Smoke Signals from the Land of No Appointments

A Memoir of the Psychedelic Sixties

Copyright 2009 by Paul Ford

Part 1: New York, New York

I had just turned twenty-one when I arrived in New York. My uncle had gotten me a job in the mailroom of the advertising agency where he was a television producer. He wanted me to become a page at NBC, a traditional way of rising in the entertainment businesses. The network wasn't hiring, however. He also arranged an informal interview for me at RCA Records in Rockefeller Center. The interviewer suggested that I first get a college degree, while admitting that he himself didn't have one. On my way out, he laid three or four albums on me, including recent releases by the Jefferson Airplane and the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Having little interest in career advancement, I instead became the nepotism candidate at Wells, Rich, and Greene, Inc. For the first week or two, I commuted to work from my uncle's house in Westchester County. Once settled into the job, I checked into a small hotel on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. If I remember correctly, a room went for thirty-five dollars a week, which was a little more than half my take-home pay. I liked the convenience of living in the Village, but my so-called friends from the suburbs objected to the idea of my living in a hotel. (That was back in the days when I still cared what my friends thought.)

WRG was a "boutique" agency that had received much publicity due to the efforts of its hard-driving president, Mary Wells Lawrence. I heard that her salary was a quarter of a million dollars a year. That may not sound like much today, but it then made her one of the highest-paid businesswomen in the country. I later learned that she was also the first woman president (now called CEO) of a company that was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Unlike Mary, most of the other high-profile businesswomen in the country had inherited their businesses.

Before starting her own agency, Mrs Lawrence, as we called her, had done the colorful Braniff Airlines "End of the plain plane" campaign at another agency. Other clients at WRG included American Motors, Trans World Airlines, and Benson & Hedges cigarettes.

Mrs Lawrence wrote in her memoir that she wanted to create an agency that would place creative people, rather than business people, at its center. She would provide the business common sense along with the creative leadership. Together, they would "theatricalize life with dreams" in their ads and commercials. After I left the agency, they theatricalized the gastrointestinal tract with their "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" Alka-Seltzer campaign. They theatricalized auto assembly work with their "Quality is Job One" campaign for Ford Motor Company. This came at a time when most people perceived a lack of quality to be a problem for American cars. In the late 1970s, they re-theatricalized the City itself with their hugely successful "I❤NY" public-service campaign. It gave the City a lift at a time of financial crisis, when many believed that big cities like New York had become unlivable and ungovernable.

In early 1969 the main offices were at 575 Madison Avenue at 56th Street. They assigned me, however, to a satellite office a couple of blocks north at 625 Madison, which housed some of the less sexy departments, like accounting and media buying. James Scott, who was from Harlem, was my coworker in the mailroom there. Cheryl Wheeler, a cute girl with a big, beautiful Afro hairdo, was a secretary (now called an administrative assistant) there. We young people quickly identified with each other and formed a kind of quiet underground conspiracy dedicated to seeking humane treatment for ourselves in a world controlled by older people.

A couple of months after I arrived, we moved to more spacious quarters in the new General Motors Building. It was on 59th Street, across from the Playboy Club, and on Fifth Avenue, across from the Plaza Hotel. That's the location at the southeastern corner of Central Park where the horse-drawn carriages originate.

Dennis Galway, who was a couple of years younger than me, joined us in the mailroom. He had grown up on West 48th Street — the notorious Hell's Kitchen. He was also looking for a place to live, so we looked together. We ended up in a second-floor loft in Chelsea, on East 29th Street between Third Avenue and Lexington. The rent was $175 per month, split two ways.

Along with Stew Greene, who was an art director, the top managers at the agency included Nat Waterston, the creative director, Charlie Walsh, the operations manager, and Fred Jacobs, the legal counsel. Dick Rich, the third principal, had already left the agency.

Back to earth. Tyrone Lewis, my boss, was the office services manager. Adam Richter, a grizzled, crewcut World War II veteran, was second in command. Hazel Ellerby was the messenger dispatcher and the all-important keeper of the petty cash box. Israel Schreff was a mail clerk. Lester Gould, who was hard of hearing, was the stingy supply clerk. There was much turnover among the grunts like us at the bottom, the messengers and mail clerks.

I guess that Ty was about thirty years old, based on the way he acted. He often complained about the younger generation of workers who he said were lazy and who took everything for granted. For some reason, he was usually looking at me when he said this. I wished he had looked at someone else occasionally, as I was sure I wasn't the only one in the mailroom who was shiftless and lazy.

Nevertheless, the mailroom had a reputation for being the first step toward a serious career in advertising. Several guys who were looking for creative jobs started there. Jack Akers worked with us awhile before landing a writing job in the agency. Another aspiring writer whose name I forget found the office politics discouraging and left. I had no interest in writing, and I knew I couldn't draw.

Gil Rivera and Robert Smith were the projectionists, and John Weston was their boss. I was thinking of trying to learn how to work the projector. Not being mechanically inclined, however, I was sure I'd goof it up somehow. Especially under the pressure of performing in front of the big executives and their multi-million-dollar clients.

The main receptionist on the twenty-eighth floor, the executive floor, was Ramonde Duchatellier, an astonishing beauty with radiant cafe-au-lait skin. One could almost hear the tropical breezes of her Caribbean homeland in her lilt.

Some of the names and personalities in the office were original. Bryce Birdsall had a beautiful face, exceptional bone structure, and an icy personality. She was sometimes called Birdy. Lenore ("Lennie") Blauvelt was riding a motorcycle to work long before it became fashionable for women to do so. Aurora "Rory" Ave was one of Mary's secretaries. Lynn Luneberg was a little spacey, so we used to call her Lynn Loony Bird.

Sydney Isaacson was a sweet girl, if a little old for me at the ripe old age of twenty-four or twenty-five. Nevertheless, she had a crush on me and gave me a copy of her favorite book, The Little Prince, as a gift. She even told me I could sit on her lap. Such behavior was way more forward than I was able to handle. Having attended all-male prep and pre-prep schools, I wasn't used to being around any women, forward or otherwise.

Beverly Lubin had an interest in me, too. She was even older than Sydney, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Old enough to know better, I thought. Betty Bromberg, who was one of Mary Wells's assistants, had a brief infatuation with me despite being married.

I did, however, develop a fondness for Roberta Rothbart, the manager in charge of the telephone receptionists. She was much older, maybe fifty or fifty-five, but she dressed meticulously and took perfect care of herself. Go figure. How can you explain sex or love? Unable to contain my affection for her, I surprised her with an impulsive kiss on the lips. To her credit, she accepted the kiss graciously, but that was the end of that. The awkwardness and abruptness of my behavior had embarrassed us so much that we both ran and hid.

I was hot for Eleanor Pravato, who was slender and slinky with long, straight, dark hair, and who dressed in the rakish mod look of the late 1960s. Not surprisingly, the other men had a passion for her, too, including her boss, Harold Singer, the print production manager.

Robert Smith, whose personality was as bland and unexceptional as his name, paid a great deal of attention to me. This was before many gays were out of the closet, even though it seemed as if every other guy in Manhattan were gay. The Stonewall Riots, the beginning of the modern gay movement, happened in the West Village during my first summer in New York. I was, however, unaware of them at the time.

Dennis was dealing pot at work. On one occasion, when he was away for a few days, I sold two ounces to Lynn Luneberg's sister, who also worked in the office. Those two lids were nearly the extent of my career as a drug dealer. This was before the Rockefeller laws; a marijuana sale was still a relatively minor offense. Dennis, however, tried to sell some drugs to a couple of suburban frat-boy friends of mine. The deal blew up and John Panzer, one of the so-called friends, came to our loft with a gun to collect his money. I vowed never to see or speak to him again, a vow I quickly broke.

If it sounds like we didn't get much work done, it's probably because we didn't.

All the senior executives at the agency had their own secretaries, and the junior execs needed to share theirs. Mrs Lawrence, however, had four full-time assistants. Kathie Durham had worked her way up from line secretary to Mary's executive secretary and multipurpose personal assistant. Kathie even sometimes stood in for Mary at meetings she was unable to attend. Rory handled the reception duties in the president's office. Betty took care of Mary's personal business, like picking up her shopping at Bergdorf-Goodman and taking it to her apartment on East End Avenue. Another woman, who was less beautiful than the others, and whose name I forget, did most of the work. She was the most efficient typist and secretary in the company.

Uniquely among the executives, Mary had her own bathroom in the office and her own uniformed chauffeur. One could often see John waiting patiently outside her office.

If Kathie Durham were the boss's smiling public face, then Grace Feldman, the office manager, played the role of chief office witch. A longtime friend of Mary's, Grace did the dirty work, the chicken-shit hiring, firing, and disciplining of office help. Everybody hated her guts. We in the mailroom were lucky enough to have our own bosses and didn't need to worry much about Grace, except to suffer her ugly face from time to time.

Part of my job was doing personal errands for the executives, like picking up a sandwich at Reuben's restaurant for Mary's lunch, or taking Stew Greene's car to the AMC shop on West End Avenue for repairs, or taking him some paperwork to sign while he was shooting on location, or taking a stereo system up to Charlie Moss's hotel suite. I think it was either the Carlton House on Madison Avenue or the Sherry Netherlands on Fifth Avenue.

My own lunch usually consisted of a street-vendor hot dog with sauerkraut and mustard, and maybe an occasional toke or two off a joint at "the Rock" in Central Park.

We messengers sometimes padded our big, fat salaries by walking to our destinations and pocketing the thirty-five cents that Hazel gave us for the bus or train fare.

One of our coworkers in the mailroom was Benny Rivera, a middle-aged, slightly rotund Puerto Rican with a heavy accent. A good guy, Benny took his job seriously, as still-eager immigrants often do. It may be that he had a family to look after. He even carried with him tables that indicated the cross street for any address in Manhattan — the sign of a true professional in our business. I, on the other hand, preferred to simply wing it, not caring much about how long it took me to get to my destination.

The office technology of the day consisted of the land telephone, the touch-sensitive IBM Selectric typewriter, liquid paper, and the mimeograph machine. The huge, noisy, newfangled Xerox machine was quickly replacing carbon paper, but it had an unfortunate tendency to break down frequently, much to Tyrone's despair. Automated in-house telephone switching had yet to be invented, so they had to hire young women to work the manual switchboard in an airless closet. Can you imagine saying all day, "Wells, Rich, Greene, can I help you?" I guess that the invention of modern, automated phone hell has passed the suffering, in some kind of zero-sum way, from the suffocating phone-closet workers to the clients.

Relative to other agency heads, Mary had a good record regarding the hiring and promotion of women. Ann-Marie Light, Carole Anne Fine, and Jackie End were a few of the hardworking and accomplished creatives who held responsible positions at Wells. As elsewhere, however, the majority of the women in the agency were concentrated in low-paying, low-status jobs, such as secretarial or the typing pool.

Among the other personalities at the agency was the late Pat Weaver, the former NBC executive who had invented the Today Show and the Tonight Show. A former radio man, he had also invented the idea of having the network, not the sponsor, produce the shows, which would then sell advertising minutes to multiple sponsors. He is, perhaps, even better known to the public as the father of Sigourney, who is two years younger than me.

I never met the future actress, but I did meet Kitty Hawks at the agency. She's the daughter of Howard Hawks, the director of many classic Hollywood movies. Kitty, who is a couple of years older than me, has in the meantime become a hall-of-fame interior designer. She lists Tom Brokaw, Mike Nichols, and Diane Sawyer among her clients.

Stan Dragoti, a top art director at the agency, married the supermodel Cheryl Tiegs in 1970. He went on to direct several Hollywood movies, including Dirty Little Billy (1972) starring Michael J Pollard. Charlie Moss, a top writer in the agency and its future president, wrote the screenplay for the movie. The joke around the office that everybody had a screenplay in their bottom drawer turned out to be no joke at all.

I learned that most campaigns are done in teams consisting of a writer and a director, if it were for TV, or a writer and an art director, if it were for print. And that a campaign succeeded if and only if the two creatives were able to work together as a team. An important part of the creative manager's job was, therefore, knowing who to pair with whom.

Advertising is a high-stakes, hardball business, and Mary's detractors sometimes called her the "queen of the black widow spiders." Perhaps this was because she was well focused on her agency's success, or because she sometimes dressed entirely in black. Most agencies were, and probably still are, old-boy, mirroring the culture of their Fortune 500 clients. Mary, however, was neither old nor a boy, and the rest of the industry resented her taking away some of what they felt was "their" business.

Sydney, the woman who once had a crush on me, worked for one of the account executives. Unlike the rest of us, they needed to deal directly with their corporate clients. Conspicuous in their gray business suits, they were known for being exceptionally unhip. As far as we were concerned, anyone who wore a suit was taking an aggressive, in-your-face, sellout position.

If, on the other hand, you were over thirty, but you worked in the art department and wore multicolored, flowered shirts, bell-bottom pants, and Carnaby Street leather boots, then you were sort-of okay. After all, being over thirty wasn't entirely your fault.

Looking back, it seems that to succeed in the high-flying world of Mary, Charlie, and Stan, you had to be exceptionally talented or intelligent; you had to be aggressive, energetic, or ambitious; and it didn't hurt to throw in a little personal style as well.

As far as my own career in advertising was concerned, I was oh-for-everything.

Living In The City

This was before the automatic teller machine. You had to stand in line at the bank and cash or deposit your paycheck at the teller window. This was also before graffiti. Public art (and outdoor advertising) had been around in New York for a long time, but it had never before taken on such a destructive or vandalistic character.

One thing you had to love about New Yorkers, even before September 11, 2001, was that they had great battle stories. Like the worker at our agency who on two separate occasions was stuck underground in Queens on the E or F train. To escape, she needed to crawl through the same manhole both times. And she was a large woman. Welcome to New York, where the people are tenacious and can endure almost anything.

I felt bad for the horny thirty-or-forty-year-old men in the office who had come of age at a time when you had to marry a woman before you could see her naked. The young women of the late 1960s blew the minds of their older and more love-deprived male counterparts by fucking them with abandon and introducing them to the joys of guilt-free and romance-free love.

Leaving the complications of sexual activity to others, I discovered that the best way to see New York after hours was by foot. I walked the neighborhoods and soaked up the smells and noises of the City from Houston Street to the nineties, and from river to river. (What is now called South of Houston Street, or SOHO, was then largely undeveloped.) One of the few things I knew about the City after growing up in the suburbs was not to get caught in Harlem after midnight while white.

The gay guys in Greenwich Village looked at you as if you were a piece of meat. I quickly learned how to affect a fast and purposeful walk.

There are several foods I can't get outside New York and miss terribly. To name three: bagels, deli sandwiches, and great Chinese takeout. For years after leaving the City, I often awoke in the middle of the night with the most powerful craving for a hot pastrami sandwich. I was like a pregnant woman — nothing other than that specific food would satisfy me. Life away from New York was a tough proposition, and the first few decades were the hardest.

Take the simple bagel. Wherever I go outside the City, merchants will try to sell you what they loosely call a "bagel." This is a piece of bread in the shape of a doughnut. I've eaten many pieces of bread in the shape of doughnuts in my day, but no matter how tasty, they aren't bagels. A bagel is chewy, not bread-y. Any New Yorker can tell you that a bagel is made by boiling the dough in water before baking. I say, let's have some real bagels outside of New York.

Dream on.

Ditto for deli sandwiches. I've had one or two decent sandwiches outside of New York, perhaps, but I've never had anything even remotely approaching an authentic delicatessen ham and Swiss cheese on rye bread, with lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise, which you can get anywhere in New York.

Double ditto for Chinese food. You can get great take-out in almost any residential neighborhood. The more of a hole-in-the-wall, the better. To this day, whenever I see a Chinese restaurant with no ambiance whatsoever, with nothing on the walls except maybe a crooked, out-of-date calendar, I'm tempted to try the egg rolls. When I do, I'm usually disappointed. As far as food is concerned, New York has spoiled me rotten.

For good food, I say, move over, California, New York is the place. California is about rules, do's and don't's. New York is about enjoyment. California is about your hippie Mom telling you to eat your vegetables, because they're good for you. New York is about your Jewish or Italian Momma cooking all day for you and insisting that you eat some more because you're getting too skinny, already. The former is about ideology, the idea that the body is a machine; the latter is about love.

The streets of New York, however, were dangerous. I was mugged twice in two years. Both times, I was close to home, as often happens. This may seem quaint, but there was then a kind of gentleman's agreement, if you will, that said that if the muggee gave up his money, then the mugger would let him go unharmed. That was before the escalation of weapons from knives to guns. I'm told that now, they'll take your money first, and then kill you for good measure.

Even if you're a white boy from the suburbs, you learn a little street smarts. Like avoiding any sidewalk that doesn't feel quite right. And if the opposite sidewalk is no better, learning how to walk down the middle of the street, doing the mambo and the shake with the maniac cab drivers.

Congratulations, you are now a New Yorker.

Dog droppings littered the sidewalks in the residential neighborhoods, creating quite an obstacle course. After I left, Mayor Ed Koch would introduce New Yorkers to the pooper scooper.

Part 2: Musical Interludes

While walking along the East River waterfront one evening, I met a wooden flute player named Roberto. He said he was from Seattle by way of San Francisco. He looked a little seedy, and Dennis, ever the hard-bitten, skeptical New Yorker, advised me not to trust him. (It turned out that Roberto was his street name. His real name was Robert, and he was white.)

Roberto said he was looking for musicians with whom to start a band. I said I played a little bass guitar, so I became the second member of the band. It seemed that most of the other musicians we played with were junkies, and therefore unreliable. To be sure, all addicts were bad, but none were quite as bad as the heroin addicts. As Dennis put it, "In New York, everyone hates junkies, but everyone is a junkie."

On one occasion, we played with a talented young blues guitarist who was from New York and who was a chain cigarette-smoking heroin addict. But I repeat myself. We were doing a song Roberto had written called "God Bless America," which is in 3/4 time and has no relationship, other than the title, to the eponymous song by Irving Berlin. For a few memorable moments, the guitarist, who was looking for a way into the song, played an arpeggiated version of the Berlin melody, which is in 4/4, over top. Amazingly, it worked, in a strange, but powerful, way. That's the kind of creative player this guy was. It's unfortunate that he never came back, and that we would never find a steady player to take over the lead.

Roberto had recently sold his eclectic San Francisco bohemian proto-flower-power songs to a local jeweler who was dabbling in the music business. I'm told that all businessmen like to think of themselves as artists at heart, and that the music business is filled with people like him. They're keenly aware that, although they may have money, they have no class, no refinement. We, a couple of ragged hippies from the tenement district, became his artistic class and refinement. From our side, the problem was that the businessman knew nothing about music. He dealt with us as if he were buying scrap metal at a warehouse in New Jersey.

I met the jeweler once, when we all went uptown to record a demo in his cramped studio space. I'm sure you can find do-it-yourself sleazeballs like him in all the creative centers like New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville.

Soon after, Roberto met a talented jazz/blues keyboard player called Chuck, who played with us awhile. On one occasion, we all went uptown to the apartment of a clarinet player named Hopkins, another friend of Roberto's. After a couple of numbers, Roberto spotted a pretty girl sitting on the couch. Diane was polite, well-dressed, middle-class, in her early-to-mid-twenties. I don't know what she was doing there — maybe she was a friend of Hopkins. We took a break from the music, and Roberto spent the rest of the afternoon coming on to her. To my amazement, she went for it. Roberto looked a good decade older than his thirty-six years. He had the perpetual look of a guy who had just hitchhiked from California, sleeping in abandoned warehouses along the way. In other words, irresistible to women.

Our drummer was classically trained and technically competent, I suppose, but in my opinion, he couldn't play rock-'n'-roll. For about fifteen minutes in the late 1960s, it was cool in certain uptown musical circles to be in a rock band on the side. His Dad was a Broadway musician who lived in the suburbs. We all went there once. It was awful — the sterile, isolated, detached houses with neatly clipped lawns, like on TV. There was a music room with a big picture window and a piano — a real luxury for us. We tried rehearsing a little, but nobody could get into the mood. It was like being in a fish tank. Then we had to deal with the mother, a typical middle-class housewife, who offered us Pepsi's and tried to make small talk with a bunch of stoned-out hippies. It was painful for all parties.

The drummer was good with the other instruments, however. On one occasion back in the City, he picked up my bass during a break in the rehearsal and played a riff that turned my head around. It was a cool run up and down the fretboard with numerous accidentals, almost like a halftone scale. Having learned a straight blues scale, I didn't know you were allowed to use that many accidentals. It blew me away, and my bass playing hasn't been the same since.

My favorite bass players were Chris Hillman of the Byrds and Paul McCartney of the Beatles. Hillman was a former bluegrass mandolin player and McCartney had moved from guitar to bass after the departure of their regular bassist from an early version of the band. Each player had broken new ground in bringing out the melodic capabilities of the instrument.

Sweet Street Music

On the street, Roberto played a Chinese wooden flute, Chuck played an acoustic six-string guitar, and I followed along with a pair of wood blocks. In Chuck's absence, I would fill in to the best of my ability on guitar. Roberto sometimes brought Diane along. Her wholesome prettiness and big, toothpaste smile helped when it came time to pass the hat in front of the office drones.

To overcome the street noise, you needed to play loud. You were competing with sirens, taxis honking, the din of a thousand vehicles. You needed to cut through the city noise with a noise of your own, one that was powerful, compelling, and consistent. As they say in the business, righteous.

People would sometimes come up to us and ask if we wanted to play at their private parties. Musicians who had done such gigs warned us that they weren't much fun.

When Diane wasn't with us, we usually put a hat on the sidewalk. If you were off that day, you might get a few quarters here and there. If you were on top of your game, however, if you got the rhythm going, then change and dollar bills would fall from the sky like a rain shower. People would sometimes leave us food or even an occasional joint or piece of hashish wrapped in tin foil.

The cliché about New Yorkers being the toughest and most discriminating audience in the world is true. They've seen and heard it all. If you're no good, they'll walk right by you, barely acknowledging your presence. But if you're good, they're the most generous and openhearted audience in the world.

On one occasion, we were playing in front of a skyscraper on Sixth Avenue when a young woman came up and stood a few feet in front of us. Her smile was so intense that I almost fell over backwards in mid-number.

On another occasion, a police officer who was walking by kicked our hat, scattering the change over the sidewalk. If I could have gotten away with it, I would have shot him and his partner in the back.

The evil cops notwithstanding, the street is a compelling place to play. You can reach everyone there, not just those who can afford to buy tickets and not just those who are in the mood for formal, structured entertainment.

Americans, unique in the world, see the street player as just slightly above a panhandler or bum. In American musical culture, street players are okay only if they later redeem themselves by cutting an album with a mainstream label. Most people don't think of street music as a legitimate form of expression in its own right or on its own terms. This is how conditioned we all are by the commercial culture, an oxymoron if there ever was one.

On the contrary, there are many wonderful players out there. Some choose to go commercial and some don't. Many prefer the street, which is a far more direct and democratic way to reach the public.

Good music is where you find it.

Magic Mushrooms

I didn't know much about drugs, except for the occasional joint and maybe a toke or two every now and then off the hash pipe. Dennis told me that when you're on LSD, you can see all the "trips" that people are on. I later discovered how right he was. You see all the personas, costumes, and characters that people put on. It's funny and frightening, like a grade-B horror/comedy movie.

Roberto got his hands on some hits of organic magic mushrooms in powdered, capsulized form, and laid a couple on me. We all agreed that this particular batch was unusually subtle. Maybe it was because it was my first trip, but I've never since had drugs that good. I dropped late one afternoon after a rehearsal, when the music was still fresh in my ears and most of the instruments were still lying around the apartment. I picked up the bass and started to play. The sound was mesmerizing.

I had briefly played a couple of musical instruments in school and sung in my junior high school choir, all with limited success. Whatever reading skills I may have had, I had long since forgotten. My silver flute teacher told my parents that I had the best tones he had heard in a beginner, but that my sense of rhythm was terrible. On the other hand, I loved to listen to rock-'n'-roll and wanted to learn how to play it.

Roberto usually gave me the bass lines to his songs. He would play them on the bottom four strings of his guitar, which are tuned an octave above the four bass strings. I'd usually play the lines just as he had. He often criticized my playing for being too robotic, which it was.

To keep time, I had to count, "one, two, three, four," in my head. I was playing with my head, a big no-no in the emotional world of rock-'n'-roll.

At a certain point in the mushrooms trip, the rhythm in my body took over and I was able to play a steady beat without thinking about it. Everything I do today rhythmically comes out of that trip.

Our culture prohibits drugs, with about as much success as it had with the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s. Traditional cultures have taken a more sophisticated approach. The shaman or medicine man would administer, monitor, and coach the psychedelic sessions. They didn't try to stamp out drugs, or punish or incarcerate their way out of a substance problem.

On a subsequent trip, I wrote down a quatrain, the first two lines of which I've forgotten. The last lines were:

It cannot be expressed in any language

It is expressed in only one language

I say, "wrote down" because my understanding was that the thoughts themselves had been around from time immemorial, from the ancient mystics to present-day seekers.

Most nights we rehearsed electrified versions of Roberto's songs. They're hard to describe, as is much original music. Let's say, folk/country/blues, by way of Haight-Ashbury, with colorful melodies and lyrics. Roberto was the best writer I ever played with, and he was a decent singer and guitar player, too.

Roberto said that if you went to a music publisher's office and there were ten aspiring songwriters waiting in the lobby, there would be ten Bob Dylan's. Roberto refused to listen to Bob, knowing that his act was so compelling that he, Roberto, might get sucked into it, too. He was afraid that he, too, might start sounding whiny, or pretentious, or grandiose.

That's how powerful Dylan's voice was in the 1960s. Some writers consciously tried to imitate him; the rest consciously tried not to.

Despite my increasing taste for the garage and the street, I continued to attend formal, sit-down musical events. On one occasion, Panzer and I dropped into one of the venerable Greenwich Village nightclubs, possibly the Vanguard or the Gate. On the bill that night were Karen Dalton, the blues singer, and Tim Hardin, a talented folk singer whose songs have been covered by such major artists as Bobby Darin, Johnny Cash, and Rod Stewart.

After Dalton's set, the lights lowered and the room quieted as Hardin staggered onstage. If a man can be said to be three sheets to an alcoholic wind, then Hardin that night was about nine sheets to a ferocious narcotic gale. Panzer declared in a low voice, "Holy Shit." Hardin leaned precariously toward the mike and said, "'Holy Shit.' I heard that out there," and began his set.

Dalton, who never achieved commercial success despite critical acclaim, died of AIDS after years of homelessness and poverty, and Hardin would die before his fortieth birthday.

The Fillmore East

The days of being able to hear Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and other seminal artists in an intimate coffeehouse setting were long over, however. As folk gave way to rock, the musical action shifted from the Village clubs to the Fillmore East theater on lower Second Avenue. The latter wasn't the best-paying job for a band, but it became so well known nationwide that it was a must-play for any serious rock band. (According to one source, more than thirty live albums were recorded there in its three-plus years of existence.)

A converted movie theater, the Fillmore seated about twenty-six hundred, including the balcony. There were two shows each on Friday and Saturday. Not being much of a late-night person, I usually went to the early, 8:00, show. The 11:30 shows had a reputation for being even more fun, however, because there was no strict time limit and the musicians were able to extend their jams into the wee hours.

Tickets went for the grand sum of $3.50, $4.50, and $5.50 each. There was no service charge. That's roughly $20, $25, and $30 in today's money.

The master of ceremonies was Bill Graham, the owner, or Kip Cohen, the local manager. Bill split his time between the two concert halls he had founded, the Fillmore East and the Fillmore West in San Francisco. He was a controversial, larger-than-life character. A gifted impresario, he had no use for us hippies, except, of course, that we bought most of the tickets to his shows. He thought nothing of driving a gaudy Mercedes-Benz at a time of widespread contempt for conspicuous consumption. Nevertheless, he was The Man when it came to putting on great shows.

We saw Led Zeppelin on their first or second American tour. Robert Plant, the lead singer, and John Bonham, the drummer, were both younger than me. The musical exchanges between Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page were priceless.

On another weekend, the members of the Mothers of Invention ran up and down the aisles during their set. Meanwhile, Frank Zappa, the band leader, talked from the stage in his usual dry, sarcastic way about being under pressure from the music industry to bring his band up to "professional standards."

The Jefferson Airplane performed at the Fillmore on their farewell tour, just before they became the Starship.

The best show I saw was The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. A masterful entertainer, Brown made his stage appearance on what appeared to be a construction crane. Though his set was divided into individual songs, it seemed one continuous, high-energy piece of music.

Though a businessman first, Bill Graham, to his credit, went out of his way to introduce his Baby Boomer audiences to the American roots music.

Chuck Berry had a habit of traveling solo to his gigs and working with a local pick-up band. I remember him stomping his feet on the Fillmore stage, trying to get the band to pick up on the beat. There's nothing worse than having to fight your own rhythm section.

I was able to get a front row seat for the Albert King show. He walked onto the stage and set up just a few feet in front of me. A left-hander, he was playing a guitar that was strung for a right-hander. (Most lefties change the strings around so that they can use the same fingering techniques that righties use on a right-handed guitar.) He announced, "I just drank a bottle of wine — you know I've got The Blues," and launched into a scorching set. I've never heard anyone crank up a blues guitar like that, before or since, and I've seen most of the greats.

BB King was the king of smooth, polished big-city blues, and a great showman.

Other acts I saw, many of them heavily influenced by the Blues, included the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Amboy Dukes, the Nice, Taj Mahal, Bobby Blue Bland, John Hammond, Jr, Tim Buckley, Ten Years After, Johnny Winter, Jethro Tull, the Buddy Miles Express, Lee Michaels, Savoy Brown, the Elvin Bishop Group, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, NRBQ (the New Rhythm & Blues Quartet), and Mountain with Leslie West.

I saw many shows, and I have the hearing loss today to prove it. A typical band opened its set with a slow-to-mid-tempo blues number, paying their respects to the roots music and getting their fingers warmed up. Then they went into their own music. Most of the British bands featured a disciplined form of musical craftsmanship that almost gave the impression of musical literacy. As a rule, the American bands were a bit more rough-and-tumble, more physical, and could pound out some great rock-'n'-roll. I generally preferred the Brits.

In August of my first year in the city, I caught a ride with my friend John Rossi and his friend Vicki Webb to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in upstate New York. The crowd was enormous, well beyond anyone's expectations, and there were few amenities. On the contrary, we were all sitting in a corn field miles from the nearest town. My friends had had the foresight to bring a tent, but I was woefully unprepared for the rain. I ended up sheltering in John's car for most of the weekend.

The logistics were a challenge for the bands, as well. The state highway was closed, and they had to be flown in by helicopter. As a result, there was often a three or four hour wait between acts.

Despite the problems, the vibes were exceptionally mellow all weekend, and the spirit of cooperation was palpable. Woodstock was unlike anything we had seen before or would ever see again.

The mass media covered the event as little more than a muddy curiosity, yet another silly excess of a spoiled generation that had known neither the economic deprivation of the Great Depression nor the bloody sacrifice of World War II. With or without official approval, however, our generation had begun to assert itself, to define the contours of its own culture and values.

The following year, a song written by Joni Mitchell and a feature-length documentary movie (both of them entitled "Woodstock") were released to widespread acclaim. The event would enter into the popular imagination as a musical and cultural high point of the 1960s.

Berkeley

Restless, Panzer and I decided to fly to San Francisco and check out the scene, before it was too late. (The Summer of Love had happened two years before.) A day or two after our arrival, my mother showed up unannounced on the streets of Berkeley, wearing a peace medallion around her neck and giving us the peace sign. She was there to visit Merle, a friend of hers from work who was about my age. We argued about the musical Hair. My mother liked the show, but Merle thought it was for "them," the straight people, the old people. I've never seen the show or the movie, but I do know that I hate the music.

A few days later, we subleased an apartment on Bonita Avenue in Berkeley, where we would stay for the last month of the decade of the 1960s. The regular tenants, a couple, were out of town for the holidays. We figured that they must have been communists, or socialists, or some such thing. Who else would have the complete works of Karl Marx in their bedroom?

The good news for Easterners in California was that the traffic stopped in both directions for pedestrians in the crosswalk. The bad news was that the cops gave tickets for jaywalking. In contrast, the attitude of the New York City police seemed to be, "If you think you can make it to the other side, be our guests, go ahead and try."

Hitchhiking was easy and relatively safe, if you were male. There seemed to be a lot of guys simply driving around town at night in their junkers, picking up freaks and taking them wherever they were going. A free taxi service.

The social life in California was fluid and spontaneous. If you said, I'll meet you tonight at six o'clock, and they were late, it was assumed that something else more compelling had come along, and you would continue your trip without them. There was almost no such thing as a social faux pas.

Likewise, the living arrangements in the Bay Area were different. We found it amusing that one might, for example, easily find a biker living next door to a nuclear physicist, next to a cop, next to a flower child. And nobody seemed to mind much.

The Fillmore West in San Francisco was a big ballroom with wide open spaces in front of the stage. The West had a dance format, as opposed to the more formal reserved seating at the East. Like the East, there were four shows per week at the West, but they were scheduled for one each night from Thursday through Sunday. This gave the bands more opportunity for extended jams, as was the style on the West Coast. The shows were usually over by midnight, in keeping with the tradition of earlier bedtimes in California.

At the West, Bill Graham himself sometimes took the tickets at the door. He would never do such a thing at the East.

One of the most infamous rock concerts of all time, the Rolling Stones show at the Altamont Speedway in the East Bay, and subject of the movie Gimme Shelter, happened soon after we arrived. As the story goes, the Stones had hired the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang as "security." They beat up anyone who got too close to the stage, and even killed a young man who dared to fight back. We didn't go to the show, thank goodness, but we did see several black-and-blue concertgoers the next day on the streets of Berkeley.

Altamont was another turning point for the Movement. Woodstock was on its way to becoming a symbol of peace through music, the best of our ideals, and Altamont quickly came to symbolize the excesses. The drugs, the arrogance, and the stupidity of it all had caught up with us and turned on us.

In late December, we went to see Sly and the Family Stone at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. After the show, Panzer took me into the dressing room and introduced me to Sly.

At the end of the month, the communists returned. The apartment was by then overrun by all the cats we had befriended in the meantime. Panzer and I grabbed our bags and sheepishly slipped out the door, tripping over a few panicky kitties on the way.

The Movement

Despite the problems associated with the commercial star system, the rock concert had emerged as the most important public art form of the 1960s. These shows were often the only places we freaks and misfits saw each other. We felt a sense of belonging in the electrically charged atmosphere of a rock show, a feeling we felt few other places. A typical rap from the stage between songs went something like this: "This is our country, man. It doesn't belong to them — it belongs to us." Forty years later, I still believe these things.

In the old days, we were all lowercase children of god, charged with the simple yet grand task of caring for each other without regard to differences, as often happens within marginalized, outsider groups. We believed that our highest ideals could be the template for what America could become. A nation that takes care of its own people and, not coincidentally, of its natural resources and natural beauty, too.

In the late 1960s, however, a base strain of religiosity began to infect the youth culture. The cults came along, including a pseudo-Christian group, a spitting insult to the mainstream church, let alone to the historical Jesus of Nazareth, calling itself the Children of God. They did street-corner recruiting in the major cities. This may have been a hip thing to do at the time, but it turned out that COG advocated child rape and forcing its women members into prostitution.

That was the end of that. Opportunists, and worse, had hijacked our language and our movement, enslaved our sisters and brothers, and traumatized our children. So it remains today. Many of the cults from that era are still in operation.

East Tenth Street

Back in New York, I moved from the 29th Street loft to my own apartment, a walkup in the "East Village" (a real-estate marketing term for the Lower East Side). The apartment was above a used-tire store on Tenth Street between First and Second Avenues. The neighborhood was a Puerto Rican barrio. My building was narrow and deep, much like the other tenements on the block. There were four identical one-bedroom apartments on each floor, two in the front and two in the rear, with a urine-stained stairwell in the middle. Each apartment had a bathtub in the kitchen. Mine was on the fifth, and top, floor, overlooking lovely Tenth Street.

When I moved in, the apartment had no electricity. This meant, among other things, that we couldn't plug in our amps. I did, however, prevail on my next-door neighbor, Señora Inocencia Diaz, to let us use one of her outlets. She had two pictures on the wall of her front room: Jesus Christ and John F Kennedy.

She gamely put up with us awhile, but not being much of a rock-'n'-roll fan, I guess, she pulled the plug on us in mid-practice. I had to go down to Con Edison and get the power situation straightened out. The previous tenant had apparently left without paying the bill.

Same with the telephone. I had no phone service, so my friends and band mates had to leave messages with poor Mrs Diaz.

She lived by herself and must have been a little lonely, as she often stopped me in the hallway for a chat, not minding that my Spanish was even more rudimentary than her English.

I haven't been back to East Tenth Street, but I'm told that the neighborhood has long since been Yuppified with Häagen-Dazs stores and the like. (I guess the "East Village" marketing ploy worked.) My brother kids me that had I stayed, I'd be a millionaire by now. Maybe so. Nevertheless, my advice to neighborhoods that find themselves in such a situation is to Just Say Nope to Yup. My advice to Yuppies is, keep your distance until you get a real job, a blue-collar job, or get old. The combination of young, urban, and professional is way too much for any self-respecting working-class neighborhood to handle.

It is often said that New York has several of whatever other cities have one of, and this is true of ghettos as well. There were at least four large human disaster areas in the wealthiest city in the country: Harlem, of course, Bedford-Styvesant in Brooklyn, the South Bronx, and our neighborhood, the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The Deep Ghetto

Roberto's wife Annie joined him in the City. On their way home from the Village in their flowing hippie clothes, they cut striking figures as they swept along St Mark's Place near the Cooper Union cube sculpture. Annie made beautiful clothes from antique velvets and other fabrics she bought at garage sales.

Roberto and Annie lived on Eleventh or Twelfth Street between Avenues A and B. Their block made mine look like Mr Rogers' Neighborhood. There were gunfights nearly every night, and the cops refused to go there. There was no water, hot or cold, in their building, nor did the landlord require a lease. It was like camping out, but in the City. Without locks on the doors, one could expect frequent robberies. If you wanted to keep your dope or money, you had to hide it somewhere a thief couldn't find it. Anything left in the open inside your apartment was considered fair game.

The landlord would come by once a month and collect whatever rent he could from each tenant. Sixty bucks would usually buy him off. The citywide standard was at least a hundred a month for a legal apartment with working utilities and your own key. (I was paying about $140 for my walkup.)

Most of the front doors I had seen outside of New York had two locks. One cheapo lock in the doorknob, which a thief could quickly and easily defeat. The second lock would typically be a dead-bolt, which takes a skilled thief several minutes to pick. For additional protection, you could reinforce the door and jam with metal strips. In the City, that was just the beginning. Most people had one or two additional locks, often including a three-eighths-inch-diameter iron bar that braced the door from the inside.

The important thing was the intimidation factor. The thinking was, if your door had four locks on it, then people would be less likely to mess with it than with a door down the hall or down the block that only had three locks.

People often played their radios loudly when they were out of their apartments, in the hope of creating the impression that someone was home. You don't want to barge in on someone in New York. They'll kill you.

On one occasion, I took the subway down to the warehouse district to meet Roberto at a drug dealer's loft. Few people lived in the neighborhood, but this guy had an incredible setup. High ceilings and what seemed like acres of floor space in a notoriously cramped city. A few years later, the world would discover SOHO loft living, and the rest is history.

The housing market in the late 1960s and early 1970s was tight, but the job market was good. Roberto, however, was on welfare, and the welfare office had begun to pressure able-bodied men to get jobs. They found him a prospective job as a messenger. He had to interview for it or face losing his check. The interviewer asked him two questions: Do you know the City? Roberto said, no. Have you ever worked as a messenger before? Again, Roberto said, no.

They hired him anyway, and for the next several months, Roberto spent his days riding busses around Manhattan.

Part 3: Vancouver

In the spring of 1971, Annie and her newborn baby moved to the Washington, DC, area to live with her mother, and Roberto left for unknown parts. I, too, had tired of the big, gray city, and decided to take off for the Pacific Coast. I had heard that Vancouver, British Columbia, was a "happening" place for young people. The Haight-Ashbury scene was over, and I guessed, correctly as it turned out, that the scene a thousand miles north in Vancouver would still be vital and interesting.

Driving in a secondhand Volkswagen Squareback my dad had bought me, I crossed the border into Canada the first evening of my trip. On my way west along the Trans-Canada Highway, I stayed in government-run youth hostels, at the grand cost of fifty cents a night. They were quaint, almost normal, establishments, with separate dorms for boys and girls. The people who ran them were earnest, wide-eyed, well-scrubbed, young social-worker types. Kind of square, like an older sibling, but not really, really square, like your parents.

The Canadian winters are long and tough, and the coming of the short summer season is most welcome. There was a tradition of hitchhiking around the country after school let out. Canada is the second largest country in the world and one of the most beautiful. What struck me was that Canadians had a much less adversarial relationship with their government (and with everything else) than we Americans did. Most Canadians assumed that government programs were there for everyone's benefit and didn't seem to mind paying for them. In contrast, Americans were at each other's throats over just about everything.

Shortly after arriving in Vancouver, I rented a room in the hippie district on East Seventh Avenue between Quebec and Ontario Streets. It was a shared house, or, loosely speaking, an urban commune. The monthly rent was $250, and I took one of the five bedrooms for fifty dollars a month.

Michael Martin-Pipe (his pen name, or, rather, his pipe name) was the master of ceremonies. He and his girlfriend Janice held the lease and slept in the master bedroom. He was a drug dealer with long fingernails and straight brown hair down to the middle of his back. She was a tough chick from back east who liked to dress up and carry dope through the airports without getting caught. They also ran a boutique on Main Street called the Legal Front (no kidding), a hippie capitalist adventure.

Janice's younger sister Kim and their friend Andrea also lived in the house. By the following winter Peter and his old lady had joined us. He kept body and soul together by doing house painting and odd jobs for a straight landlord friend of theirs.

Among the visitors at the house was Johnny Gyp-Rock, a former construction worker with missing front teeth. Another was Adrian, better known as Nose, a famously intrepid hitchhiker. Peter was fond of telling stories about traveling in the American South with his friend Nose. It seemed that, on one occasion, Peter and his wife had tired of the road and decided to fly to Denver, their next destination. They took a hotel room for the night, while Nose continued to hitchhike. To Peter's astonishment, Nose was in Denver waiting for them the next day when they arrived. It seemed that he had gotten a ride the night before, and had prevailed on the driver to allow him to drive all night.

I quickly discovered that the style of policing on the West Coast was different. With my long hair, I was an easy target, once getting picked up on what I call a triple-W (Walking While White).

I decided to try my hand at solo street music in downtown Vancouver. I ended up making more noise on the guitar than money. Maybe some solo players can make a go of it, but I usually did better in groups.

Guitar players were a dime a dozen; almost every guy I knew owned one. A word about traveling with a guitar. If your old lady was with you, and there was only one extra seat in the car, the misogynistic musicians' code of the time called for the guitar to get the seat, while she rode in the back. Women come and go, but a musician gets attached to his instrument.

I met a player called Al. He was from Quebec and was on the run from the law. I never worked up the courage to ask him what for.

Al's friend Denny was the consummate window man, but Al was good, too. On one occasion, Al and I pulled up next to two high school girls who were walking in Stanley Park. They climbed into the back seat at Al's invitation. I don't remember what happened to Al's girl, but Al and I and my girl eventually ended up at my house. After a while he said good-bye to us, leaving us sitting alone on the living room couch. After a long silence, I rose and motioned for her to come upstairs with me. In my room, I climbed onto the mattress in the loft. She did the same. We sat cross-legged, yogi-style facing each other. I lit a big, fat torpedo and took a toke. I gave it to her and she took a drag.

A couple of days later I got home and her father was stomping around the house looking for me. Eventually he left. Michael almost tossed him out.

A few months later, I met a young woman who worked in a doughnut shop in downtown Vancouver. I drove to her house in the suburbs to pick her up for a date. Not wanting her parents to see me, she came running out of her house when I pulled up. At that point I probably looked like a drowned rat. I guess women of a certain age like to go with "bad" guys.

On another occasion, I was playing outside the public library in downtown Vancouver when a young woman walked by. She stopped to talk and we went to her apartment in an upscale high-rise on the waterfront. She sat me down in a chair and started to try to brush out the tangles of my matted hair. When she got close enough, I tried to grab her butt. She jumped back, saying, "Not yet." I teased her about the "yet" part.

She was open about being a prostitute. We ended up at my house. I gathered that the apartment wasn't hers; she was just crashing there.

We had sex. Later that night, she got me talking about myself, who I was and where I was coming from. My travels from New Jersey to New York to Vancouver. My first ever extended conversation with a woman. Before I knew it, the day had begun to break. Boy, was I ever filled up with myself. I had gone on all night about myself.

We decided to take a walk to nearby Queen E Park and greet the morning light there. The park offers a panoramic view of the city. On the way home, she offered to fuck me again when we got back to the house. I felt as if she were treating me like a trick. Maybe she treats all men like tricks, I thought. Nevertheless, I took her up on the offer.

Afterwards, we went downstairs and I introduced her to Al, who was sitting at the kitchen table with his guitar. A few minutes later, she left, and I never saw her again.

Janice criticized my liaison with the woman, not because she was a prostitute, but because of her tender age. Janice had a big mouth and I never asked for her opinion. I countered that the woman is already a mother. Janice countered that the baby wasn't with her, so she wasn't a mother in the full sense of the term. I guess she had a point.

On another occasion, I was playing guitar by myself in my room when a young woman walked in, sat on the floor next to me, and silently pressed her knee against mine. I climbed to the loft and threw off my clothes. She joined me there and threw off her clothes, too. The next morning she disappeared without a word.

A few days later, I noticed a discharge. The staff at the free clinic gave me a hard time, wanting to know whom I had gotten the disease from. I told them, "Kathy." They kept asking, "Kathy who?" but I didn't know her last name. The pills they gave me cleared up the infection.

Several months later, I was standing at a downtown bus stop when Kathy got off the bus. She recognized me, came over, and said she was sorry about what had happened. I said, don't worry about it. I wanted to jump right back in bed with a woman who had once given me the clap.

Despite the problems, Canadian women made me feel warm and accepted in a way that American women hadn't. Canadian women seemed to like American men. I guess our presence in their country meant more opportunities for them.

Canadian men, on the other hand, assumed that if you were an American, you were a DD (draft dodger), an interloper. I had heard that there were a zillion guys from New York hanging out in Toronto for the duration of the war.

I bought a twelve-foot canvas teepee at a local teepee store. After waterproofing, it shrank to eleven feet. I also bought some 2x2's at a lumber warehouse to use for poles. The teepee was just roomy enough for one or two sleeping bags.

People have strong reactions to a teepee. Some love it; others hate it. If you care what other people think, if you need their approval, don't live in a teepee.

There seemed to be more people in Vancouver in the summer than in the winter. It has a vacation-y, touristy feeling. Southwestern BC is the only place in Canada I know of that doesn't have a brutal, deep-frozen winter. It rains in Vancouver in the late fall and early winter, but it doesn't snow much in the lower elevations.

Experts on such matters say that Winnipeg, Manitoba, is perhaps the coldest city of its size in North America, with Edmonton, Alberta, a close second.

The cold may partly explain why most of the Canadians I met were heavy drinkers and smokers, often rolling their own cigarettes. One gets the picture of people living in cabins in the woods with little else to do for all those long winter nights.

Vancouver, however, had a real social life revolving around Gastown, the historic downtown bar-and-restaurant district. This was also the place to go to score drugs. You could try the marijuana inside the bar, but the deal itself happened outside. Such was the arrangement among the dealers, the buying public, and the police.

That was the good news. The bad news was that the grass was often cut with tobacco. I guess the dealers assumed that most customers were already tobacco smokers, and would not notice or not mind the difference. As I wasn't a tobacco smoker, the tobacco-laced grass would take my head off. I gave up on Canadian "grass."

Trust me, tobacco is more powerful than marijuana.

Gabriola Island

While in Vancouver, I met a fellow space-traveler named Larry. He was into yoga, sometimes standing on his hands for hours at a time or swallowing medical gauze to cleanse his stomach. He had once been a cop in Chicago. This fact amused us greatly, as most of us rarely did anything that was, strictly speaking, legal.

He was also thirty years old, another possible cause for suspicion. In the early 1960s, Jack Weinberg of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, said, "We have a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over thirty." (He himself had turned thirty by the time I arrived in Canada.) In the interim, every self-appointed, media-crazy "spokesman for a generation" had repeated the slogan, not minding that our movement was largely leaderless and that we were all quite capable of speaking for ourselves.

While relations with our parents were often difficult, it wasn't true that we didn't trust anyone over thirty. Among those we held in high regard were the baby doctor Benjamin Spock, the presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, the folk singer Pete Seeger, and the LSD and meditation guru Timothy Leary, all of whom are older than my parents. To our way of thinking, the soul was eternal. (It may also be that grandparent figures are more approachable and less threatening than disciplinary parental figures.)

Larry and I got sick of the city and decided to visit some friends of his on Gabriola Island. It's in the Gulf Islands between the BC mainland and rustic, sparsely populated Vancouver Island. You have to take two ferries to get there from Vancouver, changing in Nanaimo. I wanted to pitch my teepee somewhere other than the tiny backyard of our house in the city.

In those days it was important to keep moving. We believed that if we stayed too long in any one place, we would end up getting comfortable, and married, with a job, a career, and a house, like the straight people. With something to lose, we would become resistant to change. If you weren't in constant motion, always open to new ideas, new people and places, you couldn't continue to grow and become the fully individuated person you were meant to be.

The politics on the island were as follows: Larry's friend Clayton and his old lady Ann were living together in a house they had built the previous summer with a married couple called Hal and Ann. The former couple was from Ontario and the latter was from Connecticut. Peter (not the same Peter who was in Vancouver) was a friend of Clayton and Ann's and was into woodworking, favoring maple burls. Their friend Michael, who was also from back East, was heavily involved in meditation. They were the regulars.

We were joined at various times by Tom Jones, Stephane, Marguerite, and the younger sister of one of the Ann's, whose name I forget.

Tom Jones was an alias for an American who had allegedly been involved in the Haight-Ashbury acid tests, and who was on the run from the law. It was said that Stephane had grown up in an ashram back East.

Marguerite and her son Lyle, who were from Montreal, lived with us awhile, as did various peripatetic couples such as John and Kim from Southern California, and George and Debbie from Ontario.

Clayton, Hal, and the Ann's lived in the house; the rest of us lived in tents, cabins, or makeshift lean-to's on the surrounding properties. The technologies of the day included space blankets and one-millimeter thick, heavy-duty plastic, the savior of the camper and the low-budget, freelance homesteader or squatter.

Larry and I usually crashed in the teepee. The fire inside kept us warm and dry. The smoke was, however, a problem, as was the scarcity of dry wood in rain-soaked coastal British Columbia. Had I to do it again, I'd get a fourteen-foot teepee for solo, temporary camping or perhaps a sixteen-footer for living with another person.

The payoff for living in a teepee came when you were awakened at night by the full moon peering down between the smoke flaps, flooding the interior with a magical light.

Once you've gotten used to living outdoors, it's hard to go back to living in airless boxes.

Jan, pronounced Yon, was a thirty-year-old straight guy who lived nearby with his wife Sylvia. A handyman, he drove a truck with the words Keep On Truckin' painted on the side, after the popular Mr Natural cartoon series by R Crumb. He often spoke about going to New Zealand, the land of promised opportunities for young, ambitious pioneers. As far as we were concerned, tourists and fast-food restaurants had already threatened to overrun most of North America.

Gabriella, who was named after the island, was Clayton's dog. She was on her own as far as canine love and companionship were concerned.

Some of the communards had taken American Indian names like Sundance or Flying Squirrel. I chose Young Buck, a name that came to me on a trip. I had been reading a book called Be Here Now by Richard Alpert, also known as Baba Ram Dass. (He was another highly regarded member of the over-thirty set.) In one passage, the newly psychedelicized author returns home to his uncomprehending parents, and refers to himself as a "young tribal buck."

Larry was more of a futurist and science fiction fan than an ersatz American Indian. He had stars in his eyes and was the founder and leader of the Cosmic Space Patrol, a continent-wide collection of hopelessly brain-damaged misfits. I became an honorary member of the Patrol, mainly because it was I who paid for the membership patches.

Larry was another aspiring guitarist, sometimes performing for nursing home patients. His style was even more rudimentary than mine, however, and we never came together musically. His theme song was "Ghost Riders in the Sky," an old Vaughn Monroe and Burl Ives tune, later covered by Johnny Cash. Mine was Roberto's "You're In My Dreams," a song about Beatle dreams. We both have small, reedy singing voices.

We once did a few songs together onstage in a club in Nanaimo. There was no one in the audience except for a few waiters on their break. We did, however, look the part. Our hair was down to our shoulders and my guitar had a colorful macramé strap.

Most of the others on the island had already graduated to natural highs, but I was still in my LSD evangelism phase. LSD teaches you about commitment. Once you drop, there's no going back. You have to take the trip, be it good or bad. And no bitching or crying or moaning, either, or you'll end up at the health clinic as an intergalactic hobo voyager. I've had some strange trips — everyone does — but I never freaked.

Our little twelve-foot camping teepee inspired Hal and Ann to build a full-sized eighteen-footer, which is big enough for semi-permanent camping. After scoring the materials, Ann worked the treadle sewing machine while Hal steadied the canvas and supervised. I had nothing to do with the construction of their teepee, but after finishing it, they asked me to help with its erection. You start with the three poles that form the pyramidal foundation. Once these structural poles are lashed securely into place, you lean the other poles against them. Finally, you wrap the canvas around the outside of the cone formed by the poles.

I liked my jeans comfortable, and used to break in a pair by wearing it every day. Sometimes I'd go for as many as six months between trips to the Laundromat at the Silva Bay marina, a few miles down-island. I never wore underwear. It was more sensual not to, and it was easier to slip out of your clothes if the occasion called for it. I slept in my jeans, too. On a cool BC evening, I needed all the layers I could get.

On one occasion, I was driving home from the ferry with Larry when he spotted a hitchhiker. He insisted that I stop. Whatever you say, Larry. It was a young woman. Figures, knowing him. Heather and her dog Jack climbed into the back seat. He turned out to be a great conversational opener. Larry and Heather hit it off and married about a year later.

I hated to see him marry. I knew it would be the end not only of his days of freedom, but of his creativity as well.

They invited me to their wedding at the commune. Due to a misunderstanding about the timing of the event, I was at the beach the afternoon they took their vows.

Crunch time on the island came in the fall, when the weather started to get cool and wet and most people had to go back East, or back to school, or some such thing. To me, the coming of fall separated the men and women from the boys and girls. Real men and women didn't cave in to the "responsibility" bullshit.

Living outdoors in the winter could be a challenge, but if you had lived outside throughout the fall, your body would gradually get used to the cold. The hardest challenge was the rain, which got into everything. It was impossible to keep paper, books, or musical instruments dry. I lent my guitar for the winter to Marguerite, who was living in a cabin.

Upon our arrival on the island, Michael was living in a cave high on a cliff above the Georgia Strait. His routine consisted of meditation and exactly one trip per day down to the beach below, where he filled his jug from a stream. I sometimes slept there when he was off-island.

On one occasion, I was hanging out in the cave when a straight tourist family walked past in descending order of height — father, mother, little brother, little sister. They didn't look at me, but they must have thought I was from another planet. It was then I knew it was time to move on.

There are many beautiful, quiet places to live in North America, even today. To live in such a place, however, you must be willing to be nomadic. Wherever you settle, you'll have first dozens and then hundreds of neighbors, all of whom are looking for the same things you are. Soon there will be a stoplight, a general store, a tee-shirt stand, traffic congestion, and crime. Then you have to pick up and move on. That's the history of this continent from the European invasion to present.

I look back on my days on the island as among the most idyllic of my life. Sleeping on the ground and rising with the sun. As one of our visitors once observed, mother nature is a good companion.

The land of no appointments, no alarm clocks — no clocks, for that matter — no electricity, and no TV. As a result, I have no recollection of what most people think of as the 1970s — pet rocks, leisure suits, platform shoes, disco, or whatever the hell commercial and media crap was around then. We didn't feel the slightest bit deprived. We were much more interested in living our own stories than in becoming an extension of someone else's.

We called ourselves freaks because that's what we were. Today this might be called taking control of the language, or owning the language, or some such phrase. We knew we were freaks and that we couldn't change it if we tried. Indeed, many of us have spent the better part of our lives in a mighty, but ill-fated, struggle to fit in.

Ah, the 1960s, when life was simple and everything that was wrong with the world was due to the Establishment and the old people. Unlike today, when everything that's wrong with the world is still due to old people, except that now we are the old people.

Bibliography

Brand, Stewart, The Whole Earth Catalog, 1968 to 1972

Fu Xi, I Ching (Book of Changes), 3rd to 2nd millennium BC

Graham, Bill, and Greenfield, Robert, Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out, 1992

Laubin, Reginald and Gladys, The Indian Tipi: Its History, Construction, and Use, 1957

Nyoiti, Sakurazawa (also known as George Ohsawa), You Are All Sankapu — Macrobiotics, The Astonishing Oriental Plan for Total Health, translation by William Dufty, 1969

Ram Dass, Baba (Richard Alpert), Remember, Be Here Now, 1971

Wells Lawrence, Mary, A Big Life (in Advertising), 2002

Filmography

Easy Rider, with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, 1967

Gimme Shelter, with the Rolling Stones, 1970

Let It Be, with the Beatles, 1970

Woodstock, various artists, 1970

Yellow Submarine, 1968