Another Little Piece of My Heart (11 page)

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 by 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.

Today the Victorians in the Haight have been spiffed to an asset-rich patina. But back then they were ramshackle buildings, often unpainted
and splintery, and the house on Ashbury was typical. Anyone could wander in, and I did, messing my hair to look like I belonged. But I still bore the edgy signs of a Bronx native, and my accent lacked that stoner drawl. Someone asked if I was a narc. There was a strange belief that an undercover cop had to identify himself when confronted, so when I said no they believed me. No one demanded to know what I was doing here. It didn’t take a press card to get in.

I wandered through rooms furnished in mattresses. People were milling about or sleeping something off, and a pot of mush was simmering—yellow lentils coagulating. I turned down a plate of ricey glop, and the bread looked like it might shred my gums. It would have been easy to find sex, but I was looking for the band that owned the place. I asked everyone I could where they were. Finally someone pointed to a tall, lanky dude whose straight hair fell nearly to the belt of his jeans. He had the most incredible baby face and a body that reminded me of a willow tree. This was Bob Weir, rhythm guitarist of the Grateful Dead, and he had pretty much the same effect as Pamela Tiffin had on me. Bob epitomized what I found hot in hippie men, a fluidity that challenged masculinity. But I was not about to broach the subject of sexuality—his or mine. Instead I asked him about the threat of commercialization. This was a major topic among musicians here: whether the large advances that record companies were dangling would corrupt the scene. “If the industry is gonna want us,” Weir said, “they’re gonna take us the way we are. Then, if the money comes in, it’ll be a stone gas.”

I didn’t share his optimism, but as it turned out most San Francisco bands had complete freedom in the studio—the record companies didn’t want to intrude on the vibe. For the Dead, Weir told me, this meant making albums that sounded as close as possible to the way they played live. That was their signature, and it’s why they represent a certain attitude toward music so effectively. I’ve never fully understood the Deadhead phenomenon, but I suspect that it has more to do with the ambience of freedom they created than with their skill. At their best the Dead did a rollicking update of Western swing, but to me their songs were a habitat for wandering. As for Weir, he buffed up and butched up after the sixties ended, but back then, up close, he was a model of the new, less locked-and-loaded attitude that I found wondrous to behold in men.

I later discovered that this crash pad was known as the Grateful Dead house, and that the band stayed there when they weren’t on the road. I was free to stay as long as I liked, and I didn’t need the auspices of a sexy photographer to meet the band. At any moment Jerry Garcia might saunter by, smiling through his curly beard. But the most memorable part of my visit came when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I couldn’t quite place him, but he looked like the guy I’d met at Tom’s house in my college days, the guy she kept as a stud. His hair was longer than I remembered, tied back in a ponytail, and a drooping mustache made his lips look thicker. But he had the same up-for-anything grin. I didn’t want to bring up the association with sex for room and board that came to mind when I thought of him. Maybe he’d found more gainful employment since those days—there was an infinite demand for lanky musicians out here.

“How are you?” I stammered, and then I realized that I’d never found out his name. “
Who
are you?”

He smiled broadly. “Right now I’m Groovy.”

There were hundreds of Groovies in the Haight, probably several in this house. But I didn’t object.

“I’ve been reading your stuff,” he said. “Nice … but …”

“What?”

“You’d be a better critic if you dropped acid.”

I went into a rant about how I could dig the music without taking drugs; after all, it was an expression of Emersonian ideals, which had themselves emerged from, ultimately, Kant.

“Okay,” he said warily. Then he pulled out a spliff and handed it to me. “Breathe deeply,” he whispered in my ear. I did—and coughed. It was stronger than the grass I was used to, possibly because it had been soaked in hash oil. He urged me on, and I took another puff. After a while I felt my eyelids close, but I could still see.

“Yeah,” he murmured. “Let it flow.”

He led me to the mattress by the window, where the sunlight was streaming in. I watched it flicker across the ceiling and crystallize in the panes of glass. He strummed a few chords on his guitar and began to hum. Time passed—I don’t remember how much time. I was too enchanted by his voice.

“I’ll show you,” he said. “I’ll get you there.”

In the days that followed, I absorbed Groovy’s circle of friends by a kind of osmosis. Among them was a schizophrenic cartoonist named Rory Hayes, who drew teddy bears with auras in gnarly landscapes. How did he live, I wondered, since he seemed too fragile to function? I was told that a group of cartoonists cared for him, and that was how I became aware of another art form germinating in San Francisco, a new kind of comic book, rife with sex and drugs. I quickly became hooked on these comix, as they were called. They came in a wide variety of styles, from pulpy realism to psychedelic abstractions featuring Mr. Peanut. My favorite characters were a crew of stoners called The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, the creation of Gilbert Shelton. But the most fascinating comix artist to me was Justin Green, whose intensely autobiographical work included a strip about his father succumbing in a hospital bed while berating him for his wicked ways. This was a long way from Casper the Friendly Ghost.

I didn’t actually meet these artists until 1969, when I was given carte blanche by Bantam Books to edit a paperback magazine called
US
. Unlike today’s celebrity rag of the same name, this was a collection of countercultural writing that featured, among other things, the poetry of Jim Morrison, early feminist writing by Ellen Willis, and graphics by underground cartoonists. The most famous of them was R. (for Robert) Crumb. He was rail thin, even more wary than me, and, like other introverted men I’d met, he had a robust Jewish woman in his life. I approached Crumb about publishing him in my magazine, and he let me have one of his sketchbooks. I selected a portfolio of work, including a drawing of a nun crucified on telephone lines. The publisher was pissed. I was told that the image got a whole line of Bantam books banned from Woolworth stores.
US
lasted for only three issues.