History of My Reading: 1969 To Boulder Go (part 2)

 Nineteen Sixty-Nine was a prime year for the counterculture (in fact, it was the year it got its name, when Theodore Roszak’s The Making of The Counter-Culture was published), and Colorado was one of its capitals.  It would be my first prolonged exposure beyond midwestern college campuses.

 As music was the counterculture’s living, pulsing heart, it was also the year of the music festival.  More or less invented on the model of the Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas when he organized the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, music festivals of current and cutting edge rock, blues and hybrid forms happened here and there throughout 1969, culminating at Woodstock in August. 

 For three evenings and nights over a weekend in late June, there was one in Colorado: The Denver Pop Festival.   I was participating in the writers conference in Boulder until Friday evening, so on Saturday I took a bus to Denver to hear some music.

 I’m not sure why I decided on Saturday, since the Jimi Hendrix Experience headlined the Sunday lineup. And it turned out to be mildly historic: the last concert the original Experience ever played. (Perhaps I had other plans for Sunday since it was my 23rd birthday.)  But 1969 was a big year for Creedence Clearwater Revival, and they would close the Saturday show. 

 However I did meet a girl on the bus to Denver who claimed to be a cousin of Jimi Hendrix.  She said the last time she’d visited him backstage she’d seen the drug paraphernalia, and showed her concern.  He agreed he needed to slow it down. He was really just a sweet guy, she said.  

 It was a hot day—95 degrees in Denver, and still around 90 when I arrived at Denver’s Mile High Stadium after 5 p.m.  I either bought my ticket or already had it ($6 a night, $15 for three nights) and I was early enough to get a seat in a center section, as people were still arriving. Still, the stage was set up on the field so I was separated from it by a considerable distance.

 I have specific memories of that event, which I am able to corroborate and expand on, thanks to a Masters thesis posted online by Justin Kite of Rutgers University.  He fills in some of the history and the facts of the evening.

 As the time came closer to the scheduled 6:30 start, those in my section of the stands became aware of a crowd growing outside one particular locked gate.  It looked to be wood and wire, and thanks to our position and height, we could see at least part of it. On the inside of the stadium were contingents of uniformed police, most of them opposite the increasingly raucous crowd outside, demanding to be let in, because the music was meant to be free.

 Though I was unaware of it, there was already a history to this festival.  A similar but smaller crowd the night before had tried to force their way in, and they clashed with police, egged on by some of the performers, especially Frank Zappa.  Tonight there were more of them, and they were concentrating on that one gate. 

There was also a longer history involving the Denver police, and their successful efforts to close down the Family Dog, a club in the city that featured rock acts.  And of course, there was the ongoing tension between the straight world and the freaks, the culture and the counterculture, parents and the young. Perhaps we forget how strong the hostility and suspicion could be.

 The confrontation got louder when the first act began, a Chicago band called Aorta.  I could see the gate bulging as bodies raged against it.  Then the next act took the stage: a new Boulder band called Zephyr, which eventually made a couple of albums and is noted as the first band of electric guitar virtuoso Tommy Bolin.  Lead singer Candy Givens was the constant in various versions of the band into the 1980s.

 Zephyr had hardly begun its blues-rock set when the police unleashed their first volley of tear gas canisters at the 500 or so on the other side of the gate.  Some of them lobbed the canisters back. Tear gas came streaming down towards us. 

 The music was halted as the announcer instructed those of us in our section to come down on the field and lie on the ground, face down, until the tear gas cloud passed.  So there I was: reenacting a duck and cover drill with my nose on the grass of Mile High Stadium. In a few minutes we returned to our seats and Zephyr finished their set—but this time the band members were reportedly wearing gas masks. 

Winter at Woodstock

 The next band was Poco, the new country rock band featuring Richie Furay and Jim Messina, two members of the recently disbanded and already legendary Buffalo Springfield.  (Kite’s thesis asserts that the new band of Springfield’s main members, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was originally supposed to play at this festival, but the promoter backed out of the deal when the new lineup failed to get their first album out before the festival.)  Things quieted down enough during their set for me to hear and enjoy it.

But the blazing blues guitarist Johnny Winter got the crowd outside revved up again, and probably the police, too.  They shot off tear gas again, in greater quantity, and this time successfully dispersed the crowd at the gate.  But there was a cost, as during Tim Buckley’s set the wind caught the gas and blew it back into the stadium.  Now people from all over the stadium rushed down to the field to escape the fumes.  In the confusion, the crowd outside attacked the gate again and some got through.  There was a pitched battle between them and the police, until the festival producers opened all the gates to let everybody in.  And suddenly there was nothing to fight about.

 It wasn’t the first time I’d smelled tear gas, and it wouldn’t be the last. As singular as it seems now, it didn’t impress me at the time as all that unusual, that a rock festival would be disrupted in this way.  I was more affected by the distance from the stage.  Without my perceptions artificially enhanced (though there were probably joints making their way across the rows) I felt too detached from the performers.

 By then night had fallen and just as if none of this had happened, Creedence Clearwater Revival played a normal set.  According to Kite, even some of the police stopped to listen.  As Creedence played “Bad Moon Rising,” the full moon rose behind them.  When they noticed this, they played it again.  That’s the story.  I don’t actually remember it.  Kite reports that the young Denver Post reporter called Saturday’s the best music of the festival.

 Much of the Jimi Hendrix Experience set on Sunday night is preserved on YouTube.  Besides being the last Experience show, its other claim to fame is the pre-Woodstock debut of Hendrix’s version of the Star Spangled Banner, which flowed into “Purple Haze.”  But apparently the prior hours were dominated by noisy and constant warfare between police and gatecrashers.  Kite reports that the now iconic singer Joe Cocker, on his first U.S. tour, was found hiding in his dressing room.  “So this is America?” he asked.

 For me, there was one further outcome to the Boulder writers conference. After the open reading at the end of it, a tall man with dark curly hair sought me out to compliment my poems.  Not the Litany so much as the sound poem.  He was Arnold Weinstein from Yale, and he was accompanied by four or five acting students from the Yale Drama School. 

A few days later I ran into him again.  I was having eggs and toast at the Charcoal Chef, one of those chain restaurants that serves breakfast all day, near where I was staying in Boulder.  I was at the counter when he came in for coffee.  The jars of jelly for toast in restaurants had recently been replaced with little plastic tubs which were then, as they are even more so now, nearly impossible to open. So I simply stabbed at mine with a fork, which for some reason he really liked.

 It might have been after the reading or there at the counter, but at some point he invited me to hang out with his group, which was sticking around for awhile to work on improvisations.  Actually it was never clear to me what they were doing, or what he did, but in fact Weinstein taught playwriting at Yale, was a poet and playwright, and at that point in a long and successful theatrical as well as academic career, he had been working with Paul Sills’ Story Theater.  

 It also was never clear to me what he expected me to do. At first he asked me to fool around on piano, and then on guitar, as his students did whatever they were doing onstage.  This resulted in only one moment I remember.  I heard someone on stage say “hello” and I began riffing on it on guitar.  The actors picked it up and built it until the cast was clustered at center stage shouting a rhythmic and frantic “hello” to the (non-existent) audience. 

 It was an interesting, confusing and somewhat uncomfortable few days.  It’s too bad I wasn’t up to it, because Weinstein did several theatrical pieces that integrated music, and took them to Broadway.  I’ve also wondered who those Yale students—and one in particular--turned out to be. 

My immersion in the counterculture began in Fort Collins, where (thanks to Joni's cousin Mary) I had my palm read and my astrology chart done by stoned hippies around a fire. And there was a lot of talk, from the cosmic to the very personal. People just trying to figure things out.  Especially themselves.

  It continued in Boulder.  I hung out quite a bit at a bookstore called brillig (“Twas brillig and the slivy toves”—Jaberwocky in Alice in Wonderland, in which brillig means four in the afternoon, which is probably when I usually showed up at the bookstore) with their books on astrology (Dane Rudhyar), numerology, natural health remedies, cosmic philosophies, as well as books on underground filmmakers, artists, writers.  Scorned or overlooked past writers were being rediscovered, too—including Lewis Carroll. Brillig was also a great place to overhear conversations or engage in them.  (Somewhere I have a note about befriending a clerk there, who admitted she was afraid of the customers.) 

There were books reflecting the evolving sexual revolution and the boundaries of censorship: everything from Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask to newly available novels by Henry Miller and the illustrated book version of the scandalous stage pastiche Oh! Calcutta! 

 There was R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body, Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy Verbatim.  George Leonard’s Education and Ecstasy, Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching As A Subversive Activity.  Zen Flesh, Zen Bones; The Book of the Hopi. All breaking accustomed boundaries around mind and body, searching for new answers and new questions.  Mind-expanding chemicals suggested untapped powers of mind, human potentials censored by a narrow, rigid society.  Cosmic feelings and new intimacies required a stubborn and sometimes misguided search for conscious and nurturing communities that honored individual freedom while withdrawing from a culture of self-righteous conflict that unfeelingly trashed the planet and mechanized non-human life. 

 The apocalyptic tenor of the 1960s had deepened towards decade’ end.  The unrelenting Vietnam war, the oceans dying, DDT and other chemicals poisoning food and the environment, were all in the summer’s news.  So there was interest in arcane takes on the patterns, on the future. Edgar Cayce’s books and prophesies, and similar approaches were part of the mood. 

I browsed the bookstore but unfortunately the only book I can remember reading specifically in Boulder—and I didn’t read all of that—was Bill Stage’s paperback copy of The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda.  I didn’t think much of it.  It wasn’t until his later book, Tales of Power, that I got deeply into his work, and went back to read what I’d missed.

 Besides the bookstore, I often gravitated to the campus.  I recall attending a public lecture by Nobel Prize winning physiologist George Wald, who’d begun speaking out against the warfare state.  He concluded his talk, accompanied by slides, by referring to the ultimate biological cause of the Vietnam War.  It wasn’t clear to me what he meant, so I stayed afterwards and asked him.  “You’re young now,” he said smiling, almost teasing.  “But soon you’ll have to make a living and then you’ll understand—Protein!” Very apropos as it turned out, though just what the direct relevance to Vietnam could be, however, still eludes me.

 A somewhat cryptic surviving note tells me that it was in Boulder that I saw the 1968 film version of Chekhov’s play, The Seagull, with David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave—the couple that had debuted together and had such a strong effect on me in Morgan! a couple of years earlier.  (I’ve now seen at least four versions of The Seagull, none I can think of on a live stage.)

 All of my experiences that summer adhere to the music that was playing in the background.  Everywhere, from Galesburg to Boulder, if a stereo was blasting, it was the Crosby, Stills and Nash debut album.  Or it was Tommy, the Who’s double album.  Or if not those, then Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

 It was one of the ironies of Boulder that it was legally dry—nothing alcoholic but 3.2 beer could be served.  (Despite my attempts at a bar called The Sink, I never quite got the taste for it.)  On the other hand, pot and psychedelics were everywhere.

 My surviving notes record that on July 30—the day I heard President Nixon on the radio declaring that Vietnam was “America’s finest hour,” I dropped mescaline for the first (and so far only) time.  Or what we were told was mescaline.  Unless you know the chemist, you could never be sure.  (I seriously doubt that I ever ingested a full strength pure psychedelic. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure some of the marijuana had an extra ingredient.)

 This event was at a cabin in the mountains about 20 miles outside Boulder.  The cabin was rented for the summer by John, a friend of Bill Stage’s who had shared the living room shag rug with me when he first got to town.  Since then he’d bought a truck and a couple of dogs—both blond Samoan huskies, more or less puppies.  One he named Kachina.  And he’d rented this cabin. 

John was the host for this event, and there were five others besides me.  I’d met four of them, including (let’s call them) Don and Susan, a couple.  We dropped in a meadow about noon, and everyone immediately left—singly and in pairs.  I eventually walked around, came upon one of the group—the only unattached woman—but she had such an evident force field around her that my smile faded and I got as far away as possible.

 So I walked, sprawled in another meadow in the sun, and heard voices of some of the others but I couldn’t see them. Then when it started raining lightly but threatening a storm, I returned to the original meadow and gathered up everybody’s gear—radio, cameras, etc. that they’d left—and took them into the cabin.

 I remember the sense of distance and perhaps alienation from the others.  I recorded a certain self-consciousness that rippled through my experiences, as if I was watching a film or a series of films, but I was also the lead actor.  My perceptions and emotional reactions were heightened, so when I saw Don and Susan in an intense couples thing, I felt both sides of that.  I had a lot of thoughts, about past and present and ongoing relationships, among other subjects. 

And eventually, through the six hours or so, I had one lasting observation.  I had enough visual hallucination to see the whirls and striations in rocks or the rings in wood as if they were in motion.  I saw them as process: for example, the rocks forming from volcanic flow.  Everything seemed to be half growing and half decaying, simultaneously on the way to life and death.

 I was also sick much of the time.  I had the sick stomach associated with mescaline but not intense enough to throw up.  Instead I had it longer.  But I wouldn’t call it a full-blown psychedelic experience.  Afterwards, John felt there had been some speed in it.

 Feeling sick wasn’t an entirely new experience in Colorado.  The altitude and the dry air played havoc with my sinuses, and often I felt lightheaded or suddenly fatigued.  Eventually I heard fluid sloshing around in my good ear, which was alarming enough that I saw a doctor.  He was a young ear specialist, and said it was the altitude.  He asked about my hearing, and I told him of my deafness in one ear.  He tested it, and thought the problem was in the middle ear.  He got very excited, because, though there was nothing that could be done for it when I first was diagnosed as a child, there was treatment now.  He was so happy that I might get my hearing back.  But he did another test and his face fell.  No, it was the inner ear after all, and still permanent hearing loss.  I had been on this roller coaster before so I wasn’t much fazed, but he took it hard.

 Throughout all this I kept writing.  Either falling asleep or just waking up on that shaggy floor in Boulder one day, I had the germ of an idea that would obsess me for decades, and lead to a novel and a screenplay in several versions. It was a good story and pieces of it have appeared in other people’s movies and in digital life since then.  But what I wrote then was a story about something happening in Colorado that summer.

 Somehow I missed the controversy that summer over a scheduled atomic bomb explosion in Colorado, the incredible purpose of which was to test the feasibility of extracting natural gas by exploding 100 to 200 underground nuclear bombs across the gas field.  There were protests organized by activists from Boulder and Denver, but apparently there weren’t very many of them.  And in early September, the bomb was actually exploded underground, with demonstrators bouncing in the air above it.  (I was gone by then.)  But eventually voters got it banned, and the idea failed anyway—too much radiation in the gas, duh.

 However, there was another controversy that did get my attention. Just about a month before I got there, a fire at the huge Rocky Flats plant that manufactured plutonium components, and was highly radioactive, got people wondering what other hazards were around them.  While I was in Boulder it was revealed that at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal there was some 21,000 clusters of nerve gas in explosive bombs—enough to kill two trillion people, if there were that many.  They’d been manufacturing it there for years.  The canisters were basically stored out in the open and decaying.  A stray bullet or a lightning strike that set off a chain reaction, a scientist said, could wipe out a lot of Colorado in a matter of minutes.

 It was insanity on such a huge scale that it called for a kind of Doctor Strangelove approach in the less that successful short story I wrote towards the end of my stay in Colorado.  Bill Stage read it and liked it, and showed it to a friend he especially respected when he stopped by.  He read quickly through it and made a face, directing his dour judgment to Stage, although I was in the room.

 I was crushed enough to remember this.  It wasn’t just that it was hard to be objective about new work, especially at a time of fluid standards, but that so much depended on the last thing I wrote.  It could be the key to my future, which would go a long way to directing my present.

 That said, reading it now, the guy wasn’t wrong.The main plot was funny, though perhaps not as ironic as I meant it, and I can see what I was trying to do with the subplot in contrast, but it was especially awful.  It was at best a shaky first draft.

 Besides which, the reality was more absurd than my story, and became even stranger.  Nerve gas production stopped in 1969, and Rocky Mountain Arsenal eventually became, first, a Superfund cleanup site, and now, a National Wildlife Refuge.

 All through my Colorado stay, I saw Joni whenever we could manage it. She visited me in Boulder at least once, when Stage was away for a few days.  She also invited me down to Denver to meet her sister and her sister’s husband when he came to town.  He was a law student at Yale.

 What she didn’t say was that her mother would also be there, for our first encounter ever. We met at some kind of public swimming pool, so I was basically on nearly naked view for judgment by the family.  Everybody got along fine, it seemed.  The only memorable moment was at poolside when I turned around to look down at the level below.  It was lined with people in lounge chairs sunbathing.  One was a teenage girl in her skimpy swimsuit who looked up at me and extravagantly licked her lips.  I turned away so she wouldn’t see me laughing.  I was living the theatre of the absurd.

 Another time I remember specifically we were together was on July 24, the day the Apollo 11 astronauts were scheduled to land on the moon.  Joni arrived with her friend Kathy, for a drive along mountain roads.  My  Boulder days were marked by the huge flat rock faces visible from Cascade Avenue and the university campus.  Now we were twisting through what were literally rocky mountains, with little vegetation.  Maybe it was my mood as much as the scenery, but sitting in the back seat while Kathy and Joni chatted in the front, I felt like I was getting a preview of the moon. 

 Kathy drove us to her house, and we watched the moon landing, and saw Neil Armstrong become the first human to touch another world, in the basement rec room.

 When we had sold and given away the elements of our Galesburg household and headed west, the ultimate goal was California.  This was a pause on our way to the Bay Area, specifically Berkeley, where we both had friends.  The last patch of the Colorado interlude was waiting for a “driveaway:” some unknown car a stranger paid an agency to arrange to be driven to California.  High and dry Colorado was not wearing well with me.  I yearned for an ocean.

 

At last we scored a car, and we prepared to leave.  I took the bus down to Denver to pick it up.  Joni met me there.  We were going to leave the next day.  She packed an elaborate picnic lunch, complete with a bottle of wine.  We went to Washington Park in Denver, near the sculpture of Eugene Fields’ most famous characters: Wynken, Blynken and Nod.  In my perennially ongoing college novel, three of my main characters being swept along by the tides of the times were Lincoln, Blakely and Nod.  Eugene Fields also figured in the mythology of the Illinois college I’d invented, since he’d been a Knox student for a year and later  a columnist in Chicago. But as it happened, he’d previously worked on a newspaper in Denver.  Of course, Joni knew all of this. The sculpture was her surprise.

 We spread the picnic out under a tree near the sculpture.  After I’d had a glass or two, Joni told me that she had decided not to go with me to California.  She was instead going to Connecticut, where her sister had secured a teaching job for her.  However, she though it was important for me to go on to California myself. She did not use the phrase “to sow your wild oats” but I thought that was the basic idea.  I could rejoin her later in Connecticut. 

 Who could blame her?  California wasn’t a plan.  It’s hard to say what it was. I won't go into the various ways I was a jerk.  Still, I drove the car to Boulder in shock.  The next day I felt worse—lightheaded, queasy, weak.  This didn't seem to be the way to start a solo drive for a thousand miles across challenging country I'd never seen.  Instead I drove the car back to the driveaway agency in Denver.  Eventually, Joni’s cousin Mary and her boyfriend decided to take his vacation in California, and they kindly ferried me along with them. Their camper wasn’t exactly a wooden shoe, but I had definitely sailed off.  They dropped me in Berkeley.