It was journalist Hunter S. Thompson who was indirectly responsible for the arrival of the world’s most notorious bikers at La Honda. At the time, Thompson was writing Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, having formed an edgy relationship with them. Some of them admired his chutzpah and shared his love of guns and flooring motorbikes down the Pacific Coast Highway at 3:00 a.m. They thought he’d offer a corrective to what they perceived as slanderous media coverage of them (especially stories of rape). Most important, he kept them plied with free beer.
Thompson looked up to the already famous Kesey, whom he’d met at a TV roundtable show for writers in San Francisco that summer. They went for beer afterward, and then Thompson said he had to go meet the Angels, and invited Kesey along. Kesey in turn invited the Wild Ones to La Honda, though Thompson didn’t think it was necessarily a good idea. They arrived on August 7 amid the dancing beatniks, writers, intellectuals, and grad students. The stereo blasted the Beatles, the Stones, and Ray Charles, as Ginsberg wrote in his poem “First Party at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels.”8 Cop cars were parked at the edge of the property. Kesey and fourteen other Pranksters had been busted for pot in April. LSD was legal, though, and the cops couldn’t enter Kesey’s home, because they didn’t have a warrant, but they would search everyone as soon as they left the premises.
One of the most infamous moments in counterculture history happened at that weekend’s party, alluded to obliquely in both Wolfe and Thompson’s books in a way that implied that Cassady’s girlfriend, Anne Murphy, was gang-raped by the Hells Angels. But both she and the biography Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero, by David Sandison and Graham Vickers, gave a more nuanced recount. Murphy lived a wild life: struggled with thoughts of suicide, shot methamphetamine, and participated in Hollywood orgies with as many as thirty participants. She was desperately in love with Cassady, but he saw other women concurrently. Wrote Sandison and Vickers, “Her bitter response was to slip into an ambient state of drugs and sexual promiscuity while still seeing Neal from time to time. He called her Superslut. ‘I kind of liked that, I recall,’ she later admitted.”9
At La Honda, Cassady was seeing two other women besides Anne, so when the Angels arrived, she slipped off to be, as she put it, “joyously” gangbanged by many of them.10 They brought in Cassady, and he participated as well. Afterward, they handed her a card that read, “You have just been assisted by a member of the Hells Angels, Oakland Chapter.” Cassady staggered out, naked, to curse at the police while being fellated by a new woman before leaving on a road trip the next day. At Kesey’s parties, the line between ecstasy and madness was nonexistent. One Prankster, Cathy “Stark Naked” Casamo, was institutionalized after her time “on the bus,” and another, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, also needed psychiatric treatment.
* * *
The Haight-Ashbury hippie scene had its roots in the Cabale Creamery, a beatnik/folk music coffeehouse in Berkeley cofounded by Chandler A. Laughlin III. For the last two years, Laughlin and about fifty of his friends had been emulating Native American peyote ceremonies. On June 29 he opened the Red Dog Saloon in the mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, four hours northeast of San Francisco—out in the middle of nowhere, so they could do what they wanted. The era’s first psychedelic rock poster, by George Hunter and Mark Ferguson, promised the evening would be “The Limit of the Marvelous.”
Hunter and Ferguson, who played in the Red Dog’s house band, the Charlatans, wanted to embrace a uniquely American style, in rebellion against the British Invasion. They dressed in nineteenth-century Victorian clothing from old Westerns, garb that fit with the saloon. They also carried guns, not just because of the Wild West pose but for self-defense; after all, they were longhairs far away from San Francisco.11 The Charlatans played blues, country, and folk, extending their pieces into long jams. Chemist Owsley Stanley provided the LSD; later he would become the Grateful Dead’s benefactor and soundman. Bill Ham projected a primitive version of the liquid light show he was developing. Over the next weeks, a couple hundred people made the trek to the saloon.
Back in San Francisco, the music scene was just starting to pick up. The Beau Brummels had some proto-folk-rock hits even before the Byrds (produced by Sylvester Stewart of Sly and the Family Stone, no less), but they were away touring most of the year and missed their city’s transformation to psychedelia. We Five reached No. 3 with “You Were on My Mind.”
Perhaps We Five’s co-ed template was on folkie Marty Balin’s mind when he invited female Signe Toly Anderson to be co-lead singer of his new group, the Jefferson Airplane. Balin had played the character Action in a San Francisco production of West Side Story, painted, and sculpted, and then decided he wanted to go folk-rock after hearing the Byrds. He formed the Airplane to play at his new club, the Matrix (a former pizza parlor), and they made their debut on August 13.
They in turn inspired the formation of another group, the Great Society, which featured the powerful contralto of Grace Slick. The Great Society made its debut at North Beach’s Coffee Gallery on October 15, the day of massive Vietnam Day Committee protests. Eventually, Slick replaced Anderson in the Airplane, bringing with her two compositions that would become the Airplane’s biggest hits, “Somebody to Love” (written by her bandmate brother-in-law Darby Slick) and “White Rabbit,” Grace’s uncanny homage to the hallucinogens of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
Meanwhile, some of the regulars from “Red Dog Summer” formed a concert production collective called the Family Dog and lived in a commune called the Dog House, a large Victorian at 2125 Pine Street. To keep the Red Dog spirit going, they hosted the “Tribute to Doctor Strange” dance party on October 16 at the Longshoreman’s Union Hall at Fisherman’s Wharf. Dr. Strange was Marvel Comics’ mystic magician who, with the help of the Book of Vishanti, traveled through trippy dimensions and defeated flame-headed demons such as the dread Dormammu. Fellow Marvel superheroes such as the Fantastic Four and Thor were also favorites of the hippies, due to their way-out cosmic landscapes.
Ginsberg wore his white Indian gown, while the hippies dressed as pirates or cowboys with painted faces, or in green velvet granny dresses and lace, their lively colors in marked contrast to the black-clad beatniks of yesterday. “They all joined in a snake dance,” wrote Barry Miles, “weaving circles and figure eights through the hall” to the sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, the Charlatans, and the Marbles. Bathed in the swirling lightshow, Grace Slick howled at the revelers to feed their heads. Berkeley student Jann Wenner was a friend of one of the Pranksters, and Slick introduced him to jazz columnist Ralph Gleason, who would later help Wenner found Rolling Stone magazine.12
Poster artist Victor Moscoso recalled, “I dug what was going on. I dug the scene. In fact, all I wanted to do at that point was event posters, as if I understood intuitively that this was a historical opportunity … I knew these were historical events, and they’ve got the dates on them, so you can line them up and see the progression. That’s what I wanted to do. I stopped painting. I turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.”13 Moscoso’s posters for the Family Dog would pioneer the use of photographic collage and vibrating colors. Another poster artist, Wes Wilson, would soon create a psychedelic font that looked as if it were moving and melting. Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, and Stanley Mouse were other pioneers of the emerging form.
The Family Dog returned the following weekend, on October 24, with “A Tribute to Sparkle Plenty.” (Sparkle Plenty was a character in the Dick Tracy comic strip, a baby of extraordinary beauty.) The Lovin’ Spoonful headlined the gig. The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia recalled,
The first time that music and LSD interacted in a way that came to life for us as a band was one day when we went out and got extremely high and went that night to a concert by the Lovin’ Spoonful … We ended up going into that rock and roll dance and it was just really fine to see that whole scene—there was just nobody there but heads and this strange rock and r
oll music playing in this weird building. It was just what we wanted to see … We began to see that vision of a truly fantastic thing. It became clear to us that playing in bars was not going to allow us to expand into this new idea.14
The Dead’s Phil Lesh told Ellen Harmon of the Family Dog, “Lady, what this little séance needs is us.”15
In the parks, the San Francisco Mime Troupe was performing its satirical guerrilla theater. In August, Parks and Recreation determined that the shows were not in good taste, but the troupe continued performing anyway, so director Ronnie Davis was busted for obscenity and for not having a permit.
The troupe’s manager, Bill Graham, was a German Jew who fled the Holocaust, arriving in New York at age ten, parentless. He became a mambo champion and then moved to San Francisco to be near his sister. He was the office manager of a truck manufacturer until he met the troupe at a free concert in Golden Gate Park. On November 6, Graham arranged for the Airplane, the Fugs, and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti to perform at a benefit for Davis’s legal fees at the Calliope Ballroom. Experimental films were projected on bedsheets, colored light shows on the walls. Ginsberg was there, of course—and the line went around the block. When the police tried to shut it down, Graham told them Sinatra and Liberace were en route, so they let the show continue. Graham began to realize there was money to be made in the scene. A second Mime Troupe benefit followed, on December 10. Then Graham took the Airplane on as clients. In a year he would open the Fillmore ballroom and become the most famous rock promoter of all time.
North Beach had been the scene for the beatniks when Ginsberg debuted Howl in 1955, but the new cheap neighborhood for students and bohemians was Haight-Ashbury. Gary Duncan, the guitarist of the Quicksilver Messenger Service, said,
What was really going on in San Francisco in the early sixties was a whole other thing most people don’t know about. The underground scene was really a lot heavier than what was publicized and what people think happened, you know, hippies playing music with flowers in their hair, all that crap … I first started hanging out there back when there were no hippies. There were beatniks, and crash pads, poets and painters, every kind of drug imaginable and every kind of crazy motherfucker in the world. It was kind of cool to be in on something that nobody else knew about. Early on, there was a big scene that was totally invisible. If you knew the right address and knocked on the door, you could walk through that door into a whole other world. You’d go to, say, 1090 Page Street, open up the door, and there’d be a fourteen-bedroom Victorian house with something different going on in every room: painters in one room talking to each other, musicians in another room. It was really cool, and to all outward appearances there was nothing happening. It was like a secret society.16
Ten-Ninety Page Street was a Victorian rooming house owned by the parents of one of the members of the band Big Brother and the Holding Company. There was a ballroom in the basement, so Big Brother manager Chet Helms began charging fifty cents for bands to hold Wednesday night jam sessions there, which grew into weekend parties where admission was charged to raise money for rent. Big Brother and the Quicksilver Messenger Service formed there, and Helms’s friend from Austin, Texas, Janis Joplin, visited periodically and sat in, before permanently joining Big Brother in the spring of 1966.
At the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse, you could wash dishes for food.17 Chet Helms organized meetings there for the group LEMAR (“Legalize Marijuana”). The Sexual Freedom League met to fight censorship; legalize nudity, abortion, and prostitution; establish sex education in schools; lower the age of consent to sixteen; and give lectures on “Sex and Civil Rights,” “How to Be Queer and Like It,” and “Sex in the Mental Hospital”—and of course organize nude parties/orgies. In August, the group received national press with its “Nude Wade-in.”18
At the Open Theatre, mixed media were projected onto nude bodies. The Magic Theatre for Madmen Only, its name derived from a locale in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, sold antiques along with pipes, bongs, and posters. In March, Edward Craven-Walker patented his invention the lava lamp, and Chicago’s Lava Manufacturing Corporation had begun manufacturing Lava Lites. The Psychedelic Shop, generally regarded as the first head shop, opened on Haight Street on January 3, 1966.
* * *
The birth of the hippie counterculture coincided with the anti-war movement. But if the dedicated radicals who emerged from Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement were hopeful that hippies would swell their ranks, they found that many of them were more interested in dropping out of society than they were in changing it.
The first indication that the drug culture might disrupt the coherence of the movement came when Ken Kesey was invited to speak at the October 15 Vietnam Day Committee rally in Berkeley. When it was his turn to address the throng, he said,
You know, you’re not gonna stop this war with this rally, by marching … They’ve been having wars for ten thousand years … I was just looking at the speaker before me … and you know who I saw and who I heard?… Mussolini … That’s the cry of the ego, and that’s the cry of this rally!… Me! Me! Me! Me!… And that’s why wars get fought … ego … because enough people want to scream, “Pay attention to me!” … There’s only one thing’s gonna do any good at all … And that’s everybody just look at it, look at the war, and turn your backs and say … Fuck it.
He then played an off-key rendition of “Home on the Range” on his harmonica.
Despite his strange speech, the following day, two thousand to five thousand marched to Oakland to demonstrate at an army induction center. The crowd sang “Help!” and Country Joe and the Fish jug band played their “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” on a flatbed truck while the Merry Pranksters’ Day-Glo school bus, “Furthur,” followed—until the parade was stopped at the county line by four hundred cops, with the Hells Angels biker gang looming behind them. Allen Ginsberg tried to cool the rising tension by chanting “Hare Krishna,” but suddenly an Angel snatched a sign and roared “Cowards! Go back to Russia, you fucking Communists!” The Angels lunged at the protestors, and the cops in turn began fighting with the Angels; one officer received a broken arm, and some Angels got their heads split by police clubs.
The pro-war Angels vowed to disrupt the protest scheduled for November 20 as well, and to beat up the “filthy Commies.” Upon hearing this, Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg went to head Angel Sonny Barger’s house to talk them out of it. The Angels and Kesey’s Pranksters had been partying together since August. Everyone took LSD, played Dylan and Joan Baez records, and Ginsberg even got the Angels to chant the Buddhist Prajnaparamita sutra. According to Kesey, Ginsberg went “right into the lion’s mouth with his little cymbals. Ching, ching, ching. And he just kept talking and being his usual absorbing self. Finally they said, ‘OK, OK. We’re not going to beat up the protesters.’ When he left, one of the Angels, Terry the Tramp, says, ‘That queer little kike ought to ride a bike.’ From then on, he [Ginsberg] had a pass around the Angels. They had let all the other Angels know, ‘He’s a dude worth helping out.’ They were absolutely impressed by him and his courage.”19
Still, the Free Speech Movement asked Ginsberg for suggestions on what to do if the Hells Angels changed their minds and marauded again. On November 19 the Berkeley Barb published his essay, “Demonstration or Spectacle as Example, as Communication or How to Make a March/Spectacle”: “Masses of flowers—a visual spectacle—especially concentrated in the front lines. Can be used to set up barricades, to present to Hells Angels, police, politicians, and press and spectators whenever needed or at parade’s end … Marchers should bring crosses, to be held up in front in case of violence; like in the movies dealing with Dracula.”20
Ginsberg also recommended bringing flags, musical instruments, children’s toys, and candy bars for the Angels and police, and the Constitution, little paper halos, white flags, and movie cameras. If the scene grew tense, marchers could sit or do mass calisthenics and chant the Lord’s Prayer, Om, or “The Star-
Spangled Banner.” And if violence threatened to erupt, he advised that a sound system blast the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and the marchers burst into dance. He proposed floats of Christ with Scared Heart and Cross, Buddha in meditation, and Thoreau behind bars. Also, he said that in advance of the march, the rumor should be spread that women would pull down the pants of anyone who opposed them.
The same day the Berkeley Barb published Ginsberg’s piece, the Angels called a press conference and said that although they considered the demonstration a “despicable un-American activity,” in the interest of public safety, they would not attend, as their patriotism could inspire them to violence. They also sent a telegram to LBJ offering to go to Vietnam as “a crack group of trained gorillas [sic].”21 The next day, between 6,000 and 10,000 people marched unharmed.
Ginsberg’s “Demonstration or Spectacle as Example” manifesto may have been partially inspired by Dylan. When Jerry Rubin asked the singer to participate in the VDC march, Ginsberg recalled that Dylan agreed but added, in typically enigmatic fashion, “Except we ought to have it in San Francisco right on Nob Hill where I have my concert, and I’ll get a whole bunch of trucks and picket signs—some of the signs will be bland, and some of them have lemons painted on them, and some of them are watermelon pictures, bananas, others will have the word ‘Orange’ or ‘Automobile’ or the words ‘Venetian Blind.’ I’ll pay for the trucks, and I’ll get it all together and I’ll be there, and we’ll have a little march for the peace demonstration.”22
1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Page 30