Some Historical Notes
The summer of '61 was the start of the groundswell.
There was a small army of folk singers on the road that went from Harvard Square to Ann Arbor Michigan to Berkeley CA and on to Vancouver, with stops at college towns along the way. Like later period punk bands, the folk performers would crash with their fans. All across the country college students were picking up guitars and listening to music that was not on the radio. Marijuana, once the weed of social deviants had been washed clean by the literary world and was being passed from hand to hand in dorms and coffee houses.
The LSD experiments at Harvard and books like Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley,
encouraged young people to try to expand their consciousness. This was the original quest.
Later people took acid just to get stoned and goof on the disco lights.
But back then young hipsters, we fasted the day before ingesting either mescaline, psylicibine or LSD. We got ourselves focused. Then we dropped. We had friends to guide us. We did it right.
As Allen Ginsberg once said, "Yoga is being neat while you're high".
Others of course were reading William Burroughs, like young Teddy Bernstein who showed me how to crush a Demerol pill between two spoons and snort it. Not my style. i wanted to get high, not stoned.
But it was chaotic. i wrote a poem about a strange night at Coffee Corner....
My father
wore spats
and so did i ( his in fact )
2am (zen) knifefight in
Back Bay Bickford's
sanctuary of speedheads, thieves, poets
whores, artists / children of the night / fashion
plates in seach of a tailor a
stich in
time a
stich in
time
and there was i
blue-striped spats ( and
matching vest)
diner chair shielding me
from a small angry blade
vogue(ing)
on a cosmic stage
who
knows why
Anyway that summer in Boston was teeming with action. Folk singers back from Berkeley with news of familiar names, people you had met at a party or who slept on your couch. Everyone was on some sort of Psychic Twitter in an age where a public phone cost a quarter. There was an emergence of the Living Room Star- people who played great guitar, or sang, or had drugs and stories, or who knew somebody-and would crash at your pad for indeterminate periods in return for their charisma. Everybody seemed to be on their way to somewhere else.
There were nubile girls, intrepid guys with longish hair, impromptu folk parties, the odd kilo of weed coming up from Mexico -- and psychedelic substances such as Peyote, mescaline, mushroom and LSD were legal.
Students were opting to drop out and go on the road long before Tim Leary told them to. But Tim was sure instrumental in helping that groundswell become the tsunami that changed America.
The old I Love Lucy sexual standards and practices were shifting. In those days in Boston, two unmarried people found in bed together (police would usually raid on Sunday morning) could be arrested for Lewd And Lascivious Living. Howl had busted the censors and Playboy Magazine was publishing Norman Mailer who previously had to write "fug" instead of "fuck" in his great WWII novel The Naked And The Dead.
So there you have the environment. So long Perry Como, hello Pete Seeger. Hasta la vista Doris Day buenas dias Joan Baez. Of course Miles, Bird and Monk were still strong in the burgeoning hippy consciousness.
And Vietnam had started to escalate.
Part Two: Let's Twist Again (Like We Did Last Summer )
There were many lovely young ladies that summer. Remember, we were coming out from under heavy repression. So towards September, when Sunni Finklestein, the Radcliffe Sex Queen invited me along to Provincetown for the weekend, i was totally cool. Sunni was going to visit her current interest Jim Strahlee, an actor doing stock at the Provincetown Playhouse. i was interested in the beach and it was understood i could crash with the actors.
During the long night drive i kept it at a distance, no leering. We arrive, everything's fine Sunni and Jim go off together and i crash in the barn. Since i love the beach, hanging with Jim and Sunni on Saturday was easy. Jim was an actor in the classic sense with a lot of fire, passion and self-aggrandizing bullshit. Okay with me, i was there for the sun.
That night, after a performance of Death of a Salesman we all had beer and burgers with the director, a strapping young man called Joe who was a charismatic dude with a sense of humor.
Still okay with me. i enjoyed the company then went off to sleep.
That night i woke up yelling, bad dream. Jim Strahlee was just coming in. "It's okay," he said. I went back to sleep.
In the morning it was clear everything was not okay.
Sunni and Jim had lost that lovin' feeling. Through the day the story came out. Sunni had gotten it on with Joe. Jim had discovered them on the beach.
Jim played it for all it was worth, the basic premise being "how could you be with that (married ) lowlife after you've been with me?"
I resolved to be more like Hef. i dug the split between old-school relationships and the new woman.
When i recieved my insurance check from my fire i rented a place on St Botolph Street. My old friend Ralph Pine had married a Garment Center heiress called Maddy Leob who walked around saying things like, "this dress cost four hundred dollars". We were obviously running with different crowds. My new pals were called Buster, Ronny Vile(well named) and Al the Arab. Buster was a supercool black dude who dealt pot and we would gather three or four times a week to get high and listen to jazz. When I say listen, i mean nobody spoke one word (Jazz Zen). Otherwise we smoked and played our version of The Dozens. For the very first time i had steady access to herb.
Another new associate was Rick Lloyd the first guy i ever knew to wear blond Beatle bangs and long, straight hair. Rick looked like Iggy Pop's pop. He was traveling with a red-haired Tennessee heiress named Estelle Norvelle ne' Fire and an entourage made up of well-born drop-outs. Rick always seemed to have drugs and he was the first to coin the term Freak Show ( he was an ex-carney after all).
One night I attended a performance of a play at Emerson College, directed by Ralph Pine. The Balcony by Jean Genet. While backstage i met a lovely nineteen year-old acting student named Joan. Two months later we eloped.
Next: Hello Broadway
No comments:
Post a Comment