On a Greyhound to San Francisco
You can live on a Greyhound bus. It’s not easy. They have a habit of pulling into small places and dumping you off in the small hours of the night. But you can sleep, eat and watch the world. You meet a variety of people and you are kept at a nice temperature. They make regular toilet stops. The only thing missing is a shower.
We lived on the bus for a couple of weeks.
We headed out of Boston and up to Canada, stopping off at Niagara Falls for a peer over the rail at the spray and rainbows. Then it was up to Montreal where we wandered around and spoke French. I discovered that they didn’t understand me there either.
We headed off round the Great Lakes as the early Fall colours were just starting up and blotching the green with patches of red and gold. Then it was back down into America and across the vast ocean of the plains with its rippling wheat like waves. At one point we saw a line of huge combine harvesters crawling across the land. There must have been fifty of them, each one in line a length behind the other, serviced by a stream of trucks carrying off the grain. You could imagine their journey relentlessly motoring forward at a steady pace, day and night, leaving a wide swathe of stubble in their wake.
He hopped off the bus to hitch through Yellowstone to see the bears, geysers, steaming pools, bubbling mud and algae/bacteria stained deposits. Then on to Grand Canyon for a half hour peer into the chasm.
We hit San Francisco late in the evening and decided it was too late to check out our address so we hopped a bus up to Sequoia for a sleep and took time to stare at those majestic two thousand year old masters of the forest.
Walking through Haight Asbury we were home again. They had names up on the Fillmore West for the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.
We were sick of Greyhound buses and needed a break.
Once again we found ourselves standing on a pavement with a scrap of paper looking for a fictitious person. The address did not seem to exist.
But this was the sixties (well 1971). Anything was possible.
A window went up and a girl leaned out.
‘Hey, you look lost,’ she shouted down to us. ‘Do you need a place to stay?’
We made new friends with Dave and Jack. They turned out to be the people who actually owned the place.
The Golden Gate Park and the Haight still had some of its magic. You could imagine the ‘Human Be-in’ and free concerts in the park. There was still the camaraderie and fun though the wheels were coming off, the hard drugs were there, the weekenders , young kids and junkies were all over the place.
We decided to head to Los Angeles. Given our experiences in Boston and San Francisco with addresses Jack offered to take us. We could have caught a Greyhound, we had tickets, but we decided to hitch, stop off at Big Sur and get down to this cove that Jack knew of called Pfeiffer State Beach.
It sounded cool.
I based the cover for my book on this photo I took in San Francisco in January 2013.
I was off on a tour round the world. Liz and I drove down from San Francisco to Los Angeles going over the old route that we hitched along in 1971. It was great to revisit and catch up with a few old friends.
We were only in San Francisco for two days but found we’d arrived at exactly the right time. Furthur (The remains of the Grateful Dead with Phil Lesh and Bob Weir), named after Ken Kesey’s psychedelic painted truck, were playing at the Bill Graham Auditorium. We got tickets.
Going into the place the sweet smell of marijuana was overpowering!! It set the tone.
The band were brilliant and just like seeing the Dead at their best. I got a triple album of the show that was distributed half hour after the show finished! It was perfect!!
I took this photo, among a lot of others, of the band with their great light show. I thought it made a great book cover.
At the dawn of the West Coast Acid Rock the bands came flooding out of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Activated by the social poetry of Bob Dylan and others a generation of young people had been awoken and burgeoning alternative Hippie communities had sprung up and flourished in a number of American cities. These young people had dropped out and formed their own creative communities, supporting each other and espousing their own values of peace, love, sharing and equality. They rejected the capitalist rat-race and were seeking something more fulfilling and meaningful. They were not turned on by the dream of a house in suburbia and the acquisition of money. They believed that there had to be more fun and purpose to life; that life was about community. They stood for political involvement, anti-war principles, civil rights and equality. With their long hair, bright colours and peace signs they made it clear that they opposed the principles of the society they had divorced themselves from.
The San Francisco alternative community gave rise to a number of great Rock Bands including Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding Company, but my favourite band was always Country Joe and the Fish.
The scene was centred around Haight Asbury with clubs like Bill Grahame’s Fillmore West, Avalon Ballroom, Longshoreman’s hall, Winterland and the Carousel. There were ‘happenings’ in the Golden Gate Park where the ‘tribes’ would come together to reassert their apartness.
I fell in love with Country Joe and the Fish from the moment I heard that new guitar sound created by Barry Melton. That was confirmed when Country Joe’s crystal clear voice soared in. What was even more of a clincher was the political stance of a number of their songs.
They were the most overtly political of the West Coast Bands with songs about the Vietnam War, the H-Bomb and disparaging ditties about Nixon and LBJ. My type of band! They also produced these ethereal trippy numbers around Cohen’s organ sound that were paeans to acid.
Country Joe and the Fish were the most extreme of the West Coast groups. Those first few albums were the epitome of Acid Rock.
