History of My Reading: The Music Is Your Special Friend (Fall 1967)

My first of three trips out of Galesburg during the fall term of 1967 was the October bus trip to the March on the Pentagon in Washington.  My second was the shortest: the 200 or so miles up to Chicago in early November, also with Knox College classmates, to attend a Donovan concert.

Judging by this ticket stub on sale on ebay, the concert was on Saturday November 11 at the Opera House on Wacker Drive at Madison St.  I don't recall exactly who went or even how we got there and back.  I only remember camping out overnight on the living room floor of Jeff Katz's parents house.  So I'm guessing Jeff was one, and maybe Steve Meyers, Howard Partner, Susan Isono, Karen Miyake--but those are just guesses.

Donovan was pretty much at the height of his fame.  After his folk period--influenced by Dylan and other American artists, but also with roots in Celtic traditional song--he had two huge pop hits in "Sunshine Superman" and "Mellow Yellow."  He was becoming a psychedelic troubadour, which was very much the imagery of this show.  In addition to his hits and other past songs, he performed songs from his forthcoming double album, Gifts From a Flower to a Garden, the musical expression of that imagery.   

His Chicago gig was part of a US tour. Amidst flowers, incense and other trippy trappings, each two hour concert began with an introduction by his father.  I remember that his first tune was the simple but mesmerizing "Isle of Islay." He played solo guitar, and then on some numbers he was accompanied by a jazz quintet (there were jazzy arrangements on his Mellow Yellow album especially), and did two songs backed by the Metropolitan String Quartet (according to a letter I wrote at the time.)

We had good seats in one of the center sections, third row--close enough, I noted in that letter, that we caught flowers that he threw into the audience at the end of the concert.

My third trip was the longest in distance and time.  In late November--probably during Thanksgiving break--I flew to San Francisco.  So months after the Summer of Love had cooled, I finally got there.

I went as an official representative of Knox College, to the national convention of the Associated Student Governments.  I suppose I got the gig because I was still one of the student representatives on the Faculty Student Affairs Committee, and possibly because I was one of the few students still around during Thanksgiving break.  There were three of us: Bill Larkin, Karen Miyake and me.  I don't recall seeing much of Bill Larkin while we were there, but I did hang out a lot with Karen.   

Demo against Dow Chemical and Vietnam War at U. of Wisconsin
in fall 1967--just one example of what this convention ignored. 

The convention was held in a downtown hotel, and I dutifully attended various sessions and seminars.  I wrote an article about it, published in the Knox Student. I noted that the male attendees mostly wore identical dark suits and thin ties, and seemed chiefly interested in promoting one or another candidate for ASG president.  It was clearly and disturbingly a clueless establishment organization, and I noted the contrast between the reactionary rhetoric and what was actually happening on university campuses at that moment. I heard with some satisfaction the luncheon speech by Paul Goodman (who had also been at the Pentagon), expressing my own evaluation. He asked, "Is the ASG for real?"

I recall one seminar I mention, that was billed as being about experimental colleges but was actually about sensitivity training and t-groups, the first time I'd heard of them, and I left laughing but with chagrin as I suspected there would be more and worse ahead (EST anyone?)

But I especially recall one session I didn't include in my article: a panel about drugs on campus.  I sat in the audience waiting for it to begin, and I suppose I was fairly conspicuous sans thin tie etc.  Apparently spotting my boots and long hair, someone came down from the platform to ask me if I'd like to come up and be on the panel.  I was clearly being asked as an obvious representative of the country's campus potheads (or "freaks" in the parlance of the day.)  As I had gotten authentically stoned for the first time earlier that autumn, I did not feel qualified, and immediately lost confidence in the panel itself.  I not only declined, I got the hell out of there.

Reading this article is interesting to me now because I see in it glimmers of the writing I would be doing professionally in a few years, for the Boston Phoenix and later for Esquire and other magazines: accurate reporting but with a cultural point of view. In this article I noted that: "We had also been issued a gift bag as we entered the hotel, which contained toothpaste, mouthwash, soap and deodorant, which meant that in addition to looking the same, everyone soon smelled the same as well."  (I noticed this phenomenon many times in later years at various conventions I attended as a reporter or speaker, though I began to see it as an unconscious element in the strange solidarity that often develops.)

But the memorable moments of the trip came outside and after the convention.  I don't recall how we connected, but one evening Jay Matson came by the hotel and drove me and Karen back to the apartment he shared with another ex-Knoxite--I believe it was Buddy Blatner. Their apartment was on an upper floor, with a view of downtown San Francisco, especially a fancy high rise hotel, all steel and glass, with a bubble-like glass elevator that operated on the outside of the building.  They told us an outrageous story of noticing one night that the elevator had stopped.  They tried to report this to the hotel, but instead got connected to the elevator itself.  It went on from there.  To this day I'm not sure if that actually happened, or Karen and I were the gullible audience of an urban legend.

On a glorious day we were driven up Highway One to the rocky seacoast in Marin County, surely one of the most beautiful places I'd ever been.  Mike Hamrin was probably there, and Mary Jacobson definitely was.  When I returned I wrote a song about that day (since lost), sort of on the order of "San Francisco Bay Blues."  The only line I remember was: "Mary's hair was shining for a thousand miles."

And I remember an evening that Karen and I saw a double feature at a theatre not far from the hotel: Doctor Strangelove, in the most incredibly brilliant black and white print I've ever seen, and The War Game, Peter Watkins' 1965 graphic and apocalyptic faux documentary about nuclear war and its aftermath in England.  It's the only time I've ever seen that film shown in a theatre, and one of the few times I've seen it at all.  The films were powerful and the walk back to the hotel decidedly melancholy.  We were continually fighting off the feeling of being a doomed generation anyway.

As for the residual Summer of Love, we visited Haight-Ashbury and I was not especially inspired.  It looked pretty tawdry.  The cannabis culture was more impressive.  In my few months of experience, I was used to watching seeds and stems being separated, small joints being twisted roughly into shape and passed around whatever group had assembled. In San Francisco, the joints were neat machine-made cigarettes in yellow paper, and everyone got their own.

I did make my way to the Avalon Ballroom, one of the two or three hip venues for the burgeoning San Francisco music scene.  I was hoping to see Jefferson Airplane but instead caught a new band called Big Brother and the Holding Company, with a raucous lead singer.  There was a light show blanketing the auditorium and I was pretty far from the stage, so I note with appropriate irony that I spent considerable time trying to figure out if the singer was male or female.  Female, I finally decided.  She was Janis Joplin.

Karen and I had stayed on after the convention was over.  I believe Jay hosted us. Then Karen looked at me sadly and said, "We have to go back."  It was true, and so we did.  But I didn't return empty-handed--the convention had unexpectedly provided some lasting souvenirs.  On its last day I heard someone say that a record company representative was giving away record albums.  I rushed to the appointed room, and got the last two he had.  One was John Fahey's Requia, a series of his meditative composition on acoustic guitar, which I listened to a lot over the years.

The other was the second album by Country Joe and the Fish: I Feel Like I'm Fixin To Die, which we played over and over that year on First Street, in the house Bill Thompson dubbed "The Galesburg Home For the Bewildered."

Karen and I arrived back at Knox in time for a dance in the darkened Oak Room.  Prominent among the music played that night were both sides of the just-released new Beatles single: "I Am the Walrus," and "Hello Goodbye."

Which suggests a point to be made about these 1960s college years: the music gave us pleasure, thrills, wonder, solace, the beat of our lives.  But it also provided much of the text of our lives as well.

Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was innovative in many ways, and one of them was the back of the album cover, imprinted with the words to the songs.  Printing the lyrics then became standard practice in the late 60s and 70s.  This only emphasized what was already true: these were the words we knew, we talked about, we even debated.  We communicated using them.

In fact I'd read an interview (and clipped it from a teen magazine) in which Donovan made this very point.  He referred to "Eleanor Rigby" as a three minute novel.

Of course, as Phil Spector had famously insisted (immortalized in a profile by Tom Wolfe), the meaning of the words was also in the music, the beat.  They couldn't be separated.  Still, these were the texts of those days as much or more than any books.

Movies were also important, of course.  We had access to some films from around the world, both old and new, including experimental film. Todd Crandall inherited the Knox Cinema Club, and deputized me to run a packaged experimental film series--which basically meant advertising it, picking up the movies and delivering them for exhibition in the Round Room of the CFA.

In those packages I recall a lot of trippy shorts and animation, especially from the Film Board of Canada, and a live action short I remember to this day, and have never been able to track down. (For awhile I thought it might be Steven Spielberg's Amblin, but it's not.) It was about a young male hitchhiker, picked up and seduced by a young woman, and then abandoned by the side of the road.  What I most remember is their conversation in the cabin where they spent the night.  She asked him what he wants to be, and he shrugged and said, "I'd like to be a Beatle."  Pretty much my less than secret sentiments. All of this led to interest in film techniques, and in 1967-68, English professor Richard Alexander offered the first filmmaking course I know of at Knox.

Even some Hollywood films were culturally important.  I made a list of a couple of dozen that were significant to us and the times in some way by 1968, and apart from the movies I've previously mentioned that were important to me, our generation more generally got catch phrases and visual imagery from movies as well as a few books.  During our time at Knox the most important movies generally would have to include Dr. Strangelove, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Bonnie and Clyde, Blow-Up, The Graduate in 1967 and 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.

But music had a special place, and that school year of 1967-68 also happened to be a remarkable year for popular music.  Some years later, when I knew a lot of people in the movie business around Los Angeles, I was having lunch with some technicians working on an independent production--a sound guy and a camera guy.  One was an older veteran with lots of stories, the other was about my age.  He and I started talking about the albums released in 1967 and '68, at a level of detail that included the season if not the month of release.  "You guys sound like a couple of medieval scholars," the older man observed.

These days I need a little goosing from the Internet, but there are records I remember vividly.  With three housemates and assorted friends, this was the first time I had multiple people contributing to a common cache of albums.  We played older ones (all the Dylan electrics, for example) but the new ones came in a flood.

 

We arrived still listening to Sergeant Pepper as well as Hendrix Are You Experienced?, Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow, Donovan's Mellow Yellow and Sunshine Superman, Dylan's Blonde on Blonde.  Tim Hardin's first two albums were making the rounds.  I recall watching Anne Maxfield stare intently at the phonograph as she listened to a Tim Hardin record to the end, then sent the needle back to the beginning again.

The school year began with the Doors' second album Strange Days joining their first;  Buffalo Springfield Again, Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant and Procol Harum, joined in late autumn by Cream's Disraeli Gears,  Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing At Baxter's, and (thanks to my San Francisco trip), Country Joe and the Fish I Feel Like I'm Fixin to Die.
   

Winter releases included Dylan's John Wesley Harding,  Hendrix Axis: Bold As Love, Traffic's Mr. Fantasy, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, Aretha Franklin's Lady Soul, Steppenwolf, The Graduate soundtrack of songs by Simon & Garfunkel, The Who Sell Out, Donovan's A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, the Stones Their Satanic Majesties Request, and the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour.

The spring saw Joni Mitchell's first, the Supremes Reflections, Simon & Garfunkel's Bookends, Moby Grape's Wow/Grape Jam, the Papas and the Mamas, the Beach Boys Friends.

All these plus blues from Paul Butterfield and John Mayall, new albums from Motown, from Judy Collins and Joan Baez, and who knows how many psychedelic bands that came and went (the  Electric Prunes, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Seeds, Iron Butterfly, Electric Flag, H.P. Lovecraft, the International Submarine Band etc.)

 Also on turntables were the Velvet Underground, Mothers of Invention (Frank Zappa) and the Fugs. I was listening as well to Ravi Shankar and this strange new singer, Harry Nilsson.

Bill Thompson introduced me to Vanilla Fudge, a white soul band gone psychedelic, and to the Buffalo Springfield's first album.  I listened to several songs on it over and over, and found in "Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It" some echo of my own awkwardness.

 I  introduced him to the Bee Gees first album, and then their second (Horizontal) that winter.  He especially liked the song "Daytime Girl."  That year women students were wearing ponchos, some with Native American-style designs.  He saw a woman in a poncho raising her arms when he heard the line "spreading her wings like a high-flying eagle..."

The texts of the songs, and the songs themselves, reflected and articulated feelings and insights of the times, as well as of more timeless situations.  There was an edge to them borne partly by rebellious responses to the dominant culture.  They broke old boundaries, and though this was often due to new techniques, influences of different styles of music, and pure imagination, there was that element of cannabis and psychedelic drug experiences and the attitudes they suggested.

All of this probably made us more receptive to certain poets and writers working in other media.  But that is a subject for another post.

Ric Clinebell. Leonard Borden photo

First we read, then we write, as Emerson said.  First we listened, then we played and/or composed.  I learned what I could from the records, but housemate Ric Clinebell got a little frustrated with my guitar playing, and taught me a few basic bass runs and accompaniments.  Figuring out and learning new songs with different chords and patterns also inspired my own compositions.

Me and Steve Meyers, again on one of those
Knox construction sites.  Photo courtesy of
Howard Partner.

A few times--maybe including this year-- I sat on the floor in a circle with Dick Wissler and Steve Meyers as we improvised together on guitars.  I was not skilled as they were in playing licks low on the neck but I had noticed in the guitar improvisations by Country Joe and the Fish, there was a chord or chord pattern that anchored it all, so I did that.

I first remember Dick Wissler when he was in a band, and came into the Gizmo one night with his band mates.  They were standing at the counter when they suddenly broke into "He's a real Nowhere Man" in full harmony.  I thought that was the coolest thing.  Back home when Clayton, Mike and I learned those harmonies, I loved the moments when we spontaneously sang that opening line. One of us would start and the others immediately joined in.  We got it right every time.

For those who want a sneak preview of the rest of this long-winded tour through my college years, I posted on another blog about my senior year in a series of posts around the time of my class of 1968's 50th anniversary (winter here and here, spring here and here).  But I'll be continuing here on this blog with more history of my reading in college and after.