Love Is Just a Song We Sing but a Contract Is Something Else
The architect’s name could’ve been, should’ve been, Nabisco. Everybody at San Francisco State made mockery of the buildings that dotted the nine-acre campus, all those pink and gray concrete kleenex boxes with fancy names like the Commons, the Education Building, the Library, the Gym.
The hippies gathered around a table in the Commons. At first just one table, just inside the front doors; then several, usually commandeered by George Hunter, a straw-blond, gap-toothed designer from L.A. who everyone remembers as the first longhair on campus, the first adult Beatlemaniac. He’d show up almost every day wearing some kind of western outfit or a tapered, vested Italian suit with pointy Beatle boots, and he’d hit the Tubs, a collection of surplus barracks turned into student government and snack huts. And he’d pump up the jukebox and snap his fingers and go into rock & roll convulsions. Then he’d head for the Commons, for his table, and spend the day talking with the other regulars about politics, anthropology, dreams and drugs. He didn’t talk much about music, though he would soon gather together a rock band called George & the Mainliners. That name was later replaced by the “Charlatans.” Hunter, they say, was the first hippie, the first dropout. Only he wasn’t a dropout. He was never enrolled at S.F. State.
Someone called them “the happy people.” They were sparks of life and color on a drab campus on the foggy side of town, a campus where all the old radicals looked uncannily like Karl Marx: Dan Hicks and Richie Olsen, later of the Charlatans; Rock Scully, the Grateful Dead; Peter Albin, Big Brother and the Holding Company; Jerry Slick, Great Society; Ernie Fosselius, the Final Solution; and Luria Castell and Chet Helms, the Family Dog.
Peter and Rodney Albin were involved in folk music as performers in groups and as organizers of festivals on campus. The one Rodney did in 1963 featured the Town Criers, with Marty Balin, and the Wildwood Boys, among them Jerry Garcia and George Hunter. Also scheduled, according to the campus daily, was a visiting folk shouter from Texas, “Janet Joplin,” who never showed.
Two years later Peter Albin was workshop director of a festival that featured Garcia at a banjo workshop and occasional student Dan Hicks opening a free concert for headliners Barbara Dane and the Chambers Brothers. You could just about trace the transition from folk to an adult, amalgamated kind of rock & roll at the festivals. Blues, old-time music, country and gospel all began to mix with Dylan’s protest lyrics, the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and, above all, electricity.
Peter and Rodney Albin lived at 1090 Page Street, just above Haight. Beginning in 1964 and until it was torn down in 1967, they rented out the 20 rooms on behalf of an uncle.
“1090,” said Rodney, “was one of the energy centers. It was like the Y of the Haight-Ashbury. It was known around the country. We rented out rooms for $15 to $50 a month, and there’d be 60 people there at any one time, ODing on one thing or another. Neal Cassady dropped in once or twice.”
But what most visitors remember about 1090 was the ballroom in the basement, paneled in hand-fitted redwood with beautiful molding all around, a parquet floor, stained-glass windows, a stage with an orchestra pit. Here, before the Charlatans and the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, before Luria and Ellen and the Family Dog at Longshoremen’s Hall, was the first ballroom.
“The minute the Byrds hit,” Rodney recalled, “everybody flashed: ‘Wow! Folk rock!'” And in the summer of 1965, the electricity bill at 1090 Page rose sharply. Dozens of musicians visited and jammed: Jerry Garcia, who’d switched from banjo to guitar only the year before; Gary Duncan and Greg Elmore, interested in putting a rock band together; Chet Helms, interested in learning guitar and joining a group.
Helms ended up managing the group that became Big Brother and the Holding Company and organizing free-form, 50¢ concerts at 1090. After about ten shows he turned full attention to Big Brother, while a couple of visitors to the jams — Luria Castell and Ellen Harmon — hit on the idea of putting on concert/dances. This first one, October 16th, 1965, featured the Jefferson Airplane and the Charlatans. And that takes us back to George Hunter.
Hunter was Mr. Jones’s opposite number. He — well, let Chet Helms tell it — “He’d walk into a room of people listening to classical music and without hesitation turn the dial to KYA [a teenyrock station] at full volume and grab some chick and start dancing.”
Hunter split from Los Angeles in 1962 for the Haight-Ashbury. He was following friends — “A lot of the Reds I knew in L.A. came up here and went to State” — and he was dropping out of a job as a whiz-kid designer (age 19) in a construction firm specializing in high-rise buildings.
He is now a partner and chief designer of a new club still under construction on Union Street, a boulevard of boutiques, singles spots and generally upper-crust hip shops. The idea is a hot club, like the one Django Reinhardt played in Paris. And it all ties into Hunter’s musical — and stylistic — tendencies of ten years ago.
Facing page: a block party with the Dead on Haight Street At a coffee shop down the street, Hunter talked about the Charlatans. “The whole idea there was style, in the clothes and the music. We did a lot of tunes like ‘Sweet Sue,’ ‘Doctor Dan’ and ‘Somebody Stole My Gal,’ a lot of Twenties, a lot of ragtime. Nobody knew from Scott Joplin or anything like, that, but we really liked the stuff and that whole image.”