by Lewis Shiner
On their aaa map, Golden Gate Park was a wide strip of green that ran due east from the beach to Haight-Ashbury, narrowing like a hypodermic needle to a block-wide extension called the Panhandle. Lincoln Way, the main drag that ran the length of the park, was bumper to bumper. Alex navigated while Cole drove, and finally he said, “We’re pretty close. We can walk it from here.” They circled the block to find a parking spot, stuck ten dollars apiece in their jeans pockets, and hid their wallets under the false bottom in the back.
They had barely stepped into the park itself when a kid who couldn’t have been more than 15, cultivating the faint wisps of a future mustache, walked up to them and said, “Acid? Speed? stp?” Cole waved him away before Alex had the chance to consider the offer.
The park turned out to be a series of grassy fields broken up by walls of trees, mostly pines and cedars. The streets that cut through it were jammed with cars. On the grass, kids threw Frisbees, played guitars, made out, read, argued, slept. The fog had melted, leaving a gray sky and damp, chilly air. Some of the guys had taken off their shirts in an excess of optimism. A few were as young as 14 or 15, most were in their late teens or early twenties, four males for every female. For every hippie stereotype with long hair or a handlebar mustache you saw ten lost-looking runaways, their hair in the first stages of unkempt, wearing clothes their parents had bought them, their faces drawn, cold, and hungry.
Eventually they climbed a low hill and emerged into the chaos of the Haight.
Cars idled by, windows closed, faces pressed against the glass. Mobs of people threaded through the traffic, kids crowded against middle-aged tourists slung with cameras. A Gray Line tour bus inched its way into the right lane, an amplified voice saying, “… far side of those pillars is the famous Hippie Hill, where the flower children can be found lighting up a ‘joint’ and ‘grooving’ on Mother Nature, or even ‘tripping’ on lsd, or ‘acid’ as they call it…” Human voices competed with car horns, motorcycle engines, and a cacophony of music from car radios, open windows, and street performers.
They stopped short and Cole stared at him incredulously. “It’s a zoo.”
“With no cages.”
“Can we go back to Dallas now?”
Alex ignored him, taking in the sheer scale of it. He wished Cole would pull his head out of his own cynicism long enough to be curious about this thing that was exploding in front of them. What force had brought all these people here, what need, what longing? Runaways, acid-heads, and straights, the seekers, the believers, the gawkers, all responding to a desire that didn’t have a name yet, a desire for more meaning, more connection, more experience.
It was a desire that Alex understood.
Cole, meanwhile, had stopped to stare at a girl dancing on a nearby strip of grass. She was maybe 20, some kind of Oriental, wearing a black silk kimono with nothing underneath. She swayed from side to side, disconnected at the hips, fast then slow, arms rising and falling, eyes closed. Her face was ecstatic, the music she was hearing entirely in her head.
“Yeah, okay,” Cole said. “A little longer.”
If it was girls you wanted, they were everywhere, in Granny dresses, in long skirts and sweaters, in jeans and T-shirts, in ponchos, in fatigues, in Greek fishermen’s hats and cowboy hats and floppy newsboy caps, in headbands and with long hair blowing free. And Alex did want them, all of them.
He led the way between the cars and let the press of bodies carry them north and then east. Two- and three-story Victorian frame houses lined both sides of Haight Street. They had bay windows and intersecting gables and ornate trim, and most of them were in decay. The ground floors had been converted to shops, and Cole stopped at the first one and stared at a poster taped to the inside of the glass. “Holy shit,” Cole said. “The Doors and the Yardbirds!”
“When?” Alex said. “Where?” You couldn’t name two bands they wanted to see more. “Light My Fire” had been inescapable for the entire month of July and they’d both played the album constantly, second only to Sgt. Pepper. And Jimmy Page of the Yardbirds was Cole’s guitar hero.
“The Fillmore,” Cole said. “I’m trying to read this goddamn thing.” The blue on green letters swayed and swirled into each other, drawing your eye down the page into melting orange peacock feathers. “Yardbirds Tuesday Wednesday Thursday only,” Cole translated. “Doors Friday Saturday Sunday only. James Cotton and Richie Havens all week.”
“July twenty-fifth to thirtieth,” Alex said. “We missed it.”
“Fuck,” Cole said. His shoulders slumped.
They merged into the crowd, then immediately flattened themselves against the wall as a couple of Hell’s Angels, complete with Nazi helmets, goggles, leather vests, and boots, idled their Harleys down the middle of the sidewalk. The one in the lead, skeletally thin, grinning with a mouthful of bad teeth, looked like something out of a fifties horror comic.
Across the street Alex saw an old movie palace, renamed, according to the marquee, from the Haight Theater to the Straight Theater. A list of apparent band names followed, though Alex had never heard of any of them—Clover, Melvin Q Watchpocket, Colours, Preston Webster. He pointed the sign out to Cole, who nodded, still clearly bummed about the Fillmore.
Half the storefronts sold hippie paraphernalia—handmade jewelry, roach clips, rolling papers, leather belts and hats, posters, plaid bedspreads from India. They were trying to sell it, anyway. The tourists weren’t buying, and the street people couldn’t afford the boutique prices. The rest of the stores predated the invasion and their days looked to be numbered—Sherman Williams Paint and Hardware, art supplies, ladies’ dresses, a couple of liquor stores, a cpa, even, ironically, a barber shop.
By the time they’d gone four blocks down Haight, they’d been offered drugs five times, hit up for spare change seven times, and once asked if they were looking for “action” by a scrawny, jittery-eyed character who flashed them a Polaroid of two underage girls naked and unconscious on a bare mattress.
As they pushed past, Cole said, “Did you see that?”
“He probably found the photo in the trash, and now he’s using it for some kind of ripoff.”
“I don’t know, man, this is seriously creeping me out.” He turned in a full circle. “Where are the cops now?”
“The guy’s gone,” Alex said. “They’d never find him in this crowd.”
They came to an expanse of plate glass below a hand-painted wooden sign that said, “The Psychedelic Shop.” Alex recognized the name from something he’d read, and he pulled Cole inside. Along with the usual drug and fashion items, the shop carried records that Alex had never seen before—sitar players from India, folk guitarists from the UK, calypso singers from the Caribbean. In the rack next to them were singles and lps by local bands with names like The Mystery Trend and The Serpent Power and The Chocolate Watchband. Cole’s portable record player waited for them in the motel room and Alex wished he’d brought more money.
The shop also sold tickets to the Fillmore. Another ornate poster, this one featuring a round face surrounded by green and blue tendrils, promised them the Buffalo Springfield along with Muddy Waters and Richie Havens that very night. Starting Tuesday it would be Mike Bloomfield’s new band, The Electric Flag, with Moby Grape and something called the Southside Sound System. That poster was, at least, less of a struggle to read—red and brown, incorporating a photo of the band and bunting and an eagle. They bought tickets for both shows, miniature versions of the posters, for three dollars each. If he’d had more money, Alex would have bought the posters too, to put up in his new room on Castle Hill in Austin. Assuming, of course, that nothing happened to derail his college plans in the next few days.
The guy selling the tickets looked to be 30, already losing his kinky, uncombed hair. Alex asked him, “Is there like a bulletin board around here for musicians to find each other?”
“Try Love Burger across the street. Or you can walk down to the Panhandle. There’s so many musicians do
wn there you couldn’t fire a shotgun without hitting a couple of dozen. Which might not be a bad idea, now that I think of it.”
As they walked away, Cole said, “What’s this with the bulletin board?”
“I just thought musicians looking for a gig would be into jamming. I mean, that’s why we brought our stuff, right?”
They crossed over to Love Burger, a lunch counter run by a woman with fiery red hair and some kind of Middle Eastern accent. The smell of frying meat was irresistible. They bought burgers for a quarter and Cokes for a dime and ate standing up in front of the bulletin board.
The board was hopeless. Hundreds of messages were stuck on with thumbtacks, paperclips, staples, or bits of tape, all overlapping, some merely stuffed between the layers. Loose cards and paper scraps fluttered to the floor whenever Alex touched anything. They offered a litany of sadness—parents looking for missing kids, kids looking for somewhere to crash, for any kind of job, for lost dogs and wallets and jewelry. So many musicians were looking for work that you couldn’t narrow them down to a handful to call. “Maybe we should try the Panhandle,” Alex said. Cole shrugged.
Alex’s burger was tasty, if a little on the greasy side, reminiscent of the burgers at Dirty’s in Austin. Underneath the cooking smells was the pungent odor of incense and aromatic oils. All the tables were full, the diners spilling over into the shared space of the Pall Mall Bar. A number of the customers looked like they’d been living on the street and were eating out on the change they’d collected that morning.
They jostled their way outside. The next intersection was Ashbury, where a cop leaned against the pole that supported the sign with the iconic Haight and Ashbury names on it. Tourists surrounded the sign, snapping photos relentlessly.
“Give the place credit for a sense of humor,” Alex said. “Assigning a cop to have his picture taken.”
“He’s probably there to keep them from stealing the sign,” Cole said.
Two blocks north, the street was broken in two by the Panhandle. Giant cedars and conifers extended out over the pavement, and the overcast sky darkened the green of the grass. People slept on the few benches the city had provided. Suddenly Cole snapped to attention. He had clearly heard something other than the clusters of two or three kids playing acoustic guitars. As he followed Cole, Alex heard it too—bass first, the longest sound waves travelling the farthest, then the smash and rattle of drums, the hollow garble of amplified voices, the drone of electric guitars, and finally, filling the upper register, a police siren.
Past a stand of trees, they found the scene of the crime. Some enterprising musicians had run a couple of heavy-duty orange extension cords across Oak Street from one of the old houses, enough to power a couple of amps with vocal mikes plugged in next to the guitars. Four cops, one for each musician, waded in, making throat cutting gestures, and a kid with shoulder length hair and aspirations toward sideburns popped the strap on his cheap Harmony bass. The drummer was already tearing down his cymbals. The cops looked bored, the musicians aggrieved, and whatever audience they’d had was departing with casual haste.
Cole and Alex sat on the grass and waited while the cops stopped traffic to let the kids trundle their gear back across Oak Street and wind up the cords. According to the bass drum head, the band was called Paisley Octopus. The kids looked young, 16 or 17. After the cops left, Alex tilted his head toward where the kids now sat, instrument-free, on their front porch, and Cole shrugged.
The kids were laughing as Alex and Cole walked up. “Hey,” Cole said. “What’s happening?”
“We just set a new record,” said one of the guitar players. His curly hair had mostly ended up on one side of his head. “We got in an hour and seventeen minutes before getting busted. Did you hear us?”
“Just missed it,” Alex said. “What kind of stuff do you do?”
“Blues,” the guitar player said. “Electric folk. Raga rock. You know. The usual.”
As they talked, Alex let on that he and Cole played. They adjourned to the living room and smoked a couple of joints, then instruments got passed around. The kids were not that far along, and when Alex and Cole did an impromptu version of “Laura Lee” on borrowed guitars, an uncomfortable silence ensued.
“Shit,” the bass player said. “You guys are good.”
They left shortly after and Alex saw that Cole’s mood had lightened. It was after 3:30. “What do you want to do?” Alex asked.
“Fuck this scene,” Cole said. “Let’s go to the beach.”
*
Alex was used to the Gulf, which in the depth of winter was not as cold as the water off Ocean Beach in August. They both waded in and immediately waded out again. The afternoon was hazy, with a brisk wind off the water. Gulls glided into the face of it, making cryptic noises, as kids spilling over from the Haight wandered shivering up and down the dunes.
The hotel sent them to a Thai restaurant around the corner for dinner. Afterward they walked up to Geary and caught a number 38 eastbound bus crammed with kids headed for the Fillmore, decked out in scarves and top hats, tiaras and capes, vests and walking sticks and pith helmets.
As their waitress had said, the Fillmore neighborhood was a full-blown ghetto, the side streets dark in the last of the daylight, full of old men in undershirts sitting on stoops and drinking from bottles in paper sacks, junked cars, skinny dogs running in packs, barred and boarded windows.
The auditorium occupied half a city block, and the white kids shuffled slowly in from a line that stretched around the corner and downhill. Cole and Alex got on the end of it, in between a clutch of faux-Victorians and a threesome in Army surplus that smelled like it hadn’t been washed in a while. Everybody talked too loudly and smoked too many cigarettes. The smoke was rich in pot, though the source was not obvious. Alex was excited too. He hadn’t been to a concert since Dylan, mostly because there hadn’t been any, nothing beyond the occasional teenybopper package tour.
Alex wanted to keep his ticket, and the guy at the top of the red-carpeted stairs refused. “You want the ticket, go back outside.” The pressure of the crowd kept Alex from lingering in the entrance hall. He saw a barrel of apples, and glass cases with newspaper and magazine articles about musicians and “youth culture.” Then he was through into the ballroom.
The room was so long, the ceiling so high, that you could have been outdoors. The tall, narrow stage took up most of the far wall, stacked with amplifiers and three different drum sets. The lights were low, the room less than a third full. White bedsheets hung on the walls, serving as screens for slides and home movies. In one corner, a bar served soft drinks and a grill sold hamburgers.
“So much for brown rice,” Cole said, and Alex once again had to restrain an impulse to grab him by the shoulders and shake him out of his aloofness. The room quickly filled with smoke and incense and bodies. Everyone knew everyone else. They congregated by drug preference, wide-eyed here, giggling there, fast-talking over there. He and Cole were outsiders on any number of levels, straight among the stoned, dressed in their prep-school blazers for warmth, ignorant of half the conversational topics, from Diggers and com/co and a drug called fda to the Flame and Dr. Sox. Did Blue Cheer refer to the detergent, a variety of acid, or a new band? Well, probably not the detergent. Alex kept his mouth shut and they moved on.
At eight the lights faded down. Cole grabbed his arm and pulled him to the front of the house. A short, older guy in a pork-pie hat stood at the center microphone, speaking in a low, modulated voice with a hint of an East Coast accent. “Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome a wonderful singer from New York City, Mr. Richie Havens.”
A deep baritone voice said, “Thank you,” and started to sing “San Francisco Bay Blues.” At that same moment, the light show splashed color across the stage. Alex was surprised at how similar Duncan’s show at the Studio Club had been—the film strips, the strobes, the vibrating blobs of dye, the spookiness of it.
Havens was a black man with a clo
sely trimmed beard and wire-rimmed glasses, perched on a stool. He had a battered Guild acoustic in open tuning, which he chorded with his thumb while another black man played lead acoustic guitar.
People immediately began to dance and a wave of emotion rushed up Alex’s spine and exploded in his brain. The amount of pot smoke in the air had to be a factor, and the rest was pure contact high, the ecstasy of being in the same room with over a thousand people who were, chemically or otherwise, lifting off together, in love with the moment they were in. He began to move without conscious intent, his feet somewhat restricted by the grip of his tennis shoes on the hardwood floor, his hips twitching to the beat, his hands rising on their own and pulling his arms after them. He was aware of Cole watching him with a mocking look, so he turned his back to avoid being brought down. A woman danced in front of him in a T-shirt dress that hugged her body from neck to knees. Her eyes were shut and her frizzy blonde hair whipped from side to side. She was older, maybe early thirties, with a long face and an inward smile. Alex dug the idea that they were dancing together without her knowing it. As the crowd shifted, he ended up dancing in front of a bearded guy in a lumberjack shirt, and that was all right too. He soon lost track of the individual songs, and eventually he found himself winding through the auditorium in a line a hundred people long, holding hands with a man in front of him and a woman behind, weaving intricate patterns that Alex could see like glowing contrails when he closed his eyes. Havens wrapped up his cover of “High Flying Bird” singing about the sit-down, can’t-cry, gonna-die blues and a dozen of them collapsed on the floor, their feet pointing to a common center, and Alex imagined looking down from the ceiling and seeing the giant flower they formed, like the June Taylor Dancers on the Jackie Gleason Show.
A voice said, “Are you high?” It was the guy in the lumberjack shirt, sitting up now.
“Just on the music,” Alex said.
“Do you want to trip out?” The guy held out a square of paper in the palm of his hand.
