In Honor Of Janis Joplin's Birthday -From The Archives -The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love- When The Music’s Over-On The Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love- When The Music’s Over-On The  Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death

Classic Rock : 1968: Shakin’ All Over, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1989

Scene: Brought to mind by a the cover art on this CD of a Janis Joplin-like female performer belting out some serious blues rock in the heat of the “Generation of ‘68” night.

Josh Breslin (a. k. a. the Prince of Love, although some yellow bus wit made a joke of that moniker calling him the Prince of Lvov, some Podunk town in Poland, or some place like that) was weary, weary as hell, road- weary, drug-weary, Captain Crunch’s now Big Sur–based magical mystery tour, merry prankster, yellow brick road bus-weary, even hanging around with his “papa,” “Far-Out” Phil Larkin who had gotten him through some pretty rough spots weary. Hell, he was girl-weary too, girl weary ever since his latest girlfriend, Gypsy Lady (nee Phyllis McBride), decided that she just had to go back to her junior year of college at Berkeley in order to finish some paper on the zodiac signs and their meaning for the new age rising. Ya, okay Gypsy, do what you have to do. Moreover this summer of 1968, June to be exact, after a year bouncing between summers of love, autumns of drugs, winters of discontent, and springs of political madness what with Johnson’s resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination piled on to that of King’s had taken a lot out of him, including his weight, weight loss that his already slim runner’s frame could not afford.

Moreover, now the chickens were coming home to roost. Before he had joined Captain Crunch’s merry prankster crew in San Francisco, got “on the bus,” in the youth nation tribal parlance, last summer he had assumed that he would enter State U in the fall (University of Maine, for those who did not know). After a summer of love with Butterfly Swirl though (his temperature rose every time he thought about her and her cute little tricks to get him going sexually even now) and then a keen interest in a couple of other young women before Gypsy Lady landed on him, some heavy drug experiences that he was still trying to figure out, his start–up friendship with Phil, and the hard fact that he just did not want to go home now that he had found “family” he decided that he needed to “see the world” for a while instead. And he had, at least enough to weary him.

What he did not figure on, or what got blasted into the deep recesses of his brain just a couple of days ago, was a letter from his parents with a draft notice from his local board enclosed. Hell’s bells he had better get back, weary or not, and get some school stuff going real fast, right now fast. There was one thing for sure, one nineteen-year old Joshua Peter Breslin, Olde Saco, Maine High School Class of 1967, was not going with some other class of young men to ‘Nam to be shot at, or to shoot.

Funny, Josh thought, as he mentally prepared himself for the road back to Olde Saco, how the past couple of months had just kind of drifted by and that he really was ready to get serious. The only thing that had kind of perked him up lately was Ruby Red Lips (nee Sandra Kelly), who had just got “on the bus” from someplace down South like Georgia, or Alabama and who had a great collection of blues records that he was seriously getting into (as well as seriously into Ruby although she seemed slow, very slow, to get his message). Josh, throughout high school and even on the bus, was driven by rock ‘n’ roll. Period. He got surprised one day when he heard Ruby playing Shake, Rattle, and Roll. He asked, “Is that Carl Perkins?” Ruby laughed, laughed a laugh that he found appealing and said, “No silly, that's the king of be-bop blues, Big Joe Turner. Want to hear more stuff?” And that was that. Names like Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters and Little Walter started to fill his musical universe.

What got him really going though were the women singers, Sippie Wallace, mad Bessie Smith, a whole bunch of other barrelhouse blues-singers named Smith, Memphis Minnie and the one that really, really got to him, “Big Mama” Thornton. The latter belting out a bluesy rendition of Hound Dog that made Elvis' seem kind of punk, and best of all Piece Of My Heart.

Then one night Ruby took him to club over in Monterrey, the Blue Note, a club for young blues talent, mainly, that was a stepping-stone to getting work at the Monterrey Pop Festival each year. There he heard, heard if you can believe this, some freckled, red-headed whiskey-drinking off the hip girl, ya just a wisp of a girl, from Podunk, Texas, or maybe Oklahoma who was singing Big Mama’s Piece of My Heart. And then Ball and Chain, Little School Girl, and Little Red Rooster. Hell, she had the joint jumping until the early hours for just as long as guys kept putting drinks in front of her. What a night, what a blues singer.

Just now though Ruby Red Lips came over to him, kind of perky and kind of with that look in her that he was getting to catch on to when a girl was interested in him and said, “Hey, Janis, that singer from the Blue Note, is going to be at Monterrey Pops next month with a band to back her up, want to go? And, do you want to go to the Blue Note with me tonight?” After answering, yes, yes, to both those questions the Prince of Love (and not some dinky Lvov either) figured he could go back to old life Olde Saco by late August and still be okay but he had better grab Ruby now while he could.

In Honor Of Janis Joplin's Birthday-From The Archives -The 50th Anniversary O The Summer Of Love- When The Music’s Over-On The Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death-Magical Realism 101

The 50th Anniversary O The Summer Of Love- When The Music’s Over-On The Anniversary Of Janis Joplin’s Death-Magical Realism 101

Scene: Brought to mind by the cover art on some fogged memory accompanying CD booklet of a wispy, blue-jeaned, blouse hanging off one shoulder, bare-foot, swirling mass of red hair, down home Janis Joplin-like female performer belting out some serious blues rock in the heat of the “Generation of ‘68” night. In the time of our time. Belting out songs, band backed-up and boozed-up, probably Southern Comfort if it was late and if the package store was short of some good cutting whiskey, but singing from somewhere beyond a no good man, no job, no roof over a head, no pocket dough, no prospects and a ton of busted dreams in some now forgotten barrelhouse, chittlin’ circuit bowling alley complete with barbecued ribs smoking out back or down town “colored” theater. Or the echo of that scene, okay.
*******
Josh Breslin (a. k. a. the Prince of Love, although some merry prankster yellow brick road bus wit made a joke of that moniker calling him the Prince of Lvov, some Podunk town in Poland, or some place like that) was weary, weary as hell, road- weary, drug-weary, Captain Crunch’s now Big Sur–based magical mystery tour, merry prankster, yellow brick road bus-weary, weary even of hanging out with his “papa,” “Far-Out” Phil Larkin who had gotten him through some pretty rough spots weary. Hell, he was girl-weary too, girl weary ever since his latest girlfriend, Gypsy Lady (nee Phyllis McBride), decided that she just had to go back to her junior year of college at Berkeley in order to finish up some paper on the zodiac signs and their meaning for the new age rising. Ya, okay Gypsy, do what you have to do, the Prince mused to himself. Chuckled really, term paper stuff was just not his “thing” right then.

Moreover this summer of 1968, June to be exact, after a year bouncing between summers of love, 1967 version to be exact, autumns of drugs, strange brews of hyper-colored experience drugs and high shamanic medicine man aztec druid flame throws, winters of Paseo Robles brown hills discontent, brown rolling hills until he sickened of rolling, the color brown, hills, slopes, plains, everything, and springs of political madness what with Johnson’s resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination piled on to that of Martin Luther King’s had taken a lot out of him, including his weight, weight loss that his already slim former high school runner’s frame could not afford.

Now the chickens had come home to roost. Before he had joined Captain Crunch’s merry prankster crew in San Francisco, got “on the bus,” in the youth nation tribal parlance, last summer he had assumed, after graduating from high school, that he would enter State U in the fall (University of Maine, the Prince is nothing but a Mainiac, Olde Saco section, for those who did not know). After a summer of love with Butterfly Swirl though before she went back to her golden-haired surfer boy back down in Carlsbad (his temperature rose even now every time he thought about her and her cute little tricks to get him going sexually) and then a keen interest in a couple of other young women before Gypsy Lady landed on him, some heavy drug experiences that he was still trying to figure out, his start–up friendship with Phil, and the hard fact that he just did not want to go home now that he had found “family” he decided that he needed to “see the world” for a while instead. And he had, at least enough to weary him.

What he did not figure on, or what got blasted into the deep recesses of his brain just a couple of days ago, was a letter from his parents with a draft notice from his local board enclosed. Hell’s bells he had better get back, weary or not, and get some school stuff going real fast, right now fast. There was one thing for sure, one nineteen-year old Joshua Lawrence Breslin, Olde Saco, Maine High School Class of 1967, was not going with some other class of young men to ‘Nam to be shot at, or to shoot.

Funny, Josh thought, as he mentally prepared himself for the road back to Olde Saco, how the past couple of months had just kind of drifted by and that he really was ready to get serious. The only thing that had kind of perked him up lately was Ruby Red Lips (nee Sandra Kelly), who had just got “on the bus” from someplace down South like Georgia, or Alabama and who had a great collection of blues records that he was seriously getting into (as well as seriously into Miss Ruby, as he called her as a little bait, a little come on bait, playing on her somewhere south drawl, although she seemed slow, very slow, to get his message).

Josh, all throughout high school and even on the bus, was driven by rock ‘n’ roll. Period. Guys like Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, even a gal like Wanda Jackson, when they were hungry, and that hunger not only carried them to the stars but slaked some weird post-World War II, red scare, cold war hunger in guys like Josh Breslin although he never, never in a million years would have articulated it that way back then. That was infernal Captain Crunch’s work (Captain is the “owner” of the “bus” and a story all his own but that is for another time) always trying to put things in historical perspective or the exact ranking in some mythical pantheon that he kept creating (and recreating especially after a “dip” of Kool-Aid, LSD for the squares, okay).

But back to Ruby love. He got a surprise one day when he heard Ruby playing Shake, Rattle, and Roll. He asked, “Is that Carl Perkins?” Ruby laughed, laughed a laugh that he found appealing and he felt was meant to be a little coquettish and said, “No silly, that's the king of be-bop blues, Big Joe Turner. Want to hear more stuff?” And that was that. Names like Skip James, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters and Little Walter started to fill his musical universe.

What got him really going though were the women singers, Sippie Wallace that someone, Bonnie Raitt or Maria Muldaur, had found in old age out in some boondock church social or something, mad Bessie Smith squeezed dry, freeze-dried by some no account Saint Louis man and left wailing, empty bed, gin house wailing ever after, a whole bunch of other barrelhouse blues-singers named Smith, Memphis Minnie, the queen of the double entendre, sex version, with her butcher, baker, candlestick-maker men, doing, well doing the do, okay, and the one that really, really got to him, “Big Mama” Thornton. The latter belting out a bluesy rendition of Hound Dog made just for her that made Elvis' seem kind of punk, and best of all a full-blast Piece Of My Heart.

Then one night Ruby took him to club over in Monterrey just up the road from the Big Sur merry prankster yellow bus camp, the Blue Note, a club for young blues talent, mainly, that was a stepping-stone to getting some work at the Monterrey Pop Festival held each year. There he heard, heard if you can believe this, some freckled, red-headed whiskey-drinking off the hip girl (or maybe some cheap gin or rotgut Southern Comfort, cheap and all the in between rage for those saving their dough for serious drugs).

Ya just a wisp of a girl, wearing spattered blue-jeans, some damn moth-eaten tee-shirt, haphazardly tie-dyed by someone on a terminal acid trip, barefoot, from Podunk, Texas, or maybe Oklahoma, (although he had seen a fair share of the breed in Fryeburg Fair Maine) who was singing Big Mama’s Piece of My Heart. And then Ball and Chain, Little School Girl, and Little Red Rooster.

Hell, she had the joint jumping until the early hours for just as long as guys kept putting drinks in front of her. And maybe some sweet sidle promise, who knows in that alcohol blaze around three in the morning. All Josh knew was this woman, almost girlish except for her sharp tongue and that eternal hardship voice, that no good man, no luck except bad luck voice, that spoke of a woman’s sorrow back to primordial times, had that certain something, that something hunger that he recognized in young Elvis and the guys. And that something Josh guessed would take them over the hump into that new day they were trying to create on the bus, and a thousand other buses like it. What a night, what a blues singer.

The next day Ruby Red Lips came over to him, kind of perky and kind of with that just slightly off-hand look in her eye that he was getting to catch on to when a girl was interested in him, and said, “Hey, Janis, that singer from the Blue Note, is going to be at Monterrey Pops next month with a band to back her up, want to go? And, do you want to go to the Blue Note with me tonight?” After answering, yes, yes, to both those questions the Prince of Love (and not some dinky Lvov either, whoever that dull-wit was) figured he could go back to old life Olde Saco by late August, sign up for State U., and still be okay but that he had better grab Ruby now while he could.

One Last Time-At The Ebb Tide Of The 1960s- With Helter-Skelter Charles Manson Who Passed At 83 In Mind

One Last Time-At The Ebb Tide Of The 1960s- With Helter-Skelter Charles Manson Who Passed At 83 In Mind

By Greg Green  

[Recently, shortly after the death of Charles Manson [November, 2017] was announced and then later when I felt under some pressure at the time to write a bit more about the 1960s than I was aware of at the time which had more to do with the beginnings of the internal struggle over the direction this site was taking and going to take, as something an introduction of myself into this space, I wrote two shorter versions of this piece.

I felt those pieces were as much about my understanding of went on, and what went wrong, in that big 1960s “jail-break” that the then administrator of this space Allan Jackson (who used the moniker Peter Paul Markin on this site) now deposed and off in “exile” (his term according to Sam Lowell his close friend who wound up as the lone older writer siding with the “Young Turks” as they styled themselves in the internal struggle) somewhere in Utah looking for a by-line in some Salt Lake newspaper was looking at from me when he was in charge. That was before a sudden vote of no confidence was taken by the whole staff at the urging of the younger writers whom he had brought in over the past several years but who were in their words, under-utilized and narrowly directed to write, as I was asked to do as well, about the turbulent 1960s whether they knew or cared a damn about those times or not. I, who had come over from the American Film Gazette where I had held a similar position, was supposed to take over the day to day management of the site and pass out assignments under Allan’s guidance, found myself asked to run the whole operation without him after the vote (with the assistance of the newly–formed editorial board, an organization which Jackson had virtually ignored during his tenure).

Jackson ran a funny mix, a core group of writers whom he had either known since high school and who had been exposed to the Peter Paul Markin who was the guy who Allan was trying to honor by using his name as his moniker and who was a big influence on that whole group exploring all kinds of situations in the 1960s or had met in hotbed places like San Francisco, LA, the Village, Harvard Square after high school when everything according to the older guys exploded and you had to take sides from drugs to sex to wars. Then several years ago he brought in those young guys (and a few gals but they were mostly stringers, free-lancers) who knew nothing of the 1960s but were force-pressed to write about subjects related to that time which they only vaguely had heard about (or again cared about). His argument to the younger writers something not necessary to throw at the old guard “true-believer” older writers was that this was a watershed period, a period when many were “washed clean” and the period needed to be dealt with accordingly.    

So the gist of my article was as much about Allan and the older writers being “washed clean” by the experience as about what the criminal mind of someone like Charles Manson who while a sensational figure and a prime example of what went wrong with the 1960s when the still thriving cultural counter-revolutionaries took to the offensive and needed an example to feed off of when that moment ebbed. Some of the writers in this space like Sam Lowell, Frank Jackman, Bart Webber, Si Lannon, and Josh Breslin knew the real Markin, known to them as always as “Scribe” either from the North Adamsville neighborhood where they grew up or met him as a result of a very fateful (according to Sam Lowell’s estimate in any case) decision that he made during the turbulent days of the Summer of Love in 1967. That year and that event marked them all once Scribe was able to fire them up to head out west to San Francisco the epicenter of the whole explosion and consummate the jail-break.        

I am, like Zack James, Jack Jamison, Bradley Fox, Jr. and Lance Lawrence at least a decade removed from that 1960s experience and sensibility and that second-hand knowledge was reflected in the original articles. I had no axe to grind with those times. But neither did I bow down to what guys like Frank, Sam, and Josh told me about their experiences. That said, Allan Jackson the then supposedly soon to be retired administrator and something of a guiding light in this space (and the on-line version of The Progressive American) suggested after several talks that I expand my article somewhat to include his and the others reflections of the 1960s in order to give a more rounded approach to those days and events. As I did with that second article I do here as well-Greg Green]      

***********

  

A couple of writers in this space, I think Zack James and Bart Webber, have spent a good amount of cyber-ink this past summer commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the San Francisco-etched and hued Summer of Love in 1967. The million things that occurred there from free concerts in Golden Gate Park by the likes of Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and the Grateful Dead, names that I recognized although I was not familiar with their music (the free concert concept in line with a lot that went on then under the guise of “music is the revolution” and the recruits would be those who got turned on by the music, straight or doped –up, and lived by it too), to cheap concerts at the Avalon and Fillmore West (the beginning of an alternative way to entertain the young in formerly rundown arenas which would keep ticket costs down and provide indoor night space for those same young patrons against predators and cops), to plenty of drugs from Native American ritual peyote buttons to Owsley’s electric Kool-Aid acid much written about by “square” Tom Wolfe in a book dealing with writer Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters (I think that should be capitalized at least I have always seen it that way in books) to high end tea, you know, ganga, grass, marijuana, which you can smell even today at certain concerts in places where the stuff is legal or the young don’t give a fuck who knows they are smoking stuff, communal soup kitchens (to curb those midnight ganga cravings taking a tip from the old hobo, bum, tramp railroad “jungle” camps and just throwing everything in a stew pot and hope for the best), to communal living experiment (say twelve people not related except maybe some shacking up sharing an apartment or old house and dividing up tasks and expenses or in country on an old abandoned farm not very successful although I hear in Oregon and Vermont if you look closely enough will find the “remnant”), communal clothing exchanges (via ironically given the pervasive anti-war sentiments Army-Navy Surplus or Goodwill/Salvation Army grabs)and above all a better attitude toward sexual expression and experience (the “pill” helping ease the way, the drugs too and a fresh look at the Kama Sutra no doubt) reached something like the high tide during that time.

(According to Josh Breslin who at the time was just out of high school and looking for something to do during the summer before his freshman year of college much to the chagrin of his hard-working parents who expected him to work that summer to help pay for tuition it was almost like lemmings to the sea the draw of San Francisco was so strong. For many kids like Josh and others he met out there aside from Scribe and the North Adamsville guys it really was something of a jail-break although I still can’t feel the intensity which drove Josh and the others to forsake, most for just a while, some family, career, settle down path during those admittedly turbulent times. My generation, and I was among the loudest up in Rockland, Maine where I grew up and where a cohort of the hippie-types encamped once the cities became too explosive, kind of laughed off the whole experiment as the hippies liked to say “ a bad trip,”  a waste of time and energy. Although the idea of free or cheap concerts seems like a good idea especially when you see the ticket prices today for acts like Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones who were ready to perform gratis then, the rampant uncontrolled use of illegal drugs, the idea of communal living outside of say very safe dorm life, wearing raggedy second or third hand clothes which looked like and were out of some Salvation Army grab box or Army-Navy surplus store, the idea of even eating out of some collective stew pot of who knows what composition and unbridled and maybe unprotected sex seemed weird, seemed seedy when I would see these people on the streets in town when they came for provisions or whatever they were looking for that brought them to town.)     

So as even Josh and a couple of others would admit not all of it was good or great even at that high tide which he personally placed at 1967 (others like Sam placed it at the Stones’ Altamont concert in 1969 and Scribe for his own reasons had placed it at May Day, 1971 when the government counter-attacked a demonstration in Washington with a vengeance and they took devastating amounts of arrests, tear gas, and billy-clubs) since casualties, plenty of casualties were taken, from drug overdoses to rip-offs by less enlightened parties to people leeching off the work of others who were doing good works providing energies to go gather that food, work that kitchen, rummage for those clothes, keep the house afloat with the constant turn-over of desperate “seeking” something people. (Allan chided me on this point originally because he did not believe that those he knew, he met were desperate, most had come from comfortable middle class homes and just wanted to shake things up a little before, which many, too many according to him did, going back to that lifestyle without a murmur when the tide ebbed.)  

Not good either which was also noted by Zack James (who got the information from oldest brother Alex another veteran of 1967  who while on a business trip to San Francisco this spring stepped back into that halcyon past at a Summer of Love exhibit at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park) and which I used as a counter-argument to Allan’s wisp-of-the will attitude about desperate people flocking to the coast a photograph taken at a police station where one whole wall was filled with photographs from desperate parents looking for their runaway children. No so much the runaway part, all of those who flee west that year and the years after to break out of the nine to five, marriage, little white house syndrome were actually doing that, but the need to do so just then against the wishes, in defiance of those same parents who were looking for their Johnny and Janie. Who know what happened to them.

Frank Jackman, another writer in this space, basing himself on his friendship with Josh Breslin and with the latter’s with Scribe spent some time a few years back taking a hint from the gonzo writer Doctor Hunter Thompson trying to figure out when that high tide crested and then ebbed.  The Scribe as far as I know the story himself a classic case of those who started with high ideals and breath of fresh air attitudes who wound up getting killed down in Mexico after a busted cocaine deal in the days after he became a coke head and was dealing and who now sleeps in a potter’s field grave down in Sonora. Years like 1968, 1969, 1971 came up as did events like the Chicago Democratic Convention in the summer of 1968, the disastrous Stones concert at Altamont in 1969, and May Day, 1971 in Washington when they tried to bring down the government if it would not stop the damn Vietnam War and got nothing but massive arrests, tear gas and police batons for their efforts. Those things and the start of a full-bore counter-revolution, mainly political and cultural which Frank has said they have been fighting a rear-guard action against ever since. 

Whatever the year or event, whatever happened to individuals like Scribe and those forlorn kids in that police station photograph, there was an ebb, a time and place when all that promise from the high tide of 1967 to as Scribe would say seek a “newer world,” to “turn the world upside down” as Frank likes to say when recounting his youthful days out west and in New York City when he was starting out as a writer and make it fit for the young to live came crashing down, began to turn on itself. A time when lots of people who maybe started out figuring the new world was a-borning turned in on themselves as well. My very strong feeling after having had a small personal bout with cocaine when that was the drug of choice and you could hardly go anywhere socially without somebody bringing out a mirror, a razor and rolling a dollar and daring you not to snort just to be friendly maybe it was the drugs, too many drugs. Maybe too it was the turnover as those who started the movements headed back home, back to school and back to the old world defeated and left those who had nowhere to go behind (those photographs on that forlorn wall in that anonymous police station a vivid reminded that not everybody was “on the bus” as Allan mentioned was a term used frequently to distinguish the winners from the losers in those days).           

And as if to put paid to that ebb tide there were all the revelations that something had desperately gone wrong when cult figure and madman leader of a forsaken desert tribe of the forgotten and broken Charles Manson who died the other day [November 2017] after spending decades in prison had been exposed for all the horrible crimes he had committed or had had his followers commit. Allan, Frank, Josh, Sam and I am sure Scribe if he were around would write that off as an aberration, a fluke. Still sobering thoughts for those guys like Frank and Josh who are still trying to push that rock up the hill toward that “newer world” that animated their youth.  

Once Again-The Summer Of Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet-The Complete Trilogy

Once Again-The Summer Of Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet-The Complete Trilogy

 “The Scribe Turns The World Upside Down”- “Buddha Swings-Jack Kerouac Wings”- “When Butterfly Swirl Swirled”

[The well- known writer and book critic Zack James eventually began to feel that he had signed on to an assignment from hell after spending a fair amount of time this summer of 2017 chronicling the 50^th Anniversary of the San Francisco-centered Summer of Love, 1967. Especially so since he was far too young by about a decade to have any personal affinity to that celebration. His whole involvement had come about after his oldest brother, Alex, had taken a business trip to San Francisco and had noticed an advertisement for an exhibition at the de Young Art Museum in Golden Gate Park entitled The Summer of Love Experience. For Alex it was crucial that he attend that exhibition since he had actually been out there in that decisive summer of 1967 and for about two years afterward before settling down to pursue his current life as a high-end lawyer in Boston. When Alex returned to Boston he gathered together whatever friends were left standing as he called it from his growing up town of North Adamsville and who had also gone out to the Bay area for various amounts of time in 1967.

As a result of that meeting the group of seven agreed with Alex that they should commission Zack to help write, edit, and prepare for publication a small book of memoirs of those times. The book to be dedicated to the late Peter Paul Markin, forever known among that crowd as “Scribe” once Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader of the guys he hung around dubbed him with that title for his blasted tenacity about knowing every possible fact in the universe for any occasion. More importantly the Scribe had always been something of a bell-weather for all kinds of trends like the rise of folk music in the early 1960s, the anti-war movement, and what he called according to Alex who was his closest friend at the time, the “fresh new breeze coming through the land.” The Scribe was the first to head out to San Francisco after quitting college in the spring of 1967. (The consequences of that ill-advised decision will be mentioned below.) He came back a couple of months later and rounded up every “corner boy,” that is what they were called then, to head back by bus, by hitchhiking or whatever means they could get there.

Zack put together the book and saw to its publication thinking that was the end of the matter. Not so. Alex, and then the others, kept asking him to write more stories about the Scribe and those times. That led to some reviews of the music, books, and other social events of the times. Some ten pieces in all. That is when he said enough. Told Alex to tell the “brethren” (Zack’s word) he needed to finish a book on the legendary revolutionary pre-Civil War abolitionist John Brown which was running up against a publication dead-line. That is when he “drafted” me to do some short pieces remaining from that period. Of course I am even younger than Zack so I had only heard about the Summer of Love through books and lately through looking at YouTube videos which are plentiful. Since I owned Zack couple of favors I agreed to finish up for him.

At first the three pieces that I contributed stood by themselves based on some postcards Alex had given Zack as prompts to write up about. But as I looked into more background material especially that Scribe tribute memoir book Zack had carefully put together I came to see that they all were linked together. Linked together by the character of the mad monk Peter Paul Markin, the Scribe. So I have, after re-writing some of the material, put the pieces together as a trilogy. If Alex and his guys want to dedicate this stuff to the Scribe then that is okay by me-Jeffrey Thorne]                    

***********

The Scribe Turned The World Upside Down

The Scribe said it best one night, one Summer of Love, 1967 night, one cold San Francisco night, a summer night when the Japan currents went awry and reminded one of old Mark Twain’s witty sayings about the coldest winter he had ever spent-August in the city of sweet brethren Saint Francis, when he declared (so like that mad man to use the seventh person imperative, to declare in his world-historic way, for such small letter asterisk events), that the breeze coming through the land would shake society to its foundations. Would make nine to five work-a-day world a bore (and give his poor brethren a chance to partake of the golden age that he, his parents, his Acre neighborhood, and most of the known world had been short-changed of for millennia), make that long suburban tract complete with dishwasher and sanitary garbage disposal obsolete before the last mortgage payment hit the dirt (get people to think differently about space, about community, and give that same and give that poor brethren a chance to partake of the golden age of living space that he, his parents, his Acre neighborhood, and most of the known world had been short-changed of for millennia), would make those three point two kids and that one dog a victim of old-fashioned thinking (well, okay).

Said, get this for a guy who became a non-believer, a non-believer in risen Christ if you can believe that very early in his teens (and went to church, sliding side door church solely to sit a few rows behind some lovely he was pining over just to watch her ass so yes a non-believer) that the new dispensation was at hand-if they could keep it, keep the bastards, and you know who the bastards were then-the night-takers and guys who conned you into nine to five dreams, suburban flats and, what was it three point two kids (we will pass on the not mandatory dog) from barking at the door.  

Sure the Scribe talked the talk and walked the walk, oh boy did he, spouting forth about one love, about the new garden of eden (small case is right remember he was a non-believer, maybe had always been something of an outlaw even when he cruised the books, had his nose in some book, for a sign), about that turning the world upside down and making it stick. Making the night-takers back down (night-takers Zack’s word via the Scribe which I am happy to ‘steal”). Hell, from what the corner boys said in their memories of the guy he sounds like he was always a closet Digger. Not the Diggers who fed the people in down-trodden Haight-Ashbury when the desperate young had wandered to San Francisco with nothing but dreams and knapsacks but the people around Gerrard Winstanley on Saint George’s Hill who, for a while before they were kicked off that spot by Oliver Cromwell’s agents, tried a form of primitive communism based on communal living and common use of land. Check that out sometime if you delve back into the 17^th century English revolution. They appear to have been forbears of what went down in 1967 before the experiment got out of hand through hubris, dope and confusion about how to keep the thing going against the wrath of the night-takers. Of course coming “from hunger” he, the other guys, Zack’s brethren and the Scribe’s corner boys, were not above certain larcenies, scams, cons to keep body and soul together. That contradiction was suppressed for a time, for the time before the night-takers came back with a vengeance. The ebb the Scribe called it as he descended down a slippery slope in the mid-1970s.            

That was the rub, that was the factor that got away from the Scribe as much as he knew that he/they were on tender mercies ground, knew that that little counter attack from out of the blue would come when he thought the world had stopped turning on itself and had gone upside down that eventually would do in even the Scribe. Would turn his mouth to ashes, would turn a sainted brethren (not many out in Frisco in those days knew his full given name began with Francis at a time when everybody was “reinventing” themselves including clustering up new monikers to get washed clean, also a Scribe expression and so only knew the moniker) down the gutter road, float him out to the Japan seas long before he ever heard the Duke blast that high white note. Yeah, blast the times, blast the whole fucking world for taking down a brethren as pure as snow.   

[I was not sure where I should put a bit of information about the Scribe’s fate although I knew that I had to bring some information out in the interest of completeness and to give sense of the Scribe’s contradiction so I am placing it here. I have mentioned above something about “wanting habits” and how they were suppressed for a time. The Scribe’s downfall, as witnessed by all who mentioned him from the old days, started with his quitting college given up a scholarship to “find himself” out in San Francisco in fateful 1967. Such were the times that a lot of people did that. His problem, a big problem, was that left his subject to the draft which came the next year. For reasons I could never understand at this remove he accepted induction and wound up in Vietnam as an infantryman, did his tour and came back to what he called the “real” world where he on the surface thrived for the next few years while the spirit of the communal vision 1960s still held sway. Stayed on the West Coast and did some good journalism around the fate of some returning fellow Vietnam veterans who were “lost” and living out in camps and other places away from the “real” world. But all his guys mention that there was something that Vietnam had taken out of him, had left him internally shattered. When the 1960s faded, when that “newer world” idea faded he lost his mooring. Got more heavily into dope, into cocaine. Started dealing to keep his growing habit intact. Then took a mysterious trip to Mexico to consummate a drug deal. Whatever happened and nobody has much to go on he wound dead in a back street in Sonora with two bullets in his chest. The situation was so fraught with danger that he was buried in a potter’s field down there. Like I said I still am not able to get a handle on all of that but there it is-maybe the contradiction of the times if it came right down to it.]

**************

“Buddha Swings-Jack Kerouac Wings”  

Beat down (not to be mistaken for abuse, child abuse or anything like that against up against it mothers and distant fathers but just poor, bedraggled poor, “wanting habit” as the Scribe would have coming jointly out of their respective Acres).  Beat around (check beat down except just hanging around luckless, shoeless, waiting for somebody else’s shoe to drop). Beat sound (hell easier to figure, listen to the swish of the sticks battling the pots and pans, some out of Africa our mother riff culled into cool be-bop be-bop and all that jazz away from big swing and into the big blast air). Beat to the ground (luckless fellahins stashed away in back room closets, gambling, washing endless dishes, what did some wit call it-diving for pearls, losing always losing, losing worst when blood-lust bullies take the law into their own hands).

Fuck it, fuck explanation since everybody will get it wrong just like the guys back in the Acre could never figure what was bothering the guy, what made him jump. Fuck it Jack just jumped into it, into its sea, into it misty sea, foghorn blasting some jazz-like moan, from his beautified beatified skull, maybe thinking of youthful skull behind some bushes or out on some back road highway jumping the bones of some friend’s one and only, that is pure speculation though. But really and truly Jack man, Jean-bon in old times jumped from some river of life, mill town life like a million guys before him and now in foreign lands a million guys after him, the river flowing to steam up some engine to grind the fabric that will clothe the world. Ha, like we who come naked into this holy coil can take solace from that low catholic trip it took him, and not just him but lots of others who broke the square habit at least for a time, for the youth duration. Damn beatitude in the end when all the shouting was over and Jack in some drunken grave under a pile of suffering dirt (the Buddha in him cried out as it did for that guy down in Sonora before they found him in some hideous back alley unnamed and unloved, maybe un-nameable if there is such a word) Why couldn’t he have listened to that guy out in Frisco town, the guy, a kid really, maybe sixteen set up in a too big older brother 1940s zoot suit, a wisp of beard which could not be shaven so wisp, eyes glazed on dope , on love on the high, on the low, who all nervous on bennie nevertheless blew that high white note that was in his DNA, provided by grandma, mother left for parts unknown, father shiva blew town with some chick who had a stash and gave her gash, to like everything else out to the fucking China seas. But that was at the end. That was when the music was over, when it no longer made sense. At the beginning hell no said Jack.

The world wasn’t big enough to hold all his desperations, keep them in check, keep those wanting habits every poor boy has inside him talk about DNA. Even rama jamma Buddha didn’t have no cure for that except maybe some jimson and jetsam and mystical balm for a shattered world. Like I say that was at the end though. At the beginning our boy took off as fast as he could from that mill town river and never looked back (except to take the dust off his shoes and bow down before our Lady of the River when luck ran out, the booze ran out, hell, the sweet tea sticks ran out and all of beat solace ran to catholic rivers, yeah I know capital C but those were the breaks, the end knotted up in some rat hole, some mother-forgotten rat hole and no more joy, stick either). Took it on the lam, went west east south north (I think on that last direction maybe back to the homeland, back to the stinking big river up north that some earlier Jack, some Jacques, crossed to get to that fucking mill river, Jesus, looking for the holy grail, looking for about six ways to get out of that beat down, beat around, beat sound, beat to the ground bitch stuff. Took up with some fat fast mad secular monk with crazed mom and sweet word poet father, not father William Blake but worldly father, who spouted stuff about negro streets (and angel-headed hipsters like we didn’t know he hung around Time Square Joe and Nemo’s midnight coffees looking for queers, con artists and hustlers, always hustlers, crazies (in and out of the asylums of the mind) and Moloch devouring the land (make no mistake ancient and evil dressed in grey flannel suits and quoting stock prices into those same China seas as that benny-suckled kid blowing that high white Frisco note), the land of milk and honey, rama rama, went to the mat (secret love in more ways than one with that loose bastard who couldn’t keep his mouth shut or cock in his pants -and that was that-for a time). No, not then that street wise New Jack City gangster poet taking liberties with the language and ladies’ pocketbooks or that highbrow junkie hanging around New Orleans looking for quick fixes although they qualified if it came to that.

For a time no question since the pull of fast fat monks could wear off fast under the sun of boze, booze, bennies and grand simon jimson ladies. Took his hat off and let the world slip in-thought maybe the way was the way. Startled guys like desolation angels and dharma bums into thinking they could do what had never been done like some lead pipe cinch. Ran up the mountain (no Prometheus Adonis more likely who was to know) to place incense in the fatted calf body singing, singing, singing some cross between the stations of the cross and plastic nirvana (just to be cute, cute as a nine thieves). Saw Siva run the river gauntlet and leave satiated beyond compare, saw Rama too walking down Post Street in his nightshirt.

Then fame got in his way, somebody bought into his million word notebook thoughts wanderings this is poor boy long time waiting wanting habits Jack we are talking about remember in case you have lost the drift. Make him surly and brazen wondering why the hell if fame was fame didn’t it jump out at him when he started on his Calvary Road road(and it was such a road breaking from deep incense and Adam and Eve free falls so much for free will, started out in dirty sneakers and crusted blue jeans, and when he jumped out of his skull and fled that mountebank river town. Funny no more Harvard hipsters and Columbia ranters and raspers or Denver Adonis. Now fools and jesters following his every move, hiding in bushes and make that fat monk look like some holy fool, like a goof (again remember please not that street-wise New Jack City gangster poet taking liberties with language and ladies’ pocketbooks). Ah, sullen lost planet life.         

How was he to know, how was Jack to blessed know that his illegitimate children, not child, children would abandon their flea-etched sins only a short time later, hang out their own signs, reach for their own suns, reach with thumbs furled, and follow the pied piper. Follow the brethren saint mad man with the wooly beard and the incense announcing his arrival at the table singing, singing, singing and it wasn’t hosannas but some odd unspoken tune which ripped across the land for a while. Defying that man in the grey suit (defying mother and father got to dust and never figured out). Drew magnetic forces around themselves and expected the kingdom to last until end times. Hah, Jack could have given them the word on that little mistake. I am the light Jack thought and then he faded from the scene into utter darkness those unwashed, unloved, unspoken for illegitimate children to lay waste to the desert for forty years. Jesus        

*******

Once Again-The Summer Of Love, 1967-Postcards From A Lost Planet-When Butterfly Swirl Swirled

By Jeffrey Thorne

The times were out of sort, the times were frankly a mess and in that little window of time, the time of Josh Breslin’s Summer of Love, 1967 time he saw a little chance to jailbreak out of his humdrum existence, to skip the nine to five world that his parents thrived in and expected him to follow like a lemming to the sea and thrive too for a while anyhow. We will skip all his thinking that got him there, got him to act on his jailbreak impulses, he had done enough thinking on lonely desolate roads heading west in placed like Neola, Iowa, Grand Island, Nebraska, Winnemucca, Nevada and a whole slew of nameless Main Street pass-through towns to last a lifetime. Except to say that he was not alone in his jailbreak passions as the decade as it progressed gave ample evidence of and that he was maybe unusually sensitive for a guy who ran in circles that were anything but receptive to jailbreak ideas. Let’s get him to Summer of Love epicenter Frisco and into the whole thing, the passion thing, the thing that happened between Butterfly Swirl and the Prince of Love.

For those who are already confused by the now seemingly strange fetish for  monikers  that somehow were expected to wash one clean that latter one was Josh Breslin’s self-anointed moniker once he hit Russian Hill in that Bagdad of a city (Bagdad not of these times, not humbled bombed-out times, but back when that town was an epicenter of the world and whole civilization flocked to imitate the latest ideas, cultural artifacts and visionary experience and Frisco could stand the comparison without shutter). In those days, in that little window of time when the world was turned upside down(an expression from back in the 17^th to express what was happening in revolutionary England when lots of amazing similar experiences were being attempted as that Cromwellian Puritan-like  brethren tried to in its turn wash itself clean), or a small segment of society, mainly young, when you looked back from a fifty year view, everybody was try to “reinvent” themselves, making a new washed clean beginning and so an epidemic of name-changing rushed the land. (Of course those who were trying to seek the “newer world” a Lord Tennyson phrase but apt assumed that everybody was on board that everybody was into the turmoil but while the media-driven headlines were large the nine to five world went about its nine to five business which encapsulated that great majority of young-don’t be fooled by universal long hair, granny dresses and talk, endless talk of dope and sexual fantasies those were just signposts not the real deal.)  Josh a very good looking guy what with that Sam Shepard father-aided gene and mother- aided Quebec flair, with some ego, a lot of ego for a working class kid from up in ocean-side Maine, Olde Saco to be exact, decided that he was royalty or something and so tagged himself with that moniker. (The Scribe, whom we will get to in a moment, used to kid him that he was really the Prince of Lvov, a Podunk town in Poland just to tweak his ego a bit. By the way after careful research the long-held rumor that the Scribe gave Josh his moniker is erroneous. Josh had been thinking about that moniker almost all the way from that Maine until he reached the Pacific shores).        

So Josh Breslin just out of high school and full of the getting the dust of Podunk Maine off his shoes hit Frisco town, hit first stop Russian Hill after being told by some holy goof, that term no put down but a real live Yippie freak who called attention to himself using that idea, in Golden Gate Park, the epicenter of the epicenter at a certain point, that righteous dope could be had up that hill. (Holy goof as Josh was later to find out from the Scribe a term used to describe certain personages by Scribe hero “beat” writer Jack Kerouac who got it from Buddha himself.) As he walked up the long drawn out hill in a city with a fistful of hills, mostly long and drawn out, he stopped near a park when he saw this amazing sight, amazing to him then but common to the emerging scene as he would find out later, a converted yellow school bus. Converted the operative word. The bus had been transformed on the outside into some fantastic psychedelic moving art show and inside a cheap travelling mobile home of a new sort after the seats had been ripped out and mattresses completely covered the floor and in the back boxes filled with spare clothes, food, and utensils. Topped off by a big sound speaker system just then blaring out some unheard of by him music from he thought maybe India or something (music which turned out to the Jefferson Airplane as they moved into the acid rock music world which took a spin as the rock genre of choice among the dope aficionados of the time like cool jazz had sustained the tea head “beats” a half generation before).

More importantly for our tale as he approached the bus for closer inspection Josh noticed a young guy, a guy who looked a few years older than him but still young with a long beard and long hair (Josh was beardless, would never have much more than stubble whenever he tried to grow a beard, a wisp of a beard really, and had only let his jet  black hair start to grow after he fled staid bi-weekly routine barber shop Olde Saco and got on the road) sitting on the sidewalk beside this monster of a bus. Without hesitating a moment Josh walked up to the guy and asked if he had a joint. The guy, the Scribe, Peter Paul Markin, also without hesitation, reached into his denim jacket pocket and passed Josh a big old joint, a blunt in the dope world language of the day, and said “fire her up brother, fire her up.” (Josh’s first dope experience which is a bit outside what we are trying to get across here was the usual endless and chaotic coughing that seized beginners not used to the harshness of the dried plant once he took a few “hits” and a kind of trance-like feeling in his brain that the cares of the world had been left behind.) That exchange began the Josh-Scribe friendship, a little rocky at times, but a lasting time until the Scribe’s untimely and mysterious early death several years later.      

What that converted yellow school bus was about to give an idea of the times was that the owner, although don’t make a today’s assumption about the owner part, Captain Crunch (real name Jack Shepard, Yale, Class of 1958) had bought it or traded for it that never was clear to Josh as he heard different stories from different sources for a bag of dope in order to roam up and down the West Coast ocean-side highways picking up and letting people off along the way. The Scribe, who had quit college in Boston to head west once he heard about the Summer of Love stuff happening. Stuff which had confirmed for him his long time prediction that a new breeze was about to hit the land, to hit youth nation in particular had met Captain Crunch in Golden Gate Park and had already taken one trip up and down the coast to San Diego and back. It was on that trip back up the coast in Carlsbad about forty miles north of San Diego that Kathy Callahan, Carlsbad High School Class of 1968, the Butterfly Swirl of this scenario comes into the picture.    

Kathy, let’s call her Butterfly Swirl to keep with the times and her time, had been nothing but a Southern California surfer girl meaning in those days that she looked beautiful, tanned and curvaceous on the beach while her golden-haired surfer boyfriend went hunting for the perfect wave. It was along the Pacific Coast Highway one late afternoon as it passed through Carlsbad where the yellow brick road bus had stopped to see the breath-taking ocean view that the Scribe spied Butterfly Swirl sunning herself waiting for her by then pruned surfer boy to come ashore for the day. The Scribe used to the more intellectually driven and somewhat neurotic co-ed who he was addicted to in the Boston-Cambridge haunts he frequented was fascinated by Butterfly Swirl fresh new world look. (The Scribe would admit later that he was totally unprepared to see hundreds of such beauties up and down the coast waiting on land for their own golden-haired surfer boys seeking their won perfect waves.) He went up to her and started asking questions about surfers, surfing, a subject he knew nothing about having come from the East where such a sport did not have any cache then. They talked for a while and during that time the Scribe found out that Butterfly, kind of restless going into her senior year of high school about what to do with her life, whether to go to college, whether she should work on her art, was intrigued by what she heard was happening up in youth nation San Francisco. 

Yeah, the times were like that. You would expect a guy like the Scribe to head west once he got the message. Hell he, driven by his faded beat dreams, was built for that experience. Maybe even expect a guy like Josh before heading on to other things, as most of the brethren who formed that small segment of youth nation would eventually do, to head west and see what was what. What was extraordinary was the jail breakout of a gal like Butterfly Swirl who if she was a few years older would have been so totally immersed in the surfer culture that she could have given a damn about some weirdos up north where the weirdos congregated and had done so for a couple of generations. The long and short of it was that a couple of days later Butterfly Swirl after the Scribe’s coaxing was “on the bus” heading north.

One of the things that guys like the Scribe was trying to break out of was the old girl-guy one and only thing although breaking through that barrier had been easier said than done. For a few weeks though as the bus headed to Xanadu, Big Sur, Carmel, and Monterey then up through Pacifica before landing once again in Golden Gate Park the Scribe and Butterfly Swirl were lovers. The Scribe gave Butterfly Swirl her first experiences with dope mostly marijuana, peyote buttons and mescaline, the LSD, the Kool-Aid acid test would come later. And Butterfly being an easy-going young woman began to fit in with the travelling band of gypsies spiritual and intellectual wanderers who populated the bus.       

Then the same day Josh met the Scribe on Russian Hill after he had brought Josh on board the bus Butterfly Swirl who had been out pan-handling to get some provisions for the bus saw him and that was that. Something happened between them from minute one but it was not until later that night that the big switch happened after they were all stoned. The Scribe who had taken a half-lover, half-fatherly interest in Butterfly Swirl once he saw that she was not very intellectually curious beyond her restlessness and her fear of a surfer girl’s fate (although very sexually curious and inventive) saw the writing on the wall and “blessed” the union, became head of that little trio family. Being just a few years older in youth nation made him a logical little father. A couple of weeks later at a Grateful Dead concert at the Fillmore Butterfly Swirl and the Prince of Love had their first Kool-Aid acid test and through the dreams and colors became “one with the universe.” The Scribe, satanic love preacher that night “married” them. Yeah, like I said the times were like that, exactly like that.     

[As mentioned above the Scribe and Josh would be friends until the Scribe’s untimely death in the mid-1970s. As for Butterfly Swirl by summer’s end she had had enough of roaming and cavorting and returned to her golden-haired surfer boy still looking for that perfect wave. Not everybody was built to go the distance even in the Summer of Love. J.T. ]   

On The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love-“The Monterey Pops Festival” (1968) –A Different View

On The 50^th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love-“The Monterey Pops Festival” (1968) –A Different View

DVD Review

By Film Editor Sandy Salmon  

The Monterey Pops Festival-1967, starring Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, The Mamas and the Papas, Ravi Shankar, and the usual suspects from the 1960s acid rock circuit on the West Coast, produced by D.A. Pennebaker, 1968 

Those of you who are regular readers in this space (or of the on-line edition of the American Film Gazette) may be surprised that I am reviewing a film, in this case the 1968 documentary of the first Monterey Pops Festival, when my Associate editor Alden Riley has already recently done so. And by his, and my, lights a decent job. The reason I am posting a review is due to a “controversy” or rather a few sentences at the start of Alden’s review where he had complained that he had been force-marched into the review by me as some kind of punishment for a remark that he had made to me after reading a review of my take on the 2015 biopic Janis Joplin: Little Girl Blues. He mentioned in passing that he had never heard of Janis, never heard her sing. I suggested to him that he might benefit from reviewing this documentary where one of the acts featured would by Janis Joplin and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company doing her now classic Ball and Chain blues cover. That concert was a breakthrough for her (and several other iconic 1960s rock and roll figures like Jimi Hendrix and soulful Otis Redding) which occurred in June of 1967 right at the heart of the Summer of Love of which we are now commemorating the 50^th anniversary. I had originally intended to do the review myself as part of a series of pieces and sketches of that duel 50^th anniversary. But I will admit that he grudgingly decided to perform the service which I asked him.     

Maybe I had better go back a bit before discussing my views of the documentary and of the scene out in the West Coast at that critical juncture of the emerging “youth nation” 1960s counter-cultural explosion. A while back the now retired film editor in this space, Sam Lowell, who will figure in this “controversy” later asked me as an old friend and fellow critic of his in the old days at the hard copy version of the American Film Gazette to take over the day to day film reviewing at this site. I agreed stipulating that I would bring in an associate editor who would in the not too distant future take over the reins as my own retirement was coming up. I selected young and hungry Alden Riley whose work I knew from Current Times on recommendation from his editor there also an old friend of mine from Gazette days. I believe I have made a right choice in that regard.        

One of the virtues of this site (and of the Gazette from the narrower cinematic end) is that it has attempted to under Pete Markin’s guidance act as something of a “memory” for all kind of social, political and cultural occurrences in American history, and to a lesser extend internationally. In the film area that has meant that everything is up for grabs from the recent latest version of Wonder Woman back to the “silent” era. No rule had been set down by Sam Lowell about what could be reviewed. If you look at the archives you will see that the eclectic Lowell has review everything from 1930s noir to the Tom Cruise-etched Mission Impossible series. I have been in my long career the same way and the expectation on this site is that a whole range of material would be covered. Additionally special events, events like the 50^th anniversary of the Summer of Love which maybe was not some world-historical event in itself but which definitely represented the flavor of a turbulent part of the  history of America within memory (some memories anyway) should, and do, receive extra attention. It was under that premise, as well as broadening Alden’s reach, that I suggested the review. But enough of that internal politics stuff because while Alden did a crackerjack job of reviewing the documentary I want to expand on a few things he mentioned, and a few things he didn’t since I am old enough to have remembered most of the actors (if not like Sam Lowell having been out on the West Coast at that time).       

.

Nobody of course is required in the film criticism business to have a knowledge of its history, of the definitive films and the break-through technological events which certain directors, producers and other film technician have worked on although it helps. For example when I reviewed Kirk Douglas’ classic big screen Technicolor version of Spartacus I did not have to mention that the film represented the first thaw in the hard-core red scare Cold War freeze that Hollywood had willingly gone along with when it listed “black-listed” Hollywood Ten writers who had been screwed over back in the 1940s for supposed Communist affiliations like they were Uncle Joe Stalin’s toadies or something. Maybe that was why the film turned out so well. I think so anyway. Alden mentioned in his Monterey Pops review that director D.A. Pennebaker’s work seems crude by today’s high-tech standards. And it was but I believe he missed the point that D.A. was on the cutting edge of cinema verite and some of the filming was consciously done at that level.           

That is only a minor sin. What I do not understand is Alden’s short seemingly in passing reference to the performances over those three days which is really the heart of the documentary. I would argue that the shots of the audience was so much filler to give some flesh to who was attracted to the event and why. Moreover this concert was a preliminary wide appeal event in what had been emerging over the previous several years of a different kind of rock-drug connected “acid rock” for lack of a better name which created a very different sound than had been current in the wake of the Beatles/Stones-led British invasion (those groups would be sucked into the acid rock maelstrom as well).

The sound is a return to primitive embryonic times which many in that time, usually but not always under the influence of drugs, were seeking as a whole slew of old taboos were tumbling down. Ms. Joplin’s break-out performance with her band Big Brother and the Holding Company on the old blues classic Piece Of My Heart complete with shouts, screams, wah-wahs and whatnot spoke to those primitive urgings. I do agree with Alden that such deep feelings had to have taken a toll if she had consumed that much energy on one song. I don’t know how she had gotten through a full set never mind a whole concert but maybe the drugs really did help keep her going. That is kind of the point. Such musical outbursts take much energy and no question drugs enhanced what the performers were trying to accomplish. Some of the music produced from that era like the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties had not withstood the ravages of time (I don’t believe a have heard one cut from that album as part of their playlist for a long, long maybe since back in the day.) But Janis’ Ball and Chain, Piece of My Heart, and Bobby McGee still kick out the jams.        

I suppose it is hard to tell somebody not from that generation, our vaunted Generation of ’68, about what Alden claimed I would call creative “rock and rock” when he could not believe his eyes as the Who leader smashed and Jimi Hendrix burned perfectly good guitars on stage. Rather than a retort here I will gather up Sam Lowell from his retirement and together we will discuss a litany of such creative actions on the 1960s stages. That will protect Alden from any two hour lecture from us that he may be standing in fear of coming down on his young head. 

Finally maybe there is hope that Alden will grow into this job. Although as I have mentioned previously the audience shots were filler he hit the nail on the head when he mentioned that those close-up shots of the attendees, of the audience, of the mostly young audience in their best “hippie” garb looked very cool even now. Porkpie hats, old-time Victorian dresses, World War II G.I. surplus stuff like that. I also agree that when I watched the DVD most of the audience looked like they had done some serious weed or some drug before they got to the concert (probably there as well). Certainly I also wondered like he did about those young women then, women who looked very foxy indeed. I also wonder if anybody who watched the film today and who had been there then would be shocked by the footage of them in their “to be young was very heaven” days after an unsuccessful fight against the ravages of time. Alden won’t agree but the whole effect of the documentary had me thinking at the end that those were the days when men and women played rock and roll for keeps and everybody listened with baited breathe. Yes, indeed, we did.    

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summe r Of Love -The Heart Of The San Francisco Fillmore Night, Circa 1967

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love -The Heart Of The San Francisco Fillmore Night, Circa 1967

Scene: Brought to mind by one of the songs in this compilation, The Jefferson Airplane’s Fillmore West-driven classic wa-wa song, Someone To Love.

It wasn’t my idea, not the way I was feeling then although I had “married” them under the stars one night, one late June night, in this year of our summer of love 1967. Married Prince Love (a.k.a. Joshua Breslin, late of Olde Saco High School Class of 1967, that’s up in Maine) and Butterfly Swirl (a.k.a. Kathleen Clarke, Carlsbad High School Class of 1968, that’s down south here in California), my “family” as such things went on the merry prankster yellow brick road bus that brought us north to ‘Frisco. I had only “adopted” the Prince here on Russian Hill one day when he was looking for dope. Before that I had traveled all through the great western blue-pink night, as my North Adamsville corner boy friend, Peter Paul Markin, would say from Ames, Iowa where I got “on the bus,” the Captain Crunch merry prankster bus).

I brought Butterfly and Lupe Matin (her Ames “road” name then although now she is going under the name Lance Peters. No, don’t get the idea she has gone male, no way, no way in freaking hell and I have the scars on my back to prove it. It’s just her, well, thing, the name-changing thing, and her real name anyway is Sandra Sharp from Vassar, that’s a high–end New York college for women, okay) up here for a serious investigation of the summer of love we kept hearing about down in Carlsbad where we camped out (actually we looked out for the estate of a friend, or maybe better an associate, of our “leader,” Captain Crunch, as care-takers). Yes, the “old man,” me, Far-Out Phil (a. k. a. Phil Markin, North Adamsville Class of 1964, that’s in Massachusetts, okay) married them but I was not happy about it because I was still not done with Butterfly myself. Only the residual hard-knocks North Adamsville corner boy in me accepted, wise to the ways of the world, that Butterfly had flown from me.

It was all Captain Crunch’s idea, although Mustang Sally (a. k. a. Susan Stein), if she was talking to the Captain (a. k. a Samuel Jackman) just then, which was always a sometime thing lately since she had taken up with a drummer from one of the myriad up-and-coming “acid rock” bands that had sprouted out of the Golden Gate night, The Magic Mushrooms, and the Captain was not pleased, not pleased at all, probably was the real force behind the idea. The idea? Simple enough, Now that they, the they being the thousands of young people who had fled, fled a millions ways, west, were about creating a merry prankster yellow bus world on the hills of San Francisco the notion that Prince Love and Butterfly Swirl were “married” under the sign of “Far-Out Phil and would have now have a proper bourgeois “wedding reception” was impossible. Celebrate yes, no question. Celebrate high and hard, no question. But the times demanded, demanded high and hard, some other form of celebration. And that is where the Captain (or, as seemed more and more likely once more facts came out, Mustang Sally) hit his stride.

Here is the “skinny.” The Captain knew somebody, hell the Captain always knew somebody for whatever project he had in mind, connected to the Jefferson Airplane, a hot band that was going to be playing at the Fillmore that next Saturday night. And that somebody could get the Captain twenty prime tickets to the concert. [Everybody suspected that the deal was more nuanced than that, probably the tickets for a batch of Captain-produced acid, or in a two-fisted barter, a big pile of dope, mary jane most likely, from somebody else for something else and then a trade over for the tickets. That high finance stuff was never very clear but while nobody worried much about money, except a few hungry times out in some god-forsaken desert town or something, there usually was plenty of Captain dough around for family needs.] So the Captain’s idea was that this concert would be an electric kool-aid acid test trip that was now almost inevitably part of any 1967 event, in lieu of that bourgeois (the Captain’s word, okay) wedding reception. And, see, the Prince and Butterfly, were not to know because this was going to be their first time taking some of that stuff, the acid (LSD, for the squares, okay). And once the acid hit the Captain said, and the rest of us agreed, there would be no sorrow, no sorrow at all, that they had not had some bogus old bourgeois wedding reception.

Saturday night came, and everybody was dressed to the nines. (Ya, that’s an old Frankie Riley, North Adamsville corner boy leader, thing that I held onto, still do, to say hot, edgy, be-hop.) Let’s just concentrate on the “bride” and “groom” attire and that will give an idea of what nines looked like that night. Butterfly, a genuine West Coast young blonde beauty anyway, formerly hung-up on the surfer scene (or a perfect-wave surfer guy anyway), all tanned, and young sultry, dressed in a thin, almost see-through, peasant blouse. According to Benny Buzz, a kind of connoisseur on the subject, it wasn’t really see-through but he lied, or close to it, because every guy in the party or later, at the concert, craned his neck to look at the outline of her beautiful breasts that were clearly visible for all to see. And while she may have been “seek a new world” Butterfly Swirl she was also an old-fashioned “tease,” and made no apologies for being so. She also wore a short mini-skirt that was de rigueur just then that highlighted her long well-turned legs (long flowing skirts were to come in a little later) and had her hair done up in an utterly complicated braid that seemed impossible to have accomplished piled high on her head, garlands of flowers flowing out everywhere, and silvery, sparkling, starry mascara eyes and ruby-red, really ruby red lips giving a total effect that even had the Captain going, and the Captain usually only had his eyes, all six of them, fixed on Mustang Sally.

And the “groom”? Going back to Olde Saco roots he wore along with his now longer flowing hair and less wispy beard an old time sea captain’s hat, long flared boatswain's whites, a sailor’s shirt from out of old English Navy times and a magical mystery tour cape in lieu of the usual rough crewman's jacket. A strange sight that had more than one girl turning around and maybe scratching her head to figure out his “statement.” That didn’t however stop them from looking and maybe making a mental note to “try him out” sometime. (By the way, I told the Captain later that the Prince had no idea of making a statement and, being more than a little stoned on some leftover hash that he found around he just grabbed what was at hand).

Now back to the action. In order to “fortify” everyone for the adventure the Captain proposed a “toast” to the happy couple before we left the merry prankster yellow bus to make the one mile trip to the Fillmore. So everybody, including the bride and groom toasted with Dixie cups of kool-aid. The Prince and Butterfly were bemused that, with all the liquor available around the bus, the Captain proposed to use kool-aid for the toast. Well, we shall see. And they shall see.

And they “saw,” or rather saw once the acid (LSD) kicked in about an hour later, more or less. Now what you “see” on an acid trip is a very individual thing, moreover other than that powerful rush existential moment that you find yourself living in it defies description, literary niceness description, especially from a couple of kids on their “wedding night.” So what is left? Well, some observations by “father” Far-Out Phil, now a veteran acid-eater, as I hovered over my new-found “family” to insured that they made a safe landing.

The first thing I noticed was that Butterfly Swirl was gyrating like crazy when the female singer in front of Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick, started up on their acid rock anthem, White Rabbit. Some of Butterfly’s moves had half the guys in the place kind of male hippie “leering” at her (mainly giving her a sly nod of approval, and making a mental note to check her out later when the dope hit her at the high point in another couple of hours or so). (Remember she had on that diaphanous peasant blouse, and also remember that sexual thoughts, leering sexual thoughts or not, did not fade away when under the influence of LSD. In many cases the sexual arousal effect was heightened, particularly when a little high- grade herb was thrown into the mix.) I thought nothing in particular of her actions just then, many guys and girls were gyrating, were being checked-out and were making mental notes of one kind or another. It is only when Butterfly started to “believe” that she was Alice, the Alice of the song and of wonderland, and repeated “I am Alice, I am alive,” about thirteen times that I moved over to her quickly and gave her a battle-scarred veteran’s calming down, a couple of hits off the Columbia Red that I had just coped from some freak.

And where was Prince Love during the trial by fire honeymoon night? Gyrating with none other than Lance Peters, who you may know as Luscious Lois or seven other names, by who was my main honey now that Butterfly has flown my coop. But don’t call her Lance Peters this night because after a tab of acid (beyond her congratulations kool-aid cup earlier) she is now Laura Opal in her constant name-game change run through the alphabet. Prince Love had finally “seen” the virtues of being with older woman like I had learned back in Ames Iowa time, an older voluptuous woman and although she was wearing no Butterfly diaphanous blouse Prince felt electricity running through his veins as they encircled each other on the dance floor. Encircled each other and then, slyly, very slyly, I thought when I heard the story the next day, backed out of the Fillmore to wander the streets of Haight-Ashbury until the dawn. Then to find shelter in some magic bus they thought was the Captain’s but when they were awoken by some tom-toms drumming out to eternity around noontime found out that they were in the “Majestic Moon” tribe’s bus. No hassle, no problem, guest always welcome. Ya, that is the way it was then. When I cornered, although corned may be too strong a word, the Prince later all that he would commit to was that he had been devoured by Mother Earth and had come out on the other side. That, and that he had seen god, god close up. Laura Quirk, if she is still running under that name now, merely stated that she was god. Oh ya, and had seen the now de rigueur stairway to heaven paved with brilliant lights. She certainly knew how to get around her Phil when the deal went down, no question.

And how did the evening end with Butterfly and me, after I “consoled” her with my ready-teddy herbal remedy? After a search for Prince and Lance, a pissed off search for me, we went over into a corner and started staring at one of the strobe lights off the walls putting ourselves into something of a trance-like mood. A short time later, I, formerly nothing but a hard-luck, hard-nosed, world-wide North Adamsville corner boy in good standing started involuntarily yelling, “I am Alice, I am alive,” about ten times. Butterfly though that was the funniest thing she had ever heard and came over to me and handed me a joint, a joint filled with some of that same Columbia Red that settled her down earlier. And I, like Butterfly before me, did calm down. Calmed down enough to see our way “home” to Captain Crunch’s Crash-Pad where we, just for old time’s sake, spend the hours until dawn making love. (I send my apologies to those two thousand guys at the Fillmore who had made notes to check on Butterfly later. Hey, I was not a king hell corner boy back in the North Adamsville be-bop night for nothing. You have to move fast sometimes in this wicked old world, even when the point was to slow the circles down.) Asked later what her “trip” had felt like all Butterfly could utter was her delight in my antics. That, the usual color dream descriptions, and that she had climbed some huge himalaya mountain and once on top climbed a spiraling pole forever and ever. I just chuckled my old corner boy chuckle.

And what of Butterfly and Prince’s comments on their maiden voyage as newlyweds? They pronounced themselves very satisfied with their Fillmore honeymoon night. They then went off for what was suppose to be a few days down to Big Sur where Captain Crunch had some friends, Captain had friends everywhere, everywhere that mattered, who lent them their cabin along the ocean rocks and they had a “real” honeymoon. A few weeks later Prince Love, now a solo prince, came back to the bus. It seems that Butterfly had had her fill of being “on the bus,” although she told the Prince to say thanks to everybody for the dope, sex, and everything but that at heart her heart belonged to her golden-haired surfer boy and his search for the perfect wave.

Well, we all knew not everybody was build for the rigors of being “on the bus” so farewell Kathleen Clarke, farewell. And just then, after hearing this story, I thought that Prince had better keep his Olde Saco eyes off Lannie Rose (yes she has changed her name again) or I might just remember, seriously remember, some of those less savory North Adamsville be-bop corner boy nights. Be forewarned, sweet prince.