jimi-hendrix – Miller Avenue Musings

Back to the Waterfront

Somewhere in the midst of my comedown and the start of my depression, my childhood friend Robbie Bridges, appeared and invited me to go on a road trip to southern California. Robbie was the son of Harry Bridges and he and I used to play together when we were very young. After his parents’ divorce, he’d been living back east with his mother Nancy. He was now based in San Francisco and doing some kind of a white collar job which was nothing to do with Harry or the longshore union.

Robbie must have known what I’d been through the past few months but my memory of our drive down the coast was that we talked as if nothing had happened to me and I responded well to this. Everybody around me at this time was treating me with tremendous delicacy and somehow Robbie not thinking there was anything wrong with me was liberating. At one point he asked me to drive and I did. It was an exciting moment of self discovery to learn that I actually knew how to drive a car.

He told me all about the pop music he was keen on. He was particularly taken by The Who and told me about gigs he’d been to. I cannot remember where we stayed on this trip but I think we were away from San Francisco for a few days.

A little bit of logical thinking was seeping into my fevered brain. The idea of a trip to England, became something I felt I had to do. I knew that in order to get the money for such a journey, I would need to go back to work on the waterfront. But to do that I would have to pull myself together and make accommodations with the world around me. For someone who, a mere six weeks earlier, had been stomping around the psychiatric wards at Napa State Hospital insisting that John Lennon was in the next room, this was something of a tall order. But at every point on my journey of madness, I had responded to the signals around me and the fact I had two contacts in London: my sister Nell and my friend Jo Bergman, I took as just such a signal. It did, however, require some organisation on my part.

That I had the opportunity to work on the waterfront as a ship’s clerk was a privilege indeed. This privilege came to me as a result of being Blackie Myers’ son. I was aware just how sought after the clerking jobs on the front were. For starters they paid very well indeed and it could be more than a bit interesting, particularly when you worked down inside the hold of a cargo ship.

Had I never worked on the front before, the prospect of clerking would have terrified me, but the waterfront was a world I was familiar with having done it a fair bit. However this time was different. The recent experiences I’d been through had taken me into dimensions outside the social boundaries of normal society and I realised I’d have to conform to my father’s ways. The first thing would be to cut my hair and dress in a sober manner. There was a huge prejudice against long hairs on the front and, after several months of being a hippie mental patient, my hair was long indeed. My father was a very respected guy up and down the Embarcadero and I knew that it would be disrespectful of me to behave in any way which upset or embarrassed him.

Blackie with his brothers Billie and Harvey in Brooklyn(left), Blackie at his desk in the NMU, and Blackie on Market Street with a seafaring friend.

Also it was very important to be conscientious in the work, which wasn’t really that difficult but accuracy was essential. Blackie always stressed the importance of doing your job to the best of your ability. The reason he always gave for this was to protect the union. After all that was his history. He was a sailor by trade and had helped build the National Maritime Union which was no cake walk. Whenever they tied up a ship and went on strike they were up against all the forces that the ship owners had at their disposal: the police, the national guard, and gangs of strike breakers known as Goon Squads. The fight to build their union had been long and bloody. A few of Blackie’s comrades had been killed in the struggle and while he and his sailors were building the NMU on the east coast, Harry Bridges was leading the longshore union on the west coast.

From left: Blackie Myers, Harry Bridges, Vincent Hallinan.

The west coast longshore strike of 1934 was a crucial turning point for the American trade union movement. The police, firing live rounds at the striking stevedores, injured many and killed two. The union held a funeral march for the two dead men which processed up Market Street. Thousands of people lined the street to watch. This was a major factor which led to a general strike.

How the Hearst press Examiner reported the first days of the 1934 longshore strike.

The 1934 strike was the beginning and the original union, the ILA, became the ILWU (International Longshore & Warehouse Union). Their militancy improved working conditions and wages for ordinary labourers. But it also made Harry a target. Those that felt the working class should know their place conspired against him. He was, after all, an Australian by birth, and the federal government would do their damndest to deport him. But that was in the 1930s.

From left: the 1934 longshore strike, the ILWU logo, the longshoremen march up Market Street in 1939.

From left: Harry getting good news, speaking at a conference, and speaking to a large crowd in San Francisco.

In 1952, the Myers family had travelled all the way from Connecticut to California because every job Blackie managed to get on the east coast would last only as long as it took the FBI to turn up and tell his employer what a dangerous radical he was.

The last leg of our journey west was from Taos, New Mexico to Mill Valley. All of us, Blackie, Beth, Nellie, Katie, Jimmy and I were bleary-eyed from the endless stretches of highway but when we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and climbed Waldo Grade, the end was in sight. Turning left off Miller Avenue at the 2am Club, we drove into Homestead Valley where a welcome party for us was in progress at Bob Robertson’s house. Bob was an executive of the longshore union, the ILWU. Every family friend we would know in the town we were destined to grow up in was there. The Dreyfus family, the Hallinan family and the Bridges family along with the Goldblatts and the Cox’s. It was such a friendly gathering of people and I instantly thought of all these folks as family.

The reason we had come west was the possibility of work for Blackie on the San Francisco waterfront. Harry Bridges and Blackie Myers were trade union comrades of old. However it took some time before Black was allowed to work on the front. With hindsight, I think the delay was possibly because Harry, with all the political persecution he was continuing to suffer, felt nervous about provoking the federal government. After all Blackie had been a prominent trade unionist in New York and was an early target of the witch hunters.

Beth and Blackie pictured on the left in Connecticut in 1950 and on the right in San Francisco in the 1960s.

From left: Johnny Myers with Blackie in Manhattan, centre: Jimmy. Blackie & John, on the right Johnny, Blackie, Jim and Totem our cat.

Harry was born in Melbourne, and had gone to sea at a young age, winding up working on the docks in San Francisco. The federal government had tried repeatedly to prosecute and deport Harry, claiming he’d lied about not being a member of the Communist Party.

The propaganda of the post war anti-Communist era was very powerful indeed. Hollywood fell in line with the government by creating a blacklist for writers, directors and actors who wouldn’t cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. The cooperation the committee required was to name names of those who either were Communists or fellow travellers. The Hollywood Ten all went to prison, Alger Hiss too went to jail and in 1953 the Rosenbergs were executed for treason so by that time the terror in the country was pretty substantial.

The House Un-American Activities Committee featuring a young Richard Nixon on the right and J. Parnell Thomas in the centre.

Pressbook advertising for the 1951 Warner Brothers film ‘I Was A Communist For The F.B.I’

For Americans who have grown up believing the propaganda of the McCarthy era, the image of a Communist was a ruthless person with shifty mannerisms and dishonest tendencies. Many of my parents’ friends were actually party members but none of them behaved remotely like that. Humour played a big role in most of those friendships.

Blackie had a mischievous sense of humour and was what he called a pork chop socialist. Whatever put food on the table was what motivated him and he was always fair with others. During the depression he found himself in a town where they had a fist fight contest with a prize of ten dollars for whoever won. Handy with his fists, Blackie fought the guy and beat him, but then split the money with his opponent. When I asked him if he was tougher than the other guy, his answer was: “No. I was hungrier.”

As kids, we always enjoyed Blackie’s performances. He was a very good mimic and did a pitch perfect impersonation of Harry, who he always called The Nose.

There were party members who did behave in a stereotypical secretive way but none of my parents’ friends were like that at all. One such person was our neighbour, Dennis Brogan’s grandmother Jean. She used to bring us her copies of The People’s World newspaper and my memory of her was that she was completely humourless.

The American Communist Party became a political force in the early days of the Great Depression. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had no qualms about dealing with Communists. His administration had many advisors from all avenues of left wing politics including the NMU, and Blackie was one of them. A family friend, Albert Kahn, wrote in his book, High Treason, quoting FDR just after his electoral victory in 1932: “Coming back from the west last week, I talked to an old friend who runs a great western railroad. ‘Fred,’ I asked him, ‘what are the people talking about out here?’ I can hear him answer even now. ‘Frank,’ he replied, ‘I’m sorry to say that men out here are talking revolution.’”

Blackie had gone to sea at age fourteen and became an able bodied seaman. Following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the great depression it had caused, he was often out of work and would “grab a handful of boxcars” to get from one port to another in search of a ship to sign on. The hiring halls in every port were referred to as Fink Halls as sailors would have to bribe the man handing out the jobs. The pay was low and working conditions on the ships were often dangerous. Blackie was a tough guy who during those years was both hungry and angry. It wasn’t until he became involved with those working to organise as a union that he was able to channel his anger in a constructive way.

But the fights ahead were deadly dangerous as the shipowners perceived the formation of the union as a direct attack on their interests and deployed all their weapons. The NMU organised strikes on the east coast and ports in the Gulf of Mexico and not one of them was won easily. In addition to the brute force of the military, police and goon squads, the shipowners also had the help of press barons like William Randolph Hearst whose newspapers utilised highly effective anti-labour propaganda. One of Hearst’s papers was the San Francisco Examiner, whose readers were told on a regular basis of what an enemy of the state, Harry Bridges was. During the 1934 strike the Examiner described the strikers as rioters, and celebrated the National Guard and police as heroes defending decent citizens. The fact that they were firing live rounds at unarmed workers was celebrated as protecting the interests of decent society.

People who aren’t too clear on their history often mix up the House Un-American Activities Committee with the senate committee of Joe McCarthy but the two are separate. The House Committee began stirring things up in 1947 while Joe McCarthy didn’t discover Anti-Communism as a cause until 1950. Once he did, he went at it with a vengeance, grilling ordinary citizens on television about petitions they might have signed years before or meetings they may have attended.

Blackie and Beth had been popular folks about town before he was blacklisted but after that, people they’d known pretty well would pass them on the streets of Manhattan without a glimmer of recognition.

He told me later that he truly hadn’t seen the red scare coming. But the signs were there. As an advisor to the U.S. Government on labour relations during World War 2, he was sent into Germany with the occupying troops in 1945. He told me he’d had a meeting with General Patton not long before the accident which killed him. After they’d dealt with their business, Patton poured them each a snifter of the finest brandy and held his glass up in a toast, saying: “Now that this is over, we’re going to get you bastards.” Black told me that he just laughed. But soon after his return to the U.S. his passport was taken away from him. A sailor without a passport cannot work as a seaman.

The choreography of the cold war was designed with military precision and one of the most important weapons was propaganda. Convincing the American public to forget about the Germans, Italians and Japanese being their enemy and to concentrate their fear on the Russians, was essential to this endeavour.

They were helped in no small part by the hearings held by HUAC and Senator McCarthy but also by Hollywood and those who controlled the media. People with left wing or liberal tendencies during the 1930s and 40s suddenly found themselves perceived as highly suspicious individuals and began running for cover. Many of them became stool pigeons and turned on their friends. The fifth amendment, which protects citizens from incriminating themselves, was seen by the newspapers as an admission of guilt and people who took it often lost their jobs.

But the machinations of the federal government didn’t work on my parents and their close friends and I grew up hearing fantastic trade union tales from the 1930s and 40s.

So here I was, fresh out of Napa Hospital, preparing myself for going back to work on the waterfront and yet there were still a few hoops which I had to jump through. True, I wasn’t over my crazyiness but was capable of putting on a reasonable appearance of “not so crazy.” I continued taking Thorazine, but in smaller doses. I went to the barber shop and got my hair cut short. I started shaving regularly and dressing in a conservative way. When Black was convinced I was okay he told me he’d had a word with Johnny Aitken who was the dispatcher in the hiring hall and when I felt up to it I could turn up for work.

To be continued…

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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, 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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