When I think of those years I picture a sheet of ice melting from the surface down, growing wet and warm in the sun. That was the impact of this new era. I grew more trusting, and I learned that when you trust people you can relax. So I relaxed, maybe too much. But first things first. It began with a trip to California during that uncanny season called the Summer of Love.
In 1967, London was heroin and New York was speed. But San Francisco was all about psychedelics. The postman would offer to share the joint he was puffing on, his long hair flapping under the official cap. Pungent odors emanated from every doorway in the district where young people had settled by the thousands, an area near Golden Gate Park named for the intersection of two ordinary streets—Haight and Ashbury.
I never found out how the Haight, as the neighborhood was called, acquired its mystique. I figured it had something to do with the Merry Pranksters, the crew of acid explorers, led by Ken Kesey, that Tom Wolfe wrote about. The Pranksters were architects of hippie style. Swirl-covered buses like the one they traveled in were a common sight, as was their other major innovation, mass celebrations that featured LSD. In 1966, when I was reporting on the new drug culture for my ill-fated book, I’d witnessed one of these Acid Tests, as they were called. When I returned to San Francisco a year later LSD was illegal, but it was easy to come by, and certain manufacturers, such as the legendary Owsley, were treated like rock stars. The result was a stoned, sensate community, something I’d never imagined even in my wildest fantasies about what was blowing in the wind.
I wasn’t very hip to the San Francisco scene when I arrived. All I knew was what I’d seen on TV. There was lots of coverage, little of it knowledgeable. The reporters were outsiders, and their attitude was fascination mixed with dread, a combination I hated. (I still remembered the “Guide For Worried Parents” that the publisher inserted into my drug book.) But nothing since the Beatles had produced such a media frenzy, and I was sure I could do a better job than these pros at describing it. Only problem was, I didn’t smoke grass. Though I’d tried it in college, I was convinced that if I got high again I would turn into Norman Bates. But there was no way I could understand the hippies without sharing their signature experience. So I bought a nickel bag in New York—approximately enough for two joints. Being stoned was less unsettling than I feared. I stuffed myself with Sara Lee cheesecake and got lost in a song, but there were no major changes. My intellect was intact, and I could still take notes, though they might climb the side of the page. Once I realized that I could function on grass, I felt ready to head west.
I arrived with the mental baggage of a New Yorker, sheathed in cynicism and highly suspicious of anything that claimed to be mystical. In that respect I wasn’t so different from the lefties who created the alternative culture of San Francisco. Their attitude toward the ragtag army of young longhairs in their midst was both welcoming and skeptical. On the one hand, these kids shared the values of the left, including collectivism, environmentalism, and an obsession with consensus. But they had no politics in the usual sense. They were hardly intellectual, and most of them mistrusted reason. This was profoundly unsettling to the old guard, as it was to me. I didn’t know whether to mock the hippies or protect them, especially since many were high schoolers, the lowest of the low. They had no money and no homes. They moved among de facto crash pads, occupied the sidewalks, or camped in the temperate groves of Golden Gate Park. That was where I’d been told to go if I wanted to meet the real thing. So I checked out of my motel, determined to live like a denizen of the scene—in the open air.
It was late spring. A warm mist wafted over the cypress trees; music mingled with the caw of seagulls; salt and incense were in the air. Food simply appeared, and I wandered from group to group chowing down. When I was tired I plopped on the side of someone’s sleeping bag. I had come expecting to be drenched in sex, but it was harder to come by than I expected. Free love didn’t mean you could just walk up to a chick and whip out your love wand. You had to connect on a level that seemed mysterious to me. I hadn’t yet come to appreciate the beauty in a woman with downy legs. It took getting used to, as did trusting in that vague sensation of compatibility known as “the vibe.” The consolation was that my body type mattered less than the color my karma produced in someone’s mood ring. Within a day or two I managed to hook up, though I’d never had sex in a park and I couldn’t help worrying about the cops. I wasn’t sure my partner was on the pill, and it didn’t reassure me to see her douche afterward with water from a canteen.
At first I was appalled by all this. The hippies seemed so blockheaded, so forced in their mellowness, blowing bubbles or handing me the gift of a small rubber dinosaur. I could tell from their disregard for money that they were securely middle class, while I came from a background where dropping out meant only one thing: poverty. What I saw looked dangerous and, even worse, indulgent. But the naïveté was irresistible. It brought out the Holden Caulfield in me. I wanted to be their catcher in the rye.
I quickly learned to honor the astrological metaphysics that functioned as a greeting. “What sign are you?” I was asked many times, and when I replied, the response was, invariably, “I knew it.” After a while I stopped thinking of this as silly; it was just another code, like the peace-sign salute. I was beginning to fall under the spell of the scene, with its remarkable capacity to calm my anxieties. Everything that mattered in my life—the clawing for fame, the fending off of sycophants, the constant risk of being put on or put down—all of it dropped away. Every now and then I’d catch myself, take a step back, and think, what the fuck am I doing in this place? Me, the Herring Maiven, a wunderkind of the written word, nodding to the sound of a (not very well-played) drum, seriously contemplating losing my dignity with a woman in a dress that had recently been a bedspread. But out here I was just an ordinary dude, which was precisely what I wanted. I yearned to let go of the struggle, to strip off my Manhattan identity like winter clothing until, naked (or maybe in just my underwear), I would live as a desiring animal in the wide open of the California dream.
I didn’t realize it then, but this line of thinking would soon spread across the whole grid of my generation. It was the great temptation of the sixties, the ghost of Rousseau that haunted every Freudian my age. What lay beneath the layers of repression? Suddenly it seemed possible to know, not through a lengthy course of psychoanalysis but simply by being here now. The Oedipus complex—fuck that! In the words of the Incest Liberation Front (a West Coast group of the sixties), “Sex before eight, or else it’s too late.” If neurosis was the price we paid for civilization, maybe the only way to be healthy was to be uncivilized.
I veered between embracing what I saw and bristling with contempt for it. Finally I decided that I was on vacation, and that nothing I did here would matter once I got back to New York. That was how I gave myself permission to wade, if not plunge, into the hot tub of desire that was all around me. Everything seemed inchoate, unstructured, accepting. Any combination worked: hetero, homo, bi, the categories lost their grip. Gender was (ideally) fungible, race was (officially) irrelevant, class was … what’s that? Never mind that these distinctions were still lurking under the long hair and jeans. I was sick of living in a world where the social order was all too obvious. That’s why the hippies were so appealing to people like me. They represented liberation from reality.
Out here in the land of the unrooted I left all my connections behind, among them the woman who would soon become my wife. I had to be mobile; that was my excuse for traveling without her, but actually I needed a break from everything in my life. Though I wanted to marry Judith, the idea of being truly intimate with a woman frightened me at the age of twenty-three. It helped that monogamy wasn’t part of the deal—like many sixties couples, we were free to explore. But cleaving, as my parents had, for better and for worse, seemed so … Levitical. Before it could happen I had to understand who I was. San Francisco was perfect for the purpose, and so was the music that came f
rom there. It felt as wild as British blues were restrained. There was none of the ornate eroticism of the Rolling Stones. The musicians were sexy in an ordinary way, and their sets seemed shapeless, though not aimless, to me. This was rock gone elastic.
The best bands played for free in Golden Gate Park. It felt a little like the folk-music gatherings I’d joined in Washington Square, except that there was no turf to fight for here, no standard of purity to defend. The competition among college students from Queens over who could sing like a native Appalachian was as irrelevant as a medieval debate about the nature of angels. The only offense was ambition. This, I was told more often than I liked, was an ego trip. A game. A curse that could only be explained when I admitted that I was from New York. Then I would receive a look of pity, a hug, and perhaps an exhortation to trip. I became so anxious about being plied with LSD that I refused to drink out of any bottle that wasn’t sealed.
Lots of people told me that the only way to appreciate hippie culture was to drop acid, but I was convinced that it could be explained by the right theory. I had several, ranging from the fashionable postlinear ideas of Marshall McLuhan to a homegrown historicism in which the hippies were an incarnation of the revolutionaries of 1848. In a way they were, just as they echoed the mystical beliefs of the American Transcendentalists, but they were also a manifestation of something timeless and universal. By suppressing the vaunted “reality principle,” LSD created patterns of thought and visual styles that pulsed like the glowing abstractions in stained-glass windows or Tibetan mandalas. It struck me that there was a reason why these disparate mystical traditions produced the same patterns as your average tie-dye. They all evoked the deep structure of consciousness, the interplay of neurons. That was what acid had in common with Buddhist and Hindu meditation; it unlocked perceptions blocked by the organizing power of reason. But unlike those other practices, it did so instantly. The passion for shortcuts, which had always been present in America—Tocqueville noticed it in 1832—was the real enabler of LSD.
It wasn’t until I actually took acid that I encountered the part of me I was searching for, the self I’d denied. It had little to do with my sexuality. Desire, which felt so central to my being, now seemed like only the surface. On LSD, I accessed my subconscious, and it contained not only monsters and immense depths of love but the evidence that I had something in common with all living things. That was a big relief, because I’d always felt trapped in my uniqueness. Certain artworks—the Black Paintings of Goya, the late portraits by Rembrandt, the Paleolithic drawings on the walls of a grotto in France—have had a similar effect on me; the sense of connection, across time, with a consciousness beyond my personality. Which is not the same thing as feeling the presence of God. Acid didn’t change my atheism, but it was the source of whatever spiritual feelings persist in me. Like the kids I’d been skeptical about, I found the hippie within.
Still, I’m unwilling to give up the idea that drugs have a social dimension. Every high, no matter how personal, is also collective; our associations, even in an altered state, are guided by the culture around us. Kids who drop acid today don’t have the same experience that the hippies of the sixties did, because they don’t have the same wide-open sensibility. Of course, some things about the psychedelic scene seemed ridiculous even when I was stoned. There’s no other way to describe the mantra I heard often in the Haight: “Dog is God spelled backwards.” Or the anthem of the Summer of Love, warbled by an L.A. folkie who had reinvented himself in a floor-length robe, Donovan style. This song would draw perhaps fifty thousand kids to a city ill equipped to handle them.
For those who come to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
Don’t bring cash, just your stash—and get ready for a giant “love-in” there. Well, the love-in lasted until it became apparent that the kids wandering around stoned and senseless were so many sitting ducks. Dope dealers and bruisers looking for sex descended on them, resulting in rapes and an influx of heroin. It was presented by the media as proof that the land of commodification was the only safe place; beyond lay dragons. It took less than a year for the festival to turn ugly. But at first it actually seemed that a new society was emerging, based on the life force—eros in the broadest sense. Every institution could be transformed by the creative potential of ecstasy, even the media.
A new newspaper had appeared in town, consisting of type that curled around the pages like paisley. It was called The Oracle, and as far as I could tell it was completely illegible. The covers lacked coherence; they usually consisted of mystical symbols superimposed on images of various gurus. From watching people read this paper I realized that you were supposed to let it resonate with the vibe in your mind. I tried and failed—linearity was my karma. I’d been trained to take notes, obsessively and accurately. But I didn’t know how to report my feelings. That would have violated the Tom Wolfe rulebook, which I still carried in my mind. When I look at my piece about the San Francisco rock scene of ’67, what strikes me is that none of the changes I was going through made it into print. Instead, I dutifully described the music: “jug band scraping against jazz.” I noted the right word for a great group: “heavy.” I reported on the rivalry with L.A. without taking sides, though I shared the contempt every musician I interviewed expressed for the sprawling Babylon to the south. The counterculture here defined itself by being everything Los Angeles was not. A member of the Quicksilver Messenger Service summed up the local attitude when he told me that “L.A. hurts our eyes.” But he had to go there to record.
The studio was the great Satan of these rockers. From band after band I heard about the importance of playing live. The thing that made San Francisco music special was its tangibility. But that was only possible because the scene hadn’t yet been industrialized; it was still a communal rite. The best musicians didn’t just play for the people, they were the people, and you couldn’t pick them out from other hippies on the street. I had a dire feeling that all of this was temporary, as underground cultures always are. But I didn’t say so—not yet. I was here to celebrate, and to stand guard.
I wasn’t the only catcher in the rye. There was a band of renegade activists who called themselves the Diggers, after a group of radical British agrarians in the seventeenth century. The mission of the new Diggers was to feed hippie strays, whose numbers were growing by the day. They invented slogans that have since become the stuff of retro Day-Glo posters: “Do your own thing” and “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” These people were determined to remain anonymous, and in the spirit of transgression each of them was named George Metesky. It was a cryptic reference to a notorious criminal of my childhood, the so-called Mad Bomber. I made my way to the Digger Free Store, and there I met the group’s leader, Emmett Grogan. I took out my notebook and asked him to spell his name (a reflex from j-school), and he complied. I didn’t realize that by publishing a piece that revealed his real identity I was effectively outing him. After it appeared he phoned me in a rage. No one was supposed to know who the Diggers actually were. “But I told you I was a reporter,” I said. He spat out a comment that made me feel like I’d finally succeeded in fitting in: “We thought you were faking. You looked like a runaway.” Then he threatened to throw acid in my face, and he didn’t mean LSD. “You know too much,” he snarled.
I thought about calling the police, but in the end I let his threat pass, and he never carried it out. Years later Grogan wrote a memoir under his real name. Well, I thought, he’s got a right to blow his own cover, and I don’t blame him. Not many people who spent their productive years in the service of the counterculture were left with much to sell except their names and memories.
I’ve left out the most enduring part of the San Francisco scene, which happened indoors, where, for a modest admission, you could spend a long evening at the city’s two major rock venues. I shuffled between the Fillmore and the Avalon (the latter run by a company called the Family Dog). Mesmerized b
y deafening blasts of sound, I would sink into a trance and forget that I was a fucked-up New Yorker.
These concerts had an added attraction that couldn’t be seen in the park—endlessly mutable light shows. Dyed liquid, manipulated between two glass slides, produced pulsing globulous shapes, squids of the mind. It was a new art form, as were the posters that advertised the concerts. Readable they were not, since they featured lettering in elusive patterns that seemed to be a combination of Art Nouveau, faux-Aztec, and Hindi script. I would stare at these strange things, trying to decipher the names of the bands appearing that weekend. Moby Grape, Chocolate Watchband, Sopwith Camel (originally an old biplane)—it was all part of a code, allegedly comprehensible only through the fluid logic of LSD. But it was also a scheme for building a new society. This was an unexpected outcome of the feeling I’d had when I marched for civil rights. It wasn’t just about race; it was about existence. The future was a product of will.
The best San Francisco bands were composed of migrants from every part of America where it was hard to be a hippie, which is to say most of the country. Many of these performers had been the nerds and sluts of their high schools, and they came here the way I took the subway to the Village with my sandals in a paper bag. But as the scene ripened it attracted less alienated types. With one call to their label I reached the most professional local band, the Jefferson Airplane. They’d already been featured in a Newsweek story, and one of their songs, the bolero-based “White Rabbit,” had became an anthem of what was being called acid rock. The Airplane were more cosmopolitan than the other musicians I’d met, ambitious and polished to a sheen. We had a sensible chat, with no druggie behavior, and we posed for pictures. (I have a shot of Grace Slick standing beside me, though like much of my rock memorabilia it’s stuck to something else.) But the encounter didn’t reveal much about what made the youth culture of this city so rich. I needed to connect with the real, hairy thing. So I returned to the park, where I met a child of God from Brooklyn and his “old lady,” who had baptized herself Thistle. They offered me the tarry end of a joint and we chatted until sunset, when they casually mentioned a crash pad where they were heading. I was sure to meet musicians there.
Another Little Piece of My Heart Page 8
