Devil's Defender

by John Browne

  So I decided to run for student body president of La Jolla Junior High School. I ran thinking that if I won, my parents would not move me to Palo Alto—where my dad had a new position—until tenth grade. I was right—this manipulative ploy worked, but it caused stress in the family with my dad living in Palo Alto and the rest of us in La Jolla for nine months.

  When we all did eventually move, in June 1961, it was front-page news in Hi-Tide, the student paper: “John Browne, president of the freshman class, will move to Palo Alto, Calif. after school closes. . . . He regrets having to leave, he said. . . . He is also a member of Boys’ Federation Council, in which he handles the ‘Boy of the Week’ program, and he is a member of the Youth Hostel. Golf and tennis are John’s favorite sports.”

  Because its student body consisted of the sons and daughters of Stanford professors, Palo Alto High School was extraordinary—so many smart kids. But I was not one of them. I was average in scholastics, but I was an observer, absorbing all the town had to offer.

  I soon learned there were two Palo Altos: the relatively mainstream Palo Alto of Stanford and a more underground, shadowy part of the city. There were readings in the local bookstores by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, so I went to see what a beatnik looked like, and smoked a tobacco pipe (and looked stupid doing so) and got sick. Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore in San Francisco was just a short train ride away, as were the other sins of North Beach: topless dancers and female impersonators. At the time I assumed this was going on all across America. (Until I left California, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a Young Republican.)

  I got a job washing dishes at Saint Michael’s Alley on University Avenue, next door to the Varsity Theater. The owners told me that one night Ginsberg had stood on a table and began, in a drug-induced trance of some kind, to recite his poem “Howl” until he fell to the floor. Ken Kesey lived on nearby Skyline Boulevard and gave the Hells Angels acid before they drove down University Avenue right in front of the café, blasted out of their minds.

  And there was a Stanford professor, whose daughter I hung out with, experimenting with LSD and creating quite a fuss on the Stanford campus. He and his wife were also pioneers of the sexual revolution and kept copies of Eros magazine on the coffee table. I loved that magazine. I still do.

  At school I got along with all the cliques—preppies, jocks, greasers, it didn’t matter. One day a greaser by the name of Ron McKernan came into one of my classes and, in a fit of rage, picked up a desk to throw at the teacher. Not a chair, a desk. He was looking for a friend, and when the teacher demanded he leave, Ron got mad. I intervened, calmed him down, and talked him into setting the desk back on the floor. After that we became, if not friends, friendly. He went by the nickname Pigpen and was a vocalist and keyboard player in the most innovative band in town, the Warlocks, which would eventually become the Grateful Dead. In fact multiple musicians associated with the Dead went to Palo Alto High.

  I got along with all the cliques, but I belonged to none. At least one thing made it impossible for me to fit in: I had a job. Make that two jobs. In addition to washing dishes at Saint Michael’s a few nights a week, on Saturdays I worked at Spiro’s Sport Shop in the shopping center next to the high school. I was the only kid I knew from this upscale high school who worked. I was not from a poor family, we were always middle class, but I wanted the freedom of earning my own money. No control or hooks from the parents.

  I once asked my dad if he’d buy me a car, and he said not until I got all As and Bs on my report card. I was close but not there yet. When he and my mother went to Europe for a month, I seized the opportunity to buy two vehicles: a 1952 Chevy panel truck completely rusted through and held together with bailing wire ($65) and a classic 1954 Austin-Healey Le Mans, a beautiful British sports car ($850). The Healy had a leather strap over the hood, and the windshield folded down for racing. It needed work, but I fixed it up and had it painted British racing green. When I picked up my folks at the airport, took them home, and opened the garage, my dad saw the Healey and said, “I told you, no car until you had all As and Bs.” I reminded him he said he would not buy me one but said nothing about buying my own.

  This was the first of many times he’d accuse me of becoming a “damn lawyer.”

  The Palo Alto Playhouse was a very active center for the performing arts. I had one of the leads in Rebel Without a Cause (playing the bad guy), and I was Ice in West Side Story. Both of these productions involved handguns as props, which I provided, along with blanks, from Spiro’s Sport Shop. I carried the pistols in my glove compartment, and my friends would pull them out and pretend to shoot each other walking down the main street, which obviously would never be acceptable today.

  Speaking of guns, on Tuesdays and Thursdays I’d ride my ten-speed to school with my .22-caliber target rifle over my shoulder. I was on the rifle team and needed a weapon for after-school practice. I stored it in science class during the day. Now there would be a SWAT team descending on the school, or I’d have been shot on the way to campus.

  I dated a girl named Bonnie—same as my sister—very briefly. Her father was blind. He worked at Stanford and had a watch whose face flipped open so he could feel its hands. I never got tired of watching him do that—this middle-aged guy sensing the passage of time at his fingertips.

  He had a huge garage, which he generously allowed his daughter’s friends to use for band practice. The first time I went to see the band practice I met Michael Kilmartin, the guitar player. He was tall like me, maybe six foot two, and funny as hell. We hit it off right away.

  He didn’t fit into any of the cliques either, although he was a superb athlete. He was on the track team—shot put and discus. His family had a gorgeous house on the Stanford campus, which was strange because they weren’t rich. His dad was in the military. I don’t know how they ended up with that house. It was an incredible Tudor house on campus. And Michael was brilliant. The whole family was. His ten-year-old brother, Alan, could draw like M. C. Escher and play “East-West,” a complex piece that changes from Eastern to Western tempos and rhythms, on the guitar.

  I only had one other close friend. Her name was Anne Babson, but everyone called her Punky. Our relationship was completely platonic. That makes it sound like I wasn’t attracted to her, but that’s not it. I actually really was, a lot. But it was very clear in the beginning that we were just going to be best friends. She was smart, had an artistic bent, and as a teenager was already taking stunning photographs.

  Not fitting into any one group—but getting along with them all—had its advantages. It meant I didn’t alienate any of them, and so just like in La Jolla, I had luck with student politics: I was elected class president.

  That didn’t bode well with administrators, who thought I would lead a faction of rebellious students. They had reason to worry. When Principal Ray Ruppel banned the popular FOOTHILL 69 T-shirts (from Foothill Community College) due to their “inappropriate” sexual reference, I used my skills as a silk screener to manufacture FOOTHILL 69½ T-shirts. Ruppel tried to discipline me for the stunt, but I pointed out to him that he only banned “69 shirts.” (Interestingly, at the time I didn’t even know what 69 meant.) But nothing prepared him for my next act of defiance.

  On November 22, 1963, I stood behind a podium and presided over a student assembly in the auditorium. I was a senior, just six months away from graduation. Every student at Palo Alto High was looking at me, hanging on my every word. I had never felt more hopeful and in control of my future. Principal Ruppel materialized offstage and waved me over. I excused myself from the stage and walked up to him to ask what possible reason he could have for interrupting me.

  He said President Kennedy had been assassinated. I froze. He told me it was my duty to inform the students. I refused. I didn’t return to the stage. I walked out of the building and off campus and didn’t return for days.

  I headed for the mountains with classmates Rich Godfrey and Jeffi
e Page. The three of us broke into a shack in a closed ski area. It was easy to imagine the hut as part of a tiny city or village—but a village that had been abandoned, as if its inhabitants had left in a hurry, their hut-dwelling civilization having crumbled under the pressure of some unknown force. Rich and Jeffie thought we should drink the hope right out of us and passed a bottle around. JFK, the one leader we truly believed in, was gone.

  Winter was approaching, and in the cold shack we sipped whiskey. I didn’t drink much. (I actually hated alcohol, even though I knew it was uncool to; I used to pour beer all over me and try to act drunk.) The sky outside the window was a dull, overcast white. All the shadows had disappeared. There in the forest, exactly twenty years after my father had joined our country’s effort to end World War II, and after our bombs killed all those people—and less than a decade after I fell in love with the desert and its shadows—the world looked ugly, drained of purpose.

  I didn’t know more war was coming. I didn’t know war would always be coming. And I didn’t know that my life would always be intimately tied to it and to death. For now I tipped back the bottle and observed Rich and Jeffie. They looked drunk. I wondered if I did.

  4

  “ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?”

  It was only September, but the snow fell hard in the Mile High City when I got off the train and slogged my trunk to the University of Denver. I knocked on the door at Skyline Hall, an old apartment complex on campus. I was almost scared to see inside. The arrangement was four guys—me and three strangers—crammed into a two-bedroom space.

  It was my dad who suggested I attend the University of Denver. He had spoken to some of his academic friends at Stanford and asked if they knew of a school for an average kid, not too smart but good-hearted. They told him DU was a good college with small classes and up-and-coming professors.

  So on September 1, 1964, I left Palo Alto on the train. I didn’t know anyone in Denver and had never been there. I just knew it was far away from home. The only thing I remember about the train ride was getting into an argument with some guy about Barry Goldwater. (I loved Goldwater’s independence but despised his politics.)

  At Skyline Hall a black guy answered the door. Back home, despite the town’s liberal academic facade, African Americans lived on one small street or across the highway in East Palo Alto. There were only two or three black kids at Palo Alto High, and I didn’t know them.

  The guy at the door introduced himself as Steve Rhodes from Washington, DC. We shared a bedroom and quickly became friends. He and I later started the Denver chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and were members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE). I was the only white person in the local chapter of CORE. (My dad didn’t like my affiliation with these groups. Back in the 1950s he had seen people lose their government and civilian jobs after joining radical, left-wing groups. “You are throwing away your future,” he told me more than once.)

  But my dad’s professor friends were right about DU. The school was a perfect fit for me. I had always done better in a small pool rather than the ocean. I grew to love studying. I learned to love books: the smell, the feel, the contents. DU has a beautiful old library—Tudor style with huge cracked leather chairs and green table lamps on rectangular oak reading tables. I spent hours in the main room and in the stacks. I actually had a brain, it turned out, and I could use it. To put it simply, I fell in love with learning.

  But all through freshmen year I still had the nagging sense that I didn’t fit in. That feeling reached a peak at a party at some rich guy’s house, a sea of Brooks Brothers shirts and Bass penny loafers. They were listening to some music, the Mamas and the Papas, and I had this deep experience of not belonging. These were not the people I felt comfortable around or related to. Sure, I liked pink button-down shirts, still do, but the rest of the trust-fund scene was vapid and dull. I left the party and climbed a nearby tree. Up in the branches I realized I was homesick. I missed Michael. He was still in the Bay Area attending Foothill Community College on a track scholarship.

  A few days later I checked with the athletic department at DU and asked if they’d be interested in Michael next year. I called Michael, and I put the two together. By the following fall he was at DU with me, on a track scholarship.

  We rented an apartment. Man, it was fun. Michael loved Denver. He loved being away from home. We rented 50cc motor scooters at a gas station and took them up in the mountains, zipping around on the trails. Michael was the funniest person I’ve ever known in my life—lots of stuff that seems juvenile now but at the time had me laughing uncontrollably. We had a buffet line in the cafeteria at school, one of those all-you-can-eat types. There’d be a woman in front of him, a middle-aged woman, and he’d say, “Tickle your ass with a feather?”

  And she’d turn around and go, “What?”

  And he’d say, “Particularly nasty weather!”

  One of the first things Michael wanted to do when he joined me in Colorado was start a band. He came home one afternoon with a fake Fender bass, ugly and poorly made. He shoved it into my lap and said he was going to teach me to play the bass for a new act he was forming, the Crystal Palace Guard. Two weeks later I was playing bass onstage. Our six-person band had a unique sound—blues, rock, folk—with a killer harmonica player, an amazing guitar player (Michael), and a female singer (Chris Williamson) who also played harpsichord.

  We started out performing shows at bars in Aspen and Vail. No easy feat in the winter: a six-hour drive to Aspen over snowy Loveland Pass, ten thousand feet high, all six of us and our cheap equipment packed into a broken-down Corvair van (my new wheels) and Michael’s Rambler station wagon.

  We eventually signed on with two Denver promoters, Kent and Earl, who bought us expensive new equipment—Kustom amplifiers, a brand new House of Theatre PA system—and gave me money to purchase a real bass, a Gibson EB-0. They bought Chris Williamson a Baldwin electric harpsichord.

  Within six months we were playing four to five nights a week all over Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, New Mexico, and once in Texas. At the same time we were all in college full time and pulling A and B averages. The pay was very little at first, $100 split six ways, but as we gained more attention and acceptance we sometimes made $750 to $1,500 per week.

  Kent and Earl were also the main concert producers in and around Denver. They teamed up with Chet Helm, who owned The Family Dog—an influential venue in San Francisco—and set up shop in an old ballroom in Denver that he called—what else?—The Family Dog. Helms and his partners put a lot of money into the building, and it was beautiful, with a top-notch sound system and a professional platform for the obligatory light show. He even imported talent from San Francisco to run the lights.

  All the big acts played there: the Doors, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead, Them with Van Morrison, and the Kinks. Our band opened for a lot of those groups, and we sometimes played with them in the park during the daytime. A Denver Post piece about a July 30, 1967, show in Washington Park reviewed us more favorably than the Dead and Captain Beefheart. Of course this wasn’t accurate. No way were we better than those guys. But the local band got the local love. The press referred to the Crystal Palace Guard as Denver’s answer to Jefferson Airplane.

  Unlike the rest of the band, I wasn’t a real musician, but my organizational skills and technical know-how secured my spot. I could fix almost any problem with the amplifiers and sound system, and I made sure we got to the jobs on time and not too stoned. After a few problems I instituted an “If you’re wired, you’re fired” policy, only breaking it a few times myself. (Once while performing at Colorado State University, I was so blessed by the ganja, I stopped playing to listen to how beautiful the music was. Michael yelled at me after a few minutes, and I started playing again.)

  The Doors played at The Family Dog on September 29, 1967. I sat on the floor with Jim Morrison in the greenroom as he wrote poe
try on toilet paper and paper towels. He was, as usual, withdrawn, sullen, and drunk—no drugs, just a lot of alcohol. Kent and Earl had tasked me with babysitting the Lizard King.

  He refused to play until he got more alcohol. The stores were closed, so I went around to all my college friends’ homes and returned with an assortment of cheap college-kid booze: Spanada and other fortified wine. He drank it all, much of it from both sides of his mouth at once, and stumbled onstage with his trademark white cotton peasant shirt and tight black leather pants. We surrounded the stage and had orders to jump him if he started taking his clothes off. The police were also next to the stage awaiting orders from one Detective Love, a Denver Police Department narc who sniffed around the periphery of all our activities. (The light show would flash WELCOME BROTHER LOVE to warn of his presence whenever he showed up.)

  Morrison did a few numbers and then lurched into “Break on Through,” sticking his hands down his pants to rub his very noticeable hard-on as he looked at a beautiful young woman in the crowd and said, “Be my hand!” He fell on the stage and began to scream the lyrics as he was mounting the floor, the microphone, and the stage lights. He made it through the night without getting arrested, and it was a breathtaking performance.

  On Valentine’s Day 1968 Kent and Earl put on a Jimi Hendrix show at Regis College in Denver, and I was given the thankless job of running the PA system without enough or adequate equipment. Hendrix got mad at me but finished the show. As usual I was also given the job of babysitting.

  Michael, Michael’s girlfriend Mary, and I took Jimi and one of his roadies all over Denver so they could find drugs. In Larimer Square they found what they wanted: heroin. Jimi was, like Morrison, obsessed with sex and women. We had to protect Mary and many other women during our two-day babysitting job.

  While in Larimer Square, Mary, Michael, Jimi, and I came across a Native American antique store. (The roadie headed to a bar.) Michael and I waited outside while Mary and Jimi went into the store. Jimi returned with the most beautiful antique Navajo Concho belt, which had cost him $5,000. I took a photo of Michael, Mary, and Jimi with the belt. (He appeared with the belt in concert photos and on album covers after that.) More than a decade later my connection to Hendrix and that day would come up again in an extraordinary moment in Seattle. But that’s a story for later.