Charles River Valley Boys, are due to fly into San Francisco a few days after the Pop Festival. Until then, Pennebaker and Neuwirth and I reconnoiter the San Francisco scene. Penny is sufficiently curious to stick around for a day or two, and Bobby has decided to ride along on the CRVB’s California tour. We find a place to crash at a friend’s house in Berkeley and set off to scout the Haight-Ashbury.
The Haight is south of the Panhandle, a narrow extension of Golden Gate Park that juts to the east. The great park itself is more than three miles long and half a mile wide, a sylvan retreat that offers informal camping to hundreds of young nomads each night.
Since the first Human Be-In was held in the park in January, the national press has focused a spotlight on San Francisco, sensationalizing the long hair and outlandish clothing, the free love and the acid rock and the drugs, luring a generation that’s hungry for new experience. Summer’s here, school’s out, and the kids are arriving by the thousands.
The park and the Panhandle have been the settings for dozens of free rock concerts since the scene began to percolate a couple of years ago. If these lush green spaces are the playground for the Haight-Ashbury community, the junction of Haight Street and Ashbury Avenue, two blocks off the Panhandle, is the civic center. The streets are as crowded as New York’s Fifth Avenue at lunch hour, but here ties and coats are even rarer than beads and tie-dye on the upscale streets of the Big Apple. The kids sit on the stoops of the houses, the fenders of parked cars, the curbstones. They smoke joints and cigarettes, they make out, they play guitars and drums and flutes and instruments contrived of found objects. What do they hope to find here? Drugs and sex, for sure. A place where they can be asstoned or freaky as they want and nobody will think the worse of them. Beyond that . . . ?
What Bobby and Penny and I see is what’s already changing, but it’s all new to us and we don’t perceive the metamorphosis that’s under way. We have been drawn here by the TV news, the pieces in
Time
and
Newsweek
, the same coverage that brought all these kids, and, like them, we’re digging it for the first time. For the pioneers who created the upwelling of music, theater, art, and creativity, the eruption of a whole new, gaudy, outrage-the-straights, to-hell-with-limits lifestyle in San Francisco over the previous two years, this is the beginning of the end. What arose as a community where creative spirits of many descriptions could live together—young hippies, older beatniks, musicians, potheads, artists—an enclave within the broader society, removed from the scrutiny of parents and disapproving authorities, has become the focus of the press and the whole damn country. Among the founders, the exodus has already begun, as residents of the Haight decamp for Marin and Sonoma counties, the East Bay, and more remote refuges.
We’re looking for what lies beneath the hubbub, hoping to find the genesis of the spirit we felt at Monterey, but we have no one to guide us, no insider to take us beyond the flow of wandering explorers and runaways. At midweek, we miss Big Brother and the Grateful Dead playing at a summer solstice celebration in Golden Gate Park because we’re not yet plugged into the rock underground.
A few days later, Penny is airborne for New York and Bobby and I are southbound with Bob Siggins and Joe Val, heading back to Monterey and beyond, past Carmel, where I was living just a year ago, and down the coast to the headlands of Big Sur, where the Charles River Valley Boys will perform at the country’s smallest, best-kept secret on the festival circuit.
This tour, our first and only venture to California, came about by accidents as lucky as those that brought me to Monterey with Pennebaker. Manny Greenhill, our Boston manager, has customarilybooked his artists in the Berkeley Folk Festival, an annual event that
The Haight is south of the Panhandle, a narrow extension of Golden Gate Park that juts to the east. The great park itself is more than three miles long and half a mile wide, a sylvan retreat that offers informal camping to hundreds of young nomads each night.
Since the first Human Be-In was held in the park in January, the national press has focused a spotlight on San Francisco, sensationalizing the long hair and outlandish clothing, the free love and the acid rock and the drugs, luring a generation that’s hungry for new experience. Summer’s here, school’s out, and the kids are arriving by the thousands.
The park and the Panhandle have been the settings for dozens of free rock concerts since the scene began to percolate a couple of years ago. If these lush green spaces are the playground for the Haight-Ashbury community, the junction of Haight Street and Ashbury Avenue, two blocks off the Panhandle, is the civic center. The streets are as crowded as New York’s Fifth Avenue at lunch hour, but here ties and coats are even rarer than beads and tie-dye on the upscale streets of the Big Apple. The kids sit on the stoops of the houses, the fenders of parked cars, the curbstones. They smoke joints and cigarettes, they make out, they play guitars and drums and flutes and instruments contrived of found objects. What do they hope to find here? Drugs and sex, for sure. A place where they can be asstoned or freaky as they want and nobody will think the worse of them. Beyond that . . . ?
What Bobby and Penny and I see is what’s already changing, but it’s all new to us and we don’t perceive the metamorphosis that’s under way. We have been drawn here by the TV news, the pieces in
Time
and
Newsweek
, the same coverage that brought all these kids, and, like them, we’re digging it for the first time. For the pioneers who created the upwelling of music, theater, art, and creativity, the eruption of a whole new, gaudy, outrage-the-straights, to-hell-with-limits lifestyle in San Francisco over the previous two years, this is the beginning of the end. What arose as a community where creative spirits of many descriptions could live together—young hippies, older beatniks, musicians, potheads, artists—an enclave within the broader society, removed from the scrutiny of parents and disapproving authorities, has become the focus of the press and the whole damn country. Among the founders, the exodus has already begun, as residents of the Haight decamp for Marin and Sonoma counties, the East Bay, and more remote refuges.
We’re looking for what lies beneath the hubbub, hoping to find the genesis of the spirit we felt at Monterey, but we have no one to guide us, no insider to take us beyond the flow of wandering explorers and runaways. At midweek, we miss Big Brother and the Grateful Dead playing at a summer solstice celebration in Golden Gate Park because we’re not yet plugged into the rock underground.
A few days later, Penny is airborne for New York and Bobby and I are southbound with Bob Siggins and Joe Val, heading back to Monterey and beyond, past Carmel, where I was living just a year ago, and down the coast to the headlands of Big Sur, where the Charles River Valley Boys will perform at the country’s smallest, best-kept secret on the festival circuit.
This tour, our first and only venture to California, came about by accidents as lucky as those that brought me to Monterey with Pennebaker. Manny Greenhill, our Boston manager, has customarilybooked his artists in the Berkeley Folk Festival, an annual event that
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