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.
I didn’t regret running those sketches. Crumb was the most important visual artist of the counterculture, as serious an explorer of the crannies of consciousness as Dylan was. His skill at rendering lifted his work out of its time, as did the primal sex fantasies he portrayed, some of which verged on what would now be considered child porn. Even if you didn’t share his wet dreams, their relationship to your own was so vivid, their candor so intimate, that you could only gape in glee. The dominant feeling in these cartoons was delight, though they trafficked in all sorts of stereotypes, racial and otherwise. It felt like a minstrel show without the power relations. Everyone was the butt of the joke, and so the libido was free to play. This was a major theme in sixties culture—infusing the forbidden with new meaning—and it’s directly related to tripping, images of which abound in Crumb. I still own some of his sketches, and they’re quite disturbing. One of them shows a man, presumably on acid, with a lightning bolt splitting his head in two. When I look at it today I don’t just see a bummer. I see the ripping open of consciousness, which is the story of my youth, and it wasn’t always pleasant. Crumb captured the dominant mood of the time, the duality of ecstasy and horror.
Meeting Crumb and his fellow cartoonists was further proof of what I’d noticed in New York. So much was possible once you grabbed hold of a degraded form like comic books; so much quality was hidden within it, waiting to be mined. All sorts of innovations could appear when the boundaries between high and low art were smashed. And in California this process was taking place where the traditions that dominated the East Coast barely had a toehold. At any moment you might see something that should have existed
only in a trip—perhaps a hot-dog stand shaped like a hot dog. The popular, drenched in an absurd innocence, was culture. The music, the posters, the light shows, and the comix all expressed the texture of daily life. In New York, this communalism was missing. Bohemians existed as a special order in an indifferent city, and every transgressive act was performed with one eye on the media. But out here there were no experts on the trendy. It felt like freedom to me.
If you want to understand the difference this chaotic spirit made, compare the music of the Velvet Underground, which sounds highly considered even when improvised, and the sonic mash-ups of Frank Zappa, which blaze in all directions. The Velvets are cosmopolitans; their songs work as well in Paris as in New York. But Zappa’s compositions are site specific. They flame with the spirit of California in the sixties. Not that he was part of the hippie scene. He shunned San Francisco, and he lived in a rather ordinary house in a desert town. I visited him there once. I recall a small recording studio in the basement, and a child called Moon Unit scrambling around my feet. (The name didn’t faze me; I knew babies called Ocean and Sprout.) Zappa was venomous about the record industry, and the feeling was more or less mutual. His albums were over the line even in that lineless time, with brazenly disrupted melodies and lyrics beyond the enigmatic. But, though his pieces were as tightly erudite as the Grateful Dead’s were meandering, Zappa shared with them a sense of abandon that was pure West Coast. In New York you worked hard to achieve this feeling. Out here it was as breathable as a contact high.
Despite my dabbles in hip living, I was far from sloughing off my personality. I would relax to a certain point, and then I’d flash on committing some infantile error, such as drooling. I realized that this intense defensiveness was the reason why I was drawn to Groovy. He seemed to live without doubt, and I kept thinking of what he’d said to me at the Grateful Dead house: “I’ll get you there.”
That was why I tagged along with Groovy and two of his friends on a trip to Lake Tahoe. I suspected that this expedition would culminate in dropping acid, and I remained uncertain until the moment when I decided to swallow the tab of acetate that he offered with a grin. I was on vacation from my vacation, with someone I trusted, so … what the fuck! Half an hour, and nothing. Maybe I was so uptight that not even LSD could subvert my ego. “Nothing’s happening,” I groaned. And then I got hungry.
Acid is supposed to diminish your appetite. A hamburger will look like what it is—charred flesh. A section of orange can feel like a feast. But the drug didn’t have that effect on me. I was famished. Ravenous. And I realized that I’d felt that way from a very early age. Someone offered me a hard candy. I started to unwrap it, but the crinkling was like loud static, and when I popped the candy into my mouth and chomped down, it felt like shards of broken glass. I spat it out. There was nothing to do but suffer. I decided that I would always be hungry, never satisfied. This was my karma.
Gradually the hunger faded. I don’t know how, but I clambered up a tree (something that seems impossible, since I’m afraid of heights), and I sat on a high branch, looking down at the lake. The bark was vibrating. I realized that it was alive. Wood was more than just a product, and so was I; more than the sum of my neuroses. I was human, no more or less. Groovy and his friends, with their forest of hair—they were animals like me. I watched them crowd into a small boat that had mysteriously appeared on the bank. They urged me to join them. I held back. I was sure they would attack me, but I was cold and beginning to shiver. I needed the warmth of their bodies more than my defenses. So I climbed down from the tree and stumbled into the boat. The water swirled around us, prismatized, like the colors in an abalone shell. It wasn’t a hallucination. The play of light actually produced all these shades in the water; it was my mind that assembled them into blue. Acid disrupts the ability to organize stimuli into functional patterns. But it reveals reality.
That night we ended up in a casino. I have an enduring image of us sitting on the floor, still stoned, while gamblers stepped around and over us. At some point, Groovy reached into his back pocket and pulled out a picture of a little girl. It was his daughter from a previous marriage. I tried to reconcile the image of him as a father with my memory of his qualities as a stud. Just then he put his arm around me. The smell of his sweat was faintly nauseating. I began to shiver. It wasn’t just a latent-homosexual panic but something more primal, the fear of vanishing into the body of another person. If he’d been a woman I might have been able to discharge my terror in an erection. As it was, I sat there shaking until he took his arm away.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “You’re safe.”
When I got back to San Francisco my skin was itching badly. I realized that I could no longer live without a shower, so I got a motel room. I also called Judith. She arrived the next day, and I began fielding calls from publicists. One of them made an impression on me, probably because he wore very tight pants. This was my first encounter with a music-industry type known as the company freak.
These go-betweens were hired by baffled record labels to serve as liaisons with the cryptic music scene. It was a job for hippies willing to put in the time, and it mainly consisted of scouting for promising unsigned bands. It also involved relating to rock critics, who were more numerous by that time. My new friend wanted me to meet two typical San Francisco bands—that’s how he described them. I realized that I had only interviewed musicians who were well-known, so I accepted his invitation, and the next day he picked up Judith and me and drove us to a strange place called Daly City.
I’d heard of this suburban development because it was the subject of a mocking folk song by Malvina Reynolds, called “Little Boxes.” The homes looked alike, and they were made of what the song called “ticky tacky.” We pulled up to a house like all the others. The front door was ajar, and inside we were greeted by a farrago of hair and guitars. That was how I met Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding Company. They hadn’t released any records yet, so I’d never heard of them. In the corner I noticed a rather chubby woman holding a baby close to her chest. Someone introduced us to Janis Joplin. I’d never heard her sing—no one outside the local scene had—but she looked like someone who could belt the blues.
While I busied myself with the other musicians, Judith and Janis shared a joint. They talked about growing up pudgy, about their alienation and pain. I talked to Janis as well, though much less personally; I was interested mostly in quotable lines for a story. More to the point, we all grokked, to use the sci-fi term that meant communing. I took notes, naturally, but when I looked at them later they were circles and curves. I retained enough to produce a piece that ended with the words I’d blurted as we all left the house in Daly City. I watched a vanful of musicians careen away, long hair flying from every window. “We shouldn’t be interviewed,” I shouted after them. “We should be friends.”
Weird Scenes in the Gold Mine
I was still having acid flashes when I got back to New York. It wasn’t unusual that summer to see young people roaming the streets in an advanced state of distraction, and I didn’t want to look like that. But it took several days to banish the perception that the wood in my floor was a living thing. Trees pulsed before my eyes, and, yes, I wanted to hug them. I’d become a hippie trapped in the body of a hard-driving, working-class Jew, not an easy fit.
The only thing that tethered me to reality was journalism. Writing had always served to cohere me, and now it came in very handy. I filed a celebratory piece about the local hippie scene, with no mention of my acid trip. I didn’t want to describe the feelings it had awakened in me. I was sick of reading about finding God in a flower, and there was nothing admirable about melting in the California sun. New York didn’t reward such states of being, so I kept myself out of the article. But I couldn’t keep reality at bay, and I was haunted by the feeling that there was a bigger story than flower power out there, something that would shock the counterculture away from its beautiful aspirations.
The onslaught of rape and hard drugs in the Haight was part of it, but the real impediment to building a society of love was the war in Vietnam.
There were already close to half a million American soldiers there, but the hippies I’d hung out with believed that the violence would end on its own once people dropped acid and expanded their consciousness. It was still possible in certain drumming circles to speak of summoning the Aquarian Age, and the Beatles were chanting, “All you need is love.” The deranging experience of combat was as foreign as Communism to these kids. Either they were too young for the draft or they managed to evade it one way or another. It wasn’t hard for children of the middle class to do that—a note from a sympathetic shrink was usually enough—but the boys I’d grown up with in the project were shoveled into the military, and some of them would never come home. At the Voice I got letters from soldiers in Vietnam, often with peace signs on the envelopes, letting me know how much rock music meant to them, how it was all that kept them alive. The knowledge that I was safe and free to pursue my career while those guys were in mortal danger left me with a gnawing sense of guilt. It was clear that, at some point, I would have to write about Vietnam. But the antiwar movement was still largely a campus phenomenon, and I wasn’t a student anymore. The counterculture was my area of expertise, and my shelter from the firestorm.
Another Little Piece of My Heart Page 9