KARL ARMSTRONG (University of Wisconsin antiwar bomber)
I would say that half the time, you would meet people, and they would invite you over to their place and you’d smoke some weed and sit around and drink. Four times out of the week, I would spend nights with strangers in communes. They didn’t call themselves that, but they were anarchist communes, eating organically, very simple meals. I was really impressed with the way they were living their lives. They were totally off the radar. I thought, I would like to live that kind of life. I thought I would rather live communally than the way I was living. But I knew that because of what I was doing, that wasn’t a possibility. I was definitely living on the edge.
PETER COYOTE
I founded the Olema commune in the fall of ’69, and then I went on the Grateful Dead trip to see the Beatles in London, and so I stashed my dog there and I moved there permanently in late ’69. So we were there for ’69, all of ’70, all of ’71, until the summertime, when we were evicted. So it was only a year and a half, maybe max, two years, but Jesus, it felt like five.
Credit 22.1
Peter Coyote, cofounder of the Diggers. Coyote carried a gun, rode a Harley-Davidson, and helped found the Black Bear and Olema communes in the late sixties.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHUCK COULD.
Olema was near Point Reyes, so before all of the Diggers moved in, I went into the bar in Point Reyes one night and I said, “I live here now, so if we’re going to get into the shit, let’s just get into it, let’s just fucking go!” Nothing happened. My hair was down to the middle of my back; I had six earrings, three in each ear. I had a little Fu Manchu mustache on the outside corners and I had a little goatee. I was wearing coveralls and a big old floppy, ruined fedora. This cowboy just slid a drink over to me; I took a shot and proceeded to get completely hammered. I guess I was scared out of my mind, but I got so hammered and he picked me up, dragged me to his truck, and delivered me home. It turned out that he was the guy that owned the grazing lease at Olema. He was running cattle there. So we became sort of friends. I had a rule that we paid every debt in that town, and when we were evicted from Olema, I paid debts that weren’t mine.
If you wanted to live in a world without the law, you had to be able to deal with violent men; you had to be able to protect yourself. So we were armed. We were not kidding around about defending a life that we had created and I think that’s why the Black Panthers liked us, that’s why the Hells Angels liked us.
MICHAEL RANDALL
We always felt that our mission was to turn the world on to LSD. Other communes didn’t define themselves that way. So, with that job description, it was hard for us to settle into a quieter lifestyle. To tell you the truth, once you start doing the things we were doing, you don’t want to go into a quieter lifestyle anyway. It becomes really fun—dangerous, fun.
PETER COYOTE
One of the things we tried to study and learn were the body of skills that Native Americans had inherited, because these were people for whom the natural environment was their hardware store, their furniture store, their pharmacy, their everything, and we didn’t want to see that body of information die out, and we also wanted to learn it because it was free. There was a book called Back to Eden, by Jethro Kloss, which was like an herbal medical book, and was the bible in every commune.*6 We learned the plants that were good for compresses and wounds and staph infections. One of the things we discovered was that hunters dumped the deerskins after their kills in the dump at Point Reyes. So we would collect those skins and we all learned to flesh them, tan them, smoke them, and turn them into buckskin, which made them trade goods—same thing for collecting acorns. We collected acorns and ground them into flour, and traded them to health food stores to get olive oil and commodities that we couldn’t make. We traded elderberry wine that we made with the Indians, for salmon up at Black Bear [commune].*7 So we were trying to develop a sustainable economy and trying to learn those skills required to get as much of our income and livelihood off the land as we could.
Credit 22.2
The Digger Free Family at their Forest Knolls Red House commune in Marin County, California.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHUCK COULD.
A lot of women became very good beaders. The Digger women affected a kind of beautiful circular dress that was made on circular knitting needles. They were floor length and really beautiful. That became kind of a uniform for a lot of the Digger women, with silver bracelets. I collected fox skins from foxes that were killed on the roads. I’d skin them and tan them, and take them down to New Mexico and trade them to the Santo Domingo Indians. They needed them for the green corn dance initiation for their young men. I’d trade them for turquoise or silver, sometimes money, go to Gallup, New Mexico, and get red velvet and blue velvet Navajo cloth and bring that back to California. Women would use that to make beautiful shirts. So we were just trying to create an economy with as much found and free stuff as we possibly could.
CAROL RANDALL
By 1969 we had moved to a commune we called the Ranch, above Palm Springs, in the San Jacinto Mountains. We weren’t that many people, only about twenty-five adults and a bunch of kids. Tim Leary and his wife, Rosemary, lived with us for two years. We were trying to live off the land, and working, and doing all our own cooking, baking our own bread. But we weren’t like the Farm in Tennessee.*8
The women were very feminine. We loved having babies and cooking and that whole thing. We loved it. Just being able to sit around with your girlfriends and be there with the babies, and embroider, and sew, or work in the garden together. That’s what we wanted. It was our choice. We lived in a few different houses and in the summertime, the teepees went up and some people would camp out. We shared everything.*9
PETER COYOTE
The Digger scene was very conservative and traditional, but it wasn’t enforced. In other words, the Digger women were doing what they wanted to do. They could give a shit what the men wanted to do. They wanted to be with each other and take care of the babies; that’s what they liked doing. There were a couple that liked to do mechanics and they did, no one would say anything. So for us it wasn’t a problem. The women had the economic power. We had to beg the women for money from their welfare checks. If we needed a fuel pump for my truck, we had to argue it out with the women. “You’re not going to get the groceries unless we get a fuel pump to fix the truck.” I don’t remember any women ever complaining. It was like a matriarchy, and they indulged our political ideologies and our craziness, but really, this gaggle of women was together.
Credit 22.3
The women of the “hippie mafia” at the Ranch, their commune in Idyllwild, California, in 1970 displaying various stages of pregnancy. Carol Randall, known as the Godmother of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, stands third from the left.
It wasn’t until I met the Red Rockers that I began to get an idea of feminism and what those issues were about, and I had a steep learning curve. My friend lived on a commune in Colorado called Red Rockers, and they were very gender sensitive. That was the first place that I encountered feminism, and I didn’t encounter it gracefully. We were visiting and my girlfriend got up and brought me a cup of coffee, and a bunch of the women jumped on her for that, and I sort of lost it. She was just being considerate, what the fuck? Who are you people? Anyway, this really smart woman named Mary got in my face, and I threatened to slap her, and I really just set myself outside that community.
CAROL RANDALL
These communities of like-minded individuals and families of communal creativity focused on family; friends; poetry; art; all kinds of music; spiritual practice like yoga and meditation; health; alternative medicine; and demanding to be free from societal restrictions, restraints, and hang-ups. The pureness of thought exploded. We were everywhere.
Credit 22.4
Carol and Michael Randall’s wedding on September 27, 1970, officiated by Samu, a Chumash medicine man, at his commune in Topanga Canyon. Samu also married Timothy and Ros
emary Leary. The blanket symbolizes shelter, the canes are for old age, and the vessel is a wedding vase symbolizing two becoming one.
PETER COYOTE
One of the problems was that even though we were a leaderless society, because I was the first guy out there, I was sort of the titular leader. I supplied the overarching Digger vision. But the problem with that is, if you have a leader and they stop supplying the vision, or take a day off, everything stops. So a lot of the people who came to Olema came because it was a free place to be. They would nominally accept the trip but it wasn’t their trip. Gradually, it was not a very good emblem of the world that I hoped to see. Harmony was the perception I had when I began Olema, but more often it was a very squalid, tumultuous, and cantankerous environment—a lot of drugs, and a lot of anarchy, as opposed to anarchism.
If I were going to live communally today, I would do it a little differently. Instead of having thirty people in one house or in a couple of outbuildings, I’d have one big community kitchen with a good Wolf range and a good refrigerator which can serve five families, six families, and then I’d have everybody have their own house, with a little hot plate for if they didn’t want to be with people, and their library and their own roof and their own private space, so you could come together or not. Black Bear was much more like that. Olema was pandemonium. We were all crushed into this tiny house and sheds and outbuildings. But it was a very rich life, and going to a nuclear family afterwards felt extremely lonely and diminished.
MICHAEL RANDALL
Some people called us [the Brotherhood of Eternal Love] the hippie mafia. We were making kilos of crystal acid in Europe. We had a chateau in Belgium that was related to the university in Wavre. We turned it into what we said was a research facility. We were dealing with the president of the university, and all the upper administration of the university, and scientists.
We made up fake research papers that said we had tested using THC*10 in chicken feed, and it made the chickens lay 20 percent more eggs, which, worldwide, could be billions of eggs. It was a possible way to make a lot of money, getting these really relaxed chickens to lay eggs. I thought it wouldn’t go, but they believed it at the university. We had help from the economic counselor at the United States Embassy in Britain. He didn’t know what we were doing, but he was helping us procure things. We had a lot of well-known and powerful people fooled—completely fooled.
A lot of those people must have gotten into some trouble. It ruined the career of the economic counselor at the U.S. Embassy in London. He got tricked by the hippies.
Albert Hofmann*11 gave us advice, and he gave us his support. He endorsed us 100 percent. And, man, Albert Hofmann was way hipper than he pretended to be. He took acid all the rest of his life. He was a psychedelic person. The guy was a boxer and a bodybuilder. Hofmann was not your little frail, effete Swiss chemist.
We decided to get out of the U.S. because if you get caught in the U.S., it would be the end of you, you could get three life sentences. They were getting real shitty over here with the drug laws. Plus, we could buy raw materials and chemicals easier there than you could get them here. We could get ergotamine tartrate and things like that were much easier to procure if we were a foreign company operating in a foreign country. We were pretty fucking sophisticated little shits. Before I was thirty, we had anstalts in Liechtenstein,*12 and we had Swiss bank accounts. You had to. You couldn’t do what we did if you didn’t have those things.
We made 120 million tabs of Sunshine there from 1968 to 1970. Nobody knows how big we were.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
Except for the period when Owsley was in jail from 1970 to ’72, any LSD that I was going to take was Owsley’s.*13 I remember there being a lot of Orange Sunshine, but I wasn’t particularly interested in it because I knew that it wasn’t as pure as Owsley’s stuff. I never did know who was making it.
DAVID FENTON (movement photographer)
We used to be terrified. The police were constantly trying to arrest people who were doing nothing. A lot of my friends went away [to prison] for years for marijuana possession. If you were a hippie and you had long hair, forget driving through Texas. They were out for everybody. They would even plant stuff on people.
LEARY GOES TO PRISON ON COAST
TO START TERM OF 1 TO 10 YEARS
By Steven V. Roberts
(SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES)
…Superior Court Judge Byron McMillan called the former Harvard psychology professor “an insidious menace” to society….
Michael Kennedy, another of Leary’s lawyers, said, “the judge here is mirroring what we see going on all over the country. There is a growing fear of people in authority that their authority is being undermined and that they have to take drastic action to stop it….”
MICHAEL KENNEDY (Timothy Leary’s lawyer)
The half a joint Leary had one place, and the ounce or so he had in another, those were not amounts that could possibly have caused any harm or any damage, so it couldn’t have been about the drugs. This was draconian. It had to be about who he was, what he was saying, and his politics. Basically what he was saying was anarchical because if you “tune in, turn on, and drop out” you’re flipping the bird to the government and that was antigovernment, and they were really scared, the feds, and Nixon particularly. To imagine that all of these hippies were actually joining forces with the political antiwar people scared the devil out of the government.*14
MICHAEL RANDALL
When Timothy was in prison, we did a benefit for him in the basement of the Village Gate, and we managed to get all the entertainment to play for free. The biggest one was Jimi Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix played a long set that night. Johnny Winter played right after Jimi Hendrix. Captain and Tennille, and the list goes on, but Jimi Hendrix was the mainstay. A friend of mine did the heavy lifting, and Rosemary [Leary] and I helped as much as we could. Abbie Hoffman was there, Allen Ginsberg was there, all kinds of people were there.
I gave Abbie a half a dose of Sunshine, and he got a little bit too stoned and started being Abbie Hoffman. He stood for his ideals, but he could be goddamn offensive. I loved him, but damn, that man wouldn’t fucking shut up. He wound up getting onstage and screaming at everybody. There was a scene. There was a guy sitting on a table in a full lotus, meditating. We had passed out quite a bit of Sunshine to everybody in the crowd. So Abbie comes running out onstage and starts screaming, “Fuck you, people, and fuck the Brotherhood. You’re a bunch of peace-and-love people. You’re meaningless,” and on and on and on. “If you want to do something meaningful, burn down the Philadelphia School of Law.” I remember that’s exactly what he said, and I thought, The Philadelphia School of Law? Where’d he come up with that? What good is that going to do anybody? He was out of tune with everybody. Then the guy sitting in the full lotus jumps up onstage, and bam, smacks Abbie Hoffman. I mean, we were in disbelief. Abbie Hoffman comes flying off the stage, lands on the roundtable, and it turns over. It was like watching a John Wayne movie here at the Village Gate. It all happened so quickly. And everybody’s loaded. My God. And so Abbie gets up, and he’s bleeding, and he goes, “It’s all right. It’s all right. Fuck you,” and he runs out the door, and that was the last time I ever saw Abbie Hoffman.*15
I took a dose of Sunshine myself. I’m just really, really, really stoned when Jimi Hendrix comes onstage. He came out, picked up his guitar, right here in front of me, and there was the fallen angel. I mean, he was angelic. Here’s this big, huge, beautiful black man, one of the greatest talents, and he did a wonderful show, and he played a nice, long set.
Credit 22.5
Timothy Leary, with his wife, Rosemary (left), talks to a reporter during his campaign for governor of California in May 1969. “He ran for governor just to say ‘fuck you’ to the establishment,” Carol Randall told me.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT ALTMAN.
PETER COYOTE
Janis Joplin and I were friends. We were both drug users. I had a k
ey to her house. We were both reprobates. I wouldn’t say I had any privileged position in her life at all. Kris Kristofferson was in and out of there; a lot of guys were in and out of there. Janis was a homely girl from Port Arthur, Texas, that got catapulted onto the big-time stage, and her psyche never caught up with the way people saw her, and it caused her a lot of turmoil. One of the things that I think she appreciated about me and about Emmett [Grogan]*16 was that we always told her the truth.
We had ways of pointing out to her the difference between the machinery that was propelling her as a commodity, and what was real, and I think she trusted that, because we didn’t really give a shit. We didn’t want anything from her. I liked having sex. I would have sex with a dog when I was in my twenties. We used drugs together. Emmett and I spent a month in her room at the Hotel Chelsea, after the band had left, convincing the front desk that we were with the band. So we used her for things like that and she let herself be willingly used, and that was fun. Her manager, Albert Grossman, was kind of fascinated with the Diggers and gave us a base in New York and his price tag was to run around with us, and see things that he’d be afraid to see normally. But it’s not like I was in love with Janis or she was in love with me. We were friends and we were fuck buddies and we were drug addicts, what can I say? I could see what was happening to her, I could just see.
Witness to the Revolution Page 48
