In 1965 Grace Slick and her husband formed the Great Society in San Francisco. They released 'SOMEONE TO LOVE' as a live single on Autumn Records with Sly Stone as the producer. Sadly Grace left the band to join the Jefferson Airplane, which scored a huge hit with their version of SOMEONE TO LOVE.
To hear the Great Society SOMEONE TO LOVE, please go to the following URL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsS9NJ36tnQ
The Milton town library added another angle to my education. The head librarian recognized my thirst for knowledge and allowed my taking out adult books at the age of ten. I read Nicholas Kakanzakis' THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHIRST, Balzac's A HARLOT HIGH AND LOW, Prescott's CONQUEST OF MEXICO, OM BURKE's TRAVEL AMONGST THE DERVISHES. If a book of interest had never previously been checked out, it perked my transgessional interest. My parents never questioned my choices. They had forced my attendance at a parochial hgih school. My grades were better than good, but not as good as my older brother, who always speedread my take-outs for pornography, although after never finding any titillation I went back to his comic books. Thankfully he never skimmed through HUbert Selby's LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN or LE HISTOIRE D'O.
Sadly the musical selection was devoted to Pat Boone and Perry Como, until the appearance of After Bathing At Baxter's by The Jefferson Airplane in 1968. I had purchased their monster hit album SURREALISTIC PILLOW the previous summer, which was more folk than rock except for the epic SOMEONE TO LOVE. The elderly desk librarian was surprised by the rock album.
"I didn't know this was here. I loved COMING BACK TO ME in their last album."
"Me too." I pushed the long hair over my ears. LIFE magazine had featured the Flower Revolution in the Spring and I was in. Ready to go up country or hitchhike across the country to San Francisco and drop ACID.
"Let me know how it is."
The old in my town were cooler than our parents and upon my return to our teaberry split-level ranch house in a suburban development lost in the Blue Hills, I went downstairs and cued up the "The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil" on side one. Jorma's searing opening touched my soul and I turned up the volume to 10. I wished the top was 100. Marty and Grace. Her voice launched a million trips. Marty says "Armadillo." and I was cool with it meaning nothing. Skip's drums. Jack Cassady's thunder bass. I listened to the LP three times in a row, until my father came down into the basement and shouted, "Turn down that noise."
Nothing said how great this LP was better than his rejection. I was no longer trapped in the suburbs.
ps I reached the Haight in 1971.
Long past the Summer of Love.
I dropped Orange Sunshine and traveled to the where forever there.
I'm still a hippie. Where's the LSD?
To listen to After Bathing at Baxter's please go to the following URL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INUHhW_w-ws
On the weekend of August 15-18 in 1969 I was 17 years-old. My hair was a little long.
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young people were heading to the Woodstock Music and Art Festival. I had to work washing dishes.
There was nothing cool about that.
I dropped out for permanent that autumn.
In the end I'm an old hippie.
Here's the Jefferson Airplane LIVE AT WOODSTOCK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUxMxwaLqg0
Fifty years ago the Monterey Pop Festival was held south of San Francisco.
"Three days of understanding. Even the cops grooved with us," sang Eric Burdon of the Animals later.
Many regarded the gathering of 60,000 counter-culture music fans to be the opening act of the famed Summer of Love.
Check out the line-up.
Friday Night
The Association The Paupers Lou Rawls Beverley Johnny Rivers Eric Burdon and The Animals Simon & Garfunkel
Saturday
Canned Heat Big Brother and the Holding Company Country Joe and the Fish Al Kooper The Butterfield Blues Band The Electric Flag Quicksilver Messenger Service Steve Miller Band Moby Grape Hugh Masekela The Byrds Laura Nyro Jefferson Airplane Booker T. & the M.G.'s Otis Redding
Sunday
Ravi Shankar The Blues Project Big Brother and the Holding Company The Group With No Name Buffalo Springfield (played w/ David Crosby) The Who Grateful Dead The Jimi Hendrix Experience Scott McKenzie The Mamas & the Papas The Mar-Keys
Only Ravi Shankar played longer than the allotted forty-minute set.
I was 15.
I loved the Airplane.
I traveled in the summer of 1971 to the Haight.
Four years too late.
But a hippie to the core.
Then and now.
To view THE MONTEREY POP FESTIVAL pease go to the following URL on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXqbcrKeHs0
you haven't lived until you've been in a flophouse,
with nothing but one light bulb and 56 men
squeezed together on cots with everybody snoring at once
and some of those snores so deep and gross and unbelievable—
dark
snotty gross subhuman wheezings from hell itself.
your mind almost breaks under those death-like sounds
and the intermingling odors: hard unwashed socks pissed and shitted underwear
and over it all slowly circulating air
much like that emanating from uncovered garbage cans.
and those bodies in the dark
fat and thin and bent
some legless armless
some mindless
and worst of all:
the total absence of hope
it shrouds them
covers them totally.
it's not bearable.
you get up
go out
walk the streets
up and down sidewalks
past buildings
around the corner
and back up the same street
thinking:
those men were all children
once
what has happened to them?
and what has happened to me?
it's dark and cold
out here.
~ Charles Bukowski
Red Tate lies on the pavement Helpless flat on his back If his mother saw this sight Tears would fill her eyes
Red Tate drinks Ripple. Sometimes Thunderbird Red wine dulls his nerves. A bum A tramp. His mother’s second son.
1978
In April 1962 my father attended a business meeting in Manhattan for Ma Bell. While my father was at his appointment, my older brother and I accompanied my mother to Battery Park to see the Statue of Liberty and rode a taxi north through the Bowery heading to the Enpire State Building. As we passed along the Bowery, I asked my mother, if the men sprawled on the sidewalks were dead.
"No, they're drunk like Red Tate."
Red was our town drunk. He has served with the Marines in Korea. He drank wine at the gas station and slept in a concrete bunker in the abandoned army base in the Blue Hills.
"You don't want to end up here "
My mother took us the Empire State Building. From the top the metropolis stretched to the horizons and into the Atlantic.
My father met us at Tad's Steak House. We asked about the men on the Bowery.
My father told us that some soldiers came back from the war damaged and drink helped quiet demons.
"Like the devil?" Asked my brother.
"No, something much worse."
During WWII my father had tested radar-directed 20mm cannons on B-26s In Kentucky. Thousands of miles away from the front line the fatality rates were 15%. My father never said what was worse adn I have no idea either. foto by Meryl Meisler
