bomb detonating over Hiroshima. . . How do you tell these sorrows to a punch- drunk principal who believes in a war to end all wars? The gates finally open, and the frisk people take one look at us and wave us through. We settle on a blanket close to the stage which is set up between two walls of speakers at the far end of the stadium. The playing field fills up immediately, and then the bleachers begin to fill, until by two p.m. we’ re at the bottom of a great bowl of humanity. Then Jerry Garcia peeks out from stage right, and 50,000 people come to their feet with a roar. IMPEACH REAGAN!, the sky pilot wrote against the blue sky, and the thunderous approval drowned out the music. People were a little rummy from the sun by the time Dylan came on stage. Sans harmonica, he launched into a series of new renditions of old songs, once bringing the entire stadium to its feet to It was a long day. The Dead played for three and a half hours under a hot sun with heavy competition from a sky writer, a tiny dot of a plane that made peace signs and did fortune-telling feats which read the collective mind of the stadium: sing along on “ Everybody Must Get Stoned.” But what struck me as the afternoon wore on was that something bigger than the music was happening, as if the music were merely a touchstone. We w e ren ’ t there fo r mus ic, we were turned bad tn the Haight in the summer o f 1967 before the gathered for ritual. # # # Ah, the meat ax of semantics. Are you proud to be part of the counter-culture? The counter-culture isn’t the counterculture, if you stop and think about it, it’s the culture, and what’s called the culture has cancer of the blood. Do you believe in going with the flow? Both shit and water flow downhill if the grade is steep enough. Do you believe in gravity? Now we’ re getting someplace. Do you believe in a mixed bag? Albert Einstein was a mixed bag. He said he wanted to know the thoughts of God, and then he took a boat to America and gave Roosevelt the atom bomb. After the little incident at Hiroshima, he began writing long letters of explanation to Japanese school children. It’s rumored that Marilyn Monroe had a picture of Einstein on her vanity. It’s rumored that John Fitzgerald Kennedy unhooked Marilyn Monroe’s bra. Do you see how it all hangs together? Not like they tell you it does. It’s a fact that Einstein refused open-heart surgery. When it’s time to go, it’s time to go, Einstein said, showing that much understanding of the thoughts of God. After giving us the bomb, Einstein said: “ Eve ry th ing ’s changed now but the way we think.” “ Forward Ever, Backward Never," the signs all over my high school read. “A sensitive but troubled boy,” the principal said. “ No more free lunch,” my father said. The squeeze was on. I liked that principal. He’d been a boxer in college and his nose was all over his face. “Why are you doing this?” he asked me just before calling in my father to deliver the coup de gr7ace. What could I say? I was seventeen and following my heart. Now I’d say, “ The signs are all wrong! They should read ‘Back and forth, back and forth, like a mine sweeper, forever and ever!” ’ My friend Mert and I walked out of that high school, got on our Harleys and tore up the soccer field. We were on the streets. AM barbarians riding the backroads of Connecticut before the days of stereophonic sound, looking for the thoughts of God on the air waves. The concert ended as nonchalantly as it began. The stage crew began breaking things down, and the stadium emptied without incident. Some scuttlebutt had it that Ken Kesey was having a bash for Dylan and the Dead on his Springfield farm, and I’d half a mind to drive my van right up Kesey’s rural route driveway with no more credentials than my heart beating in my chest. But we let that one slide. Kesey’s thing would be for patriarchs and matriarchs and we were hard-core rank- and-file. Lana, Brenda and I walked back to the campground arm-in-arm, a forged unit beyond media definition, strands of the DNA of human potential, part of the seamless continuity that smooths out Time itself. The Summer of Love is a hard place to do time in, but we sing our song and carry on, and when all is said and done, we opt to love. Writer John Bennett is a godfather of smallpress publishing—the founder of Vagabond Press. He lives in Ellensburg, Washington. His last story in CSQ was “The Family House.” hipsters. There sickness and change. The initial wave o f love children was quickly followed hy a tidal wave o f THEBIGBANG 6 1 6 S W P A R K A V E . P O R T L A N D Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988 11
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