Category Archives: history

Cultural stomp

February 18, 2014Community, feed your head, historyPatrick Edmondson

The Great Speckled Bird Sept 8,1969 vol. 2 #26 pg. 15

Cultural stomp

Atlanta theater has been dying a painful death for the past several years. And Atlanta audiences have been suffering from cultural deprivation. But Michael Howard, director of the Alliance Theater is taking a step to improve the situation.

On September 6, a group of young people from Austin, Texas, is giving Atlanta an opportunity to witness what may be part of the rebirth of theater.

Mixed media-a live rock band, film, song, audience-actor participation—is combined with the story of a kind of Everykid in the new and exciting way of communicating what these young people are trying to say.

“Stomp” is an experiment in communal Theater. Under the direction of Douglas Dyer, the “Stomp” cast has been living and working together since the play was first created. Although it uses a tightly structured plotline, it is also an experiment in breaking down the antiquated isolationism of the audience and drawing the audience into participation. It is an experiment in speaking with eyes, hands, minds—not just stage voices. It is an experiment in which Atlanta audiences must participate in order to understand.

If this new, relevant, real theater is to survive, people must open their minds and support it by involving themselves in the experiment and remembering it.

Opening Saturday, September 6, at 8:30 p.m. Be there and be open.

—Pam gwin

Bucky Wetherell was with STOMP. Listen to his interview.

STOMP!, written and directed by Douglas Dyer, in the crypt of the Mausoleum for the Arts.

Nothing is so flaccid as an idea whose time has come and gone. The idea for Hair was timely conceived, executed, and fully realized. Stomp! is an almost-frank attempt to exploit the concept of Hair, to resonate to its sounds, and to reproduce the responses to it. Stomp! is too tiny in conception and too weak in execution: it is almost a tiptoe.

The performers are young, from the University of Texas, where the show started as a campus production. They try hard and are almost enthusiastic most of the time. I, too, tried hard. I really worked to believe. In the end 1 could not believe; the show said nothing to me. 1 kept the beat of the music even when (most of the time) I could not hear the words. The words I heard eddied around in an intellectual circle, in the service of no central conception.

The message of the show is purportedly revolution, but it is an all-purpose revolution, one uniting or deceiving everyone and no-one: the clichés of brotherhood, war-resistance, sexual liberation, and left liberalism. In the end you stand on the lawn outside, the Experience past and quite meaningless to you.

Some of the media things come off; some of the people are obviously very good people; some of the ideas were very good ideas and now entitled to a dignified old age. These do not make a play. Go. It only costs $3. Try very hard, and see how hard you can work, without direction, to accomplish nothing.

– Morris brown

The Bird wails: “Atlanta theater has been dying a painful death for the past several years.” But hail the new hero: Michael Howard comes. Stomp in hand. offering a mixed-media novelty.

But that is all wrong. Theater has been dying/not in Atlanta but in the West, the same painful death that all culture must undergo before revolutionary rejuvenation or eternal mummification. The best of it, the Living Theatre, Che, are merely crumbs from the grand repast of the future at best or a safety-valve offering moments of escape from an eternity of perversity.

Nor did the theater ever die in Atlanta: it was never alive here to begin with! Not, at least, in the grand sense, but only in the form of a few experimental fragments most notably at the Academy Theater and, lest we forget, Arthur Burghardt’s efforts in Dutchman. True, Atlanta has built an imposing mausoleum for a never-was theater as part of the High Museum, ranking just below Rich’s as an architectural wonder. Stomp, then, may he fine despite the company it keeps. But the real theater cannot be reborn where it never lived, certainly not in the High Museum. Theater must be now where the people are: there, out there, at work, at play, at war, at death, at hunger. In the streets: guerilla to date, not too successful here, despite tremendous success elsewhere, but that’s where it’s at or got to be at. Not the Atlanta Pop Festival, but the aftermath in Piedmont Park was the real. Not what the people from Austin can do on the stage, but what we all do here: that’s real. Possible scenarios: Riot on Fourteenth Street, Layout on Bird Night, Park Scene on Sunday, County Jail, etc. In fact, they’re all being staged, again and again, nor is there any danger of a future takeover alienating the spontaneous culture from the community by the activities of culture sharks a la [Steve] Cole. It’s ours, because we live it.

Ted Brodek

Stomp Vamped!

February 18, 2014Community, historyPatrick Edmondson

The Great Speckled Bird May 3, 1971 Vol. 4 #18 pg. 5

Stomp Vamped!

It appears that artists in Atlanta will have to look to the State for approval of their creations or else subject their work to later censorship.

Stomp, a rock musical with social and political content, has been threatened with mass and repeated prosecutions if certain scenes were not taken out of the production.

The people involved in Stomp, known as The Combine, decided to perform two nude scenes in the show with clothes on until they could, along with their ACLU attorney, Morris Brown, decide on an action to take against the Georgia law being used to censor their production.

Jack C. McEntire, Captain of the Atlanta Police Department and William Baer Endictor, Esq., Assistant Solicitor General of the Criminal Court of Fulton County, told Alex Cooley, producer of Stomp, that if an objectionable scene was restored to the show, the Atlanta police would arrest everyone connected with the show, including “the man who cuts the grass,” and all would be prosecuted.

One of the nude scenes in the unadulterated show is “the birth” in which a woman is naked from the waste up. The other scene is “the river.” An actor described the scene as being involved with nature as closely and purely as possible which requires removing clothes. Neither scene is obscene or lewd.

The law threatening Stomp is S26-2105, enacted July 1. It states:

(a) Every person who, during the course of a play, night club act, motion picture, television production or other exhibition, or mechanical reproduction of ^human conduct, engages in conduct which would be public indecency under Code section 26-2011 if performed in a public place, shall be guilty of participation in indecent exposure and upon conviction, shall be punished as for a misdemeanor.

b) Every person who procures, counsels or assists any person to engage in such conduct or who knowingly exhibits or procures, counsels or assists in the exhibition of a motion picture, television production or other mechanical reproduction containing such conduct shall be guilty of a misdemeanor. ” (thus the grass cutter)

The vagueness of this law threatens everyone’s participation in the creation and exhibition of art.

The Combine, believing this law to be unconstitutional and one in a series of political harassments, has begun a class action to enjoin local law enforcement officials from enforcing this law until its constitutionality can be tested. The plaintiffs are: Alex Cooley, producer, Elizabeth Herring, Ronnie MacKey, representing the Combine, and M.E.Johnson, Jr., a private citizen who feels his rights are being denied by the censoring of the play. No hearing date has been set.

Although The Combine performed the nude scenes clothed on Friday night, they had decided to do the scenes naked on Tuesday night. The Combine could be protected temporarily from arrest if they performed the nude scenes by a restraining order or temporary injunction. If they failed to get a permanent injunction, The Combine could be busted on past shows performed with the nude scenes.

The Combine started out in Feb., 1969 at the University of Texas in Austin. They traveled with the show (then Now The Revolution) to Houston, Atlanta, New York and 16 performances in Europe, including the Dubrovnik Festival in Yugoslavia and the Edinburgh Festival in England. The show was televised in Scotland, Amsterdam, and taped in Munich for European distribution. All this without political or social hassle.

After returning to the U.S., the Combine chose to return to the south and play in Atlanta.

On Friday night the main concern of the Combine ‘ was whether or not to do the nude scenes. On Sunday, everything was changed. At 4:57 am, a fire alarm was called in for 3156 Peachtree Rd.—the site of Stomp’s theatre. In about an hour, the building was destroyed. Lieutenant Lester who handled the fire said: it “burned so completely that I can’t tell (how the fire started)—we don’t even know if the fire was lit.” –

Alex Cooley, however, believes that the fire was set. He said that the building was wired by electrical contractors, inspected by the city and approved by a master electrician. He added that the electricity was turned off each night at a master switch; there was no gas in the building. In fact, there was no utility going into the building except water.

He said that the last person left the building at 10:45 pm and it was unlikely that the fire started by spontaneous combustion.

On Monday afternoon, the gutted church was being torn down because it was a “dangerous construction,” Lester said. “It may help us really, when the building gets torn down. . .we will look into it as it’s being torn down.”

Since coming to Atlanta, the Combine has been hassled with dog complaints, health complaints, nudity complaints, the threat of losing children, and have now lost their stage!

All was destroyed in the fire—props, music and instruments, and lighting. And the Combine had no insurance. But they are looking for a place to perform again and will improvise whatever they have to; Then they will take up the fight with the state again.

—Lucia droby

Allman Brothers meet Atlanta!

February 18, 2014history, The Allman Brothers BandPatrick Edmondson

A Personal story of May 11, 1969.

Upon first seeing the Allman Brothers Band, an interracial rock and roll band from the heart of segregated, reactionary Georgia not only calling themselves brothers, but acting like it, Miller Francis of The Great Speckled Bird put Duane on the cover with the words: “There are times when it’s easy to think that the rock and roll musician is the most militant, subversive, effective, whole, together, powerful force for radical change on this planet; other times you know it’s true. “

Georgia State University’s Library has this issue of the Bird available as a pdf. here.

The Great Speckled Bird

Vol 2 # 11 April 19, 1969

by Miller Francis

The Allman Brothers play a form of what some might want to call “hard blues” but that term merely relates their music to what we already recognize and accept as valid; it says nothing of their real achievements. What informs their creation is not black music but the experience of young white tribesmen in experiencing black music. After all. Ray Charles, and what he means, is a crucial part of the lives of this new generation of non-blacks. Thus black music can be approached creatively by our musicians if the jumping off place is our experience of that music rather than the music itself.

Quote of the Week:

Policeman, after complimenting Barry for getting together such a pleasant, orderly crowd, “You can stay in the park all night for all we care.”

A leaflet drawn up by our “leader” says “Last week we were attacked. Some of us were shot. We were jailed, the culprits have not been caught The police did not and have never protected us” yet the same self-appointed “leader” personally takes it upon himself to represent the community by asking “permission” from the same power structure which exploits us, permission to listen to music which belongs to us, permission to meet together in a park which also belongs to us! The Man can’t bust our music. -don’t count on it.

Definition of MUSIC AS POWER. A perfectly straight middle-aged man stood near the band in the park Sunday, mesmerized for two hours at sounds which took him places he never knew existed. After the band took a break, his remark, more than a little unconvincing even to him as he said it, was, “That’s just a lot of noise. ” He knows things he doesn’t know he knows, and the character of our generation is determined by just those things.

Rock & Roll, our New Music, is sound for the head and body, orchestrated, electric, cosmic music that will rip you up by your corporate America roots and set you down just inside the Gates of Eden outside of which, we’ve known for some time now, there are no truths. You don’t, can’t, “listen” to the Allman Brothers; you feel it, hear it, move with it, absorb it, you “let it out and let it in” (the Beatles) and enter into an experience through which you are changed. You catch a glimpse of the kind of world we are becoming and you know more than ever the horrendous load of bullshit we’ll have to drop off on the way in order to give birth to that kind of world.

A rampant fear of the mythical dragon of “Communism” (a la J. Edgar), nourished and fed by the power structure, flows throughout the hip community of Atlanta like a poison fragmenting us, blocking any efforts at organization, and our self-appointed “leader” holds up an SDS button, and says, “I transcend this.”

THE ALLMAN BROTHERS

Duane Allman-Guitar & Vocal

Gregg Allman-Lead Vocal & Organ

Berry Oakley-Bassist

Butch Trucks-Drums

Dickey Betts-Guitar

Jai Johnny Johnson-Drums

Class prejudice the whole “redneck” concept—destroys the community from within, rendering it impotent, and our “leader” organizes us around contempt for the working man.

The Colony 400 monster rises in our very midst, attempting to determine how we will live our lives, and our self-appointed “leader” tell us hat “fear” and “paranoia” are our only enemies.

The Allman Brothers from Macon, Georgia, are a fantastically together group of young rock and roll musicians whose music draws as heavily from the blues: as the experience of young white tribesmen can without exploiting its source—a few steps farther and you get a merely talented farce like Johnny Winter. Since our generation is tribal, totally unlike our parents and grandparents and their parents, it is only natural that we would turn to the black man, whose tribal roots go so much deeper and do not have thousands of years of bullshit “civilization” to cut them off from these roots, for forms with which to relate to the new world. The history of the black man in America is the history of tribal man in an alienated, fragmented, capitalistic, literate, industrial, “I”-oriented culture; young people are simply showing good sense when they attempt to co-opt black culture (just as the dying order desperately attempts to put its stamp on the culture of its youth)—but creating and redefining our own culture in terms of the new space-age tribalism is the crucial struggle and follows as naturally from where we are at now as Grace Slick follows Patti Page. The blues, the entire complex of music which has come out of the experience of the black man in America, belongs to forms and patterns and relationships to experience of which we now have only the tiniest fraction of an inkling (even that is a hell of a lot). The black man’s blues (whether manifested in Lightnin’ Hopkins or Smokey Robinson and the Miracles) flows out of him while our “blues” is wrenched out bloody like a prematurely pulled tooth. Contrast the shouting subtleties and the rock- like soul of a Mahalia Jackson with the strained histrionics of a Janis Joplin (who, somewhere down under her package, probably does have some soul of her own). Art is not a product, it is a process: the blues—whether country or urban, acoustic or electric, raw or commercial -cannot be copied from records or concerts or books on black culture. The musical language of the black man cannot be co-opted simply because it happens to be powerful and sings of things we are just now recognizing as more valid than what we have been hung up in for centuries. Our music must develop its own power, its own forms, its own patterns of relationship with our tribal roots and our space-age technology in an unbroken line all the way down into our preliterate origins and all the way out into unknown galaxies.

The Allman Brothers know all this, and a lot more.

What we find in Piedmont Park on Sundays is a celebration of the awareness of the tribal experience. It in no way resembles the mass media bullshit image of the Haight-Ashbury community of “hippies” living like stoned zombie children off the sweat of others; it is an integrated collectivity of many different kinds of people intermeshed in an unbroken psychic web that transcends class, color, age and sex, and makes all of these things meaningful only within the context of the struggle to crush the power structure that stifles all of us.

The “political” manifestation of the Sunday Piedmont Park experience undid everything the music had built up. The sounds produced a together, militant, upright, powerful group of people involved in a psychic community struggling to become physical, to become “political” in the largest sense of the term. The politics of the “open” microphone is the equivalent of a band in which only a “lead” guitarist is amplified-it belongs to the past along with “teachers” and “employers” and “managers” and “leaders.” If we must have raps with our music, let them be unamplified groups planning whatever action they deem necessary. If hundreds of tribalists get sufficiently turned on, each one on be his own open microphone.

The Merry-Go-Round exudes an odor of capitalist shit that you can smell all the way down in the park, and we are told by our self-appointed “leader” that our enemy is “violence.”

Capitalism the logical extension of the word “I” exploits the life style of our movement and our current self-appointed “leader” attempts to organize his own ego trip.

The only happening at the park Sunday which approached the power and the glory of the music was the waving red flag, another nonverbal experience which colored the events of the entire day and night.

UPS: The tribal altar of Piedmont Park-stone pillars on either side of a two-stage stairway, level after level of people, sitting on the grass, on the steps, on the pillars, with the band, behind, in front, on all sides, across the top outlined by sun and sky, milling around, surrounding and enveloping and being enveloped by the music in an unbroken web of tribal psyche, sun, trees, grass, grass, music, animals, man woman and child all vibrating as one out of tune with die seats of established power and in tune with other communities wherever our music is being played

One together person reading Cummings’ “I sing of Olaf” to an overwhelmed audience unused to hearing those most militant statements—

“I will not kiss your fucking flag”

“There is some shit I will not eat”

Black saxophonist coming out of the crowd to jam with the band

New tribesmen passing their own version of the peace pipe

Phil Weldon rapping gently but forcibly about the red flag blazing above the stone pillar

Angry interchanges between Barry Weinstock and members of the community at midnight Sunday when it became obvious to everyone that spending the night in the park would accomplish not one fucking thing for anyone except those who dig spending the night in the park with the blessing, approval and “permission” of their city “fathers”

The power structure takes policemen out of our community and sends them into black neighborhoods to do their rotten thing and gives us our very own detective to soothe our ruffled white middle class beautiful gentle people (i.e. non- violent) feathers, and our self-appointed “leader” leads us to believe that we have won a great victory.

DOWN OF THE DAY-Barry Weinstock asking the band to stop playing so he could go into his rap!

The most subversive manifestation of the power of our music is its ability to weld an entire park full of every type of person from all walks of life into one, throbbing pulsation of experience.

Georgia State University’s Library has this issue of the Bird available as a pdf. here.

Atlanta’s Own Greenwich Village

February 18, 2014Community, historyPatrick Edmondson

Sunday Times Observer May 27, 1962
Atlanta’s Own Greenwich Village By BOB WILLIMON
THEY used to call it “Tight Squeeze,” and you could get killed there. Today they call if the 10th Street Business Section, and—taken together with 13th, 14th and 15th streets immediately to the north—it’s as near as Atlanta comes to having its very own Greenwich Village, Soho, Chelsea, Left Bank, or whatever other big cities call the collective digs of their avant garde citizenry.A stroll through the 10th Along Juniper, llth, 12th, Street area brings the sights, 13th and 14th streets, modern sounds and smells of exciting apartments blend with old living to all but a clod. From an old Victorian mansion comes the arpeggios of a piano student engrossed in Haydn, Liszt, Beethoven or Franck. High in a garret with plenty of north light, if one but climbed the stairs, can be found an artist, sometimes complete with beard, trying to express his feelings in a way he hopes will lead to fame and fortune.
Around the corner and up the street, one of the South’s oldest art theaters offers high-grade films like “The Red Shoes,” or a Guinness epic, and, just across Peachtree Street (or over on 15th Street), Atlanta’s budding legitimate theater stars try their emoting talents before appreciative audiences. Dancing schools are thick in the area, and, especially in the spring, sidewalk florist shops remind one of Paris.

Margaret Mitchell Penned GWTW in the Neighborhood

Margaret Mitchell wrote “Gone With The Wind,” at least a major part of it, in an apartment just off nearby Piedmont Park. Exciting and exotic restaurants offer oriental and other gourmet foods, but you can also get a hamburger or a plate of country ham, grits and red-eye gravy.

The wail of the trombone, the happy twinkle of the banjo, and torrents of draft beer blend to make life happier or at least more tolerable to many who would escape the unrelenting pressures of everyday life.

The 10th Street area is all this and more. Fine old Atlanta families, whose sense of stability led them to refuse to join that swift northward expansion of Atlanta, still tend their flowers and water their well-manicured lawns in stately old mansions, others of which have long since become business establishments or boarding houses.

Along Juniper, llth, 12th, 13th and 14th streets, modern’ apartments blend with old homes converted to the boarding houses which have served, and are serving, generations of Atlantans. If one were a sociologist, he likely would find that young high school and college “graduates coming to Atlanta to seek their fortunes gravitate naturally to the 10th Street section due to its artistic aura, its reasonable rents, convenience of transportation and shopping facilities. For those not yet ready or willing to accept a sentence to staid suburbia arid the eternal lawn-mowing chore, the 10th Street section is a welcome means of escape. Withall, the 10th Street section is a vital, throbbing, essential part of Atlanta—culturally and otherwise.

It was not always so. Back in 1867, the 10th Street area was known as “Tight Squeeze,” because it “took a mighty tight squeeze to get through (it) with one’s life,” according to Franklin Garrett’s wonderful three-volume history of Atlanta: Atlanta and Environs.

According to Garrett, what is now Peachtree Street prior to 1887 (when a 30-foot-deep ravine was filled in) jogged sharply westward at the present Peachtree Place and followed what is now Crescent Avenue for a piece, returning to its present course at or about llth Street. The road was narrow, crooked and bordered by heavy woods. There was a cluster of small houses at the. bend which is now 10th Street, together with a wagon yard, a black- smith’s shop and several small wooden stores. ,

According to Garrett, it was apparently the practice of highwaymen to waylay persons returning from Atlanta (after selling goods) at Tight Squeeze. John Plaster, a Confederate veteran, was fatally knocked in the head there on Feb. 22, 1867, after selling a load of wood in Atlanta. His attackers were not apprehended. Another victim, Jerome Chesire, sustained life-long injury in a similar attack. The Fulton County Grand Jury, alarmed by the attacks, urged that a force of “Secret Detectives” be set up to patrol Tight- Squeeze and other approaches to Atlanta to protect travelers. The detectives; of course, were to be “sober, steady and energetic.”

Used to be Called Blooming Hill

By 1872; the 10th Street area was no longer known as Tight Squeeze, but had become “Blooming Hill,” the reason for such change being unclear to this researcher.”

A man known only as Spiker, a citizen of Blooming Hill, wrote the local paper in 1872 that (Blooming Hill) is a “considerable little town.. . . with several fine dwellings, two grocery stores and another building.

“Rough Rice,” continued Spiker, “having become disgusted with the newspaper business in the city, has opened a liquor establishment here and says whiskey sells better than literature. There is a Temperance Hall just fitted up here and a Lodge of Knights of Jericho organized. Jack Smith has a brickyard where he manufactured the best brick in the county. And ,last, but not least, the foundation has been laid for a church.”
Booming Business Section One of City’s OldestSpiker, obviously, was proud of his section. Today, if he could take a survey, he’d be even prouder. Some 110 retail outlets, – ranging from one-man operations to huge supermarkets, do a booming business in this area roughly bounded by Seventh and 12th streets and by W. Peach- tree on the west. Juniper on the east. Some 80 of the merchants are banded together as the 10th Street Business Association, and the area is one of the oldest shopping centers in Atlanta.

Sally Vanderwerf

February 14, 2014history, tell your storyPatrick Edmondson

1. I first moved to Atlanta in the summer of 1968.

2. I moved to Atlanta to see what the whole Hippie movement was about and also to spread my wings and fly after two years of Jr. College in Bradenton, FL. Five of us drove to Atlanta from Bradenton. We got there in the early evening and started looking for a place to “crash.” We tried house after house on 14th St. Finally we went to the Catacombs, a blues bar on the corner of 14th St. and Peachtree St. We ran into a man called PaPa John. He invited us to dinner at his home way out somewhere. He had about 3 or 4 children and his wife made spaghetti for supper. We went back to the Catacombs after that and met a biker named Monkey who said we could crash at his apt. because he wasn’t going back there.

The next day I rented an efficienty apt. at 181 14th St. I met a lot of very nice people living there. While there I sold The Great Speckled Bird at various street corners. I also would spare change people for some cash. I remember meeting a guy named Beano who was somehow my cousin many times removed. He was from Mississippi. Two guys named Charlie and Stevie were acquaintances of mine then as well. I remember going to a 4th of July Parade and a bunch of us stopping the parade in a protest.

3. My best experience associated with the strip was the people. There was a community there that was caring and felt safe like a family.

4. My worse experience was moving out of the community to Peachtree Hills.

5. I learned from that time in my life that all people are family members waiting to be met.

6. Like I mentioned above, I lived at 181 14th St. for several months.

Peace,

Sally Vanderwerf

Here’s Sally’s 14th Street Poster and Sally today

14th Street Art

February 14, 2014history, tell your storyPatrick Edmondson

I came to Atlanta in 1965 after graduating NYU film school. I had gotten a job with Georgia Public Television. I moved into a stable/garage on 14th street, behind the house rented by WRFG co-founder Harlan Joy. When the shack burned I stayed a month at Bill and Linda Fibben‘s further down on 14th street which became a center for counterculture activities.

In 1967, having attended dozens of experimental film showings in New York I decided, with help from friends, to try to bring them to Atlanta. I rented the Art theater on 14th street for Friday and Saturday midnight screenings, booked films from the cinemateque in New York, and from October to January showed the works of Stan Brakage, Gregory Markopolus, Ed Emshwiller, Ken Jacobs, the Kuchar Brothers, Jack Smith, Adolpus Mekas, etc. It cost a $1.50 to attend and we sold out every night. (Local film distributors thought I had discovered a gold mine and wanted to know how to get in on the action.)

One night I showed an hour documentary on Lenny Bruce- the other hour the Hampton Grease Band performed. Another night I showed the actively enjoyed trippy feature “Lovers of Teruel”. The eclectic series ended when the backers, Diane Berger and Justice Randolph, realized that even though we were selling out, the costs of advertising and booking the films and the rental were losing us money. Alas, it was much fun while it lasted, and the theater itself soon followed us under. The attached is a poster that I stapled to trees on the Strip and the Emory campus. In 1969 I made a film for Vista featuring a buying cooperative in Cabbage Town for which I filmed the Fulton Cotton Mills in operation. I believe it is if not the only, certainly the last, film footage of the Mills up and running. The film is noteworthy also because of the interviewed Cabbagetown locals. Later, I established a film production company, Synapse Films, where I introduced numerous ex UGA art majors into the art of making money as grips in the motion picture industry. David Moscovitz

Richard Powers

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.

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.

Phooey!

February 13, 2014history, Politics, RightsPatrick Edmondson

Why is the word Phooey associated with segregationist governor Lester Maddox?

Phooey was Maddox’s all purpose cuss word. Remember Lester Maddox had been elected Governor because he was a segregationist. He was nationally known for having used axe handles, ‘Pickrick Toothpicks’, to threaten any “colored” people who would come to his restaurant. His other talent was riding a bicycle backwards in parades. Really. Those ‘talents’ got him elected Georgia governor.