The Blues Muse: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781518621147: Books
This section takes my ‘man with no name’ back to the USA with Dylan, post-accident, and the West Coast Acid Rock scene about to explode.
San Francisco
Bob was OK. He had broken a vertebra or two but nothing too major. It had straightened him out. Lying in the bed in Woodstock recovering, free of pills, obligations, tours, books, recording, song-writing and all the hassles with fanatics, managers, promoters, band members, producers, record labels, A&R men, Press and all the other leeches that wanted a piece of him, had given him time to think.
He told me it was like coming up from deep under water and finally taking a breath of fresh air. He had a wife and young kids that he hardly had time for. He was surrounded with people pushing and demanding and bleeding him dry.
The accident was his way out.
He was free.
I couldn’t argue with that. Nobody could. I’d been doing that all my life. But for me the only thing that was important was the music. I didn’t have no family.
I was back now. I was in the States. It was time to check out what was going down on the West coast that I’d heard such a lot about.
I caught a greyhound that took me up to Canada, around the Great Lakes and down through the Mid West. In Canada I caught the first Fall colours as the trees were on fire with their yellows and reds. Across the plains we crawled as if marooned in an ocean of wheat. A line of huge harvesters crawled endlessly forward eating a gret swathe, discharging into truck after truck as they went. We stopped off at Yellowstone and I hitched through, taking a peek at the geysers, steaming pools and black bear. We halted at Grand Canyon and I stood on the rim, looked across that great striated gorge and then got right back on the bus.
I’d lived on that bus for three days. By the time I got into San Francisco it was dark. I had a name and address Sara had given me but it was too late. I got right on another bus and shipped out to Sequoia to catch some sleep.
I walked through Haight Asbury. It was a different America to the one I’d left. A big black woman gave me a bag of doughnuts. She thought I could use them. I sure could. I walked around in the sunshine and it felt free. Everywhere I looked it was flares, Indian print dresses, kaftans, scarves and colour. There was a revolution going on round here.
Strolling through Golden Gate Park I came upon a hill with hundreds of Freaks sitting, partying, playing music. It had the same vibe I’d felt in St Mark’s Square and Soho. The music was bringing people together. There was a real positive vibe.
By the afternoon I hefted my pack and bedroll on to my back and started heading down Fullerton road searching for the address I’d been given. It didn’t seem to exist. A window went up and a pretty young girl shouted out.
‘Hey. You look lost. Do you need a place to stay’
That was the beginning.
San Francisco was taking off. The Three Day Trips Festival was just the beginning. I don’t think the Longshoreman’s Hall had ever seen anything quite like it. It was a Freak magnet. Light shows, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters dolling out Kool Aid laced with acid, feedback and long drawn out jams from the Grateful Dead, a harder but equally elongated set of jams from Big Brother and the Holding Company and an audience that seemed to be part of the bands. It was all hair, flowing robes, dresses, colour, and big smiles. This wasn’t so much a show as a gathering.
I soon discovered that it wasn’t a gathering that was limited to concerts. This was no dressing up to go out scene. San Francisco was a mass of small cafes left over from the Beat Poetry of the fifties. That intensity had given way to an expression of joy. Everything about the kids spoke of sharing, openness and positivity. This was a home grown, can do culture. They made their own style, clothes, culture, art and music.
There were no rules.
In the coffee houses they sat around rapping, laughing, reading, playing chess and listening to music.
The Golden Gate Park was a focus for this burgeoning community. I took my guitar and joined the crowd that was always gathered on hippie hill. There was always plenty going on. Along the way Janis was in her tree, strumming her guitar and working out a song.
My new friends Dave and Mal took me in hand. The focus was either the Avalon Ballroom, the Matrix or Bill Graham’s Fillmore. It didn’t seem to matter much who was on. The gathering of the like-minded was the chief aim.
But it was the music that shouted at me loudest. The Jefferson Airplane soared through the smoke and colours of the light-show. Grace’s voice rose and fell hypnotically as the guitars of Marty Balin, Jorma Kaukonen and Paul Kantner weaved patterns in my head. Maybe it was the acid, the jay or the music but everything built into an experience that melded into something transcendental. From its roots in folk, through the strange filter of acid rock a fusion of sound had blended into something approaching perfection.
Country Joe and the Fish came in from Berkley with their outrageous anti-war epics and acid drenched instrumentals that took you off wafting through internal space. Barry Melton’s guitar sounding like nothing I’ve ever heard with those clear lysergic tones while Joe’s beautiful voice sent me into the stratosphere as it wafted through my ears like a soft breeze and lifted my spirits. But then man, they could rock too.
Over the weeks I was engrossed in similar trance-like reveries as Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Charlatans and Sopwith Camel all worked the same magic.
This was music that played in your head, with your head and around your head. It came out of the culture and transmitted the culture until the music was the culture. The sound was a distillation of the philosophy, thought, love and joy of the whole community. The bands were not performers so much as extensions of the people they were spawned from. The concerts were not so much entertainment as sharing and growth. We grooved together.
I could not believe that music as wonderful and complex as this was not being heralded far and wide. It felt like the culmination of all that had gone before.
