February 16, 2008
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Art Kunkin's LA Free Press
When we ARRIVED on the west coast, Art Kunkin sent Eve Babitz to meet me at the airport and she took me on a breathless round of visiting her friends--the highlight of which was meeting Frank Zappa in his stone cabin in Laurel Canyon--before delivering me to the Free Press office where Art invited me to edit the paper. With memories of my battle with Bowart still fresh, I was cautious and insisted that I would be willing only if granted complete editorial control, retaining the right to change the layout, the content, the writers, to run or not to run whatever I liked. We both knew I would be in town for only a few weeks. Allowed this freedom I immediately enlisted the help of John Bryan, the veteran underground publisher who'd published an iconoclastic paper, Open City, in San Francisco the previous year. John was every editor's dream, the kind of writer who, if there was an unexpected page in the paper needing to be filled, could stay up all night and hammer out a beautifully-crafted 3,000-word treatise on, say, censorship or police brutality. Between us we almost doubled Art's initial [circulation] to nearly 20,000. The paper was selling for a quarter. One thing I noted was how the underground press was beginning to get more attention from the outside world, particularly with propagandists from afar, being flooded, for example, with expensively printed books containing the very forgettable thoughts of North Korea's dictator, Kim Il Sung and regular copies of the Cuban tabloid Granma.
A close look at the Los Angeles dailies was not inspiring. Hearst’s Herald Examiner was barely worth serious examination, its pastiche of columnists with nothing to say—the philosopher kind who tell you what they were thinking as they backed their car out of the garage—along with the stereotyped syndicate mix of blood, barbarity and (anti) sex. The Los Angeles Times was not much better, hugely dominated by its advertising which filled 80% of most pages, allowing for pockets of news stories which, quite often read as though they had been written by press agents. As for the Santa Monica Outlook, it had just adorned a story about some minor marihuana bust with 144-pt type while relegating the Vietnam War to a two-column head. Thus, if ever there was a need for alternate journalism this was surely the time and place. The electrifying Doors were playing at the Whisky Au Go Go and Sunset Strip was vibrating with music-fueled street action. One year after Kunkin had peddled his first Freep at the initial Renaissance Fayre (medieval finery, instruments and graciousness spread over a sunny meadow), the paper was being eagerly read by thousands. New lifestyles were the rage, and poet Diane de Prima's book about commune living had created much curiosity. She noted that the same problem seemed common to all of them: where to draw the line between communal and personal property; how to relate to women and ways to avoid the same handful of people always doing all the work. Another writer, Carol Maddox, had similar experiences. "(Commune members) took a surprisingly hard line towards non-functional members", she wrote, although there was considerable disagreement on whether non-functional meant "being sick, sleeping, reading, digging music, hiking in the foods or making love". And there were a lot of "paper revolutionaries" lacking any long-term vision. "What usually happens when people start talking about revolution", Joan Baez once remarked, "is before you've got the word halfway out, it's already deteriorating into throwing stuff at policemen". Making the transition from one of the Freep’s typesetters to acting as an inflammatory polemicist, was the black militant Hakim Jamal. He wrote frequently in 1970 of his late hero Malcolm X, speculating on his death and the threat he posed to some while still alive.
Unfortunately, I had left town by the time Hakim planned to introduce me to Angela Davies. He did, though, introduce me to a sweetly innocent English blonde named Gail Benson who had readily succumbed to his 'God' scam. This consisted of Hakim’s insistence that he was God and that he wasn't prepared to argue about it. There wasn't much to be said about a situation like that, and it was clear that this sort of intimidation was not going to end happily. It eventually did conclude with Gail Benson's murder in Jamaica and Michael X, with whom Hakim was by then spending all his time, being hanged for it. (Uncannily prescient, some time before Michael X’s death, I had collaged his image into an ancient photograph showing a policeman pinning the picture to the gates of Buckingham Palace). Hunter Thompson came to town on a publicity tour for his Hells’ Angels book, lodging at Gene Autry's glitzy hotel on Sunset. I took along a bag of good weed as a gift and we spent an hour or two jointly bemoaning the state of the world. We stayed in touch and when I wrote to him later to ask him if he’d care to write a piece for the Christmas issue of my tabloid newspaper, Other Scenes, that Sunset hotel was still on his mind.
The remainder of Hunter’s eight-page letter dealt mainly with the how he and his friends had tried to elect a dope-smoking friend as mayor of their home town of Aspen, Colorado, a campaign that he later emulated (also losing) and about which he wrote a lengthy piece which ran first in Other Scenes and then—tidied up and lengthened—in Rolling Stone. Although we continued to correspond, we never met again, but I followed his outlaw career with bemused admiration all the way to its glum end.
When Andy brought his seven-member entourage out to L.A., I was an observer at two sharply contrasting interviews, the first with an NBC reporter who seemed out of his depth, asking such feeble questions as "Don't you think you've sold out by being successful?" and "How do you feel about taking film back 6o years?" Responding with his usual monosyllables, Andy wittily suggested that NBC run a silent interview. Next came Richard Whitehall for Cinema magazine who proved to be a much more perceptive critic, acknowledging that only after attending a screening of Chelsea Girl had he begun to understand how Warhol was exploring the medium. The difference between the two interviews reaffirmed how people carry preconceived ideas to new situations and how interviewers found in Warhol exactly what they were looking for. (As a reporter I'd long ago learned the familiar trick of manipulating quotes to back up a story written in my head even before the interview).
Nearly all of Andy's earliest skeptics had convinced themselves that Andy was putting everybody on, playing some elaborate con game to make fun of his viewers, but you can't be conned unless you're willing to be. Almost every time I listened to people asking Andy questions I felt more and more convinced that he was the nearest thing to being totally neutral that is attainable by any human being: a seismograph that recorded the waves on which it bobbed, a mirror which reflected back whatever peered into it. Might one not conclude that his most pertinent comment on the state of society was the way he reflected it?
On the second day of the visit we all went over to the extravagant Beverly Hills home of Lou Irwin, post-hippy owner of a chain of 40 movie theaters. His house was memorable for campy wallpaper and indifferent art, but even more for rooms leading out of rooms in such repetitious symmetry that you could stand just about anywhere with a movie camera and shoot half a dozen different sets with barely a turn of the body. After lox, bagels, coffee and some semi business-like plastic conversation, we were off (via a rented gray Lincoln) to a Teenage Fair next to the Coliseum. Here, amid a jumble of surfing movies, young models in 50c paper dresses, balloons, posters and frozen bananas, half a dozen rock groups competed for attention. Andy seemed delighted to be at what was billed as "a psychedelic freak out"--light show, ancient newsreels shown backwards, synchronized strobes etc as well as the first performance by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band whose leader confessed they'd ripped off most of their ideas from earlier exposure to a show Andy had staged with the Velvet Underground. The day ended at the Daisy where Susan Bottomley, who preferred to be billed as International Velvet, met Blow-Up's David Bottomley who took her home and painted her body with his own version of a currently popular psychedelic poster. One night I accepted Lenny Bruce's invitation to attend his performance at a small theatre that sadly was only half-filled. The continued harassment by the law everywhere he went, was beginning to affect him, and his "act" was hardly an act at all by now, having becoming mainly a harangue about the way judges administered the law and how his words were constantly being misinterpreted. One amusing bit hinged on the way that police officers had stood at the back of the clubs where he played, taking down his words, which they later read out in a monotone in the very different ambiance of a crowded courtroom. It didn't seem fair, Lenny averred, for him to be penalized for somebody else's (inferior) performance. Although a fundamentally religious man with a keen sense of morality he came over as something very different, especially when he philosophized on the difference between priest and rabbi ("both shit but only one fucks") and questioned the infallibility of the black-robed hypocrites who passed sentence on him. As a man who used a public forum to explore the human condition and fearlessly bared his own life in illustration, he deserved more understanding and respect. A ‘Human Be-In’ was announced for San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and on January 14, 1967 a group of us from the Freep drove up the coast together. As soon as we entered the park it was clearly a gathering of the clan, and yet one we had been unaware even existed. Virtually everybody was costumed in non-everyday garb. Many a trip must have been made through Salvation Army stores and the racks of theatrical costume houses, to retrieve all those old bonnets and regimental guard jackets with embossed brass buttons. A man in Indian robes was dancing slowly by himself in an admiring circle. Brightly colored paper kites were ubiquitous as well as bells, banners, balloons, bubbles and bare backs. Smiling people were sharing big baskets of food. We were genuinely astonished to observe all these joyous people all around us. It was a society en masse that none of us had seen before, one that we eventually came to appreciate was lacking both rules and hypocrisy, a society whose religion was nature. The air was streaked with incense and hemp smoke around a central stage from which Mario Savo exhorted us to support his Free Speech Movement and repeated the fuck-words that had gotten him thrown off the campus of UC Berkeley. Poets Michael McClure, Gary Snyder and Lenore Kandel (whose poem To Fuck with Love had earned her an obscenity charge) read from their works as Allen Ginsberg chanted Om! A smiling, 46-year-old Tim Leary--daffodil clutched in his right hand--chanted "Turn On, Tune in, Drop Out". A parachutist landed near the stage, to tumultuous applause, and proceeded to dispense one thousand hits of free acid, before disappearing into the crowd. The Diggers and other groups from the neighboring Haight-Ashbury community had spent weeks getting the event together and persuading groups like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead to play. San Francisco's pioneering psychedelic newspaper the Oracle had declared the Human Be-In to be "the joyful, face-to-face beginning of a new epoch..." Later reports estimated that 20,000 had attended.
We drove over to see Max Scherr, former bartender at the Steppenwolf, whose student sellers were peddling fifty thousand Berkeley Barbs every week along Telegraph Avenue adjoining the university campus. Max published the paper out of his kitchen where we sat discussing the Be-In. We were excited and thought it had been a triumph; it was the first time, we affirmed, that we realized there actually was a community. But after noting the lukewarm reception to Jerry Rubin's pitch for more anti-war demonstrations, Max had a more sober assessment. "I was sad" he said, "that we didn't take all that energy and do something with it. At the very least we should have marched on City Hall or something". On the other hand, the Haight-Ashbury crowd, whose views were manifested by the psychedelic Oracle, had already dropped out, maintaining that it was the activists--the people busy with such confrontations as lying in front of troop trains – who were among the obstacles to achieving the kind of society that we all sought. "Why don't you straighten out your own heads and let everybody take care of themselves?" was their argument. "We'll set an example by actually living the kind of world we want". And, of course, the obvious reply of the activists was: "Yeah, but you're only able to do that because we're fighting the battle for you". Stalemate. And both sides were absolutely right.
Years later that thought came back to me when I was reading Irwin Silber’s movie critiques in the Nation, usually writing about movies I'd already seen and enjoyed. His reviews always made me feel guilty about the film's lack of political content, and reading them quite spoiled the fun. The term 'politically correct' had yet to gain approval, but that was the mindset from which it sprang. It had been Silber who, praising the emergence of such groups as Bread and Puppet Theater, El Teatro Capesino and the radical film-making collective Newsreel, pointed out the contradictions facing radical artists who depended on the slick, established media to get their ideas out. It was the classical situation, he said: All 'enlightened' ruling classes had offered individual success to its fiercest critics "while carefully screening out the new ideas (and) weeding out those concepts overly threatening". It seems odd, in retrospect, that the underground press met with so much opposition from even some of the intellectuals who you might have expected would support its "anti-social" attitudes. Surely they agreed that so-called anti-social behavior could be the most constructive of all social behavior, being an affirmation of the individual's right to exist individually in a collective structure. Freedom, I would suggest, is obtained only by taking it, without stopping to define its limits (and inhibiting one's actions) in advance. Asking for permission in advance is always less effective than acting first and apologizing later. (The political equivalent--a specialty of today’s Democratic party--is to refrain from doing anything in case it has repercussions). Laws usually are reformed because of extensive defiance, a defiance that creates the climate for legislative change. In my view, the intellectual's obligation to society is pretty much the same as that of the artist; to present a vision of something that can be, rather than what is. All this, of course, with the proviso that 'can be' is based on a mutual respect for everybody’s freedom. True morality implies a tolerance for other attitudes and modes of life, not necessarily an endorsement of them. The major immorality surely must be the insistence (by coercion, blackmail or legal threats) that others live and think as you do. Most members of the alternate society don’t regard anything as holy, and understand that nothing is above challenge and examination. The most firmly entrenched ideas, institutions and individuals are the notions most in need of examination. Thus, in my humble view, it’s the rebel who keeps the society reflective, challenges the status quo and keeps alive the idea that there are always alternatives While still on the Coast, we joined about 30 editors at Michael Bowen's house in Stinson Beach, north of San Francisco, for the first meeting of the Underground Press Syndicate. Most underground editors were in their early 20s, and favored long hair, beads, open shirts, corduroys pants and sandals or moccasins. We discussed whether UPS might make some restrictions on membership--to prevent us being gouged by somebody who joined merely to get everybody else's free issues (members had always been encouraged to use each other's material without hindrance or payment) but nothing was settled. Optimistically, the group talked of installing better inter-communication by ham radio, teletype and the still barely -used photo transmitting machines (faxes and portable phones had yet to make their appearance). Rolling Thunder, a representative of the Hopi Indian community--whom some believed already had their own esoteric communications network--spoke to the gathering. The troubles the country faced, he said, were white men's troubles and these had to be solved by white men. But native Americans offered support and encouragement and were pleased that some of the younger people had returned to nature and "a faith in the Great Spirit" and that age-old Indian symbols had regained favor. He suggested, for example, that an evil symbol might best be contained by a circle and that such a human circle around the Pentagon might achieve this end. (The following year this event took place). Max Scherr of the Barb turned up again and was nonplused by the devotion of some papers (the two Oracles, EVO and a handful of others) to the Indian mystique. Most of the papers including the L.A. Free Press and Detroit's Fifth Estate adopted a much more radical stance, with the remainder somewhere in between. It echoed the split demonstrated earlier at the Be-In and was never--probably never will be--resolved: is it better to show an example by dropping out, or to keep fighting for everybody's right to drop out?
Underground papers were springing up everywhere, especially on college campuses where their subsequent growth often came about as a result of being banned and thus moving off campus into the town itself. As a result of this development, they usually both broadened their coverage and increased their circulation. "Why do the undergrounds pay so much attention to sex?" Neil asked me. "Is that part of the revolution?" My response was that very largely, the emphasis on sex was at least partly a tactic to upset the smugly high-minded. That wasn’t all of it, of course, because obviously it meshed with the way young people felt, which was that sex should be open and free and that there should be no objection to nudity and sexual imagery. What we were reporting was merely a normal and very common activity of life. Sometimes the sex became art as, for example, when Claes Oldenburg created for Other Scenes a group of outrageous collages consisting of pictures of Vogue models onto which he had pasted cocks and balls cut from porn magazines. Claes, an early friend of our paper , contributed an amusing piece titled "Some Momentous Monuments" about imaginary projects he'd like to create. He visualized replacing Park Avenue's central strip with a sort of slipway down which enormous balls would continually roll into the arch of the Grand Central building from which they would be carried back underground to 96th Street to start their downhill journey again. “They would be very large--10 or 12 stories high--in yellow, red and green like the traffic lights. Perhaps they should be chrome so that they would reflect the city as they rolled. They would not stop at intersections--they would keep rolling and you would have to try and make it through the intersection (with them bearing down on you). This would intensify the terror of Park Avenue. The traffic would continue to flow as things do in New York no matter what happens; it would be just another obstacle in New York. No mercy of course. You've have to calculate the frequency and speed etc. and there would be experts on that and betting, I suppose". Exciting and stimulating as New York had always been, California was a revelation, in that it offered a running commentary about a totally different new kind of life. I was tempted to drop everything and sit down and write a book, a joyful book about the beautiful young people who inhabited the West. A world within a world which coexisted separately but was beginning to surface through the more conventional society and as a result change that society forever. In the underground circles in which we traveled everybody seemed to live joyfully, without rules and lacking the hypocrisy of the more urban scene. Nudity didn’t bother people one way or another. It was not “sexy” but natural, and some times it existed and sometimes it didn’t. Most folk accepted what came, usually without either great expectations or disillus-ionment. Maybe they had come to appreciate the lesson of Braque (and that of others) that “things merely are.” These young people were largely objective, adaptable, evaluative. Sometimes they liked what fate brought them, sometimes not, but they accepted or rejected it with clear heads. and honest explanations if, indeed, they found explanations even necessary. People were invariably straightforward and fearless with each other, apt to regard their fellows with a frank and appraising gaze. You quickly found yourself not laughing at them, but with them, amused rather than affronted by their ankle-length, velvet robes and plumed hats. The flower children were religious, but it was not the religion of a church and its panoply. Their religion was nature, the sun and the moon and the stars, and crispy pebble-filled streams in soft woods. They believed in God, a benevolent god who was with them and in them and with and in all their friends. And their enemies too, who they chose naively to believe, were enemies only because they haven’t met and gently discussed their differences. It was easy here in the West to be lulled by such innocence and illusion and it took a return to New York for reality to restore me to how life was not really so joyous after all. America's war in Vietnam was causing some major re-evaluations about just what it was the country stood for. "The old myth had it that we are decent folks who admire Abe Lincoln and want, for foreigners, only free elections, an opposition press and enough protein" wrote Fred Gardner, in Other Scenes, March 1970. "For a long time this self-image has kept everyone smug and righteous while the cold warriors extended the empire through murder and intrigue.
So wide was the gap between the old America and what was currently happening, it was almost as if we had become two countries. By no means everybody over 30 supported the war but it was hard to find any young person who did, and there was almost total unity among the protesters and a growing chasm on the other side. Even some of the normally gutless politicians were beginning to speak out. The movement had its own clowns in Wavy Gravy and the two ridiculously bemedalled Pentagon clones, General Wastemoreland and General Hershey Bar who were to be found handing out literature and making hilariously satirical speeches at all major gatherings. Writing about Hershey Bar, our San Francisco correspondent John Bryan credited him with originating the slogans Make Love, Not War and Draft beer, Not Students. The "general", a former dancer and nightclub performer named Capyso Joe, came up with some great one-liners:
The particular issue of Other Scenes in which that appeared, was fairly typical in its internationalism. It included a letter from Cairo revealing how Egyptians were being propagandized by American media ("it's galling to see them practice their pious, self-righteous, self-serving deceptions on an international scale"), a story about Japanese public baths, an excerpt from Richard Neville's Play Power, reports from India and Cuba, an article making the point that ecology was being used as a red herring to divert radical protest and The Pimps of Pop, a story by Norma Whittaker about "rock imperialists". My own column suggested mildly that John Lennon and Yoko Ono lying around in a hotel suite and renting billboards protesting the war was not the most revolutionary of actions. Just before leaving LA we went to a tea party at Aldous Huxley's house in the Hollywood hills, where fellow guests included Alan Watts, Leary and other spiritual heavies. What an afternoon that must have been although, regrettably, memory fails me. It was, after three months, pretty much my farewell to the West Coast to which I didn’t return for several years. Amber and I took off for Japan where I was scheduled to update my guide book about that fabulous country. When the subject of my early book comes up, my friends joke that today it’s more like Japan On $5 a Minute, but when I first wrote the book in the mid-Sixties it was really not that hard to accomplish on $5 a day. Taxi rides began at about 30c, an extravagant meal cost under $3 and even Tokyo’s classy Okura hotel offered rooms for as little as $8. A writer friend of mine, Rick Kennedy, stayed for six months in a Ueno ryokan, whose ¥1000 yen ($2.90) daily rate included a breakfast so huge it sometimes included 20 dishes. Both he and I loved Shinjuku’s Fugetsudo coffee shop, its walls lined with avant garde murals and jazz album covers, filled from morning till late at night with young beats, artists and students playing chess and leafing through the piles of international publications. Pretty hostesses would be a feature of other cafes and, although they rarely spoke English, their attention could be engaged by inviting them to admire such trinkets as foreign matches, photographs or other baubles.
I loved Japan from the first moment I saw it and in the introduction to my book I explained what an immediate impression the vivid colors (bright red telephones, lush green rice fields, blue summer yukatas) made on visitors. And even more so, the distinctive sounds: the click of getas running along a station platform…popping plastic covers as the oshibori or hot napkins are unwrapped in restaurants…the crunching sound of ice being chopped into useable pieces on the sidewalks in summer…the repetitious click of hundreds of steel balls dropping into slots as you pass the open doors of pachinko parlor…the crash of steel shutters coming down as the shops close at ten o’clock in the business districts of small towns. “It is still a poor country” I wrote, “and its people have long ago learned to make a virtue of simplicity, which is the basis of all good Japanese art. The word shibui, so hard to translate exactly, implies taste, appreciation and patience. To the true connoisseur of shibui, a beautiful object does not become less beautiful with the passage of time but rather more so. A tea cup that develops minute cracks with constant use, for example, has indeed become a cup suitable for the drinking of tea”. Alex Besher, teenage editor of the Shinjuku Sutra, Tokyo's very own underground rag. The trilingual Alex, or Sasha as everyone called him, was a 16-year-old American of Russian parentage who was studying at Sophia University “The whole hippie thing was starting to happen in the US” he recently recalled, “and of course we were quite removed from it all. Vietnam was in full throttle and there was a ripple of counter culture hitting Tokyo. In fact Tokyo in the Sixties was a very politicized, culturally edgy place… Butoh dance was taking the stage, a lot of underground theaters, art happenings, things like that. “I had only heard of underground papers so I had no model; the only thing I knew was to get on the Bullet Express to go back to Kobe where I came from and hire the same printer I had used for the high school paper. So my take on the cultural scene in Tokyo in ’67 was reflected in the title. Shinjuku was a happening place, it was a crossroads of East and West; you had people coming from Afghanistan or India or China or on their way there. And, of course, the Fugetsudo was just around the corner”. Sasha and I got along famously and we agreed to do a joint issue of the Sutra and Other Scenes , each creating 12 pages, with me footing the bill and Sasha doing all the production (i.e, getting it printed).
For my part I already had good friends in Japan and among other items I pasted up a page from Time correspondent Jerrold Schecter's forthcoming book about the controversial Soka Gakkai; a piece by Murray Sayle, a column by Shibata, semi-nude pictures of the Nichigeki Dance Troupe and--for a front page--the second page of a letter from a GI in Vietnam, describing all the pot-smoking that was going on. I had fabricated the letter, based on interviews to glean local color about Saigon, by handwriting it on a page ripped off from the local USO. After six years together, Amber and I had decided to get married in Tokyo, with Willy's generous reception at the press club and a cake iced with Make Love, Not War. Right after the wedding we mailed out the Shinjuku Sutra to our subscribers. Amber being familiar with my compulsive ways (we'd already been together for four years) was not surprised by having to spend our honeymoon sitting on the floor of our hotel room stuffing envelopes. On an earlier trip I had stayed one night in Frank Lloyd Wright's wonderful old Imperial Hotel with its rooms of porous volcanic stone and its cave-like, carpeted corridors, a hotel built to withstand earthquakes. Now they were pulling it down, ostensibly because of its "instability” but actually because the land was too valuable to "waste" on such a relatively small structure. Other Scenes had begUn with a couple of random issues produced in Los Angeles, one containing Lenore Kandel's banned poem, FUCK HATE. (That was the entire poem). Ed Ruscha created an amusing logo for us in which a house whose chimney was a half-peeled banana spelling out Other Scenes in clouds of smoke. Earlier issues had been from Japan and London but now back in New York, we produced the paper from our tiny apartment at 26 Perry Street where we lived, published and entertained a continuous stream of visitors. Amber, the perfect hostess, pinned a list to the refrigerator door indicating our guests' preference for tea or coffee and in what form. It was one of the many things I loved about her although I was often too preoccupied to show it. She'd doodle "Somewhere over the rainbow..." on scraps of paper and occasionally proclaim: "Sometimes, I feel so lonely". I would dismiss this. How could she be lonely, I would ask, when we were together all the time? Alas, I didn't understand. Now she says this is a pathetic sort of memory to have about what was actually a ten-year relationship and, indeed, it is. All I can say is that to me it was a blissfully happy—although clearly chauvinistic—relationship, during which we barely spent a day apart. How hard it is, though, to remember specific activities, most of the memories subordinated to my single-minded devotion to getting out the paper for which, thank the goddess, she was worth her weight in gold, bringing in most of the money to pay the rent and printing bill. Most of Amber’s time was devoted to typesetting the paper on a rented IBM machine, a task at which she was so proficient that eventually we rented a small basement on West 10th Street and set up Ambertype, contracting successfully to do the typesetting for the numerous alternative publications that were emerging. She'd hire our friends to typeset, paying them by the hour, keeping careful accounts which subsequently proved how badly we’d underestimated our expenses. Even at the best of times we barely broke even but all the underground papers were in the same boat. None of us were doing it for the money but with the idealistic belief that we were helping to change the society. In these more commercial days it is sometimes hard to make people understand how much everybody we knew shared this belief and how little money seemed to matter. For the third issue of Other Scenes I interviewed Bill Graham who was now running New York’s Fillmore on 2nd Avenue, packing in unruly crowds with weekly rock concerts which to my elderly ears all sounded alike. I'd first met Graham in San Francisco and when I asked him about the scene there. He was pessimistic. “There was a golden opportunity in the Haight-Ashbury, which will probably not come up again in our generation, for a community of young people with new ideas about community life. But too many of them used or abused the privileges that were given to them--the fuzz didn't really harass anybody that much and what society said, in effect, was 'Let us see you do your stuff'. There was the park, and both acid and grass were flowing pretty loose, whether right or wrong, but what about the opportunity that presented itself? How did you use the park? How did you use the right to express yourself? Where was your political platform? Where was your theater? “Where were the debates, the experimentation with dialog? Where were your art festivals, your fairs? You should have had flowers. But instead of that they found out that it became a tourist attraction because they wanted to look at you. Where were you at?" It seemed clear that Graham associated me personally with all this, and I heard later that he'd described me to somebody as "a communist" but although Amber always complained that we weren't living the revolution "just reporting it" I felt that we were doing a pretty good job of that. My sympathies were entirely with the alternate society and its grievances about being misunderstood. Nor did I see anything wrong with becoming a participatory journalist--in contradiction to the way I'd been trained--believing at that juncture that there was a "right" side and a "wrong" side and if helping a cause that you believed in was "un-journalistic" then so be it. I found myself working 24 hours a day on "just reporting it" and there wasn't time for much else (including my marriage). When it came to the music scene I was totally out of touch with my contemporaries (all of whom were younger than me) because of my lack of interest in what I regarded as superficial music. I like ballet, opera, most classical, jazz, pop, Broadway stuff, Sinatra, the Great American Song book etc. A generation thing. The hot new group of the week sounded to me very much like the hot new group of last week or the week before. Contemporary music was very much a blind spot in my tabloid newspaper.
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