. . . Before Rock had been in the Haight, he'd had to go to many other places. He had to go to Earlham College, spend two years with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Snick), had to study philosophy in Switzerland, and get arrested for taking part in the civil rights demonstration against the Sheraton Palace Hotel and the franchise holders on auto row along Van Ness Avenue. "I served no real purpose in those demonstrations," he has decided. "I spent a good part of the summer of 1966 in jail, and I didn't serve any real purpose there, either, except I could listen to the colored prisoners talk about Malcolm X. I was in jail with one very militant young cat who's opened the Black Man's Free Store. I can remember the judge telling him he was a black son of a bitch."
Rock was up in the morning. He and the band, The Grateful Dead, would be leaving soon, not to return till the fall. Until they went, Rock emerged on the streets in the morning during the hours of the friendly vibrations. Then he could half walk, half skip down the hill to Haight Street, walking along it without bumping into people, hailing his friends, stopping to chat with the ones who were there before the place became an international byword.
"Actually," he said in a cheery tone that never deserts him, even when he talks about his disillusionments, "the band is a partnership, five musicians and two managers, and we've been in the neighborhood four or five years. About three years ago a bunch of us discovered LSD and the psychedelics [at least one member of the band doesn't use dope] and we learned what it was like to feel community and take care of our brothers. At that time there were about fifteen houses in the Haight with young people living without parental supervision. A lot of them were on hard drugs, but then something happened and we found what we called 'getting together.' Ding! Everybody was really excited then. San Francisco was a party town then. Everybody was going to parties in these big old three-story apartment buildings and the big band was the Charlatans. They were the originals. They played the first dances at the Longshoreman's Hall. Then we threw some dances at the California Hall with the Jefferson Airplane, and it was about then that Ken Kesey came to town with the Acid Test. Ding! Do I remember those days. Ding! Going from the Fillmore Auditorium and back to the California Hall. Ding! It was crazy. Sometimes I really thought the floor was going to fall through with two-thirds of the people high on LSD.
"But we just can't keep up with these kids now. We were pioneers in LSD. We took it very sparingly. These kids coming in here drop it two and three times a week and go a little crazy. When we started, we read about it, talked it over, and tried to get into each other's heads. We didn't just take it anywhere but in the surroundings we were most comfortable in. Even with the Acid Test, when you had lights and drums and bells and paints, you did it so you could work and play together all night long. Right now I can't imagine taking acid and going to one of those shows. The Grateful Dead used to play high on acid, but under the present circumstances we couldn't get in contact with each other.
"Ding! I remember. Ding, ding! The event that pulled a lot of us together was the Trips Festival [October 1966]. A thousand people were there for three days, all the rock bands, all the light shows, the San Francisco Mime Troop, the Committee Theatre. They were there to interact and grow together. It isn't true that people like Timothy Leary were listened to. They weren't...ever. We went back to the neighborhood here bound and determined to make it a better place. After that we started our friendship with the Diggers and helped them take care of people and people began to pour in. Ding! Just a few weeks ago it looked like there was going to be a riot - so many new kids, not knowing themselves or anybody else - so we quickly got a truck and put the band on top of it. Then we drove down Haight Street, right where the people and the cops were. We drove and the people followed until we led them into the park, where we had a dance. We went to New York. Ding! We played in Tompkins Square, where they'd had a riot the night before; but this time the Puerto Rican kids jumped up on the stage and started dancing instead of throwing rocks.
"The Grateful Dead went from being an acid band to being a community band. We just refused to go the route of the Jefferson Airplane. [After the Airplane took off from San Francisco it became so successful that it's now doing singing commercials for network advertising.] We held out for a long time before we signed a contract with a recording company, a whole year we held out. Finally we signed with Warner Brothers, but only after we got artistic control, and that's something San Francisco groups don't do. They sign. Ding! Money. Ding, ding!
"Then our band started falling apart. We'd been working all the time for free, and bands like ours that compose so much of their own music and style have to spend a lot of time alone together. Anyway, we've been driven out of our community. At the beginning of the summer we thought we could stick it out, but here it's just started to be July and the place is full of dope pushers. They have a cover charge at the Drogstore! Imagine! Fifty cents for a cup of coffee here in our community! Tourists all over. We used to be able to walk down the street and see our friends. We could be concerned about the neighborhood, help keep it clean and try and improve it, but now the sidewalks are full of these Tenderloin types. The only thing I can see to save it from its collective head is for us to withdraw for a while.
"We have to get out of here to keep our heads. Since the summer began our doorstep has been littered - there's no other way to describe it - with every kind of freak. I can't use the word hippy. I was a hippy, but I don't have anything to do with what's going on here. We used to have one cardinal rule: Do not impose your trip on anyone else. Well, that's what these people are doing, and we don't want to go on their trip. Our neighborhood worked until the newspapers shot it up, and then the kids and the tourists came and imposed their trip on us, a sidewalk freak show. If it were a festival it would be great, but it's just another form of cruising up and down in your car, putting on a show bumper to bumper.
"Ding!" Rock said in a voice that, for him, sounded woebegone. "We were happy and we were making other people happy, and as we saw it we were building an alternative society, a little one, here. We'll come back in the fall and start all over again. Maybe we'll have some other big powwow like the Trips Festival, but, I don't know, the city's no place to take drugs."
(from Nicholas von Hoffman, "We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us About," 1968)
Thanks to Paul Hebert.
I've only seen these few pages from the book, so for now this is incomplete and lacking context.
ReplyDeleteVon Hoffman was a Washington Post journalist who came to San Francisco in 1967 to report on the hippie scene. Peter Coyote later wrote: "Von Hoffman came to the Haight-Ashbury, using his teen-age son as a beard, and traveled through the underground behind a smoke-screen of good-will and "wanting to understand." Besides misunderstanding most of what he saw...Von Hoffman's articles about the demi-monde and its use of drugs, named names, places and dates. A number of people were subsequently raided and arrested because of information which he printed."
Von Hoffman was interested in the Haight-Ashbury scene generally, not the Dead specifically, but Scully talks a little about what they've been up to. The near-riot & park dance he refers to had been that spring - I think on 4/9/67, but McNally's book assigns it to 3/26/67, after a mass confrontation between hippies and police earlier that week:
"March 26 was Easter Sunday, and the street was set for [a riot]. As people began to gather, Allen Cohen of the Oracle went to the supervising captain and said, 'You don't want to hurt anybody, man... Let the people have the street.' 'It's an illegal rally, and we have to get them off the street.' Yet the captain was not itching for trouble. Cohen sent a messenger up to 710 and then got a bullhorn from the police. Mounting a police car, he announced to the growing crowd that the Dead were going to play in the Panhandle, and to go there... Sure enough, the Dead came down Masonic Avenue waving, went down to the Panhandle, plugged in, and played." (p.189)
Scully says that due to all the problems in the Haight, "the Grateful Dead would be leaving soon, not to return till the fall." It was a definite plan. Danny Rifkin told Melody Maker that July, "We are leaving for New Mexico for a while. We will live on a mountain for a couple of months and straighten our heads out." Jerry Garcia also told the Seattle Helix that July, "We’re moving to the Southwest. You know, we’re concerned about our productivity. And what we’re going to do is like get away from...this kind of thing... Get away from a lot of people and a lot of action and a lot of energy and just go out and do our own thing for a while."
The Helix announced, "Having now left San Francisco and moved to New Mexico where they can “make new music” outside of the Haight hassle, the Grateful Dead will likely be in tribal retreat for a time."
But the announcements were premature. The Dead decided not to go, and stayed in the Haight until 1968.
https://deadsources.blogspot.com/2014/08/july-16-1967-jerry-garcia-interview.html?showComment=1449461793146#c5952142751642835268
Note how grim the "Summer of Love" sounds for Scully, with the Haight filled with tourists & dope pushers & new kids & high prices & unrest, and the sense of togetherness gone - "we've been driven out of our community." Garcia would often later lament, as Scully does here, that "our neighborhood worked until the newspapers shot it up."
Scully underplays the Dead's involvement with LSD. "We used to take it sparingly," he claims, and implies that now they don't play high anymore. (But whew, these kids today, we can't keep up!) This was a common line of his with reporters - he'd tell papers publicizing the 1968 PNW tour, "We don't take drugs anymore... Meditation is healthier than acid."
The Dead's last show at the Carousel in 1968 was to be a benefit for the Black Man's Free Store, so it's intriguing to hear that Rock Scully had spent time in jail with the guy who founded the store.
I don't know what's up with all the "dings!"