by Lewis Shiner
Cole shook his head.
“It’s at the far end of Golden Gate Park, this giant outdoor grassy arena. Full to overflowing, tens of thousands of us. Leary, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Dick Gregory, all the bands—the Dead, the Airplane, Big Brother, Quicksilver, as an equal part of the one big thing. We had so much energy there, you could light up a city with it. We did light up a city.”
“What went wrong?”
She was quiet for a while. “What always goes wrong? It was all supposed to be free. Free love. Free music. Free everything. Only it’s not. The food’s not free and the rent’s not free and love is not that free either. You know who Bill Graham is, right?”
“The guy who runs the Fillmore.”
“There are people who hate him because he doesn’t fit in. He charges three dollars a ticket, and he’s inflated the prices the bands charge, and he’s fucked over his competition. If you’re late, you’re fired, and nobody gets in for free, and he’s always screaming at people because everything is supposed to be exactly the way he wants it. But you know what? If he didn’t make a profit, there wouldn’t be anyplace for these bands to play, and a lot of them would probably never have formed in the first place. So because he’s a particular kind of obnoxious asshole, you can go to the Fillmore any night of the week and see a great show. You don’t have to ask who’s playing, you just go. You go to the Avalon, who knows when the show will start, whether the bands will show up, whether they’ll be in tune or not. The bands don’t know if they’ll get paid and neither does the landlord. That’s the hippie dream in action. That’s where we are six months after everybody walked away from the Human Be-In and tried to make it stick. We’re going to the Fillmore and not the Avalon, which is not even open on weeknights. We’re seeing a show and dropping acid and getting laid.” She gave Cole a wry, apologetic smile. “Present company excepted.”
“I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying we all should be assholes like Bill Graham?”
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m saying. What was your name again?”
“Cole.”
“Well, Cole, you were right. It was nice to talk to you, once I helped. And now I’m going to toddle off to bed.” She stood up and started down the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
“It’s only a few blocks.”
“Aren’t you telling Chris?”
“He wouldn’t remember if I did.”
“Let me walk you.” She raised her eyebrows. “No bone jumping,” Cole said. “I’m from Texas, where chivalry ain’t dead yet.”
“All right,” she said.
Cole stuck his head in the door and got Alex’s attention. “I’ll be back in half an hour,” Cole said, and Alex nodded distractedly.
He and Deb crossed Haight and walked up to Page in companionable silence. “Do you like music?” Cole asked.
“I like to dance. If you asked me who played what in any of the bands we saw tonight, I couldn’t tell you.” She gave him another wry smile. “I’ve disappointed you again.”
Page Street consisted of more Victorian row houses, mostly run down, and at three am on a weekday people were out strolling in their hippie garb or sitting on their front steps playing guitars. One couple stood necking in a doorway.
“The bands here,” Deb said, “they’re not into making the individual musicians into stars. They’re like little communes. The Dead have a house over on Ashbury. Quicksilver has a ranch in Marin. Big Brother used to live in a house down the street. That’s part of what made this all so special. Only that’s changing too. All the runaways trying to get a little piece of it, all the tv networks trying to put it in a frozen tv dinner package, all the record companies coming up from LA and throwing cash around.”
She was quiet for a while, and then she said, very softly, “We thought it was the beginning, but it was already the end.”
She stopped in front of a narrow three-story house with peeling gray paint. “I’ll be safe now,” she said. “Go back to the party. Thanks for walking me.”
Cole took a step back and said, “I enjoyed it. Sleep well.”
She gave him one more wry smile before she climbed the stairs and disappeared inside.
*
The party had thinned considerably by the time Cole got back. He found a cheap Harmony acoustic guitar leaning against the wall and took it out on the steps, got it in tune, and played quietly for a while, pausing a couple of times for a fresh beer.
Around five o’clock Chris and Alex, Guy and Ben, and half a dozen others emerged in a cloud of marijuana smoke. “We’re going to walk down to the beach and watch the sun come up,” Chris said.
Cole put the guitar inside and followed along. He saw no reason to point out that the beach was nearly five miles away and that the sun was scheduled to rise in the east.
They paraded down Haight Street, past bodies huddled in doorways, past blowing scraps of paper and cigarette butts and puddles where people had urinated against the side of buildings, past an open second floor window from which Country Joe and the Fish’s slow, dreamy “Bass Strings” floated out. One of the three women in the party, wearing a long, flowing dress and wire bracelets on both arms and both ankles, periodically spun around in a jingling, billowing tornado of color and Indian spices. Another noodled on a plastic Tonette. Chris had his top hat and cape on again and occasionally mimed a baton as he led the procession.
The dew was condensing on the grass as they entered Golden Gate Park. Cole’s tennis shoes were quickly soaked. He let himself drift toward the third girl, with neither bracelets nor Tonette. She was dark-haired and compact, wearing black-framed glasses and well-worn jeans that dragged on the ground.
“Where are we?” Cole asked.
“San Francisco,” she said. “Western hemisphere, planet Earth, Sol system, Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy.”
“I’m not tripping,” Cole said. “I’m just new here. Looking for something more specific.”
“In that case, we’re on Hippie Hill. This is where George Harrison was yesterday. Or, to be precise, two days ago, since it’s technically Wednesday now.”
“Science major?” Cole asked.
“Journalism.”
Her name was Valerie and she was a junior at San Francisco State. She’d tried acid and didn’t like feeling out of control. She’d grown up outside Springfield, Oregon, where her parents grew hazelnuts. “Filbert farmers,” she said. “Not how I saw myself.”
As they walked she pointed out the sights. Kezar Stadium to the left, home to occasional nfl games. Carousel to the right. Japanese Tea Garden and Stow Lake. Speedway Meadow, named for a nineteenth-century horse track.
By the time they got to the Polo Fields, the sky had lightened behind them. The long night and the long hike had turned the parade into a trudge. The fields themselves were vast, the size of three football fields, sunken fifteen feet below the surrounding land and encircled by rough wooden bleachers. Kids huddled in the stands or lay in sleeping bags on the short grass, curled up with their backs against the horse barns north of the stadium. Cole wondered if Becky was one of them.
Eventually they emerged onto the Great Highway and a tired cheer rose up. They shambled toward the beach, Valerie running ahead of the others. Morning had fully arrived, foggy and cold, the gray of the ocean blending seamlessly into the gray of the sky. Up the beach a bonfire blazed, surrounded by bodies, most of them asleep in the sand. Cole sat on the edge of a dune and watched as the others ran and skipped along the firm stretch of beach where the tide had receded. Valerie joined hands with the woman in bracelets and the two of them danced in a circle, leaning further and further away from each other until they let go and tumbled backward, shrieking with pleasure, into the wet sand. The air smelled of fish and salt and, faintly, of exhaust from the highway.
Cole’s eyes closed and he must have fallen asleep. When he opened them again, Alex was walking toward him. It took a long time. Finally Alex stood in front of him, sm
iling peacefully. “Let’s go,” he said.
As they crossed the highway to the motel, Alex said, “Did you manage to have any fun at all?”
“Something like that,” Cole said.
*
Alex didn’t wake up until late in the afternoon on Wednesday. The first thing he saw was Cole sitting up in bed, playing his unplugged Strat. They went out to eat, then came back to the room, Cole to his guitar, Alex to the two underground papers he’d picked up the day before at the Psychedelic Shop.
The Oracle had evidently started out as a regular underground paper and then gone astray, evolving into a psychedelic literary magazine with themed issues, this one on American Indians. It featured dizzying color art, complicated layouts that kept you from reading it in order, and rambling philosophical arguments. Along the way it had shed its sense of timeliness and community function—the current issue was dated June. The few want ads were selling something or looking for missing kids or lost property.
The Berkeley Barb was more like Dallas’s Notes from the Underground, except the last third was ads for nude models and massage parlors, stag films and erotic toys, mixed with explicit personal ads. A few of the ads were from musicians, and Alex made some calls.
He eliminated the kid still living with his parents, the drummer who was so stoned he sounded like a stroke victim, and the organist who’d never played in public before. He was left with somebody named Frank who was staying at a ranch in Marin County and who’d been in a couple of bands as a rhythm guitarist and backup singer. He already had a bass player, but was willing to see what Alex could do. He had a line on a drummer and was mostly looking for a lead singer and a lead guitarist. Alex pitched it to Cole, who was willing to give it a shot. He called Frank back and made a date for the next afternoon.
The drive took them across the Golden Gate Bridge under bright sunshine and fast-moving white clouds. Alex was high again from being in a place that he’d seen in a million photographs and tv shows. The two supporting towers were like giant orange ladders into the sky, the suspension cables like monumental bass strings. The Bay was a pure, cold blue and the Marin hills ahead of them alternated pale rock faces with dense patches of vegetation.
Once on the Marin side, you were in the country, surrounded by redwoods and high grass. You’d see the occasional gas station or feed store on the roadside, built of unfinished lumber, with old metal or carved wooden signs. Traffic eased as you got further north, and Alex stuck his head out the window to suck in a lungful of the sweet, cool air. They turned off before San Rafael and drove west through San Anselmo, a Disneyland version of a 1950s small town. From there they skirted the edge of the mountain range that included Mount Tamalpais, and the road turned into a roller coaster flanked by massive trees.
Frank’s directions were precise and got them slowed down before they turned in at his mailbox. They took a rutted dirt road into the forest for a painfully long mile and a half and eventually emerged into a clearing. On one side, a long, two-story house was in the process of slowly falling down, and on the other a barn looked out on a corral with a few horses in it. In between were three pickup trucks, from brand new to thirty years old, and a tractor. Next to the tractor was a bearded guy in a Hoss Cartwright hat, hair past his shoulders, with a Winchester lever-action rifle cradled in one arm.
Cole drove up to him and put on his best Texas accent. “We’re lookin’ for a fella name of Frank?”
“Barn,” the man said.
Cole drove through the open barn doors and parked next to a beat-up station wagon. At the far end of the ramshackle building was a raised wooden platform with a double bass drum set. Next to it was a Marshall, the monster British amp that Alex had heard about but never seen, and a beautiful flame maple top Les Paul resting on a stand. Sitting in front of the improvised stage was a husky guy with long dark hair and a beard. Next to him was a skinny kid with lank brown hair, long enough in front to fall over one eye, putting a joint to his lips.
“Frank here?” Cole asked, and the skinny kid, in mid-toke, raised one hand and nodded. With the other hand he held out the joint, and Alex took it gratefully. It was the strongest dope he had ever tasted and he was immediately high. He offered it to Cole, who took a minimal sip and passed it on.
Frank finally exhaled and said, “How you guys doing?”
“It’s beautiful out here,” Cole said. “It’s like paradise.”
Frank smiled proprietarily. “Ain’t it though? This is Doug, the drummer I told you about. I decided not to call the bass player today.”
They unloaded and set up. After two more hits, Alex was floating so high that he saw acid-flashback sparkles at the edges of his vision. When he tuned up, he not only heard the notes beat against each other, he saw the ripples they made in the air. “That is amazing shit,” he said.
“Home grown,” Frank said. “That’s what paid for the gear.”
Alex realized that the guy outside with the Winchester was not just playing cowboy.
Cole, who hadn’t had any more dope after the first sociable hit, said, “Want to try something?”
Frank tuned to them and kicked off a mid-tempo shuffle in A. The drummer was steady and simple, not touching his array of toms and cymbals. Frank had the goods—a nice touch, fat tone, tasty embellishments. His amp was so loud that both Alex and Cole had to turn up. When Cole punched his treble boost and started a lead, Frank went with him, playing fewer notes and lagging half a beat behind, weaving in and out of Cole’s melody. Alex dug the spacey effect and closed his eyes to get caught up in it. When he opened them again, Frank was looking at him, nodding him toward a vocal mike.
The riff was close enough to “Rock Me Baby,” so that’s what Alex sang. Frank nodded his approval, and Cole started playing the lick from the Animals version behind him. Frank immediately played a tight harmony version of the part a third higher.
They dragged the song out for probably ten minutes and it began to get weird. Cole would drop back and comp some chords to let Frank solo, and Frank would comp along with him. As soon as Cole began a solo, Frank would play over him.
Finally Cole brought it to an end, looking more puzzled than annoyed, and the drummer did a big finish.
“Neat,” Frank said. “Very nice.”
“What songs do you know?” Cole asked.
“Songs?”
“You know,” Cole said. “Beatles or Stones or Yardbirds, anything like that?”
“You mean, like, top forty shit?”
“Album cuts, whatever. What we don’t know we can probably fake.”
“That’s not really what I had in mind. I’m not interested in doing anything anybody else has already done.” He fished another joint out of his shirt pocket, lit up, and took a gigantic hit. As he held it in, he said, “My vision is of something organic, built up bit by bit by bit.” There were no takers when he offered the joint. “Each note grows out of the note before it, through trial and error.”
Alex saw that it was time to step in. “That’s great for the long term. How about something we can play today? You’re a really good player, you said you’d been in other bands, what’d you do with them?”
“Blues, long jams. The blues is like the soil that the music grows out of, dig? Endlessly fertile.” He took a bottleneck off the top of his amp and played the Elmore James “Dust My Broom” lick, the joint hanging out of the corner of his mouth. “See what I mean?” He played the lick again and the drummer fell into the same shuffle rhythm as before. Alex had to give him credit, he was steady.
They stuck it out for an hour. When Cole tried to teach Frank one of their originals, Frank had trouble remembering the changes. They did a slow, 12-bar blues and then a weird jam that sounded like Butterfield’s “East-West” where Frank retuned his guitar to all Ds and As. At one point Cole gently suggested that they take turns soloing. Frank shook his head and said, “That’s not my vision, man. The guitars should intertwine, like two vines growing around each other.”
Before they left, Alex bought two ounces of the incredible weed, which he hid inside the speaker cabinet of his Bassman. They hadn’t been able to score any dope in the city, and having a stash again made the afternoon seem like less of a waste.
Cole, to Alex’s surprise, was more amused than anything else. Once they were back on 101, Alex said, “Can we look for someplace to eat? That dope gave me some serious munchies.”
“Sorry,” Cole said. “That’s not my vision, man.”
*
That night they walked around the Haight after dark. The place made Alex edgy and you could see that Cole was close to freaking. Most of the stores had closed by eight pm, leaving the street people to take over. Clusters of men huddled in the shadows, throwing paranoid glances over their shoulders. Hollow-cheeked girls sat in doorways, smoking tiredly, probably available for the price of a meal and a place to crash overnight, not unlike Cole’s friend Becky. Now and then Alex heard a few bars of distant music before the wind shifted and took it away.
“Let’s get out of here,” Cole said, “before something bad happens.”
“And go where?”
“I don’t know. Back to the motel?”
“We came a long way just to sit around a motel room. How about if we go back, you drop acid?” When Cole didn’t immediately refuse, Alex said, “You’ll never have a better opportunity. No parents to wander in, nobody to call the cops on you. Hell, I’ll stay straight if it makes you feel more secure. I’ll spin records for you, we can walk around in the park.”
Cole was thinking about it.
“You have to try it at least once. If you don’t try it, you’ll never know.”
“Okay,” Cole said.
*
Cole felt reckless, exhilarated. Alex, clearly afraid he would change his mind, wanted to dose him then and there. Cole shrugged and put the scrap of paper under his tongue and handed over the keys to the hearse.
By the time they got to the motel, Cole was feeling precarious. An odd, formless anxiety, as if only the force of his will kept the ground solid under his feet and his body upright. Then he noticed that his hand left afterimages as it moved. He stopped on the walkway outside their room and waved his hand in front of his face slowly, then quickly. “Hey,” Cole said. “This feels great.”
