jefferson-airplane – Page 2 – Miller Avenue Musings

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, 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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The Summer of Love – part 1

Pictured above are The Quicksilver Messenger Service

There was a song which was released as a single in May of 1967 by Scott MacKenzie. It was entitled San Francisco (Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair). It went into the charts nationally and also became an international hit. All of my friends were avid listeners to the popular music of the day and yet I never heard a single one of them enthuse about Scott MacKenzie or his song. I heard it on the radio and regarded it as a purely commercial pop record cashing in on the hippy scene in the Bay Area. And yet whenever there’s a television or radio documentary about the Haight Ashbury in that year this is the song that’s always trotted out to accompany it.

It was written and produced by John Philips of the Mamas and Papas. The tune was catchy enough but the lyrics were a bit worthy with references to all the “gentle people” to be found in the city by the bay. True there were many Be-ins and Love-ins that year which is what the song was on about. But there was a dark side to the hippy phenomenon as well with regular reports in the Chronicle about overdosed dead bodies collapsed in doorways along Haight Street. The name Charles Manson was unknown then but he too resided in the Haight Ashbury district at that time with his ‘family’ which, along with him, would become infamous in just a few years time.

The summer of 1967 in San Francisco became known as the summer of love. The hippy happening was at its height with young people from all over the United States and the world arriving on Haight Street every day, possibly encouraged by Scott MacKenzie and his wretched song.

For me, however, as the summer of love reached its peak, I went off the rails on a psychedelic substance and wound up incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. I was twenty years old and, as a result, my memories of that year are skewed by this experience. With hindsight, I was headed for psychological trouble with or without LSD but that doesn’t alter the fact that I flipped out on acid. And I do know from others that it was a particularly bad batch.

Working for Bill Graham at the Fillmore Auditorium provided an exciting window on the emerging San Francisco rock scene which had, by 1967, become world famous. I returned from a trip abroad in January and rang up Bill at the Fillmore to let him know I was back in town and available for any poster work he needed. I had only been away a few months but things had changed dramatically. The scene had become nationally and internationally renowned with reporters from all over the world turning up to write about Haight-Ashbury and the music it had spawned. The two biggest bands, Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead were becoming very famous indeed and there was a gaggle of new poster artists in town. Before it was Wes Wilson, Mouse and a few others but now psychedelic artwork was everywhere and the advertising industry had begun imitating the lettering style that Wes had made popular with his poster art. Also Bill Graham was different. He too was in the process of becoming a celebrity.

I went in to see Bill and Bonnie at the Fillmore and he seemed more polished somehow. He was certainly better dressed, sporting a snappy green suede jacket. He was now mixing with famous people in the music business and the glow was rubbing off on him a bit. Enjoying his suede jacket he asked Bonnie if she thought it made him look like a ‘rock mogul.’

He’d been back east and seen a special preview of the soon to be released Don’t Look Back, a documentary on Bob Dylan, by D.A. Pennebaker. He gave his verdict loudly: “Bob Dylan is an asshole! Albert Grossman steals the show.” Dylan’s manager, Grossman, is seen in the film prodding London impresario Tito Burns to get more money for Bob. Bill had become friendly with Grossman after negotiating with him for an exclusive deal on the Butterfield Blues Band.

I overheard Bill giving an interview in his tiny office at the Fillmore to a reporter from Time Magazine. When the article came out, he was furious with the way the guy had written about him. He felt misrepresented.

The job Bill gave me was a poster design for a weekend show featuring The Blues Project, Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker and the Stu Gardner Trio. I was very excited about doing this poster and, following my old pattern, I walked up Russian Hill to the corner store where I bought a pack of cigarettes and a Cadbury’s chocolate bar. I started work about 8pm in the kitchen at my parents’ apartment on Union Street and worked through the night. I drew a picture of a black male blues musician playing a harmonica which stretched off into the distance and swerved around in a liquid shape to frame the lettering. On the top of the harmonica I drew a keyboard being played by musicians. I had a drummer and depicted the vibrations his drumsticks created. I also did cartoons of Paul Butterfield, Bob Dylan, Pig Pen and Jerry Garcia. Down below was a black street scene with people dancing and in the right hand corner stood a white police officer with a billy club observing them. The police officer was not sympathetically drawn. He looked mean and intolerant. I was trying to put the blues into a political context.

All of this appeared on a light green background with the letters coming out white. I delivered the artwork to the printer and thought no more about it until I wandered into the Fillmore that Friday night. Being apologetic was not a quality I was used to seeing in Bill Graham but that is exactly how he approached me as I walked up the stairs. “After all the trouble I’ve had with the police,” he said, “I simply couldn’t allow that picture of the cop to be on the poster. It would be a red rag to a bull. I’m sorry but the printer and I had to change your artwork.”

What he and the printer had done was to black out the entire street scene as well as all the musicians playing. The only bit of my work remaining was the blues player, the harmonica and the lettering. To be honest it looked very good. It was dark blue with a lighter blue for the harp player who was reversed out of the background with the lettering in white.

On the left is the original poster and on the right is what Bill Graham and the printer cooked up.

The trouble with the police that Bill was referring to had occurred at the Fillmore before I came along. I remember reading about raids on the hall by the police in the Chronicle before I knew him so I was aware of the reality he was dealing with. The police definitely harassed him in the early days and the memory of those encounters clearly lingered. For me the abiding recollection of my poster being changed was the diplomatic way in which Bill had explained it to me. He was a very persuasive person.

Being part of the furniture at the Fillmore meant I got very used to seeing the bands up close and becoming familiar with them and their repertoire. Quicksilver Messenger Service was a five piece unit which featured John Cipollina on lead guitar. Cipollina had been in my sister Katie’s class at Old Mill School. I remember being impressed by their image. Both lead singer/guitarist Gary Duncan and Cipollina had long straight hair and wore dark cowboy hats making the band look like a gang of wild west outlaws. For some numbers Duncan would slide his guitar strap around so that his instrument was on his back and he’d beat a cowbell with a drumstick. As with all the bands at the Fillmore these guys were constantly stoned on weed.

I didn’t get to know members of Jefferson Airplane until they changed female vocalist. Originally Signe Andersen was in the band but at some point during my time at the Fillmore she left and was replaced by Grace Slick who I had seen performing with her band The Great Society. Grace was a very beautiful woman, good musician and terrific singer. She was also a very nice person, at least to me. They used to rehearse at the Fillmore in the afternoons and I was always impressed that they would lug their own gear up the stairs. Early on Bonnie MacLean had introduced me to Marty Balin and I would have regular chats with him in the foyer of the Fillmore while painting my boards. Another local band, Sopwith Camel, had a hit record on the radio entitled Hello Hello, which Marty described as “a piece of shit.” The fact that it was being played on KFRC irritated him. “We’ve got to get a single out,” he said.

RCA ad art for singles by Jefferson Airplane.

In addition to Marty Balin I became friendly with their drummer Spencer Dryden. I remember one day taking a ride down into the Tenderloin district with Spencer in his VW Beetle. His ashtray was heaving with roaches and cigarette butts. He lit up an enormous joint as we sped down Geary. By the time we hit the Tenderloin I was seriously stoned. Spencer went into some building while I loitered on the street and was soon approached by this smiling black guy in a leather jacket. “Hey little brother,” he said. “You want something good?” He opened a shiny pouch with three or four enormous fat joints wrapped in bright yellow cigarette paper. When he realised he wasn’t going to make a sale he moved on quickly. Then Spencer came out and we drove back to the Fillmore. I don’t remember why I was along for the ride but I was.

My favourite musician in the Airplane was Jorma Kaukonen whose guitar playing was so exotic. His riffs had something of the Arabian Nights about them. I never spoke to Jorma but he and Bill had a conversational rapport which was interesting. He was regularly sitting in Graham’s tiny office just talking. Bill didn’t shoot the breeze with many people but Jorma was an exception.

The other band I became very familiar with was The Grateful Dead. Bass player Phil Lesh and I regularly had a chat as he was a fan of the EC horror comics of the early 1950s and had seen my cartoon of the Old Witch in a comic strip I had done for one of the psychedelic newspapers. On an evening at the Fillmore I would often go up to the band room and just hang around. I did an awful lot of hanging around at the Fillmore. One afternoon up there I saw Pig Pen and Bob Weir leafing through binders with plastic window pages containing black and white 8×10 photographs of good looking women.

Like Jorma in the Airplane, I truly enjoyed watching and listening to Jerry Garcia play the guitar. He seemed to physically propel himself forward with each note he played which was hypnotic to observe. Garcia was probably the most friendly person on that scene. He seemed so approachable. I never engaged Jerry in conversation but he’d always say hello to me.

The look of the Grateful Dead was something to send shivers down the spines of most middle class parents. Very long hair on guys who didn’t really have the right kind of hair to be that long with the exception of Bob Weir. The Dead had the Haight Ashbury lifestyle written all over them. One of the funniest numbers in every one of their sets was when Pig Pen (aka Ron Mckernan) would come out from behind his electric keyboard and sing Good Mornin’ Little School Girl. He had a terrific blues voice and the sight of him with his long hair and beard singing: “Tell your mama and papa, that I’m a little school boy too,” was such a contradiction that it made me laugh every time.

Members of The Grateful Dead, from left: Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Ron (Pig-Pen) McKernan, Bill Kreutzmann

Bill Graham kept a cowbell and drumstick in his office and when the Dead were doing their second set of the evening he’d bring them out and go to the side of the stage behind the amplifier and accompany them rhythmically. I never saw him do this with any other bands.

Bill Graham at the side of the Fillmore stage accompanying The Dead with cowbell. From left: Bob Weir, Pig Pen and Bill Graham.

The band room was guarded during gigs by Dicken Scully whose brother Rock was one of the Dead’s two managers (the other was Danny Rifkin). Dicken was tall, thin, wore glasses and had long blond hair. He was a very nice guy to me but was very strict about who got beyond that door. Lots of people tried to get past Dicken but unless he knew you had a genuine connection to one of the bands playing he was resolutely firm in denying access.

One thing that hanging around the Fillmore did for me was to feed the fantasy of becoming a performer myself. I was much too shy to get up on a stage and sing but it was an aspiration which grew as I clearly had the talent and a good singing voice. On long walks home from the Fillmore I would compose my own songs. My route home took me down Geary to Van Ness. I’d then turn left on Polk Street and walk however many blocks to Union. Then I’d turn right, going up and over Russian Hill until I reached my parents’ apartment. The walk took me about forty minutes which was just long enough to write a song and once inside I’d scribble the words down on a piece of art work. I had a big professional drawing board in my bedroom and was constantly doodling.

Hanging around the Fillmore was not like having a social life for all my real friends were across the Golden Gate Bridge in Mill Valley. Every opportunity I had to go there was seized upon with enthusiasm. My mode of transport was hitch hiking. I’d put my thumb out on Lombard street and within half an hour I would be walking down Miller Avenue. I’d make my way to one of many houses where, invariably, I’d get loaded on weed with my friends who were all indulging in this activity. As I’d walk in, I’d be handed a lit joint and away we’d go. The music on the record player could be Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde or Revolver by The Beatles. A lid of grass sat in a plastic bag on a table surrounded by packets of Rizla cigarette papers. We’d roll skinny little joints, light them and suck the smoke deep into our lungs. We would then hold our breath as long as we could and finally release the smoke in a mighty dizzy exhalation. Much of the conversation which followed was whispered by people holding their breath.

This was the way of life I had embraced. Being loaded meant that everything was either interesting or funny. The smallest detail in a work of art became something enormous and recorded music seemed that much more exciting. One negative side of being stoned so often was my tendency to talk about creative things I might do rather than actually doing them.

To be continued...

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