the-beatles – Miller Avenue Musings

A Flip of the Lid, chapter 8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued. . .

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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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