Good grief, Gerard.

Another one out of the park.

George Steinbrenner would go broke buying baseballs if you were a Yankee batting cleanup.

Jeesh. We were the Dumbest of the Dumb. How did we so ignore our elders? You may have been with the Smartest of the Dumb up there in San Francisco. If only we could have seen Mountain Girl suing Jerry Garcia's wife for the moolah after he OD'ed on heroin some decades later.

I know how I got so stupid. Years of being spoiled and sheltered and virtually on my own. Weekends we kids sped anywhere on our bicycles, bought candy bars at the Huntington Sheraton Hotel where we so enjoyed running our dogs through the lobby and where the staff was too polite and kind to rebuke us hard enough to get us to stop. Saturdays at the library, Sundays riding our bicycles in circles in department store parking lots while the world rested. Weekdays we could choose to ride or to join the carpool to school. Life was easy and taken for granted.

Looking back, it seems I didn't learn a thing to prepare me for adulthood. School was boring and I never studied. And then, at the silly age of 15 I arrogantly absorbed the advise to, how did it go..? "turn on, tune in and drop out." This worked for Mr. Alpert, but not for me.

So I ended up in a train wreck, with the rest of the Dumbest of the Dumb. I am a very humbled human being, still being humbled, only now it has become my favorite joy. I have learned not to dig my heels in so hard when Life's lessons call. I sweated like hell while finding my way out of and back from the wreck. I'll never make it all the way. God bless us all.

What a terrific (in the true sense of the word) story. You have not only remarkable writing talent, but amazing character to have recovered from the tsunami that was your youth.

The Van Der Leun juggernaut rolls on. As for this -- "for better until something better comes along, for richer and only for richer, for fairer or knock-down gorgeous" -- it's at least as true today as it was during the Age of Aquarius. At least.

I'm off to listen to "Grazing in the Grass."

"Grazin' in the grass is a gas baby can you feel it?"
As a kid I was on the outside looking in at the cool guys and the anti-establishment and the deeeeep inner meaning of the latest Beatle's album, maaan. I didn't get it. I was my own worst enemy but it wasn't because of the counter-culture. Your notes have revived a sense of curiosity at what caused that "scene" in the first place, and a thankfulness at having missed it.
You do good work and I'm glad to have stumbled across your site--thanks I think to Roger Simon, but it could have been another referral.

Dan Patterson

It's amazing that one guy can crank out so many amazing essays so consistently. This is what I had hoped Hunter Thompson would be doing by now. Maybe he did too, and couldn't stand that he wasn't.

Barbara, you make an excellent point. It has been galling to me to watch my parents, who absolutely killed themselves to provide good and easy lives for me and my siblings, torment themselves with guilt when we have derailed at times. They just want to know where they went wrong, and the sad truth is we had it too good.

Excellent writing skills. I started reading you during the last election and have not stopped.

Long before my vow of marriage that, "We will all, verily, abide by the Will of God," I was racing down Carmel's main street in 1964, on 2 x 4s with rollerskates nailed to each end, and being mocked by the cool, long-haired, surfer types with their Fender Jaguars and '49 Oldsmobiles...

For I went the other way, enamored of COOL, but cursed with an inquiring mind, unable to sip the chloroform of Valley Life but unwilling to go to 'Nam...

So I opted for Korea, studied Korean at the Presidio, honed my mind and my linguistic skills, and sought refuge on an island touching the DMZ. My nights were long, filled with examinations and apologias and questions, dealing with the benefits of living the American Dream, but often asked in the "Wahthafuk am I doin' HERE?" mode...

And returning Stateside in late 68, I was baptized in spittle at the airport, mistaken for true veterans who'd actually FOUGHT for America, but it sealed my outsider status.

There followed the Summer of '69, and I was hired to play 12-string and sing at a 200-acre ranch, on the road to Sonoma, with its ballroom and wetbar downstairs, and 12 rooms upstairs, and Jerry sitting in on a rare Saturday...

But I could never sacrifice my need for Truth, and Med School couldn't quell my fire, though private practice as a licensed healer SHOULD have been credential enow, but only drew the pains of others to myself and, unable to shed them, I arranged for my wife to kidnap our son, that I might pay in pain for a doorway out...

Of all that Stateside life, but the Truth.

Thanks for that post Carridine. My own search for truth led to 20+ years living in zen centers. I think some people in the 60's were just there for the party and others were really onto something that ended up eluding most of us anyway.

Well, still, it sounds like a lot of fun.

ahhh - a partier

Gerard,

Beautifully written. It makes me appreciate the things my wife and I have been through for the last 24 years. I think I'll try to find some special way to say thanks next year.

Subsunk

You captured the 60's so well in this piece, I felt I was back there again. I wasn't into the drug scene, but I remember the "free" love part. It made it hard for a woman to say "no", and difficult for a man to stay faithful.

Barbara,
I partied, (there was a walnut bowl in the wetbar of the 200-acre House; bowl filled with Acapulco Gold flowertop, speed, acid, ludes... on the house) but I was honored and in awe of the power I came to wield in that little room, sitting on my St George amp and playing my Gibson 12-string with taped-in-place pickup...

The other guests dug me, my music, my drifting patter set to melodic accompaniment, quite like a troubador in '69 California... kind of like Gerard with rythmn and a beat!

Yet something bigger called, and the Summer of '69 came to a close, and I went back to straight-dude school, until my doctorate in December 74. I'd say I never looked back, but here I yam...

A sumptuous feast that was, Gerard. I ignored the younger elders, who seemed incapable of meaning anything, but I took in to my core my elder elders, who stood in their words, without ceremony and in secret, and we stood in ours the same way.
I am lucky to have only been a child in the sixties. I can honestly say I wasn't really there for all that. I was riding my bicycle at Gramma and Grampa's house.

He's an old hippie, and he don't know what to do
Should he hang on to the old, should he grab on to the new
He's an old hippie, and his life is just a bust
He ain't tryin' to hurt nobody
He's just tryin'
Real hard
To adjust... ...the Bellamy Brothers

It is said, and wisely if not with perfect accuracy, that if you remember the Sixties you weren't there. I always wanted to be there, but was too pusillanimous to go; I like to tell myself I detected something wrong under the surface, but that's ex post facto excuses -- it was fear, at the root. And Martin Mull had the postscript:

So if I might beg your pardon, I'll go out and start a garden
It'll just be small potatoes, just some carrots and tomatoes
And if anything comes up we'll join the Grange!
Why don't you and I get normal for a change?

Regards,
Ric

Actually, I was there in the Sixties and my curse is that I remember everything.

Keep writing, then, Gerard. It will exorcise the demons.

My one and only marriage in 1969 lasted 32 miserable years. It started in the Navy Chapel, 32nd Street Navy base, San Diego - just me, the Chaplain, the groom and 17 other sailors. They took me to a dive beer bar for a celebratory drink and then held a reception at the Captain's house, but I was expected to appear the next morning to clean up the mess. And that is the story of my life hence, cleaning up the messes of others. Despite the year, no naked guests, just me in the typical '60s no shape white wool jumper that made me look 6 mo. pregnant, even though I wasn't. The Chaplain spent half the ceremony giving me a chance to back out with tales of woe at marrying "the Navy." Most of the latter half, he spent giving the groom dire warnings if he forgot to bring me flowers at least once a week.

Why did I stick around for 32 years in an unhappy marriage? I took vows and even though they might not have meant much to the other party, they were important to me. I don't make idle promises or ones I don't intend to keep. I was naive and believed. I'm no longer so naive, that's why I will never marry again.

Beautifully done.

Strange that the "beauty" of those days feels like a burden now.

But reading the way you wrote it brings relief.

Lord.

Gerald, Sweet memoir of strange days or daze. I took Owsley Purple Flats acid in Western New York in the Summer of 1967 ,in the summer of 1968, I went to War Zone C in the infantry, in early 1970, I set off in my own crossfire hurricane of pcp, acid, uppers downers, all arounders, cheap wine and increasing doses of madness, watching my friends die of heroin overdoses, losing every semblance of sense, hope, a future.
In early 1978, minutes from death , I cried out to Jesus in a little storefront in Tucson. Three years later, I married the love of my life and find myself 32 years later amazingly sane, centered and hopeful. Listen to this song for a wonderful story http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9jDL2SyDfg

You're giving me nightmares. In those days I had sex with hairy women, pubes, armpits and legs. The horror.

I spent the last half of the sixties killing people and blowing things up. The government paid me to do that. I lost my wife 'n' kids along the way and ultimately myself.

The "good old days"? That cracks me up.

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"The Chinese ideogram Truth: a human standing by his words."

I am not the greatest Sinologist around, but I do know how to use Google and dictionaries and understand Chinese Ideogram radicals.

For a moment I thought maybe you'd fallen victim to one of those bits of apocrypha like "May you live in Interesting Times" - which is no known curse in Chinese at all.

But never fear, this particular rather blunt knife has tracked down the error. I think you've picked up this factoid via everybody's favourite poetic nutcase sinophile, one Ezra Pound (who latched onto the character below in its correct sense):

信 -- indeed a man standing by his words. And the meaning is Trust. In modern spoken and written Chinese, more likely to see 相信 (Xiangxin).

Other than that, as always a pleasure to see this posting repeated. What an amazing life you have led. And certainly it is an Examined Life. I wish I could write one tenth as well as you do!

The bigger the wedding the shorter the marriage.

Thank you kinch. The Pound origin is exactly correct. It is from Instigations which, published in 1920, was published well in advance of Pound's later nuttiness. Thanks for bringing the latest scholarship to my attention. I hadn't read Instigations in more than 40 years but that of Fennalosa's observation on the Chinese ideogram stuck with me.

I wasn't there.

Seeing it through your eyes certainly helps illuminate how we got "here" though. What a mess when truth goes missing.

(Elegantly told - thanks)

I was there during those years but never made it to the Hippie status. A very odd time indeed.

The story is really something & the writing something more.

My parents were born in '46 and very far, in every way, from everything in this story. I doubt they or I would have done well had they been any closer to that world. The tamer 1970s around us were hard enough and we missed Vietnam, drugs, hippy life, more by luck than "good choices". We got out easy with one divorce and plenty of photos in seriously ugly clothes & hair.

I did not attend the wedding cited above - but I knew Michael Rossman, both in the middle 1960's when he was one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley ( I roomed at his large flat for a while in 1966 ) - but then I left for London & Paris, there to make my career as an artist - founding my studio, Banner Arts - which is credited with creating "social media before social media" - which could apply to the radical arts of the Bay Area in general during the 1960's & 70's.

Returning back to the Bay Area, in the 1990's. I met up with Michael again and we picked up our friendship from where it left off. He had traveled to Central American, I had journeyed from Europe to Africa, Central Asia and the Far East - finally basing myself in Paris & London.

Michael Rossman became the self-appointed curator extraordinary of the vast amount of Bay Area Poster artworks - from the Hippie & San Francisco Music movements, the FSM (Free Speech Movement), the Women's Movement, Anti-War Movement (see Michael's poster at the top of this article) as well as the Black Panthers, Chicano Movement and Native American Movement (AIM) and the early Gay Rights Movement.

His extensive & extraordinary collection is now in the Oakland Museum, expertly archived by Lincoln Cushing III, a talented archivist and author of several books on Poster Art and Activist Art.

Aside from the Pagan craziness described above, Michael was actually a very scientific guy and a very good teacher and a wonderful friend.
We will miss you Michael!

John Dugger,
Fellow, Royal Charter Textile Institute, Life Master Fabric Craftsman
Founder, Banner Arts Studio, UK & USA

John,

Rossman was an interesting guy. His writings and other works are collected at: mrossman.org

Consision

You should get together with any of these hundreds of people from that event and see if you could find enough of the group to hold a reunion. At first blush this might not seem like a great idea but I did exactly that going back to the early 60's and we had a great time. Good to see the old friends and see what they did with their lives and sad but meaningful to hear about those no longer with us. Time is running out...