To Be Young Was Very Heaven-With The 50th
Anniversary Of The “Summer Of Love, 1967 In Mind
By Social Commentator Zack James
[I was about a decade or so too young to have been washed,
washed clean to hear guys like Peter Paul Markin, more on him below, tell the
tale, by the huge counter-cultural explosion that burst upon the land (and by
extension and a million youth culture ties internationally before the bubble
burst) in the mid to late 1960s and maybe extending a few year into the 1970s
depending on whose ebb tide event you adhere to. Over the next fifty years that
explosion was inspected, selected, dissected, inflected and detected by every
social science academic who had the stamina to hold up under the pressure and
even by politicians, mostly to put the curse of “bad example” and “never again”
on the outlier experimentation that went on in those days. Plenty has been
written about the sea-change in mores among the young attributed to the black civil rights struggles rights early in
the decade and the huge anti-Vietnam War movement later and maybe even just as
reaction like in many generations coming of age, just the tweaking of the older
generations inured to change by the Cold War red scare psychosis they bought
into. The event being celebrated or at least reflected on in this series under
the headline “To Be Very Young-With The Summer of Love 1967 In Mind” now turned
fifty was by many accounts a pivotal point in that explosion especially among
the kids from out in the hinterlands, the kids who were caught up one way or
another in the Vietnam War and were beginning, late beginning, to break hard
from the well-established norms from whence they came.
This series came about because my oldest brother, Alex
James, had recently taken a trip to San Francisco on business and notice on a
passing bus that the famed deYoung Museum located in the heart of Golden Gate
Park, a central location for the activities of the Summer of Love as it
exploded on the scene in that town, was holding an exhibition about that whole
experience. Alex and his “corner boys” back in the day from the old Acre
neighborhood in North Adamsville, a suburb of Boston where we all came of age,
had gotten their immersion into counter-cultural activities by going to San
Francisco in the wake of that summer of 1967 to “see what it was all about.”
When Alex got back from his business trip he gathered the
few “corner boys” still standing, Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the
corner boys, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon, Jack Callahan, Bart Webber, Ralph Kelly,
and Josh Breslin (not an actual North Adamsville corner boy but a corner boy
nevertheless from Olde Sacco up in Maine whom the tribe “adopted” as one of
their own) at Jimmy’s Grille in Riverdale, their still favorite drinking hole
as they call it, to tell what he had seen and to reminisce. From that first
“discussion” they decided to “commission” me as the writer for a small book of
reflections by the group alongside a number of sketches I had done previously
based on their experiences in the old neighborhood and the world. So I wrote or
rather compiled the notes used in the sketches below but believe this task was
mostly of my doing the physical writing and getting the hell out of the way.
This slender book is dedicated to the memory of the guy who got them all on the
road west-Peter Paul Markin whom I don’t have to mention more about here for
he, his still present “ghost” will be amply discussed below. Zack James]
CD Review
1967: Blowin’ Your Mind, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1990
Scene: Brought to mind by one of the songs in this compilation, The Byrds Filimore West-driven classic wa-wa song, So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star .
Phil Larkin, now road-weary “Far-Out” Phil Larkin, for those who want to trace his evolution from North Adamsville early 1960s be-bop night “Foul-Mouth” Phil, the vocal terror of every mother’s daughter from six to sixty (and, occasionally, secret delight, secret delight of one Minnie Callahan, damn him, for one of some girl classmates), to full-fledged merry prankster now sits on a 1967 be-bop night San Francisco hill with his new flame Butterfly Swirl, and his old flame, Luscious Lois, now transformed into Lilly Rose, transformed at the flip of a switch, as was her way when some whim, or some word in the air, hit her dead center. (Sometime, but not now, remind me to give you my take on this name-changing epidemic as not only were we re-inventing ourselves physically and spiritually but in our public personas shedding our “slave names” much as some blacks were doing for more serious reasons than we had at the time. Yes, remind me.) A nameless hill, nameless to first time ‘Frisco Phil, although maybe not to some ancient Native American shaman delighted to see our homeland the sea out in the bay working it way to far-off Japans. Or to some Spanish conquistador, full of gold dreams but longing for the hills of Barcelona half a world away.
But enough of old-time visions, of old time rites of passage, and of foundling dreams. Phil, and his entourage (nice word, huh, no more girlfriend solo, or as here paired, lovingly paired, to be hung up about, just go with the flow). Phil, Butterfly, hell, even jaded Lilly Rose (formerly known as Luscious Lois in case you forgot, or we not paying attention) are a “family,” or rather part of the Captain Crunch extended intentional family of merry pranksters (small case, so as not to be confused with their namesakes and models legendary mad man writer Ken Kesey and his La Honda Merry Pranksters, okay) who just yesterday hit ‘Frisco and have planted their de rigueur day-glo bus in the environs of Golden Gate Park after many months on the road west, and some time down south in La Jolla. After hearing the siren call they have now advanced north to feast on the self-declared Summer of Love that is guaranteed to mend broken hearts, broken spirits, broken rainbows, broken china, and broken, well broken everything. The glue: drug, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll, although not just any old-timey be-bop fifties rock and roll but what everybody now calls “acid” rock. And acid, for the squares out there, is nothing but the tribal name for LSD that has every parent from the New York island to the Redwood forests, every public official from ‘Frisco to France, and every police officer (I am being nice here and will not use the oink word) from the Boston to Bombay and back, well, “freaked out” (and clueless). Yes, our Phil has come a long way from that snarly wise guy corner boy night of that old town he lammed out from (according to his told story) just about a year ago.
Or has he? Well, sure Phil’s hair is quite a bit longer, his beard less wispy and more manly, his tattered Chuck Taylor sneakers transformed into sensible (West Coast ocean sensible) roman sandals and his weight, well, his weight is way down from those weekly bouts with three-day drug escape, and fearful barely eaten four in the morning open hearth stews, and not much else. And as he sits on that nameless hill with his “ladies” he no longer has the expectation of just trying LSD for the hell of it, having licked it (off a blotter), or drank it (the famous, or infamous, kool-aid fix), several times down in La Jolla, watching the surf (and surfers) splashing against the Pacific world with blond-haired, blue-eyed, bouncy Butterfly, and the raven-haired, dark as night-eyed Lilly Rose, or both listening to the music fill the night air. Not square music either (anything pre-1964 except maybe some be-bop wild piano man Jerry Lee Lewis, or some Chicago blues guitar fired by Muddy Waters or microphone-eating Howlin’ Wolf), but moog, boog, foog-filled music.
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