From Eternity To Here
The San Francisco scene started at the Red Dog Saloon, as much as you can say it started at any one place. Most of the elements were there: rock & roll, a sort of light show, the first psychedelic dance poster, the theatrical lifestyle and acid. Lots of acid. The best LSD in the world, in fact, the genuine Owsley.
When the Red Dog opened on June 29th, 1965, Owsley Stanley had been making LSD for about four months and the Berkeley contingent at the Red Dog knew him. Chandler Laughlin, the saloon’s entertainment director and manager of the resident rock band, remembers precisely the first night Owsley’s acid was available: March 5th. “It was the second night of the Fuck Rally at Cal,” he recalls. “Me and a Hell’s Angel named Gypsy and Neal Cassady and his old lady Ann Murphy and a bunch of other people drove down past the campus, where the students were shouting ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!,’ out to where Owsley was, picked up the acid and went on down to the Cabale Coffee House to hear the Chambers Brothers rock & roll.”
Even before Owsley, acid had been spreading fast in the Bay Area for about two years, though at the time nobody had any idea just how fast. Even though LSD was still legal, the scene still seemed to itself a tiny fringe movement, probably not much larger than the circle of acidheads one happened to know. It was a buttoned up sort of psychedelic scene, with self-conscious religious or therapeutic goals.
But already down around Stanford University a novelist named Ken Kesey had a scene where people took LSD for adventure, just to see what would happen. And Kesey was pushing the limits of what could happen. He had opened his acid parties to the most notorious outlaw motorcycle gang, the Hell’s Angels, to whom he had been introduced by a journalist named Hunter S. Thompson. Furthermore, the British-sparked rock & roll revival had been going on for more than a year, and one way or another a lot of people were picking up on the fact that instead of spending your trip on a prayer mat or staring at a Zen rock garden, you could dance.
At the time, anybody would have thought the scene in the Bay Area was Berkeley. The Free Speech Movement the year before had made headlines all over the world and there was still a lot of political ferment there. The Berkeley Barb, third oldest of the underground newspapers, was just starting.
But the artistic community was restless, caught between the austere late-Fifties avant-garde tradition, the late-beatnik experiments with “Events” and “Happenings” and the Pop Art dalliance with simple fun. The directors of Berkeley’s Open Theater were tired of conventional art presentations. At the San Francisco Tape Music Center, where Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick and others had been putting on New Music concerts for four years, codirector Ramon Sender felt the same way. The improvisational group called the Committee was reorganizing; the Mime Troupe was performing political satires in public parks.
By coincidence, the Tape Center was at the edge of a neglected San Francisco neighborhood known, from its principal intersection, as the Haight-Ashbury district. It was a quiet place, largely made up of retired Russians with a peaceful integration of blacks and Orientals. It happened to have the most convenient cheap housing for San Francisco State College students. Really cheap — $175 a month would get you two bottom floors of a beautiful Victorian mansion with four fireplaces and leather wallpaper. Like many obscure neighborhoods, it was the location of a discreet sprinkling of gay bars. It had attracted a few settlers from North Beach where media pressure and police harassment had closed down the Beat scene a few years before.
“For the most part, we were rejects from other towns,” remembers Rock Scully, a State College graduate student and integration-march organizer at the time. “We were pretty big swellheads who had stood out like sore thumbs and split. The Haight-Ashbury was a very beautiful place, the houses were nice and lent themselves well to us — the high ceilings, the gas jets that still worked.” In a setting of Victorian mouldings and scrollwork, in cheap rooms with stained-glass doors and window seats, a hip aesthetic developed around the art nouveau not-quite-antiques that were going cheap at secondhand stores. There were pads in the Haight entirely decorated in Victoriana, with gaslights instead of electric bulbs. In the same area as the Tape Center, on Divisadero Street, a tiny shop that opened in 1964 embodied the style. Magic Theater for Madmen Only was part art gallery, part hip artifact shop, part stash-box market, under surveillance as a dope-dealing operation; it established the pattern for later hip boutiques.
But the Haight was quiet, residential. There was no place to hang out in public but a donut shop or a laundromat — unless you wanted to go to a bar, and the dopers were self-righteous about booze. It was just a neighborhood where rather a lot of people were interested in art and getting high.
One sometime Haight resident was an actor turned folksinger named Marty Balin. Like everybody else in the Haight and Berkeley and Palo Alto he was listening to the Beatles. Like Bob Dylan, like the Los Angeles group that took the name the Byrds, like the New York group the Lovin’ Spoonful, he’d started thinking about breaking the first commandment of the folk music movement: thou shalt not “go commercial,” which above all meant playing rock & roll on electric guitars. Balin was part-owner of a folk-music coffeehouse called the Matrix, two and a half miles removed from the Haight on Fill-more Street: the perfect showcase for his idea. There were others “going electric” besides Balin and his Jefferson Airplane, like the band in Palo Alto that would take the name Grateful Dead and the future Quicksilver Messenger Service in Marin County.
To a psychedelic eye in the sky, the Bay Area would have looked like a maze of tiny puddles of acidheads, each ignorant of the others. The Red Dog Saloon was one place where people could get an inkling — from out in Nevada — of how big it was becoming.
The Red Dog was a sound commercial adventure, with its live entertainment and French cooking; at one time it was drawing 50 cars a night from Reno and Carson City. But the people who ran it were making a style out of it the way the Haight hippies were doing on their turf. ” ‘This is an old western town,’ we’d tell ourselves,” says Chan Laughlin. ” ‘And we’re more old western than anybody else. Just remember, when your feet hit the floor in the morning you’re in a grade B movie. This is that saloon down the street where the manager has his office under the stairs and all the gun hands sit around out front and periodically he comes out and motions a couple of them to ride away and rustle some cows. It’s that place, complete with fancy girls going around bending over tables and the music and people roaring and ordering more drinks and carrying on.’ ” One day somebody goosed their script along a little further by riding into the Red Dog on a horse.
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