus ride across the country to New York
37:19
Speaker 2: for the publication, and by the time he got back,
37:23
Speaker 2: they had been filming and they were they were going
37:25
Speaker 2: to make a movie. He didn't really want to write anymore.
37:27
Speaker 2: Writing is slow and difficult and so forth and so on.
37:30
Speaker 2: It's work, and he wanted a more direct communication of
37:34
Speaker 2: what he was seeing out of the value of the
37:37
Speaker 2: LSD experience. So they were going to make a movie.
37:39
Speaker 2: Except they were all tripping when they filmed the movie,
37:42
Speaker 2: which meant that half the film stock was like, you know,
37:45
Speaker 2: out of focus, not so good. So he ended up saying, okay,
37:51
Speaker 2: we'll have a party, and they called it the Acid Test.
37:54
Speaker 2: The first one had fifty people. The last one, the
37:58
Speaker 2: Trips Festival, had five thousand, which should tell you something
38:01
Speaker 2: about the momentum of what was going on in late
38:07
Speaker 2: sixty five and then up through January sixty six and
38:11
Speaker 2: in sixty and it's very interesting because the Grateful Dad
38:15
Speaker 2: sort of stepped out under the stage and what they
38:19
Speaker 2: did worked with the LSD and the place just took
38:22
Speaker 2: off into heaven. But you didn't have to be tripping
38:25
Speaker 2: to know this, to understand this, because in fact, Ralph Gleeson,
38:29
Speaker 2: who was the jazz critic and the rock critic of
38:31
Speaker 2: the Chronicle San Francisco Chronicle, a diabetic who completely sober,
38:37
Speaker 2: got it too. There was something about the atmosphere and
38:41
Speaker 2: the presence of loud. There's some connection between loud music
38:45
Speaker 2: and the way it goes through your body, I mean
38:48
Speaker 2: electronic really loud and LSD. It makes you sensitive to
38:52
Speaker 2: it and it makes it an amazing experience. And it
38:57
Speaker 2: was for everybody there. And one of the people in
39:00
Speaker 2: Hayte Ashbury said that everybody in the Haye Ashbury was
39:03
Speaker 2: born at the Trips festival. That they were there and
39:06
Speaker 2: they got it. And what had happened was that the
39:09
Speaker 2: US government and its infinite wisdom was going to build
39:12
Speaker 2: freeways all across San Francisco, including right past the Haye
39:16
Speaker 2: Ashbury through Golden digging up Golden Gate Park so that
39:20
Speaker 2: you could get the Marin County faster north the Golden
39:23
Speaker 2: Gate Bridge faster. Well, fortunately the neighborhood said uh uh,
39:27
Speaker 2: and they managed to have it canceled. But in the interval,
39:32
Speaker 2: the property values of Hayte Ashbury were like at rock Bottom,
39:35
Speaker 2: So it was an expensive neighborhood to have a revolution in.
39:38
Speaker 2: For thirty dollars a month, you get a room. For
39:40
Speaker 2: fifty dollars a month you get an apartment. I mean
39:42
Speaker 2: it was people could find five people could put together
39:45
Speaker 2: ten dollars a month and have a place to live
39:48
Speaker 2: nice and experience what was going on. So the Hate
39:54
Speaker 2: Ashbury was this test laboratory for what would happen if
39:58
Speaker 2: a bunch of very high people hung out and experimented
40:03
Speaker 2: with drugs, but with sexual behaviors, with all kinds of things.
40:09
Speaker 2: One of the things that people I don't think of
40:11
Speaker 2: acknowledged is one of the things that came out of
40:14
Speaker 2: the Hay was the image of the gentle male hippie.
40:17
Speaker 2: And to the best of my knowledge, that was the
40:20
Speaker 2: first time that gentleness in the man was celebrated in
40:24
Speaker 2: American culture as far as I'm concerned. It led in
40:29
Speaker 2: just a few years to the emergence of the gay
40:31
Speaker 2: the really powerful gay subculture in the Cash Show and
40:36
Speaker 2: later we now have reached the point where where we
40:39
Speaker 2: have the federal government harassing and trying to dismiss the
40:43
Speaker 2: lives of trans people, and I think it all connects back.
40:48
Speaker 2: I teach occasional high school classes of kids that are
40:51
Speaker 2: fascinated with the sixties, and what I tell them is
40:55
Speaker 2: the reason I'm telling you, or I'm telling them why
40:59
Speaker 2: you're interested in But I'll tell you why I think
41:01
Speaker 2: you're interested in it in it, which is simply none
41:05
Speaker 2: of the things that came out of the Hayte Ashberry,
41:08
Speaker 2: whether it's organic food, yoga, zan the gentle you know,
41:13
Speaker 2: challenges to sexual stereotypes, none of that's gone away. Hate
41:18
Speaker 2: did not have any impact on American politics, although it
41:21
Speaker 2: did help end the war, but it certainly had an
41:24
Speaker 2: impact on American culture. And it's still there and the
41:27
Speaker 2: questions that it raised are still being challenged and unfortunately,
41:31
Speaker 2: from my opinion, in a completely negative way, by the
41:34
Speaker 2: current administration. But that's another issue.
41:38
Speaker 1: Booked on Rock podcast will be back after this.
41:41
Speaker 2: Don't go away, gentlemen, we may need all of you.
41:52
Speaker 1: Hey, guys, thanks so much for checking out the Book
41:54
Speaker 1: Down Rock podcast. If you've just found the podcast, welcome.
41:57
Speaker 1: If you've been listening, thank you so much for your
42:00
Speaker 1: and make sure you tell a friend, a family member,
42:02
Speaker 1: share on social media and let people know about Booked
42:06
Speaker 1: on Rock, and if you do like the podcast, make
42:08
Speaker 1: sure you subscribe give a five star review. Wherever you
42:11
Speaker 1: listen to the Booked on Rock podcast, We're on Amazon, Apple, iHeart, Spotify, Spreaker,
42:16
Speaker 1: tune In, and on YouTube music. You can check out
42:19
Speaker 1: the full episodes on video, along with video highlights from
42:22
Speaker 1: episodes on the Booked on Rock YouTube channel. Find it
42:25
Speaker 1: at Booked on Rock. Thanks again for listening. Now back
42:29
Speaker 1: to the show. Ballroom posters to promote concerts were and
42:34
Speaker 1: still are a thing of beauty. We've all seen them.
42:37
Speaker 1: It originates in San Francisco. From the beginning, these are
42:40
Speaker 1: cherists as art objects. People would tear them down, you
42:43
Speaker 1: say in the book, tear them down as almost as
42:46
Speaker 1: soon as they went up. Talk about how this began.
42:48
Speaker 1: Promoters Bill Graham, legendary Bill Graham, his place in this
42:52
Speaker 1: story and who's responsible for the first one.
42:55
Speaker 2: So Bill Graham was this want to be actor who
42:58
Speaker 2: then found his niche in content promotion. Also a guy
43:01
Speaker 2: named Chet Helms who had the avalon. So Bill had
43:04
Speaker 2: the fillmore and Chet had the avalon. And the thing
43:07
Speaker 2: about this about San Francisco is particularly at that point,
43:11
Speaker 2: is that it's not that big a place and a
43:16
Speaker 2: poster was a very effective communications mean and relatively speaking,
43:20
Speaker 2: very inexpensive for the promoters. And if you put ten
43:23
Speaker 2: up on H Street, and a couple of more in
43:26
Speaker 2: North Beach and a couple of more on Telegraph Avenue
43:28
Speaker 2: in Berkeley, shazam, the word would get around. So it
43:32
Speaker 2: was a very effective communication device. What you can't exactly
43:38
Speaker 2: explain is that the leading what we're called the Big Five,
43:42
Speaker 2: MOUs And Kelly, Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, and Rick Griffin
43:49
Speaker 2: were fantastic artists who liberated by LSD and some prior training.
43:56
Speaker 2: They all had some training, I mean Bascoso I think
43:59
Speaker 2: he had an MFA from Yale, and deriving their work
44:03
Speaker 2: from a number of things including art nouveau, but also
44:08
Speaker 2: the asset experience. They used to call the first posters
44:12
Speaker 2: boxing posters because they were just you know, name picture ugly,
44:16
Speaker 2: you know, I mean, and very quickly they started expanding
44:22
Speaker 2: their imagination, sometimes to Bill Grahma's regret, because they would
44:27
Speaker 2: get into doing this very difficult to read lettering and
44:30
Speaker 2: he'd say, I want people to know where the show is,
44:32
Speaker 2: and they'd say they'll study, and they did and it worked.
44:36
Speaker 2: You know, it sucked people in and yes, I mean
44:40
Speaker 2: their collector's items to this.
44:42
Speaker 1: Day underground publishing in San Francisco. Among the many important
44:46
Speaker 1: stories told in the book, chapter thirty gets into the
44:48
Speaker 1: newspaper The Oracle, which first published in nineteen sixty six.
44:52
Speaker 1: What was the mission of the Oracle.
44:54
Speaker 2: The Oracle was edited by a poet which will tell
44:57
Speaker 2: you something, and an art director by the name of
45:00
Speaker 2: Michael Bowen who was out of the Surrealist school of painting,
45:04
Speaker 2: and it was to spread the message of peace, love,
45:08
Speaker 2: and psychedelics. Some of it was not much on astrology,
45:12
Speaker 2: so some of it was kind of to me gibberish.
45:15
Speaker 2: But also the poet Gary Snyder wrote an essay on
45:18
Speaker 2: Buddhism in the Western world that was one of the
45:21
Speaker 2: best essays ever, you know, on that subject, ever written.
45:24
Speaker 2: So you know, you got a lot of stuff in there,
45:26
Speaker 2: and it presented a lot of information, and it was
45:31
Speaker 2: incredibly successful for a year. And then what happened, among
45:36
Speaker 2: other things, as Peter Berg points out, is that the
45:39
Speaker 2: San Francisco Police Department, at the end of the Summer
45:41
Speaker 2: of Love the Spy, then the San Francisco Police Department
45:45
Speaker 2: had turned H Street into a one way speedway where
45:49
Speaker 2: nobody could you know, just sort of hang out, and
45:52
Speaker 2: installed crime lights to make it you know, deliberately ugly
45:55
Speaker 2: really so that it was, you know, it was no
45:58
Speaker 2: longer a very nice place to have out.
46:00
Speaker 1: And the sharpest critics of the Oracle were the Diggers
46:03
Speaker 1: who were the Diggers.
46:04
Speaker 2: The Diggers were former actors from the Mime Troop who
46:08
Speaker 2: were very political, not in an exactly overt way, but
46:11
Speaker 2: specifically explicitly anti consumer. And they talked about free so
46:16
Speaker 2: they talked about they got sometimes stole, sometimes mooched food
46:21
Speaker 2: which they cooked and gave to people, not to be
46:25
Speaker 2: social workers, but on the principle that everybody should be
46:28
Speaker 2: able to eat. And they advocated that. And they disliked
46:32
Speaker 2: the Oracle because the Oracle was sort of supported by
46:35
Speaker 2: the stores which sold trinkets and this is in the
46:39
Speaker 2: clothing and you know stuff. And they wanted to warn
46:44
Speaker 2: that anything that can be sort of captured by the
46:48
Speaker 2: corporate culture blue jeans will be if you could make
46:52
Speaker 2: money on it. That's their job, the corporate and that
46:56
Speaker 2: they objected to and they were overly optimistic, shall we
47:01
Speaker 2: say that everybody would basically try and reject money and
47:05
Speaker 2: live communally and live in a very low cost way.
47:10
Speaker 2: But their point was real enough and it's taught us
47:13
Speaker 2: all a lot of lessons.
47:15
Speaker 1: Booked on rock podcasts. We'll be back after this.
47:18
Speaker 2: This is heavy. There's that word again, heavy? Why are
47:21
Speaker 2: thanks for heavy in my future? Is there a problem
47:23
Speaker 2: with yours? Gravitational pull?
47:26
Speaker 1: Find the bookdown Rock website at bookdown rock dot com.
47:30
Speaker 1: There you can find all the back episodes of the show,
47:32
Speaker 1: the latest episode in video and audio, plus a video
47:35
Speaker 1: highlight and link to our YouTube channel. Links to all
47:38
Speaker 1: of the platforms where you can listen to the podcast,
47:40
Speaker 1: plus all the social media platforms were on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok,
47:46
Speaker 1: and x. Also check out the booked on Rock blog.
47:49
Speaker 1: Find your local independent bookstore, find out all the latest
47:52
Speaker 1: hot rock book releases, and before you go, check out
47:55
Speaker 1: the booked on Rock online store. Pick up some booked
47:57
Speaker 1: on rock merch. It's all had booked on rock dot com.
48:03
Speaker 1: You mentioned the Human Being. Let's go back to that
48:05
Speaker 1: January fourteenth, nineteen sixty seven that's held at Golden Gate Park,
48:09
Speaker 1: Polo Fields. Tell me if I'm in the ballpark here
48:13
Speaker 1: reading about this and maybe think about when Touch of
48:16
Speaker 1: Gray became a hit and the longtime dead fans were
48:18
Speaker 1: now surrounded by the younger fans who they didn't feel
48:22
Speaker 1: fit the vibe. Yeah, you say it was the beginning
48:24
Speaker 1: of the end of the Hate as a functional neighborhood.
48:27
Speaker 2: The Hate through nineteen sixty six, you know, was completely
48:30
Speaker 2: under the rap virtually completely under the radar, effectively under
48:34
Speaker 2: the radar, and they did a lot of you know,
48:37
Speaker 2: they experimented, they had fun. It worked, so they decided
48:40
Speaker 2: to throw a party. You know, why not, let's celebrate,
48:43
Speaker 2: and they celebrated at the b IN. The problem with
48:46
Speaker 2: the b IN was that somewhere between thirty and fifty
48:48
Speaker 2: thousand people showed up. The entire police department presence at
48:53
Speaker 2: the b N was two cops on mounted horses. They
48:57
Speaker 2: you know, it's one of the mysteries. Well, well, they
49:00
Speaker 2: obviously got caught by surprise and they certainly didn't expect
49:03
Speaker 2: that many people. And it went fine, at least until
49:06
Speaker 2: they started arresting people. For as they streamed out, there
49:10
Speaker 2: were some people were walking in the street on H
49:12
Speaker 2: Street and you know, obstructing traffic, you're arrested. But the
49:16
Speaker 2: point is that it blew their cover. And after that,
49:21
Speaker 2: the entire spring was filled with you know, people covering
49:25
Speaker 2: the media story and as I say, mostly getting it
49:28
Speaker 2: all wrong or just trivializing it, making it, you know,
49:33
Speaker 2: more superficial than it was. With the basic message that
49:37
Speaker 2: come summer, every board high school kid in America that
49:41
Speaker 2: would be just about everybody was going to come to
49:44
Speaker 2: San Francisco. And I've never gotten an accurate account. I
49:49
Speaker 2: don't think anybody ever did of how many tens of
49:52
Speaker 2: thousands of people did come to San Francisco that summer,
49:55
Speaker 2: but it was too many, and it was it was
49:57
Speaker 2: a lot of young kids without emotional or financial or
50:03
Speaker 2: life quality sophistication, so that instead of contributing, they were dependent,
50:09
Speaker 2: you know, feed me, you know, give me a place
50:11
Speaker 2: to sleep.
50:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, I see what you mean.
50:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it was it was hard, and people like
50:16
Speaker 2: the Diggers and people there was a wonderful church called
50:19
Speaker 2: All Saints Church and the hate that did the same thing.
50:22
Speaker 2: I just went completely batch it trying to save to
50:27
Speaker 2: take care of these kids. But it you know, instead
50:30
Speaker 2: of being the celebratory neighborhood, it was a neighborhood struggling
50:35
Speaker 2: with a problem.
50:36
Speaker 1: All good things come to an end, and that that
50:38
Speaker 1: was the that was the sign that, yeah, this is
50:40
Speaker 1: tiing to come to an end. The high water mark, though,
50:44
Speaker 1: was the Monterey International Pop Festival. See the high water
50:48
Speaker 1: mark of what happened in the Hate would be the
50:50
Speaker 1: splendid June weekend of the Monterey International Pop Festival. And
50:53
Speaker 1: now throughout the book you delve into the music that
50:55
Speaker 1: was emerging and happening in Los Angeles and London as
50:58
Speaker 1: well as San Francisco. This is where all three connect
51:02
Speaker 1: and it's the first American performance of the Jimmy Hendricks Experience.
51:06
Speaker 1: This event comes together in response to police rights in
51:09
Speaker 1: the fall of sixty six on the Sunset Strip.
51:12
Speaker 2: Which eventually becomes the project of a guy named Lou Adler,
51:16
Speaker 2: who is the record company president for the Mamas and
51:20
Speaker 2: the Papas, who were very popular in LA and John.
51:25
Speaker 1: John Phillips, the leader of.
51:27
Speaker 2: Mamas and the Papas, and they start this, they change
51:31
Speaker 2: it into a nonprofit and they bring actually four cities
51:34
Speaker 2: because also New York. And what became quickly obvious was
51:38
Speaker 2: that it was a celebration of psychedelic music. You know,
51:41
Speaker 2: be a hippie, you know, bring bells, bring flowers, etc.
51:46
Speaker 2: And the fact is that the capacity of the arena
51:50
Speaker 2: where they were Monterey took place with seven thousand people.
51:54
Speaker 2: There were probably thirty thousand people on the grounds of
51:56
Speaker 2: the fair grounds. Now any other time this caused a
52:01
Speaker 2: heart attack in the cops and in general created major problems.
52:06
Speaker 2: Let's put it that way. Nothing happened. The cultural image
52:11
Speaker 2: of hippie and the Summer of love is of beautiful
52:15
Speaker 2: people with flowers in their hair, listening to great music,
52:19
Speaker 2: very high, very happy, very peaceful. And for four days
52:23
Speaker 2: at Monterey, it really was true. By Saturday is Friday, Saturday, Sunday,
52:27
Speaker 2: and by Saturday afternoon, the chief of police of Monterey
52:31
Speaker 2: was sending his half of his cops. You know, he
52:34
Speaker 2: called out when they saw what was about to happen.
52:38
Speaker 2: They'd called every cop you know within one hundred miles,
52:41
Speaker 2: I suppose out and they go home. It's nothing about that.
52:46
Speaker 2: And my favorite picture, which is the next to the
52:49
Speaker 2: last picture in my book, is a picture of a
52:52
Speaker 2: police officer, motorcycle police officer stringing. Yeah, to take a
52:56
Speaker 2: look here. Every seat in the arena had a flower
53:02
Speaker 2: on it, an orchid. They shipped in ten thousand orchids
53:05
Speaker 2: from from Hawaii, and this motorcycle cop is stringing orchids
53:11
Speaker 2: on the antenna of his motorcycle with a big smile
53:14
Speaker 2: on his face because he has absolutely nothing to do,
53:18
Speaker 2: which is the way we like police to be there,
53:20
Speaker 2: standing there looking at kids and going nothing to see here.
53:24
Speaker 2: And that's that, you know. That's the story of Mono
53:26
Speaker 2: Ray in that picture.
53:27
Speaker 1: That says it all. Yep, I'm looking for the photos here.
53:31
Speaker 1: Unless the preview copy doesn't have photos, i'd be bummed.
53:35
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, you're right, yeah.
53:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, you obviously got a galley. The galley. I'm
53:43
Speaker 2: sorry you were you were rubbed.
53:45
Speaker 1: Ah, that's okay, it's all the more reason for me
53:48
Speaker 1: to buy a copy.
53:49
Speaker 2: Well, there you go.
53:50
Speaker 1: But let me go.
53:51
Speaker 2: Let's see if yeah, I was gonna say, let's see
53:54
Speaker 2: if this will come through at all. Let's see.
53:57
Speaker 1: That's you could Yeah, you could see it.
53:59
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, there you go.
54:02
Speaker 1: Oh there, yeah, yeah, oh wow. Look at that and
54:05
Speaker 1: he's smiling. Oh that guy went in there probably with
54:09
Speaker 1: a serious look on his face like I'm ready to
54:11
Speaker 1: go to battle.
54:12
Speaker 2: That's right, you know, and and uh, that's beautiful. There
54:16
Speaker 2: was a certain amount of magic at Monterey.
54:18
Speaker 1: The story about Hendrix. The photographer from San Francisco, Bob Sideman,
54:22
Speaker 1: the story he remembered he sees Hendrix, he looks like
54:25
Speaker 1: he's in no shape to get on stage if.
54:28
Speaker 2: The stand up he had, you know, Jimmy, Jimmy was
54:32
Speaker 2: the kind of guy that if you offered him a
54:35
Speaker 2: handful of hits, he'd take them all. And he did
54:38
Speaker 2: and was like just he looked like a crumpled laundry.
54:42
Speaker 2: And then the roadies they were taking bets that he
54:44
Speaker 2: wouldn't play. And then the roadies came and got him,
54:47
Speaker 2: and he went out and he was Jimi Hendrix.
54:49
Speaker 1: A truly heroic metamorphosis.
54:52
Speaker 2: Absolutely and and uh, you know, he summed up everything
54:57
Speaker 2: that had been going on in however long he played well.
55:01
Speaker 1: People talk about Woodstock, how important that is in your opinion? Monterey?
55:07
Speaker 1: I mean, like you're right. For four days at Monterey
55:09
Speaker 1: it was reality, and it colored the next decade and
55:11
Speaker 1: more of the youth culture and.
55:14
Speaker 2: On any number of levels. You know, there was a
55:17
Speaker 2: vip row with every important record company executive. We're sitting
55:23
Speaker 2: there and they all, you know, Clive Davis and Warner Brothers,
55:27
Speaker 2: they all took their cues from what they saw that weekend.
55:32
Speaker 2: You had sort of soft rock stuff from La which
55:36
Speaker 2: got a certain amount of attention, and then you had
55:39
Speaker 2: San Francisco and Jimmy and there you go.
55:42
Speaker 1: If you could bottle that feat and sell it, but
55:47
Speaker 1: then to be commercialized, we don't want to sell it.
55:50
Speaker 1: But no, it was a magical time. It was like
55:52
Speaker 1: that magical time that came and went. Must it must
55:56
Speaker 1: have felt like it kme went so fast because time
55:58
Speaker 1: goes by so fast. I mean, we read about that
56:00
Speaker 1: era and it seems like a long time. But boy,
56:03
Speaker 1: was what five years.
56:05
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I mean the magic was you know,
56:09
Speaker 2: was really you know, a year, a year and a half,
56:13
Speaker 2: two years, say, and I cheated, you know that. That's
56:15
Speaker 2: why I ended at Monterey at a high point, because
56:19
Speaker 2: not always for bad, but things got much more complicated
56:23
Speaker 2: and it just it diversified. It went out into one
56:27
Speaker 2: of the people who was one of the light show people,
56:30
Speaker 2: guy named Roger Hilliard, later went to Boston and he
56:35
Speaker 2: and a guy named Paul Hawken. You may have heard
56:37
Speaker 2: of Smith and Hawkin, which is a fairly well known
56:40
Speaker 2: series of stores created Arewon, which was one of the
56:43
Speaker 2: first distributors of organic food in America, and it grew
56:48
Speaker 2: until I don't know what many billions of dollars industry now.
56:53
Speaker 2: And that's just one of the things. But to go
56:56
Speaker 2: into that, to go into where the music business went,
56:59
Speaker 2: to go into the war, that's another three books, and
57:03
Speaker 2: I only had time for one.
57:04
Speaker 1: Right, the last great Dream How Bohemians became hippies and
57:08
Speaker 1: created the sixties. It's out now, right, Oh yeah, yeah,
57:12
Speaker 1: it's out now.
57:13
Speaker 2: All your better bookstores all right.
57:14
Speaker 1: You can find wherever books are sold and look forward
57:16
Speaker 1: at your nearest bookstore. If you have an independent bookstore,
57:19
Speaker 1: look for it there. You can go to bookdom rock
57:20
Speaker 1: dot com to find your nearest independent bookstore and if
57:23
Speaker 1: they don't have one, they're asked them to get a copy,
57:26
Speaker 1: demand to get a copy. And where can people find
57:28
Speaker 1: you online?
57:29
Speaker 2: Dennis Dennis McNally dot com. It's not very original, but
57:32
Speaker 2: there I am, and you can among other things, there's
57:35
Speaker 2: a bunch of not just Amazon, but a bunch of
57:37
Speaker 2: places where you can go online and buy the book
57:40
Speaker 2: if you like.
57:40
Speaker 1: And you did this interview from beautiful San Francisco. Yeah,
57:44
Speaker 1: how long have you lived there?
57:45
Speaker 2: Oh? Cold? I've lived here forever. I came here when
57:48
Speaker 2: I researched my first book in nineteen seventy four, and
57:51
Speaker 2: came back two years later. Here I am. But I
57:55
Speaker 2: got to say, it's a wonderful summer day in San Francisco.
57:59
Speaker 2: It's about fifty degree and foggy and the winds blowing.
58:02
Speaker 2: So so if you're if you're coming to visit San Francisco,
58:08
Speaker 2: Ring Layers.
58:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Dennis, thank you so much. It's so
58:14
Speaker 1: great to have you on the show. I hope to
58:15
Speaker 1: have you back on again someday down the road.
58:18
Speaker 2: You happy to you. Take care. That's it. It's in
58:29
Speaker 2: the books.