Author: milleravenuemusings

I am a semi-retired actor, singer and graphic designer who once designed posters for Bill Graham's legendary Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco in the late 1960s.

Being Taken Into Custody

Previously in Miller Avenue Musings:  It is the summer of 1967 in Mill Valley where I have stayed up all night talking with poster artist Wes Wilson.

As I left Wes and Eva’s house on Locust Avenue it was a beautiful summer’s morning.  The sun shone brightly in a clear blue sky.  Taking a left through their garden gate, I walked up the hill to Blithedale where I turned right, heading in an easterly direction.   

   My madness had evolved.  I was now convinced that I was a messiah, put on this earth to solve all the problems of humankind.  If that seems a slightly tall order for a drug crazed twenty year old hippie, it was.  But in my fevered state of mind, it all made perfect sense.   Important people would be landing at the airport in San Francisco and driving north on Highway 101.  My thinking was that I must meet them at the highway.

   At the junction of Blithedale and Camino Alto, I cut through the railroad tracks where I had walked to and from school at Alto and Edna Maguire so many times as a kid.  I was excited by the idea of meeting all these people who clearly had the best interests of the planet earth in their hearts and minds.  Amongst their number was, I felt certain, The Beatles, or at least John Lennon, if not all four.  I had the entire LP of Sgt Pepper dancing through my head at this time and felt certain that they would be part of this mobilisation.  Another tall order, I grant you, but making perfect sense to me in my ridiculous state of mind.

   I walked along the tracks until they met Lomita then turned right and headed for the highway.  At the overpass, I positioned myself on the sidewalk overlooking the northbound traffic.  The rush hour had begun and the southbound traffic was one huge slow moving mass but I was totally oblivious to it.  I kept my gaze focussed on the horizon where the highway snaked to the left at Richardson Bay.  I was in a very calm state and kept a beady eye on the traffic.  I must have been there about an hour because a Highway Patrol officer had spotted me 45 minutes earlier and when he saw me again, he stopped to talk to me.  My state of mind was to accept everything I encountered and the Highway Patrol officer was very friendly as I recall.  I told him I’d finally had a good trip on acid and probably babbled something about the caravan of vehicles coming from the airport.  He told me he would be taking me to the county jail in San Rafael and that he’d have to handcuff me which I accepted.  I then sat in the back of his vehicle as he drove us north to the county jail which was underneath the San Rafael courthouse. 

   I had been booked into Marin County jail the previous year when I was arrested in Mill Valley for being in a car where marijuana was found.  I spent one extremely miserable night in the communal male cell and it had been a bleak and depressing experience.  This time, however, they simply put me in a room where I waited until the ambulance guys got there.  Before too long they arrived and I was strapped onto a stretcher with wheels.  

   The guy who sat in the back of the ambulance with me as we drove north towards Napa must have heard many a mad person quack on about saving the world.  Perhaps he secretly hoped that one of them would reveal a great truth, for he pumped me with very specific questions all the way to Napa.  Sadly I cannot recall his questions but I definitely formed the opinion that he was hedging his bets in case one of these crazy patients turned out to be the real messiah.

From left: a California Highway Patrol car, the Marin County Court House and the entrance to Napa State Hospital.

   Ever since childhood I remember that the word ‘Napa’ was synonymous with crazy people.  My father Blackie had a vast vocabulary of slang nicknames which he used to describe practically all things.  A mental hospital would be a laughin’ academy in his colourful lexicon.  Yet most of the people I befriended there were surprisingly normal seeming.  I was given a bed in what looked like an ordinary hospital ward.  The guy in the next bed on my right was very nice and we became friends.  We never discussed why we were there.  To be honest I had no idea why I was there.  It was just an interesting experience I was going through.  I accepted everything that came my way.

    Almost immediately I was given medication which I think was Thorazine and the nurses would come to me with pills several times a day.

   The staff were very friendly and I soon learned from them that their already difficult jobs had been made much harder by the budget cuts introduced by the recently elected California governor, Ronald Reagan.  Reagan had targeted mental health and higher education for his budget cuts and the impact was being felt.  

Ronald Reagan, elected as Governor of California in 1966.

   His election as governor the previous year had been the first step in what he and his financial backer, car dealer Holmes Tuttle, saw as the road to the White House.  Reagan’s victory in California was a sign of what was to come in America.  His speech in support of Barry Goldwater in 1964 had put him on the political map.  The senator from Arizona ran unsuccessfully against Lyndon Johnson for the presidency and advocated the use of nuclear weapons in the war in Vietnam.  Reagan made similar statements once he was in the governor’s mansion.  So now, with actual power, he set about his attack on university students and the mentally ill.

Three faces of Ronald Reagan.

   A committee called Marinites Interested in the Mentally Ill made a report.  Its members observed overcrowding and unrealistic patient loads at three state mental hospitals serving Marin County.  The group toured Mendocino, Sonoma and Napa hospitals and now that Reagan’s budget cuts were beginning to bite, they planned to make monthly inspections.  The Marinites complained that dismissal of institutional and treatment staff was detrimental to patient care.  At Mendocino they noted that outings to the beach, an effective therapy for patients, would no longer happen since the dismissal of an automobile maintenance man.  The loss of janitors had meant trained technicians switched from patient care to cleaning up with brooms.  A registered nurse was pressed into service pushing a food cart, “when she is needed by patients,” the report stated.

   At Napa hospital, the paperwork had increased by 500% due to new programmes like Medicare and Medi-Cal yet the budget cuts got rid of so many office staff that psychiatric workers were doing their own stenographic work as well as their main jobs.  One of the psychologists whose caseload had increased overnight from 130 to 230 complained: “I’m no longer a psychologist.  I am a caretaker.”

A newspaper article about the Marinites and the leafy entrance to the hospital.

   So the staff at Napa were overstretched.  One economy measure was to close the laundry one day a week, but this meant they couldn’t provide the optimum number of bed and diaper changes for their patients.  I don’t recall a staff member being unfriendly but they were all overworked and a bit distracted.  My time at Napa was interesting and I don’t remember any boredom or depression on my part.  It was all an enormous adventure and I was enjoying it.  

   Outside the walls of Napa State Hospital there was a lot going on in the world.  In Vietnam the Viet Cong launched a huge rocket attack on the enormous US air base at Da Nang, killing 13 and wounding 173 others.  The rockets, fired with deadly accuracy from a nearby mountain, set the air base ablaze, destroying three barracks and a score of aircraft worth an estimated $48 million.  War on the streets of the USA erupted in Newark, New Jersey as National Guardsmen and police battled black rioters firing rifles and submachine guns.  For the first time the guardsmen were using live ammunition which brought the death toll to 16 people killed.  Later in the summer, rioting would also break out in Detroit, Michigan.  I, however, was aware of none of this.  If I was going to save the world it was going to have to be without knowing what the hell was going on in the world.

Two newspaper clippings. On the left the Viet Cong attack on the US Air Base in Da Nang and on the right the rioting in Newark.

   That I had been picked up by the Highway Patrol on the overpass was reported in the Independent Journal, the afternoon newspaper in Marin County.  The news item about me was tucked away on page eleven under the headline: ‘Admitted LSD Taker Is Held.’  The article was wrong about the time of day.  The reporter must have misheard the Highway Patrol officer and written it as evening whereas it was very early in the morning.

   One subscriber who saw the story was Nona Kaufmann.  Mrs Kaufmann was alarmed to read about me and brought it to the attention of her daughter Janice.  Jan and I had dated at Tam High and I knew her mother fairly well.  The Kaufmanns lived in Strawberry on the other side of the highway.  

   I had first met Jan one evening in the back seat of a VW Beetle driven by Mark Symmes.  Mark, who was accompanied by a young woman in the front passenger seat, drove us up Edgware to the junction of four corners where there was a big space to park.  I have no memory of why I was in the back seat next to Janice, who I did not know.  I also don’t recall who the young lady with Mark was, but once he’d parked the vehicle, they began making out.  I turned to the young woman on my right and instantly found myself in a passionate embrace.  This was the start of a pretty steady relationship which lasted the rest of my time at Tamalpais High.  Without realising it, I fell in love with Jan.  The reason I didn’t realise it was that I was constantly putting on a front as a lady’s man at school with much flirtation.  I wasn’t aware that I subconsciously put Janice on a pedestal while other women were, I felt, there to be treated in a cavalier fashion.

   I remember Jan asking me what I was going to do with my life and it concerned her that I had no idea.  I remember her father Stephen becoming alarmed at the fact that I bought an expensive sweater for her at Christmas from J Magnin’s in San Francisco.  “This seems serious,” Jan quoted Mr Kaufmann as saying.  

   When I went to sea right after my graduation it was actually my first proper time away from home and I returned, a very changed person, to a Mill Valley which had been transformed.  Most young people were now smoking marijuana, in stark contrast to what the place was like only a few months before.  The short haircuts which were part of a uniform look for young men was no longer the norm as most guys had long hair.  One school friend who had previously looked very collegiate, now resembled Sonny Bono of Sonny and Cher.  He talked of the hidden drug messages in Bob Dylan’s lyrics and how the name “The Lovin’ Spoonful” referred to heroin use.  He spoke enthusiastically of all this as if drug use was a political movement.

   I fell out of touch with Janice during this period.  At the time I was picked up by the Highway Patrol, she was a student at UC Davis and was shown the I-J article by her mother on a weekend visit home.

   Jan visited me at Napa which must have been very strange for her.  She was directed to my ward where she found me surrounded by a group of men, all eager to talk to someone.  These guys apparently were pretending to take their medication rather than actually swallowing the pills.  They offered handfuls of tablets to Jan.  Two of them told her they behaved crazy to avoid being put in jail.  Jan and I wandered through the restricted outdoor area followed, she remembers, by “this posse of fellows.”  Though these guys were not taking their medication, I clearly was, as Jan remembers me as medicated but delusional.  I talked about saving the world with John Lennon and John Sebastian.  This crazy notion took quite a bit of time to fade from my conscious mind.  Looking back on it, I’m truly grateful to Jan for visiting me at the hospital.  She was and still is a good friend.

   One thing I didn’t know at the time was that my father Blackie was there at the hospital almost every day of my three week incarceration.  He did make appearances when others visited, like my sister Kate, but I had no idea of his presence on a day to day basis.

   I was a very passive patient who, when instructed to do something by the staff would oblige.  On occasion strange impulses would appear within me like suddenly taking all my clothes off and standing naked in the corridor.  This didn’t happen often but when it did, a staff member would arrive and gently tell me to put my clothes back on, which I did.  I remember being locked in an empty hall where I walked up and down singing my pretty near perfect imitation of John Lennon doing Day In The Life from the Sgt Pepper album.  

   There was no radio at Napa, so the three weeks I spent there I didn’t hear the Top 40.  I missed the fact that Light My Fire by the Doors climbed the hit parade as did the ghastly San Francisco by Scott McKenzie.  I never heard Up Up and Away by the Fifth Dimension or Don’t Sleep in the Subway by Petula Clark.  I was stuck with Sgt Pepper going through my head.  

   In the hospital every door to the outside world was locked and in that way, all of us patients were prisoners.  I got into the habit of trying every door in case it wasn’t locked.  One morning I turned the knob on a door leading out into the garden and found that it opened.  I walked out and closed the door behind me.  I found myself on a neatly trimmed lawn.  I walked across the grass and kept going.  I passed administrative looking buildings and eventually came to a street.  I turned left and walked until I arrived at a bus stop.  I don’t believe I was there long for very soon a bus arrived.  I got on and for some reason I wasn’t challenged to produce a ticket or money.  So I found a seat in the rear of the bus and sat down, looking out the window and watching the beautiful scenery go by.  I had no idea where I was going.

To be continued.

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Talking All Night in Mill Valley

Previously in Miller Avenue Musings:  It is the summer of 1967 in San Francisco and I, having taken the drug STP, have flipped out and gone crazy.

In the second day of my madness I returned to my parents’ apartment on Union Street after a visit to Bob McClay’s office.  I don’t remember if it was my parents or myself that contacted Wes Wilson but I do remember that he arrived in the late afternoon and drove me back to his house in Mill Valley.

   He and his wife Eva, who’d recently given birth to their son Colin, lived in a nice house on Locust Avenue just below East Blithedale.  The house was set back from the road and as you entered from the street through a gate you followed the path through a pretty lawn.

Three photos of Wes with his wife Eva (and baby Colin) at different stages of their life together.

   Eva was in bed breast feeding her baby.  After saying hello, Wes and I went upstairs to his studio.  He lit a joint and we started talking.  He engaged in every topic I raised and questioned me in depth.  He clearly was interested in what I had to say whereas most of my friends had, by this time, started making excuses to avoid talking to me.  It was as though all the doors in my mind had flown open at once and I stammered from subject to subject with great haste, but Wes took each subject I touched on and examined it forensically.

   By the summer of 1967 Wes Wilson was the most prominent of the psychedelic poster artists working on the San Francisco scene.  Before I knew him, his posters had inspired me to send off samples of my own work to Bill Graham which got me my first job for him, painting the boards at the top of the stairs at the Fillmore which advertised the coming attractions.  Bill could only confirm his bookings two weeks in advance so I was always doing my boards that far ahead.

   The first time I met Wes was on one of his Friday afternoon deliveries of that week’s Fillmore posters.  He’d come up the stairs carrying a sizeable brown package full of posters, fresh from the printer.  Bill would get his ladder out and staple about seven of them along the wall above the staircase.  Wes was a very friendly fellow in contrast to Bill who was all business and brusque in his presence.  Bonnie and Jim Haynie seemed to like Wes a lot but Bill, who never interfered with Wes’s way of working, would stare at the new poster and say nothing.  

   On that first occasion I was all over Wes with questions about how he did his work.  I was quite surprised to learn that he worked small and enlarged: meaning that his art work was smaller than the printed poster.  He was very encouraging to me and talked about his desire to purchase an airbrush when he could afford it.  I had never heard of such a thing and even after I examined one down at Flax’s, I still had no idea what you did with it.  

   The first Wes Wilson poster I ever saw was while I was a student at College of Marin, doing my comic strip Captain Campus in the Tower Times.  The headline was Batman with a cartoon of Batman and Robin advertising three nights of gigs at the Fillmore which Bill Graham was producing with Quicksilver Messenger Service and The Great Society.  Also advertised were “Batman movies chapters 1 – 2 – 3.”  The great success of the ABC Television series  Batman starring Adam West had spawned a craze for everything to do with the caped crusader and the three chapters in question were from the 1940s serials which I had seen at the Sequoia’s Saturday matinees as a kid.  I’d recently sat through a showing of all of them at a North Beach cinema thinking they would be as good as I’d recalled but sadly, seeing them all in one sitting, they were numbingly dull.  One advantage of the very funny new TV series was how good the costumes were.  In the cheapo 1940s serials they were dreadful.

From left: Lewis Wilson as Batman in the 1940s serial; Adam West as Batman in the 1966 TV show; Wes Wilson’s poster; Title card for the 1940s serial.

   The next poster by Wes to catch my attention was a brightly coloured orange and red design in which the letters fit stylishly into the shape of a human head.  Headlined a “Blues-Rock Bash” it featured The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Jefferson Airplane.  Again this was a Bill Graham production happening one night in a gymnasium and two nights at the Fillmore.  I think it was this poster which convinced me that I could do this and inspired me to write to Bill.

Three early Wes Wilson posters. The middle one inspired me to think I could do this kind of art work.

   By the time I finally started working at the Fillmore, Wes had done so many posters that it could already be considered a body of work.  Of course he was also still doing artwork for Bill’s rivals over at the Avalon Ballroom, the Family Dog.  Bill paid him on time and didn’t interfere with his concepts, unlike Chet Helms over at the Avalon, and this eventually made him work exclusively for the Fillmore while an artist named Stanley Mouse took over the Avalon work.  

   Wes had designed the original logo for the Family Dog.  Ever since I was a young boy I’ve been a fan of good logos.  Be it for Warner Brothers, Chevrolet Motors or Coca Cola, it was a subject on which I had very strong opinions and the Family Dog logo was, in my opinion, an excellent piece of work.  A good logo must travel, meaning that it looks good big or small and is always familiar whenever you see it.  The Family Dog logo adorned all the Avalon posters done by Wes, Mouse and all the others who followed them.

From left: The Family Dog logo that Wes designed; A poster he designed for a gig at the Avalon; Wes with his son Jason in 1987 – the two painted this enlarged version of the poster to be displayed in the Hard Rock Cafe in San Francisco.

   Wes got his start in the design business when he was living at the very bohemian Wentley Hotel on the fringes of the Tenderloin district in San Francisco.  A friend introduced him to someone who was running a print shop for an insurance firm and was on the hunt for an artist with design skills.  This guy was impressed by his drawings and they went into business together as Contact Printing.  Wes was doing the layouts and handling the printing as well.  A personal project he produced at this time was the “Are We Next?” posters.   He had them printed and took several over to Berkeley for a big anti-Vietnam War rally at which he saw Allen Ginsberg.  The famous beat poet told him he thought the imagery of a swastika lodged within the stars and stripes was “too paranoid.”

From left: Wes pictured with his poster “Are We Next?”; the poster itself; Wes signing copies at a poster convention years later.

   Wes was later visited by a delegation from the Anti-Defimation League who were concerned that the poster might be anti semitic.  Wes assured them it wasn’t, introducing them to his wife Eva.  “She’s Jewish,” he said.  “I love her dearly.  We’re having a baby soon.  Her father was a screenwriter.  One of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten.”  By the time they left they were satisfied that Wes was not a Nazi sympathiser.

   Somewhere along the line at Contact Printing, Wes did the posters for the Trips Festival at the Longshoreman’s Hall which brought him to the attention of Chet Helms.  Chet ran The Family Dog, which was producing weekend concerts at Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium.  He and Graham would produce alternate weekends.  Wes did the poster for what turned out to be a sold out sensation featuring the Butterfield Blues Band.

Three early Family Dog posters by Wes Wilson.

   The business arrangement between Chet Helms and Bill Graham came to a shuddering halt after Graham got up early the Monday morning after the sold out weekend and phoned Albert Grossman in New York to negotiate an exclusive deal for himself to promote all future Butterfield shows.  When Helms realised what Bill had done he dissolved their partnership and started doing shows at the Avalon.  While painting my boards at the Fillmore I heard all Bill’s phone calls as he wasn’t remotely shy and retiring and one thing he’d say many times was: “What Chet doesn’t realise is that you’ve got to get up in the morning.”

   My first day working at the Fillmore was just after the Andy Warhol weekend. Bonnie MacLean told me all about it and Wes’s poster for that event is one of my favourites.  If you look on the Wes Wilson website he tells an amusing tale about Andy Warhol paying him a visit at the house on Locust.  They were both interviewed on a radio station in San Francisco and afterwards Warhol asked Wes where he could find some “fun” activity.  The only suggestion he could come up with was paying him a visit in Mill Valley to talk about art.  “Andy looked so utterly bored at that prospect,” said Wes, “that my impression was that he would not be taking me up on my offer – but I passed him my address and phone number just in case.”  Exhausted from several late night poster jobs, Wes drove home and went straight to bed.  About 8pm he was woken by strangers at his front door asking if this was Wes Wilson’s place.  Wes was in his pyjamas as a stream of creatures, including Andy Warhol spilled out of a limousine parked in the street and proceeded to party.

Three Wes Wilson posters for Bill Graham at the Fillmore Auditorium.

   One artist that Wes introduced me to was the German illustrator Heinrich Kley.  He used Kley’s pen and ink drawings of turtles playing musical instruments on his poster for the band The Turtles who appeared at the Fillmore in July, 1966.  This inspired me to purchase a book of his drawings which were wonderfully surreal.  Kley drew beautiful pen and ink drawings of various animals doing improbable things.  Elephants ice skating, alligators dancing with bears, and the turtles which Wes had used, playing stringed instruments and a tambourine.

Another three Fillmore posters for Bill Graham including the one on the right featuring illustrations by Heinrich Kley.

   Wes introduced a style of lettering that I thought he’d simply invented, but subsequently learned that it was based on a typeface crafted by Austrian painter and graphic designer Alfred Roller at the beginning of the 20th century.  The first time I saw this style of lettering was on one my favourite posters by Wes: a double bill of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore.  This poster also taught me what Wes was up to with his airbrush.  It featured two photos of the bands which were outlined in a cloud like halftone shape which had clearly been achieved with the airbrush.  I also believe that this was the first time Wes had used bleed for its borders.  Whereas all his previous posters had white borders, the navy blue background of this one bled off beyond the trim marks.  With a few exceptions, Wes continued to bleed his borders for the rest of the posters he did for Bill Graham.

Three Fillmore posters featuring the lettering style of Alfred Roller.

   Wes continued to use the Alfred Roller style of lettering and it is associated with his work.  His illustrations were also very striking.  Many artful nude females adorned several of the posters and to my mind they all resembled Eva.  Wes had a command of colour which was impressive.  For the Fillmore and Avalon posters he rarely used more than two colours and how he used them was interesting.  For the “Sin Dance” poster for the Family Dog he only had red and green but by printing most of the red over the green it gave a black and by having the logo reversed out of the red it made it white.  So the effect was four colours rather than the  two actually used.  

   Of course Wes understood the printing process thoroughly and was able to innovate, often pushing his printers to try things they normally wouldn’t do.  When he designed the poster for The Association with the flaming letters, the printer rang him up to say that they were getting a little white line around the letters.  Wes had a look and decided it was an attractive effect.

   The relationship with Bill Graham eventually turned sour.  Usually Bill was very honourable about paying people on time and in full but he did suffer occasional spasms of greed.  The late Jim Haynie remembers him regularly violating the fire regulation limit to sneak more paying customers into the Fillmore often via the fire escape.  It soon became clear that the sales of his posters were a going concern.  When I asked my friend John Goddard, who ran Village Music in Mill Valley, how many Fillmore posters and handbills he sold, his reply was:  “More than you would think.”  People were now collecting them.  

   Wes had been copyrighting each poster as it came out but Bill wanted to formalise the arrangement with a contract.  So Bill and Wes sat down and worked out a deal.  They drew up a contract which Wes signed, granting him 6% per poster.  “But then he broke the agreement right away,” said Wes.  “An article came out in TIME Magazine reporting that he’d sold 100,000 posters.”  So Wes went to see him with a few friends demanding his royalties.  He said he was due $6,000 on one particular poster.  “He got all upset,” remembers Wes, “And we went from being friends in the morning to being enemies that afternoon.”

   Although Wes was a political pacifist, he, like Graham, had been in the military and could fight.  When things got heated with Bill he suggested that they step outside and settle things with fisticuffs.  “Bill Graham said okay to that,” said Wes.  “And as we walked out the door onto the sidewalk, Bill quickly turned around, locked the door behind him and disappeared up the stairs.  From that day on, he continued to cheat me out of lots of money by not honouring our honestly agreed-to and mutually signed agreement.”

   Wes sought advice from a few lawyers and they all said that because he’d left his signed contract in Bill’s trust without a copy of his own, he might as well forget it.  “Bill had shown himself to be a lying crook rather than an honest person,” said Wes.  “That’s how I lost all of my respect for Bill Graham.”

Three photos of Wes Wilson throughout the years.

   This incident must have occurred after I had visited Bill at the Fillmore in mid 1968 on my return from a European trip.  I wanted to get royalties on my four Fillmore posters.  He went upstairs to look at the books and returned to write me a cheque for a few hundred dollars.

   But back in the summer of 1967, as Wes and I talked through the night up in his studio, such concerns were not on the table.  We talked about everything from societal politics to human sexuality.  Finally as the sun started rising Wes excused himself and went to bed.  I walked out on their front porch as the first light of morning settled gently over the beautiful lowlands of Mill Valley.  The fever in my brain convinced me that something important was happening.  People were coming from all over the world to meet me.  I walked down the path to the wooden gate and, opening it, stepped onto the sidewalk of Locust then up to East Blithedale.  The sun was now coming up as I headed towards Highway 101 with a great sense of purpose.

To be continued…

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A Flip of the Lid, chapter 8

It was July, 1967 in San Francisco and I was now in my second day of madness, having taken what I believe was a dose of the dangerous drug STP.  I was possessed by a conviction that there was someone coming to see me who I was meant to meet.  Having gone to the Haight Ashbury district with my father Blackie in the hope of meeting this person, I gave up after half an hour of wading through an ocean of hippies.  Back at our apartment in North Beach, I decided to go out for a walk.

   I wandered down Union Street to Washington Square and turned right on Columbus, passing many Italian restaurants, crossing Broadway with its topless nightclubs and City Lights, the best bookshop in North Beach.  I made my way to the mini flat-iron Columbus Tower building on the corner of Kearny.  There was a Zim’s Burger bar on the ground floor which I always enjoyed eating at.  But a Zim’s burger was not of interest to me on this occasion.  I made my way up to the second floor and paid a visit to Bob McClay at the Tempo office.  I had met Bob through my friend Jo Bergman who was working with him and Sue Cox at Tempo earlier in the year.  

   Tempo was a tip sheet for top 40 radio stations and it was owned by legendary disc jockey ‘Big Daddy’ Tom Donahue.  Sue and Bob had produced the weekly tip sheet and Jo answered the phones and ran the office.  

Three photos of Bob McClay and a visual of the TEMPO Top 40 tip sheet

   Sue (now Susan Kirk) remembers: “McClay wrote the articles choosing whatever topic he deemed current and important about the music scene.  I chose the new records and reviewed the latest hits and artists.  We mailed 45’s from the week’s pick to over one hundred radio stations across the US and around the world.  DJ’s didn’t have access fast enough like we did so we really did radio a great service.  The artists benefited from what we did, getting their latest recordings on the air.”

   Tom Donahue had hired Sue, she remembers, because she had “a great ear for hits and Tom knew it.  As a boss Tom was exacting in what he wanted but was pretty hands off.  My dear friend Carl Scott who knew Tom well moved into the office above Tempo in Columbus Tower.”  

San Francisco DJ “Big Daddy” Tom Donahue pictured in centre with record producer Phil Spector and Righteous Brothers vocalist Bill Medley.

   Bob McClay was also now presenting a regular program on FM Radio KMPX.  I had visited him at the studio on Green Street about a month earlier while he did one of his shows.  I’d never been in a radio studio before and enjoyed chatting with him while the records played.  Clearly Bob had some experience in this line of work.  He was much more of a disc jockey than Larry Miller who I had first listened to on the station.

   In fact KMPX, which started its hippie output with Miller early in 1967, had now been transformed by Tom Donahue.  KMPX, had previously specialised in foreign language programming and had sold Larry Miller the graveyard slot of midnight to 6am.  His radio voice was friendly and unpretentious and the records he played were an interesting mix of folk, rock and blues which soon attracted a sizeable hippie audience for the FM station.  There was at this time a big distinction between AM and FM radio.  AM had a larger wavelength whereas FM stations were less mainstream.

   So Tom Donahue went to the management of KMPX and proposed that he would present the eight to midnight slot and that they should switch to 24 hours of the kind of music that Miller was playing.  They agreed and Bob McClay was one of the people Donahue recruited to the station.

From left: Bob McClay, Larry Miller, Tom Donahue at KMPX and at KYA with John Lennon.

   Though I was a regular listener to Miller’s show on KMPX I still listened to Top 40 which at this time was KFRC.  I had listened to pop music stations ever since I first discovered Radio KOBY in 1956 when I was nine years old.  Early Elvis, Pat Boone and Harry Belafonte hits kept me listening.  1950s pop was a very  broad church incorporating Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney and the big band sound of Elmer Bernstein. That station carried me through grade school into junior high when it was superseded by KEWB.  They played hits like Bobby Darin’s Mack The Knife, Poison Ivy by the Coasters and Misty by Johnny Mathis.  After The Beatles came along in 1964 and dominated the charts for a long time, KEWB suddenly found it had a rival in KYA.  Soul came into the mix with two stations: KDIA and KSOL.  From 1966 on it was KFRC that I listened to and by this time most soul artists were making the charts: Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, James Brown, Stevie Wonder and many more all crossed over to become Top 40 stars.  And up until his departure in 1965, Tom Donahue was one of the most popular DJs on KYA.

   Of course Donahue was an old fashioned Disc Jockey who had “Top 40” running through his veins.  Back when he was on KYA he would rattle off patter like: “It’s 2.20 KYA Home of the Hits time here at twelve sixty on your radio dial and here’s Sam Cooke with…”  But now on the hip FM station, he slowed things right down with his mellifluous deep voice: “You’re listening to KMPX where we’re changing the world.  That’s right man, we’re changing the world.”

From left: Tom Donahue when he first arrived at KYA in 1961, with Bill Graham in the late 1960s and a ticket for the final Beatles concert which he produced.

   An extremely big man in every sense, Donahue established himself as a DJ during the 1950s on station WIBG in Philadelphia.  In 1961, in the wake of the payola investigations which damaged many of the reputations of East Coast DJs, Donahue arrived at KYA in San Francisco where he was an instant hit.  In partnership with fellow DJ Bobby Mitchell, he formed Tempo Productions, putting on record hops and concerts.  They branched out into other businesses, forming a record company, opening a North Beach night club and investing in thoroughbred horse racing.  Donahue departed KYA in 1965 but stayed on in San Francisco to oversee his many business interests which included producing The Beatles final ever concert at Candlestick Park on August 29th, 1966.

From left: Ralph Gleason with the Beatles, Paul McCartney and Joan Baez, Lennon, Harrison & McCartney going on stage at Candlestick Park.

   Sue Cox remembers that she, McClay and Bobby Mitchell were all involved in the production of that final Beatles performance.  “Carl Scott and I stood 50 feet from the stage on the ground and wept together when they ended the concert.”

From left: The Fab Four crossing the baseball field, a poster for the event, Sue Cox pictured with Ringo and Wes Wilson’s poster for the concert.

   I never got to know Tom Donahue but met him in McClay’s office a few times.  Extremely tall and physically very weighty, I would see him around town, sometimes visiting Bill Graham at the Fillmore.  He made the transition from fast talking top 40 DJ to mellow presenter of folk and rock album tracks on FM radio.  Having grown a beard sometime during his tenure at KYA, Big Daddy now had very long hair as well but he didn’t convince my hippie friends in Marin that he was one of them.  

   All my friends and I were in our early twenties and considered the age of thirty to be very old indeed.  One friend sarcastically listed the three most important people in the hippie scene: “Bill Graham, Tom Donahue and Ralph Gleason.”  Bill was 36, Tom Donahue was 39 and Ralph Gleason, the jazz critic on the Chronicle was 50.

   Bob McClay, however, was a different kind of person altogether.  He was much more of a genuine enthusiast than a businessman.  Both McClay and Donahue were older than me and had been part of the beat generation.  Of course smoking weed had been going on forever but it always occurred in the mysterious world of beatniks and jazz musicians.  It wasn’t until the hippie era that it came out into the open.  I remember a pre-hippie article in MAD Magazine in 1960 in which Wally Wood drew fabulous pictures for a hip version of The Night Before Christmas.  It featured a Santa Claus with dark glasses and a very thin cigarette between his lips.  It opened with:  ’Twas the night before Christmas, and all thru the pad, Not a hipster was stirring, not even old Dad.  The chimney was draped in that stocking routine, in hopes that the fat man would soon make the scene.

A few of the fabulous illustrations by Wallace Wood for MAD Magazine’s hip version of The Night Before Christmas from 1960.

   In fact when my friend Jo Bergman first introduced me to Bob McClay we quickly discovered that we shared a passion for the cartoons of Wallace Wood in MAD Magazine.  Hanging out in Bob’s office was a fun way to spend time as he seemed able to do his work while chatting.  All the record companies would send them free discs which were scattered all over the place.  

   Among the discs which Bob gave me was John Sebastian’s first solo album called Tarzana Kid and, being a devoted Sebastian fan, I loved it.  He also gave me an LP of The Mugwumps, a band which preceded both the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Mamas and Papas.  It featured Denny Doherty, Cass Elliot, Zal Yanofsky, Jim Hendricks and John Sebastian and my favourite track was their vocal harmony performance of the old Coasters song Searchin’.  Another gift from McClay was an LP of British Cat Stevens which I loved.  I was particularly taken by I Love My Dog.  An album by The Who entitled A Quick One had the terrific song Boris The Spider.  McClay also introduced me to the Bee Gees with their single New York Mining Disaster 1941.  I had never heard of them and they sang just like The Beatles.

From left: John Sebastian’s Tarzana Kid, The Who’s A Quick One, Cat Stevens, The Mugwumps and the Bee Gees.

   Another person I encountered, both in Bill Graham’s little office at the Fillmore and at Bob McClay’s place was the photographer Jim Marshall.  Although I was in the same room with Marshall many times, he never spoke to me and never acknowledged my presence.  He was rather loud and opinionated.  There didn’t seem to be any subject on which this guy did not have an opinion.  While sitting in Graham’s office talking at him he constantly took photos of Bill. He did the same thing with Bob McClay.  

   While clicking snaps of McClay one afternoon, he mentioned John Philips of The Mamas and Papas.  Marshall had witnessed Philips refusing to sign autographs for some fans and describing such activity as “chicken shit.”  Marshall then railed against such attitudes: “That’s the price you pay,” he thundered in his overly audible manner.  “It comes with the territory.”  Whether or not he shared this opinion with Philips is  not known.  He then derided Marty Balin for describing the thrill of performing as like having sex.  He was basically a show business photographer who was in San Francisco at this time because it was the place to be.  I don’t recall Bill Graham or Bob McClay saying much in Marshall’s presence.  I think they would just quietly nod in agreement with whatever stridently stated opinions he would offer and get on with what they were doing as he snapped pictures of them.

Three shots of photographer Jim Marshall, in the centre with Ralph Gleason and the Beatles at Candlestick Park.

   So I paid a visit to Bob McClay in my now crazy state of mind.  Sue had left Tempo to be Music Director at Radio KRLA and had taken Jo with her.  Jo was filling time until Mick Jagger was ready for her to return to London to run the Rolling Stones’ office.  I’m now grateful that Jo and Sue weren’t there as it must have become immediately clear to Bob that I was not in my right mind.  I have no recollection of what nonsense I talked on this occasion but he skilfully managed to get rid of me without any unpleasantness.

   Back out on the street I walked up Columbus avenue, crossing Broadway where the Condor Club featured topless star Carol Doda, famous for having silicone implants to enlarge her breasts.  I knew this part of town pretty well.  Whenever I was working all night on a poster, I would take a break in the early hours and walk down to Broadway, observing the hustlers outside each club.  I was under 21 and looked much younger so they never tried to hustle me.  

   I did once visit one of these clubs to discuss doing a poster for them.  It was lunchtime and these two hefty expensively dressed men sat at a table with me while they ate their delicious looking steaks.  I had brought a layout pad with some sketches on it which they looked at as they chewed their medium rare beef.  I was reminded of a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movie called 3 Ring Circus in which Jerry, who was starving hungry, is being talked at by a circus boss who is eating his delicious breakfast of bacon and eggs.  As the boss talked he waved his bacon laden fork around in the air.  Lewis’s eyes and face moved with the bacon as the boss waved the fork.  Of course I wasn’t starving but it was a drag watching these two gangsters eat their succulent steaks in front of me without offering so much as a cup of coffee.  My father Blackie drummed into me that you should never eat in front of people without offering to share what you had.  This attitude was almost certainly a product of his experience of the depression, but these two goombahs suffered no such inhibition.  I never did do a poster for them.

   So I continued walking up Columbus towards Union Street.  By now I was in my second day of acting strangely and Blackie and Beth must have been very concerned about my mental health.  They had many close friends to turn to and I suspect that they contacted Alvah Bessie, a writer who they’d known for years. Alvah had fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and been one of the Hollywood Ten who went to prison in the early 1950s for defying the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.  Blacklisted like my parents, Alvah had carved out a job for himself at the Hungry i nightclub as stage manager and host introducing such acts as Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce.  

   Alvah’s daughter Eva was married to Fillmore poster artist Wes Wilson.  I don’t remember if I called Wes or if my parents did.  All I recall is Wes arriving at the apartment on Union Street and driving me back to their house in Mill Valley.  

To be continued. . . 

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The Summer of Love – Ch 7 – Going Off The Rails

During the Summer of Love in 1967, I flipped out on what I have always assumed was the drug LSD.  I truly went nuts and was picked up by the Highway Patrol out on the Tiburon Overpass and incarcerated in Napa State Hospital for 3 weeks.  In attempting to write about this experience many years later, I’ve done a great deal of research into the hippie phenomenon of that time and came across a drug which had its heyday in that summer of love.  It was called STP.

   The only thing I knew about the drug STP was what some hippie guy said over the microphone at a concert up at the Mountain Theatre which featured Eric Burdon.  This guy announced to the audience: “Eric Burdon is on STP.”

   This made no great impact on me at the time.  STP was the famous name of a car engine oil product but was borrowed for the monicker of this particular drug.  Years later, after reading an online article entitled: Learning about STP by Matthew J Baggott, I started to wonder about the drug that had knocked me off my rocker all those years ago.  This exhaustive essay started me thinking that maybe it was actually STP and not LSD that sent me off the rails in 1967.  I do know that another friend who took the same drug as I did, also had a very bad experience with it.

   STP, according to Baggott’s article “had a chemical structure like a hybrid of the stimulant amphetamine and the psychedelic mescaline.”  He went on to explain that it appealed to local acid producer Stanley Owsley as it could be “a gateway drug for ‘speed freaks’ to switch from addictive amphetamines to nonaddictive psychedelics.”

   It was Owsley who produced the first batches of STP which were devoured in the Haight Ashbury district.  The underground newspapers The Berkeley Barb and the San Francisco Oracle praised the new drug as a legal alternative to LSD (California had outlawed LSD in October, 1966).  Owsley even distributed it free at the Summer Solstice celebration in Golden Gate Park on 21st June, 1967.  It was after this event that the adverse reactions to STP began to appear.  According to Baggott: “The first case of STP intoxication seen at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic was a nineteen year old man who sought help after being up for two days.”  On that same evening, more than twenty three STP patients were treated at the clinic.  The clinic ultimately saw thirty two patients and another thirteen were treated at the SF General Hospital over the next few days.  Dr David E Smith, the Haight clinic’s founder, believed that for every patient who sought treatment, another thirty nine were riding out bad trips in the community.

Two photos inside the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic and one of their posters warning about STP. The eagle eyed amongst you might spot the photo from my Yardbirds poster on the wall in the photo on the right.

   Joining up with colleague Frederick Meyers, a UC Medical Centre pharmacologist, Smith and he held a press conference in June to warn of the dangers of STP.  In the press conference, Meyers and Smith stated that the greatest danger was that “giving chlorpromazine, the drug usually prescribed as an antidote for bad LSD trips, intensifies the potentially fatal side effects of STP.”  This fact inspired a sensational headline in the SF Chronicle: “A Warning on New Drug – STP Can Be Lethal.”

Two articles in the press about the dangers of STP and a photo of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.

   But as all these events were unfolding down in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, I was sitting at my drawing board up in North Beach trying to think of ideas for posters.  I quickly executed the logo of my signature as Tom Connell had suggested for I was pursuing my poster business idea with him.   In addition to regular weed smoking, I was still pining for a good experience with LSD and it wasn’t long before I found myself across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County where I acquired a capsule of acid.  

   There was a drinks party I attended at the Dreyfus household in Mill Valley.  Babbie and Barney Dreyfus knew how to throw a good bash and their house up in Blithedale Canyon was packed with interesting people, all getting plastered.  I found myself in conversation with Jared’s new partner Val, a good looking young woman from London.  Having now lived most of my adult life in London I am seriously embarrassed to report that I was insisting on doing bad imitations of English accents in her presence and she was patiently correcting me, insisting that no such accents existed.

   I don’t believe that Jar and Val had yet married but they soon did and went onto have two sons, Adam and Christian.  In the early to mid 1970s we had a good visit in London where I first met the boys and she probably doesn’t remember correcting my ghastly British accents.  

   After the party was over I stayed the night, crashing on their sofa and decided to take my capsule of LSD.  It was a very mild dose which, nonetheless, kept me up all night.  There was, adjacent to the Dreyfus living room, a large porch enclosed by windows with views of the sizeable garden below.  There were a few whicker chairs and several large plants in pots which I spent a good deal of time exploring.  For some reason I had the Jimi Hendrix single Purple Haze pounding through my head.  I guess I had been listening to it a lot and I very much liked that the instrumentation conjured up an image of large iron machinery at work.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience performing in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park. I witnessed this show from the street above.

  So this music played in my head over and over.  When the sun came up I heard Jar’s dad Barney coming downstairs for his breakfast before heading to the city for a day’s work at his office.

   The previous year Barney had helped me out of a jam when I had been arrested in Mill Valley for a marijuana offence and he dispatched one of his lawyers to sort things out.

   Not long after Barney had gone, I left the Dreyfus house and walked downtown.  I felt good.  It was said by people in my circle that one should let at least twelve days pass between LSD trips so your system could be cleansed of the drug.  So I was content that I would not be taking any acid again until such time had passed.  The sky was blue and the sun shone as I walked down West Blithedale towards the Bus Depot.  I made my way onto Miller Avenue and just past Brown’s Department Store, I stuck out my thumb.  Hitch-hiking was the way I commuted between Marin and San Francisco.  Before long I got a lift all the way into the city.

   Back at my drawing board in North Beach I sketched ideas for posters along the lines that Tom Connell and I had discussed.  It was on the second day of my LSD abstinence that a close friend from Mill Valley turned up at my parents’ apartment.  He had some acid and wanted me to take it with him.  I knew that I should wait out the full twelve days but he showed me two chunky white tablets. I wavered.  On a whim I decided to take it.  I got us glasses of water from the kitchen and we swallowed the pills.  The now familiar swirling visuals set in immediately. We decided to go to Mill Valley.  As we left the apartment, we stood for a moment on the steps leading down to Union Street.  I said to my friend: “We are gods visiting this planet.”  This marked the beginning of the madness which consumed my soul in the coming weeks.  We got in his VW Beetle and drove over to Marin.

   We went someplace on the lower slopes of Mount Tam where a group of our friends were sitting under a tree surrounded by hills covered in the long grass, bleached white by the summer sun.  In one of my mother Beth’s books she referred to “the warm hills of Marin” and it was this long grass which made that image so right.  I don’t remember which friends were there or what I said to them but I’m certain it was something weird.  The swirling visuals of the acid we’d taken wore off pretty quickly but the state of mind I found myself in persisted.

Some samples of Marin County grass in the summer.

   When I returned to North Beach in the evening I had become convinced that I was waiting for someone to arrive.  I looked out my bedroom window onto Union Street and watched strangers come and go as the darkness settled over Russian Hill.  I was in the grip of a premonition that someone was coming to see me.  It was now dark outside as I descended the steep staircase to the front door and opened it.  I stood at the top of the steps leading down to the street and gazed below.  I was jittery and nervous about the arrival which I felt was imminent.  The street lights came on.

   I stayed out in front of the apartment for about half an hour then came inside but decided to leave the front door open.  I climbed the stairs and sat down on the top step.  After awhile my mother Beth appeared and asked why the front door was open.  I said that I was expecting someone but she protested that any visitor could ring the bell and that it was dangerous to leave the front door open at night.  I walked down and closed it.

   The next day I expressed a need to go to the Haight Ashbury to meet the person that I felt I was meant to meet.  My father Blackie decided to accompany me.  I can only guess that my folks sensed that something was not right.  Perhaps they were humouring me, going along with my notion that someone was coming.  

   I wasn’t used to being accompanied by Blackie anywhere at this time.  We took a couple of buses to get to Haight Street which was packed with hippie pedestrians and it’s safe to say that Blackie was completely out of his element.  He hated long hair on men and he didn’t like the drug culture.  After all, the hippie phenomenon was barely two years old at this time and I think it had taken his generation by surprise.  When I was growing up, drug activity was a thing you’d read about in newspapers and it was something which was always happening on the other side of the tracks.  Not in our lives.  But ever since the big bust at Tamalpais High School in June 1965, it had invaded the American middle class in a big way.  Puff the Magic Dragon had clearly arrived and taken a sizeable proportion of the children away.  And now clearly I was one of those children.

Haight Stree in the summer of 1967.

   Blackie and Beth were not at all typical American parents and the irony was that I really never had much to rebel against in my family because my parents were such rebels themselves.  Both my folks had turned their backs on their religious backgrounds: Beth was an American Irish Catholic and Blackie had a Protestant father and a Catholic mother.  They had each gravitated to the political left and devoted their lives to furthering the cause of socialism.  When the anti-red witch-hunts began in the post-war period, they paid a heavy price for their beliefs.  Blacklisted out of his trade as a merchant seaman, my father was unable to hold a job down for more than a few months on the east coast as the FBI would turn up, informing his employer that he was a dangerous radical.  This was the reason my family drove across the country as it was implied that he could get work on the San Francisco waterfront through Harry Bridges and his longshore union the ILWU.

   Whatever the reasons, the work on the waterfront didn’t materialise until we’d been in Marin County for almost four years.  Blackie worked on the Golden Gate Bridge, he delivered dry cleaning and whatever else that brought the groceries home.  

   It may well have been the severity with which the federal government came down on Vin Hallinan for defending Harry in his 1949 court case which delayed his employment on the waterfront.  Vin was first sentenced to six months for contempt of court and later to eighteen months for income tax evasion.  I now wonder if the board members at the ILWU figured that letting Blackie work on the front would further provoke the government.  After all, before he was blacklisted, Blackie was a very prominent and popular trade union leader who regularly featured in the media.  I remember Black telling me that he simply didn’t see the red scare coming.  One day he and Beth were well known folks about town in Greenwich Village and the next people they knew well would pass them on the street without a glimmer of recognition.  They went from minor celebrities to pariahs practically overnight.

   One thing which always surprised me about Black was that none of the hardship thrust upon him seemed to make him an outraged person.  He’d get cross about political things he didn’t agree with and phony politicians would always inspire one of his colourfully caustic comments, but he was not a bitter man at all.

   So here he was, accompanying his twenty year old son, who was  in the early stages of a psychotic state, on a cockeyed visit to the centre of the hippie scene in San Francisco.  Haight Street was throbbing with long haired freaks of all ages.  Lifeless looking young people sat on the sidewalk as hippie drug dealers whispered coded pitches to passing strangers.  Young men and women sold copies of the San Francisco Oracle, a hippie newspaper.  A steady refrain of: “Spare change?” echoed throughout the atmosphere.  After about half an hour of wading through this long haired horde, we gave up and made our way back to North Beach.

On the left a shop called Head Quarters followed by photos of three different people selling The Oracle and an Oracle cover.

   To be honest I didn’t understand my conviction that I had to meet someone, so what the hell Blackie made of it, I have no idea.  Once back in North Beach I had a phone call with Tom Connell who told me that he had secured the financing to proceed with the poster business but I was in another zone altogether.  He asked if I had thought of new ideas for posters and it was not something that I was even thinking about.  All that seemed important to me was meeting these people that I was meant to meet.  Tom told me that he had found a few other poster artists willing to do the work and, as he sensed that I wasn’t in my right mind, he said that he was going ahead with me or without me.  In my right mind I’d have been very upset by this and would have tried to mend the situation but in my frenzied state it was totally irrelevant to me.

   I went out for a walk, taking Union down to Columbus.  As I got to Washington Square I turned right.  

To be continued

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The Summer of Love. Chapter 6

By the summer of 1967 my thinking was pretty muddled.  My use of marijuana was ridiculously constant as was my smoking of ordinary cigarettes and my lifestyle was truly unhealthy.  I still harboured an ambition to have a good trip on LSD.  I had struck up a kind of business partnership with Tom Connell to produce psychedelic posters and this gave me a confidence for the future.  The war in Vietnam was happening on the other side of the world yet it was a presence in my consciousness.  I was a 20 year old male American and like many of my fellow Tam High graduates, I knew that eventually I would be called up by the draft board.  I had no game plan for this.  
   My good friend Ed Smith, who was drafted that year, told me many years later that the options seemed to be: going to college, going to Canada, going to jail or going in the army and quite probably to Vietnam.  People who were politically active like Ringo Hallinan added another option: fighting to end the war. 
Vietnam was now a major preoccupation in the media.  Daily graphic horror stories of bloodshed on both sides filled television screens across the land as the American war escalated.  David Harris, president of the student body at Stanford dropped out to fight the war and eventually went to prison for refusing to fight in Vietnam.  He was romantically linked to folk singer Joan Baez who was still politically engaged unlike her previous pal Bob Dylan who was now a hero to the dope smoking hippie movement.
   My brother Jim, partly as a way of dealing with Eddie Smith’s four choices and partly as an act of rebellion against my parents’ left wing politics, had joined the army.  He waited for his 18th birthday so that he didn’t need their permission.  I remember tearfully trying to talk Jim out of it but he had made his decision and stubbornly stuck to it.  It must have been a very bitter pill for Blackie and Beth that Jimmy joined the army but they seemed to accept it.
   My parents and all their close friends were adamantly opposed to the Vietnam war just as they had been against the war in Korea.  The analysis on the left was that the second world war had shown the political establishment that war was good for business.  So to keep the economy on a war footing they chose the Russians as the new enemy for Americans to fear.  They set about convincing the American public with powerful propaganda which was aided by the televised congressional witch hunts of HUAC and later Senator McCarthy.  The prosecutions and convictions of the Hollywood 10, Alger Hiss and the execution of the Rosenbergs augmented the feeling of terror in the land.  But that was in the 1950s.  Now in the mid-60s there was a new generation that questioned American imperialism and capitalism itself.  
   On the waterfront Blackie steadfastly refused to work across the bay in Oakland at the military bases and he was always very disappointed when those ship’s clerks who he had sponsored to work on the front took the highly lucrative labour across the bay once they made the B List.  Some of these clerks would work as many as seven days a week.  Black described them as “hungry.”
   So when brother Jim made a stopover in Seattle en route to his posting in Korea, I flew up and had a good visit with him.  I was very relieved that he was not being sent to Vietnam.  I stayed overnight in his hotel room and after breakfast the next day we said our goodbyes.  I then took the shuttle to the airport to fly back to San Francisco.   
   As I boarded my flight and turned right to enter the cabin I saw that the plane was packed with uniformed American army personnel.  I was suddenly seized with panic.  Here I was, a long haired hippie amongst all these crew-cut soldiers.  My reaction was, of course, ludicrous.  They were all young Americans about my age and I’m sure I would have got on fine but my thinking at the time was that they would be hostile.  I turned to the stewardess and asked if I could take a later flight.  She said yes and I made my way back to the departure lounge where I was told the next flight would be in a few hours.
   At this time of my life I’d had very little experience of airports  and while, later on, I would be sure to take a book to read, I had nothing to occupy my time.  Perhaps it was this which made me approachable.  A very friendly young man introduced himself to me and engaged me in conversation.  He was a devout Christian and spent the next few hours doing his very best to convert me.  We spoke of many things profound and light.  It wasn’t at all dull, as conversations go, but by the time my flight was boarding, I was still an atheist.
   As the summer of 1967 rolled on, the state of California, which had been Democrat controlled for as long as I could remember was now in the hands of an extremely conservative administration.  The previous November had seen the election of Ronald Reagan as governor which was the first time a politician from the extreme right had broken through. 


   Reagan, a movie actor, had been a lifelong Democrat and FDR supporter up until the post-war period.  When the House UnAmerican Activities Committee came to Hollywood in 1947, he jumped on the anti-Communist bandwagon and named names.  My father Blackie had met Reagan during his years as a trade union organiser and described him as a phoney.  In Blackie’s rather strict moral code, being a phoney was bad enough but to be a fink, naming people to the Committee, put him beyond the pale.  He detested Ronald Reagan.
   The new governor of California had become a darling of the extreme right wing of the Republican Party.  In 1964 Barry Goldwater ran for president on a pro-Vietnam War platform and who should be there to make a televised speech on his behalf but Reagan.  Goldwater lost big to incumbent Lyndon Baines Johnson but Reagan’s speech at the Republican convention put the faded movie star on the conveyer belt which ultimately took him to the governor’s mansion.
   He was up against Pat Brown who had been governor for many years and had even beat Richard Nixon in the previous election.  In eighth grade my class took a field trip from Edna Maguire School to Sacramento and while we were having lunch on the lawn by the capitol building, I suddenly spotted Governor Brown walking on the lawn.  At this time Vin Hallinan was defending a prisoner on Death Row named Alex Robillard.  So I walked up to Brown and asked him what was going to happen to Robillard.  The governor put his hand on my head, gazed up at the sky and said: “Well son, I’m afraid he’s going to have to die.”
   Reagan’s campaign stressed law and order which, after the Watts riots in 1965, was a popular stance with white middle class voters.  His support for the Vietnam war and his promise to lower taxes also appealed to them.  The California electorate swung his way after Brown made the mistake of comparing Reagan to John Wilkes Booth, the ex-actor who had assassinated President Lincoln.  According to the Independent Journal, more than half of Marin County voters came out for Reagan. 
   Once in office in Sacramento the new governor began cutting budgets and getting bullish about the student demonstrations on the UC campus at Berkeley.  He targeted Berkeley in particular as it was where the Free Speech movement led by Mario Savio had made headlines in newspapers coast to coast.  
   My flight from Seattle was incident-free and when we landed, I returned to my parents’ apartment on Russian Hill.  I had become more than a bit remote from my parents Blackie and Beth.  The wayward approach I seemed to take in my lifestyle must have mystified them.  But my wayward approach had its genesis in their lack of interest in my education when I was younger.  I never learned how to work at things I was not interested in which seems to be a necessary part of the educational process.  During my time at Tam High, my then girlfriend Janice Kaufman asked me what I planned to do with my life and quite frankly there was no plan at all.  When I graduated all my friends went off to college or joined the army and I went to sea.  I was seeking adventure.
   Tom Connell had suggested that I design a logo of my signature and I got down to work on it.  I remember the time that I changed my signature which read: John H. Myers from a ‘J’ with a rounded top to one in the style of John Hancock.  It was while I was in high school and my algebra teacher, Mr Davlin, used to read off the names of the marked homework sheets as he handed them back and when he got to mine he’d always say something like: “John H. Misshmeervuh.”
   It wasn’t long before I was back in Mill Valley getting high.  I made my way to the lady folksinger’s house in Strawberry.  She was always welcoming of a house full of young dope smoking fools.  It was with her and a few others that I attended another rock concert at the Mountain Theatre up on Mount Tam.  Top of the bill was Eric Burdon of The Animals.  The audience wasn’t as big as it had been for The Doors so there was plenty of room to move around.  The Master of Ceremonies was a British guy, possibly in his 50s with longish grey hair and a beard.  My folksinger friend told me that he operated an English style pub in Tiburon.  
   At some point in the proceedings a long haired fellow walked up to the microphone on the stage and spoke, amplified, to the audience:  “Eric Burdon is on STP.  It’s beautiful.”  This was the first time I had ever heard of this drug.  STP was a well known oil product for cars but clearly the hippie fellow was talking about a psychedelic.
   The front page of the Chronicle always had a story about LSD at this time.  One such article on the front page was all about a guy named Owsley who was supposed to be manufacturing the strongest acid in the Bay Area.  LSD had been made illegal in the state on 6th October, 1966.

Owsley Stanley III pictured with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh.

   Eric Burdon finally did appear and I don’t recall being very taken by his performance but I got chatting with a pretty young hippie woman and wound up that evening at her apartment in the Haight-Ashbury and who should be there but the older English guy who had been presenting the concert at the Mountain Theatre.  He was very engaging and clearly was having a fine time with his pick of beautiful young women.  In fact the whole scene in the Haight seemed to be a bit of a candy store for older men in search of younger female company.  I got the impression that this guy had been able to re-invent himself in America and the hippie thing, which was only a few years old, must have seemed like the icing on the cake.  I stayed the night and made my way back to North Beach in the morning.
   At this time most of the San Francisco bands lived in the Haight district.  The Quicksilver Messenger Service had a house there as did Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. 

Jefferson Airplane in the Haight district.

The Grateful Dead in the Haight Ashbury.

I remember being surprised one day at the Fillmore as the Dead arrived at the band room with a huge entourage and among them was a schoolmate of mine from Tam High, named Susila Ziegler.  I knew her as Suzanne.  She was a beautiful blonde who lived, I think, up in Scott Highlands so it was surprising to see her in the very bohemian company of the Dead.  “I’m Bill’s old lady,” she told me meaning Bill Kreutzman, the drummer of the band.  There was another person who I saw regularly with the Dead who was very loud and used to construct meaningless sentences a lot: “There are ball bearings in my soup!”  I kept seeing this guy a lot as he was always coming and going with the Dead and one day I was talking with Bill Graham when he walked by.  “Do you know who that is?” he asked.  I answered I didn’t and he told me it was Owsley.
   The previous year I remember seeing author Ken Kesey at the time he was famously on the run from the law.  He was standing by the Merry Pranksters bus which was parked on the corner of Steiner Street.  I recognised him from photos in the Chronicle.  He had very short hair and was dressed casually but was wearing brogues which were an unnaturally bright orange colour.

From left: author Ken Kesey, Merry Pranksters bus and Kesey inside it.
   Kesey had been involved in The Trips Festival which was the very first manifestation of the psychedelic dance concerts which Bill Graham and Chet Helms later produced.  The venue for The Trips Festival was the Longshoreman’s Hall down near Fisher-man’s Wharf.  It was early in 1966 and I attended.  It was the first time I ever saw Bill Graham who struck me as having a very serious face juxtaposed with a Frankie Avalon hairdo.  This was where the first light shows were tried out, later to be perfected at the Fillmore and Avalon Ballrooms.

Early poster art for The Trips Festival and a photo of Quicksilver Messenger Service playing at it.


   But that was back at the beginning of the scene and now was the summer of 1967.  I had not a clue that I was on the brink of the biggest disaster of my young life.

To be continued…

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Remembering Conn ‘Ringo’ Hallinan

Conn ‘Ringo’ Hallinan passed away on June 19th after a tough battle with cancer.  The tributes began appearing the next day.  Kate Hallinan, daughter of Danny and Wendy Hallinan, wrote movingly about what it was like to have Ringo for an uncle.  On the Portside website, David Bacon gave a rich description of Ringo’s abilities as a journalist, teacher and political activist.  Charles Idelson wrote a history packed obituary entitled The Life and Times of Conn Hallinan bulging with great quotes from friends and colleagues.  Sam Whiting wrote a fine lengthy obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle and Ringo’s colleague from UCSC, Paul Skenazy, wrote of the value he gave to his students.  Ringo was a very loved person.  He was witty, generous, politically savvy, a wonderful writer and raconteur, and his grasp of history and modern day politics was simply awe inspiring.  Oh yes.  I forgot to mention his command of military history and weaponry.  He was one very impressive human being. 

   I first met Ringo and all the Hallinan family when I was five years old after the Myers family arrived from the east coast to settle in Mill Valley in September of 1952.  My father Blackie, a sailor by trade, had been a founding vice president of the once radical National Maritime Union but was now blacklisted and unable to hold a job on the east coast due to the negative attentions of the federal government.  On our arrival in Marin he, my mother Beth, sisters Nell, Kate and brother Jim were immediately embraced socially by people of the political left.  We met the Dreyfus family, the Coxes, the Robertsons, Harry Bridges, the Goldblatts and of course the Hallinans.

   It was a dangerous time to be left wing as the anti-red hysteria in the US was so severe that it made people with left-of-centre beliefs stick together.  Liberals were tarred with the same brush as Communists by the government and the media.  The House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy whipped up a climate of terror in the land with their televised hearings demanding citizens to name names. 

   Ringo was the fifth son of Vin and Vivian Hallinan.  Each of the six boys was given a nickname: Patrick was Butch, Terence, Kayo, Michael, Tuffy, Matthew, Dynamite and Conn was originally called Flash but he didn’t get on with it.  “I felt more like the Pillsbury Doughboy than Flash,” he said.  So when he saw John Ford’s western Stagecoach he settled on Ringo after John Wayne’s character, the Ringo Kid.  Danny, the youngest son was christened Dangerous but that never took either.

   The Hallinan family lived a life that most people dream about.  Vin and Vivian were both very rich and lived on a huge estate in Ross, the wealthiest town in Marin County.  Vin was a famous criminal lawyer and Vivian was an owner/manager of many big apartment buildings, mostly in San Francisco.

   Because of the Hallinans’ left leaning ideas, the snooty residents of Ross wouldn’t allow their kids to play with their youngest son Danny who was the same age as my brother Jim.  Therefore we were invited many times to spend the weekend up at their mansion.  A big porch with pillars overlooked a massive lawn, artificial lake, large swimming pool and gymnasium.  They had a maid who cooked and a meal at their house was like eating in a fancy restaurant. 

   Ringo would take Danny regularly to the movies including horror films.  I heard a blow-by-blow account of Beast From 20,000 Fathoms from Danny on their porch after Ringo had taken him to see it.  In fact I heard detailed descriptions from Ringo and Danny of films I never did see until I was a grown up: Them!, The Thing and It Came From Beneath The Sea.  Danny described to me, years later, how strange it had been travelling home across the very same Golden Gate Bridge they had just seen pulled down by Ray Harryhausen’s giant octopus.  Danny, Ringo and I shared a passion for horror movies though this was not true of all the Hallinan boys.  “Tuffy liked horror films,” said Ringo.  “But by the time I was taking Danny and you guys to them, he was gone to college.  Dynamite never liked them and the older brothers were too cool.”

The Rafael theatre in San Rafael was where most of the 1950s sci-fi horror movies played.

   Horrors of a more serious nature were affecting the Hallinan family at this time.  When we first met them, Vin had just finished a 6 month federal prison sentence for contempt of court. He was also running for president of the United States on the Progressive Party ticket.  What had brought down the full force of the federal government’s power on Vincent Hallinan was his decision, in 1949, to defend Harry Bridges, president of the ILWU, the longshore union.  The government had been trying to convict and deport Harry, a native of Australia, as a suspected member of the Communist Party, for years.  Vin came out of jail just in time to campaign for the presidency.  It was no surprise that he was not elected as president in 1952 but his campaign gave a rallying point to the American left at a time when it was under severe attack across the land.  The media put its spotlight on the campaigns of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson but paid little attention to his.  However Vin and Vivian received much scrutiny from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.  Both of them had been under surveillance by the federal government ever since the Bridges trial and investigators now turned what they found over to the Internal Revenue Service.  In 1953 the government indicted both Vin and Vivian for income tax evasion.  In a trial which examined all the luxurious extravagance of the Hallinan lifestyle, the jury ultimately decided to acquit Vivian but convicted Vin so he returned to prison for the next eighteen months.

From left: Vincent Hallinan and Harry Bridges in court; Vin’s presidential campaign; Vin, Vivian and Danny at the Ross polling station November, 1952; Vivian on the cover of March of Labor.

   So it was a turbulent time up at the Ross mansion.  I only knew a little of what was happening as my parents would discuss it at the dinner table.  There was no shame in the Myers family about going to jail.  Blackie had done a fair bit of time inside as a union organiser and Beth said of Vin’s situation: “If they can’t get you on anything else, they can always get you on income tax.”

    On most of our weekend visits with Danny it was always Ringo who paid special attention to us.  During one such visit, we three boys spent a summer’s night out on the lawn in sleeping bags.  The stars glittered in the sky above as we lay on the grass near the empty artificial lake.  We weren’t asleep and almost certainly chattering about something or other when the near silence in the woods behind the lake was suddenly shattered by the sound of tramping footsteps accompanied by a blood curdling growl.  Danny immediately sat bolt upright with a wide eyed look of terror on his face.  The footsteps and growling came closer.  We all fell into a panic.  We stood up in our sleeping bags ready to run when the monster leapt onto the edge of the artificial lake.  Of course it was Ringo.  His performance succeeded in scaring the wits out of all three of us.  He then sat out with us on the lawn for some time telling us stories which was his way.  He was a wonderful story teller.

   On another occasion Vivian drove Ringo, Danny, Jimmy and I to San Rafael where she dropped us off at the Rafael Theatre.  The movie we saw was This Island Earth, a terrific full colour sci-fi film about the inhabitants of a distant planet, Metaluna, and their attempt to colonise earth.  The Metalunans all had enormously huge foreheads and white hair.  I was particularly thrilled to see the Metalunan Mutant whose image I had drawn pictures of from the newspaper ads.  The second feature was an exciting bank robbery film, Violent Saturday. When the films were over the four of us walked back in the dark along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard to San Anselmo then onto Ross.  On what was a pretty long walk for young kids, Ringo kept us engaged in conversation the whole time.

From left: The Hallinan boys with Vin in the early 1950s; Hallinan family portrait 1960-back row: Ringo, Tuffy, Dynamite,Butch, Kayo. front row: Vin, Vivian, Danny. On the right a photo of Ringo late 1960s.

   Of course the Hallinan boys were all tough and played rough, unlike the Myers kids and, sensing this difference, Ringo always played to it.  I remember one summer’s day sitting on the huge porch in Ross while Ringo held an American football in his hand with the the sharp end aimed at the side of my head.  “If you move a muscle,” he told me in his calm, commanding voice, “I will propel this football directly at your temple which will, I promise you, knock you spark out.” How long this went on for I don’t remember but although I was in a state of acute tension throughout that time, I was also amused by his performance which was, as usual, pitch perfect.  Just as the growling wild animal noises had been in the forest behind the artificial lake, he achieved a realism worthy of a quality film.

   Vin, in addition to being a well educated lawyer was also, in Ringo’s words, a jock.  He was a committed athlete who didn’t smoke or drink alcohol.  He taught all the boys to swim, play football and to fight,  The Hallinan boys soon developed a fearsome reputation in Marin County.  They also were academic achievers and steeped in history.  I remember being at Ross when the boys were painting the downstairs hall and Ringo was up a ladder telling Jimmy and I all about the British admiral Horatio Nelson who disobeyed an order to withdraw during a naval engagement.  “And he lifted the glass to his one blind eye,” intoned Ringo dramatically from the top of the ladder as he mimed the telescope with his right hand.  “And he said, ‘I see no ship.’”

   When the family finally sold the Ross mansion and moved to Tiburon I still stayed over and one night I shared a bedroom with Ringo.  Before we went to sleep, he laid out a list of conditions for sleeping in the same room as him.  “Do not rustle the sheets,” he said quietly but forcefully, “As it may keep me awake.”  He went on for some time listing the various things I must not do which seemed to build in importance and intensity until he finally reached his crescendo: “And if you should snore, you’ll wake up in the middle of the lagoon with an anvil wrapped around your neck!”  He had a knack for improvising his stories in a perfectly structured way, starting small and building to a glorious climax. This instinct made Ringo a wonderful writer, performer and later, teacher.

   I didn’t see Ringo much in my teenage years except when I’d spend weekends at my sister Nell’s apartment in San Francisco.  She saw a lot of the Hallinan boys through leftwing political activities such as sit-ins at car showrooms on Van Ness to protest racist hiring practices.  So I wasn’t around for all the activities celebrated in these tributes to him.  My first face to face reunion with Ringo occurred in 1995 at Babbie Dreyfus’s service of remembrance at the Outdoor Art Club in Mill Valley.  Danny, Dynamite and Kayo were also there as was my brother Jim and sister Kate.  Jared Dreyfus was the master of ceremonies and his wife Genie, kids Adam, Christian and Kate were all present.  

   On my next visit to California I had lunch with Ringo in Berkeley.  He was talking about how, as kids, he and his brothers used to explode into fights all the time often for no reason at all.  I asked him when was the last time he had a physical fight and he said it was with Sonny Barger of the Hell’s Angels on a 1965 demo.  Several years passed before my curiosity about this resurfaced.  I was having an email exchange with Danny who mentioned that this fight was something which Ringo was particularly proud of.  So I got in touch with him and he told me about it.  The demonstration occurred at the time that he was chair of the DuBois Club and he was approached by the Vietnam Day committee with a request for some muscle as they’d learned of the Hell’s Angels’ intention to disrupt their march.  From his contacts on the left he put together about forty guys who could fight and were willing to form a front line for the march.  

   “The cops had stopped us at the Oakland-Berkeley border,” said Ringo.  “And we saw the Angels clustered at one side of the street, about twenty five of them.  The Oakland police were working in cahoots with the Angels and opened their lines to let them through.  We had a big banner we were holding.  Kayo and I were in the centre.  Sonny Barger, chair of the Angels, came through first, shouting abuse at the demonstrators.  He started tearing our banner down.  It was the perfect setup for us.  As he pulled the banner down, Kayo hit him with a right hand on one side of his jaw and I delivered a left hook on his other.  He went down like a stone.  The Angels kept coming, thinking we were a bunch of pacifist wimps.  They suddenly found themselves surrounded by a lot of tough guys bent on pounding them.  I remember the looks on their faces as they suddenly realised they were in trouble.  And they were.  We kicked their asses until the Oakland police attacked us and drove us back.  Barger has lied about that day on many occasions.  How they kicked the commies’ asses.  It was a fine moment.” 

On the left a photo of Danny and Ringo in the former Soviet Union, 1961; On the right, Ringo caught by the camera at anti-Vietnam war march that the Hell’s Angels tried to disrupt in 1965.

   Of course Ringo and Kayo were both tough guys.  “Our parents thought we should know the way the world really worked,” said Ringo.  “And that there was right and wrong, and that we should support the former and resist the latter. Yes, we had money, but that didn’t help you in a fist fight with some right winger.  We didn’t win all those fights, but after a bit kids got the idea that picking a fight with us wasn’t worth it and they stopped using the “N” word around us.”

   But in addition to being tough, all the Hallinan boys were extremely well educated.  Ringo’s intellect was so impressive as he was constantly absorbing and accessing new information in brilliant detail which he shared with everyone he encountered.  

   His friend Michael Myerson remembers: “Of the many times I’ve been with Ringo over the years, I can think of few during which I didn’t learn something new.  Want to know the best way to throw a punch?  What Yosemite teaches us about archeology?  Ringo’s your go-to source.  He’ll explain how Marshall Georgy Zhukov and the Red Army wiped out Hitler’s best divisions which in turn allowed the British and US D-Day invasion to be successful.”  

   Kate Hallinan, a practicing attorney, remembers that her uncle “was my Google in the days before the internet—his vast filing cabinets full of meticulously catalogued newspaper clippings provided sources for my first research papers, and he always had a suggestion for a great book on any topic one can imagine. He could discuss any political happening or historical period and his news columns were astounding in their detail and nuance, and always peppered with his signature humour and his signature compassion for the world and for the ever present injustice within it.”

On the left Danny barbecues while chatting with Ringo; From left: Ringo Hallinan, Anne Hallinan, Kate Hallinan, Wendy Hallinan and Kate’s daughter Clementine.

   His columns were indeed splendid.  He would describe  scary military encounters in such locations as the China Sea with such precision and he knew how much all this weaponry cost: the high performance US F-35 fighter jet had a price tag of $1.7 trillion and cost $36,000 an hour to fly.  It also had $640 toilet seats and a $7,622 coffee maker.  Of course Ringo was deeply opposed to warmongers and the weapons industry but this didn’t stop the journalist in him reporting what he saw.  He would use the F-35 and its mind boggling cost in lectures as an example of how the American government had the wrong priorities when so many citizens were in poverty and student debt was so high.

From left: Ringo being interviewed on television; A leaflet advertising one of Ringo’s lectures; Ringo with his wife Anne.

   Both Sam Whiting in the Chronicle and Paul Skenazy of UCSC mention Martha Mendoza one of Ringo’s star pupils who went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism.  She was still going to Ringo for story advice in the weeks before he died.

   If the tributes from his previous students are anything to go by, Ringo has inspired several generations of young journalists to go out in the world and tell the truth.  Paul Skenazy says: “If there is one comment of Ringo’s that sums up his approach as a teacher and journalist it might be this: ‘The objective persona is like the tooth fairy—it doesn’t exist. . . . The point isn’t to be objective and neutral, but to be fair and accurate.’ Fair and accurate wasn’t just a catchphrase with him, it was a way of life. It required thoughtfulness. It demanded research. It required a sense of history, of class and race awareness.” 

   Those of us who knew and loved Ringo Hallinan are poorer now he’s gone, but the world is a richer place for the work he did on this earth.

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1967-The Summer of Love-part 5

As the summer of 1967 arrived, I became more and more determined that I should have a good experience with LSD.  I had become convinced that the reason I wasn’t able to have a good trip was to do with my ego and that I needed to work on myself.  So that was my inner dilemma.  The particularly bad trip I’d had the previous year at the Fillmore was all about loss of control.  I felt I had to hold onto my ability to control and was terrified that it was oozing away from me in dramatically large globules.

   Although I was living at my parents’ apartment on Russian Hill in San Francisco’s North Beach, I was definitely becoming more and more remote from them.  When I occasionally brought young women home with me, I never introduced them to Blackie and Beth.  On one occasion my extreme hippy friend Matt came over to the city and crashed on the floor of my bedroom.  I don’t recall the details of his encounter with my mother Beth, but she became very upset by his lack of hygiene in our kitchen.  Back in my bedroom Matt said: “I’m sorry I freaked your mother out.”  He said this in a way which implied that he had no control over his behaviour.  Matt was unable to interact with straight society.  His way of life involved smoking marijuana in industrial quantities and only associating with those who did the same.

   Although I was steeped in the drug culture, I was still able to socialise with straight people, something Matt was incapable of doing.  He was a highly intelligent and articulate individual but made no compromise with society.  Jared Dreyfus and I were both very diplomatic people and the fact that we smoked grass didn’t alter that reality.  I remember Jar being acerbic about one of my hippy friends whose syntax was littered with phrases like “Oh, man” and “Far out.”  He raised a critical eyebrow at such talk and wasn’t timid about sharing his opinions with me.  “Myers,” he said. “Are you really spending time with people who speak like that?”  Though I was no longer in high school, Jar’s opinion was still important to me and any opportunity to visit the Dreyfus house was always welcome.

   While growing up in Mill Valley there were certain buildings that I had loved.  The old Carnegie library up on Lovell was a place I enjoyed spending time.  A building of solid brick which first opened in 1911, it was a magical place where my siblings and I would spend hours reading or just searching for books of interest.  I was not a big reader but I did love books nonetheless, particularly those with illustrations.  Up on the top floor was where most adults spent time but down on the lower level was where the children’s books were.  There was also a separate entrance to the lower level, with a round-top door and a brick surround which matched it.  It was a glorious place to hang around.  

 The Carnegie Library on Lovell. (Courtesy of the Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library)

  Another venue I spent a lot of time at was the Bus Depot.  It was a train station when it opened in 1889, but by the time my family arrived in Mill Valley in 1952, it was the place the Greyhound buses to and from the city arrived and departed from.  More importantly for me as a small child was the huge selection of comic books they displayed on their racks.  I spent so much time at the Bus Depot that the ladies who worked there, Brun and Margo, got to know me and allowed me to read the comics when other kids were told to put them back.    

Several views of the Depot as it was before it was the Book Depot. (Courtesy of the Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library)

   A building I also loved was the Dreyfus house up in West Blithedale canyon.  It was a large wooden house which probably dated back to the turn of the century.  I never saw anything above the middle floor which contained the kitchen, dining room, living room, TV room and a wonderful glass enclosed porch which overlooked the hill down to the street.  The street snaked around the house from the bottom to the top.

   After a visit to the Dreyfus house one day, I got a lift downtown in Jar’s silver Austin Healey.  He pulled into a parking place on Corte Madera in the shade of the Bank of America building.  I was telling him about some person I didn’t care for and suddenly he turned to me and said: “So that bastard is walking around living his life with no problems and Dave is dead.”  Dave was his older brother who had been killed in a helicopter accident at the beginning of the year.  “That’s god’s justice, John.  He’s alive and Dave is dead.  Which leads me to conclude that god’s justice is a crock of shit.”

   What neither of us could have known at the time was that in the last years of his life, Jar became a born again Christian.  It was something which puzzled all of his family.  I remember both Barney and Babbie being baffled by Jared’s religious conversion as were his kids Adam, Christian and Kate.  Jon Diederich who was a good friend from grade school at Old Mill credited Jar with making him question his Catholic faith at a very young age so for his friend to embrace a branch of the very faith he had earlier mocked, was puzzling.  After his conversion, Jar never tried to convert me and the few times we discussed his religious beliefs he respected my lack of belief.  I even recall raising the conversation we’d had about Dave in his car and he remembered it clearly.

   After leaving Jar I took a Greyhound bus back to the city.  If I had a graphics job to complete I would do it at my parents place where I had a big drawing board in my bedroom.  So the city was where I worked and Mill Valley was where I would go to hang out with my friends and get high.   On my next Mill Valley excursion, having crashed at a friend’s house high up on Edgewood, I awoke to a sunny day and, splashing water on my face, walked down the road to Molino and took a left on Mirabelle.  I continued onto Ethel past a few barking dogs until I came to the steps behind Brown’s Department Store where I descended to Miller Avenue.  Suddenly I found myself downtown on a beautiful summer’s day.  I wandered up  past Mens’ Mayer’s and Meyer’s Bakery then crossed the street.

   The depot was still the Bus Depot with Greyhounds coming in and out of town on the hour.  I sat on the bench by the taxi rank and watched the world go by then glanced up at the old clock to see it was almost 1pm.  Hunger beckoned.  I walked up past Pat & Joe’s and Redhill Liquor to Sonapa Farms just below the Sequoia building to have one of their delicious sandwiches.  

Sonata Farms, a deli just below the Sequoia Theatre on Throckmorton. (Courtesy of the Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library)

   I sat in the window facing Throckmorton while eating my roast beef on rye in a basket with a big dill pickle.  The thing about sitting in the window at Sonapa Farms was that you got a panoramic view.  The hill which exists at that end of Throckmorton could be properly appreciated from the top to the bottom.  A steady parade of Chevies, Mustangs and VW’s ran up and down to and from East Blithedale.  The pedestrian traffic was interesting too.  Most were faces I didn’t know but one person stopped and turned to look at me.  A broad and engaging smile told me it was someone I knew.  It was Tom Connell.  Tom was a person I had known for years through the Dreyfus family but I hadn’t seen him in a long while.

Tam High photos of Dave Dreyfus and Tom Connell who, along with Abby Wassermann were in the class of 1958. (Courtesy of the Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library)

   He was older than me and had a passing resemblance to the film actor Robert Vaughan although unlike the Man From U.N.C.L.E., Tom had blond hair.  He’d been in Dave Dreyfus’s class at Tam High and was what I guess you would call an entrepreneur.  Tom always had a money making scheme in progress.  Every winter he would run a Christmas tree lot and as kids, my brother Jim and I worked for him, finding ourselves in freezing caravan trailers at various locations around the county.  The Dreyfus’s had a beach cabin out at Stinson which Tom used to make use of for what Jared referred to as scenes, or in other words amorous encounters with young women.  It seems that every person I knew through the Dreyfus family was smart and articulate and Tom was no exception.  So he came in and sat down.  He’d heard about my poster work at the Fillmore, probably from Jar, and was interested to hear more.

   I told him that since I’d stopped working for Bill Graham that poster commissions were thin on the ground.  He listened to me with an impressive intensity.  He wanted to know about what the work of producing a poster entailed.  He offered to drive me back to San Francisco if I’d buy him some gas for his sports car.  I was rather charmed by his candour, coughed up for a visit to the gas station and off we went across the Golden Gate Bridge.

   As we drove into the city, Tom was thinking out loud of how a business could be built around my ability to produce posters.  It was a seductive idea.  He found a parking place on Union Street near my parents’ apartment.  Unlike my hippy friend Matt, Tom was charming to my mother Beth and had a nice chat with her before coming into the workplace in my bedroom.  I showed him samples of original artwork and the finished printed product.  He suggested that I produce a logo of my signature in much the same way that Walt Disney’s supposed signature was the trademark of the Disney Corporation.   

   Tom’s idea, which was evolving conversationally, was to produce posters on a variety of themes and sell them.  He encouraged me to get on with the signature logo and said that he needed to speak to someone about finance before we could go ahead.  It was an interesting idea and I felt excited by it.

   I got word that brother Jim was being posted to Korea which sounded better than Da Nang.  He would be stopping over for a few days in Seattle and wondered if I’d like to fly up for a visit.  It seemed like a good idea so I booked a flight.  At this time I had pretty long hair and bushy sideburns.  I was, at age 20, unable to grow a full beard.  I could manage a moustache, sideburns and the area around my neck but there were no whiskers between my chin and lower lip so I had to wait a few years to be fully bearded.  

   My flight to Seattle was without incident and when I disembarked I came across members of the Jefferson Airplane being mobbed by autograph hunters.  It was very odd to see them in a totally different context to the Fillmore where such a thing would never happen.  It was also interesting to see how famous they were becoming.  Marty Balin was dutifully signing his name and nodded hello as I walked past.

   Jimmy met me at the gate in his army uniform.  We went off for lunch where he was surprisingly talkative.  He told me about basic training which he didn’t enjoy at all and found himself regretting his enlistment.  He also told me about some of his colleagues, one of whom bragged of a gay relationship he’d had with a famous Hollywood movie star complete with photos of him with the actor.  Hardly the stuff of discretion.  He told me too of another soldier who, while stationed near Death Valley, would stamp on and kill tarantula spiders whenever he encountered them, which was often.

   Jim and I didn’t share many interests while growing up in the Myers family.  I was a year and a half older than him but he outgrew me at age five which erased any possibility of physical bullying on my part.  His height and angular handsome face was in contrast to my diminutive stature.  I was a remarkably tiny child and though good looks seemed to run in our family, Jim was always the handsome one while I was the little cute one.  By the time I was ten I’d developed a passion for MAD Magazine, comic books and horror movies.  Jim studiously avoided expressing interest in anything I felt passionate about and therefore began collecting baseball cards.  Oh he read my comic books and MADs but quietly without fanfare.

   One thing we did share was a sense of humour.  Many times we’d find ourselves in hysterical stitches at the Sequoia Theatre while a Road Runner cartoon unspooled or at certain scenes in a Jerry Lewis movie.  Yet neither of us could tell a joke properly.  We’d start giggling about the punchline before we got to it.  Our teddy bear collection as young kids, known to us as Bearville, was a unifying experience as was our cat Totem when the family moved from Seymour Avenue down to Catalpa Street.  Just as we had invented voices for all thirty of the teddy bears, we would talk for Totem in a funny voice which amused us no end.  However, if there were no teddy bears, cat, or road runner cartoons involved, Jim and I went separate ways.

   So it was surprising to me to find him so animated as we talked over our lunch.  He had gone from living at home to being in the army which must have been a hell of a shock.  I remember, at age eighteen, getting very emotional on the bow of the ship Torvanger as it sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge on its way to Japan.  I was leaving home in a life changing way and, alone on the bow of the ship, I burst into tears and sobbed for some time.  I don’t know that Jim had a similar experience but it must have been a tough moment for him, leaving the nest.

   So Jimmy and I had a good visit.  I stayed the night in his hotel room.  He took photos of me wearing his uniform which was odd as my hair was long and I had bushy sideburns.  The next morning after breakfast we saw a bit of Seattle, said our goodbyes and then I was off to the airport. 

   My flight back to San Francisco was early afternoon.  As I have mentioned previously I had long hair and sideburns.  I was dressed in blue jeans, cowboy boots, a white shirt and a black leather vest (or waistcoat).  I looked like a hippy.  There was a huge stigma in American society about long hair on men.  In 1967 it was fine for male pop stars and Hollywood actors but in general society such an appearance attracted unwanted attention. “Are you a boy or a girl?” was a phrase regularly shouted by men at other men with long hair.  Whenever I worked as a ship’s clerk on the waterfront, my father Blackie insisted that I cut my hair as this intolerance was so prevalent on the front.  

   I boarded my flight to San Francisco and as I turned right to enter the cabin I saw that practically all the seats were occupied by uniformed soldiers.  I immediately felt panicked.  The prospect of wading through this potentially hostile crowd in such cramped conditions filled me with dread. 

To be continued…

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1967-The Summer of Love part 4

The Beatles launching their LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Some person said: “If you can remember the 1960s, you weren’t there.”  I have no idea who made this statement but from my point of view it’s wrong.  I was there and I do have very clear memories of a lot of it and in 1967 I was a 20 year old hippy poster artist who went crazy on LSD and wound up in a mental hospital during the Summer of Love.  So if I can remember it, anyone can. 

   That summer in the bay area, was very eventful.  Large outdoor rock festivals began happening, a manifestation of the fact that lots of young Americans were adopting the hippy way of life, albeit for a short time.

   Haight Street in San Francisco was throbbing with hippies and head shops.  What my father Blackie would describe as guerrilla capitalism was everywhere with long haired drug dealers on every street corner whispering coded pitches to passing strangers.  A good friend of mine went there to score a lid of grass and had to follow the dealer up to his apartment.  Once inside the guy pulled a gun on him and demanded all his money. My friend extracted a meagre ten dollar bill from his wallet insisting it was all he had.  He lived.

   On Haight Street the sidewalk was packed with long haired young men and even longer haired young women.  A constant refrain of ‘Spare change?’ could be heard up and down the street from weary looking young people.  Psychedelic posters for dance concerts at the Fillmore and Avalon decorated many windows and the Zig-Zag Cigarette Papers logo adorned posters, T-shirts and coffee mugs. 


   But the most defining event of that summer was the release of the Beatles’ LP, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.  This album instantly became a hit with everybody I knew.  Each house I entered, for the longest time, had this record playing.  On the front cover was a colour photo of the four Beatles wearing brightly coloured old fashioned marching band uniforms, standing in front of a big collage which featured pictures of a wide variety of characters including Karl Marx, Marilyn Monroe and Edgar Allan Poe.  

   The music seized your attention right from the start: the rock band opening of the title track with George Harrison’s bee-sting guitar notes and Paul McCartney’s athletic vocal.  It proceeded to take you on a journey of many different musical styles with full orchestral backing and new surprises each time you listened.  And the lyrics were so very good.  The words to She’s Leaving Home, Fixing a Hole and With a Little Help From My Friends were intelligent, sensitive and they made you think.  McCartney’s lyrical optimism was countered artfully by Lennon’s cynicism.  Also for the first time these guys seemed to be reflecting on what it was like to be a Beatle.  Lyrical references to newspaper taxis and silly people who don’t get past their doors, gave shape to the Beatles’ recent history of an entirely unprecedented celebrity which they’d been living through for the past few years.  And here they were in the midst of the hippy era seeming to be more relevant than ever.

   This was the very same foursome who provided most of the soundtrack to my teenage years.  Their music and lyrics spoke directly to me and my generation about the agonies and joys of young love, lust and all the satellite subjects which concerned their audience of acne-ridden adolescents.  From their arrival in the USA in early 1964, I, along with millions of young people all over the world, followed their musical output devotedly, learning each of their songs by heart and singing them out loud with my friends at surreptitious drinking sessions.  

   But unlike other showbiz fads, they simply didn’t fade away.  They got better.  Rubber Soul was their first LP which illustrated the point that they were definitely not a flash in the pan.  Their talent was something special which stood the test of time.  Then in 1966 they produced Revolver which continued to break new ground with songs like Eleanor Rigby, Taxman and Got to Get You into My Life.  During that year they also found themselves mired in controversy.  John Lennon gave an interview to the London Evening Standard in which he predicted that Christianity would die out and said that “we’re more popular than Jesus now.”  This caused no controversy in the UK and the interview was not published in the USA until late in the summer.  In June Capitol released a compilation LP entitled The Beatles Yesterday and Today with a cover photo featuring all four wearing white coats and covered with decapitated baby dolls and pieces of raw meat.  They were all laughing and looked like crazed butchers.  The band said it was a protest against the Vietnam war.   As soon as it was released it was immediately withdrawn by Capitol and replaced with a new photo.

On the left is the photo the Beatles’ wanted and on the right the one Capitol Records chose.

   When the Lennon interview was reprinted in the USA that summer, it ignited a huge furore in the southern bible belt which rippled across the country.  A disc jockey in Alabama organised a public burning of Beatles material and all this occurred just as they were about to embark on an American tour.  The press conference which kicked it off was an uncharacteristically sombre business.  Previous Beatles press conferences had all the colourful anarchy of a Marx Brothers movie but this one was weighed down with seriousness.  John Lennon, looking pained, reluctantly apologised for causing offence.

Beatles burning in the Bible Belt, a very sombre press conference and a message for John Lennon.

   On top of this, they had to flee the Philippines in a hurry after they’d snubbed the first lady, Imelda Marcos, who had invited them to tea.  They were clearly unprepared for the angry public reaction.  So after their final concert in Candlestick Park in San Francisco, they decided to stop touring and just work in the recording studio.

   The Beatles were worshipped in a way which was not entirely healthy and I was as starstruck as everybody else.  The hysteria generated by their initial American success in 1964 seemed to have morphed into a slightly different form of hero worship but it was still idolatry plain and simple.  I remember sitting around a house in Strawberry which I visited regularly and discussing the Beatles as if they were gods.  The house was owned by a woman who was older than me and had two young children.  She was separated from her husband and several of my friends and I would gather there regularly to smoke weed and listen to music.  She was a guitar playing folk singer who was managed by Frank Werber.

   It was at this time that I realised that Mill Valley was becoming a place where people from the rock and roll scene were moving in.  Wes Wilson and his wife Eva had a house with a long garden on Sycamore. Bill Graham and guitarist Mike Bloomfield moved into Mill Valley.   Mike had left the Butterfield Blues Band and started his own group called The Electric Flag.  I once saw his bass player, Harvey Brooks with a big smile on his face, wandering, along Sunnyside near the Post Office one morning.  I also heard a remark which chilled my soul.  The woman in Strawberry was talking about somebody who was “shooting smack with the Electric Flag.”  Nobody in my immediate circle was doing anything like that. It scared me.

   I guess that I made a distinction between smoking grass and what I considered to be hard drugs.  Somehow I didn’t consider acid to be in that category but through my limited experience with it I knew how powerful it could be.  As the summer arrived I became more and more determined that I should have a good experience with LSD.  I had become convinced that the reason I wasn’t able to have a good trip was to do with my egotism and that I needed to work on myself.  This was not an easy prospect as I had always been a little guy with a big mouth and an even bigger head.  The particularly bad trip I’d had the previous year while at the Fillmore was all about loss of control.  I felt I had to hold onto my control and was absolutely terrified by the fact that it was oozing away from me in dramatic fashion.

   While all this internal drama was going on with me, out in the real world the Vietnam war was, by this time, raging.  The daily news had a stream of stories about military action in Vietnam as well as many about students burning their draft cards and huge demonstrations against the war.  The police tactics against anti-war protestors became increasingly violent and just as blood was definitely flowing over in Vietnam so too did it flow on the streets of America.  David Harris who was married to Joan Baez went to prison for refusing to be drafted into the army.  I know a movie producer in Hollywood who pretended he was gay, which he wasn’t, and avoided the draft that way.

   My sister Nell was no longer in San Francisco but living in London with her husband and their newborn son Poggy.  Nellie and the Hallinan boys had been very active in demonstrations in the city but now had taken her left wing activism to England.  The Hallinan boys all remained very active in civil rights and anti-Vietnam war demonstrations

   Back in 1965 both Kayo and Ringo Hallinan recruited a small army of tough fighters to form the front line of an anti-war march from Berkeley to Oakland which the Hell’s Angels had announced they were going to break up.  Not realising who was in the front of the march, Sonny Barger, Northern California president of the Angels, waded into the crowd thinking they were dealing with pacifists.  Barger, shouting abuse, as he pushed his way through the crowd, reached up to pull down a banner.  “As he pulled the banner down,” said Ringo, “Kayo hit him with a right fist on one side of his jaw and I delivered a left hook on his other.  He went down like a stone.  The Angels kept coming, thinking we were a bunch of pacifist wimps.  They suddenly found themselves surrounded by a lot of tough guys bent on pounding them.  I remember the looks on their faces as they suddenly realised they were in trouble.  And they were.  We kicked their asses until the Oakland police attacked us and drove us back.  Barger lied about that day on many occasions.  How they kicked the commies’ asses.  It was a fine moment.”

Conn (Ringo) Hallinan on the left before the fight and his brother Terence (Kayo) Hallinan seen punching a Hell’s Angel.

   But I stayed away from the big demonstrations as so many turned violent.  One day I was hitch hiking out of Mill Valley to the city and got a lift with a young man who was on his way to an anti-war demonstration in Berkeley.  He was quite candid in telling me that his motivation was nothing to do with the war but rather it was to meet beautiful young women.

   I went to a party in Berkeley and met a guy about my age who was joining the marines the next day.  I asked him why and his answer was chilling: “Because I want to kill somebody,” he said.   I was so startled by this that I asked him, if it was completely legal, would he kill me?  His answer was yes.  Now it just happened that I met this guy rather than one of the thousands of young recruits who had no such agenda and were simply doing what the government was ordering them to do.

   The whole situation was something I was just not thinking about.  My way of dealing with the possibility of being drafted was to smoke another joint.   And yet my brother Jim was now in the military and having done his basic training he would be having a stopover in Seattle for a few days en route to Korea.  I thought about flying up to see him.

   Several guys from my Tam High class of 1965 went into the service and found themselves in Vietnam.  Corky Corcoran, Ed Smith and Les Taylor all served over there.  Another who was a year younger than me was Ernie Bergman.  

   Corky, who I had known since 7th grade at Edna Maguire, joined the army in the summer of 1966 and became a paratrooper.  Never having been on an airplane before, he was flown to Fort Lewis in Washington where he did his basic training then it was off to Fort Benning in Georgia where he attended jump school.  By 1967 he was in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade.  “We went through the Brigade Jungle School in Bien Hoa,” said Corky, “To prepare us for the upcoming months in the Dak To area of the central highlands.”  His job was as a radio teletype operator, part of a 3-man team working from a jeep filled with communications equipment.  “We were constantly on the move,” remembers Corky.  “ There were some scary times indeed but I made it home in July, 1968.”

Corky Corcoran on the left as a soldier in Vietnam and on the right with his wife in more recent times.

   Les Taylor had grown up in a military family, having lived in France, Germany, Turkey and several locations in the USA before arriving at Tam High in his sophomore year.  By the time he got to Vietnam he was a qualified helicopter pilot and his initial training began while he was still a student at Tam.  On one of his early missions as co-pilot in Vietnam, ferrying men to a combat zone, his commander froze at the controls and he had to take over and fly the copter into the landing area.

Les Taylor in two different military uniforms and on the right a more recent view if him.

   Eddie Smith and I had been friends since 6th Grade at Alto.  He didn’t go into the service until late in 1967 and went to Vietnam the following year.  He said that more American GI’s died between ’68 and ’69 than at any other time in the war.  Ed: “I was on a mortar platoon out in the field most of the time. But when we were in base camp, it was just as dangerous.  The Vietcong and the regular North Vietnamese Army were shooting mortar rounds and rockets at us all the time.  I had plenty of close calls but luckily never got wounded.  It was scary as hell and I had nightmares for quite awhile once I got back to the states.”

Ed Smith on the left in Vietnam, middle back in Marin after his service and a more recent photo on the right.


   Ernie Bergman who was in my brother Jim’s year, joined the Navy in his graduation year of 1966 but didn’t get to Vietnam until April 1967.  His first day in Danang was traumatic as he was assigned to be a stretcher bearer for the hospital triage centre where the wounded were brought to see if they could be saved.  “What a shock to my whole being!” Says Ernie.  “I saw soldiers and marines with all kinds of injuries, lost limbs, large wounds, lots of blood, lots of horror.  One guy I was carrying looked like he was on the wrong side of a claymore mine and had 1000 little pockmarks all over his body, face and uniform.  Just before I put him down he started shaking so I called the nurse over.  I was looking directly into his face and he died right there.  Holy Shit!  This is REAL!  If anything, that first day in Vietnam at the triage center probably had more emotional and mental effect on me than anything else I experienced in my 30 months overseas and in Vietnam.”

On the left a picture of Ernie Bergman in the Navy and on the right more recently at the US Congress in Washington DC.

   So while I was smoking weed, dreaming of tangerine trees with marmalade skies, staying up all night to the sound of Larry Miller on KMPX, these guys were experiencing hell on earth in Vietnam.  The ride I was on didn’t have much further to go.

To be continued…

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1967 – The Summer of Love, ch. 3

Jim Morrison singing with The Doors at the Magic Mountain Festival, Mount Tam in the summer of 1967.

The Matrix was a small club which started in San Francisco in the mid-1960s.  It was located on Fillmore at the Marina end of that street.  I only ever went to The Matrix a few times and never knew that it was part-owned by Marty Balin who sang with Jefferson Airplane.  The first time I went there was because Marty had invited me to observe a gathering of the Jefferson Airplane Fan Club one afternoon.  It was in 1966 before Grace Slick had replaced Signe Andersen and Marty was the only band member in attendance.  The club was packed full of young women who were asking him questions adoringly.  As the Airplane was recording with RCA at this time he told the young audience that he and the band had recently had lunch with Elvis Presley.  A groan of abhorrence rippled through the room which caused Marty to say: “Well, anyway, I was impressed.”At this time Elvis would have been known to these young people only as the star of movies like Spinout and Paradise, Hawaiian Style.

   So one evening early in 1967, Augie Belden and I decided to go to the Matrix.  Why we chose that night I don’t remember for the act playing was a band we’d never heard of called The Doors.  We sat at a table very close to the stage and there weren’t more than eight people in the audience ourselves included.  We found The Doors compelling to listen to and look at.  Their manner was very confident and the songs were original and catchy.  Jim Morrison, the band’s singer was good looking and charismatic.  His vocal style was impressive and he had a rock and roll voice though my brother-in-law insists that he always sang flat.  

   I was particularly impressed by the lyrics to Twentieth Century Fox and was beguiled by their rendering of Kurt Weill’s Whiskey Song.  Equally impressive was the keyboard style of Ray Manzarek.  Morrison didn’t speak to the audience between numbers but he held our attention by leaning on the keyboard and talking quietly with Manzarek.  This enigmatic performance art kept the small audience engaged even though we couldn’t hear what they were talking about.  

   All the material they performed that night was on their debut album which I purchased soon after.  They had a unique sound.  The centrepiece was Manzarek’s keyboards and Morrison’s vocals but drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger filled their spaces with original and engaging instrumentation.

Marty Balin’s club The Matrix.

   Augie and I saw The Doors in March and sometime between then and the summer their single, Light My Fire, went to number one nationwide and they became an enormous draw overnight.  The next time Augie and I saw them was at Bill Graham’s Winterland but by now they were huge and I found them less exciting than I had at the Matrix.  Though Jim Morrison had a passing resemblance to Mick Jagger he exhibited none of the physical fluidity of the Stones vocalist.  He would just stand at the microphone like a statue holding onto it without any movement.  Also his vocal improvisations, which occurred often, were mainly dull and uninteresting. 

   The next time I saw The Doors was up on Mount Tam at the Mountain Theatre. Radio KFRC put on a big show called The Magic Mountain Festival and, in addition to The Doors, Dionne Warwick appeared.  Her set was brilliant but again I found The Doors a bit dull.  All their numbers sounded very similar and dragged at a slow tempo.  By now they were touring the nation and possibly beginning to burn out.

   Augie and I were very lucky to have seen The Doors at The Matrix before they were famous.  It was such an intimate setting and there wasn’t a trace of self indulgence in their performance whereas the times I saw them after Light My Fire was a hit, Jim Morrison would leave enormously long pauses between sung passages.  A friend told me of one gig where Ray Manzarek became so exasperated with Morrison’s pauses that he said loudly over the microphone: “Will you please sing?”

   I spent the afternoon wandering around and I came across my old classmate Bill Champlin and had a chat with him.  His band, The Sons of Champlin, were playing the following day and knowing I’d done poster work for the Fillmore, he told me that Bill Graham had decided not to book his band anymore because he thought they were “too ugly.”  If he was upset by this he gave no indication but then Bill Champlin was a showbiz pro from early on.  All through high school he had bands like The Opposite Six working the dances in Marin County.  Bill had a good growling rock and roll voice and played the piano with panache.  He had been a music student of Mr Greenwood’s at Tam High.  This meant he was in the high school marching band along with Mark Symmes and Billy Bowen.  These guys spoke highly of Mister Greenwood who brought out a high calibre of musicianship in his students.

   I had been to the Mountain Theatre many times throughout my childhood for the annual plays and it was a novelty to see a rock concert happening there.  The Monterey Pop Festival was a week away and the news from there travelled fast.  Monterey provided a showcase for the bay area bands as well as hosting Otis Redding, The Who and The Jimi Hendrix Experience.  Word spread that The Who and Hendrix finished their sets by wrecking their equipment and Jimi actually set fire to his electric guitar on stage.  This did seem a bit extreme for the largely peaceful scene in San Francisco so, the following week, when Hendrix played the Fillmore, I went along to see him.  I watched his set from upstairs and in addition to playing the guitar with his tongue he also played it upside down behind his back as well as creating feedback on his amplifier and simulating a sexual act with it.  I can only guess that someone had had a word with him not to go too far at the peaceful Fillmore for the only violent thing he did was to throw his guitar on the floor at the end of the set.

   As Hendrix was also doing a free concert in the Panhandle at Golden Gate Park on that Sunday afternoon I decided to make my way there and have another look and listen.  The Jimi Hendrix Experience was a trio with Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Redding on bass.  All three had crowns of fizzy long hair and were dressed in what looked like old fashioned marching band jackets.  They performed on a flatbed truck which was parked at the Baker Street end of the Panhandle and they attracted a sizeable crowd. 

Hendrix plays in the Panhandle. The eagle eyed among you can spot John Goddard of Village Music in the front row wearing dark glasses just above Jimi’s right thumb.

   The only songs they played which I knew were Wild Thing and Hey Joe which had been a radio hit the previous year for The Leaves but the rest of his material was original.  As with The Doors I bought their LP entitled Are You Experienced?  The song I particularly liked was Purple Haze.  The instrumentation conjured images of a factory with massive machine-like hammers going up and down.  Because his diction was not too clear I and a few friends mistook the line: Excuse me while I kiss the sky for Excuse me while I kiss this guy and assumed that Jimi Hendrix was gay.

   I continued doing poster work for individual bands and, of course, socialising smokily with my friends in Mill Valley.  I picked up a bit of poster work from Bill Graham’s rivals over at the Avalon Ballroom.  I did a few bumper stickers to promote their two quietest nights, Thursdays and Sundays.  

A few bits of poster art I did after leaving the Fillmore.

   I was not an early riser during 1967.  I stayed up late and slept late.  If I was at my parents’ in North Beach, I would draw pictures into the night and early in the year I found an FM radio station which played good music all night long.  It was KMPX and the disc jockey was named Larry Miller who had a very nice personal style with none of the usual DJ malarkey.  Since I first discovered pop radio as a kid in the early 1950s I had found disc jockeys incredibly annoying.  Were it not for the music they played I would never have listened to their asinine babbling but Larry Miller was nothing like that and I regularly listened to him all night.  He didn’t play hit records but rather music which clearly appealed to him.  He also played records with drug related subject matter.  Cocaine Blues by Dave Van Ronk was one and The Pusher by Steppenwolf was another.  The Pusher was actually written by country artist Hoyt Axton but Steppenwolf made it their own and I became rather hooked on that song.  John Kay’s voice was raw, soulful and a bit scary as he sang with a righteous fury about getting his bible, razor and gun in pursuit of the pusher-man. 

A handbill which DJ Larry Miller designed himself for his show on Radio KMPX.

   I had never heard anything by the Velvet Underground until Larry Miller played it.  I was a bit shocked by the words to Heroin with Lou Reed describing sticking a spike into his vein.  KMPX exposed me to music that I never would have heard otherwise.

   Around this time I was invited up to Coco Cutler’s apartment on Telegraph Hill.  Coco was an old friend of my parents from their political past, meaning she was left wing.  She was in her sixties, physically tiny and had a beautiful face.  The view from her flat was stunning as it looked out across the Embarcadero and the Bay Bridge.  I had seen an old film, Dark Passage, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall which had a scene of him climbing the steps from the Embarcadero up to just below Coco’s window and was surprised to hear that she had watched them film that scene in 1946.  She said it was impressive just how many times Bogie had to climb that hill.

   The reason that Coco had invited me up to her place was to meet a young friend of a friend who had come from London.  She was Jo Bergman who I liked immediately.  Jo was short with a smiley face surrounded by a cloud of frizzy black hair and her laughter was infectious.  Jo spoke in an American accent but clearly had a European and British sensibility.  Coco’s good friends Elliott and Norma Sullivan lived in London and had made the introduction.  Jo was over here working for a friend who ran a record plugging business.  She was biding her time until she would return to London to set up and run the Rolling Stones office for Mick Jagger.  She regaled us with tales about the London music scene and how the Stones were harassed by the police about drugs but they wouldn’t touch the Beatles because they’d been made MBEs by the queen.  

My friend Jo Bergman in three photos with and without the Stones.

   The record plugging office where she worked was located in Columbus Tower which I knew as there was a Zims on the ground floor which I regularly ate at.  I absolutely loved a Zims Burger.  

   As Jo had invited me to visit the office I soon did.  She sat at a typewriter in the reception area on the first floor and her boss, a guy named Bob McClay, operated from the next room.  I guess that his business was recommending discs to radio stations.  We hit it off straight away as Bob was the only person I had ever met who shared my passion for the cartoons of Wallace Wood.  Wood was one of my favourite cartoonists from MAD Magazine.    

   McClay’s office was littered with LPs and singles.  He invited me to take whatever I wanted, so I did and was soon listening to the Bee Gees (New York Mining Disaster 1941), Cat Stevens (I love My Dog As Much As I Love You) and The Who (Boris The Spider).  

   Columbus Tower was located at the tip of Columbus Avenue and Kearney Street and it had the look of a much smaller Flatiron Building which stands on Fifth Avenue in New York City.  It was owned at this time by Frank Werber who managed the Kingston Trio and also ran The Trident restaurant in Sausalito.  As I was always on the hustle for graphic design work, Bob McClay made an intro and I spent some time talking with Werber in his spacious office up on the top floor of Columbus Tower.  He was a very engaging guy and interestingly had a back story similar to Bill Graham’s.  Born in Germany he and his parents escaped the Nazis in dramatic circumstances and he grew up in New York. Though I had a nice time talking with Frank I didn’t come away with any graphic design work.

   Though the city was where I did any business that was going, my emotional home was still Mill Valley where I’d get high with my friends.  A preoccupation for me at this time was to have a good trip on LSD as the few times I’d tried it hadn’t been great.  I guess I was bowing to peer pressure as so many of my friends were dropping acid and having a wonderful time.  They would tell me that I had to let myself go and not let my ego get in the way.  It truly became an aspiration to have a good experience with the drug which seemed to be all over the place.   

   When we got high we would always play records.  Listening to records and singing along with them was a thing I had been doing since I was a little kid.  At nine years old I would jig around my parents’ bedroom to Elvis records doing pretty accurate imitations of him.  I had a passion for the rock and roll of the 1950s which subsided after Elvis went in the army and wasn’t re-ignited until the Beatles came along.  I was totally ignorant of the mechanics of music but this didn’t stop me emulating the vocal styles of John Sebastian, John Lennon and Bob Dylan.  

   As the summer progressed an acetate of a recording by the Beatles started making the rounds.  An acetate was a pre-release disc which wasn’t for broadcast or sale.  It was A Day in the Life which would feature on the soon to be released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  I heard it a few times.  First in Bob McClay’s office and then at a packed Fillmore gig.  I was standing near the band room door talking to Dicken Scully when this track came over the sound system.  It began with John Lennon singing wistful lyrics in a mellifluous manner.  Then a full orchestra began a musical climb like a rocket ship, going higher and higher until it crashed into a piano riff with Paul McCartney singing of getting out of bed, catching a bus, then going into a dream.  At this juncture a combination of Lennon’s voice and the full orchestra took us off into a musical dreamscape before returning to Lennon singing his song.  Then the orchestral rocket began again and climbed higher and higher and higher until it finally reached its climax.  Then sounded a beautiful musical chord.  It was like nothing I had ever heard before and the huge crowd at the Fillmore burst into applause.  From where I was standing I could see Bill Graham on the other side of the auditorium laughing maniacally as he looked up at the ceiling.  Having stage managed the playing of the acetate he was clearly pleased with himself.  It was a special moment.

To be continued…

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1967 – The Summer of Love, chapter two

Pictured on the left, Bill Graham

By 1967 I had become a head.  A great deal of my time was devoted to getting high with my chums in Mill Valley.  When one joint had been passed around the room and reached the end of its existence someone would pull another Rizla out of the packet, sprinkle a sizeable batch of grass into it and roll another one.  We would spend hours talking and laughing about ‘straight’ people and how unaware they were about their rituals and behaviours.  We took great delight in considering ourselves different to the rest of society.

   One aspect of the cultural changes brought about by the dope smoking phenomenon was that it provided a sanctuary for oddball outcasts.  In earlier times young people who didn’t fit in would be shunned by various levels of In-Crowd but the sharing of a joint was a friendly experience which transcended such divisions.  Back in 1965 when I accidentally stumbled upon a highly secretive group of friends who were turning on, there was in play a certain amount of social cross-pollination.  Rich kids who lived in the leafier parts of Mill Valley would be going to Marin City and Sausalito to score their matchboxes from young people who they would never otherwise encounter.  Then the federal narcotics people held a massive raid in the summer of ’65 just before my graduation with a fanfare of publicity which succeeded in popularising marijuana throughout Marin County and in turn the bay area.

The front page of the Sunday Chronicle in June 1965 announcing the big raid in Mill Valley, Marin City and Sausalito.

   The fact was that young people were already ostracised from adult society by not being allowed to drink until they were 21 so the leap to smoking grass was not that big a deal.  And it was a very big social change.  When I first stumbled onto my friends’ clandestine pot smoking it had scared me to death.  But now I was a head like everybody else.

   On one occasion I was very smoke ridden and listening to Donovan singing Season Of The Witch when a friend asked if I had “heard about that Dreyfus guy?”  He then handed me the Independent Journal with a front page photo of Dave Dreyfus above the headline: ‘Helicopter Crash Kills Ex-Marinite.’  

   I was thunderstruck by this news which clearly meant nothing to my friend who couldn’t possibly comprehend its importance to me.  The Dreyfus boys; Dave, Tim and Jared, had been a part of our lives ever since my family arrived in Mill Valley in 1952.  Babbie and Barney Dreyfus were very close to my parents Blackie and Beth and I remember many a barbecue up at Bootjack Camp.    

   Dave had decided to join the army in the early 1960s which was a highly controversial thing considering the leftwing politics embraced by all my parents’ friends.  There was a political chasm between the boys of the Hallinan family and those of the Dreyfus family.  Both Dave and Tim Dreyfus seemed to sidestep their parents’ politics whereas all the Hallinan boys were uniformly militant in their support of a long list of causes which included civil rights, both in the deep south as well as the bay area, and opposition to the war in Vietnam.  Many a fist fight was waged by the Hallinan boys with those who disagreed with their politics.  And they were all tough fighters.  The use of the N word by any caucasian would ignite one of these battles which gained them a fearsome reputation throughout Marin County. 

   Back in 1952 their father, Vin Hallinan was a candidate for president on the Progressive Party’s ticket.  There wasn’t a hope of his being elected but his candidacy was a rallying point for the left which was under serious attack by the federal government at this time.  His opponents were Dwight D. Eisenhower for the Republicans and Adlai Stevenson for the Democrats.  In my sister Nell’s class at Old Mill School they held a mock presidential election and Nellie was surprised to learn that Tim Dreyfus voted for Eisenhower.  He even sported an I Like Ike badge with pride.

Some images from Vin Hallinan’s presidential bid in 1952. In the photo on the left Vin, Vivian and a very young Danny arrive at the polling station at Ross School to be to told by the precinct inspector that because they’d already sent a postal ballot from New York they couldn’t vote that day.

   So when Dave Dreyfus joined the army, all the Hallinan boys were disapproving but Babbie resolutely refused to criticise Dave for his decision.  He did his two years in the service then went to Texas where he learned to fly helicopters and became a flying instructor there.  He was a passenger on a demonstration ride while attending a helicopter convention near palm Springs when the crash that killed him occurred. 

   Dave was only 26 years old.  This was my first experience of death on a personal level and the fact that I got the news through a cloud of marijuana smoke made it all the more upsetting.  The last time I had seen Dave was at my sister Nell’s flat on Greenwich Street in San Francisco.  He was a very engaging and funny guy.  He was gently disagreeing with Nell’s commitment to socialist principles.  “But I like steak,” was his reply to her criticism of eating in fancy restaurants when so many were hungry. 

   Perhaps it was fear that turned both Dave and Tim away from their parents’ politics.  The cold war era was a frightening time to be left wing in your political outlook.  HUAC and Senator Joe McCarthy’s investigations ignited a blaze of terror across the nation, the reverberations of which are still felt today.  Guilt by association was a major concern.  My father Blackie told me that, after he was blacklisted, people he and my mother knew well in Greenwich Village suddenly didn’t know them at all on the streets of New York.  The fear of being subpoenaed and grilled about some petition you may have signed in the 1930s meant that debate on matters political became diminished.  The prosecution and conviction of Alger Hiss and the execution of the Rosenbergs sent a powerful shock wave through the families of the left during the early 1950s.  One of the scarier sights would be a visit by FBI agents to your doorstep and all of our families had many such visitations throughout the 1950s. 

Pictured on the left is Ethel Rosenberg being arrested by federal agents. On the right is the front page of the LA Times after they were executed.

   I remember Jared Dreyfus telling me about a kid in their neighbourhood saying to his brother Dave: “When it becomes legal to kill commies I’m going to kill your mother.”  Dave then proceeded to beat the daylights out of him.

On the left is a photo of the House Un-American Activities Committee under the chairmanship of J. Parnell Thomas with a young Dick Nixon standing on the right.

   My brother Jim also decided to join the army the previous year rather than be subject to the draft.  He waited until his 18th birthday in September, 1966 to enlist, thus avoiding the need for Blackie and Beth to give their permission.  Our parents, like all their close friends, were firm in their opposition to the war in Vietnam.  I had a temporary deferment because of shipping out as a sailor and the draft was a big problem which I, in my state of regular smoky intoxication, was simply not thinking about.  The choices seemed to be: getting drafted, going to jail or leaving the country.  One other choice as Ringo Hallinan points out, was fighting to end the war.

   Jim’s decision to deal with it by enlisting was complicated.  In part it was an act of rebellion against my parents and their politics, a fact he would admit to me later.  But it was also to confront those three choices.  Once inside he made a decision to sign up for the stenography corps and, luckily, he served his time in Korea and Germany.

   I too was against the Vietnam war but never fell in with a particularly political crowd so didn’t participate in any of the big demonstrations which were prevalent at that time.  The cycle of my life seemed to be getting a bit of poster work and doing my best to grind out something decent.  Then when I’d finished I would put out my thumb and head to Mill Valley where I would smoke myself into oblivion.

   Among my friends who I would turn on with was a very odd fellow named Matt.  Early in 1967 he somehow got this cabin at a place called Slide Ranch out in the wilds along the Pacific Coast Highway.  There were two routes to reach Stinson Beach: one across Mount Tam and the other along the coast road which you would pick up above Tam Valley.  So if I was hitching to Matt’s place I’d need two rides: one from the city to Tam Junction then another out the coast road.  It took a few trips to get used to where exactly it was as there was a steep dirt road which descended on the ocean side of the highway.  It came down past Matt’s cabin on the left then continued down around to the right stopping at a house at the bottom.  

   I had first met Matt the previous year when he was living on a houseboat in the marshes of Larkspur.  It became a regular hangout for me and was where I developed my passion for The Lovin’ Spoonful.  With a head full of ganja I listened to their first LP over and over.  It was not long after I had returned from my voyage on the Torvanger.  That trip had transformed me from the loud mouthed little guy I was in high school into a slightly introverted fellow who’d been out in the world.  So I returned a changed person and found a very different Mill Valley to the one I’d left behind only a few months earlier.  The pied piper of marijuana had come and taken a considerable number of the children away.  Tam High was practically unrecognisable to me.  A great majority of the boys had long hair and most of the girls sported serapes.  A large number of the students were smoking weed.  

   Someone who personified this dramatic change for me was Peter Perdue.  I had known Peter in my senior year as he was a friend of my brother Jim’s.  Peter was a slightly comical figure who was constantly seeking ways to be entertaining for his friends.  He had a vague resemblance to the comedy star Jerry Lewis and would physically flap around in a similar manner.  When I’d last seen him his hair was short as was every male student at Tam High but now his hair was long and expertly cut to make him look like Sonny Bono of Sonny and Cher.  In fact he dressed in bell bottom trousers and his girl friend of the time, Adrienne Inge, looked and dressed just like Cher even though her long hair was ginger instead of dark brown.  

   Peter was positively evangelical about the sociological changes which were happening.  He would read drug related interpretations into all of Bob Dylan’s lyrics, telling me that Mister Tambourine Man was, in fact, a drug dealer and he told me that the name The Lovin’ Spoonful was a reference to shooting up drugs.  He seemed to feel that the hippy phenomenon (it hadn’t yet been christened that) was something akin to a political movement.  I sifted a great deal of Peter’s opinions on this subject through a filter of skepticism.  But he was a very entertaining person to be around.

   His relationship with Adrienne was about to hit the rocks as she became smitten with an older guy named John Parker.  John was the elder brother of Gregg Parker who, like Peter, was now a senior at Tam.  John had been busted for marijuana possession and was on probation.  This didn’t stop him smoking weed, far from it.  Adrienne lived with her mother Eleanor in a small house on East Blithedale at the corner of Nelson.  Eleanor was an interesting old dame who did not like the business of pot smoking one little bit.  This was tough on her as Adrienne made no pretence about getting loaded on a regular basis.  Her mother made every attempt to become broad minded on this subject but then she would get a bit drunk and go crazy throwing all reserve out the window.  I would have long conversations with Eleanor across her kitchen table but one time I turned up while she was drunk and she pretty much threw me out of her house.

   Peter Perdue meanwhile was going through agonies over losing Adrienne to John Parker.  So it was through John Parker and Adrienne that I met Matt as they would go to his houseboat for their assignations.  

   But now, in 1967, Matt was no longer in Larkspur on a houseboat but all the way out at Slide Ranch which was a seriously remote location.  When I would visit it’d be for a few days.  Whoever had money would finance a visit to the grocery store in Stinson where we’d buy jars of peanut butter, loaves of white bread and bottles of milk, cheap food which went a long way.  I was charmed that a band making the rounds in the bay area was called The Peanut Butter Conspiracy.  However I never actually heard them play.

   Matt had worked as a carpenter but at this time didn’t look or behave like he had a job at all, also he seemed to keep himself stoned on weed around the clock.  He was highly intelligent, articulate and a disarmingly honest person which, at this time of my life, I was not.  So much of what was going on inside my head frightened and embarrassed me.  I think my biggest problem was that I didn’t have a girlfriend.  Bob Dylan expressed my state of mind succinctly in his 1965 song It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding): “And if my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”

   I was now 20 years old and still living at my parents’ place in North Beach.  Hanging out with Matt and our circle of friends was an enjoyable way of not thinking seriously about my future.

  I soon had another assignment from Bill Graham which was a poster for a one-nighter on a Sunday at the Fillmore with an impressive lineup: B.B. King, Moby Grape and the Steve Miller Blues Band.  I decided to go for an Arabian Nights look and started with a tall chimney out of which came a swirling fog, within which I drew the lettering in a wavy pattern with the names of the bands along with the date and time.  Behind the chimney I drew an evil looking genie who was beckoning to a bald headed man in the foreground holding an equally bald headed child.  The significance of these images was lost on me as I was just letting whatever my hands drew make their way onto the poster board.  To the right I depicted a woman, presumably the child’s mother and behind her another genie with a slightly noble look on his face.  The bald headed child had a long extended arm which stretched around towards the mother.

A slightly skewed view of my artwork for the BB King poster.

   I remember how Bill used to examine Wes Wilson’s posters when he would deliver them on a Friday afternoon.  After perching a ladder against the wall above the staircase, he would staple about eight of the posters up in a row then stand back.  He would stare at them and extend his right arm towards them with his thumb straight up.  He would then rotate his thumb down to the 9 o’clock position and keep staring.  I think he was trying to formulate an opinion of the work Wes had done and as that work was something outside his control, I believe this bothered Bill.  Wes, in addition to Bill, was also in the process of becoming famous and was chalking up some very impressive commissions including the poster for the very last performance of The Beatles at Candlestick Park the previous year.  

   Wes would arrive with a friendly smile on his face.  Bonnie and Wes were highly conversational people but Bill was almost always busy and shooting the breeze wasn’t his style.   Though I had never heard Bill express an opinion on Wes’s posters, he clearly had them and his confidence in matters to do with graphic design was clearly growing.  

   I went in to see him in his little office to get paid for my latest poster for the B.B. King show and he suddenly became very cold and business-like.  

   “What have you got on this poster?” He asked.  “There’s a genie and another genie and a martian.  And a little martian.  I don’t like it.”  He wrote me a cheque for the artwork and said: “Come back when you can do something I like.”

   I was stunned.  His words wounded me tremendously and immediately.  Bill had always liked my work but now he was telling me to get lost.  I walked away from the Fillmore deeply traumatised.  I’d been fired.  If I had been at all professional I would have gone back to the drawing board and ground out some good spec art work and taken them into show Bill but I was not that person at all.  Instead I took refuge over in Mill Valley getting stoned with my friends.  I was too mortified and embarrassed to tell them what had happened with Bill so I just kept it to myself.

   I was, however, still able to walk into Bill’s concerts for free which I did, usually in the company of our friend Augie Belden.  Augie was always in search of a good time and he had a VW beetle which could take us into San Francisco to go see shows at the Fillmore and Winterland and on one occasion we saw a rather extraordinary performance at The Matrix featuring a band we’d never heard of called The Doors.

To be continued…

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