by Peter Coyote
The Angels pay their debts: they threw a party in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park on New Year’s Day. They asked us to arrange the details, but they footed the tab, including the free beer, and offered the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and Big Brother and the Holding Company as a huge thank-you to the community. It was the first large-scale free rock concert in any city park, and it was a grand day.
Whatever else they were in those days, the Angels were definitely authentic, and this was the critical denominator on which the Diggers founded a relationship with the club. The Angels respected our dedication to freeness and anonymity (as far as they respected any outsider), but the real beginning occurred, I think, when Emmett and I showed up at Chocolate George’s funeral.
I don’t remember how Chocolate George died—it was a year or so after the arrest in the Haight in late sixty-eight or early sixty-nine. Emmett came to me one day and said, “We’re going to pay our respects.”
This idea was a little unsettling. The Hell’s Angels were real tough guys, not wanna-bes or guys expressing biker fantasies on the weekends. They roared through the streets on their chopped Harley-Davidsons, dressed in black leather jackets with the club’s death-head logo flaunted across the back, and they brooked no interference or the slightest disrespect. I had seen two Angels empty a Mission Street bar in a fistfight, and when they clustered on Haight Street in small, raucous knots, people gave them a wide berth. Those who sought to prove something by challenging them or behaving in an overly familiar manner paid a fearsome price. I had witnessed several incidents where inappropriate behavior had been chastised by a swarm of leather boots and scarred fists. I did not know what Emmett had in mind and was not comfortable with the idea, but I was not about to punk out, and so I agreed to go.
The scene at the funeral home was definitely nerve-jangling. The place bristled with choppers, chrome gleaming like blades. Hard-faced men in greasy leathers and dusty boots paced sullenly in the front yard, smoking and communicating distractedly. The air was thick with anger and the possibility of sudden violence.
Inside, the home was jammed with more of the same. Many of the Angels appeared stupefied and had obviously been dropping “belligerence,” their pet name for sodium Seconal (reds). All eyes turned toward us, the outsiders, as we entered, and the room grew deathly quiet. I could feel my bowels churning, but Emmett and I “held our mud” (remained expressionless), doffed our hats, and walked over to the coffin. There was George, all right, only he wasn’t laughing and shouting “hello” in his booming voice. His skin appeared pale and translucent, incongruous against his dark leathers and vivid patches, stuffed into a silk and flowered crate like an oversize bracelet from a plush jewelry store. No one moved. We stood over him for a while, resisting the impulse to be rushed by the aggressive silence, then saluted George good-bye and left at a leisurely pace; I could only hope no one would notice my pulse, which was pounding so hard that I was sure my ears were flapping. After this time, however, whenever I encountered Angels on the street there was a nod or friendly chitchat. In this way I met Frisco chapter president Pete Knell and became friends, but that belongs at a later point in the story.
The Diggers had seized the imagination of the counterculture; we were news. The following story may illustrate our authority. Not long after George’s funeral, Peter Berg, Emmett, Sweet William, and I drove to Los Angeles to confront some music producers who were hoping to stage a “Digger benefit,” intending to charge money for tickets but then donate the proceeds to charity. We were not about to be used in that manner.
We scored a car and drove from the Bay Area directly to an expensive house surrounded by a high wall in ritzy Bel Air. Sunken lights in the driveway cast eerie shadows on giant ferns, and a black wrought-iron gate swung open for us by unseen command. We made our entrance into a room full of casually but expensively dressed music-business types, the emerging counterculture aristocracy. White was the color of the season, I believe, intended to indicate refinement and spiritual evolution—New Age Protestantism, which equated material rewards with God’s love, I guess. If they were the light, we were the dark—leathers slick with oil and road dirt, edgy, armed, and not about to have our name co-opted by a bunch of Nehru-shirted aesthetes whose monthly tab for weed and cocaine equaled any of our annual incomes.
The house bubbled with self-importance. It was a “heavy” event: everyone there thought of himself as powerful and important, and this included us. As things were called to order, Emmett disappeared (to rifle the coat-room, we later discovered), and Berg, Sweet William, and I were left to impress on these folk that under no circumstances were they to charge money for anything pertaining to the Diggers. I said it nicely, Berg said it coldly, and Bill made it dangerous. There was some consternation and nervous frittering as the do-gooder fraternity realized a major event was slipping through its fingers. Then Derek Taylor, the rep for the Beatles, rose decisively and ended it, announcing over his shoulder breezily as he walked out the door: “That’s it, I’m out of here. These guys have always been the hippest. If they say it’s not happening, it’s not happening. So I’m not playing. Why waste time?”
With a nod to us, he was gone, leaving the event (and the other producers) bereft of the Beatles’ star power. The meeting fell apart, and we left feeling flushed with our ability to make things happen.
The Hollywood sun felt langorous and lush after the bracing fogs and winds of the North Coast. Elated by our success, we decided to stay in Los Angeles for a while. Benny Shapiro, sitar master Ravi Shankar’s manager, took us in and loaned us his house as headquarters. The Diggers’ reputation as cutting-edge social thinkers had spread fairly widely; now our refusal to accept money and our ability to quash or create events had amplified our status as underground “heavies.”
There was no reason for Hollywood people to regard us any less cynically than we regarded them; consequently we were “tested” assiduously and often by the wealthy rad-lib community there, who hoped to dismiss us and justify their own lack of commitment by discovering inconsistencies in our ideology or behavior. There were two flaws in their strategy. The first was that we didn’t have much of an ideology, and the second was that we were rarely ever consistent. Authenticity is a large, whimsical room to run around in.
People tried to buy in by offering “money for the cause,” but except for very close friends who were willing to play with us, this never worked. One night in Benny’s living room, some lounge-suited trickster offered Emmett $2,500 “pocket money—to help your work.” Emmett thanked the guy impassively and, in the next moment, as if he had forgotten something, picked up a telephone, called Huey Newton, and donated the money to the Black Panthers on the spot. We were broke, but Emmett’s move was shrewdly designed for the audience (probably to play them for higher stakes later). With one stroke, he reaffirmed our mythology and staged a piece of living-room theater to enhance our local reputations and facilitate further connections.
Ploys like this built our credibility so that soon people competed to host and support us. Since we could take money only from our closest allies without suffering a loss of mystique, we had to determine who in L.A. should be granted access and what the cost of punching their ticket might be—both to us and to them. Show-biz people are nothing if not clever, and the sharpest figured out quickly that while money may not have been the appropriate medium of exchange, drugs and compliant starlets were a very effective substitute, readily accepted by the four warriors from up north. In short, being courted in Babylon was fun. We were young, hip, penniless, and adored for it. With no records on the charts or films in the can, we sashayed from the plushest rooms to the nightspots of the moment, lounging on couches the size of pickup trucks and snorting coke from designer coffee tables.
All I had to do was be myself and do whatever I felt like. How could anyone be unhappy when life was so simple? It would be years before I slowed down enough to ask myself, if I was so happy, why was I loaded every day?
&n
bsp; One night Peter Fonda, Brandon DeWilde, and Dennis Hopper visited Benny’s to check us out. These guys were our age, sons of the film community, caught somewhere between their home base and their imaginings of free life, seeking to connect with a pure strain of the underground. We discussed “what was happening” for some time and how it might be translated into film (still never accomplished, as far as I’m concerned), and we passed scenarios and ideas back and forth as they picked our brains for stories. Chat was easy and things felt good. Then Sweet William took the floor, magnificent in his Angel colors, his hard-chiseled face and poetic eyes mesmerizing even those of us who knew him well.
“You know what I’d do?” he said. “I’d make a movie about me and a buddy just riding around. Just going around the country doing what we do, seeing what we see, you know. Showing the people what things are like.”
This was the germinating idea for the hit movie Easy Rider, a film about which I have complicated feelings. Of the three actors who visited us at Benny’s that night, only Dennis Hopper would leave the safe havens of his known haunts and run around with us during the rest of our stay. I came to think of the others as beautiful hothouse flowers that could not withstand the rigors of unprotected environments.
Dennis was connected to the Diggers by an alternate and more substantial route, however. A serious art collector, he was an old friend of Billy “Batman” Jahrmarkt, whose San Francisco gallery had championed such young artists as Bruce Conner, George Herms, and Wally Berman, creators of uniquely Californian visual statements that were not necessarily derived from the art capitals of New York and Europe.
Knowing Batman made Hopper family, a distinction he may have found dubiously beneficial. Some time later, Emmett, Peter, Billy, and I were cooking smack in his living room forest of pop and op art when his wife at the time, Brooke Hayward, walked in, appraised the scene, and left for good, precipitating a long downhill spiral for Dennis. His dark time at the bottom of the well made his eventual success in Hollywood that much sweeter for me, because he possesses the honesty and generosity that makes you root for him instinctively.
Offscreen, in those days Dennis was a passionate and half-crazy seeker of truth, something like the photographer he played to perfection in Apocalypse Now. I liked him. One afternoon, he, Michael McClure, and I were having lunch shortly after the opening of Michael’s controversial play, The Beard. Michael was telling a wonderful story, filled with colorful obscenity, when a flushed-looking fellow walked over, muttered something about having a date in the back of the room, and punched Michael in the face three times with impressive rapidity. We leaped to his defense, and Dennis terminated the matter by jumping onto the table and adroitly drop-kicking Michael’s assailant into unconsciousness. It’s hard not to like a guy like that!
Despite good feelings for Dennis, Easy Rider remains a sore point with me. Peter and Dennis had seen and been excited by the Mime Troupe and suggested that I write and direct a scene with the company for inclusion in the film. I was excited by this prospect and pleased because it could funnel a little cash into the pockets of my fellow performers, who were still subsisting on a five-dollars-a-show salary.
Several months later, they called with an offer: twenty dollars a week and a place on Fonda’s couch for me, but nothing for my friends—“because this is a real low-budget thing, we’re doing it because we believe in it” (as if we did not behave that way daily). I wrote them off angrily as spoiled brats and refused to play. Even in the realm of low-budget independent films and even in 1968, twenty dollars a week was a beggar’s wage.
The finished film added insult to injury when the two protagonists visit a commune in the Southwest where sincere and drab hippies, the kind of nutless townfolk John Wayne might have protected in a corny western, are given the full Hollywood spin as “good people,” as if they were Franciscan monks who just happened to smoke dope and dress funny. The community entertains itself by watching a clutch of dodos clump through a mindless commedia-type stage play announced by a crudely lettered sign as “Gorilla Theater”—an obvious travesty of the Mime Troupe’s guerrilla theater and a backhanded slap at the communards, who are less hip than the individualistic, wandering biker heroes.
This was an inaccurate, smug, and insulting reflection of the life my friends and I were creating out of hard labor, with minimal assets and comforts. It was galling to see our style and our intentions misunderstood and misrepresented to the vast cinematic audience. What elicited my enduring scorn, however, was the film’s ending, where the two “free spirits” are blown off their motorcycles by rednecks in a pickup truck. This ending was more than infuriating and dishonest; it was counterpropaganda that suggested that the cost of living free in America was death—so if you don’t want to die, boys and girls, stay home and be audiences; real adventures are for charismatic, handsome people like Hollywood actors. But in fact, people were living “free” all over the United States at that time, dealing with the tough issues of subsistence, making peace with their neighbors, and developing appropriate spiritual and community practices while this sorry-ass subtext was being promulgated by guys who were queasy about leaving their safe haunts in their own hometown! This was the status quo in hip drag, and I was disgusted with it. I did not see Dennis Hopper for many years after that. When I did, we had both been resurrected as actors and men, and the joy of seeing him healthy and well (and the clusters of memories we shared) wiped away all my bitter associations as if they had been fog.
Years have gone by since that film made a fortune and introduced America to national treasure Jack Nicholson. Peter, Dennis, and I have grown and changed, and I have no desire to chain anyone to an identity they’ve since transcended. However, that slow-motion cinematic death still burns in my mind as a betrayal of the sensibilities it capitalized on. Far fewer people will read these words than have seen that film, I am sure, but at least I’ve marked my objections, and I can drop that chip from an overloaded shoulder, leaving it in the road behind me with those crushed bikes, sprawled actors, and fake blood.
By the summer of 1968, some of the problems associated with living without money began to chafe. I was restless. It was far more entertaining to pitch Digger philosophy or create spectacular events than to scrounge for money or car parts and move flats of food and vegetables from one place to another interminably. Emmett and I set off for New York City to check out the scene, see what we might accomplish there, and, we hoped, have some adventures. Janis Joplin, a good friend, sometime lover, sometime dope partner, always steady pal, was in New York when Emmett and I arrived. We ran around for a few weeks together, taking her out to hear great jazz and blues singers she might have otherwise overlooked because they lived far afield from her rock-and-roll milieu.
After she and her band left to continue their tour, Emmett and I stayed on in their rooms at the Chelsea Hotel, pretending to be “managers.” That ruse wore thin, and we were forced to move from room to room, jimmying the flimsy locks to find an empty room and greasing the palms of the maids with the bottles of Southern Comfort that well-wishers sent Janis by the case and she had left behind for us.
Anyone who has ever tried to pitch anything over the phone can understand the daily routine we invented to establish social connections in a strange city. You begin with a name and a phone number—perhaps you got them at a party or from a friend of a friend. You have just enough legitimacy to keep the other party on the phone long enough to begin a pitch. Then, to keep the person engaged, you have only your imagination and skill—stock in trade for improvisational actors.
By the end of the summer we had created a network of apparently unlimited horizontal and vertical social mobility, with access to virtually every room we wanted to enter—from the Park Avenue mansions of the wealthy and celebrities like Baby Jane Holzer to the “shooting galleries” on the Lower East Side, recording studios, Italian social clubs, and rock stars’ living rooms; we had drinks with columnist Jimmy Breslin, shared joints with Puerto Rican
gang leaders. Each personal encounter enhanced our ability to set up the next meeting, where we could encourage people to participate with us in our grand revolutonary scheme. Each “score” increased our prestige and in turn made the next round that much easier. This was not social climbing but social spread, the recombination and intermarriage of previously separated “networks” of people in order to create the condition of a free society we described.
One example of our summer’s work was the brokering of a peace meeting between New York detectives and Puerto Rican gang leaders. Emmett and I used our status as outsiders to create a neutral turf where the antagonists could meet and talk. We did this, surprisingly enough, through Albert Grossman, the avuncular Ben Franklin–lookalike manager of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin. Albert had given us the run of his office, and his assistant, Myra Freedman, was generous with her time, full of bonhomie and edgy New York wit and extremely useful to us, taking messages and allowing us to turn their offices into a command central. For this particular meeting, Albert made a few calls and arranged for us to use the penthouse boardroom of the CBS building after hours.
The police and the gang leaders met outside the sealed and darkened building. They were escorted upstairs and into the room by the doorman, who had to unlock the front door of the immense skyscraper for them. There, at the head of an impressive hardwood table with seating for twenty, were Emmett and I, in blue jeans, with our long hair, earrings, and leathers, waiting for them as though this was our living room, reveling in the confusion and shock apparent on their faces. It was a classic Digger ploy—hard politics conducted with a style that put us in charge of the meeting and gave us the authority to ensure a successful rapprochement. This was our art, a miniature perhaps compared to the vast canvas of the media event in Chicago, but it was substantial and we were becoming very good at it.