Dennis McNally

Long time publicist for the Grateful Dead Dennis McNally has a new book "The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties." We talk about San Francisco, the Dead and more!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Websett's Podcast. My
guest today is Dennis McNally, who has a new book,
The Last Great Dream, How Bohemians became Hippies and created
the Sixties. Dennis, why this book?

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Why now?

Speaker 3 (00:28):
I find myself, you know, in my age as apparently
the self appointed historian of the counterculture in America since
World War Two. I did books on Kerouac and The
Grateful Dead and the sort of the deeper background of
it all, and then I sort of paused, and in

(00:49):
twenty sixteen I was invited to curate a photo show
about the Summer of Love for the California Historical Society.
Every museum in the Bay Area was going wild over,
you know, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love.
So I started on that. I started with the beats
and sort of started poking around. It was it was

(01:11):
it was a treasure hunt, really, and it was great fun.
And after a few months I went, this is a book.
This is the origins of the sixties, of what we
think of as the sixties, which is in considerable part
starts starts in the Haye Ashbury. Although it has kindred
spirits in many places, specifically la New York and London,

(01:37):
which is what I studied.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Okay, some of the similar vintages you but many people
were not alive at the sixties. What do people not
get about how the sixties really were?

Speaker 3 (01:53):
The media, you know, there's a fascinating article by a
guy named Hendrik Hertzberg, who would turn out to be
the writer for The New Yorker and a very distinguished guy,
and he probably he was a beat reporter for Newsweek
in the late sixties, and he the went to the
Haye Ashbury quite early, and for whatever reason, it's a

(02:18):
brilliant article. And if news We could actually run it
instead of what they ended up doing, because of course
different people write, and he was just a traveling reporter,
they would have had the best thing ever written about
the hate. Because what happened was the media after the
BN which exploded the whole story with an enormous turnout

(02:41):
in Golden Gate Park in January of sixty seven. The
media descended on the hate, and unfortunately, these are people
who basically couldn't see past what they saw, which was flowers,
unusual people, stoned people, and they couldn't see the basically
spiritual and anti material aspects of that culture and how

(03:08):
it had all sort of ended up in the music.
And all they knew was these people were weird and
they didn't understand them, and that's the way they wrote
about them. And that's really lasted many years. I teach
a high occasionally go and lecture high school class that
focuses on the sixties. And the point I keep trying

(03:30):
to make to these students, because they're fascinated with the sixties.
Now a few of them, you know, have hippie parents
or just you know, some fascination with like the music
little you know, young deadheads for instance. But what I
keep trying to emphasize with them is, in my opinion

(03:52):
that the reason they're interested in the sixties is that
it's never gone away the issues that were raised, whether
it's organic food or Asian studies or sexual you know,
the whole idea of the gentle male hippie, which evolved
into gay liberal into a welcoming gays to San Francisco

(04:12):
in the seventies. And you know, now with the issue
is trans people, what we have actually is, you know,
an exact reversal of those values with the values of
the president administration, which you have to remember. One of
the side effects of the Hayde Ashbury and the free

(04:33):
speech movement and the Wats rebellion was the election of
Ronald Reagan as governor in nineteen sixty six and then
president in nineteen eighty. And from Reagan to Trump is
you know, pretty much a direct line of resistance to
the sixties. That's really, you know, to some extent, what
it's about.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
Okay, what was in the water in California? Why did
this started in California?

Speaker 3 (05:04):
San Francisco is the only city in America. New Orleans
is slightly different for the reason that it was a
colonial city and it's just different. But San Francisco is
the only cities evolved as economic institutions. You know, people
come together and they do business. But San Francisco as

(05:28):
a city was created by frankly, slightly crazy people who
were not fitting in with their world on the East Coast,
or in Chile or in China, and they came to
San Francisco on a gamble and they were gambling on gold,
of course, and it left this ethos that even though

(05:52):
you know, it became a city and it had a
conventional political structure and churches and normal you know, superficial
normal things. But it left a heritage of tolerance for
craziness that is unique in American in American cities, the

(06:12):
example being a man named Emperor Norton. Norton had been, uh,
went crazy basically after he went busted in the stock market,
and he dubbed himself Emperor Norton and then proceeded to
print up Emperor Norton banknotes. Now, you know, every city

(06:34):
has its crazies, and and you know there's no great
surprise in that. But what is different about San Francisco
was that the bartenders and the restaurant people in San
Francisco accepted these clearly not real dollars and fed him
out of admiration for his craziness. That's the only way
I can explain it. And and that's just something that's

(06:58):
always been a little part of San Francis.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
When did Emperor Norton live.

Speaker 3 (07:03):
In the eighteen sixties and seventies.

Speaker 2 (07:05):
Okay, eighteen sixties, seventies, the beginning of the century, there's
an earthquake. You're saying that this ethos pre dates all
of this, It really starts around the time of the
gold Rush.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
Absolutely, it's just you know, there's a quote in my
book from Robert Duncan, one of the poets I studied,
that talks about San Francisco is the Western edge of dreams.
You know, it's you start talking about geography, and it
gets a little mystical, and some people get very nervous.

(07:40):
But the fact is that San Francisco, you know, so
called Western civilization, which were theoretically least part of starts
in generally around Europe, Europe and the Middle East, and
proceeds west, and it gets across America, and it gets

(08:02):
to the Pacific, and it, you know, stops in the sense,
and San Francisco was the edge, and in fact, from
the beginning looked west to Asia just as almost just
as much as it did back east to you know,
Boston and New York and the centers of American so

(08:25):
called civilization.

Speaker 2 (08:27):
Okay, you talked about the roots being in San Francisco,
Los Angeles, in New York. Let's stay in California for
a second. What was going on in Los Angeles?

Speaker 3 (08:38):
Los Angeless is somewhat different from San Francisco. As I say,
the tolerance for crazy, well, it came out different, and
Los Angeles unusually did not have this big tradition. I
mean it was founded by Roman Catholic priests, of course,
and then around the turn of the century and heading

(08:59):
toward the era when Hollywood sort of brought many people
to Los Angeles, it did not have that tradition. But
what it did have, and I don't particularly have an
explanation for it, is an openness to unusual religions, so
that theosophy prospered there. They brought in I've just gone

(09:23):
blank on his name. Do to Christian Murdy, who they
decided was the new Jesus. He said, nah, I'm just
a teacher. But stayed in Los Angeles and they're all kinds,
you know, esoteric occult astrology. Joseph Campbell, the great historian

(09:44):
of art, came to San Francisco, I mean Los Angeles
in the thirties and was bemoaning the fact that everybody
in Los Angeles seemed to be into astrology, which he
regarded with some reserve, shall we say. And you know,
so there was this this receptiveness and then what happened eventually, Uh,

(10:08):
and the most interesting for me, other than for instance,
the the the music world, which Los Angeles contributed John
Cage to the world. And uh, but the the main
line of cultural transference was in art. Los Angeles immediately

(10:30):
immediately became in a narrow way. I mean, it wasn't
like it was in the Los Angeles times. But the
fact is that that modern art, uh and abstract expressionism
and then later pop art, you know, it just came
straight out of Los Angeles. Andie Warhol's first show was
in Los Angeles, and there was a receptiveness to to

(10:54):
experimental art that Los Angeles, Uh, you know gave really
gave the United States.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
Now you talk about third point of the triangle in
New York. How does New York figure into your sixties thesis?

Speaker 3 (11:07):
Well, yeah, New York was the capital of freethinking in America,
at least since Walt Whitman, you know, held court at Fafts,
which was this bar in the Bowery, which is to say,
just on the edge of Greenwich Village. And for whatever reason,

(11:29):
Greenwich Village became the home of freethinking from really the beginning,
in particular the beginning of the twentieth century and through
what they call it the introduction of modernism in American
art and literature, and there was the Masses and Robert
Eastman and all kinds of things. Mabel Dodge Lewin was

(11:52):
doing peyote in the village in nineteen teens before she
and d Lawrence moved out to uh to Santa Fe
or Taos, I should say, and you know, there's there's
always been this, you know, froth the the hippie specific

(12:14):
hippie thing was tricked to me. The the catalyst, the
trigger of it was LSD.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
But before before, before you get there, okay, so we
have the landscape, the ground is tilled with all of
this craziness, insight, astrology, different thinking. When does it start
to Germany? You know, you talk about Norton in the
eighteen sixties. When did these things start to flower? Is

(12:43):
it all as we say, post war, post World War two?
Is it before that? When does it start to coalesce?
We not coalesced. When did it start to germinate?

Speaker 3 (12:56):
Well, that's a very good question. I would say it
started to germinate again in the introduction of the modern
to an openness, to a culture that was not explicitly
Christian for instance, that was you know that anticipated a
certain looseness and freedom that runs into the rest of

(13:22):
the twentieth century. By the you know, one of the elements,
for instance, in an important element ethical element in the
scene of Greenwich Village was Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers,
and that started in the thirties, for instance, again as
a conscious communal attempt. She had started out as a

(13:44):
left wing socialist and then decided that it just it
lacked soul. She adopted Catholicism, but was concerned that the
Church did not have enough social concerns for you know,
the the less privileged, and created the Catholic Workers, which
had a real impact in the Greenish village, particularly in

(14:09):
their pacifism. But yet so it germinates in various strands.
Before World War Two, but you have this devastating depression
which you know, people generally speaking it was more important
to survive than to try and create something new in

(14:29):
many ways during the thirties. Then you have this complete
unified effort during World War two in which everyone whether
it was women going to you know, work in factories
or boy scouts collecting newspapers for you know, recycling dribes.

(14:50):
Everyone was rationed sugar and meat and tires and whatnot.
So you have this unified effort against fascism. And then
what happens is we get to the end of World
War Two and we should be you know cha la lah,
a happy day, except that we're immediately in a Cold War.

(15:11):
And the problem with the Cold War is that a
lot of Americans said, wait a minute, you know, we
fought this war. We deserve you know, we deserve a win.
What is this with, you know, continuing yet another war.
And the problem is that rather than accept that, hey,

(15:34):
eighteen million Soviet people died in that war, you know,
they have their reasons for doing what they're doing. There
was a large trend towards blaming internal flaws in the
American resistance, which is to say, the Roosevelt administration, and

(15:55):
they called it communism. They say, oh, there must be communists,
there must be a We all know now that sometimes
people will grab a conspiracy theory as a more satisfying
answer to why things are the way they are, rather
than saying, well, the objective forces of history look at this.

(16:15):
Of course they're you know, going to resist the Soviets.
So anyway, you end up with what we call McCarthyism.
Except it was a great deal more than than Joe McCarthy,
and uh so there's this incredible repression and and uh,

(16:35):
you know, intolerance of any deviating viewpoint, in particular sexual.
I mean, a great deal of the of the the
government attacks on on, you know, so called investigating so
called disloyal people ended up being about gay people and
about anybody. That nudism was considered subversive. And it literally

(17:01):
it's in the law that Eisenhower passed or his executive order.
So and then on top of all that, you have
this incredible burst again after the depression of prosperity during
the fifties, and everybody's you know, gobbling up their prosperity,
and you know, you can't blame them, but the price

(17:23):
of that prosperity was silence. You know, don't don't push it,
don't challenge things. I was interviewing Michael McClure, the beat poet,
and I said, you know, why did on the Road howl?
But howl in a more rarefied way, because it's one
hundred and fifty people heard it. First. On the Road

(17:46):
was this best seller, and you know, a whole raft
of people, starting with Janis Joplin, David Bowie, Bob Dylan
and Jerry Garcia just as examples of sixties. We people
we associate with sixties read Kerouac and went, yes, this
is a world I want to be part of. And

(18:07):
it was basically about spiritual freedom, about looseness, about exploring
rather than conforming. And it had this incredible impact. So
I interviewed Michael mclaur and I said, why did this
book have such a powerful influence. I read it and
I like it and it's important to me. But and

(18:27):
he just looked at me. I was young, and he
looked at me and he said, Dennis, did you live
in the fifties? And I said, well, you know, I
was ten when they ended, so I kind of sort
of but not. And he went, well, if you had,
you'd understand why. It just it was radical, and you know,

(18:50):
it was denounced by the right, and it had the
extraordinary good fortune of having its first great review, its
first review, you it's important review done not by the
main critic of the New York Times, a guy named
Orville Prescott, nicknamed Prissy, who would have lunched it, and

(19:12):
instead by a young editor who was very interested in
this stuff named Gilbert milsted it's one of the discovering
him was one of the the uh the great successes
of my research on Kerouac, because nobody had talked to
him before, and that was you know that he was
open to it, and he wrote a review that that

(19:32):
said that On the Road was the fifties version of
The Sun Also Rises, and you know it's never stopped
since God only knows how many copies it'd sold.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Okay, in your book, you talk about the poets Kenneth
rex Roth, Lawrence Ferlingetti. How does that end up in
San France, Cisco, and how does that Germany?

Speaker 3 (20:03):
If you decide that you're going to be a poet
and you're not at an academic institution, you right away
put yourself outside normal culture because you're not going to
make any money and you're going to have to, you know,
find a way to preserve your voice. Rex Roth, I

(20:24):
start the book, you know, when I was doing that
photo curation, I had started with the obvious, which was
how and which was in nineteen fifty five. But how
and Allen Ginsberg, who was of course an import from
New York, along with Grolengetty, all came into San Francisco

(20:46):
in the mid fifties that had already had a really
thriving poetry scene. It was sort of led because he
literally had he had salons classes in two things, poetry
and anarchism, various flavors of anarchism, and anarchism not as
throwing rocks or bombs or whatever, but anarchism as in

(21:08):
freedom of thought. And that, you know, that's rex Roft's
fundamental connection. So when I went to start the book
as a book, I decided that the connection of rex
Roth and Robert Duncan, who was raised by theosophists and
occultists and various you know, mystic, very mystical family, he

(21:33):
brought in again an openness to shall we say, the mysterious,
and together they generated a scene that quickly included Philip Lamontilla.
It was very interesting pairing because of course Duncan was
very gay, to the extent that he had literally outed

(21:54):
himself in nineteen forty four, which is remarkable, ended up,
which resulted in him being basically completely ignored by the
Eastern literary establishment for the rest of his life. That
that's just simply seemed seemed to revolt people on the
East Coast. It didn't bother anybody in San Francisco. Interestingly,

(22:19):
Rexcroft was you know, occasionally periodically homophobic, and somehow it
didn't matter to him at any rate. They together, they
sort of stirred up this interest in in poetry that
led to you know, many other poets, James Brown and

(22:41):
Helen Adam and all kinds of people, and there was
this very active poetry scene and it was all about poetry,
to oversimplify, but poetry that came from the heart, that
was that was individual, individually focused. At that point, the
the new critics that dominated American poetry, mostly from the

(23:06):
East Coast, basically prized uh, precision, irony, distance, lack of emotion,
all the kinds of things that San Franciscans, the San
Francisco poets said now and among other things, it was
in San Francisco was poetry made to be read out

(23:27):
loud and performed, and they, you know, poetry readings became
a standard feature of San Francisco poetry. That message or
that you know, that that that practice that the poets developed, spread,
among other things, to the students at what was then

(23:49):
called the California School of Fine Arts and later the
San Francisco Art Institute and students there in particular, started
as the fifties went along, spreading that message in their
own lives. The classic example of that is a guy

(24:09):
named Wally Hedrick. Wally Hedrick was a student at CSFA
and then eventually taught there and became a very distinguished
assemblage what they called funk Art that was, you know,
associated was the beat painting or in his case, metalwork

(24:30):
version of poetry in nineteen fifty eight. To skip ahead,
but really, in some ways the crux of my whole book,
you know, you can talk about it is he's teaching.
Wally is teaching at the Institute what was going to

(24:53):
become the Institute Saturday class to high school students, and
one of his students was a young man named Jerry Garcia.
And one of the things that Wally did in his
classes was play acoustic blues like Big Bill Brunsi and such,
which resulted in Jerry Garcia. When he got an accordion

(25:13):
for his birthday that year, Piston moaned and cried and
told his mother, no, no, no, it has to be a guitar,
and you know it, and there he went for the
rest of his life. But at the same time, he
and his buddies said, because remember this is nineteen fifty eight,
this is you know, current bestseller, front page news and

(25:37):
top of the bestseller list. He said, what is this
beat thing? You know we keep reading about it. And
Wally replied, you're a beat. Go down a City Lights,
get this book and you know, on the road and
you know you'll see. And he did, and it was
his bible for the really for the rest of his life.
His role model, carok was his role model. Which is

(26:00):
why thirty years later or twenty years later, whenever it
was that I popped up, I sent him a copy
of my biography of Kdillac and he eventually turned to
me and said, why don't you do us? And I said,
good idea. And that led me into the next stage.
I had already sort of been adet head, and that

(26:21):
led me to this next stage after the Beats, which
was hippies and the Grateful Dead.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
Okay, you mentioned City Lights, which opens in nineteen fifty
three in Los Angeles. There are issues with the government
and there are riots downtown. If you were not downtown
and there wasn't a newspaper, you would have no idea
this was happening. When City lights opened to what did

(26:49):
we was the general population aware of this? And was
Jerry Garcia just lucky he was in the right place
at the right time taking this class or was this
in the water such that other people were flowering at
the same time.

Speaker 3 (27:07):
It was kind of in the water, but it was
also you know, luck, but not just look, Jerry Garcia
was consciously sort of skeptical of the conventional culture and
as a paint again, as a paint if you identify
yourself as an artist, poet or artist paint or whatever,
you automatic you automatically, you know, challenge conventional norms. I mean,

(27:31):
you know, you're you're you're looking for a different path.
And he he Uh so it wasn't just luck that
he popped up in that in that classroom. Uh, but uh,
it was important, of course that that Fri Lnghetti who
took over city lights from a guy named Peter Martin

(27:53):
and made it what it was that you know, he
he got he was a trained poet. I mean he
had gone to he had gotten his doctorate at the
Sorbonne after World War Two on the GI Bill, and uh,
he gets he wants to live in a city that
that has some soul. That's that's what he said. And

(28:14):
he took it through the train to San Francisco and
immediately went Yes, he said, he found again a poetry
culture that was what he said, provincial but liberating. And
he created a clubhouse, you know, a social gathering like
the Beats or or you know, any hippies later needs

(28:38):
physical institutions to get, you know, to gather around. And
for for the Beats, it was city lights and then
a bar called The Place on Grant Avenue, and things flowered,
people connected, and you know, how people find these directions

(28:58):
these paths is one of those eternal questions that you
have to ask each individual. And unfortunately nobody was going
around saying, so why are you here in those days.
It's a pity. Speaking as a historian, I would have
loved to have come across that research.

Speaker 2 (29:20):
But okay, you mentioned, let's get back to LSD. How
does LSD start and permeate the culture and why in
San Francisco.

Speaker 3 (29:33):
The first introduction in any significant way into American culture
of psychedelics, and it was originally psilocybin, and which is
a derivative from peyote, but you know, so organic in
that sense, versus LSD, which is sort of you know,

(29:53):
laboratory created was of course from la and that was
Aldos Huxley's The Doors of Perception. Aldus Huxley had left
England fleeing World War two and come to Los Angeles
for two reasons. One was that openness to alternative religion,
which he was quite aware of, and he studied with

(30:16):
Vedanta and a lot of stuff like that, and also
the weather. Frankly, you know, it's a pleasant change from
from London. And eventually but he was, you know, again
an omnivorous seeker. And he read an article by a
guy named Humphrey Osmond who was doing very sane, sober

(30:39):
research on the effect of psychedelics and alcoholism in edmund
Don't ask me why, but Edmonton, Canada, and he wrote
an article. Huxley read it and said, you know, at
that time they largely called psychedelics, and in particular when
they got to LSD, uh psychoto neumenic which means imitating schizophrenia,

(31:06):
that they thought it duplicated when people tripping were duplicating schizophrenia.
And Osmond said, no, no, no, you know that that's
probably not fair. How about psychedelic and he created the
term psychedelic, which means mind manifesting. You know, whatever's there
is gonna, you know, be shown to you in the

(31:27):
course of your your experience. And Ousley said, I mean,
Huxley said, bring it. And OsmAnd came to Los Angeles
for a conference and brought some mescaline with him, which
is psilocybin, and he took it, and being Huxley immediately

(31:50):
wrote a small book about it called The Doors of Perception,
which is really the first sort of message and to
anybody he's sort of exploring these sorts of issues in
America that there's this thing. Now. During the fifties, the
use of CIA was largely controlled by the CIA. They

(32:14):
had a program and this is not conspiracy theory, you know,
it's it's it's well documented history. They had thought that
it might be a really good truth stroke, which turned
out not to be. So, you know, you it revealed
all you could never figure out what, you know, what

(32:36):
was literal and what was you know, imaginary. But they
there were experimenters, and they used to a combinate a
network of psychologists and various strange people, a lot of
strange people that grafted themselves onto the psychedelic earliest psychedelic.

(32:59):
There was a guy named Captain L. Hubbard, who, among
other things, turned on some you know, was was involved
with introducing LSD to Henry Luce. Okay, Henry Luce was
the owner of Time magazine, a very you know, big deal,
and he and his wife they lost their daughter and
in her sorrow missus Luce Claire Claire Booth Loose reached

(33:23):
out to various people, including one of Huxley's friends, Gerald Hurd,
and tried psychedelics so, you know, many times as grief
therapy basically, and I think it worked for Loose did
it once? It ended up meaning that psychedelics was covered
for a long time rather favorably by Time and Life.
There were very positive articles about including one great article

(33:46):
about Carry Grant addressing his alcoholism with with psychedelics. So
you know, this is one of the again one of
the weird threads that that that introduced it to people.
The reason it had and in particular in a big
time way in the San Francisco area, was the work

(34:08):
of a fellow named Owsley Stanley. Owsley Stanley was a
It was a fascinating character, brilliant and also in my opinion,
probably on the autism spectrum, because his relationships with people
were always fraught. But but he got interested and ended

(34:35):
up making five million hits of LSD, very strong hits
on my Dad, so that the scene, the San Francisco,
you know, summer Lolove scene, so called the hippie scene,
had fuel. In other words, there were people. There are
a lot of people, you know, through the fifties, artists

(34:57):
of all stripes, theater and ants and whatnot, but in
particular in the Bay Area, but elsewhere, and they all
are experimenting and they get to LSD and whatever else
you say about LSD, and you can say a lot
people have. The fact is that if you've taken LSD,

(35:21):
you realize, to quote Jerry Garcia, that it reveals that
there's a lot more going on in life in reality.
Then you've been taught that it has many layers and
many possibilities, and it's all much more interesting. It can
be frightening, it can be whatever. But there's more there

(35:44):
than just being told, well, you know, live your life,
you're gonna die, you know, make babies and be normal
quote unquote. And LSD was a key to exploration.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
Let's just stay with Jerry Garcia for Mario so called
Captain Tripps. He starts with LSD, but has his life ensues.
He ends up being hooked on Heroin. Where is the connection,
if any, between LSD and on that journey for Jerry.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
Garcia, well, psychedelics, whether it was pot which is a
very mild psychedelic and LSD opened him up to, you know,
many things, including opening his his playing, which was based
on improvisation, into you know, an entire musical world. His

(36:46):
problem and was that, unfortunately, among other things, he became
deified to the point where, uh, when you're stuck in
your hotel room for an entire tour because you literally
can't take a walk, you can't you can't go to

(37:07):
the museum. You know, you're in New York and you
can't go to the Museum of Modern Art because you're
gonna get blombed on eventually, and lots of other stuff.
I could go, you know, great length, but unresolved issues
from his childhood ended up fighting depression, which which he

(37:30):
would never acknowledge and which people never saw because he
was an unusual guy in that even depressed, he was
endlessly curious about the outside world. He would talk with
strangers and people that you would ordinarily go you know eh,
or interviews, which is why people love to interview, because

(37:52):
he did not do merchandising. He wanted to have a conversation,
which frankly, you know people from Rolling Stone would go, wow,
he just wants to talk. I once, as the grateful
that's publicist. I once started. I begged him to promote
a side issue something he'd done with David Grisman. I

(38:15):
think to this interview he was doing with Rolling Stone,
and you know, there's one paragraph on half a paragraph
and there's this long passage about Jerry's daughter then daughter,
three year old daughter, and I was about ready to
just read the Riot Act to the editor who had
done the interview, and he said, listen. I tried, and

(38:35):
I realized he was telling the truth. I tried to
ask him about the music. He just wanted to talk
about his fascination with you know, what was going on
in his daughter's mind as he was growing up. Well,
that's that's Jerry. But unfortunately, as I say, unacknowledged depression.

(38:56):
He's self medicated and that you know, he he was
anti authoritarian, so he wouldn't go to a doctor. So
he chose something.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
Okay, Jerry is obviously not here, but inside relevant of
what he verbalized, he was testifying about the powers of LSD.
Was he convincing themselves there were other powers of insight
in the other drugs he ultimately gravitated to. Or would
he admit really, at his core this was self medication?

Speaker 3 (39:30):
Oh? I think you know? He yes, he would admit it.
A friend of his, John McIntyre, had been with the
band and that had gone away and had come back
and saw Jerry, I want to say, in the early
middle eighties, at which time he was already pretty well addicted,

(39:53):
and John said how are you? And Jerry said, well,
mostly I'm just becoming a junkie. He knew what was
going on, he he you know, he uh, he could
acknowledge it. But you know, he once said that it

(40:14):
wasn't that he could be ornery about things like his
personal space. You know, people tried to, oh, Jerry, you're
hurting yourself, and you know this is more than once.
Many deadheads come up to me or you know, anybody
associated with the band and said, why didn't you save him?
And my response is, have you ever you know, known

(40:34):
someone deeply addicted, and you know, until they're ready to
confront this, it ain't gonna work. And it didn't.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
Okay, let's go back to LSD. You know, LSD is
not illegal till a certain point in the sixties. Honestly,
stan Lee makes his doses. Is this a small qude
of people, or is when does LSD start to spread?
You know, the country at large was a number of

(41:08):
years behind San Francisco, but certainly from sixty to sixty
four to sixty five, the rest of the country was oblivious.
It was almost to hangover the fifties. What was going
on in San Francisco.

Speaker 3 (41:25):
Well, there was, certainly there was a community. There's a
community of seekers, of people that were comfortable. There was
a place called the Tape Music Center, which opened its
main thing in nineteen sixty three. Now what made it
interesting This was electronic composers a guy named Mortzebotnik, Pauline
Oliverro's and Ramon Sender. And they're producing music that is

(41:49):
not popular, I mean in the capital pre popular sense.
It's you know, bleeps and blurbs and very you know,
very limited market. It had a much greater influence than
it had any business doing because among other things. When
they opened, they had this building. They rented this building
and very near the Hate. It was part of the

(42:11):
transition from of Bohemia or whatever you want to call it,
from North Beach to the Hate. But they included in
their building KPFA, which was sort of a voice of
cultural descent in the Bay Area, very unusual in America
when it started in the fifties and through the sixties,

(42:35):
and the Anhelprint Dance Workshop, which was again a very
revolutionary new approach to dance, very very much in line
with what else was going on, but for dance. And
they started spinning off all these cultural fusions where you'd
have events which combine art and dance and theater and

(43:00):
music and whatnot. And one of these, for instance, took
place one of the spinoffs at one of the aligned
groups was called the Mime Troop, and the Mime Troop
had a setup at a church on Cap Street in
the Mission District of San Francisco, and they did this
benefit for a guy who got arrested for pot and

(43:23):
it combined all those things. One of the musicians was
a young man, an unknown named Phil Lesh and as
he later wrote, he didn't really know you know why
he was I mean, he was there because it was fun,
but he didn't exactly know what they were doing, whether
they were just trying to you know, apati that has

(43:45):
smacked the bourgeois or what. He just knew that it
was incredible fun and that it led into improvisation, which
two years later he leaving the musical familiar that he
had been in, which was either big banjazz or neo
classical modernist stuff, and started playing improvisational music with Jerry Garcia.

(44:14):
But you know, that stuff just sort of flowers in
the early sixties, and these are the kind of people that,
when said you should try this, it's amazing experience, they did.
The thing about the Hayde Ashbury was that it took
what were the anti mainstream opinions of the artists, the

(44:40):
avant garde artists of the fifties, and combined it with
the music. And what had also happened in parallel was
the folk scene, which is overtly political and had always
been again associated with what had started out as the
IWW and was now would he Guthrie and through the

(45:01):
fifties as they gently left wing mode and all these
folkies here are the Beatles yet another major influence, and
start and go, No, this rock and roll thing sounds
like fun. And they started playing rock and roll in
in particular in San Francisco and for instance in La

(45:24):
with the Birds, and in folk rock in New York
City with the Love and Spoonful and so forth. And
the end result is and then they encounter LSD by
and large in just about that order, and they start
creating an improvisational not always improvisational. The Jefferson Airplane, which

(45:49):
was by far the more influential of the bands at
that point. Then you certainly more than the Grateful Dead
used only you know, certain elements of improvisation, and they
were actually much more well for starters. They could sing,
unlike the Dead in the early days. And the end
result was you have this this fusion of message and mode,

(46:14):
namely psychedelic rock, and it all comes together in San
in particular the Birds triggered you know, mirrored it or
started it really in some ways in at Zero's where
again they combined dancing LSD some LCA. I don't know
how much. It is very clear. There's a great article

(46:37):
in the Free Press which was, by the way, the
first way that people in La had to sort of
connect with each other in that you know, Milliere, but
this guy and right now I'm going blank on his name,
but the guy who wrote the article, it clearly clearly
had done LSD. And I suspect some of the people

(46:59):
in the audience at Zero's had because again, you know,
nobody was concealing anything in in San Francisco, and everybody
in San Francisco knows somebody in Los Angeles, so there
was there was already a flow, and the end result
is the so called Summer of love.

Speaker 2 (47:19):
Wait, wait, before we get to the Summer of a
hold on a second. Yeah, you have the mind true benefit. Okay,
obviously if you're hipped to that world, you know about it. Really,
by the seventies, every city has a local free rag
where it has all the listings. If I'm living in
San Francisco in the early sixties, am I aware? They say?

Speaker 3 (47:42):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Yeah, I mean there's a San Francisco My troop not interested,
but I know it's there, or is it? Nineteen sixty
six sixty seven? Also, this was happening right under my nose.
I had no idea.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
No, the mind troop had, you know, the benefit for
the Mine Troop, which was in November of sixty five
for starters, they had been arrested for performing without a
license in the parks. They had gotten their permits. They

(48:18):
had permits for forty nine shows all over the city.
And then one of the one of the supervisors, not supervisors,
but the members of the Park and Rec Commission said no, no, no,
they're vulgar. We can't allow this. After what he saw
the first performance. Then they went no, we're canceling. Well,
this is called freedom of speech, and in fact that's

(48:41):
what the judge decided not terribly long thereafter. So they
went to the park, didn't set up a stage because
that would have violated their lack of permit. But Ronnie Davis,
the leader of the Mine Troope, said, you know, in
the usual introduction, ladies and gentlemen and the Mime Troop
of San Francisco presents of us, and they really immediately

(49:05):
just for talking, they busted it. So it's in the paper,
so you know, if you're if you're you know, again,
it's sort of in the air in San Francisco who
they are. But the San Francisco scene in a way,
for instance, the Los Angeles to the best of my knowledge,
didn't have other than the Freak, which you know is

(49:27):
a very important connector. But in San Francisco it was
in the daily paper because the San Francisco Chronicle had
two people that covered the emerging counterculture from the fifties,
namely a guy named Tom Albright, who was the art
critic and very sympathetic to Wally Hedrick and all the rest,

(49:48):
and a very important guy named Ralph Gleeson. Ralph Gleeson
had been was a jazz started out as a jazz critic.
He was the first daily first jazz critic, regular jazz
critic at a daily American newspapers. I have read. I
assume it's correct, but he's open to all kinds of music.

(50:09):
So in the fall of nineteen sixty five, these four
people who call themselves the Family Dog went to meet
with him and told him that they were going to
put on some shows and that the reason to that
point rock and roll had been produced at the Cow Palace,

(50:31):
and there were the sort of standard rock and roll
shows of the era where you had ten bands that
each played five songs, and you couldn't dance. You're getting arrested.
People were getting arrested if they danced, and as Luria Castell,
the kind of the leader of the dog said, you
know the only problem is that they can't dance. We're

(50:51):
going to have a show where everybody can dance. You know,
there's not going to be any problems, which was quite correct.
And they started shows in as I say, in the fall,
and Gleeson was all over it. So it didn't you know,
you didn't have to be hip. You didn't have to
be you know. All you had to do is read
the daily paper and read Ralph Gleeson, and he told

(51:15):
you where to including the mind Troop benefit and other
benefits there were three. In fact, he covered it all,
so all you had to do is read the paper.
So it was a lot easier because of Gleeson. Uh,
this kind of information dissemination was much easier than almost
anywhere else.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Okay, let's do some cleanup work. You talk about the
migration from North Beach to the heat.

Speaker 3 (51:49):
Why and when The departure from from North Beach, of course,
was obviously a cause of two things. One was there
was an influx influx of tourists thronging Grand Avenue, and
you know, sometimes dumb young young guys who get you know,
sloshed and looked for trouble. At least one cop who

(52:13):
hated interracial couples and harassed some of the poets who
were in interracial couples, and just in general, rents went
up and it just you know, North Beach sort of
lost its luster. The interesting thing about the Hate was,
first it was it had been a student neighborhood since

(52:37):
the early fifties. San Francisco State University was originally at
the located at the corner of Hate and Laguna, one
end the east end of Hate Street, so it became
you know, people were attending it. They lived in the Hate,
which had been a very elegant neighborhood through the thirties,

(52:59):
but in the third the Depression, it was cut off.
These really magnificent buildings were cut up into apartments, very
pretty expensive apartments. In fifty four, I don't know when
they started there, frankly, maybe the thirties even, but in
fifty four they moved to the current location, which is
out in a residential neighborhood called the Sunset Far Away,

(53:22):
but fortunately a straight streetcar ride to the Hate, so
it stayed a student neighborhood. The other important thing was that,
in their magnificent ignorance, the Dwight Eisenhower created the National
Defense Highway Act and the engineers started building interstate freeways,

(53:46):
which was fine in between say San Francisco and Reno,
but they planned on doing having nine of them criss
crossing San Francisco, dividing the city into little boxes. Fortunately,
the supervisors resisted all but of it, and the last
two were the last. The last one to be rejected

(54:07):
was going to run straight up the Haye Ashbury neighborhood
through Golden Gate Park so that you get to the
Golden Gate Bridge faster. Locals were not having it, and fortunately,
by March of sixty six it was rejected as you know,
not not being useful. The result, however, had been that

(54:29):
property values in the Hatue were like rock bottom, so
it made it a very inexpensive neighborhood. As I say,
uh the uh. The Tape Music Center sort of brought
a lot of adventurous souls into an area with like
literally one block off Hate Street and bit by bit

(54:51):
and there was some other There's a place a coffee
house called the Blue Uni Corn, which again brought but
The fundamental reason was it was cheap. I mean you
can to get you know, some friends and end up
paying twenty or thirty dollars a month a person to
live in the hate and this gives you you know,
most people can scavenge together that much money even then,

(55:15):
and you could live there. And that was the journal,
you know, the nucleus of what became this psychedelic neighborhood.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
Okay, let's go from sixty to sixty five, sixty five,
there's a lot of change before that. Jerry Garcia is
influenced by the yard scene. He is not the only one.
You have Jerry Garcia and a jug band, you have
Dan Hicks. What's going on musically then.

Speaker 3 (55:43):
Well, again, primarily before the Beatles, it was what you
call folk. Jerry had, as I say, heard Big Bill
Brunsey and gotten started studying the blues and just generally
that also he actually played some early early rock and roll,

(56:06):
which again was African American music modified by country music
and creating this new new genre. But various things, as
we all know, happened. You know, little Richard uh got religion,
Chuck Barry, you know, Elvis went into the army, Chuck
Barry got arrested. So the end result was this phenomenon

(56:32):
called folk music, in which which had been sort of
around but not you know, focused on, and a a
sort of sanitized version, namely, the Kingston Trio made a
hit and people got interested and they and people like
Jerry got interested in not just you know, in Kingston Trio,

(56:53):
but in all the varieties of American music, whether it
was Cajun or you know, Elizabeth Cotton or you know,
you name it, and he started studying that and then
eventually he encountered what in some ways was his greatest love,
which was bluegrass music and specifically the bluegrass banjo. And

(57:15):
so he went off in, you know, in this highly
demanding technical Uh there was a very strong folks sing
in Berkeley that was a little more you know, sort
of laid back. You know. Bluegrass is actually is not
a folk music. It's a professional music created by professional musicians,

(57:37):
and it's demanding and it's it's it's challenging to play.
And he was into that. But the Berkeley people, they
created a band called the Crabgrassers to make gentle fun
of bluegrass because they felt it was all too too technical,
too demanding, and to to to seeking virtueos of virtual

(58:00):
rather than the community spirit of folk music. At any rate,
he wasn't the only one. David Freiberg was a part
of a folk duo called David and Michaela and eventually
he fell in with low company like John Chippolina and
they created Quicksilver Messenger Service and on and on, and

(58:22):
Paul Cantner was a folkyu and Marty Ballen spotted him
and said, you look right, you want to join a band.
And you know, Jerry garcia Is, just after he had
started playing electric music with what was then the Warlocks
and would become the Grateful deb ran into his buddy,

(58:43):
another blues guitarist by the name of Jorma Caalcanan, and
Ormas says, you know, it's amazingly I'm in this electric band,
and Jerry said that's funny, so am I And you
know you Ormis was of course the Jefferson Airplane. So
you have this span of musicians, almost all of them
from folk roots. And as I say, then they can

(59:05):
encounter first the Beatles and then in many cases LSD
and things change.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
Okay, talking about the heat. As the sixties continue to
play out, we have the hippies. The image is people
who are essentially living on nothing. They're not violent. You
have Emmic Grogan and the diggers providing food. When does
that lifestyle start and why?

Speaker 3 (59:36):
Well, in some ways it's sort of had always been
a you know, the idea of anti materialism, you know,
started with throw you know, frankly, that's what my third
books about is. You know, the background, the roots. You know,
there's no there's no plan this this stuff. You know,

(59:57):
nobody was saying, ah, we'll start, you know, to some extent,
you know, it just happened. The hay Ashbury was San
Francisco had a certain level of tolerance which made it,
which encouraged it to happen there. It has a connection
to nature that for instance New York, with all due respect,

(01:00:19):
doesn't you know, you just don't feel the world of
nature when you're in Tompkins Square Park and there is
some kind of connection. And I won't go too far
with this, but between appreciation for nature and the psychedelic experience, well,
you know, it's one thing to be on h Street
and you know you're really high and down the end

(01:00:42):
of the block is Golden Gate Park and you know,
you want to go experience nature there it is or
quite close by an accessible marine county and tam and
all this good stuff, unlike New York, which is you
know which sort of you had to fight the fact
that there's eight million people all around you. So you know,

(01:01:06):
it's so at any rate, it coalesces in the hate
just because just because it was it was, it was cheap,
it was it was fun and for the year in
nineteen sixty six at least it worked like a charm.

Speaker 2 (01:01:24):
Okay, So in nineteen sixty six, how many of these
people were just living with cheap rent, working somewhere doing something,
And how many were hippies, which people in that era
might label free loaders or you know, hangers on in
that era, how big an element was.

Speaker 3 (01:01:45):
That well, you know, even hippies had to work occasionally.
The classic example is Danny Rifkin, who was one of
the first managers of The Grateful Dad. He was the
guy who managed, He was the house manager. Sure, here's
an example. He was the house manager at seven to
ten Ashbury Street, which later became the home of The

(01:02:06):
Grateful Dad, and you know, sort of a legendary place.
So he was getting his rent free. He was working
very part time at the post office, and you know,
so if you work, you could work ten hours a
week or you know, at some dull mail sorting job
and spend the rest of the time being happy. So

(01:02:26):
you know that's not to say I mean freeloaders, no,
you know not, I mean people found a way to
live on the margin and have the time. You know.
My personal favorite slogan is time is more important than money,
because you know, time can buy you money, but you know,

(01:02:47):
money can't really buy you time. And the the you know,
and that was certainly Rifkins you know philosophy. Then he
lived modestly and as a result could spend most of
his time doing you know what he chose, and that was,
among other things, to later to become the Dead's manager.

(01:03:11):
An unmanageable bunch, but there you go. It worked for him.
And so the people that were coming to the hay
again were almost all, you know, having an affinity for
living on the outside of the standard world. The neighborhood
became identified as hippie simply because well it started with

(01:03:37):
a lady named Peggy Caserta. Peggy Caserta was I happened
to be a lesbian, was what was then called a
stewardess for Delta Airlines, and then I think she worked
in the you know as anyway, she came to San Francisco,
fell in love with the city, and eventually opened Narsitica.

(01:03:59):
Narsitica was named after one of Sappho who was you know,
sort of the not role model, what's the word, the
icon of lesbian culture, and Asitica was one of her lovers.
And she opened this clothing store in nineteen sixty five.
Actually it was sort of a mod store and it

(01:04:22):
sold mod fashions. Then she took LSD and it became
a psychedelic store. The Grateful Dead model for her not
very good looking models by and large, but you know,
she took what she could get her best. Her best
customer was Marty Ballen, who was probably the most stylish
guy in the hate and he kept her going and she,

(01:04:46):
among other things, helped introduce bell bottom jeans to America
because her all of her male friends were wearing boots
and they needed, you know, none stove pipe jeans to
get them over their boots. The fact. And then shortly

(01:05:08):
thereafter there were a lot of other stores, including the
psychedelic shop, which were these two brothers, Ron and Jay Felon,
who decided, you know, what we need is a store
where you can go learn how to take a good trip,
to prepare yourself, that it's an important activity. And they bought.

(01:05:29):
They sold books, obviously, they sold Huxley, they sold Archie
Shep and you know avant garde jazz, John Coltrane, of
course music and you know all the chachkes that what
we think of as being part of hippie culture, incense

(01:05:51):
and decorations and such. And it happened, and you know,
more stores came.

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
There was Okay, to what degree was there a migration
and what was the motivation prior to nineteen sixty seven,
the BN in the Summer of Love, people like Janis Joplin,
How did they get the memo? And what drove them
to San Francisco.

Speaker 3 (01:06:21):
Janie, There's an easy answer to that, which is she
read about on the road in time. She was already
not your average Port Arthur's person because she had glombed
onto the blues early in her teens. She heard I
think she heard Elvis Costello, Elvis Presley doing Jailhouse Rock. No,

(01:06:42):
not Jailhouse rock Big Mama Thornton's song a Humdog, and
then she went to Big Mama Thornton and she was
hooked on the blues. So that made her a very
unusual person. And she was from this factory town or
oil refinery town in Texas called Port Arthur. And then

(01:07:03):
she read about on the Road in time somehow managed
to get a copy of the book. I don't think
they sold a lot of copies in Port Arthur and
said this is it. I'm a beat Nick. And again
it was her bible. Dan Hicks of Dan you know
Dan Hicks and the Hot Legs said that, you know,

(01:07:25):
I met her as in her first visit to San Francisco,
because it was obviously in on the road to San
Francisco was where it was at. So she headed out
to San Francisco, didn't do very well. She was a
folky by then, but didn't didn't hit as it were,
and but what's his name? Hicks describes meeting her as

(01:07:46):
this big, tough, lesbian beatnick and she, you know, Janie
got around who's clearly by but at any rate, but yeah,
it was on the road that taught her that. And
it was the scene in the fifties, for instance, the

(01:08:10):
one of the essential fountains of alternative culture was a
place called the Black Mountain College, which was actually in
North Carolina, but it was where almost all of the
avant garde artists on the East many of the avant
garde artists and poets of the East Coast, starting with
John Cage and Joseph Alberts and all these people taught

(01:08:32):
and their students heard about San Francisco, That's all I
can say. And they migrated, and one of them was
became the bartender at the place, and another was a
woman who was not really so much part of that scene,
but was an important artist in San Francisco by the
name of Ruth Osawa, who did these sculptures that are just,

(01:08:53):
you know, a marvel. At any rate, The fact is
that if you wanted to know, you found out.

Speaker 2 (01:09:11):
Okay, what is the antecedents of the ben? How does
the ben happen?

Speaker 3 (01:09:17):
In?

Speaker 2 (01:09:18):
What is the BN experience?

Speaker 3 (01:09:21):
So Haye Ashbury in nineteen sixty six, as I say,
was pretty low key. Nobody was paying any you know,
neither the police nor city fathers were paying particular attention
to it. It was just this funky neighborhood where oddly
dressed people had started to emerge, very colorful, but you know,

(01:09:46):
nobody paid much attention to them. One of the institutions
that flowered in the fall of sixty six was The Oracle,
which was the local what you would definitely call the
hippie newspaper, mystical involved with a lot of astrology and

(01:10:07):
a lot of you know, mystical painting and third eye
and you know, the sort of explorative stuff, and obviously
very much connected to LSD. It was run by a poet,
you know, what would you expect and and uh, the leader,
the art director of the the Oracle was a guy

(01:10:29):
named Michael Bowen, who again came out of that mystical tradition.
And I might add, just to throw in a curveball,
that his his role model. Oh god, I'm forgetting his name,
but is a man John somebody or other who lived
in Mexico and whose brother in law was an important

(01:10:53):
figure in the CIA. And they are all these what
I regard is fairly daffy conspiracy theories that say that,
you know, the whole of the sixties was just a
function of you know, it was actually a CIA front.
Now I think that's incorrect, And I don't think Jerry

(01:11:16):
Garcia was running for anybody or any of those guys.
The fact that the CIA had introduced LSD to America
is a fact. But after that, frankly, I think they
lost control. And you know, individuals did what individuals do.
But at any rate, Bowen and others they had. On

(01:11:38):
October sixth, nineteen sixty six, LSD became illegal in California,
and the people at the Oracle, being profound, profoundly anti negativity,
announced that they would instead of resisting, instead of protests,

(01:12:00):
they would simply celebrate, celebrate the joy of the day.
So on October sixth, nineteen sixty six, they got the
Grateful Dead and I think the airplane to come down
and play on flatbed trucks set up in the Panhandle.
The panhandles, this long, thin extension of Golden Gate Park.
It's like one block wide. It's between two big streets.

(01:12:24):
But literally they threw electric cords over from a second
floor apartment to the trees in the Panhandle to power
you could do it then with simple you know, extension cords,
the equipment and the bands played. It was called the

(01:12:49):
Love Pageant Rally. And two thousand people showed up and
had a wonderful time. So this germinated, and eventually the
people at the Oracle and the others said, let's let's
have a bigger celebration. Let's get you know, all the
people that are connected with us, which included, among other things,

(01:13:10):
all the people very political Berkeley people, and generally speaking
historians say, oh, the Berkeleys are political, and the Hippies
were a political and no connection. Well, no, the Berkeley
smoke pod, the hippies were certainly not for the war.
They may be a little less active, but the fact

(01:13:32):
is that there's a great deal more shared than antagonistic
book between them. Michael Rossman, who wrote a wonderful book
called The Wedding Within the War and was very much
part of the free speech movement, called the Hayte Ashbury
our mark one ghetto. That it was that they were

(01:13:55):
kindred and they decided to have a party and celebrate. Now,
you know, nothing wrong with that. Day to day life
in the hate was kind of a celebration. What they
did not expect and what I don't think anybody could have,
especially San Francisco Police Department, was that somewhere between thirty

(01:14:15):
and fifty thousand people showed up, and you had the poets,
the beat poets who were their mentors, read and then
you had rock and roll and it was this marvelous
day that celebrated nothing in particular except let's have a
good time. One of the Berkeley politicos, a guy, the

(01:14:38):
guy who produced Country Joe and the Fish, said that
there was a great opportunity to rally the people and
they blew it. And you know, most of the people
that were there would say, nah, you know, I had
a wonderful time, and you know, it was kind of
a perfect day. But the problem, of course with the

(01:14:58):
b N was can't conceal fifty thousand people. When I
say that the police department ignored it, that's because the
entire security. Think about this now, the entire security police
security for this event. We're two mounted patrolmen horse patrolman looking,

(01:15:21):
you know, down on thirty forty fifty thousand people. And
the lady came up to them and said, officer, you
have to help me. I've lost my child and you know,
I don't know how to find them. And they and
the cops said, lady, we can't go down there. They're
smoking pot, go to the stage, ask them to make
an announcement. They'll find you know, you'll find your child.

(01:15:43):
It won't be a prog And of course that's the
way it worked out. I might add that they then
messed up their perfect record by arresting about one hundred
kids when they were walking after the event and they're
walking home down h Street, and they were started arrest
people for obstructing traffic. But anyway, on the whole, you know,

(01:16:05):
it came out of nowhere, and that's sort of proof
about how much out of nowhere it came. But it
was never going to be nowhere after that, because then
you have a flood of media from all over the
country descending on the hate. You know, what's going on here.

(01:16:26):
And as I say, they basically just didn't have a
clue as to what was underlying what was going on.
All they saw was literally what they could see.

Speaker 2 (01:16:39):
Okay, it's at this point from the outside, you can
tell us the real story that people start to come
from all over the country in sixty seven is the
summer of love. At this point, the I mean I'm
living outside San Francisco, I mean the other coast. People
were aware of something. I really didn't know what was

(01:17:00):
going on until really the year after. So my point
is was sixty seven flowers and fun and when did
it start to go downhill? Overrun? With people coming?

Speaker 3 (01:17:16):
It started to go downhill, you know, by March or April,
everybody in San Francisco again with the eruption of media coverage.
The people in San Francisco, including the diggers, were aware
that new people, more people would become, particularly after school

(01:17:38):
got out, high school kids, college kids in other words,
people with very little money and you know, very young
and not a lot of emotional or occupational resources. The
people that had been in the hate in sixty six
were all, generally speaking, mostly in their twenties. They did something.

(01:18:00):
They they found, you know, they they they, as I say,
lived lived on the margins, but clearly knew how to
you know, how to get by by the summer you had.
And nobody knows how many could have been as many
as one hundred thousand people came to San Francisco and

(01:18:20):
they basically came in and they said, feed me, find
me a place to sleep. They were you know, mostly dependent,
I'm not you know, they were seekers and and and
you know, bless them, but it flooded a very small
neighborhood and pretty much destroyed almost immediately the so called

(01:18:42):
good vibes, not so called they were there were very
legitimately good vibes. But with this kind of overload, uh it.
You know, the diggers. There was a wonderful institution called
All Saints Church that and the neighborhood in general did
their very best to take care of these newcomers. But

(01:19:04):
it was, you know, it was dysfunctional. It was simply
it was too many people and too much at once.
So the reason, frankly, and I'll freely confess to cheating,
which is the reason my book ends with the Monterey
Pop Festival, is that this is the high point discounting

(01:19:27):
the anxiety of the spring, the legend of the Summer
of Love, which when they first asked me to do
that photo, showice that you realize that the Summer of
Love was in fact the fall of sixty six, because
a that's when San Francisco has its best weather, and
b you know, it was, as I say, low key

(01:19:48):
and under the radar.

Speaker 2 (01:19:50):
The peak.

Speaker 3 (01:19:54):
The image that people have of the Summer of Love
is sort of be a tific young pe people with
flowers in their hair, listening to you know, fabulous music,
tripping their socks off, and being as peaceful and benign
as you could ever imagine. And at Monterey this was
the truth. There were seven thousand seats in the arena

(01:20:17):
at Monterey that could actually listen directly to the music,
although you could hear it all around. There were probably
twenty five thousand people hippies at Monterey, and nothing bad happened.
I mean the police, I can't imagine what was going

(01:20:39):
on Friday afternoon. This ran Friday, Satday, Sunday. And Bob Marinello,
I think his name is Bob Marinello, the police chief
of Monterey. I can't imagine what was going through his
mind as the floods of people arrived. And if they
had wanted to, you know, create trouble, they could have.

(01:21:01):
I mean, you know, simply by numbers. I just got
this most wonderful story just the other day, and now
I'm trying to remember who it was that told me.
She's an Asian woman and she was telling me about
her mother who lived near the Monterey Fairgrounds and who

(01:21:24):
you know, didn't know what was going on, knew nothing
about the festival. All she knew was that on Friday
there were a couple of hippies that were like sleeping
on her lawn and she just sort of went, oh,
you know, never mind, I'm not going to get involved
with it. And on Saturday they were like several they
were sleeping under her house, you know, they were all

(01:21:45):
over the place, and she's basically calling her daughter saying,
what the hell is going on, and her daughter's trying
to explain it to her. And then on Sunday they
already all these people sleeping on her lawn and vanished,
and she went, oh, okay, well at least it was temper,
no harm done. The fact is, and it's my my
favorite picture in my book is the peacefulness of what

(01:22:12):
happened in Monterey when it you know, it just could
have been a disaster. Was There's a marvelous picture of
a police officer. They the organizers had put orchids on
the seats of all the seats in the arena, and uh,
this this there's a picture of this police officer, motorcycle officer,

(01:22:34):
stringing orchids on the that he had picked up on
the aerial of his motorcycle, smiling, you know, it's just
completely unbusy, and he's just fooling with flowers, which is
you know, of course, the way we'd all like in
a mass gathering for the police to you know, feel
that there are no stress, no need to to come

(01:22:57):
up with attitude. And that's you know, that sort of
the magic of Monterey, and frankly, that's why I decided
to end it, because everything after Monterey gets more complicated.
As I say, the Hate stops being fun city and
becomes among other things, the police department changed Hate Street

(01:23:17):
into a one way street and put up crime lights
these you know, really ugly yellow It looked like it
looked like the outskirts of the Berlin Wall or something,
and made it as unattractive as possible. And given you know,
the thousands of people that were just sort of wandering
around and didn't quite know where to go, you know,

(01:23:40):
it became less than charming. So what happened really in
many ways is that things simply dispersed. They went out
into the country, California country, so that you have even
more people up in the Humboldt down in Carmel and
you know, all the way around, or they went back

(01:24:02):
and you know took up in in on the East
coast wherever, or the Midwest. My favorite example of all that.
And one of the things that that you know is
really I think really significant about what The important thing
to remember about the hate is it had very I
think it had very little impact politically. There was a

(01:24:25):
certain it certainly benefited the anti war movement, but other
than that, not so much politically. Culturally, however, endless elements
of what happened in the hate are still part of
our lives today. That's one of the reasons why what
I tell these these high school kids that are interested is,
you know, none of this has went away. The fact

(01:24:46):
that the hated Ashbury sort of created and advertised the
gentle male hippie, which was one of the archetypes I think,
led to things like uptons and promote a promotion of
gay liberation, which you know, the next decade you had

(01:25:07):
the influx the created gay neighborhoods in San Francisco, and
now we're dealing with with an administration that wants to
deny the existence of trans people. You know, the wars
go on part I mean organic food sam The experience

(01:25:29):
of LSD led people in the hate to be very
sensitive to things like like sugar and artificial food and
things like you know, plastic clothing, polyestic clothing, that sort
of thing. And you know, now organic food is a
forty billion dollar a year industry. One of the people

(01:25:52):
who was critical in all that was a guy named
Roger Hilliard. Roger Hilliard was the was one of of
the light show artists at the Avalon Ballroom with a
guy named Ben bean Meter and eventually he and a
guy named Hawken Stephen Hawkin. No, I'm thinking of the
physicist Ah Paul hawk anyway, who later with Smith and

(01:26:19):
Hawkin the fairly famous store chain of supplies. But in
the seventies they went east and near Boston they created
erewon E E R E W h O N, which
was a major influence on the wholesaling as it were,
organic food and such things all across America. And you know, now, uh,

(01:26:45):
you know, one of the sources, one of the primary
sources of organic food is the Midwest because they noticed
the poisons, you know as much as we do, so uh,
you know, and it goes on. I mean, there's my
favorite example of all this actually, and again it's not

(01:27:07):
overt there's a marvelous book that I recommend to everybody
called What the Dormouse Said. What the Dormouse Said is
a history of Silicon Valley and LSD. It's by a
guy named John Markoff, who covered Silicon Valley for the
New York Times for years and had, you know, did
a really excellent book about the connection between LSD and

(01:27:30):
the people who created the personal computer. Now there's a
reason why Silicon Valley where the individual home computer happened
in Silicon Valley rather than say, near Mit. And that's
because there was a guy who created the Institute for
not Advanced Studies. I'm mixing it up with somebody, but

(01:27:52):
at any rate started distributing this is when it was
still legal LSD to all these engineers in the Silicon Valley,
and some of them were part of the Homebrew Computing Club,
among them Steven Jobs and Steve Wasney, and they went
on and again. This is clearly influenced by Ellis Date

(01:28:16):
with Apple, and you know, there you have it. That's
an essential part of American culture today. Obviously, now I'm
not saying it. You know, it only exists because of
the psychedelic connection, but it's influence.

Speaker 2 (01:28:42):
Okay, So in the spring of sixty seven you have
Scott mckenz who the hit if You're Going to San Francisco,
and the Jeffery Souperent Airplane breakthrough with their first album
with Gray Slick, their second album, Somebody to Love to
What do you believe that drove people to San Francisco?

Speaker 3 (01:29:04):
Not so much Summer Somebody Loved. I mean, it was
a it was a song that brought people to pay
attention to to the airplane. But the song that came
out of the hate that brought everyone to the Summer
of Love was White Rabbit. White Rabbit. To this day
is this very very potent song. It's it's mysterious, it's inviting,

(01:29:27):
it's seductive, and it's also misunderstood because, among other things,
the the you know, the final chorus is feed your head,
and uh, Grace Slick sincerely intended that as a way
of you know, growing, not just stuffing drugs in your head,

(01:29:48):
but learning and art, music and very you know whatever,
but grow. And people heard that and it was the
first message to you know, young people listening to the
radio that was pure. That is to say, it wasn't
modulated by the media. It was just what the air

(01:30:09):
what the airplane thought, and it you know, it worked.
McKenzie saw. I attended a lecture by Lou Adler. Okay,
so what happened with Monterey where the roots of Monterey
was in the fall of sixty six, there were a

(01:30:33):
number of clubs, music clubs on the Sunset Strip where
there was about a mile long strip of many clubs,
and the kids thronged the clubs fair enough, and local
business owners didn't you know. It created traffic jams. There's LA.

(01:30:53):
Well that's a new thing in La, traffic jams. But anyway,
they they have acted and in the fall of sixty six,
Ronald Reagan, Conservative is elected governor. So the LAPD decides
to kind of crack down on all this traffic and
they start arresting people and these kids don't appreciate it

(01:31:16):
and resist, not violently. Any violence was the cops, but
they so they were called the Censet Strip riots. Well,
you know, again, it's easy to call the riots. These
were nineteen year olds sitting down on the street and
getting arrested, and people in the rock scene, in particular

(01:31:42):
the manager of the Birds and Derek Taylor, who was
the publicist for the Birds, who had been the publicist
for the Beatles that was kind of a charismatic figure
in LA and others created a campaign, you know, to
resid that, to resist the idea that these kids were

(01:32:03):
causing riots. And they had a benefit in February, and
then they decided to plan another benefit, a bigger show
in Monterey in June. Louis, I mean they go, the
organizers go to the sort of reigning king and queen

(01:32:24):
of rock and roll in LA at that moment, rock
and roll but music, John and Michelle Phillips of Mamas
and the Pappas, who were tremendously popular, and they loved
the idea, and they said, no, let's turn it into
a benefit. The only person that was paid at Monterey
was Robbie Shankark because they had signed his contract early
and earliest and they had, you know, they acknowledged it. Otherwise,

(01:32:49):
they bought out that people who had invested the early
money and went to work and they created the festival.
Now I had the pleasure of listening to or talk
about all this and among other things, for what it's worth,
he denied the idea that the Scott McKenzie song written

(01:33:12):
by John Phillips was kind of an advertisement for Monterey Pop.
It's the only time he spoke that I went, I don't, well,
I just it's kind of too perfect an invitation a promo.
You know, really, you know, really you didn't that didn't
occur to you because you certainly engaged when that came out.

(01:33:35):
They were engaged with the creation of Monterey Leave it,
you know, leave that as it as it is. Certainly
that song had that impact of attracting, you know, more
people to San Francisco and in particular to the festival.
So what happened was very quickly they they realize that

(01:33:58):
what they're really doing, what they're really going to be
doing at Monterey's celebrating psychedelic music. That's their their advertising
is about, you know, bring bring bells, bring flowers, you know,
be a hippie. And they run into a problem because,
among other things, The Grateful the Grateful Dead and other
bands from San Francisco are very very puristic and they

(01:34:22):
wanted to be free, and it's like, well, you know,
how do how do we pay for the stage? And
long story short, this wonderful, weird thing happened, which was
one of the they had a board which included people
like Smokey Robinson and Paul Simon, and because of Derek Taylor,
Paul McCartney McCartney. After they finished recording Uh Sergeant Pepper,

(01:34:48):
he took a brief vacation, went to l A was
hanging out with Derek and started telling them about this
fantastic new music, new musician in London by the name
of Amy Hendricks. So they go okay, and they already
had thought about the who. And then there is this
friction with the San Francisco bands, who are, as I say,

(01:35:10):
are very puristic and very suspicious, just inherently suspicious of
Lou Adler and John Phillips. And what happens is John
gets Paul Simon, who is also on the board and
who the hippies are a fond of because he had
written a song called Feeling Groovy. I know this sounds

(01:35:32):
maybe even a little ridiculous, but they trusted Paul because
of that song. And Paul literally comes to San Francisco
and talks with everybody and as as Rock Scully wrote
in his memoir, and Paul convinced them that, you know,
it was too good idea, an idea to pass up.
Go So they went, and of course the airplane among others.

(01:35:59):
The Grateful Dead had the wonderful experience of playing in
between The Who their American debut virtually American debut, and
Jimmy Hendrix's American debut, which means actually one of the
critics said that some of the guitar playing in the

(01:36:19):
Grateful Dead set was some of the best in the
in the weekend, he for whatever reason did not really
dig Hendricks. But of course, as I have written several times,
who would remember, you know, between those two two sets,
it was, you know, very minor. But what happened at
Monterey was well a number of things. I listed four heroes,

(01:36:43):
four or five heroes. The first hero was the audience, which,
as I said, was overwhelming and yet you know all
that you could ask from an audience. The second was
Janis Joplin and Big Brother, Who's again was one of
those purest. In the last little while before the event,

(01:37:06):
John Adler had made a deal with d H. D
a pennamaker who had done the just released Don't Look Back,
which was the documentary about Dylan brilliant, brilliant movie, and
asked him to shoot, well, you know that smells movies money,
and the San Francisco bands were all saying, no, we
won't be in the movie, and the grateful Dad never worked.

(01:37:31):
The Airplane was managed by Bill Graham, who was a
little smarter, and he said, be in the movie. So
the air the Big Brother, which was managed by a
guy named Julius Carpen who was an ex prankster and
as purest as anybody else. They they do their set,
they ripped the place apart. I mean, you know, Janie

(01:37:51):
is just Jannish Dooplin, and nobody had heard of them
outside of San Francisco at that point. They hadn't released
an album, and it was just shocked to the a
pleasant shock to the system. They come off the stage
and Pennebaker is like begging them to be in the movie.

(01:38:13):
And of course the cameras were down when they were
when they did the set. So Albert Grossman, who's after all,
Bob Dylan's manager Capital you know all Caps, says you know.
They go to him and they say, you know, should
we be in the movie, And Albert says, be in
the movie. It'll do you good. And so they overrule

(01:38:39):
their manager and they get a second set on Sunday,
evening and rip up the place again and that's that's
boom one uh and and it's a set boom too,
and it's a you know, it's an enormous flash the airplane.
And it's really interesting. Even even Grace Slick, who was

(01:39:00):
among the more critical people on the planet and who
rarely raved about her own performance or the band's performance,
was just ecstatic that day. It just connected. It was magic.
And so that's boom two three, boom four is And

(01:39:22):
I might add that the number one song at the
time of Monterey Pop was Aretha Franklin's Respect and standing
in for Her and jam and all of the incredible
black music of that period, whether it was motown or
in this case Stacks. Vote is Otis read it again,

(01:39:45):
a guy that most you know, not so many white
people are so terribly afraid of, and otis redding Kills.
And that's boom whatever it is. And finally the two
final which is the Who which played on Sunday Night

(01:40:06):
and the Dead which and then Jimmy Hendricks and there's
a wonderful story about that that I found, which was that, yeah,
the Gravel that were not the only people that played
on LSD and Jimmy. Jimmy Hendricks was certainly a great fan.

(01:40:27):
And he Ousley is there and he's passing out to
these incredibly strong doses of LSD and Jimmy takes a handful.
I mean the guy. The witness said at least three
or four, I mean, you know, and he's like, he
goes down. He's just crumpled in the corner. He looks like,

(01:40:49):
you know, dirty laundry. And his time on stage comes
and two crew members come up, pick him up, walk
him out, and as he hits the stage, he turns
into Jimmy Hendrix. You know, God only knows, and rips
the place apart. As you know. It's just it's one
of the more extraordinary introductions of a talent. This is

(01:41:11):
his first significant show in America and it's the beginning
of what was a all too short, you know, genius
genius career. I might add that the mamas and the
papas closed the show, and I don't know how many

(01:41:32):
I've always wondered how many people stayed in their seats
to wait for them after Jimmy, because you know, how
do you follow that? You know, you can't. That's one
of the reasons by the way that the who preceded
them because Pete Townsend had seen Jimmy Hendrix in London
and did not want to follow it, and so they

(01:41:52):
flipped a coin and Pete won and said, no, we'll
go first. We'll do fine. Now you do your thing.

Speaker 2 (01:42:00):
Okay. To what degree does an underground alternative universe still exist?
Into what degree is it or not in San Francisco.

Speaker 3 (01:42:15):
When you're talking about today twenty twenty five. Yes, yeah,
I don't know if there's an underground universe.

Speaker 2 (01:42:27):
There is.

Speaker 3 (01:42:28):
As I say, so many of the issues of the
sixties that came into prominence in the sixties, there are
issues that go way way back. Alternative viewpoints about America.
Is it a universe? I don't know. It's a collection
of ideas that many, many people hold on to. I mean,

(01:42:55):
we have a putting it politely and extremely extremely conservative administration,
and all the numbers say that it's not a universal
viewpoint by any means. It acts like it's a universal viewpoint.
It ignores alternative viewpoints, it represses alternative viewpoints, which is

(01:43:16):
the shocking and Unamerican thing about it. But you know,
most people don't think that, you know, all immigrants are
evil and should be immediately evicted, etc. I could make
a list, a long, long list, so as I say,
other than for instance, dead heads, who are very real,

(01:43:41):
very you know, quite a lot of them, and many
of them, you know, we're not born when Jerry Garcia died.
And yet I've talked with a lot of them, and
they basically they get I mean, you know, they get
what the Grateful deads stand for. They don't know much
about the history of the Grateful Dead, but they definitely
got to read my book. But they they absolutely grasp

(01:44:06):
the notion of community, of peacefulness, of you know, standing
against racism, and uh, you know it's it's it's not
like it's gone at the moment. You know, the other side,
if that's the way it is, is getting you know,

(01:44:28):
has all the power and is getting a lot more
pr but it's not, you know, it's not everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:44:35):
Okay, music drove the culture in this era. Let's just
even say the whole decade was that a moment in
time and many stars aligned. You know, how do you
do it with radio? I don't want to go through
a whole litany now. You say the ideas remain, Is

(01:44:58):
it that we don't have the right music speaking to
these ideas, or is it that was a moment. In
that moment may or may not return, but it's not
happening now.

Speaker 3 (01:45:13):
I'd say the latter that that that was, it was
an extraordinary moment. You're absolutely right.

Speaker 2 (01:45:18):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:45:19):
You know, music became the convey the container for all
those values, going back to rex Roth and Duncan, the
values again of non violence and and just generally of
of a freedom of thought and sensuality and so forth.

(01:45:42):
And it connected with LSDA, connected with with rock and roll,
connected with volume. There's something about LSD and volume that link.
I'm I'm not a scientist, but uh. And as you say,
music was the binding agent for my general our generation.

(01:46:05):
That is this, you know, the mid late sixties and
into the well into the seventies, and eventually, as all
things must, it loses its juice. It became a little
artificial what they called arena rock, which is, you know,
among other things, not improvisational. It's it's it's showbiz theater,

(01:46:30):
which for many, you know, was great, but it did
not have quite the purity of the earlier efforts. And
then there's a reaction to it and it's called punk
and you know, not unreasonable and very anti virtuosic, among
other things. And yes, I think that, among other things,

(01:46:53):
in addition to being the container rock music galvanized all
that stuff into sex, drugs and rock and roll that
people really, you know, that that was a motivating force
for a whole bunch of people, including me. Now I
might add that because I was in the backwoods of

(01:47:15):
Maine in high school, graduating in sixty seven, and then
college in upstate New York, I missed all of it,
which is apparently why I spent the last fifty years
researching it, researching these stories, because you know, I wasn't
there for the party. But you know, I do think

(01:47:35):
that that the music did galvanize things, united people and
whatever you say about current music. And I have you know,
great respect for Taylor Sweat, for instance, it's not overtly
at least certainly about an alternative culture, although she's certainly

(01:48:00):
not worshiping it at the feet of the current current reality.

Speaker 2 (01:48:07):
Okay, so what's your favorite Grateful Dead album?

Speaker 3 (01:48:13):
Probably Live Dead.

Speaker 2 (01:48:15):
Which lead with the original Live Dead, the one before
Working Man's Dead.

Speaker 3 (01:48:21):
Right exactly. The Live Dead was a you know, a
live album. It's the first I believe sixteen track live albums,
so it has you know, extraordinary sound and it's them
at their most experimental and highly improvisational. I mean there
are songs that go on for you know, thirty minutes

(01:48:43):
with one minute of singing and twenty nine minutes of improvisation,
and you know, that's sort of my my fave. There's
a second album that they did that I really really love,
and it's in part because it was the classic Grateful Dead,
you know, weird. They finally took a year off and

(01:49:05):
during their vacation in nineteen seventy five, they recorded this.
They started recording this album very slow, you know, kind
of just with They went into the studio with nothing.
They just started seeing what was there and it's called
Blues for Allah and some wonderful stuff there. And then,
in classic Grateful Dead fashion, they had gotten into it.

(01:49:28):
They had some marvelous material. And then their record company,
which at the time was themselves, basically their record company
guy comes to them and says, we have to have
the album. In three weeks we signed a contract. Blah
blah blah, which is a typical Grateful Dead business, you know,
very bad business decision they made a lot of If
they'd spent three more months, that album might be remembered

(01:49:53):
very differently. But you know that's them, Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:49:56):
In the gatefold cover of Live Dead, it's the Grateful
Dead playing in a street. What is the background in
story of that photo.

Speaker 3 (01:50:10):
It's a marvelous photo. It's by Jim Marshall, who's the
great photographer, one of the great photographers ever and certainly
a great photographer of the San Francisco scene. It's on
H Street and this is in the spring I want
to say, of sixty if I recall correctly, of sixty eight.

(01:50:33):
Actually so, it's a slightly old, a year old picture.
And what happened was that in the fall of sixty seven,
two horrible things happened. One was that briefly gray Lines,
the tourist bus people created what they call the Hippie Hop,
which was a bus tour of the hate, which is,

(01:50:57):
you know, you can imagine being in the Grateful Dead,
and way up to and on your left is a
is the home of the Grateful Oh my god. In addition,
in October, after the visitors of the summer sort of
you know, slowed down the San Francisco Police Department raided
a number of homes, one of which was the Bedful

(01:51:19):
deads for pot in the city and the bust among
other you know, persuaded the dead that maybe it was
time to leave the hate. I might add that the
two people that they the band member, they were arrested.
Everybody that was in the house, which was mostly non
band members. There were two people that were in the
house that were band members. Didn't smoke pot, pig pan

(01:51:42):
and bob wear, but leave it be. They also missed
a kilo that was in the kitchen cabinet, but they
did find one hundred dollars bill in somebody's desk, which
amazingly was was not there the next day. And so,
as I say, they decided, you know, may maybe it's
time to go. And bit by bit the band members

(01:52:04):
start going to Marin and you know, h no longer
living communally, and you know, that's fine, but they wanted
to say goodbye. So they plot and uh, the word
goes out underground that they're going to play on such

(01:52:25):
and such a date, and with the cooperation of a
cop that knew them and that they liked, the city
had blocked off the street because just generally it was
going to be a block party, and suddenly from two
different directions they pull in flatbed trucks loaded with their

(01:52:50):
gear and start playing. And of course there's that marvelous
picture of you know, people as far as the eye
can see down h Street, the tops of every house
that looked down, you know, the windows and whatnot, and
it's it's it's a it's a celebration, and it's a

(01:53:13):
goodbye and worked like a charm.

Speaker 2 (01:53:18):
And what is the personal best grateful dead show that
you were actually at.

Speaker 3 (01:53:25):
I don't know about a whole show. You know, for me,
the most enthralled and just mind blown at the virtuosity
that I ever heard was a show I'm gonna be
such a dead hit here on I want to say

(01:53:48):
June thirtieth, nineteen seventy four, which was the wall of sound,
which had something to do with it because it was
listening to it was an extraordinary experience, even though I
was inside. And they ended the first set with a
forty five minute jam of playing in the band into
Uncle John's band into playing in the band, and I

(01:54:11):
just my jaw dropped almost I mean, you know, my
jaw dropped a fair number of times. The first time
I heard Dark Star, you know, blah blah blah, but
this was just so sustained. It was just so they
were so on top of it that, you know, yeah,
go good, you know. And I haven't listened to it since,

(01:54:33):
I don't think, but at any rate, I would recommend
that anybody if you want to hear Grateful Dad at
what I think, for what it's worth, is there some
of their finest that would be the moment.

Speaker 2 (01:54:45):
Okay, I've been talking to Dennis McNally, whose new book
is The Last Great Dream. He talks about the music
in San Francisco, but the roots of music and hippie
dumb and hate Ashbury. Dennis, I want to thank you
so much for taking this time with my audience.

Speaker 3 (01:55:04):
My pleasure. I've been you know, I've been reading your
your stuff for a very long time and enjoying it.
Somebody asked me what your names first started getting around,
and somebody says, have you been reading left sets? And
I said, yeah, he's you know, he's pointing out that
the record companies don't have a clue. Gee. We knew that,

(01:55:24):
but you know, somebody said it.

Speaker 2 (01:55:27):
And on that note, we're needed for today till next time.
This is Bob left sex