her husband at the age of twenty-five, lived in a Berkeley crash pad with a bunch of kids, slept around and took drugs. Now she’s back. There’s another letter from a man who got caught up in a street riot and was appalled by the lack of respect for the “ sacredness of private property” that he saw all around him. “ . . .the most frightening exhibit of human behavior I have ever experienced,” his letter said. His sense of propriety was restored by the arrival of the riot police. There were letters from people who were five years old in 1967 and “ proud of it,” people who painted murals of Jim Morrison on their bedroom walls, people who lived in convents by day and prowled the Haight by night, people who remembered their “ groovy love beads,” and people whose dream was to drink Tang and get in on the Apollo space program. Seattle cracks her Sunday paper over hot cakes and coffee, shakes her head and chuckles. Ah, we’ve come a long way, baby. The drugs turned bad in the Haight in the summer of 1967 before the leaves began to change. The initial wave of love children was quickly followed by a tidal wave of hustlers and hipsters. There was sickness and disillusionment and a lot of victims. The Grateful Dead and other seasoned counter-culture people began moving out. To Morning Star Ranch, to the country, to places untouched by the media. They took with them the ember that smolders at the heart of a way of life. Not a movement, not a fad; a way of life. What is significant about the Summer of Love, about the entire period referred to as The Sixties, is that this ember, which is still passed from generation to generation, burst into flame. Back in the Fifties we used to race around through the night in ‘40 Ford cous pes. Whitewalls and teardrop skirts. We were ignorant as zoo monkeys. We were teenage barbarians. I remember the night I was scanning the air waves and hit upon the new music for the first time. It was Chuck Berry. Talk about your quantum leaps. From Frank Sinatra to Chuck Berry in one fell swoop. It was the most liberating thing that had ever happened to me, better than an unhooked bra in the back seat on a dark country road. That was a tough era in which to keep the fire burning. McCarthyism was a bad taste in every liberal’s mouth. I knew from nothin’ about McCarthyism. The skull and crossbones flew from my car antenna. I was a high school dropout in a New England mill town, a factory worker for minimum wage. A sensitive boy, but deeply troubled, is the way the principal put it when he handed my father my walking papers. My father told me, “ Get a job—you’ re through eating for free.” I worked in the factory by day and set pins in a bowling alley by night, just before technology replaced pin setters with machines. My friend Mert and I got into a discussion one night with the alley owner, a tough old Pole. “Two years,” he told us, “ two years, you punks, and your rock ‘n’ roll will be in ashes. Responsible people won’t tolerate that kind of noise for long.” «<C We loved him like a father, but he had no idea what the future held in store. We laughed, drained our cokes and walked out the door into the summer night. Fired up our Harleys and rode off in the direction of Woodstock. Summer of Love, 1957. By the time the Seventies rolled around I’d tried my hand at just about everything and was marking time for $3 an hour as a dishwasher in what would now be called a Yuppie joint on San Francisco’s Union Street. My first day I reported for work at 8 a. m. after being up all night on acid. I made it though the noon rush on Watney’s ale. It was a mystery to me why they treated me so well. I took extended lunch breaks and ate what I pleased and no one said boo. They just kept shoving the Watney’s through the bus-boy window. One day Joan Baez walked in and paid for a bowl of borscht with plastic. She’d just been to the hairdresser. If you didn’t know she was Joan Baez, you’d have sworn by her coiffure and the way she was dressed she was Miss Virginia Slim herself. I was a dishwashing force there on Union Street. It took about a month before I found out what was going on. Where lunch hour had been a nightmare of bus trays stacked all over the kitchen floor, now there was order. I was doing the work of three men. The other two dishwashers had failed to show up on my first day, and seeing what I could do, the management te rm ina ted them w ithou t notice. The management was getting better results at a third the cost. Realizing my worth, I asked for $5 an hour and got fired myself. It was a matter of principle, they said, not to pay any dishwasher more than $3 an hour. Diamonds and rust, my friends. The dynamics of a capitalist world. The dissonant note that gives our music its distinctive edge. The grit in the oyster that makes the pearl. Times are hard for the hardcore. False prophets have taken up residence in the Hotel California. As Jim Bakker put it so succinctly when he moved in: “Well, it’s great to have a place where Tammy can shop, shop, shop.” # # # So I open the Seattle Times one Sunday morning in June, and there’s a picture of The Grateful Dead gathered around Bob Dylan like a pack of grinning m on ke ys . “ O n ly N o r th w e s t A p pearance,” the caption reads. A month later Brenda and I are crossing the Columbia River at Biggs Junction in a ‘63 Ford van, sleeping bags in the back, headed .for Eugene. Brenda was eleven during the Summer of Love, living right here in this Washington desert valley where I now wash glass for a living. I was twenty-nine and working the bars in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Brenda was tuned in to gospel music, and I worked just around the corner from Preservation Hall. And now twenty years down the road, we’ re on the road heading for the same destination. We travel down the Columbia Gorge toward Portland under a stormy sky. Lightning flashes, howling winds, angels humming over Hanford irradiated waters. I glance over at Brenda. She’s got the earphones on and is smiling with her eyes closed, tapping out rhythm on the dash. A sign reads BRIDGE OF THE GODS. I glance to my left and see that I’m being passed by an old VW van covered with Dead insignia. The driver gives me thumbs up, and his lady smiles and waves. I grin and jam an Oreo cookie into my mouth. “ I’m here for the duration!” I yell. They give me the “ can’t hear you” head shake and f in ish the ir pass. 8 Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1987 East Portland 32nd & E. Burnside 231-8926 m a y s ! MUSIC MILLENNIUM NW Portland N.W. 23rd &Johnson 248-0163
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