Category Archives: Lifestyles

Skip Williamson – Decatur Book Week 2008

IMG_3461Skip Williamson was one of the original underground comic artists.

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Snappy Sammy Smoot

Skiprevealed he had done ad work in Chicago while LSD was still legal and used to inspire ad art. He came up with a  sun that wants to be a raisin.

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That commercial inspired the sun I have used as a logo ever since.sungif

 

Here’s Skip’s view of Decatur.w_skip-williamson_decatur

 

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Underground Comic Bijou Funnies , cover by Skip Williamson    

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Little Five Points

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The People’s Place had been a porn theater. Now It was used for community building. Some of the first cooperative food buys were distributed there. This was to grow into the Sevananda Food Co-Op. Later it was a bank. Now it is The Star Bar.

Saved from the Expressway, BOND neighborhoods flourished and Little Five Points or L5P became counter-culture downtown for a while. Patti Kakes Kunkle ran Identified Flying Objects with husband John David, both of whom were Frisbee Grand Masters. Their shop carried Grateful Dead and tie-dye items plus lots od discs for disc golf and frisbee plus kites and anything that flew. Patti knows EVERYONE in L5P and was unanimously named The Queen of Little Five Points.shapeimage_3

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Patti with The Marching Abominables

Every Halloween L5P has a big parade to let the collective freak flags fly.  You can see videos of them on youtube under the Queen of Little Five Points

Queen Patti kakes at Identified Flying Objects
Queen Patti kakes at Identified Flying Objects

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2019 meet-the-generation-of-atlantans-who-helped-make-little-five-points-what-it-is-today

Ego Road

Now The Carter Center is a good neighbor. It was not so at first. It fell in with a bad crowd–developers.

A Highway to connect with the Stone Mountain expressway was supposedly essential to the planned center, even if it caused Colony Square-style destruction of several communities for the gain of a few.  “Fool me once…”  Civil disobedience experience was called into action to save our homes and neighborhoods.

It succeeded. The highway was recalled eventually and all see the center flourishes as do the neighborhoods. Thank you RoadBusters for Little Five Points!

Song protesting the proposed Carter Expressway. When you drive by and see it end at Moreland, that is a victory for the citizens.
egoroad

 

Ode to Dock Ellis

Ode to Dock Ellis

The recently deceased Dock Ellis is famous for pitching a no-hitter while tripping his balls off.  There’s actually a song written about the incident.

Dock Ellis’s No-No
It was a lovely summer’s morning
An off-day in LA
So thought one Dock Ellis
As he would later say
His girlfriend read the paper
She said, “Dock, this can’t be right…
It says here that you’re pitching
In San Diego tonight”

“Got to get you to the airport”
And so off Dock Ellis flew
His legs were a little bit wobbly
And the rest of him was too
Took a taxi to the ballpark
An hour before the game
Gave some half-assed explanation
Found the locker with his name

Time came to go on out there
Down the corridor
The walls were a little bit wavy
There were ripples in the floor
He went out to the bullpen
To do a bunch of stretches
Loosen up a little
Throw his warm-up pitches

All rose for the national anthem
People took off their hats
Fireworks were exploding
The cokes were already going flat
Dock was back there in the dugout
So many things to watch
Some players spit tobacco juice
Others grabbed their crotch

The umpire hollered, “Play Ball!”
And so it came to be
Dock’s Pirates batted first
And when they went down 1-2-3
Dock’s catcher put his mask on
And he handed Dock the ball
It was 327 feet
To the right & left field walls

The Pirates took the field then
And Dock stood on the rubber
He bounced a couple of pitches
And then he bounced a couple others
You might say about that day
He looked a little wild
The lead-off batter trembled
Nobody knew why…Dock Ellis smiled

You walk 8 and you hit a guy
The things that people shout…
Especially your manager
But he didn’t take Dock out
Dock found himself a rythym
And a crazy little spin
Amazing things would happen
When Dock Ellis zeroed in

Sometimes he saw the catcher
Sometimes he did not
Sometimes he held a beach balll
Other times it was a dot
Dock was tossing comets
That were leaving trails of glitter
At the 7th inning stretch
He still had a no-hitter

So he turned to Cash, his buddy
Said, “I got a no-no going”
Speaking the unspeakable
He went back out there throwing
Bottom of the ninth
& He stood high upon the mound
3 more outs to go
He’d have his name in Cooperstown

First up was Cannizzaro
Who flied out to Alou
Kelly grounded out for Dean
The shortstop yelled, “That’s two”
It must’ve been a mad house
The fans upon their feet
The littler ones among them
Standing on their seats

Next up would’ve been Herbel
But Spezio pinch-hit
He took a 3rd strike looking
And officially, that was it
It was a lovely summer’s morning
An off-day in LA
So thought one Dock Ellis
As he would later say

Tales of General Weirdness and Wildness

I remember those days so very well. I’m now 54 years old. At that time I was an impressionable young 16/17 year old. I went to both pop festivals. I lived off 13th street in a drug rehab house…….named Renewal House. I met a guy there named Robert Straight, But everyone called him “Decent”. I married him in Piedmont Park in the gazebo June 21, 1970 or 71. A guy named Michael Spraidlin? or Spraitlin? married us. The Allman Brothers played in the park that day…….

Someone later told me the wedding was filmed by one of the local news channels and to this day I wish I had a picture to show my daughter. There are alot of memories of those days. I thank the Lord I made it through. I have scars from those days and the old saying  goes–if you play you may end up paying. Wish I had a picture of that wedding………

Thanks  adavi

Well, I was rather rebellious as a teenager to start with. Out of control sexually, hated to live at home, and I guess you could blame it all on the Beatles.HA HA My mom took me and  my sister and a friend to see them August 18, 1965.. I was 12! They were at the Atlanta Stadium. From that time on I was hooked. I started smoking pot when I was 13/14 and started tripping on acid at 15.I was a wild child. Older friends took me to the strip and one experience led to another. My sister was a groupie to several bands at the time. I remember a club named Richard’s…. Lynyrd Skynyrd first played there.

How could I ever forget?  Piedmont Park whose various bridges I slept under as a 14 year old runaway.  On whose grass I lost my virginity one humid southern night to a big hippie girl who went by the name Wild Honey Sunburst.  The park’s fountains became bathtubs for the homeless young freaks of the day.    

This big blond was constantly in the company of small slim brunette named Canary- a self-professed “coal-burner” from Memphis.  They had a room in a boarding house.  

Hey do you remember that Fish and Chips on the Strip?  It was open 24 hours I think and was shelter for many during bad weather and that movie theatre that showed that movie theatre that never took down those Funny Girl posters. 

 Then there was the live Drag Theatre on the corner (or maybe a bar)….    I stayed with a dope dealer for awhile who had an apartment in a cool brick building.  There were French doors inside and he hid the dope in the …..   I remember it was a big place and the rent  was something like $75.00 per month.  He didn’t beat me up when he discovered that some of the MDA was missing.  He was a much older man… about 27!  

Who didn’t at one time or other sell “The Bird”.  I used to sell somewhere on Roswell Rd. at the city limits I think.  Some guys were turning tricks in the parks for $5.00 (bj only) and others were “rolling the queers” as they sought sex partners at night.  

What was it all about?   Freedom? For me think so.  There was in those times a collective spirit of change and love and revolution which hasn’t been matched since.  It was as if everyone was tuned in to the same psychedelic channel.  The free concerts in the park… the headshops with hand-written signs “no-rip-offs”.  There was that old victorian house that the Black Panthers used as their headquaters.  Just so many memories.  

Thank God for guys like Carter Tomassi whose black and white photographs let us step back in time for a moment to remember where we’ve been.

Jimmy M

Oh, my; I am so sorrowfully out of touch. I did not know that John Cippolina had died. He in particular, as well as QuickSilver Messenger Service have been a part of my personal story (you know, the one that makes folks politely drift away when they hear it coming for the fourteenth time) since 1968.

Actually, it was with John’s mother I first spoke. He was in the shower. She relayed conversation back and forth, at the end of which I was very excited: John had invited me to the Avalon for their gig that night–guest list, see us in the dressing room (which was not “back” stage, but out front, back a ways, and adjacent to the dance floor). Reason being–I was under recent indictment (May ’68; this was maybe mid-late summer) for “refusal to submit to physical examination for the purposes of induction into the armed forces of the savior of the free world…lada,lada, lada). The purpose of the meeting at the Avalon was to see if there were some way that QSD could play for–my trial!

Well, that never happened, even though John thought it worth looking into. I always have remembered (obviously) the way they treated me. I think John said, in response to my gratitude for inviting me to meet with them, something about how they were only musicians–but I was really stepping out to fight against that war that truly exemplified the “Pride of Man.” (That, of course, was the song that gave me the idea.) So I miss him, I miss the easy confidence that somewhere, probably in Marin Co. he’s getting old (we were born the same year), regrouping with the old crew. But he’s not.

I offer this tribute so that others of his fans may know that he cared about the humanity of this planet, in those dangerous (but truly alive!) days. -greg gregory 

Greg convinced the jury and got his CO at the same time as Joan Baez’s husband David Harris was denied his. Greg moved to Atlanta and wrote for The Bird and was an early mover and shaker in the Little Five Points B.O.N.D. neighborhoods organization that laid the groundwork for making the neighborhoods humanly liveable.

I worked at the The Twelfth Gate starting in the summer of 1969 untill 1972 I think, and lived on 14th street. I was also in Daryl Roades and the HaHavishnu Orchestra from 1975-1976. I went to The Atlanta College of Art, the guy who ran The Catacombs went to the school also. I think he was called Mother David. He had a run in with one of the teachers and scared the teacher to death. He aimed a gun at him, the teacher started trying to talk him down, he shot it and out came pink flowers.There was also another coffee house called The Grand Central Cafe(something like that)on 9th St. I saw The Hampton Grease Band there for the first time in 1968. I lived in a sort of commune on 14th and then on 15th with Robin Feld, she, Ursula and I worked together after the church pulled out of The Twelfth Gate. It was exciting to see all the jazz bands come through, Elvin Jones, The Weather Report, Larry Coryell, Oregon, Macoy Tyner as well as Little Feat, Radar and The Grease Band, etc. You might want to contact Tony Garstein. He was the drummer for Radar and I’m sure he would have some pictures for you.

Gena

Greetings!

I have been waiting for the Internet to provide this project for 12 years!

I was there in ’69. Tried the Orange Sunshine, stayed with (biker) johnny Reb, next door to the catacombs, up the street from white columns, Ate Thanksgiving dinner in Piedmont Park before being returned to my home.

Spent much time on the strip between 1970 and 1972.

“Worked” at the community with Gypsy (biker) Vick (hippie) and Crystal and many others.

Then the bikers had a meet and the charter changed and Gypsy was replaced with Chains

Remember Bongo and Steve (the guy with the big cross)

Sunshine (was that Bonnie Raitt?)

Spade Bob, Poet, Runaway Richard, Mary (The Bridge) Flower and the other folks who lived in the apartments under the Salvation Army Girls Lodge (127 or 1127 11th street)

Jd, chili dog charley, smokey, marvin gardens (how could I forget that name,ever)

Here are a few places I didn’t see mentioned

General store (down 10th st. next to the alley)

G.B.’s an awesome restaurant for us (corner of 11th and peachtree after the Drag club closed) owned by Golden Boy I finally figured

 The Bridge (metro atlanta mediation canter)up 11th street

Salvation Army Girls Lodge (behind G.B.’s)

 The Bowery (a club I wasn’t old enough to enter) next door to the community center

 our place outside the strip area – SHOTWELL

 a couple of bands I didn’t see mentioned

celestial voluptuous Banana

Eric Quincy Tate

 I hope this project really takes off!

 I was little Bob. Now my friends call me cat as in

cheshire T. cat.

Hi,

What a great thing you are doing! I love it.

When did I first come to Atlanta? March 1970.

What brought me to Atlanta? My sister. I had run away

from boarding school. My sister came to DC and found

me, and I went to Atlanta to live with her.

When did I first visit the strip?  March 1970. It was

such an experience. I remember very clearly the first

time I walked down the strip. I felt like I was home.

My best experience? The free concerts in the park. It

was always such a beautiful day when the bands played.

So many people. My best experience of all was an acid

trip in the park that I shared with my sister. We sat

by the water for hours…in the gazebo.  My sister

died in an auto accident a few years ago. I felt

compelled to return to Atlanta and visit the park. I

sat in exactly the same place we had been during that

trip and remembered her.

Worst experience?  When the police came down the strip

and started arresting people for “loitering.” They

beat people. I was arrested twice, once for loitering

and once for jay-walking.  Then the police cleared out

Piedmont Park. It became a lonely, sad place.

What did I learn? I don’t know, really. It was a

defining time in my life. I thought it would go on

forever. I guess I learned that we can never really

have that time back again…though I would give

anything if we could. I sort of feel like a fish out of water now.

Julie

I don’t know if you are still collecting stories, etc., but on the off chance you are I thought I’d send mine along with the poster.

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 efficiency 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

This is a link to a website of the era. http://www.bandhistory.com has the history, music and photos of many of the period bands and their history leading up to the hippie era.  I was in one of those bands and lived on the Georgia Tech campus from 1966-1970.  We played some of the free concerts at Piedmont Park, as well as at “The Headrest” and “Funchio’s House of Rock.”

Good luck on your project.

Todd Merriman

While I had spent most of my life in Atlanta, I left to go to school in Macon, GA.  There I found a whole new world.  I had always liked “different” music, but a lot of it was being made in Macon.  I had gone to the Municipal Auditorium in Atlanta, sat in the “white only” balcony to see Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles, and many others while in high school. But,  I was introduced to The Magnolia Ballroom and Peacock Lounge during college.  In Macon, we hung out at the gay bar, the biker’s bar, the black jazz club, the trucker’s lounge & really listened to R & B, and the beginnings of Southern Rock.  I let my hair grow — and got rid of the bleached blond look.  T-shirts and jeans, brighter colors and pierced ears entered my life, along with opposition to our involvement in Vietnam, and actively trying to integrate my college and Macon.

During a visit home — Atlanta— I discovered the Illien (sp?) Gallery and then, the Stein Club. After meeting a lot of people at the Stein, I decided to move back to Atlanta, and go to grad school at GA State.  Living just off Piedmont, I could walk home at 2 AM from the Stein with no problems.  I knew the folks at the A & P, the hardware store, the bakery and the deli.  It was small town life, but, oh, so different !

Music was available all up and down the Strip.  The Atlanta Pop Festivals, seeing Stevie Winwood and the “British Invasion” at the old Fulton Stadium, Little Feat on 10th St., shows at the Sports Arena, the Great Southeastern Music Hall—-such great music ! Then, there was soccer at the Stadium —- and those pre-game parties– and rugby games and parties ! The big Atlanta Snow left about 15-20 of us “trapped” in a house on Piedmont, across from the Park.  Survival parties would set out for the liquor store at Ansley Mall, and come slipping and sliding back with cases of beer, etc.

During all of this, there was the Stein.  My home away from home where I could always count on finding friends, something interesting to talk about, meeting people from all over the States and elsewhere, discovering new places to go, finishing a pitcher while my clothes were washing/drying at the Laundromat…….the place where, when some of us started having kids, getting married, etc., the management built a beer garden with swings and a sandbox !  Both my children learned to walk at the Stein, rolling around in their little yellow walker, and then being helped out of the walker and picked up a million times by all their friends there at the Stein.  The Stein spawned other parties —- Orphan’s Thanksgiving, the Opera Party, 4th of July, the Halloween Costume Party, the Kentucky Derby Party — all fun and a little crazy.  We would wander off to Rose’s Cantina, the Chinese place on the corner of 10th, down to the Fox to see The Grateful Dead, to “the Park” where I heard the Dead and the Allman Bros. playing together about 10 feet away from me, but always coming back to the Stein to start the evening, end the evening, or both !  Suzanne

Larry Ortega :When I was 15 years old, my dad, who worked at Emory University in Atlanta, gave my friend Cynthia and me two tickets to see this guy named Pete Seeger, a folk singer who I had never heard of. (I think that my dad thought that folk singers were wholesome!). Cynthia and I piled into a small auditorium on campus, and sat on the floor. As we sat there, a college student came to the microphone and told us that earlier that day, the National Guard had shot and killed four students at a little college in Ohio called Kent State, during a protest against the war in Vietnam. Then, Pete Seeger came out and sang his heart out, and we all sang with him. That night my life changed, and I have never been the same. I have been to his concerts since then, but I don’t think that anything will ever match the power, and the sadness, and the awe that we all felt that night. Pete Seeger and I share this stupid belief that children should be nurtured, and not shot down by their own government. The last couple of times that I have seen Mr. Seeger on television, he has mentioned that he was losing his voice in his advanced age. He isn’t losing his “voice,” at all. It’s right here.

I grew up in Atlanta, literally–from 66-67 I was playing Army wife, then came home and worked for Delta till 68 then off to Kansas to play army wife again–thats where I got the Bird in the mail. Back to Atlanta in 69, and stayed. My Bottom of the Barrel days interspersed that–I remember meeting my husband in SF in April 68, buying beads and a brass peace symbol in the Haight.  The peace symbol still hangs in my car–Jeff Espina has/had the beads! We knew the owners and were there a lot–also==was it the Carousel, or something, that had a sliding board onto the dance floor?  That was definitely 67/68.

I think it was pre-68 when the Bird did a class-action suit because the postal service tried to shut them down for running ads for abortion centers.  I was one of the “class” with about 6 other women, but we never had to go to court, cause the PO just let it die.

And pre-67, before they tore down al lot of DT housing–dated a Tech guy who lived right on 75/85, and we would climb out on his roof, thru the kitchen window, smoke, and groove on the cars on the freeway.

My daughter was born in 1970, and I do remember taking her to a Jerry Rubin thing at Piedmont park–she couldn’t have been a year old, cause we dropped her out of her stroller, and she still brags she is the youngest person with her pix taken by the FBI.

Jeani Jessen

Rose – Vicki Levy

I would really like to get on your mailing list. I grew up in Atlanta, Met some of the first guys I played guitar with, (Duane Allman and Richard Betts) at t he Twelfth Gate C.H. where I lugged my Fender Dual Showman and 1962 SG Les Paul for my audition. I was young, not too impressionable, full of love for life and music. I have fond memories of the friends I made on P’Tree, between 10th and 14th Streets. I wonder why no one ever mentions the “Pig Pen” Police station that was opened in the middle of the strip. I remember them being very nice for the most part, unlike the Police from other areas of Atlanta. …well anyway, I am enjoying reminiscing through your site. Thanks for the mems. I remember many free concerts in the Park and even jammed a few times with some groups there. -Bryan Smith

The Fruit Jungle was the place I always went before, after, or during concerts in the park. It was also the only late night stop for munchies on the way home in the wee hours. A very colorful place and one where it seemed, the people were always welcomed. 

 Although not on the strip one of the other places I did not see mentioned was Comes the Sun in Buckhead. 

Duke Klauck opened the store in 1969. It was open until 1974. 

I worked there for a period of time. The store had the largest supply of rolling papers, blue jeans and other supplies at the time. There was an in house leather worker and I believe it was one of the first stores to sell water beds. Few people knew that Duke was a Yale Graduate. He moved to Santa Fe and started the spa/wellness center Ten Thousand Waves. Ten Thousand Waves is still in operation in Santa Fe. 

Rose

My husband, Bob Levy was the co-owner of The Merry Go Round store and opened Sexy Sadie’s, Freedom Shoe Company and Percy Flasher’s, across the street. We met in 1969, when he and Lenny Wineglass just had the Merry Go Round.  –Vicky Levi

Beatles Tour

 

droppedImageTalk about conflicted emotions. I had four of these. Then my grandfather, who I loved very much and had stayed with nights to care for, had died. His funeral was scheduled for Sept. 11, 1964! (note date on tickets I had)

Rain or shine, it should have said or hurricane, which is what occurred.  Otherwise my father had planned to surprise me and fly me down..

The next year they came to Fulton Stadium in Atlanta. Tickets sold out before South Georgians got a chance.beatlesatl

A 38th Anniversary look at The Beatles concert at Atlanta Stadium

By Donnie Thompson

http://www.earcandymag.com/rrcase-beatlesatlanta.htm

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Beatlesallenbeatlespressbeatlesatl3

We were told a story we are unable to check, but pass on since it is so great a story, true or not.

It is said… an Atlanta policeman went to the locker room of the Atlanta Stadium just before show time and caught one George Harrison partaking of a magic cigarette. The officer was sticking to the book and arresting him. Big hubub. Brian Epstein offering anything to just forget it all. Head officer comes and says, “Listen to that crowd! If these guys don’t go on, there will be a riot and a lot of little girls going home with broken hearts today. Can we come to a better agreement than creating a broken hearts club, Sgt. Pepper?”

Sgt. Pepper got the message and tore up the citation. Good story whatever.

 

 

Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Summer of Love by Paul Krassner

 

   realistchickActually, the Summer of Love in 1967 was born on October 6, 1966, the day that LSD became illegal.  In San Francisco, at precisely two o’clock in the afternoon, a cross-fertilization of mass protest and tribal celebration took place, as several hundred individuals simultaneously swallowed tabs of acid while the police stood by helplessly.  Internal possession was not against the law.  The CIA had originally envisioned using LSD as a means of control, but millions of young people became explorers of their own inner space.  Acid was serving as a vehicle to help deprogram themselves from a civilization of insane priorities.  The nuclear family was exploding.  Extended families were developing into an alternative society.

There had always been a spirit of counterculture, taking different forms along the way.  Just as the beats had evolved from the bohemians, the hippies were now evolving from the beats.  No longer did you have to feel like the only Martian on your block.  There were subcommunities developing across the country.  “Make love, not war” had become more than a simple slogan.  The banning of LSD also affected Bay Area underground papers.  The political Berkeley Barb got psychedelicized and the psychedelic San Francisco Oracle got politicized.  The CIA’s scenario had backfired.

The blossoming of the flower children–encompassing sex, drugs and rock’n’roll–was at its core a spiritual revolution, with religions of repression being replaced by religions of liberation, where psychotropic drugs became a sacrament, sensuality developed into exquisite forms of personal  art, and the way you lived your daily life demonstrated the heartbeat of your politics.  There was an epidemic of idealism.  Altruism became the highest form of selfishness.

Greek philosopher Socrates said, “Know thyself.”  Novelist Norman Mailer said, “Be thyself.”  And the ’60s counterculture said, “Change thyself.”  Comedian George Carlin–who had entered show biz in the late ’50s, wearing a suit and tie, performing traditional stand-up schtick–started surfing on that wave.  He reinvented himself visually–jeans, T-shirt, beard, ponytail–and acknowledges that smoking marijuana really helped him to fine-tune his material.

“My comedy changed because my life changed,” he says.  “The act followed what was going on in me.  Humor is very subjective, and what I was doing on stage didn’t match up with what was going on in my life or the country–1967 was the Summer of Love, it was the height of the cultural revolution–love, peace, free sex, all crested that summer.  Everything was changing.  I was playing big shows like Jack Paar and Ed Sullivan, but inside I was anti-authority and I hated that shit.  Parents might not have been able to relate, so I went to the kids.  I was using my act to further my ideas about the times.”

The mainstream media began to catch up with a whole new generation of pioneers traveling westward without killing a single Indian along the way.  San Francisco became the focus of this pilgrimage.  On Haight Street, runaway youngsters–refugees from their own famlies–stood outside a special tourist bus–guided by a driver “trained in sociological significance”–and they held mirrors up to the cameras pointing at them from the bus windows, so that the tourists would get photos of themselves trying to take photos of hippies.  When Time magazine decided to do a cover story on hippies, a cable to their San Francisco bureau instructed researchers to “go at the description and delineation of the subculture as if you were studying the Samoans or the Trobriand Islanders.”

This was at a time when a rumor that you could get legally high from smoking dried banana skins was eagerly spread across the country.  In San Francisco, there was a banana smoke-in, and an entrepreneur started a successful banana-powder mail-order business, charging $5 an ounce.  Agents from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs headed for their own laboratory, faithfully cooking, scraping and grinding thirty pounds of bananas, following a recipe published by the underground weeklies.  For three weeks the FDA utilized apparatus that “smoked” the dried banana peels.  The Los Angeles Free Press promoted another hallucinogenic–pickled jalapeno peppers, anally inserted.  All over southern California, heads were shoving vegetables up their asses.  After I mentioned on stage that the next big drug would be FDA, sure enough, Time reported that there would be “a super-hallucinogen called FDA.”  Silly me, I thought I had made that up.

And then there was Newsweek.  Kate Coleman, who, before graduating from UC-Berkeley, was busted at a sit-in by the Free Speech Movement, got a job there in New York.

“In the summer of 1967,” she recalls, “Newsweek indirectly bought enough grass and paraphernalia to warrant a felony sentence in New York of one to 15 years.  Only three years behind the times, it was decided to do a cover story on marijuana, and naturally I was assigned to the story.  I went down to the Lower East Side’s Psychedelicatessen and purchased two beautiful water pipes, a hash pipe, roach holders, a dozen packets of cigarette papers, and a few little psychedelic toys.  What a haul!

“I also bought two ounces of Acapulco Gold and one ounce of Panama Red from my favorite exclusive downtown dealer.  Newsweek footed the whole bill without a ripple, and I got the payola of a lifetime.  But it didn’t end there.  The fact that marijuana was to be legitimized twixt the pages of Newsweek gave rise to unexpected curiosity on the part of both the senior editor and the writer of the piece, both of whom decided, independent of each other, that their respective editing and writing would lack verisimilitude unless they tried the stuff.  I was approached by people all over the magazine, asking me to get them some pot.”

A highlight of the Summer of Love for me was an acid trip at the 1967 Expo in Montreal.  I had been invited to speak at the Youth Pavilion and also to give my impressions, on Canadian TV, of the United States Pavilion, a huge geodesic dome engineered by Buckminster Fuller.  Before entering the U.S. pavilion, which was guarded by marines who had attended a special Protocol School, I ingested a 300-microgram tab of LSD.

“This pavilion is really beautiful, with all these flowing colors,” I said to the interviewer.  “You don’t see them, but I do.  There’s an interesting kind of symbolism, though.  These military men, combat marines, I don’t see that in any other pavilion, military men guiding you around, saying, ‘Yes, there’s the Little Girls room’ or ‘Would you like to touch my medals for killing Viet Cong?’  I think it’s very appropriate that we should be standing right here by the largest escalator in the western hemisphere, since my country is the greatest escalator of the war in southeast Asia….What I would like to do, as a gesture of my commitment–since I feel there’s something lacking in the American Pavilion, which is a certain recognition of the fact that the country is really split in two–since we’re a nation of symbols, I would like to indulge in a symbolic act.  I have my draft card here.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Would I kid about a thing like that?”

“It’s his draft card.”

(It was really a photostat of my draft card, since I burned one each time I was invited to speak at a college campus.)

“And I’ll hold a match here.”

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“If I may.”

“He’s burning his draft card.  How about that for a scoop, hey?”

“Now, the reason I’m doing this is, again, because we get hung up on symbols.  People will be more upset about this than about the fact that children are being burned alive in Vietnam….”

The marine lieutenant called his captain.  When the interview was finished, the captain told me it was against the law to burn my draft card.  So I took out my draft card and showed it to him.

“But he burned it,” the lieutenant insisted.  “I saw him, sir.  He burned it.”

“I burned a photostat of my draft card.  So I lied on television.  That’s not a crime.  People do it all the time.”

“It’s also against the law to make a copy of your draft card,” the captain said.

“Well, I destroyed the evidence.”

I knew that political demonstrations were barred at Expo, but I had managed to smuggle one in, along with the acid.  The interview was labeled an “incident,” and there was a heated argument between the U.S. Information Agency and the Canadian Broadcasting Company, but the incident was already on tape, so now it had become a free-speech issue.  It would be shown on TV that night and become front-page news in Montreal papers the next day.

Just as I was leaving the pavilion, a band struck up a fanfare.  I made the mistake of projecting my own feelings, and suddenly I was convinced that LSD had been sprayed into the air, that everybody was tripping, that peace and love were breaking out all over the world at that very moment.  As I was walking along, I started smiling at families and waving to them, and they were smiling at me and waving back.  But then a core of reality came to the surface, the force of my own feedback made me turn around, and I saw that those same people were now pointing at me.  What an asshole!  I still blush with embarrassment.

Now, a non-profit organization, the Council of Light, has organized a free 40th Anniversary all-day concert to be held at Golden Gate Park on September 2 “intended to not only celebrate the music, but also resonate with the consciousness raising of the ’60s as represented by eight goals chosen to receive donations and publicity from the concert.  They are: Environmental Sustainability, Relieve Poverty & Hunger, Raise Education, Promote Gender Equality, Reduce Child Mortality, Improve Maternal Health, Combat AIDS, and create a Global Partnership for Development in undeveloped nations.  Charities chosen by the Council representing these eight goals will receive all money raised beyond basic costs of the production.”

For information, check out summeroflove40th@yahoo.com.  But you don’t have to be present at the concert to celebrate this phenomenon that occurred four decades ago–an evolutionary jump in consciousness–exploding out of the blandness and repression of the Eisenhower-Nixon years.  Currently, a mass awakening, exploding out of the blandness and repression of the Bush-Cheney years, seems to be happening again.  Or is that just wishful thinking?

*   *   *I asked several folks to recollect an aspect of what the Summer of Love meant to them.

Stephen Gaskin–author of Cannabis Spirituality: When the Human Be-In of January 1967 at Golden Gate Park was conceived, it was against the background of sit-in’s and teach-in’s and was somewhat inspired by the civil rights movement.  It was like a true rumor when the word on Haight Street was that all the hippies were supposed to come out to the Polo Field and see us all together.

I walked up to that gang of hippies filling the meadow, and I had to sit down and lean against a tree as if I was coming on to acid.  While I was coming on, a mounted policeman rode up to look at the crowd and was addressed by a woman, also surveying the crowd.

She said, “Officer, my son is down there.  Help me find him.”

The officer replied, “Ma’am, everybody down there is smoking marijuana.  I can’t go down there.”

Later on, down by the stage, I saw a guy who seemed to be trying to hypnotize a young woman who was on acid by waving an incense stick in her face and rapping on her intently.  I thought he was messing with her mind and she seemed to be in trouble.  I tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention and said, “Do you need to be rescued?”

She said, with evident relief, “Yes, please!”

She and I walked over to the edge of the crowd and sat on the grass and she laid her head on my knee and finished coming on until she felt strong enough to go dig the rock and roll.

It was the first time we got to see how many of us there were.

 Stewart Brand–publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog: As I recall, it was either late in 1967 or early next year that just the torso of the lovable dope dealer Superspade was found hanging from a tree out by Ocean Beach, signalling that the Mob was taking over from the amateurs, and the high times were not over, but the luv was.

The displaced amateur dealers, now skilled entrepreneurs, took their budding business acumen elsewhere in the 1970s, starting all manner of companies, such as Whole Earth Access (same name as my Catalog, quite different people).

Roberta Price–author of Huerfano: a memoir of life in the counterculture: In the summer of 1967, between junior and senior year, I got job in London as assistant to the Young Ideas editor at British Vogue.  I was a very young 21, but nobody asked if I had any ideas.  I got sandwiches for Mandy Clapperton, the acting Young Ideas editor (the previous one was out with hepatitis).  I went for clothes at Mary Quant and peeked over the office partition as a Beatle or Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful walked through the office.  They all seemed frail and vulnerable in person.

My U.S. friend Pam was studying in London that summer, and at night we swung through Swinging London together.  At Granny Takes a Trip, I bought a white crocheted dress that stopped a few inches below my crotch.  Pam bought dope from a young Englishmen.  We couldn’t find rolling papers, so Pam used tampon wrapper paper to roll joints, which worked.  On Carnaby Street, we bought bubble dresses for us and Nehru jackets for the guys back home.

On weekend nights we went to the UFO, which had a constant light show and a staff who sold acid.  The Liverpool Love Festival, Procul Harem, Tomorrow, the Pink Floyd, Arthur Brown, Eric Burdon and Fairport Convention played.  We danced with men but couldn’t hear their names; the flashing lights were enough to give you an epileptic fit.  The crowd was a bit international, the space was dark, flash lit, grimy, vast.

Pam and I got $79 round-trip tickets on a German student train from London to Athens.  It took three days, and all day long they piped American rock music over the sound system.  Their musical taste wasn’t as good as at the UFO.  I heard “When you go to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair” at least 50 times.  We danced in the aisles anyway.

In Greece, we rented a VW bug with two young Englishmen we met on the train.  We drove around for a week, camping out at Delphi on the full moon.  I was restless and dreamed of the Oracle.  She was younger than I but looked like a hippie with her ethnic leather sandals and the wreath in her hair.  She told me that after that summer, everything would be different.  I already knew it.

 Darryl Henriques–author of 50 Ways to Pave the Earth. I began my professional show business career in 1967 when I joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, earning the princely sum of $5 a performance.  We were doing an antiwar Commedia play called The Military Lover.  The Fillmore, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, the Doors, the Beatles, the Stones, the Byrds, the Animals–all of God’s creatures–you remember, don’t you?  That was the year Captain Kirk hot-rodded around the galaxy in the Starship Enterprise and Dustin Hoffman graduated with Mrs. Robinson.  Allen Ginsberg was Howling, Paul Krassner was realizing, Abbie Hoffman was freeloading, and Scoop Nisker on KSAN in San Francisco was telling everyone, “If you don’t like the news, then go out and make some of your own!”

We took the show on the road ($65 per week, a 1300% raise) and traveled across the country performing in theaters and colleges. It seemed every time we got to a college Dow Chemical had just been there, was coming there or, in the case of the University of Wisconsin, they were there.  Dow was going to colleges across the country to recruit students to assist them in the crucial task of fabricating napalm to be used in Vietnam.

Next morning we went to the demonstration at the Commerce building, and at one point someone picked up a bugle and blew the signal to charge.  The students immediately surrounded the building, and a group of them went in to conduct a peaceful sit-in.  The campus police were unable to convince the protesters to leave, so the Chancellor called in the city police who took it upon themselves to beat the students with their nightsticks and spray them with tear gas, sending 30 of them to the hospital.  It was officially the first violent protest against the peaceful protesting of the Vietnam War and Dow Chemical.

The irony was that according to the public relations director of Dow, they “could not have gotten better advertising” than student protests.  They even started a company publication called the Napalm News. Not only that, but more students signed up to be interviewed, and on many campuses it became a “badge of honor” to be interviewed.  Dow was justifiably infamous for their production of napalm, but their product that did more damage to people and the environment was Agent Orange.  It was an equal opportunity weapon since it poisoned American servicemen as well as Vietnamese peasants.  Better death through chemistry.

Little did I know how crucial it was for America to stop the Vietnamese from invading America.  But thank God, in the end we won and now the Vietnamese are busy making our running shoes and sewing our T-shirts.  You have to admit that killing over two million people to get them to make our running shoes was a bit extreme, but such are the pitfalls of the global economy.

Ken Babbs–Merry Prankster: Where were Ken Kesey and the Pranksters?  They had already gone, as Peter Coyote put it, “under the asphalt.”  The previous year, after two busts for marijuana, Kesey had faked a suicide and disappeared into Mexico, leaving me in charge of the bus and ramrodding the Acid Tests in LA which came to a screaming halt the day before LSD became illegal when the bus and the Pranksters slunk out of town and hied off to Mexico to join up with Kesey, everyone to return to the Hoo Ess Ay when Kesey gave hisself up to the FBI and was sentenced to six months in jail.

Kesey and Paige took the fall so the Pranksters could go free, reason being to keep Neal Cassady from going to trial.  He’d already been busted twice and had done two years in the Big House for two joints, and with one more conviction he’d be up for a life sentence.  In the high days of the Summer of Love, the whole fershlugglnger crew cranked up the bus and drove down to the sheriff’s honor camp to visit Kesey and Paige.  They parked in the lot next to the camp, speakers playing James Brown, Pranksters in their Day-Glo regalia, lined up at the gate to be checked in.

At the end of the day the bus pulled out, “Hit the Road, Jack” blaring, up the Bayshore into San Francisco to the Haight and a stop at 711 Ashbury to visit the Dead before they, too, got busted, the only appearance of the Pranksters in the Summer of Love carnival, and then it was back to Oregon, to gardening, building, kids in school, digging under the asphalt, deeper, joined by Kesey and Paige in the leaf-changing days of fall.

Mountain Girl–author of Primo Plant: Growing Marijuana Outdoors: Before the moon-shot, before Watergate, one summer a long long time ago, there was The Hippies.  They came to our Fair City, from every town, every place in the country, from near and far, looking for the Haight-Ashbury.  They were young, gripped with restlessness and seeking a higher  way of life.  They filled the sidewalks of the old neighborhood–looking, seeking, clutching old suitcases, barefoot and hungry, with no particular place to be.  Girls with raccoon eyes wept in the arms of boys just out of the Scouts, as hope faded for hot food and a safe place to sleep.  Exhaustion and grime settled over them, and as weeks passed, more and more came.

The local shopkeepers tried to cope, and the young stole and carried off whatever they could.  Puppies on strings and kittens stuffed in pockets accompanied the march.  The good folk were moved to give food, some helped the mob find sleeping space, but crime soared and frightened them.  The mayor of Fair City awoke in a foul mood and ordered sweeps, and the police raided freely.  Tear gas rolled over the crowded street as thousands of lives touched and found each other and eventually themselves  Music and songs from sidewalk songwriters filled the smokey air as joy spilled over and changed Fair City into Hippie Heaven.

And even today, Haight Street is filled with signs, clues, artifacts, reminders of the glory days for sale in a hundred shops.  Go there and see for yourself.

 If you don’t know Paul Krassner, read his wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krassner

You can now read The Realist issues online: http://www.ep.tc/realist/

https://voices.revealdigital.com/cgi-bin/independentvoices?a=cl&cl=CL1&sp=BHGDEIJ&ai=1&e=——-en-20–1–txt-txIN—————1

realistchick

How I came to be a Hippie. BY STEPHEN GASKIN

from Feb ’94 High Times pg. 30, 33 

Well, since the editors of HT said ‘ I could have this page a few times a year. I guess I should give you a little to go on about where these opinions come from.

I guess most people don’t identify it with my hippie self, but I served with Able Company. First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, in Korea in 1953 as a rifleman, a BAR man and a Fire-Team Leader, I drew combat pay and was fired on and returned fire- and carried dead and wounded friends back from no-man’s-land. I joined February 26, 1952 and was discharged on February 26, 1955.

1 went to junior college at San Bernadino Valley College and took several years getting an AA degree. But I realized I was wasting time and needed to finish school already. I went to San Francisco with new wife and baby and went to school full-time on the GI Bill, which was $135 a month with wife and kid. At that time 1 was already a latent beatnik, which only got more so during the years I went to SF State. I got my BA in 1962, and my MA in 1964. After I graduated, I taught there in creative writing and general semantics from 1964-1966,

I first began Monday Night Class in 1967 on the San Francisco State College Campus, where I had been S.I. Hayakawa’s teaching assistant. 1 happened to be the one who answered the phone when the Free Speech Movement called up from Berkeley thinking that a general semanticist would favor free speech. To my absolute astonishment. Hayakawa threw a fit  that foreshadowed the right-wing force he later became in California politics. I told the guy from Berkeley, “I’m sorry baby. He doesn’t like you.”

It wasn’t till much later that I fell in with the hippie movement myself. Some of my students came to me and all but said that they liked me and all but that I  didn’t  know what was going on. They said that they wouldn’t be able to take me more seriously until 1 did something for them, 1 wanted to be taken seriously so I asked what it was. “First,” they said, “we want you to go see A Hard Day’s Night by the Beatles.

” Well, just as they had planned, I fell in love with John Lennon, recognized the power of youth as represented by the hippies and began my path as a hippie. The times were outrageous. There were a couple of hundred thousand hippies on the streets in San Francisco. Tripping on LSD was pandemic. Sometimes it seemed as if the whole city smelled of reefer smoke. Grass was $75 a kilo, Acapulco Gold was $250 a kilo, acid was $2.50 a hit and so was rock’n’roll. Every circle of people on the street had a joint circulating around the inside.

Like many people, I got a little strange when 1 was tripping weekly. The wife of my creative writing teacher when she saw me in my first hippie garb, beads and long hair, said: “You have gone too far!”

It wasn’t that I got fired for being a hippie. It was that I got too weird to rehire at the same time my contract expired. After two years of teaching, I went across Mexico and the Yucatan peninsula to British Honduras ( now Belize) in a 1952 Volkswagen bus. The road across the Yucatan wasn’t even bulldozed, just chain-sawed and machete’d. When I returned to San Francisco, 1 got my last voluntary haircut and tried to get rehired at SF State. Something in me wasn’t serious, though, and I found myself in my job interview, spreading my coattails and curtsying as I said, “Am I square enough for you now?”

I was not rehired and I don’t blame them. It was obvious that my major interest was getting high.

When, in the normal course of getting stoned. I wanted to take counsel with fellow trippers. I went to lan Grand who headed the Experimental College. He gave me Monday night in the Gallery Lounge at San Francisco State- This was the founding of Monday Night Class in 1967. The idea was to compare notes with other trippers about tripping and the whole psychic world.  We began as 12 people, dropped to six and eventually grew into a huge meeting of as many as 1,000 or 1,500.  We left the Gallery Lounge and went to the Glide Church and then to The Straight Theater on Haight Street and then to Chet Helm’s Family Dog on the Great Highway.  We discussed love. sex, dope, God, god. war, peace, enlightenment, mind cop, free will, astrology. theology, diet, birth control and what have you all in a stoned, truthful, hippie atmosphere. We studied religion. psychology, fairy tales, legends, children’s stories, the I-Ching  and tripping.

It ‘was easy to tell  when we were onto something hot; I could see the expressions move across those thousand faces like the wind across a wheat field. It was like being inside a computer with a thousand parallel processors.

Now some people may think that I am not as religious as i used to be and it is true that on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I might be an agnostic, and on Tuesday and Thursdays, a primitive animist, while partying down on Saturdays and sometimes sitting Zazen on Sundays, There is, however, something I have to say. At no time do I subscribe to any Brand Name religions.

I love the ethical teachings of most religions and I love the psychedelic testimony of their saints. I do not believe in any of their dogmas. I am a believer in free will. I am not a believer in predestination. I think a belief in prophecy robs us of 01 free will.

I think each one of us has a nonshirkable obligation to figure out the world on our own as best we can. The way we behave as result of that investigation is our real and practiced religion.

I consider myself to be an ethnic hippie. I know that the hippies were preceded by the beatniks, the bohemians, the nihilists, Rimbaud, Joyce, Voltaire and on back to Socrates, but the wave of the revolution that spoke to me was the hippies. Rock’n’roll lights my soul and gives beat to the Revolution.

I see by the watching machine that LSD is making a comeback. I find some hope in this and, I admit, some trepidation. I was called for an interview the other day and I found myself trying to explain the difference between how we felt about acid when we were the Revolution and it was fun to freak ’em out and how it felt when we were trying to hold our own civilization together here on the Farm. We didn’t take acid on the classic Farm from 1970 to 1983, and it is still not our policy on the new Farm.

I am quite concerned about the lack of good contemporary tripping instructions in this Acid Renaissance. The medical establishment is still likely to label teenagers with a temporary acid psychosis as “bipolar paranoid schizophrenics,” load the poor kids up on Haldol or Thorazine until they twitch and drool, and mark them for life with a label they will never live down. You would think that they would know by now that most LSD-stoned people dry out over a period of time and don’t need heroic measures as much as they need support and love while they re- enter ordinary life.

hey – it was such a meaningful time for all of us…

hey it was1hey – it was such a meaningful time for all of us…here’s my two cents to help flesh out the story….

growing up in East Point, graduating in ’64, I had gone to college in NY but spent the year in Manhattan, drawn by concerts at the Apollo and the civil rights marches – and exploring the new world of open sexuality, which was unheard of in high school – it was a way, we felt, of really getting to know someone, of touching soul to soul…a connection with ‘Others’ that had never been a possibility before…

when I came home I became pregnant, despite every effort not to, and married my high school sweetheart who was just back from Vietnam, went to south Georgia for his year of college and then tried to settle down in S. Fulton – it was 1967 and every fiber of my being was screaming to be free – causing a holocaust of heartache and karma that I’m still feeling the effects of – I tore away and rented a tiny apartment on 13th Street, where I smoked pot and sang along with Janis Joplin records constantly, while waiting for a scorpio boyfriend who rarely showed up…meantime, I sewed fringe on my jeans, and made a skirt out of another pair… I’d walk up to the Strip and just Be there, letting experiences happen…we’d sit with our backs up against the storefronts, sharing buzzes and watching the gawkers with their car doors locked streaming by – we’d smile, marveling how we’d once been in that world but were now in a new one…

the music had so much to do with altering our vibration, working with our DNA…we lived and breathed in it…..the acid trips seared it into us…a spaceship that emptied us into other worlds we’d never known existed that we were now free to explore…the warm, wasted Hampton/Allman Brothers concerts in the beautiful Park were the ultimate sense pleasure and profound experience of dissolved boundaries…for a period of years, even after I’d moved out of the area, I’d sit up in the big magnolia trees and groove on the Piedmont Park scene…

we loved the clothes at the Merry-Go-Round on the Strip, where as the producer’s executive assistant I bought some costumes for the motorcycle movie “J.C.” that we were filming locally – I still have the long fringed vest and some paisley flared Levi’s…

we felt so backwards and deprived, knowing the real ‘action’  was on the West Coast, and not being able to get to Woodstock…I heard about the real hip places in Atlanta, but never seemed to belong to the most ‘in’ crowd anymore than I had anywhere else – but there were Jimi Hendrix and others at the Municipal Auditorium, and I still have my program from the Pop Festival at Byron, where we were cooked in a hot stewing pot of bliss and misery and made One…we were wet, hot or hungry, or all three – we had money trouble, family trouble, car trouble, housing trouble, bad trips, exploitation, and people leaving us stranded in strange places, like the ever-weird Cobb County – we had a ‘mind-blowing’ time at the Grand Funk concert at Lake Spivey, but no way to get home – we had ‘crabs’ and depression and bewilderment – and we came into our realization that the visible world isn’t all there is, that we are one with everything, and we are incomprehensibly creative….

after all these years I remember the profound tenderness of a one-night stand with Bill Fibben, of the Great Speckled Bird – of so many other encounters – the cosmic love we experienced and expressed is still awakened and active deep in our cells – it formed deep commitment, and we went to work with it, rolling out in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, in empowerments of every kind, in changes to every civic structure…this realized Love went into everything – in the 80’s numbing echo of the 50’s we’d hear people say the hippies were all gone, they’d sensibly sold out to better-paying jobs…but we hadn’t really – those who weren’t as radical did go corporate, but didn’t lose all their realizations, and now at retirement age they’re even visible again in the conscious, progressive activities of our time – some of us stayed high and even after we ‘cleaned-up’, never did go back to the ‘muggle’ world – we’ve continued with our ‘back-to-the-land’ simple living ways, we’ve become healers and artists, gardeners, musicians, helpers and  teachers of various sorts….

I’m in the mountains now – my daughter survived both my neglect and my repentance and we’re very close, both committed to Peace…I’m deep into multi-faith spirituality, healing, singing, chanting and dancing, and finally learning to interface with matter better, to make an honest living sharing gifts of cosmic-conscious life with those who missed the days of revolution and transformation that changed the world in that seminal evolutionary moment experienced in Atlanta on the Strip………heyitwas2

Peace, ya’ll………………love Carol