All posts by Patrick Edmondson

Hippie Tales

February 13, 2014UncategorizedPatrick Edmondson

This is the place to collect your memories about Atlanta’s hip community from about 1967 to about 1977 .

“Something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear”. Whatta Decade! How was it for you?

We need other perspectives to get it right.

What was it like to be a gay man or woman in Atlanta before 1967?

What was it like to be a hip African American in Lester Maddox Georgia?

What was it like to be a biracial couple in Lester Maddox Georgia?

We don’t know, but you might be able to tell us.

Did the ch-ch-changes change your life?

Curious minds want to know.

Here is what we want to know to start- (digress freely)

1.When did you first come to Atlanta and what brought you here?

2. When did you first visit The Strip?

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

4. What was your worst experience associated with The Strip and the hip community?

5. Did your experiences at that time effect your life? If so, what did you learn or take away from it all?

6. It seems everyone around in that time and place has an Allman Brothers story. Share your Allman Brothers story if you have one please.

Tell us to what name you wish your story accredited. If you wish to use a “street name” or be anonymous, please give us a way to contact you for furthur information.

If you are in the Atlanta area, we can arrange to digitally tape your interview if you prefer.

Where are you now and whatcha doin?

These were responses we received .

Boyd Lewis

1973 Mike, Jan Jackson & Tom Jones w/headband were dear friends and proprietors of the Penn & 8th Zoo. Anyone knowing about Tom, Curtis, Mike, Jay – please write.

1. Any erstwhile hippie who didn’t know who Jon Jacobs was ain’t worth a cigar box worth of dried out seeds and stems. Jon was the legally blind photographer and writer for the Bird from the paper’s beginnings. He came South to join the civil rights movement and wound up with the underground press. He was a “red diaper baby” whose parents were 30s lefties. All are deceased. Jon helped found the last major urban commune, “Big Shanty” on West College Avenue in Decatur, across the tracks from the high school. It was home to the Last Great Jive Assed Jug Band, Elise Witt and the Small Family Orchestra, Lenny and La Banana, Berne, and Deluxe Vaudeville Orchestra and a wacky band of Irish hooligans called A Parcel of Rogues. Several founders of Radio Free Georgia called it home at one time or another. It’s also where the Atlanta Juggler’s Festival got started. I lived there for three months. God, it was great. Boyd

For a solid year, maybe more, Piedmont Park became People’s Park. Entire communities set up camp in the wooded area along the concrete drainage ditch and every now and then, their campfires or carelessly discarded doobies would set things ablaze. Mayor Sam Massell was tolerant at first, then under pressure from Big Bidness, the police crackdowns began. I know of at least two freak riots in the park, one of which was televised with a cop smashing a longhair in the teeth with a billy club without provocation. If you survived, these were the good old days. Boyd

Atlanta’s antiwar protests were unusual in that they included many black protesters. Dr. King’s antiwar stance dating back to 1966 perhaps gets credit. This is where the massive May 9, 1970 Mobilization march ended up, at the state capitol. This may be the last positive thing that ever happened at the statue of that ol’ racist rabble rouser Tom Watson. By this time, whites had left the civil rights struggle to focus on the war, and many young African Americans were fixed on cultural nationalism. Boyd

May 9, 1970, the great Mobilization march to end the Vietnam War, where a Georgia trooper snags a longhair at the state capitol.

the spring of 1971 on Myrtle Street just north of Ponce

Black student activism in support of hippie concerns is often overlooked. Here, students from the Atlanta University Center sing and flash the power sign at a May, 1970 rally opposing the Vietnam War, the Orangeburg Massacre and Kent State killings. It wasn’t all about white folks, y’all.

In the first floor apartment of this 1899 Victorian mansion at Peachtree and 10th, an iconoclastic woman journalist named Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind. When I lived in the Hippie House a.k.a. The Dump a.k.a. Peggy Mitchell’s apartment, I was totally alone. I was the caretaker for the abandoned building and lived there rent-free for nine months during 1977. Only gradually did I become aware of the apartment’s history. For about three months in the fall of 1976, I had rented a storefront at Peachtree and Crescent where I was going to begin a freelance photography business. Woeful choice. I was broke. So I asked Boyd Taylor of the Australian/Atlantan real estate firm Hooker Barnes whether he had any maintenance work to be done on his properties since I didn’t have the rent money. Sure, sez he. We’ve got this big old house at the end of the block we’re going to tear down and replace with a midtown skyscraper. You can stay there rent free if you make sure vandals don’t break in and burn it down. And so I became the last resident of The Dump from February-November 1977. I had two great parties there. One was in the summer on behalf of WABE when public radio superstar Bob Edwards came to Atlanta. It was an old South barbecue in the backyard with Spanish Moss courtesy of my grandfather’s place in Florida. The second was a benefit for Radio Free Georgia on Halloween, 1977. While Rodger French and Toni Shifalo juggled flaming torches in the backyard, some looped friends and I went into the abandoned and very dark third floor with a candle and the hand of a department store mannikin. We held a seance for the spirit of Peggy Mitchell or the daughter of the house’s builder, reportedly killed on the third floor by a jealous lover. The seance worked. (to be continued) Boyd

Kids from Emmaus House youth group at entrance of Four Corners Park, 1971. The kids were members of “Among Ourselves” mentored by Gene Ferguson, a lanky black activist who served as youth director of the Episcopal Church-sponsored community center and chapel.

A scene from WRFG in Little Five Points, circa 1974. Bonnie was office manager of Radio Free Georgia’s first studio on Euclid Avenue and Rodger French hosted “Spam and Grits”, a radio embodiment of the music of Goose Creek Symphony (a little bit country and a whole lotta hippie). The demon child in the center didn’t identify herself, but today she’s probably a suburban matron driving her kids to soccer practice in a Ford Expedition

The fist of rebellion punches through the legendary Atlanta night fogs. This photo in downtown Atlanta is from 1970.

Bill Fibben ‘n’ Carter Tomassi Photo is from 1972 and shows Bill Fibben (left) and Carter Tomassi pausing from their coverage of the Piedmont Arts Festival. Both were regular photographers for the Great Speckled Bird. Fibben is dead, while Tomassi continues the picture trade.

Roger French of the Atlanta Juggler’s Association and Deluxe Vaudeville Orchestra. He played accordion with the Last Great Jive Assed Jug Band and lived under the stairs-Harry Potter-like–of Big Shanty, the Decatur commune that terrified the coeds from nearby Agnes Scott College. He was a Navy signalman during the Vietnam War. Photo is from 1974. Presently, Rodger is on diplomatic assignment in Accra, Ghana (for real!).

As that great woodland sage Barney the Dinosaur would say, “Sharing is caring.” The generosity evident in Atlanta during the hippie period is captured in this tender moment, when one soul reaches out to another and says “Here, have a toke.” The only gateway here was the gateway to a good time. Photo in Rabun County from 1971.

Kate, my sister, in a friend’s apartment on Argonne Street, circa 1971, awaiting a Tai Chi tossing or palm reading or other such hippie nonsense. Kate left a mind-numbing job with Holiday Inn reservations in Memphis to join the circus. After assorted adventures, she wound up crashing in a women-only rental house in Virginia Highland. She’s now a respectable matron in a gated community in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Longhairs pack Grady High School’s gym for a 1970 hearing by the city’s Community Relations Commission taking complaints about city police harassment of Bird sellers and hippie types along the Peachtree Strip. The hearing was chaired by the CRC’s director the late Rev. Samuel Williams, who taught philosophy to Martin Luther King Jr at Morehouse.

keep on truckin Cartoon genius R. Crumb’s eternal legacy to the Freak Power movement was the slogan “Keep On Truckin” (as in “keep on truckin/truckin on down the line/ hey hey hey/ I said to keep on truckin’/ truckin’ those blues away”). A truck with a Trucker logo in Piedmont Park around 1970.

A bare chested guitarist performs an impromptu concert in Piedmont Park to an appreciative audience in March, 1974.

By these posters ye shall know the hippie pad. A child darts as a hippie mom primps for a big night out at the Great Southeastern Music Hall late one Saturday afternoon in 1971

Poleece. Fuzz, Da Pig. The Man. Here are Atlanta’s finest gathered at Peachtree and 15th. They were a reserve force ready to rush down to Piedmont Park in case help was needed to quash yet another hippie musical rebellion antiwar thingy. Mayor Sam Massell tried to establish links with the hoard of longhaired dope-smoking anarchist hooligan fringe early in his administration. He even set up a police precinct on “The Strip” called “The Pig Pen” with a window mural by “J.J. of L.A.” of Rich’s-like pink pig wearing a patrolman’s cap. The cops who worked the office were really cool.

The Hari Krishnas were an integral part of the alternative lifestyle in the early 70s in Atlanta. They had banquet tables of free vegetarian food in the park during concerts and gave away incense. Few locals went Krishna even though their rhythm section with drums and jingle bells couldn’t be beat (ow!). One came away from a theological discussion with Krishnas with a vague impression that a big blue god named Krishna danced his way through life to please a great big god named Vishnu, who was always asleep, and whose dreams created the reality of everything that is. When one was zippy, all this made perfect sense.

Two mounted cops overlook a cautious hipster in this 1971 scene in Piedmont Park

In this Where’s Waldo scene, try to count the totally happy people in this photo taken on a Sunday afternoon in Piedmont Park in 1971.

Two writers for The Great Speckled Bird shown relaxing on the Bird’s legendary couch. Sunshine Bright and Mike Raffauf were writers and damn fine lawyers to boot who fought the good fight to introduce civil liberties to the howling jurisprudential wilderness that was Georgia in the 60s and 70s.

Flag wrapped, long haired, bandannaed and a little paranoid, this couple marches along Peachtree Street in a May, 1970 anti war demonstration.

A longhair testifies to police harassment of fellow longhairs at a hearing conducted at Grady High School in 1970 by the city’s Community Relations Commission. The CRC was established in Atlanta following the assassination of Dr. King to provide an escape valve for racial and social tensions in the “city too busy to hate.”

Assorted hipsters at a folk music event in 1973. Two of these people wound up working for Ted Turner’s Cable News Network, which goes to prove the infiltration of dope-loving anarchist hippie types in the news media. What Shaun Hannity would do with this information boggles the mind.

Robert Joe Shifalo, AKA “PigIron” performs a solo on a schoolteacher’s bell in this 1973 photo. Joe, an erstwhile lawyer, died in 2009 and was remembered as the dude who got an abandoned Atlanta elementary school building and converted it to the Litle Five Points Community Center, home to WRFG, Horizon Theater, and countless artists, social activists and revolutionaries.

Bill Hardin

Robyn – Stewart Brown and Steve Marsh at the 12th Gate

Robyn at the 12th Gate, Steve Marsh, later with Thermos Greenwood, on guitar

Hampton Grease Band, Harold Kelling and his Mosrite warming up at a high school gig, 1969

Here is maybe the last photo of Harold Kelling playing at his Christmas party……

Harold Kelling, George Coates, Charles Wolff, Tommy Dean and Rick Hinkel Grease Band, Brick Wall, Thermos Greenwood and ……

How about a horrible Jimi Hendrix at the Auditorium shot. It gets worse than this……..helps if you are in closer, right? Bill won’t like I included this, but It was often my vantage

Arlo

February 13, 2014photographers, tell your storyPatrick Edmondson

We’ve just met Arlo, as he wishes to be known. He was also on The Strip when it was aborning. But he had a good camera and knew how to use it. He has the only known picture of Middle Earth Headshop as well as the best pictures from July 7, 1969 when The Grateful Dead played a surprise concert in Piedmont Park with several bands that had played the just finished Atlanta Pop Festival.

Tom Coffin

February 13, 2014Bird People, photographersPatrick Edmondson

Tom Coffin was among the founders of The Great Speckled Bird. He was also a photographer on the scene in the early days.

Carter Tomassi

February 13, 2014artyfacts, history, photographersPatrick Edmondson

Carter Tomassi joined the Great Speckled Bird as a photographer simply because since he first arrived in Atlanta he had been on the scene taking pictures of everything. And Carter was a very good photographer. Jan Jackson was an Earth Mother I first met at Oxford College. She moved to Atlanta where she and husband Tom Jones moved into what they helped become The Zoo on 8th at Penn. She befriended Carter at Piedmont Park one Mescaline Sunday and he became a fixture at The Zoo and concerts.

Now Carter maintains a website to show his pictures of Atlanta’s hip community and musical events. His pictures of Byron Pop Festival are the best.

Here is his site www.messyoptics.com

Drop by, say hello from The Strip project and enjoy the views.

Bill Fibben

February 13, 2014Bird People, photographersPatrick Edmondson

Bill Fibben was the photographer of the hip community since his days at the Atlanta School of Art. He was the hippie beat photographer for The Great Speckled Bird because he and wife Linda had been among the first Atlanta bohemians to transform into hippies. Bill was truly everybody’s friend.

History of The Strip Project

February 13, 2014Project historyPatrick Edmondson

Ever since the days when Freaks roamed Atlanta, whenever fellow travelers gather, tales have been told. We talked always of forgot, and the gift of a painting of The Strip, put Pat and Patti into action.

First there was this site, then there were gatherings and shows at the Mitchell House on The Strip. videos: 2007 Midtown Mixer

2008 Music in Midtown

The Bird Bash 2008 reunion.

Gene Guerrero speaks.

Outside show

A joint show with The Great Speckled Bird, “The Turbulent Sixties in Atlanta, 1968-1976, a DeKalb Historical Society Exhibit opened May 18, 2011 – closed April 20, 2012 (420-12) at the 2011 Summer Dekalb History. The Bird has landed in downtown Decatur. This was held over twice and was their largest attended event as of 2014.

Tim Embry and Mystere as they graced the AJC

We assisted, through The Atlanta History Center, with a traveling exhibition called 1968. It has been at several locations around the country.

The future is still unfolding and we all continue as irregular verbs.

Electric Ballroom

February 13, 2014ClubsPatrick Edmondson

The Electric Ballroom was opened in the Georgian terrace by Alex Cooley.

The Turkey Trip was to be at the Duke Tire warehouse at 11th and Peachtree right on the Strip. As often happened, the night before the event the place was hurriedly condemned by the city. The concert was moved to the Georgian Terrace and the price was raised. Many were upset, but the music was fabulous. The Allman Brothers had just released their album and were in high form. The Hampton Grease Band was wonderfully greased. Special guests were Knowbody Else. Their lead singer kept his head down and long locks hanging as he hid beside the drummer. But his growl was like an old bluesman. Soon after they changed their name to Black Oak Arkansas and the singer emerged with bleached hair, buff naked chest and buckskin pants to prowl the stage as Jim Dandy Mangrum.

The success of this event led to Alex Cooley opening the Electric Ballroom here.

Jim Stewart’s first entry into the Rock Music arena was his engineering/production work on the psychedelic band known as The Knowbody Else. A lucky break came when Phillip Rauls was promoting their STAX record and contacted by the management team of Iron Butterfly inquiring about an opening act for their forthcoming show coming in Memphis. As it turned-out, The Knowbody Else opened the Iron Butterfly’s show and created such a splash with the audience that Iron Butterfy’s band members became impressed and offered the local band a permanent position opening for their U.S. tour. The Knowbody Else then changed their name to Black Oak Arkansas and signed a long term contract with Atlantic Records.

Great Southeast Music Hall

February 13, 2014ClubsPatrick Edmondson

Great Southeast Music Hall