Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans a mere story. Once upon a time,
I thought my parents were real estate moguls. Oh you
know what, actually, are you stoned right now or just tired?
Just start? Just a quick reminder. I was unwittingly born
into a Northern California pot smuggling family and didn't find
(00:30):
out until I was well into my teens that my
entire world could have come crashing down at any point
because my seemingly straight parents were the kind of outlaws
that Nixons were on drugs, and Nancy Reagan's just Say
No anti drug campaign would sentence to twenty plus years
in prison if they were coughed. So the vilification of
(00:52):
pot has a long American history, and my dad's journey
from LSD loving college kid in Brooklyn to an epic
bicoastal pot smuggler is because of my mom. So let's
start with my mom's story and her pioneering life in
San Francisco's early nineteen sixties counterculture scene. I'm Rainbow Valentine
(01:13):
and this is disorganized crime smuggler's daughter, want to do young,
free and groovy, making it up. We rolled along, rolling
along country. He didn't rain in the Golden gag York State,
(01:46):
making it up as we roll. Born in Oakland, my
mom grew up in LA in the nineteen forties and fifties.
She remembers all her Japanese neighbors just hearing during World
(02:06):
War two me was scarce and better we're scarce. I
never had better until I was in the shifty somewhere.
Everybody wore gloves when you were now, and everybody were
stockings girdles. It was like the whole society was constrained.
My mom's family moved from mar Vista, a beach neighborhood
(02:29):
along LA's Prohibition rum Runner Road, a ka Venice Boulevard,
to the San Fernando Valley in the fifties. San Fernando Valley,
full of orange groves, was stifling for anyone who thought
outside the box, and my mom has never fit in
anyone's box, even though she is tiny. She lived a
double life as a socially acceptable cheerleader and prom princess,
(02:53):
but also did modern dance and shockingly at the time,
was friends with non white kids, including Richie Valens. Her
mom a Bay Area native from a family of mostly
little people. They were perfectly proportioned adults, but everyone was
super tiny, like you know, under five feet tall. They
were little people. So my grandma was a discontent, repressed
(03:15):
housewife into astrology and esoterica like theology, and her dad,
a Jewish orphan adopted by Jesuit fur trapper priests in
French Canada, owned diners. One was called the Teepee and
located in a concrete teepee shaped building in Long Beach, California.
The other was the ground roundup on Van Ey's Boulevard
and San Fernando. Money was tight for my mom's family.
(03:38):
Times were tough. You grew up in poverty. You didn't
have it. You said you didn't have a doll. I
had dolls. I didn't have shoes. Who socks? I to
wear my brother's old socks, and my shoes had holes
in them, and I put cardboard in the shoes. I
made all my own clothes as a kid, and my
mother shot me to so by eleven. In nineteen fifty nine,
(03:58):
there was a nuclear meltdown at the Rocketdye nuclear facility
in Santa Susiana, California, a few miles from where my
mom and her family lived in Granada Hills. For two weeks,
radiation poured over the San Fernando Valley. Now this meltdown
was covered up, it was never cleaned up. It's still
sitting there, and it was overseen by former Nazi scientist
(04:20):
Werner von Braun, who was brought to the US by
the government in the covert operation paper Clip in nineteen
forty five. So when this happened, my mom was young,
she was eighteen, and she had married her childhood's sweetheart
because she was pregnant, and the radiation caused my mom
to have a stillborn baby. So my mom was totally traumatized.
(04:44):
It's nineteen fifty nine, and she was completely shamed for
having this stillborn baby. It was a time when women
were blamed for anything that went wrong or explained for
everything that was the fifties. My mom was bursting with
artistic tendencies. So she fled the oppressive San Fernando Valley.
Just left. This eighteen year old husband left, her family,
(05:04):
left the shame, and she took a bus up to Berkeley, California,
where her best friend was going to college UC Berkeley,
and they went over to North Beach. It's nineteen sixty
It's ground zero for the beatnecks who would create the
world famous historic San Francisco counterculture and the iconic Hate Ashbury.
(05:25):
Now at this point we are going to leave Golden
Gate Park to go in to I. I guess light
sojourned through the Hate Ashbury district of San Francisco. So
in order to understand why and how my parents are
who they are, it's important for us to understand the
political and societal culture of the nineteen sixties. And who
(05:48):
better to explain it other than my bff's dad. Dennis
McNally is an author, historian, and the former publicist for
The Grateful Dead Well. San Francisco has always been a
place that was hospitable to the weird, to rangeness, going
back to the way it started, which was not in
(06:09):
any conventional way but because of a gold rush. So
by nineteen sixty it was politically still a relative the conservative,
a bunch of Republicans, but for instance, it had become
the home of the beat scene, where Alan Getsbrook had
read Howell for the first time, and the beat scene,
what they were doing was basically opting out of the
(06:31):
American value system by sort of going in a sense,
going underground, and they smoke pot and they listened to jazz,
and they you know, thought their thoughts. There was just
this bubbling cauldron, frankly of avant garde arts groups. There
was room for cultural strangeness. At the center of this
bubbling cauldron of the nineteen sixties San Francisco was my bohemian,
(06:53):
beatnick artistic mom. So she says that the scene of
the counterculture of bohemians, the people who formed the counterculture,
was small. It was about two hundred people. My mom
was friends with everyone who became someone. She's My mom's
the kind of person who will just casually mention Oh
(07:15):
the time Jack Nicholson came over for Thanksgiving and you're like, wait,
what what. My mom dated pig Pen, who was part
of the Grateful Dead. She chauffeured Mimi Farina to Vallet class.
She also provided Janis Joplin with her signature for hat.
Oh yeah, well, I don't know Janice, who was at
a North Point house. And Janice floated in with an
(07:37):
entourage and said, I don't know what I'm gonna wear.
So I always wore a rabbit for her hat, and
so I said, hey, where's this She's photographed to treat
her hat? Oh I know, So Now that my parents
are older, I've become the appreciative and surprised audience at
(07:58):
these little anecdotes. My parents will drop about major historic
events they were part of. Oh like my mom dropping
the random fact that in nineteen sixty four she was
in the second row at the Beatles Cow Palace show.
That was opening night for the Beatles first ever concert
tour of North America. Oh, and there's my mom in
the second row. No big deal, Like, wait what Mom?
(08:20):
They only sang halfway through one song and then there
was like complete insanity. The audience started pushing forward and
the seat started bending and scary. It was. So when
my mom arrived in North Beach, she quickly met her
(08:40):
second husband. He sheltered her in her college trum from
a creepy junkie who wanted to you know, who's hassling them.
My mom's second husband was a fairly well known mid
century modern jeweler and beatnick. Cohabitating couples were totally frowned
upon in the sixties, so my mom married him. He
had lots of friends in the jazz world, playing at
(09:03):
the jazz clubs. So we will go to the Black
Cook Jazz Club of Jazz Workshop. That's so cool, that
was cool. Like pioneers, oddballs and innovators. Jazz came out
West as well. It arrived in San Francisco, becoming a
thing sometime after San Francisco's nineteen thirty four waterfront labor
(09:27):
strike called Bloody Thursday, when DOC workers became the first
union to reluctantly integrate. Because of blue collar jobs on
San Francisco's waterfront and a shift from banking to industry
during World War Two, there was a massive migration of
African Americans to San Francisco, over six hundred percent population
(09:47):
increase between nineteen forty and nineteen forty five. By nineteen fifty,
over forty three thousand African Americans lived in the city,
and the jazz clubs boomed. The Jazz Workshop, located in
North Beach, my mom's neighborhood, was central to the action.
Between nineteen sixty one and sixty for a number of
live at the Jazz Workshop albums were produced. My mom's
(10:10):
other hangout, the Black Hawk, was a famous jazz club
located and was now the Tenderloin District. A short but
calf strengtheningly hilly walk from North Beach tell us about Dizzy.
Dizzy Gilleski Jessey was, you know, his Jessy would come
over and make us. He made us breakfast once and
then I saw the recipe in the Lincoln Center recipe book,
(10:33):
the same recipe. It was very odd. You know, it's
a very Southern like scrambled egg recipe with sam and
green pepper and grits. So it was something I had
never eaten, and you know, I just we went every
night to see Dissey. It was amazing, and he was
(10:54):
just really jolly. He was Catholic, so he was trying
to be really good with his wife and not get
in trouble because it was a funny guy. Yeah, oh yeah.
My mom and her second husband, the jeweler, would go
(11:15):
to the Jazz Greats hotel rooms and they would fashion
ornate rings for them and they would also smoke pot.
My mom says that at the beginning of the sixties,
everyone in the beat scene was smoking pot, but it
was pretty underground. Everybody was really afraid to turn anybody
on or show anybody what they were doing. Was who
cloaked in fear. It changed with the music. When the
(11:37):
music changed and got people got dancing and it got
a lot looser, you know, because the culture of the
fifties and before that it was all about suffering and
you have to suffer. And then we decided in the
sixties that actually life should be beautiful and I should
be laughing and dancing and you know, so here, you guys,
(12:00):
we're just gonna be like, go on our own path
and have a good time. The jeweler taught my mom
how to make her own jewelry. Her best selling piece
was a Jesus on a cross with a giant erection.
That's my mom. Before she was able to make money
with her jewelry, she had a lot of other weird jobs,
(12:22):
lots of little odd jobs. She was a belly dancer
for a gay Gypsy refugee from the Holocaust who was
a sword swallower okay, and together they would perform at
galas for the wealthy. Another one of her gigs, my favorite,
was at the Domino Club on Kearney Street in San Francisco.
She posed nude on a chez lounge and a famous
(12:43):
artist painted her on black velvet and auctioned the painting
off to the gentleman crowd. She loved this job because Strangely,
no one ever hit on her. Later she realized that
the nude models were a cover for a gate club.
My mom was also an engineer at KMPX, which was
the country's first rock radio station and by Big Daddy
(13:06):
Tom Donahue. Big Daddy Tom Donahue had all the men
be the DJ's and all the women were behind the
scenes as the engineers running the show because the women
weren't totally stoned and they could keep their ship together. Now,
because my mom was from la she knew how to
drive and she would show for the rock stars from
the airports to their crash pad. Now, that job also
(13:27):
came with a task of delivering pot to the rock stars,
as the performers all got a big satchel of weed
with their payment. Here's your crash pad in your pot,
we'll see out the show. Oh ridiculous. Did you ever
sell pot in the sixties? Did I? Yeah? Oh? No? Hash?
Oh so hash? Where'd you get it? You know? I
(13:50):
started bringing up all the stuff I had when I
was a kid. I had a stamp collection, So I
traded my stamp collection for a couple of pounds. I hash,
how come you only did it once? I didn't have
any more stamp collections. My mom was deeply involved with
a San Francisco improv comedy scene in the early sixties
(14:11):
because she was a whiz typist. She was the secretary
for the Committee Comedy Troupe. She was also the secretary
for the Family Dog, which was the rival production company
to Bill Graham Presents. My mom even helped the legendary
comedian Lenny Bruce slog through his obscenity trial in the
early sixties. Lenny Bruce was arrested multiple times for his
vulgar and sexual material. He used words like cocksucker onstage,
(14:35):
shocking at the time, you guys. So Lenny Bruce hired
my mom to type up his notes, which were handwritten
while he was on the toilet because he was a
junkie and junkies spend a lot of time in the bathroom,
So Lenny Bruce would be on the toilet and writing
his obscenity trial. Stuffed the toilet paper under the door
for my mom to transcribe. Yeah, and he kept saying,
(14:56):
you know in his records that I was typing for him.
Words can't hurt anybody you set up a story about,
you know, So if you call somebody a count, or
you call them a cock sucker, they're not really. You're
just using words or just words. And the judge wouldn't
(15:20):
buy it. They wouldn't buy it. They're still sent him
to cheil. You mentioned you told me once that after
that trial of Sutday trial, people started saying the word
fuck in normal day right. Never set up right, never
said up, wouldn't even say God, damn it. So my
mom's relationship with her second husband, the jeweler, was volatile,
(15:43):
and she left him and fell in love with an
actor who later became a well known TV star. My
mom's third husband, the actor, was an extrovert. He invited
everyone to their little Telegraph Hill apartment after the comedy shows.
My mom would cook and everyone would dance. They play records.
It was like the height of this amazing music revolution
in San Francisco. While her husband, the actor, was on
(16:07):
the road with the Rolling Stones in their groupies, she
retaliated by having an affair that resulted in a surprising pregnancy.
She'd been sterile for eight years. Since he's stillborn, my
sister's biological father abandoned my mom and she settled down
with her baby, my future big sister in a fisherman's
cottage North Point, a neighborhood known for the famed Garadeli Square.
(16:31):
I'm Ramo Valentine. You're listening to disorganized crime. We'll be
right back now. The mid sixties were a volatile, transformative
time in the world, particularly the US. Nineteen sixty five,
(16:52):
the Vietnam War is in full swing, drafting thirty five
thousand kids a month in La the Watts Race. Riots
explode between police and African American neighborhoods, and in nineteen
sixty six, US troops and m are four hundred thousand.
Anti war protests are growing, The Black Panthers are founded,
and West Coast Acid manufacturing King Owsley is busted for
(17:15):
the first time. Nineteen sixty seven is the Monterey Pops Festival,
The Detroit rece riots, and huge Vietnam War protests occur
in San Francisco, New York, and DC. Nineteen sixty eight,
Nixon wins the presidency. Martin Luther King Junior is assassinated.
The rock musical Hair All about the Vietnam War and
(17:36):
Hippies opens on Broadway. This is a long way from
the nineteen fifties era of repression saw cops and Elvis.
The last eighteen was as seeing a tremendous increase of
the so called hippies. It is the belief of the
people who live within the area that we the middle
(18:00):
class or in the Upper franss, I've done a very
very poor job running our government and our way of life.
Thousands of young people are pouring into San Francisco, into
the hate Ashbury neighborhood, and the press called these young
people the hippies. Here's our historian, Dennis McNally. The people
who lived in the hate Ashbury did not call themselves hippies.
(18:21):
They called themselves freaks. Hippie was a word created by
the newspapers because freak it had edges to it, and
the newspapers just didn't like it. You know, it wasn't
it wasn't a word they like to use, whereas hippie
sounded sort of soft and adorable. And so they made
that up and and it worked, and everybody used it
as he has used it ever since. Hippy seen frequently
(18:44):
gathered together in large groups, and you know, going up
to Woodstock and you name it. They gathered around rock
and roll and they used LSD instead of just smoking
pot and the LSD. There's some kind of connection between
LSD and rock and roll, which is to say, it
(19:05):
makes you sensitive to that incredible sensory overload that you
can get from really loud music, and you know, it
just sort of it takes you somewhere. And there was
this guy named Owsley in the San Francisco Bay area
who was really obsessive and in the end he produced
(19:26):
what was probably the purest and strongest LSD ever made.
And he had lots of very interesting and slightly strange
theories about what he was doing and why, you know,
you had to do certain things, but the end result
was he produced literally millions of hits of LSD. LSD
(19:51):
no nineteen sixties counterculture stories complete without it. Along with
notable acid manufacturers like Owsley, Stanford University is manufacturing acid
in the early sixth season in the late fifties to
test out. They have no idea what it does. Stanford
University is located in Palo Alto, which is the home
of many of the nineteen sixties musicians, So somehow this
(20:12):
acid is making it up to North Beach and my
mom's second husband, the jeweler has a hook up. He
gets Stanford acid, and what people are supposed to do
is take the Stanford acid and then write a trip
report and return it to Stanford so they can find
out what happens when you take acid. That's how my
mom started taking acid in the early sixties. It was
Stanford acid, so you know, probably pretty great. I mean
(20:35):
that's some Ivy league acid. He got me a dose
or gave me dose and then he went to sleep. Yeah,
So this my first ASCID in just little Fisherman's house
in North Beach. But it was great because I assumed
back to when I was three and four years old
(20:55):
and my father was super abusive to my brother and
I was terrified. So I went through the experience, but
as an older person, so I wasn't so terrified. So
it helped peeled me reliving those experiences of fear and
saying I couldn't deal with us. Now I'm in my
(21:17):
adult body instead of my child body. And that was
my first acid experience. While my mom was being radiated
(21:40):
in LA's never cleaned up nuclear meltdown, running away to
San Francisco and nude modeling for gay men, my dad
was growing up in Brooklyn in a middle class, intellectual, atheist, Jewish, communist,
art loving family. Throughout the nineteen sixties, a new wave
of immigrants was starting to move into New York City.
(22:00):
As American immigration laws relaxed and white residents moved out
to the suburbs. New York City was turning into a
multicultural metropolis unlike the world had ever seen. Across the decade,
as a whole, people all over New York, like the
rest of the country, were fighting for change. New York
City in the sixties saw countless strikes and protests, sometimes
(22:22):
boiling over into violence. Now, let's also remember the nineteen
sixties are fifteen to twenty years after World War Two.
Every adult had gone through World War Two in some way,
New York City is full of refugees and survivors. My
dad's mom fled the Ukrainian Pograms from the thirties and
her siblings were murdered in the Holocaust. So New York
(22:46):
City is full of humans with what today we call PTSD.
My dad was the youngest of three children. His dad
was a Rembrandt scholar, a book designer, and his Russian
immigrant mom stayed at home, although later in life. She
had her own art gallery in the Berkshires near Tanglewood
in Massa. She sits. My dad's family lived in Brooklyn
(23:08):
and my whip smart Dad was skipped a few grades,
causing him to be the smallest kid in high school,
an easy target for bullies. His grandparents, my great grandparents,
lived upstairs, and he played in the streets with his cousins.
He went to summer camp on the Berkshires, he had
a dog, and well, he was, for the most part,
a happy kid. According to my dad, life was uneventful
(23:29):
until nineteen sixty three when he started at Brooklyn College,
because that's when he met the Sugar Bowl Man. The
Sugar Bowl Man, he completely changed the direction of my life.
And there I am, and I pull up this giant
BSA lightning rocket already parked there as a Triumph single
cylinder five D. My dad is really into motorcycles at
(23:52):
this point in his life. And there's this guy leaning
on this bike and he's six foot five, and I
pull up in my big time bike and I'm five
foot eight, and he nods at me, says, hm, nice bike.
I want to come over to my place and Smolka Joint.
(24:13):
So The Sugar Bowl man is also a nice Jewish
Brooklyn boy. He's super tall, has a deep voice, and
he introduces my dad to a whole new world. So
the Sugar Bowl I get over to his house and
(24:35):
the apartment was dark and had all sorts of hanging things,
hanging tapestries and little water lights and sort of cushions on.
What was more relaxing than a couch? You know, I
guess pillows guy. Basically he walked into the Brooklyn caspot
(25:01):
and the Sugar Bowl man. I mean he's got incredible
pot smoked anything like it, and he's got lots of it.
He tells me here, hey, man, you want to try DMT,
And sure, I mean, why not? Well, DMT diamens will
(25:24):
trip to me is the center of a five hundred
mic acid trip before you get the pipe out of
your mouth from a toog and man, just a rocket
ship ride and in fifteen minutes you're straight again, just
straight again. It's like where was Where was I? You know?
(25:45):
I went through the doors of perception so fast it
was like light speed anyway, But I was completely enamored
by psychedelics, and there I had the opportunity and so
what I started to do was, I mean, I realized
(26:06):
pretty quickly that fuck one, it costs money to do this,
and two if I bought two, If I got two joints,
I could sell one and pay for one to smoke
myself for free. That was sort of the initial concept
of it. And then the DMT and it costs money.
So I ended up sort of passing it out at
(26:29):
Brooklyn College. Were you living with your mom? Yeah, I
was living at home with my mom. I was bringing
all my friends over the trip. Would be up all
night and my mom would say, hey, I've got bagels
and locks for you here in the morning. You shod
wonder what the fuck we were doing. It's not like
we talked about it. Would just be up there listening
to music and tripping all night. All the time. It
(26:53):
was so great and so much fun, and so the
drugs were so amazing. They were so clean. I could
be able to pass them out to my friends and
it would pay for me to take whatever. And what
the fuck? I even made money, and all of a
sudden it was pretty good money. I mean, it just
(27:13):
servil happened. Organic clich the sugar bowl man is the supplier.
I mean, he had. The Sugar Bowl Man had the
best drugs I'd ever had, and the acid was made
by Nikky sand Mister Sunshine. Nikki Sand aka Nikki Sunshine
(27:37):
aka Mister Sunshine, childhood friend of the Sugar Bowl Man,
was another disciple of LSD and wanted to manufacture as
much as possible to enlighten the world. And Nikky Sunshine's
extensive LSD operation was funded by trustafarian Billy Hitchcock, a
descendant of the Robber Baron family, the Melons as in
(28:01):
Carnegie Melon. Now Nikki Sunshine's patron. Billy hitch Talk had
a mansion in Millbrook, New York. This was the site
of world famous acid tests and mega hippie rangers lord
it over by none other than doctor Timothy Leary, former
Harvard professor and pioneering acid tester. R What I understand
(28:21):
from our signature historian Dennis McNally Millbrook was insane. Leary
got booted out of Harvard and he connected with a
fabulously wealthy guy by the name of Billy Hitchcock. Anyway,
he was a stunningly wealthy guy, and Billy Hitchcock really
liked decidedly, he really liked LLSD, and when Leary got
(28:43):
booted out of Harvard, he ended up at their mansion,
at the mansion that Billy owned in Millbrook, New York,
and people started going there. At first day it was
like so esoteric jazz musicians. They decided they would find
artists to share the cellist with, and then it became,
(29:04):
you know, sort of more and more people, and eventually
they got started getting harassed by the guy named Gordon Liddy,
who was a local investigator for the for the DA
of that county. And of course Gordon Liddy later became
part of the Watergate conspiracy. But that whole side story,
and they they again they talked about LSD and they
(29:29):
gave it a lot of publicity. You mentioned Nikki San
Niki sand although also known as Niki Sunshine. He was
a true believer in LSD and he created what was
called Orange Sun Sunshine and made lots and lots and
lots of that, and then when the police went after him,
he did a very successful vanishing act and got away
(29:50):
with it for but I think twenty five years, and
eventually they caught up with him. There's a whole amazing
pattern of people deciding that a that they liked LSD
and they found it a useful thing, and then be
people rising up to meet that demand. It's American capitalism
at its finest. My dad never got caught up in Millbrook,
(30:13):
but through the Sugar Bowl Man, he did enjoy Nikki
Sand's premier acid Orange Sunshine, and he enjoyed a lot
of it. He was running around New York with his chums,
a guy were calling the cameraman and the jazz man
and this guy named Nome. I mean, all I knew
was it was fucking great and we were having a
grand time, and we were listening to great music all
the time. I mean, we were just tripping out everywhere where.
(30:36):
Bagel traps, He's just the streets. And the cameraman says, oh,
let's go up to my dad's house in Woodstock. One
weekend in the middle of the winter. There was I
don't know, January February of sixty seven, was me, the
cameraman's house, his dad's house, Gnome and this other crazy guy, Steve.
(31:03):
But he was really nuts and loved to drip out,
and he had broken his leg and we all went
up there and he went up with the broken legs
the middle of the winter, the snow everywhere, and I've naturally,
I've got the acid. But it was fucking fabulous shit.
And these were five hundred mic tabs, beautiful little purple berries.
(31:27):
And so the four of us drop a tab and
really strong, but absolutely clean and wonderful in you know,
I mean so strong you couldn't do anything to put
your head in a pillow. And I would just watch
blueberries float by. As the blueberry would float by, it
would say blueberry or strawberry. We went on the whole night,
(31:53):
you know, and and we're tripping out through the morning. Naturally,
I said, so let's drop some more. Everybody said, okay,
that sounds cool, and I said, well, you know, we're
gonna have to drop two tabs this time because one
won't get us off. After last we all dropped two. No,
(32:21):
it was twice as blue beage. So by early by
late sixty six, I was taking acids, you know, in
(32:42):
psychedelics so often that I finally said, oh fuck school,
and I quit college and decided to major in acid.
One oh one. This is a big deal. My dad
was young fit ripe for the draft. A few months
after quitting school, he got the dreaded letter from Uncle Sam,
(33:04):
and he willed to comonstrators protest US involvement in the
Vietnam War in mass marches, rallies, and demonstrations. Central Park
is the starting point for the parade to the UN Building.
He estimated one hundred twenty five thousand Manhattan marchers include students,
pass wives, beat nick, poets, doctors, businessman, teachers, priests and nuns.
Makeup and costumes were bizarre. My dad had a plan.
(33:31):
The night before my dad's draft board interview. He took
acid and stayed up all night so he'd be really
spaced out for the draft board. At the draft interview,
my dad refused to disrobe or pe in a cup,
so they sent him to the psychiatrist, who declared my
dad one why, which is just above four f one
y means Uncle Sam may call again, but probably not.
(33:55):
My dad was free. I'm remo, Valentine, you're listening to
disorganized crime. We'll be right back. Many predicted that there
(34:17):
will be no beautiful summer for the hippies of San Francisco,
that the dreamy bohemia of hate Ashbridge will be destroyed
like the Big generation of the fifties by thrill seekers, tourists,
uncommercial exploits. The psychedelic love generation of the sixties may
find that it takes more than new words and new
drugs to conquer the old order. It's nineteen sixty seven.
(34:41):
The summer of love is in full swing. The summer
of sixty seven was madness. What happened to the Sugar
Bowl man was? I mean, he was just really easy
and loose, and he was really supplying I guess, a
lot of big stuff. And apparently one of his old
friends got busted and dropped a diamond him rad it
(35:05):
on him, and it scarce the shit out of him,
and he retires. Because everything changed, The CIA came well,
they had been in there, but they started fucking with
the acid all over the place. So they were putting
stryctine in the acid, and everybody was getting on bad trips.
(35:26):
But what we were getting in New York was just badassi,
and it was a tough It was a weird time.
By the late summer sixty seven, we were just making
a lot of noise and all sorts of political shit, right,
and the war in Vietnam. Music was changing, the changing
(35:47):
the world, and the basis for all of that was
the drugs that turned on the brilliant people who made
the music, who made the art, who created the stuff.
So those who were involved in that that they were
on a terror tear. Now did the CIA tamper with acid?
(36:13):
Whether true or not, there was plenty of propaganda circulating.
According to Dennis McNally, I've never seen any credible evidence
that the CIA literally poisoned psychedelics. There obviously were people
who made psychedelics without the care and attention of an ousley,
(36:34):
so that you get lesser stuff. But what the CIA
did very consciously is poisoned the atmosphere and nuts as
much of the CIA as the FBI poisoned the atmosphere
in which you were taking LSD, so that if you
planned us there were the two that I remember in
(36:57):
particular was of the person who took LSD and then
stared at the sun until they were blind. There were
rumors about people taking LSD and then jumping off, you know,
thinking they can fly, jumping out of windows and dying,
and you know, those those stories are almost you know
when when you ever you try to research that stuff,
(37:17):
you discover that most of it is fraud but it
was just definitely no question disseminated, uh and and put
out by the FBI. So they they they tried to
poison the well, at least metaphorically. Both of my parents
say that by the Summer of Love in nineteen sixty seven,
the true spirit of the psychedelic revolution was over. My
(37:41):
dad didn't want to live in the city anymore, and
he moves up to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. There he becomes a
humble candlemaker and burns down his house and he leaves
a pot of piping hot wax on the stovetop stone.
When you burn the house down, I mean we smoked
a lot of pot. At one point, I invented a
At that point, I invented the first electric pot bomb.
(38:08):
I had an a pipe that was heated electronically. Electrically
was something to cook the pot and then it went
through the air pump and into your mouth. In Stockbridge, Massachusetts,
(38:29):
my dad hung out with his friend the cameraman, and
through him, my dad ended up appearing as a featured
extra in the nineteen sixty nine hippie cult classic film
Alice's Restaurant with r Low Guthrie. This led to a
brief career as an assistant director in New York City
film and then his first hash trip opportunity arises in
nineteen sixty eight. The cameraman tells my dad about a
(38:51):
guy interested in trading a Lotus E Lawn, which is
a fancy sports car, for two pounds of Lebanese hash.
So my Dad goes to the hash guy tells him
the Lotus guy, I will trade three pounds of hash
for the car. The hashguy psyched, He agrees, and my
(39:12):
Dad clears one pound of hash for profit. It's a
winter snowstorm and my dad and his VW Bug is
smoking hash and driving the two pounds of hash to
the Lotus guy. When the pipe falls in my dad's lap.
In the skirmish to put out the burning embers, my
dad fears off the road into a snow bank, and
(39:37):
the state police appear. My dad is quietly freaking out.
His VW Bug, stashed with two pounds of hash, is
stuck in the snow bank in a blizzard. My dad
is totally stoned. His crutch is burning. Not an ideal
situation for a drug smuggling draftable, young, dark, olive colored man. Luckily,
(39:59):
the police want to get out of the snowstorm as
fast as possible, and incredibly, my dad for his VW
from the snow bank and unaware of the illegal drugs,
send him on his merry away. This is just the
start of my dad's good luck in the smuggling industry.
So this is your first big deal? How do I
(40:21):
make you feel? Are you kidding? It was so great?
It was really exciting, and we had a pile of
money again, and you know, and it was cool, you know,
and fuck, you know, I'm selling candles for three dollars
a candle or whatever. The fuck. I'm living like a pauper,
you know. And then here I was, you know, I'm
back to back to being cool again and free. I mean,
(40:46):
money is freedom. In nineteen seventy, my dad decides to
head out west, where the action is. After dropping off
five hitchhikers on Berkeley's University Avenue, my dad heads to
Marin County, where he crashes on the porch of some
grateful dead roadies for a couple of weeks. Then he
had a buddy decided to go on a road trip
to Big Sir to get some redwood burl slabs. That
(41:08):
buddy was my mom's brother. My dad, ever an art
enthusiast visionary, wants to make redwood tables to sell to
the high end New York City store Hammocker Schlemmer, apparently
the fanciest store in New York. In Big Sir, my
dad exchanges some nicky Sunshine acid for eight burl slabs. Anyway,
I can't say the most hippy thing. You're treating acid
(41:30):
for a VW bus redwood slab? Right, well, that is hilarious.
The redwood burl guy named Crazy Richard gives my dad
some of his own acid, and my dad trips his
balls off, as he says, So I started getting really high,
and it was great. I mean it was not uptight.
(41:51):
I wasn't It wasn't physical. It was strictly phenomenally hallucinatory
and not uptight, not not stressful, not speedy, not any
of that stuff, but just so high all you could
do is watch and there you are. You could understand
people talking, but you were so high you couldn't speak.
(42:13):
Instead of leaving my dad at SF's General Yar, my
uncle chooses to leave the New York Filmmaker as my
dad is reputed to be at his sister's house to recover.
My mom has a history of helping people come down
from bad trips throughout the sixties and seventies. Brother says, hey,
he can you take care of him or something? Do
you remember any of that here you take care of
(42:36):
and would you say okay, yeah, but you must have
said something earlier about how how oh the filmmaker's pretty
cute or something? Did you think the filmmaker was cute?
You made? I must have, you must have. My mom
says he was catatonic for two months. My dad says
(42:59):
two days. You didn't have to help him go to
the bathrooms. No, nothing like that. I just couldn't. I
could and speak. And for how long? No? No, no, no, no,
he just remember how long it was out? How long?
Long term? She like, a couple of weeks or a
couple of months. Yeah, those are two different things. Regardless.
(43:22):
My dad was psychedelically plopped at my mom's Fisherman's cottage,
where she lived with her one year old my big sister, Vertica.
My dad never left, and since he had a family,
(43:44):
my dad needed to make money. On one hand, his friend,
an Academy Award winning director, invited my dad to La
to work with him. And on the other hand, he
was enchanted by my mom, his family, and the inner
circle of West Coast psychedelic pioneers and rock and roll.
He could move his hippie family from the rock and
roll counterculture country living county the hustle and bustle of Hollywood,
(44:08):
or he could stay in Moran and make big money
being his own boss film or rock and roll outlaw.
It's Sophie's choice for dudes in their twenties, right, So
my dad chose smuggling, and my adrenaline loving parents began
a dangerous double life of extremeize and lows, truly living
in a house of cards that could fall apart at
(44:30):
any moment. And I was in that house of cards
playing pretend. Little did I know my parents were also
playing pretend. Theirs was a far more dangerous game though.
In the next episode, my Dad's first big trip, his
(44:51):
first big deal. It involves seven hundred pounds of Colombian pot,
police blackmail, and the Redwood City Jail. We'll dive into
that next, plus some esclin a nutcracker in the outregeous
history of reefer Madness. I'm Rainbow Valentine and this is
disorganized Crime Disorganized Crime. Smuggler's Daughter is written and recorded
(45:13):
by Me Rainbow Valentine. Our producers are Gabby Watts and
Taylor Church. Executive producers are Brandon Barr, Brian Lavin, Elsie
Crowley and Me at School of Humans and Connel Burn
and Charles Bryant at iHeartRadio. Our music is by Gabby,
Lala and Claire Campbell, with original theme by Mark Karen
and Me. You can find us online at iHeart dot
(45:35):
com slash Podcasts