All posts by Patrick Edmondson

all that typical hippie junk no one believes in anymore. Right?

feed your head, history, Lifestyles

Posted by CN Staff on August 22, 2007 at 09:09:59 PT

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist 

Source: SF Gate

USA — Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that’s happening in the newly “greening” of America and don’t say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored optimism. OK?

I’m talking about, say, energy-efficient lightbulbs. I’m looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I’m talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins.

I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation’s oddest status symbol. You know, good things.

Look around: We have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth.” Even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, “it’s the right thing to do” (read: “It’s purely economic and all about their bottom line”).

There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing pro-environment sea change happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along.

All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMA seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the grid and it’s about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, hemp-covered apology.

Here’s a suggestion, from one of my more astute ex-hippie readers: Instead of issuing carbon credits so industrial polluters can clear their collective corporate conscience, maybe, to help offset all the damage they’ve done to the soul of the planet all these years, these commercial cretins should instead buy some karma credits from the former hippies themselves. You know, from those who’ve been working for the health of the planet, quite thanklessly, for 50 years and who have, as a result, built up quite a storehouse of good karma. You think?

Of course, you can easily argue that much of the “authentic” hippie ethos — the anti-corporate ideology, the sexual liberation, the anarchy, the push for civil rights, the experimentation — has been totally leached out of all these new movements, that corporations have forcibly co-opted and diluted every single technology and humble pro-environment idea and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone and Odwalla smoothie to make them both palatable and profitable. But does this somehow make the organic oils in that body lotion any more harmful? Verily, it does not.

You might also just as easily claim that much of the nation’s reluctant turn toward environmental health has little to do with the hippies per se, that it’s taking the threat of global meltdown combined with the notion of really, really expensive ski tickets to slap the nation’s incredibly obese butt into gear and force consumers to wake up to the gluttony and wastefulness of American culture as everyone starts wondering, “Oh my God, what’s going to happen to swimming pools and NASCAR and free shipping from Amazon?” Of course, without the ’60s groundwork, without all the radical ideas and seeds of change planted nearly five decades ago, what we’d be turning to in our time of need would be a great deal more hopeless indeed.

But if you’re really bitter and shortsighted, you could say the entire hippie movement overall was just incredibly overrated, gets far too much cultural credit for far too little actual impact, was pretty much a giant excuse to slack off and enjoy dirty, lazy, responsibility-free sex romps and do a ton of drugs and avoid Vietnam and not bathe for a month and name your child Sunflower or Shiva Moon or Chakra Lennon Sapphire Bumblebee. This is what’s called the reactionary simpleton’s view. It blithely ignores history, perspective, the evolution of culture as a whole. You know, just like America.

But, you know, whatever. The proof is easy enough to trace. The core values and environmental groundwork laid by the ’60s counterculture are still so intact and potent that even the stiffest neocon Republican has to acknowledge their extant power. It’s all right there: Treehugger.com is the new ’60s underground hippie zine. Ecstasy is the new LSD. Visible tattoos are the new longhairs. And bands as diverse as Pearl Jam, Bright Eyes, NIN and the Dixie Chicks are writing anti-Bush, anti-war songs for a new, ultra-jaded generation.

And, oh yes, speaking of good ol’ MDMA (Ecstasy), even drug culture is getting some new respect. Staid old Time mag just ran a rather snide little story about the new studies being conducted by Harvard and the National Institute of Mental Health into the astonishing psycho-spiritual benefits of goodly entheogens such as LSD, psilocybin and MDMA. Unfortunately, the piece basically backhands Timothy Leary and the entire “excessive,” “naive” drug culture of yore in favor of much more “sane” and “careful” scientific analysis happening now, as if the only valid methods for attaining knowledge and an understanding of spirit were through control groups and clinical, mysticism-free examination. Please.

Still, the fact that serious scientific research into entheogens is being conducted even in the face of the most anti-science, pro-pharmaceutical, ultraconservative presidential regime in recent history is proof enough that all the hoary hippie mantras about expanding the mind and touching God through drugs were onto something after all (yes, duh). Tim Leary is probably smiling wildly right now — though that might be because of all the mushrooms he’s been sharing with Kerouac and Einstein and Mary Magdalene. Mmm, heaven.

Of course, true hippie values mean you’re not really supposed to care about or attach to any of this, you don’t give a damn for the hollow ego stroke of being right all along, for slapping the culture upside the head and saying, “See? Do you see? It was never about the long hair and the folk music and Woodstock and taking so much acid you see Jesus and Shiva and Buddha tongue kissing in a hammock on the Dog Star, nimrods.”

It was, always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie junk no one believes in anymore. Right?

First Pop Festival experience

Festivals, tell your story

Monday, August 31, 2009

I grew up in Griffin, GA; a small town south of Atlanta. I had the pretty normal life of a small town boy and as I grew into my teens I began listening to FM rock stations and hanging around with some of the musicians and others considered a little on the “hippy” side Then in 1969 Hampton, GA was invaded by thousands of people coming to attend the First Atlanta Pop Festival. I was working with 2 friends as a field hand at the Georgia Experiment Station for a summer job.

We decided that we would drive over to the raceway and check things out. So we loaded a truck with a few watermelons, other fruit – from the fields we were working, and some beers. (Being natives of the small town we knew where we could get beer, even under aged) and drove over. We were still somewhat naive about this culture but we were probably the hippest people in our town at the time. I guess by the time we arrived at the festival it had become a free concert because we ultimately found ourselves inside the field and walking around with our beer, sampling pot (my first time) and meeting people from all over.

We wound up staying for a very long time as I remember see several acts including Spirit, Janis Joplin, and others. We left late that evening and were the local heroes for having the guts to even go over.

At that time ROTC was mandatory in the high school which meant military haircuts etc. I spent the rest of my summer growing my hair and paying Saturday night visits to Atlanta and the strip. By the time school started in the fall my hair was not all that long, but much too long for the ROTC Sargent. I was advised if I did not cut my hair I would fail the class and could be expelled from school. I saved them the trouble and got with a couple of friends to head to California. Unfortunately we only made it as far as Starkeville, Mississippi before the car crapped out. A local minister helped us get it repaired and we returned to Atlanta.

By now my friends had had enough of the adventure and decided to return to Griffin. I decided to stay in Atlanta where I remained for the best part of the next 5 years or more.

I first visited The Strip on weekend visits from Griffin until the fall of 1969 when I left home. I began to form great friendships and lived in a “Crashpad” on 14th street. I would leave what few belongings I had at the Speckled Bird office for collateral and sell copies for food money. I ate a lot of Krystal burgers during that time because they were the cheapest meal to eat.

I experience acid for the first time at the Donovan concert at the Municipal Auditorium (now an admin building for Georgia State University.) It turned out the be somewhat of a bad trip and I learned quickly I did not like acid much after that.

I had a slight run in with the law and found myself back in Griffin for a while in 1970. But the call of the Byron festival rang out and I traveled there a week early to help build the stage etc. After staying in Byron through the event I returned to Atlanta where I continued to live and hold several short jobs between my “street pharmacist” endeavors.

I was living with several friends in a house on a small street of Piedmont (Mytle street, I think) when we were raided and I was arrested for possession (of less than an ounce of pot) and operating a dive. Oddly enough I wasn’t even in the room with the dope and my name was not on a lease but that did not matter. (I found out later that the GBI had been watching me and my friends from Griffin days.)

I was more careful after that with my drug activity and took various odd jobs. I finally landed a job as a cook at Tom Jones Fish & Chips on Peachtree street between 10th and 11th street. When the manager left town with the contents of the safe one night I was promoted to manager.

That is where I stayed until a bounty hunter came in and took me in for not appearing at a hearing. It turned out that the notice for the hearing had gone to the house I was living in at the time of the bust. I had since moved.

I took a plea bargain and agreed to return home and return to school to avoid jail. By then my mother had moved to Atlanta so that made complying with the law and still hanging on The Strip easy.

What was your best experience associated with The Strip and the hip community?

All the music. Piedmont Park had something happening almost every weekend. And when shows came to town you either got a job as an usher or new someone who did. I saw so many acts at the Municipal Auditorium for the price of a joint.

Second Atlanta Festival in Byron

The summer a friend and I hitchhiked to Washington, DC with a few hits of acid to sell and $50 each.

Later on, nights at Funochios, Richards and Eelectric Ballroom.

I had a few. Bad acid trips, living on the street not knowing where I would sleep or get my next meal, my arrest, beaten up and robbed of a half pound of weed (which I had to work off by selling more for no profit).

A night of depression where I was convinced suicide was a good move. Took 10 hits of acid with a guy named “Angel”.  When it kicked in I realized, “this was a bad move.” Was counceled by a guy in the house that, “I shouldn’t worry, the acid itself probably wouldn’t kill me.” He stayed with me through the evening to keep me on an even keel and keep me from freaking out. I never saw the guy again after that. I tend to call him my angel. That was the point where I never took acid again nor considered suicide.  I learned that Angel later shot himself on the back steps of Chili Dog Charlies.

Loves lost or let slip away by stupid acts and bad decisions.

Those experiences were the best and worst in my life. When they were up there was nothing like it. When down it could really drepress you. I have used my past as a testimony when working with teens and men in my church.

I always say that I don’t know that I would repeat them but I wouldn’t trade them for anything in the world

I went to a house on 14th street with some musician friends one night. There was a concert scheduled for the next day so people were starting their partying early. While in the basement of the house we were passing around joints and listening to some guys playing guitar and singing. I found out the next day it was Duane Allman and other members of the band but I was too high to know who they were the night before.

My street name was “Skinny”, a name that followed me from High School. I weighed about 130 pounds soaking wet and hung around with a 250 pound football player who’s nickname was “Uncle Heavy”. He had a reputation of taking the smaller weaker guys under his wing for protection. And when the counter culture hit Griffin he was right there along with me and others

I am now married to a wonderful woman who grew up in the Decatur suburbs. Her life was vastly different from mine. She grew up with both parents in the typical middle class home. She offered the grounding I needed and the faith in me that made me want to be a better person. We have raised 3 wonderful sons; twins 30 years old and their 27 year old brother. I just became a grandfather to a beautiful boy. I have worked for BellSouth (now AT&T) since 1976 in media and graphics production from multi-image slide to video & multi-media.
Mike Payne

 

Memories of The Dead in Piedmont Park 7/7/69

Festivals, history, tell your story

We were married  07/07/69 at the “Free Concert” in the park after  the 1st Atlanta POP.

Schroeder & Renée

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Schroder and his beloved Renee, Hippie love story – together till he recently died.

The Piedmont show which actually 2 or 3 days after, Tuesday I believe was the result of politics.  According to the Great speckled Bird, “How could we charge $$$ for music … even $13.50 a day.”  we had to do something to appease the social uproar over our commercialism.  Spirit, CTA, and Delaney and Bonnie stuck around for room and board.  And the Dead played for travel, rooms and beer.  So yes I was very involved in it as well as the rest of the team.

I remember Pigpen cracking two cases of beer, neatly arranging them on the balustrade around the pavilion, and calmly dosing each one with premium Owsley Acid.  Everyone around the pavilion was glowing.

 I would love to have a list of the people that attended the FREE concert in Piedmont Park after that Festival with Spirit, Chicago Transit Authority, Delaney and Bonnie and Friends (including Dave Mason and others), and THE GREATFUL DEAD.  That was the seminal moment.- Robin Conant

Delaney and Bonnie & Friends start off the afternoon.

 Very nice. I can tell you why there was no one there at 1:00PM. The performers who stayed after the last night of the Pop Festival were all invited to “The River House” a rather infamous hippie house on Riverside Drive. Quite a few made the trip, including “The Dead” Those memories are a bit fuzzy, so I’m not sure who all was there. I vaguely remember sitting outside on the ground watching the sun come up and singing folk songs with Jerry Garcia playing acoustic guitar. Seems like there was a bunch of people making music, but I couldn’t swear who was there. John Ivey & Ricky Bear, local studio musicians, lived nearby on the river. They may have been there; possibly Barry Bailey. Barry played a lot with John & Ricky. Studio work and just local jams. This was when “The Joint Effort” was changing its name to the Atlanta Rhythm Section. A PR decision. Anyhow, no one woke up before late afternoon and that threw the free concert behind schedule.

 If you hear from John Ivey or anyone else from the River House, please let me know.

 

If you were there, what are YOUR experiences

 

A Bus Stops in Piedmont Park July 7, 1969

Festivals, tell your story

A Bus Stops in Piedmont Park  July 7, 1969

July 7, 1969 Piedmont Park with The Grateful Dead

(c) 1998 Patrick Edmondson  (Excerpted from a longer work in progress)

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Ed Casady of Spirit in the Piedmont Park Pavilion 7/7/69. photo by mystere
Note the Dead’s equipment

You have to understand; it was the sixties. Things were different then. In Atlanta there had started to be free concerts held in Piedmont Park. At first they were only for special holidays, then there were concerts nearly every weekend. Soon someone figured out how to “liberate” electricity to the Pavilion and there was some music in the park almost everyday, officially permitted or not.

The quality varied widely from garage bands needing lots more practice to local heroes such as Radar or the unbelievable Hampton Grease Band, to up and comers The Allman Brothers.  National acts showed up, too; which brings me to the point of the story I’m setting up here.

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Mickey Hart with Mark Andes and Ed Casady of Spirit, Bonnie Bramlett of Delany and Bonnie & Friends

I have meant to write this down for a long time. Finally I did on 7/7/98. Days later I checked on the exact date of the concert. It was 7/7/69! (insert Twilight Zone intro here…)

The Atlanta International Pop Festival was held at Hampton Raceway in July 1969.  It was such a large crowd – in Atlanta!  Lots of famous musicans of that day and all days performed. A great time was had by all.

We were about to leave and saw a guy in a leather jacket. Painted on the back was, “I came from England to hear Led Zeppelin!”.  Somehow it impressed us enough to stay to hear the unknown Led Zeppelin close the show; amazing performance!

People began to wind their way slowly back to the campground just lingering in the vibe of the evening, the music, and there being SO MANY HIPPIES; we aren’t alone!

Passing among the crowd were leaflets declaring simply, “Come to Piedmont Park Monday 1 PM”. Another band trying to get started we thought; but we had a feeling…and no one had work or classes Monday afternoon .

Monday about lunchtime we loaded up the Celestial Omnibus with our small circle of friends and headed off to the park, joining lots of other small circles of friends coming together in a temporal free-zone, our community, beginning to coalesce  around the park. The Strip was for commerce with straights and all; the Park was for letting your freak flag fly without fear of the attacks still common from rednecks. Here, if only for the moment, weirdness was the standard, and we reveled in it.

The Celestial Omnibus  was a hippie VW bus. My fourth bus experience.  My first bus experience had been when a fellow Beatle maniac’s mother had agreed to drive the two of us 30 miles to the theatre showing “A Hard Day’s Night” a year before it would drag to our town. We went in a VW van, rare in South Georgia. On the way home we were in dreams of being the Beatles going to a gig; a great time! I thought this was the coolest mother to appreciate how much it meant to the two of us, even if adults sneered at her stupidity in indulging us. It wasn’t normal.

My second “bus” experience was years later.  Not too much out of the ordinary happened in Tifton. The expressway was a new link to the outside world bringing  the outside world in greater force than old Highway 41. I was killing time  waiting on my friend Fred to finish work at the Royal Castle, currently THE In spot for burgers and fries after school, just off Interstate 75.  Our band was to practice that night and I was impatient for him to come on.

“Man, you gotta come see these guys! “, a friend rushed in  yelling. “A wild old school bus full of crazy people and loud music is stopped for gas next door. Hurry before they leave! You gotta see this!”

We all ran over to see. A commotion  seemed to be erupting from this strange old traveling bus that was gassing-up at the Phillips 66 station. The bus itself was colored like a circus vehicle, which was what I had naturally assumed it was since this was still living under the spell of the button-down fifties.  Anything so colorful just had to be part of a circus or a fair. And there were certainly people that looked like they were in a circus swarming out of and all over the bus. Most wore these coveralls. People would probably have been scared since they were acting so unusual if they hadn’t assumed from the vehicle and clothes that they were entertainers headed somewhere on the expressway. I just remember these weird expressions and some kind of excitement they generated.

Was it…?  I wondered when I later read “The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test”. The chronology seems to fit but I am unsure, it was at least similar minded folks; still it was a seed. I thought how it would be neat to carry your friends in a rolling  party.

Christmas after starting college came the third bus experience, Christmas 1968. A VW bus driven by Martin the beatnik gnome, the Cassidy figure in my life, spirited me from home.  Friends from college  headed to the Miami Pop Festival, living on the fringes. Incredible adventures. I lived them and I barely believe it all.

Now I acquired my first car. A 1959 VW microbus that cost $100 and came with $150 worth of camping equipment, but could barely climb a big bump; my long bus trip begins. With Martin’s mechanical wizardry we gave it a motor and everything else transplant. My part was to paint the bus.

The name in psychedelic bubble smoke letters was “The Celestial Omnibus”.  In Senior year English class we had read an E.M. Forster story, “The Celestial Omnibus”, about a bus that literally took you to literary heaven ; it remained corporeal as long as you didn’t doubt , but if you had doubt. It would come crashing back to normal life.  That was much the aim I had for this vehicle.

Two fish twirled in the yin-yang replaced the VW circle to lead the way. The driver’s door got the zig-zag man, still hip code then. The opposite side doors got a reclining Mr. Natural with a speech balloon declaring, “Mr. Natural says…”.  Fill in your own sage advice if you have any, Mr. Natural said only a fool would follow his advise anyway. We were subtle stealth hippies. We loaded up the bus and headed for the hills of Piedmont, park that is.

Upon arriving at the Park and parking by the Pavilion, we found…nothing happening. A beautiful July afternoon even if it had been a hoax. We were grooving on the park as other groups of our friends and acquaintances arrived.  Many folks were left over from the Pop Festival still meandering onward.

The crowd was growing.  Drizzling rain was welcomed. A community formed. Someone brought out a giant clear plastic tarp and threw it out for people to crowd under.  The edges were tucked down and, this being the sixties, joints came out everywhere.  Vision was soon obscured and it became a personal challenge to see how long you could stay before scrambling to the edge, poke out your head and gulp purer air before returning under the plastic.

The rain stopped and on a count the plastic was quickly pulled back at once. A smoke signal was released to Atlanta and everything began to shift.

Lovely hippie women in long skirts swirled and danced through the crowd stopping at various individuals. “Please open your mouth.”, they beatifically smiled. A bit of paper was placed on the tongue & and with a cheery, “Enjoy!” they would sashay away. There were also jugs marked “acidophilus cider” being offered for swigs.

Legend has it that this was a going away party for a certain teddy bear that had to be held a coast away from local authorities.  After twenty minutes it was indeed a party with the only music coming from someone’s portable  eight-track in the pavilion.

“Make way for equipment!” The crowd was parted so trucks and funky vans could drive up to the pavilion.  As they were unloaded we watched for stencils to identify the bands.  The Allman Brother’s mushroom, of course; Spirit; Delaney and Bonnie and Friends; the Chicago Transit Authority; The Hampton Grease Band; and some lighting bolt through a skull design.

When our friend Dan, just back from Fran Sanfisco,  saw this,

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Jerry Garcia in Piedmont Park. Phot by Arlo Forbes

he lazily smiled  slyly beneath his round blue-smoked glasses and droopy ended mustache. His laconic drawl informed us, “Ya’ll are in for a treat. It’s the Dead.”

The Dead! San Francisco musicians, emissaries from the Tribes on the West Coast, free, here on a Summer Day in Piedmont Park! The Dead were of our culture, but we really considered them as of us rather than stars, an antithesis to the new culture.

Sixties roadies really worked. From installing the exact setup on varied stages once or twice a day, they evolved the process into balletic precision.  Zen masters at work in a dance of their own devising. Barely giving each other a notice, they knew just when to put out a hand needed to help get amps, cords, drums and all into place.  Everything seemed to grow almost organically as layer after layer of equipment was installed for various bands.

Soon Glenn Phillips prescient-electronica guitar yelps and Harold Kelling’s sweet melodies wove threads around sonic blues riffs from attacked guitars. Mike Greene, now the president of the Grammies, played and sang sweet harmonies to counter Bruce Hampton’s fabled screamed/sung dada linguistics and insane stage antics.  Hampton and Martin had first met when they had been the weird kids at Georgia Military Academy where their parents had sentenced both to do time for being weird; a threat I also received.

With a little help from their friends with the paper and cider, this crowd was really getting into the music driving the musicians to redoubled efforts. Everyone was dancing and strolling about meeting or just smiling at people.  Some sat in groups and communed with the music.

The Allman Brother’s blues flowed in accompaniment to a glorious sunset. The multi-rhythms of Berry, Jaimoe, and Butch set waves of energy moving through the people. Duane’s heartbreaking solos merging with Greg’s plaintive vocals touched your soul.

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Spirit

Strange trap set on stage; two big bass drums mounted slanted sideways over the regular trap set. Older bald head, eyes electric- Ed Casady pounded like a spirit possessed wailing the enigmatic Spirit lyrics.  “Fresh Garbage” introduced by stepson Randy California’s tasty guitar licks interwoven with keyboards and mingled voices created a feeling like a strange and enveloping tapestry.

IMG_4082_2Bonnie Bramlett with husband Delaney led a band of friends. The Friends featured Jim Keltner’s horn section and Merry Clayton leading the backup vocal trio.  Excellent Gospel tinged southern rock.

The party was in full swing as Chicago Transit Authority’s brass led melodies created “Saturday in the Park” on a Monday evening.

With the night came more magic. Dan got a cot from the Celestial Omnibus and lay in the open with a sign saying “Feed Me.”. Throughout the rest of the evening innumerable paper bits, a few joints, and a few female breasts were inserted in his smile.  Gabi and I being purists who endured eating Morning Glory seeds to get to the natural source, passed on over five hits to he and Ronnie.

Now the Dead began to tune.  Word spread through the telephone pipeline to the suburbs; A beckoning from the bathhouse pay phones.

As the crowd grew the officers of the law had at first grown tense. Since the crowd was all peaceful and grooving together; a gathering of the tribes, they relaxed.

Love really began to prevail. Dealer’s opened their stores and set phalanxes of joint rollers to work.  Cops asked for some of the cider, were warned and tried it anyway. They let pretty women try on their hats. They danced and let people decorate them with flowers and incense. They winked at people passing joints and even took mostly ceremonial hits at first. Cops got kissed. Soon cops were joining the circles around water pipes.

“I can’t do this any more!” yelled one young cop as he tore off his uniform.  For his trouble two hippie women soothed him under a hedge by the stonewalls. Giggle, moans, and body parts occasionally protruded from the shrubbery during the rest of the evening.

The Dead began playing I watched a skinny longhaired guy in hanging jeans climb a scraggly elm in front of the Pavilion. He sat on the one branch protruding vertically about 15 ft. from the ground. It didn’t look like it could possibly hold even his weight.  We watched in expectation of his imminent descent

The rhythm seemed to get him before gravity.  Unbelievably he let go of the main part of the tree and stood erect on the limb. He began to sway with the music and shift from foot to foot.  Then he jerked still and stayed as paralyzed for a few minutes. Just as suddenly he began to prance and gyrate wildly breaking laws of physics.

I glanced at him every few minutes from then on. He continued to be a marionette pulled by every chord Jerry played. Finally I looked back and he was gone without a trace. I asked but no one around saw him ever come down…

It was midnight and Dead had played most of the songs for which they were becoming known and they stopped after about three hours. But now more equipment was added to the stage?!

Most of the musicians retook the stage to play with the Dead.  Big horn section, background singers, eight drummers, a bass quintet, and Harold Kelling, Glenn Phillips, Duane Allman and Dickie Betts, Delaney Bramlett, Chicago’s guitarist, Randy California, and Jerry Garcia trading and interlacing lead lines.

This was a two-hour shakedown song before they settled into “Dark Star” experimentation. This became a rock symphony full of the once and future hits of all concerned.

About 3:30 AM Jerry’s guys shifted to their closing song. Coda after coda rang into the darkness of Atlanta’s late July night stillness.

The musicians hung out a while. No one wanted to leave and break the spell. We watched the roadie’s performance as they prestidigitate loads of equipment into their small spots within the trucks and vans. When loaded, these spirited away into the night. Only naked bulbs over the pavilion competed with the moon.  Light around both seemed to hang in solid Van Gogh visions of colors streaks.

Cops and the crowd felt the shift back almost to the normality we had forsaken for a while.  All our faces had been stolen.

We collected our stimulated to satiation group into the Celestial Omnibus. Dan’s face became animated, “Was I right?” He had been. it had been a night to live in memories. We’d forever know that skull split by a lightning bolt.

 

(c) 1998 Patrick Edmondson

(First published in Smash magazine, Excerpted from a longer work in progress)

The Twelfth Gate is a church for turned-on types.

Clubs, Community

Atlanta Constitution Magazine  June 9, 1968 pg. 24

The Twelfth Gate is a church for turned-on types. Coffeehouse Preach-In

By Olive Ann Burns  (note the wonderful Southern author)

image001THERE’LL be a preach-in and love feast at Piedmont Park this afternoon if it doesn’t rain.

The crowd will gather at 12:30, as usual on Sundays, at The Twelfth Gate, 36 Tenth St. NW, an old two-story green house with red, gold, blue, pink and tan trim, like straight out of a storybook, man.

If we have a great big beautiful day, the community of worshippers—many of them as bearded as the early Christians—will walk eight blocks together to Piedmont Park for a be-in by the lake. In full view of the park’s usual Sunday population of ballplayers, bird watchers, lovers and picnickers, The Coffeehouse Church will begin its celebration of worship by reading aloud:

image003“We gather as we live, in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit . . .. 0 Lord, we confess our slowness to see the good in our brothers, the evil in ourselves.

 And this is the one objective and ever lasting truth—in Jesus Christ our sins are forgiven. May we receive the gift and live . . ..”

 A handsome, dark-eyed young Methodist minister will preach the sermon—the Rev. Bruce Donnelly, who speaks straight from the hip about the fact that for thousands years “turned-on types have experienced religious highs—visions and trips even—without the aid of mind-expanding drugs.” He talks about what’s wrong with straight society and what’s wrong with hippies, about what it means to be free: Free to love God, free to give, free to be sincere, not hung-up in guilts, fears or prejudices.

Even without a tie, the Rev. Donne looks like a product of straight society, which he is. He grew up as a Methodist Youth Fellowship leader at Peachtree Road Methodist Church in Buckhead, was president of his fraternity at Emory University and three years ago married a lovely straight-type Agnes Scott College graduate named Barbara Chambers. But he digs the needs of the artsy, folksy, craftsy types among the 25,000 unmarried young adults who live in Atlanta’s 10th Street area.

Bruce’s thing is The Twelfth Gate: On Sundays a religious community, the rest of the week a coffeehouse A place to talk play chess, buy a girl a gift. take a free course—in ESP or leathercraft, yogi-style meditating or the parables of Jesus—or sit over coffee and salami in rapt silence while the folk singers do their thing with songs like “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ or “Isn’t It a Drag That People Take Tranquilizers “

THE house opens every night at 8. The music starts at 9 Cover charge 50 cents or a dollar. No LSD. no pot, no beer, no whisky, no crash-pad, no nightclub-types jokes, no go-go. You could take visiting preachers, fifth-grade Girl Scouts or sheltered teen-agers there for the music and find nothing objectionable—unless you object to beards, candle light, red walls, satirical posters, a heavy fog of cigarette smoke or jokes about “kids on pot today, speed yesterday and acid the day before, but if you mention a cocktail, man, they wouldn’t touch the stuff, and that’s what I call hip-pocrisy. “

Unlike some other coffeehouses, the only pot available at The Gate is the kind that holds 50 cents worth of exotic coffee or tea. Jasmine and Himalayan Darjeeling have to compete with Georgia sassafras, brewed for the coffeehouse by a red-bearded folk singer who was once an Eagle Scout and got expelled from college for joining the march on Selma.

image005THE upstairs Head Shop sells no water pipes, roll-your-own cigarette papers or other equipment for smoking pot. It merely has folk records, books, posters, horoscopes, and lapel buttons that say, “God Is Alive and Well in Mexico City” or “Keep the X in Xmas.” In the Flower Shop, also upstairs, you can buy trappings of the hippie subculture—candles, beads. Incense (10 cents a stick), metal crosses hung on thongs, psychedelic sunglasses, and paper flowers. But there’s nothing weirdo about paper flowers when you find out they were made by student nurses at Georgia Baptist Hospital.

What’s so great about flowers” “They’re a symbol of beauty and peace, you never see one flower fighting another flower.” explained Brenda Brantly, the 23-year-old very unhippie engineering data clerk who is chairman of The Coffeehouse Church’s official board. Brenda came to Atlanta from Milner, Ga., and has surely seen a honeysuckle vine smothering a rose bush, but that’s what she said.

Despite all the beards, beads and sandals. The Twelfth Gate is too straight for most hippies. “I think I’ve finally convinced my father,” said Brenda. “that the kids here just aren’t interested in freaking out.” The working girls and boys, the college and trade-school kids and student nurses who patronize The Gate turn on with poetry, folk songs, art or religion, not with drugs.

Yet a Georgia Tech sorority refused to initiate a pledge when the members learned she’d been going there, and a lot of parents can’t believe any coffeehouse on 10th Street could really be nice.

 “Part of the problem.” said Bruce. “is newspaper articles that call this a hippie house and label me as a minister to mixed-up kids. Also there’s the public notion that anybody who has a chin growth or long hair or sings folk songs is a hippie. This is just not a hippie thing. We’ve had no trouble with kids trying to take drugs here. Those who come are bright, turned on to life, with a great depth and capacity for enjoyment. But most of them have too much sense to risk damage from LSD or a police record from marijuana. If you say the sun is beautiful today, they don’t automatically think, “Yeah, but it would be really great under grass.”

image007“Sure. some of the kids have problems, especially with money. Most of those who left home because of family conflicts—or to be on their own were told by mommy and daddy, “Okay, you won’t live with us, we won’t send .you to college or pay your rent.”  But they’re working out their problems in responsible ways. And they run this place responsibly. It’s the only church of 18 to 25-year-olds anywhere, that I know of, and we’ve never been late with a bill. Out of coffeehouse profits we pay me, we pay rent and overhead. We spent $2,500 this year sending three students to art school, and we’ll do that again next year. We’ll also give $3,300 to the Methodist inner-city ministry here. This inter-city program will pay my salary beginning in July, but the kids will then pay a manager—a soldier at Ft Mac named Pete Schoen. He’s getting out of service soon and will take over buying groceries, booking folk singers -and-running the staff, so I can have more time for running the church and counseling.”

MOST of the kids who come to The Twelfth Gate are between 18 and 25. (Bruce is 26.) Most of Atlanta’s hippies are just 13 to 17.

“There are only about 250 of these bubble-gum hippies and teeny-boppers in the 10th Street area,” said the young minister, “I’m talking about the ones whose life-style includes philosophizing, sharing what they have, not working at regular jobs. I’m talking about resident hippies, right? I don’t mean the 2,000 kids under 18 who hit Atlanta last summer.

“The vacation hippies fell in three categories: Those having trouble at home, those who wanted to see what it’s like to be on their own, and a minority who came for thrills—for sex and drugs and the glamour of running away.

“They came from all over the South, but a lot of the summer kids. were runaways from $50,000 homes in the Atlanta suburbs. Some stopped shaving, mussed their hair, went dirty, wore beads swiped from mom, stood on the corner of 14th and Peachtree to get stared at and learned to say would you be-in to a cup of coffee. To them everything was psychedelic, man, meaning colored lights, not consciousness-expanding. But most of them went back home after two or three weeks—when they got sick or real hungry, or maybe it was time for school to start. Unfortunately, a lot of the thrill-seekers went home really messed up on LSD—or VD.”

According to Bruce, the word is out that Atlanta is where it’s at this summer, man, the place to be: “Some think we can expect 16,000 to 18,000 between 13 and 15 years old. The out of-towners think Atlanta won’t lock up or run out that many. Well, Atlanta will. If 18,000 come, 16, 000 will soon leave. The problems of runaways aren’t solved by police harassment, but this city is just not equipped to take care of a big migration of teen-agers.”

A lot of parents and policemen call The Gate about runaways, from as far away as California and Idaho. One month Bruce located 20 kids out of 90 calls. “But I don’t really have much time. I often drop by the crash-pads or apartments where hippies live when the coffeehouse closes at midnight, and some hippies come to our church service on Sunday. But the heartache is that I’m not really helping these younger kids and nobody else in Atlanta is.  A lot of them are real sharp and talk about real gutty issues, but The Gate doesn’t attract them. Young teen-agers aren’t interested in sitting around listening to folk singers. What they want is a rock house—a nice dance place. All we’d need to start one is an empty warehouse or auditorium with a jukebox and soft-drink machine. No chairs, no tables. no overhead. Psychedelic light shows maybe, and let them rock out. Young kids have a lot of stored-up tension and dancing is still the safest way they can work it off. But churches tend to back away from this fact.”

BRUCE got up to greet the red-bearded folk singer, who had walked in with a gallon jug of clear red sassafras tea hanging from each forefinger. The minister wrote him out a check for it, and they talked for a few minutes — debating whether it was anger or hate that Christ felt for the money changers when He drove them out of the temple. The bearded man said he thought what’s wrong with most Christians is “they won’t decide what they’re against and then take a public stand against it.” Bruce said, “I’m just not as much of a revolutionary as you are, but I do believe in Christian action.”

Then he was called to the phone I couldn’t help listening: “You want a real hippie or somebody who looks like one” . . . Right. The Marietta YMCA, next Sunday night. I’ll see what I can do for you.”

He hung up and grinned. “It’s gotten so part of my job is booking hippies or bearded folk singers for churches, schools and civic groups. I’m a sort of rent-a-hippie agency except I don’t get paid. If an MYF group asks for somebody to perform and tell about our ministry; I send one of The Gate’s folk singers, or an art student who puts on light shows he films himself, or this kid who makes and plays vagabond instruments. But if they want a real hippie, I go out to the crash-pads and find them one. Hippies like to talk about their thing. Besides, they’re usually hungry, and churches have good suppers. Anyway, I went to look for this certain kid a few weeks ago and he’d just cut his hair. I said, ‘Look, they want a hippie in full costume, right” What kind of impression you gonna make, man, with that short hair?’ He said he could borrow a wig. When his audience got to asking why he had long hair, he took off the wig and said, “What’s that again?’ “

ONE thing you learn at The Twelfth Gate is that it takes more than long hair or a beard to be a hippie. A folk singer said he wears one “because I happen to have a very fat face and besides it’s easier to get a singing job if you have a good growth.” A Gate waitress said some of the guys are just too lazy to shave, or want something to hide behind Roger Swanson, who looks like straight out of the Bible, has just always liked beards.image009

“I got out of the Marine Corps on Nov. 6 last year,” he said, “and Nov. 6 was the last day I shaved. At first I was very paranoid about the beard. I didn’t like being considered a hippie and it was hard to get an apartment. Some of the hippies do skip out on rent. You can’t blame the landladies. But it’s not hard to get a job with a beard, by the way—not in Atlanta, not if you do good work. I’m a carpenter’s helper. I also write poetry. I went to college for five years before the Marine Corps. But I’ve just gotten interested in this writing thing, also in photography.”

Roger often emcees at the coffeehouse – introducing the poets and folk singers, reminding patrons that the waitresses work for nothing except maybe $2 a night in tips, “so please cross their palms with silver when you say thanks and we have church here on Sunday afternoons at 12:30. Church does take the drag out of Sunday, so come on over.”

The Coffeehouse Church is called a “ministry” by the Methodist’s North Georgia Conference. It’s not a full-fledged church yet in the sense of a membership roll, but the kids are hoping it soon will be. Besides Sunday services, it has all the Methodist trappings, including a budget ($27,500 for next year), an official board and committees for finance, worship, programs and social concerns.

The social concerns committee ran a tutoring service for children in Vine City last summer. Two boys go to East Lake Methodist every Saturday to help with a recreation program for 270 colored children. Four of The Gate’s folk singers go on tour, booked for Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings and openings of church coffeehouses. The kids have now started a fellowship supper on Sunday nights, with ministers, politicians, city planners, lawyers, doctors, sociologists and other specialists who discuss the needs of the young people in the 10th Street area and help decide The gate’s best course of action.

As a result, the coffeehouse now has an employment agency and a free medical clinic.

“Our kids man the waiting room and screen all the patients,” said Bruce. “The clinic is now open every Monday and Thursday night at First Presbyterian Church with psychologists for counseling and doctors and nurses supplied by the Fulton County Medical Association. We had a clinic last summer in my office at the coffeehouse, with just one doctor, man, and we couldn’t take care of all the patients here.”

The Twelfth Gate began a year and a half ago at Grace Methodist Church, when Bruce was an assistant pastor there. It was Grace’s effort to “do something” for the non-churched young people in the downtown community.

Diane Smith, a beautiful girl with hair to her waist, had sat listening while Bruce talked. “I was one of the original weirdos who came to The Gate when it was at Grace,” she said. “In those days none of us kids worked. We talked all night and slept till 3 in the afternoon, and if you worked, you missed out, right? I got in a real bind with money. I’ve been through the starvation bit, the having-your-gas-turned-off bit, the corn-meal boiled in water, you know, with days of nothing. and then one of the boys would earn $5 singing folk songs or a girl would wait tables for a night, and then we’d buy potatoes and a cheap roast and cook it at my apartment. I’ve had a straight job for some time now and I’m out of debt.

“But back to our weirdo days. We used to wish so much,” said Diane. “that we had a nice place to go. One night somebody said a minister had opened a coffeehouse over on Charles Alien Drive.

Oh, right, a minister has opened a coffeehouse. We shrugged it off. Then a handful of us went over to see. It was just a six-room old house with no atmosphere, and the folk singers weren’t hired. Mostly they were those of us who could sing. But Bruce was marvelous. Just nice. We kept going back and taking our friends, and after the place closed at midnight, Bruce and his wife would come to our apartment and 30 or 40 of us would talk all night.

AT Grace they all assumed we were hippies on drugs, of course. I don’t say to the potheads, hey, I’m going to hate you for taking the stuff, but I don’t want to be around them. What’s so great about watching a kid on LSD giggling like a maniac while he crawls around on the floor, talking to dust, and then going wild remembering the awful things people have done to him, and getting crazy for revenge. It’s horrible and repulsive. And what’s so great about seeing a girl who has everything going for her get so messed up on drugs she loses her job and her friends and all she’s got left are hippies like herself. Last time I saw her she was under acid and could see her self down in a soft-drink can just a tiny little person down in a can.

“Anyway, at Grace they put out all this effort to get us and then they didn’t know what to do with us. The coffeehouse was so successful we were spilling out into the yard — maybe 300 kids a night, and some of the neighbors were complaining. We got the idea we were less welcome and Bruce was getting more and more criticized, right? We thought, if the kids went to church it would show the members that Bruce was doing some good, you know, so about 20 or 30 us went to a pre-Easter service last year. Catholics, Jews, Baptists, Methodists. nothings. The guys were clean and dressed up in suits and had their beards trimmed, and the girls put on dresses, right? We sat in the back, you know, and everybody was nice to us. but like we had this feeling we’d made everybody uncomfortable. Maybe the embarrassment was all on our part, but we could see them thinking if a bearded long haired type joined the church or the choir, and that TV camera zoomed in on him, people watching television would say,” Goodness, look at Grace” Right?”

“FOR just this reason.” said Bruce. “I get more and more convinced that churches need to specialize. A minister who invites everyone in the TV audience to ‘come worship with us next Sunday’ might get a shock if they all did. It wouldn’t work, not because of snobbery or prejudice or hypocrisy. but because people who look or feel different aren’t comfortable. Everybody has a label in straight society. A boy holds a cigarette in an effeminate manner, he’s called a homo. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t, he’s branded all the same. A guy has a beard. He’s branded a hippie, though he may have a very straight job. A girl has her “hair long and wears levis and paints pictures, she’s a weirdo. Eggheads may be respected these days, but a boy who’d rather write poetry than play or watch football is looked upon with suspicion. And there are some young people who, let’s face it, just aren’t very attractive on the surface, though they may have a depth and sincerity and loyalty you rarely find in the typical frat house or MYF group.

“The beauty of a coffeehouse is that you can expose people of all types and backgrounds to each other. With the candle light and music and coffee they relax, open up and be come themselves. Things seem more real. They don’t have to wear masks, or pretend what they don’t believe. They share a sense of belonging, and I am absolutely convinced that the need to belong to somebody is the most basic need of human beings, more basic than the need for food or sex or creativeness.”

“The kids who came to The Twelfth Gate when it was at Grace were so hungry for deep friendships they could forget food. The strange thing that happened there was the way all of a sudden, after four or five months, without my giving them any lectures about loafing, those 30 or 40 self styled weirdos started hunting jobs. They had begun to see that life is more than having friends and talking all night, that it matters to have some reason to get up in the morning. Some cut their hair and beards some didn’t. Nearly all went to work.”

Most of them were committed Christians and felt that Christ was alive in their lives says Bruce. “but they didn’t feel they had found a way to live for others. Then the kids decided to start a coffeehouse right on 10th Street, so others cotild have the chance to find themselves—the way they had at the Grace coffeehouse. The Methodist North Georgia Conference gave me the assignment, provided we’d held regular worship services.”

So The Twelfth Gate opens its door every Sunday as The Coffeehouse Church, when they aren’t having a preach-in at Piedmont Park. The kids sit in twos and fours around the tables for the sermon—drinking their coffee and smoking their cigarettes, dressed more like guests at a costume party or a come-as-you-are than like a congregation.

The Sunday I went, what made me feel “at church” was the rapt silence, the atmosphere of spiritual seeking. All eyes fastened on the Rev. Donnelly as he talked about Christ having to hang on the cross because of people’s hang ups, or quoted a priest who once asked, “Who can look up at the crucifix and say, ‘All this you have done for me and I don’t care?”

Not many churches could advertise a Sunday service that lasts three or four hours and hope to have anybody come, but that’s the way it is at The Twelfth Gate. Always after The Word comes what they call The Word Shared— something like a bull session, something like old-time Methodist testifying.

When I was there, as soon as Bruce got through with the sermon and the final folk hymn was sung, a girl at a back table said, “I’ve sinned, and I know it, and I’ve asked God’s forgiveness, right? But maybe God is like my father. I respect my father and I love him and I’ve hurt him so much. But I just can’t tell him. I just—-” She struggled for self-control. She had arrived in Atlanta the week be fore from Massachusetts. “I mean he thinks I want some thing—food or clothes or money. What I want is his love and understanding? But he just says you’ve done what, you please—and I have—so don’t come asking me for forgive ness now.”

“I guess your dad has hang ups of his own,” somebody commented.

“I know how you feel—I’d never ask my father’s forgiveness,” said a student type in suit, white shirt and tie. “I’m sure he’d just say go to hell. Let’s face it, parents really suffer when we do wrong, and it would be the right thing to apologize, even if the apology gets thrown in your face. But it’s hard to be glad about doing the right thing if you’re crying.”

“Every time I come here,” a girl near me muttered to her friend, “we get hung-up on forgiveness and the generation gap. No matter what Bruce has talked about.”

THE next speaker was at dashing young pirate. His beard had a sort of Sir Walter Raleigh trim, he wore one gold earring, his long hair was held neatly in place with sun glasses, pushed up from the forehead, and I tried hard not to assume he was a hippie just for looking like one.

“If there is this God that’s so Almighty and can do anything,” he began, “why doesn’t He answer when I ask forgiveness? If I offend her” — he nodded to the girl beside him— “she’ll forgive me the minute I ask her to and then every thing’s all right again. God is a lot greater than she is, but all I get from Him is silence.”

He was answered by a rather small young man with a hearing aid. wire rimmed granny glasses, cowboy boots and a mild manner. He spoke calmly: “What do you expect? Is God supposed to put on a light-show in your brain or send a message fluttering down from Heaven? When you’re not feeling holy, when you’re restless and incomplete, when the day is not beautiful, when somebody smiles and you say. ‘Go away, you bother me,’ that’s what it’s like to be unforgiven and separated from God.

“God to me is love,” he said. “I know I’m forgiven when I feel turned-on to Him, holy, with no hang-ups. It’s just a total sense of peace and relief and release from guilt.”

Not all ministers think a coffeehouse like The Gate is a valid way of reaching out to those not attracted by the established church. Though many in the Methodist clergy are enthusiastic about what Bruce Donnelly is doing, at least a few doubt that it is valid even as an experiment. They think church coffeehouses are a passing fad, like the hippie thing, and too far out from “the true vine” to change any lives.

MAYBE, maybe not. The doubters should go see for themselves.

All I know is that I like the picture of 40 or 50 young people working their hearts out for a dream, most of them without any pay, and then freely giving away thousands of hard-earned dollars in the name of the Lord.

I know I was deeply moved by the folk singers at the Sun day service, impressed by the young minister’s sincerity and positively electrified when that young man told what it’s like to feel holy.

1968 exhibit

Project history

1968…ch-ch-changes.  We are honored to be involved in the 1968 Project headed by the Minnesota Historical Society. Please check their website.

About the Exhibit | The 1968 Exhibit

The 1968 Exhibit is next onview at:

DURHAM MUSEUM | SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8 – SUNDAY, MAY 4

DURHAM MUSEUM

Omaha , NE

See map: Google Maps

CONTACT

(402) 444-5071

Ink By the Barrel: The Great Speckled Bird

The Bird

The Great Speckled Bird

One of the hazards of starting a newspaper in your home town is that you cannot escape some of the mishaps of your youth. About once a year I get a nice note from Buckhead resident Helen Sterne saying she is enjoying our newspaper, but she always closes with: “It certainly is a lot better than The Great Speckled Bird!”

In the late 1960s Atlanta was no Haight-Ashbury, but long before bankers and lawyers were walking the streets of Midtown, the area along Peachtree between 8th and 14th streets was known as “The Strip.” The sidewalks and alleys were full of long-haired, blue-jeaned, tie-dyed “hippies” offering all kinds of illegal substances and alternative lifestyles. It made today’s Little Five Points look like Phipps Plaza. On any given Friday night, parents would drive us through The Strip on the way back from dinner at the Piedmont Driving Club or Capital City Club, lock the doors and warn us of the dangers of this part of town.

So naturally, with 13-year-old curiosity, we would get up the next morning, tell our parents we were going to play tennis, and sneak out with our Jimi Hendrix T-shirts to “expand our minds” or to try to “find ourselves” amidst the record stores, head shops, and clothing boutiques on The Strip. One of the required souvenirs was to get the latest issue of The Great Speckled Bird. It was full of the latest inside reports on college students going on strike and closing down campuses, about battles with police in the streets of Chicago, about counterculture political parties, civil rights demonstrations, wild concerts, dangerous drugs and a movement older people feared most, a concept foreign to us – something called Free Sex.

One day, I noticed an ad promoting an opportunity to make money: buy 50 copies of The Bird for 15¢ each and sell them for 35¢. My first newspaper entrepreneurial thought stirred. I could get rich! I bought 50 copies and the next day, took 25 to my school, Westminster. I could stimulate intellectual thinking and make a tidy profit. Only one problem: students didn’t want to buy The Bird from a freckly-faced eighth grader.

Next idea: sell them to my neighbors. So I wandered up my street and stopped at the Sterne household. Mrs. Sterne answered the door. As I made my sales pitch, a look of horror crossed her face. She was the matriarch of a household containing her husband, the president of Trust Company Bank, and two Catholic schoolgirls. A household I was threatening to poison with radical, seditious journalism. Trying to fill the silence, I mumbled something about selling them at school. Well, when the story got around, I was selling them for the profit of Westminster.

Two days later, I’m dozing in chemistry lab and the principal walks in, grabs me and says I am being summoned to Dr. Pressly’s office. Dr. Pressly, the school’s founder, was a man who was so polished, so patrician, but so powerful that I must have done something really great to be going to see him.
He asked if I was telling people I was selling The Bird for the benefit of Westminster. I turned bright red and quickly said no. He said some board members had gotten confusing information and were calling him, greatly concerned. Graciously, he let the conversation drop there.

But others didn’t. Apparently, at that very moment my father was at Peachtree Golf Club, involved in a shouting match with a legendary school board member, Mr. Warren, about my disparaging the good name of the school.

All this because I was trying to make 20¢ a copy. I think I sold only about 12 of those papers. I wish I still had the rest. I could probably sell them for a lot more now.

Ink By the Barrel: The Great Speckled Bird

Make Bread sell The Bird

Lifestyles, The Bird

sellbird

  Many people in the hip community made cash by selling the Bird. The Bird deal made it so you couldn’t lose money and could, by selling regularly, make a decent living by hippie standards.

shapeimage_3Birds were mailed to me at Oxford College and I sold them in the cafeteria evenings. It was considered uncool to not pay over the stated price and magnanimously say, “Keep the change!”

Fridays I would race in my slow but steady Celestial Omnibus VW in I-20, up I-75 to the Birdhouse on 14th, to start. If I had money, I’d buy Birds. If not, they would front a few to sell, return and repeat until you had cash to buy Birds to carry wherever to sell.

Weekends I’d try to get 14th and Peachtree where the Uniform company had a lawn shaded by huge trees. People would hang out and talk to you or nap in the shade. The job was to barker Birds. You could walk along the edge of the street holding the latest cover up to see and try to catch the eye of each driver. Acting a bit for the tourists always got money.

It was always a a trip. friday and Saturday nights young, rich hipsters headed to the park would pay not 25 cents, but $5 to the “real” hippie selling Birds. Determined to be wild suburban middle aged couples where the woman wanted to “kiss a real hippie”, you’d let the husband show off by leeringly asking for marijuana by some cool, unknown nickname he had heard who knows where, and ask if it was true it was an aphrodisiac. Or pass you party favors of one style or another to be hidden under the tree until you were ready to leave. You also met a lot of good friendly folks.

Cops would come by and stop. Some decently friendly. Some on power trip staring and trying to make you nervous enough to step in the street and be arrested for “impeding traffic” even if the street was empty.

riotcop
Same cop at the Piedmont Police Riot

My worst experience came on my second day selling at that corner. A really fat young crewcut cop on a tricycle pulled up stopping just inches from my feet. he took his time standing up on the trike and swinging over one ham leg and stepping down. A moment to work that gunbelt around and up to where there should have been a waist. straighten his cap. Then suddenly pull his gun and crouch pointing it at my face a few inches away. I had grown up in a small town and until that very minute I had thought all cops were peace officers just making everyone safe. This cop changed my mind when he said a word aloud I had only seen in print before, and rarely then.

“Come on MotherF__ker! Give me a reason to shoot! Please, you hippie Mother___ker!” he screamed blowing spit like some redneck sheriff caricature in a drive-in movie. His manner, the gun in my face and what he had screamed outloud scared me to death, and it showed. He held the pose oblivious to the horrified faces in cars streaming by. He held it through a  stoplight cycle and a half, as judged by cars stopping. He  laughed cruelly and put up his gun. Chuckling he walked  back and laboriously swung his ham back over the trike’s gas tank. Like any good silly movie, it wouldn’t crank till the third try then sputtered alive.  He charged forward and I had to jump aside as he rode off very pleased with himself.

This was absolutely shocking to me and was a step in radicalizing my view of mindless authority.

One of the best days selling the Bird was before the start of the Second Atlanta Pop Festival. There was no bread to spare at my house so we were not planning to go down to Byron. Then a parade of incredible vehicles of hippies just checking out The Strip before heading down to Byron proceeded down Peachtree. Amazing painted cars and schoolbuses revamped into sculptures on wheels. A sparkling city dump truck with music blasting from inside. The driver laughed, pushed a lever and the tail end rose open like to dump. Inside was furniture, an 8-track blasting and about ten stoned laughing people trying to run up the curved shiny insides.

By dark I raced home and told Gabi to get some stuff and let’s call some people and head down to this party. We’ll just play in the parking lot, we don’t need to get in front of the stage to hear the good music. Anyway there is suppose to be a free stage off in the woods a bit. We packed the Celestial Omnibus and drove through the night to Byron. The expressway was clogged as we got near.

We crossed the median and went back an exit and drove the wrong way down a parallel access road with lights out then turned out through a field towards lots of lights. Soon we had stumbled into the festival past cops trying to turn back the multitudes already peacefully ignoring them. It was worth the trip.