Hippies Stories

Deborah Taylor

Tue, 4 May 2010 16:40:32 -0400

I was just sitting here on this drab Saturday thinking about some fond memories of my youth. Although I wasn't born in Atlanta, I've lived here since I was 5. I've seen Atlanta grow and grow and grow. I truly believe that air-conditioning was the ruination of the South. My hippie experience started when I was 15 and went on a family trip to San Francisco. My aunt would take me down to the Haight-Ashbury look at the "hippies". WOW! I felt such a connection with them. One day while visiting my family, I struck out on my own and went down to Golden Gate Park. They were having some sort of concert there. The people were unlike any others that I had met in my whole young life. I spent all day there. When I returned, my Mom had our car packed and they whisked me away. I was changed for life. From then on, I didn't care what people thought of me because I knew there were some people out there who were totally accepting. Fast forward to 1969. I had heard rumblings of hippies down on P'tree St. I had to check it out. My girlfriend and I would make up stories to our parents. We dressed "respectably" in their eyes and have our "hippie" clothes in our trunk. We changed at a gas station and we would head straight for the strip. I spent many wonderful afternoons and nights there. I remember getting thrown out of the Waffle House on 14th St. just for the way we were dressed. I remember the riot in the Park, the overturned police car and the big clash on the baseball field between the "freaks" and the cops. When I went home that evening it was on the news and I was in a panic that my parents would see me there. My Mom watched and said "see what could happen to you if you went down there". I just kinda smiled. I saw Canned Heat at the Sports Arena, The Allman Brothers, Alice Cooper, The James Gang and many others at the Municipal Auditorium. Grand Funk Railroad, Ted Nugent at the Agora Ballroom. I love the "strip" and all the things that went along with it. Met my first lover there. I felt that things started to go bad around 1971 or 1972. You couldn't trust just anyone anymore. The park became dangerous after dark. You had to watch out for thieves. It just wasn't the same anymore. But it was so much fun while it lasted. I miss it.

14th Street Art

Tue, 4 May 2010 16:31:15 -0400

I came to Atlanta in 1965 after graduating NYU film school. I had gotten a job with Georgia Public Television. I moved into a stable/garage on 14th street, behind the house rented by WRFG co-founder Harlan Joy. When the shack burned I stayed a month at Bill and Linda Fibben's further down on 14th street which became a center for counterculture activities. In 1967, having attended dozens of experimental film showings in New York I decided, with help from friends, to try to bring them to Atlanta. I rented the Art theater on 14th street for Friday and Saturday midnight screenings, booked films from the cinemateque in New York, and from October to January showed the works of Stan Brakage, Gregory Markopolus, Ed Emshwiller, Ken Jacobs, the Kuchar Brothers, Jack Smith, Adolpus Mekas, etc. It cost a $1.50 to attend and we sold out every night. (Local film distributors thought I had discovered a gold mine and wanted to know how to get in on the action.) One night I showed an hour documentary on Lenny Bruce- the other hour the Hampton Grease Band performed. Another night I showed the actively enjoyed trippy feature "Lovers of Teruel". The eclectic series ended when the backers, Diane Berger and Justice Randolph, realized that even though we were selling out, the costs of advertising and booking the films and the rental were losing us money. Alas, it was much fun while it lasted, and the theater itself soon followed us under. The attached is a poster that I stapled to trees on the Strip and the Emory campus. In 1969 I made a film for Vista featuring a buying cooperative in Cabbage Town for which I filmed the Fulton Cotton Mills in operation. I believe it is if not the only, certainly the last, film footage of the Mills up and running. The film is noteworthy also because of the interviewed Cabbagetown locals. Later, I established a film production company, Synapse Films, where I introduced numerous ex UGA art majors into the art of making money as grips in the motion picture industry. David Moscovitz

First Pop Festival experience

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:13:15 -0400

I grew up in Griffin, GA; a small town south of Atlanta. I had the pretty normal life of a small town boy and as I grew into my teens I began listening to FM rock stations and hanging around with some of the musicians and others considered a little on the "hippy" side Then in 1969 Hampton, GA was invaded by thousands of people coming to attend the First Atlanta Pop Festival. I was working with 2 friends as a field hand at the Georgia Experiment Station for a summer job.

We decided that we would drive over to the raceway and check things out. So we loaded a truck with a few watermelons, other fruit - from the fields we were working, and some beers. (Being natives of the small town we knew where we could get beer, even under aged) and drove over. We were still somewhat naive about this culture but we were probably the hippest people in our town at the time. I guess by the time we arrived at the festival it had become a free concert because we ultimately found ourselves inside the field and walking around with our beer, sampling pot (my first time) and meeting people from all over.

We wound up staying for a very long time as I remember see several acts including Spirit, Janis Joplin, and others. We left late that evening and were the local heroes for having the guts to even go over.

At that time ROTC was mandatory in the high school which meant military haircuts etc. I spent the rest of my summer growing my hair and paying Saturday night visits to Atlanta and the strip. By the time school started in the fall my hair was not all that long, but much too long for the ROTC Sargent. I was advised if I did not cut my hair I would fail the class and could be expelled from school. I saved them the trouble and got with a couple of friends to head to California. Unfortunately we only made it as far as Starkeville, Mississippi before the car crapped out. A local minister helped us get it repaired and we returned to Atlanta.

By now my friends had had enough of the adventure and decided to return to Griffin. I decided to stay in Atlanta where I remained for the best part of the next 5 years or more.

I first visited The Strip on weekend visits from Griffin until the fall of 1969 when I left home. I began to form great friendships and lived in a "Crashpad" on 14th street. I would leave what few belongings I had at the Speckled Bird office for collateral and sell copies for food money. I ate a lot of Krystal burgers during that time because they were the cheapest meal to eat.
I experience acid for the first time at the Donovan concert at the Municipal Auditorium (now an admin building for Georgia State University.) It turned out the be somewhat of a bad trip and I learned quickly I did not like acid much after that.
I had a slight run in with the law and found myself back in Griffin for a while in 1970. But the call of the Byron festival rang out and I traveled there a week early to help build the stage etc. After staying in Byron through the event I returned to Atlanta where I continued to live and hold several short jobs between my "street pharmacist" endeavors.
I was living with several friends in a house on a small street of Piedmont (Mytle street, I think) when we were raided and I was arrested for possession (of less than an ounce of pot) and operating a dive. Oddly enough I wasn't even in the room with the dope and my name was not on a lease but that did not matter. (I found out later that the GBI had been watching me and my friends from Griffin days.)
I was more careful after that with my drug activity and took various odd jobs. I finally landed a job as a cook at Tom Jones Fish & Chips on Peachtree street between 10th and 11th street. When the manager left town with the contents of the safe one night I was promoted to manager.
That is where I stayed until a bounty hunter came in and took me in for not appearing at a hearing. It turned out that the notice for the hearing had gone to the house I was living in at the time of the bust. I had since moved.
I took a plea bargain and agreed to return home and return to school to avoid jail. By then my mother had moved to Atlanta so that made complying with the law and still hanging on The Strip easy.
What was your best experience associated with The Strip and the hip community?
All the music. Piedmont Park had something happening almost every weekend. And when shows came to town you either got a job as an usher or new someone who did. I saw so many acts at the Municipal Auditorium for the price of a joint.
Second Atlanta Festival in Byron
The summer a friend and I hitchhiked to Washington, DC with a few hits of acid to sell and $50 each.
Later on, nights at Funochios, Richards and Eelectric Ballroom.
I had a few. Bad acid trips, living on the street not knowing where I would sleep or get my next meal, my arrest, beaten up and robbed of a half pound of weed (which I had to work off by selling more for no profit).
A night of depression where I was convinced suicide was a good move. Took 10 hits of acid with a guy named "Angel". When it kicked in I realized, "this was a bad move." Was counceled by a guy in the house that, "I shouldn't worry, the acid itself probably wouldn't kill me." He stayed with me through the evening to keep me on an even keel and keep me from freaking out. I never saw the guy again after that. I tend to call him my angel. That was the point where I never took acid again nor considered suicide. I learned that Angel later shot himself on the back steps of Chili Dog Charlies.
Loves lost or let slip away by stupid acts and bad decisions.
Those experiences were the best and worst in my life. When they were up there was nothing like it. When down it could really drepress you. I have used my past as a testimony when working with teens and men in my church.
I always say that I don't know that I would repeat them but I wouldn't trade them for anything in the world
I went to a house on 14th street with some musician friends one night. There was a concert scheduled for the next day so people were starting their partying early. While in the basement of the house we were passing around joints and listening to some guys playing guitar and singing. I found out the next day it was Duane Allman and other members of the band but I was too high to know who they were the night before.
My street name was "Skinny", a name that followed me from High School. I weighed about 130 pounds soaking wet and hung around with a 250 pound football player who's nickname was "Uncle Heavy". He had a reputation of taking the smaller weaker guys under his wing for protection. And when the counter culture hit Griffin he was right there along with me and others
I am now married to a wonderful woman who grew up in the Decatur suburbs. Her life was vastly different from mine. She grew up with both parents in the typical middle class home. She offered the grounding I needed and the faith in me that made me want to be a better person. We have raised 3 wonderful sons; twins 30 years old and their 27 year old brother. I just became a grandfather to a beautiful boy. I have worked for BellSouth (now AT&T) since 1976 in media and graphics production from multi-image slide to video & multi-media. Mike Payne

all that typical hippie junk no one believes in anymore. Right?

Thu, 6 Mar 2008 23:42:21 -0500

Posted by CN Staff on August 22, 2007 at 09:09:59 PT
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Source: SF Gate

USA -- Go ahead, name your movement. Name something good and positive and pro-environment and eco-friendly that's happening in the newly "greening" of America and don't say more guns in Texas or fewer reproductive choices for women because that would defeat the whole point of this perky little column and destroy its naive tone of happy rose-colored optimism. OK?
I'm talking about, say, energy-efficient lightbulbs. I'm looking at organic foods going mainstream. I mean chemical-free cleaning products widely available at Target and I'm talking saving the whales and protecting the dolphins.   I mean yoga studios flourishing in every small town, giant boxes of organic cereal at Costco and the Toyota Prius becoming the nation's oddest status symbol. You know, good things.
Look around: We have entire industries devoted to recycled paper, a new generation of cheap solar-power technology and an Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth." Even the soulless corporate monsters over at famously heartless joints like Wal-Mart are now claiming that they really, really care about saving the environment because, well, "it's the right thing to do" (read: "It's purely economic and all about their bottom line").
There is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing pro-environment sea change happening in the culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power in D.C., one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: The hippies had it right all along.
All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMA seeds? It came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the grid and it's about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, hemp-covered apology.
Here's a suggestion, from one of my more astute ex-hippie readers: Instead of issuing carbon credits so industrial polluters can clear their collective corporate conscience, maybe, to help offset all the damage they've done to the soul of the planet all these years, these commercial cretins should instead buy some karma credits from the former hippies themselves. You know, from those who've been working for the health of the planet, quite thanklessly, for 50 years and who have, as a result, built up quite a storehouse of good karma. You think?
Of course, you can easily argue that much of the "authentic" hippie ethos -- the anti-corporate ideology, the sexual liberation, the anarchy, the push for civil rights, the experimentation -- has been totally leached out of all these new movements, that corporations have forcibly co-opted and diluted every single technology and humble pro-environment idea and Ben & Jerry's ice cream cone and Odwalla smoothie to make them both palatable and profitable. But does this somehow make the organic oils in that body lotion any more harmful? Verily, it does not.
You might also just as easily claim that much of the nation's reluctant turn toward environmental health has little to do with the hippies per se, that it's taking the threat of global meltdown combined with the notion of really, really expensive ski tickets to slap the nation's incredibly obese butt into gear and force consumers to wake up to the gluttony and wastefulness of American culture as everyone starts wondering, "Oh my God, what's going to happen to swimming pools and NASCAR and free shipping from Amazon?" Of course, without the '60s groundwork, without all the radical ideas and seeds of change planted nearly five decades ago, what we'd be turning to in our time of need would be a great deal more hopeless indeed.
But if you're really bitter and shortsighted, you could say the entire hippie movement overall was just incredibly overrated, gets far too much cultural credit for far too little actual impact, was pretty much a giant excuse to slack off and enjoy dirty, lazy, responsibility-free sex romps and do a ton of drugs and avoid Vietnam and not bathe for a month and name your child Sunflower or Shiva Moon or Chakra Lennon Sapphire Bumblebee. This is what's called the reactionary simpleton's view. It blithely ignores history, perspective, the evolution of culture as a whole. You know, just like America.
But, you know, whatever. The proof is easy enough to trace. The core values and environmental groundwork laid by the '60s counterculture are still so intact and potent that even the stiffest neocon Republican has to acknowledge their extant power. It's all right there: Treehugger.com is the new '60s underground hippie zine. Ecstasy is the new LSD. Visible tattoos are the new longhairs. And bands as diverse as Pearl Jam, Bright Eyes, NIN and the Dixie Chicks are writing anti-Bush, anti-war songs for a new, ultra-jaded generation.
And, oh yes, speaking of good ol' MDMA (Ecstasy), even drug culture is getting some new respect. Staid old Time mag just ran a rather snide little story about the new studies being conducted by Harvard and the National Institute of Mental Health into the astonishing psycho-spiritual benefits of goodly entheogens such as LSD, psilocybin and MDMA. Unfortunately, the piece basically backhands Timothy Leary and the entire "excessive," "naive" drug culture of yore in favor of much more "sane" and "careful" scientific analysis happening now, as if the only valid methods for attaining knowledge and an understanding of spirit were through control groups and clinical, mysticism-free examination. Please.
Still, the fact that serious scientific research into entheogens is being conducted even in the face of the most anti-science, pro-pharmaceutical, ultraconservative presidential regime in recent history is proof enough that all the hoary hippie mantras about expanding the mind and touching God through drugs were onto something after all (yes, duh). Tim Leary is probably smiling wildly right now -- though that might be because of all the mushrooms he's been sharing with Kerouac and Einstein and Mary Magdalene. Mmm, heaven.
Of course, true hippie values mean you're not really supposed to care about or attach to any of this, you don't give a damn for the hollow ego stroke of being right all along, for slapping the culture upside the head and saying, "See? Do you see? It was never about the long hair and the folk music and Woodstock and taking so much acid you see Jesus and Shiva and Buddha tongue kissing in a hammock on the Dog Star, nimrods."
It was, always and forever, about connectedness. It was about how we are all in this together. It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other. You know, all that typical hippie junk no one believes in anymore. Right?

Oasis In Space

Thu, 6 Mar 2008 23:38:06 -0500

http://oasisinspace.spaces.live.com/
Driftin towards shiftin has its ups and downs detailed by Karen at www.whatsuponplanetearth.com (last 2 energy alerts) and I'm right there with those( the clunky parts). Here in 3D, I've had some serendipitous coincidences. Was (last gasp) trying to (once again) transcribe my book ( Manic-Depressive Tours) from notebooks to computer (daunting/what's the point?) when RB sent me a blog link by a fellow Atlantean http://subgeniusslack.blogdrive.com and it's quite invigorating TSTL... especially the Byron Pop fest link (chapter on that in MDT) and the www.messyoptics.com has lots of pics of old friends too numerous to mention here BUT, the one of Norris at 15th street and the caption inspires me to share part of that chapter:
            I met Archie while I was living at the “Chakra commune” of 15th Street in Atlanta. I moved there with some Chakra band members after returning from their Texas tour. (Later on that story).This one-block neighborhood between the High Museum of Art and West Peachtree St. was a menage of lovely, forested* old Victorians housing- an esoteric mix of hippie communes with a spiritual bent. On our immediate left were Krishnas, next to them The Children of God (hippie Christians), on our right Meher Babas, across the street The Theosophicals, ours was loosely TM-ers. In the other houses and mixed in with all these were artists, musicians, actors and techies at the Museum. Each house seemed to have a band. We’d often just close the block to have “battle of the bands” parties or jams.
            After Texas and the wild events that led up to me landing on that bus, I was glad to be back in Hotlanta but feeling a bit disjointed though I loved this house and its illustrious inhabitants:
Through the screened porch and the ornate oval-glass door was the living room on left-home of Duckworth- artist, actor, street-theater magician and set designer at the Museum theater .Witty, wirey small but a ready spring of energy expressed in his head of dark spiral-coiled hair. He had a bunk bed in corner curtained by a billowing parachute tacked up here and there by his collection of oddities and works of art.
On the right a step up led to the room of Norris, black conga drummer in Chakra- his park attire colorful harem pants, rarely any shirt or shoes, a brilliant scarf on head turban style. He’s a most agile yogarian-full of generous joy and humor.
Next room on right housed Ted Levine, white drummer with a most amazing afro, his dark brows, piercingly intelligent, observant, amused eyes lit up his angular face. He had a picky, precise adherence to his monkish environment, diet and yoga/meditations routines which is why we moved to separate rooms as soon as we got back from Texas.
Remaining on right, next room housed 2 sweet dancer actresses/artist/jewelers whose names I forget as they were rarely there.
Across from them Jimmy Godwin, laughing Chakra guitar man. An excellent player-he had long, strawberry-blond hair and an effervescent personality.
Working back up the hall, the large kitchen, our only communal space (other than the porches and half of the living room). We shared our macrobiotic meals there and other interactions. It had lots of aqua-blue open cabinets, butcher block counter tops, a great big gas stove and a large farm table-a cheerful, vibrant room.
My room was next up in what should have been the dining room. It had only one window but the built in buffet and shelves above housed my collection of books, trinkets, autoharp, zither and dulcimer. Only room for a single bed (which suited me as well-only room for me). My treasure was a beautiful old quilt I’d found at a funky antique store. It had silken and velvet patches that were embroidered and joined by colorful, decorative stiches. It was in wonderful condition and I was so enchanted by it. I wanted to know its history. .....and blah blah blah... (& that's a whole other story).  ...
(The turretted/balconied 2nd floor had it's own cast of colorful characters...later on that -in MDT, not here)

Beat Zen Guru

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 21:58:30 -0500

Oxford College was a step forward from Tift County’s time warp, but not by much. I stepped in to a world desperately clinging to antiquated rah-rah week starting with Freshman Hell Week, definitely another story. Luckily for me there were a few left over beatnik, proto-hippies among the entering freshman and among rising sophomores, the rulers of the insular world of Oxford isolated from the main campus and retaining some rules from another century. One being that the town literally closed about 7:30. Even the stoplight was turned to blink. A college student had nowhere to go on nights the snack bar wasn’t open. Women had to be signed in and out after 6. They had only recently won the right to sign themselves out for a weekend. Formerly a parent had to be responsible. Men were free to roam, but only sophomores could have a car and they were suppose to be kept in a controlled lot. Lucky people had an outside source of escape.
On weekends I was rescued by Pixie Ujhelyi or someone she had sent in the faithful turquoise dart, another story. During the week I was imprisoned, so I was very happy when Jan Jackson, quintessential daffy hippie chick, said her boyfriend Martin about whom I had heard so much, was actually coming tonight and we could all ride somewhere for food and hangout. Well that meant riding to the Huddle House in Conyers since it was all that was that was open on Monday nights except filling stations for about fifty miles.
I got money and was headed to the girl’s dorm when this wiry little guy came out of the shadow. “Hey hippie, where you goin’?” He had a wide, smug grin and looked like a brown haired greaser gnome moving with angular lope.
Spider sense tingling. I had lived this scenario, where are his buddies hiding? But he grinned and laughed then walked back in the shadows. I raced to find Jan and my friends.
When I told her what had happened, she got a twinkle in her eye and said, “Meet my boyfriend Martin!” and the wiry guy again stepped out of the shadows laughing to himself.
“You hippies ready to ride for some chow?” With that six clambered into his VW bus to go for coffee and sandwiches and a jukebox.
This was my introduction to Martin who was to become my beatnik hippie guru.

Shortly after, on a weekend Pixie had come for me, but would be unavailable to give me a ride back from her apartment near Oglethorpe. Calling around Oxford students I knew to be in Atlanta, I got Jan at Harvey’s house on 14th. She said Martin was taking her back and they’d come get me.
Gabi and I were sitting around the living room, where we had begun sharing one sleeping bag, much to the stern displeasure of her mother who stayed upstairs with Pixie in the one bedroom, which featured an opening so you could overlook, and overhear, everything that happened down below in the living room in a single sleeping bag at night. The thought that her mother was just above us listening was almost enough to extinguish the lust of two eighteen year olds in love. Almost enough, Mrs. Ujhelyi wasn’t overly fond of this guy that came on weekends to extensively make love to her daughter.
There came a knock at the apartment door and in breezed Martin followed by Jan and two others talking and in a great mood. Martin sat at the table and pulled out a workmen’s lunchbox with a curved top. Jan had said he was always hungry. He was crumbling up some sort of relish and rolling cigarettes. Ohmigod, he’s got marijuana and Mrs. Ujhelyi is just up there and can see us! I realized with a shock.
Gabi saw my alarm and shrugged and smiled. Soon we were passing around the joints. Pixie acted shocked but made sure she got some good hits. My first time smoking and I was getting very high. Martin was a great guide to both of us about what was happening in my mind. He was a bridge to the lingo of the beatniks, which strangely was suddenly not strange.
Bidding Gabi and Pixie an altered goodbye. We piled into Martin’s blue VW bus Ol’ Baby and were off down the length of Peachtree to catch I-20 at the capitol. The lights of traffic were a phantasm to my newly stoned mind. The trip back to Oxford lasted a joyful eternity with Martin giving his own Casady style rap on life as he drove. Jan added comments both sardonic and hilarious. Oh what a ride.

Hippies Plague the Women’s Club!

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 21:56:57 -0500

http://www.gpb.org/media/pdf/peachtreestreet.pdf

IN THE LATE 1960S AND EARLY 1970S, THE MEMBERS FACED A VERY DIFFERENT PROBLEM – A PLAGUE OF HIPPIES.

Jim Auchmutey #31 [08:16:57:00] The strip was that area up around Peachtree and 10th street that was uh the south’s little version of Haight Ashbury. And uh I remember going down during the summer of 1970 when I was not quite 15 years old. And it was the first time I’d ever let my hair grow over – I had hair – I’d ever let my hair grow over my ears. (08:17:16:00) (08:17:26:00) The streets would just be crawling with folks. I mean, there, there was a real happening place then. And Margaret Mitchell’s old neighborhood had become hippie. And uh I’d buy bootleg records down there and blacklight posters.
[08:17:38:00] (08:18:50:00) And a lot of people who had - who were probably appalled by hippies, were coming down there uh the traffic used to be
backed up on Peachtree for miles uh with folks from the burbs coming in to look at all these people, you know. That was, that was what everybody was talking about back then, so everybody wanted to come down and see it. It was like the big cruising scene.
(08;19;11)
NARRATION: THE MEMBERS OF THE ATLANTA WOMAN’S CLUB
HUNKERED DOWN AND TRIED TO IGNORE THE HIPPIES SLEEPING ON THEIR PORCH. IT WOULD PROVE TO BE A SHORT-LIVED PHENOMENON. MIDTOWN WAS ABOUT TO SHAKE OFF ITS SLEEPY POST-WAR LOOK TO BECOME ATLANTA’S SECOND BUSINESS CENTER AND ITS CULTURAL CENTER.

THE ARTS WERE BEGINNING TO FLOURISH IN THE NEW MEMORIAL ARTS CENTER, DEDICATED IN 1968 TO THE MEMORY OF 106 ATLANTA ARTS PATRONS WHO DIED IN A 1962 PLANE CRASH IN ORLY, FRANCE. HERE THE SYMPHONY, THE HIGH MUSEUM OF ART, THE ATLANTA COLLEGE OF ART AND THE ALLIANCE THEATER ALL HAD ROOM TO GROW. IN 1982 THE CENTER WAS RENAMED THE ROBERT W. WOODRUFF ARTS CENTER ON THE
93RD BIRTHDAY OF THE COCA COLA MAGNATE, WHO HAD BY THEN GIVEN IT ABOUT $50 MILLION. THE NEXT YEAR, THE HIGH MUSEUM MOVED INTO A NEW SIGNATURE BUILDING NEXT DOOR. TODAY THE WOODRUFF ARTS MUSEUM.

Eddie 2

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:51:31 -0500

Hello boys and girls, grampas and mee-maws. Its your ole fiend Eddie the Road Manager with some more rambleings 'bout when I had some of the best times of my life in the Hippie community in good ole Atlanta.

Ya'll remember The Fruit Jungle? I spent many late nights food tripping in that place. One thing cool...for a while there was an older dude probably in his late 40's working there late shift, and I had been told that if you were broke, slip the dude a joint and he wouldn't charge you. I had to try this and with a little paranoia on my part slipped the man two joints to pay for soda, cake and cigs...WOW!!! the cat smiled at me wiggled his eyebrows and said have a nice nite. After this, I would always bring him a "present" even if I wuz paying...unfortunatly he didn't last too long there.

This ones a hoot...I know there has to be folks who remember this happening. In the rear of Atlantis Rising was a large dirt parking lot where folks started hanging out doing what we did back then. My friend Jimmy Smith and I were walking down a side street going to the parking lot when all of a sudden! Man all the cops you ever wanted to see were screeching and motorcycling and sireening to the parking lot...scared us to death!! I mean we thought it was the inquisition-final last round up-death to the beholder and then some come at last. Being prudent and not half dumb hippies he and I found a nice little hidey hole and hid our stashes and went to investigate. Not 10 minutes after the big cop-o-rama drama cops began leaving the area...swear to god 2 different motorcycle dudes shot us the peace sign!! Others were waving and smiling as they left...strange mo-pocky...we found out latter there was a beat cop in the area and was in the parking lot being pretty friendly with everybody and a couple of guys hanging out thougth it might be fun to dose this cop. They got a very pretty lady to offer the cop an iced cold coke with a hit of acid in it. What caused the big cop infestation was the poor guy was having so much FUN he forgot to call in on his radio and let the big cop on the radio know all was well. As I remember, the tripping policeman stayed with us for a few hours...I guess the cops thought we could take care of him....wonder where he wound up.....

Another fond memory of mine was the Turkey Trip in the ballroom of that hotel across from the Fox. I saw the poster for it, but I only remember the ABB playing that night. I had a friend who was new to atlanta and had never seen the allmans...so I somehow arranged to get him on the stage crew and buy him a hit or orange barrel. the first time I saw the ABB i was tripping my a** off so this would be a good way for Acey to see them (see previous post)...it was fun watching every body bumping around and trying to maintain while moving various mysterious pieces of musical equipment....sometime during the show, the Brothers were in a particularly intense jam and this weird guy jumped out of the audience and started wailing on Duane's microphone...he was doing some pretty good lead singer moves but the mike was turned off...what was cool was no one jumped on the guy or tried to bounce him off the stage, Kim Payne Allman Bros. road manager just reached up and turned the mike on. This scared the shit out of leadsinger man to hear himself at volume and he kinda slunk back in to the audience.

First real concert I saw was the Dave Clark 5 in the auditorium...went to Atlanta Cabana and oggled them for a while.

Place I stayed for quite a while was wonderful. An apartment in an old house about block and a half from Catacombs...pot-ment was one of 3 in this house and Berry Oakley and Mike Callahan lived there for a while...Berry had just come off a tour with Tommy Roe and was just hanging...he used to get me stoned and teach me progressions on the guitar so he could practice bass lines...I was awful but it was fun. Our 'potment was close enough to the strip where alot of times I would just put on some tunes turn um up and sit on the front porch and meet bunches of people...so cool.

Almost every memory I have about those days are positive and truly fun. There were times when a friend would get busted or in trouble and that would be a drag. I was stopped once driving and didn't have my wallet on me so I was guilty of driving without a license...with no ID the good ole DeKalb county po lice called a PADDY WAGON!! and hauled me down to the city jail...bummer...I actually met these great black dudes whome I played checkers with at a quarter a game. I didn't have to try very hard to lose but I made sure to. So these guys could buy cigaretts & shit. One bummer was there was a thing with music in the park that day and my friends who could get me out did not know i was busted untill Jim Neiman was doing his set and dedicated a song to "Eddie the road manager in the clink". Man!! do you think i was lucky or what? I think I was very lucky at that time in history to go to the Atlanta city jail and come out smiling.....whew!!

I'll try to add to this as time goes on...shoot I'm 59 years old memory ain't what it used to be. I do miss all the friends I made back then...some of the best friends i've ever had...having some of the best times WE ever had. Now a days when i see the news and all the crap thats happening in the world and around the town i live in, I realize how very lucky we were to grow up in such turbulent times (LOL).

peace and happiness, eddie

Eddie the Road Manager

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:48:03 -0500

Holy Crow where do I start? Just out of high school 1967... Band I was road manager for had a gig at "The Pink Pussy Cat" across from the Atlanta Cabana...didn't this later become Funocio's?

One of the waitresses asked us if we wanted to go to a coffee house that was open all night. Yep, took us to the infamous "Catacombs" where many a man and woman were able to find a life to suite their style, or a style to suit their life, whatever.

The town in North Carolina I am from, was, as you can guess, about as unhip as they came...beach music, Madras, Weejuns and princess collars. Pembroke University (a little south) had started attracting all these yankees who were I guess, doin' good in the first 2 years of college in this podunk town so they could move on to glory in a "better" yankee college. It was a lucky thing, that one of their frats had their house about 2 blocks from my house in Lumberton because I became welcome there and found all this great subversive literature that would probably get me killed. It was great, I would spend days reading Eye Magazine, "The Realist"...it was like a library.
So, when I got to the Catacombs that summer night, I knew Atlanta was going to be my home from now on. I basically took the crap i'd brought with me and moved it to the waitresses and her girlfriends apt. (the girlfriends name was Dale and please i'm sorry but i can't remember the waitresses name for the life of me.) These 2 ladies were from Fla. and pretty much showed me the ropes. Another guy john landau, also from Fla. was there also and we begun to hang. This had to be in June 'cause I remember seeing Bob Hope in the Independence day parade.

My main form of transportation back then was walking, and walk I did. There was no free food or diggers back then, I learned to panhandle and there was always the girls who wanted to mother you a bit and would bring you a Zesto's or something to take away that hunger headache...Right now, thank all of ya’ll for your kindness and friendship. I wish I could call you each by name but i can't... There was no strip back then, there was a wall across the street from the 14th street art gallery (above the catacombs) where people would start to gather mostly in the early evening.

Hey ya'll remember that near riot we had one night when this runaway chick named "Nicki" had this big to do in front of the hippies and the cops got called and the hippies were not gonna let Nicki be taken home against her will (she wasn't ). It was wild everybody in the street and about 3 poor cops against about 150 kids.

Well since I got to the scene as a road manager for a band my nickname became Eddie The Road Manager (hey Darrel!! read yer thang) To clear up one thing, Jim Neiman was not "Nasty Lord John" that would be John Meeks who I shared an apt. and later a really cool house with. John also worked at the Scene, the hotspot, go daddy nightclub i couldn't get into because i was only 17. John played live drums along with records the dejay would play...supposedly VEDDY English!!

Awrite, 'nuff history for now...I see shows on tv and shit that call that period of time turbulent and dangerous...and I guess it was BUT i had the most fun allowed a human being back then. I had some uncanniy ability to sense trouble brewin' and remove myself from the said action....i really was and still am a pacifast...i spent the first piedmont park riot in a bare tree with a gram of hash watching these idiots fight with the police. My idea was to have as much fun, get as high, laid and help folks as much as possible. So I'm not perfect and don't claim to be.

Here are some of the cooler things I Remember (not in particular order, will try to give at least year or corresponding event.
THE FIRST TIME I SAW THE ALLMAN BROS.
I was working in Mu records in Atlantis rising. My old friend Richard Galwin (sp) and I were walking in the park anticipating free music that week end when Richard asked me if i'd ever heard the Allman Bros. and for some goofy stoned reason I thought of the Wilburn Bros. I didn't realize at the time the power that was lyin’ around and didn't think the free music would be more than a few local bands and a small headliner. I used my "working at atlantis rising" vibe to get myself and a friend on the stage crew for that Sunday.

I remember a two-toned stage on wheels from Atlanta parks and recreation and a couple of rednecks there to watch it. We were kinda jerkin' around when I saw Berry Oakly (who had lived next to me and john on 14th street about a year earlier). We talked and he told me about his band the ABB and i began to suspect I was in for more than just some fun. We began to stop jerkin’ around and become more fluid with instructions from various road managers and dicks in charge of the world when (i really think it was Schroder) one of the "Big Dealers" came by and laid a jar of orange juice on the stage crew. Yep you got it dose a rama....wa hoo! we were now past fluid now we were oozing, silent mind controlling cymbal stands to assemble themselves, brain waves communicating...we were baked, trippin' stoned...we were the Stage Crew and had no fear.

Back then the Bros. would set their equipment up first, at the back of the stage, allowing room for the other bands to set up and play. and they would do Mtn. Jam to warm up...sound check...all of a sudden, Richard....remember Richard? boy i sure do, hope yer still around little buddy. Richard grabs me and (so excited " the Allman Brothers are gonna play") Richard grabs me and pulls me off the stage and there we sit 6 feet away from Duane and 8 feet from Greg...and they start Mtn. Jam...I would like to have a film of my face as they played that song, just to watch the changes I went through....changed my life...one thing I still remember thinking was how good it would be to be the wood in the body of Duane’s guitar.

After that came band after band of Excellent music...the Booger Band was killer...being on stage and feeling their music even through your feet was amazing. I remember my friend Steve Cooke, who had been into the orange juice too, offering the organ player a toke of a large joint right on stage between songs....freaked the poor guy out. Long day of movin’ equipment, smoking, watching beautiful Georgia peaches dancing and swinging from the trees, frisbee trails everywhere, like some miniature space port...did I say space port? Every where you looked, smiles, happiness, friends, allman brother talkin’ to old friend...dicky betts did not put his gold les paul down that I saw...good vibes, curious straights, students, winos, little children teaching big children how to play...ABB came back after dark and played until past time to quit. Everybody cleaned up the joint, we all went home and had sweet dreams.........
to be cont. (I hope)

Eddie the road manager

West Palm Festival

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 23:16:37 -0400

From left to right: Lance, Mark Goodfriend, Schroeder, Lee Shannon & Stevie Parker.

The tent on the right has quite a history of it's own. It came from a Sears' store in Denton, TX. Renée & I rode with John Ivey to the Dallas Pop Festival, Labor Day of '69. We arrived a week or so before it started and needed a place to stay. I'm an Eagle Scout and had no problem with tents, so off we go to the closest Sears' store to buy the biggest tent they had in stock. The Hog Farm needed a few things, so this guy we called Beethoven, dressed in an orange jumpsuit with beads and a stovepipe hat went with us.

We were quite a sight at the neighborhood mall in Denton. Beethoven found the toy department and proceeds to buy handfuls of less than a dollar toys and gives them away to every child or adult that would take one. By the time he meets up with me in sporting goods he looks like the pied piper with all the people following him around. including security guards. We must have drawn every guard in the store. I was glad to get out of there.

Put the tent up back stage and enjoyed the privileges of shade and almost seclusion in the midst of chaos and the Texas sun. Maybe 75% of the performers shared the tent and refreshments with us, more than I can name or remember. Each musician is a separate story. Maybe more another day....

Brought that tent back to Atlanta, used it in one more Pop Festival, as shown in picture and managed to keep it and use it for 36 years. A lot of camping trips, lot of fishing, lot of family time. Renée and I have three children. All of them learned to play cards in that tent during rainy weather. Good memories.

hey - it was such a meaningful time for all of us...

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 14:44:37 -0400

hey - it was such a meaningful time for all of us...here's my two cents to help flesh out the story....

growing up in East Point, graduating in '64, I had gone to college in NY but spent the year in Manhattan, drawn by concerts at the Apollo and the civil rights marches - and exploring the new world of open sexuality, which was unheard of in high school - it was a way, we felt, of really getting to know someone, of touching soul to soul...a connection with 'Others' that had never been a possibility before...

when I came home I became pregnant, despite every effort not to, and married my high school sweetheart who was just back from Vietnam, went to south Georgia for his year of college and then tried to settle down in S. Fulton - it was 1967 and every fiber of my being was screaming to be free - causing a holocaust of heartache and karma that I'm still feeling the effects of - I tore away and rented a tiny apartment on 13th Street, where I smoked pot and sang along with Janis Joplin records constantly, while waiting for a scorpio boyfriend who rarely showed up...meantime, I sewed fringe on my jeans, and made a skirt out of another pair... I'd walk up to the Strip and just Be there, letting experiences happen...we'd sit with our backs up against the storefronts, sharing buzzes and watching the gawkers with their car doors locked streaming by - we'd smile, marveling how we'd once been in that world but were now in a new one...

the music had so much to do with altering our vibration, working with our DNA...we lived and breathed in it.....the acid trips seared it into us...a spaceship that emptied us into other worlds we'd never known existed that we were now free to explore...the warm, wasted Hampton/Allman Brothers concerts in the beautiful Park were the ultimate sense pleasure and profound experience of dissolved boundaries...for a period of years, even after I'd moved out of the area, I'd sit up in the big magnolia trees and groove on the Piedmont Park scene...

we loved the clothes at the Merry-Go-Round on the Strip, where as the producer's executive assistant I bought some costumes for the motorcycle movie "J.C." that we were filming locally - I still have the long fringed vest and some paisley flared Levi's...

we felt so backwards and deprived, knowing the real 'action' was on the West Coast, and not being able to get to Woodstock...I heard about the real hip places in Atlanta, but never seemed to belong to the most 'in' crowd anymore than I had anywhere else - but there were Jimi Hendrix and others at the Municipal Auditorium, and I still have my program from the Pop Festival at Byron, where we were cooked in a hot stewing pot of bliss and misery and made One...we were wet, hot or hungry, or all three - we had money trouble, family trouble, car trouble, housing trouble, bad trips, exploitation, and people leaving us stranded in strange places, like the ever-weird Cobb County - we had a 'mind-blowing' time at the Grand Funk concert at Lake Spivey, but no way to get home - we had 'crabs' and depression and bewilderment - and we came into our realization that the visible world isn't all there is, that we are one with everything, and we are incomprehensibly creative....

after all these years I remember the profound tenderness of a one-night stand with Bill Fibben, of the Great Speckled Bird - of so many other encounters - the cosmic love we experienced and expressed is still awakened and active deep in our cells - it formed deep commitment, and we went to work with it, rolling out in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, in empowerments of every kind, in changes to every civic structure...this realized Love went into everything - in the 80's numbing echo of the 50's we'd hear people say the hippies were all gone, they'd sensibly sold out to better-paying jobs...but we hadn't really - those who weren't as radical did go corporate, but didn't lose all their realizations, and now at retirement age they're even visible again in the conscious, progressive activities of our time - some of us stayed high and even after we 'cleaned-up', never did go back to the 'muggle' world - we've continued with our 'back-to-the-land' simple living ways, we've become healers and artists, gardeners, musicians, helpers and teachers of various sorts....

I'm in the mountains now - my daughter survived both my neglect and my repentance and we're very close, both committed to Peace...I'm deep into multi-faith spirituality, healing, singing, chanting and dancing, and finally learning to interface with matter better, to make an honest living sharing gifts of cosmic-conscious life with those who missed the days of revolution and transformation that changed the world in that seminal evolutionary moment experienced in Atlanta on the Strip.........

Peace, ya'll..................love Carol

Pink Floyd in Atlanta

Mon, 1 Oct 2007 21:00:54 -0400

by HopHead 
Back in the days when I was a committee chairman at the Georgia Tech Student Center, I was buddies with all the local concert promoters ... and I took full advantage of these relationships. This was long before TicketBastard came to dominate the industry. Instead of computerized sales, the promoter divvied the actual printed tickets up and delivered them to the various ticket outlets all over the city. So at each outlet, you could only select from the tickets they had on hand.

Leveraging my relationship, I’d simply stop by the promoter’s office the day before the tickets went on sale and buy them directly from him – I could pick any seats I wanted since they hadn’t been distributed yet. It’s a beautiful thing to be in a office with an entire show’s worth of tickets to pick from! Generally I’d purchase the same fifth row, left of center seats for every show at the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium.

Pink Floyd, however, was appearing at Atlanta Symphony Hall during the Meddle tour – the first-ever rock concert at Symphony Hall. I was a huge Floyd fan, ever since Umma Gumma scared me silly. I’d never been to Symphony Hall and had no idea what tickets to buy – there was no seating chart at the office since they’d never before done a show at this venue. This particular show was especially important because I was getting tickets for all my friends as well, about two rows worth. So I just took Alex’s word on what the best seats were, and walked out of his office with 10 seats in row KK and another 10 in row LL.

I had no idea where these seats were located and had some trepidation – the seat numbers were unfamiliar and I’d spent all my friends’ money – but I shouldn’t have worried. Alex had taken care of me. The whole batch of us arrived at the concert tripping our brains out – how else are you supposed to see Pink Floyd? We entered the Hall in full hippie regalia and discovered that our seats were in the direct center of the first two rows of the balcony. Whoa! The balcony in Symphony Hall swoops right down almost to the stage – we were looking right down on top of it!

Looking down from our seats we could see a huge light boom with three rows of lights resting on the floor of the stage, stretching horizontally almost the entire width of the stage. Behind it, the curtain was closed. The show began almost subliminally with the sound of a beating heart gradually increasing in volume until it was just loud enough to hear. Then the lights started to pulse red in time with the beating heart. After a moment, the band started to play from behind the curtain. Already this was show unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

The lights continued to pulse and sequence in a manner I’d never seen before, and the curtain remained down until after the first song began to segue into the next. Suddenly, the entire massive light boom began to slowly and majestically rise from the floor until it was as high as the top of the stage – the lights still pulsing rhythmically with the music. Then the curtain opened, exposing the band and their equipment for the first time. Suddenly the entire light boom rolled from the front of the stage to the back and the lights rotated from pointing to the audience to pointing down at the band. Given the special effects available today that may not seem so much, but in 1970 it was brain overload!

Later in the show we heard a helicopter approaching – an unmistakable sound to anyone who had seen news clips from Viet Nam. Louder and louder, the helicopter sounded like it had entered the hall even though we couldn’t see it. It flew directly overhead, then behind, then around the hall again. It dawned on me that Pink Floyd’s sound crew was using quadraphonic speakers – I looked behind me and, sure enough, there were giant PA speakers positioned in the back corners of the balcony. Still, I felt like I needed to duck when the helicopter flew overhead. One of the guys with me stood up screaming, flung his clothes off, and ran out of the hall. This is a band that likes to play with your mind ...

Pink Floyd Part Two

Ok, so I had a wonderful, mind-bending experience the first time I saw Pink Floyd – these guys had caught me by surprise with a show unlike any I had seen before. I knew they were going to mess up my mind, and still, they did it anyway. So next time they came to Atlanta I figured I was ready for them.

This time they were playing in support of their brand new album, Dark Side of the Moon, at the old Atlanta Municipal Auditorium instead of Symphony Hall. (Could the naked, screaming guy have had something to do with that?) The Municipal Auditorium was where I’d seen most of the shows that hit Atlanta – Traffic, the Who, Mountain, Elton John, the Dead, the ABB, among many others – most of them from my regular fifth row, left of center seats.

But this time, remembering the quadraphonic experience from Symphony Hall, I decided to get creative. Instead of sitting up front, I figured I’d get the seats with the best sound. So I took out a seating chart, drew a big X on it, and determined the exact center of the floor seating. This is where I bought two rows of tickets for Floyd (since I could get seats anywhere I wanted).

Well, when we arrived for this show we were even more psychedelicized than the last time, I mean we were on a different planet! We were a little late getting there (for obvious reasons) and, although the show hadn’t started yet, the auditorium was very crowded. Rather than work my way through the crowd in my precarious state of mind, I decided to ask an usher for help. Now I’m a tall guy – I seldom have to look up at anyone and when I do, it tends to make me a little uncomfortable. So when the usher told me to wait and came back with a guy about a foot – a foot! – taller than me, I was discombobulated to say the least. Then this giant of a man looks down on me and says in a voice I’ll never forget, a basso profundo not unlike Lurch the butler, “Come. With. Me.”

Yikes! The show hadn’t even begun yet and already the mind games had started. Lurch led us right past the rows I’d purchased, all the way to the front of the auditorium. I freaked when we went by the seats I knew were ours – I had no clue what could be happening. Turns out the soundman for Floyd had done the same thing I’d done – he’d drawn an X on the floor plan and situated his soundboard in the exact spot I’d selected for our tickets. In order to accommodate the missing seats, they had set up two rows of rickety, wooden folding chairs in the space between the front row and the stage. We were all seated, crammed together within touching distance of the stage.

Oh glory! The show started and Floyd proceeded to blow our minds. There were three black chicks doing back-up vocals all wearing sequined dresses. Each girl was wearing a different colored wig in bright neon red, blue and green. A guy wearing a gorilla suit cavorted across the stage, climbed some scaffolding, and began swinging on a rope from the balcony. Another guy dressed like the Mad Hatter walked down the aisle through the audience on stilts. When he reached the stage, he took one giant step up and started walking around the musicians. They ignored him as if he wasn’t there. Same with the gorilla. This is all happening right in front of us. No other concert experience had ever prepared me for this. The music was incredible and our minds were unlimbered from reality.

My buddy Jim was seated right next to me and was white-knuckled, grabbing the arms of his chair. Later he told me he thought he’d been kidnapped by aliens, for real. I can understand why. A truly unforgettable concert experience.

How I came to be a Hippie. BY STEPHEN GASKIN

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 23:36:50 -0400

from Feb ’94 High Times pg. 30, 33
Well, since the editors of HT said ' I could have this page a few times a year. I guess I should give you a little to go on about where these opinions come from.
I guess most people don't identify it with my hippie self, but I served with Able Company. First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, in Korea in 1953 as a rifleman, a BAR man and a Fire-Team Leader, I drew combat pay and was fired on and returned fire- and carried dead and wounded friends back from no-man's-land. I joined February 26, 1952 and was discharged on February 26, 1955.
1 went to junior college at San Bernadino Valley College and took several years getting an AA degree. But I realized I was wasting time and needed to finish school already. I went to San Francisco with new wife and baby and went to school full-time on the GI Bill, which was $135 a month with wife and kid. At that time 1 was already a latent beatnik, which only got more so during the years I went to SF State. I got my BA in 1962, and my MA in 1964. After I graduated, I taught there in creative writing and general semantics from 1964-1966,
I first began Monday Night Class in 1967 on the San Francisco State College Campus, where I had been S.I. Hayakawa's teaching assistant. 1 happened to be the one who answered the phone when the Free Speech Movement called up from Berkeley thinking that a general semanticist would favor free speech. To my absolute astonishment. Hayakawa threw a fit that foreshadowed the right-wing force he later became in California politics. I told the guy from Berkeley, "I'm sorry baby. He doesn't like you."
It wasn't till much later that I fell in with the hippie movement myself. Some of my students came to me and all but said that they liked me and all but that I didn’t know what was going on. They said that they wouldn't be able to take me more seriously until 1 did something for them, 1 wanted to be taken seriously so I asked what it was. "First," they said, "we want you to go see A Hard Day's Night by the Beatles.
" Well, just as they had planned, I fell in love with John Lennon, recognized the power of youth as represented by the hippies and began my path as a hippie. The times were outrageous. There were a couple of hundred thousand hippies on the streets in San Francisco. Tripping on LSD was pandemic. Sometimes it seemed as if the whole city smelled of reefer smoke. Grass was $75 a kilo, Acapulco Gold was $250 a kilo, acid was $2.50 a hit and so was rock'n'roll. Every circle of people on the street had a joint circulating around the inside.
Like many people, I got a little strange when 1 was tripping weekly. The wife of my creative writing teacher when she saw me in my first hippie garb, beads and long hair, said: "You have gone too far!"
It wasn't that I got fired for being a hippie. It was that I got too weird to rehire at the same time my contract expired. After two years of teaching, I went across Mexico and the Yucatan peninsula to British Honduras ( now Belize) in a 1952 Volkswagen bus. The road across the Yucatan wasn't even bulldozed, just chain-sawed and machete'd. When I returned to San Francisco, 1 got my last voluntary haircut and tried to get rehired at SF State. Something in me wasn't serious, though, and I found myself in my job interview, spreading my coattails and curtsying as I said, "Am I square enough for you now?"
I was not rehired and I don’t blame them. It was obvious that my major interest was getting high.
When, in the normal course of getting stoned. I wanted to take counsel with fellow trippers. I went to lan Grand who headed the Experimental College. He gave me Monday night in the Gallery Lounge at San Francisco State- This was the founding of Monday Night Class in 1967. The idea was to compare notes with other trippers about tripping and the whole psychic world. We began as 12 people, dropped to six and eventually grew into a huge meeting of as many as 1,000 or 1,500. We left the Gallery Lounge and went to the Glide Church and then to The Straight Theater on Haight Street and then to Chet Helm’s Family Dog on the Great Highway. We discussed love. sex, dope, God, god. war, peace, enlightenment, mind cop, free will, astrology. theology, diet, birth control and what have you all in a stoned, truthful, hippie atmosphere. We studied religion. psychology, fairy tales, legends, children's stories, the I-Ching and tripping.
It 'was easy to tell when we were onto something hot; I could see the expressions move across those thousand faces like the wind across a wheat field. It was like being inside a computer with a thousand parallel processors.
Now some people may think that I am not as religious as i used to be and it is true that on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I might be an agnostic, and on Tuesday and Thursdays, a primitive animist, while partying down on Saturdays and sometimes sitting Zazen on Sundays, There is, however, something I have to say. At no time do I subscribe to any Brand Name religions.
I love the ethical teachings of most religions and I love the psychedelic testimony of their saints. I do not believe in any of their dogmas. I am a believer in free will. I am not a believer in predestination. I think a belief in prophecy robs us of 01 free will.
I think each one of us has a nonshirkable obligation to figure out the world on our own as best we can. The way we behave as result of that investigation is our real and practiced religion.
I consider myself to be an ethnic hippie. I know that the hippies were preceded by the beatniks, the bohemians, the nihilists, Rimbaud, Joyce, Voltaire and on back to Socrates, but the wave of the revolution that spoke to me was the hippies. Rock'n'roll lights my soul and gives beat to the Revolution.
I see by the watching machine that LSD is making a comeback. I find some hope in this and, I admit, some trepidation. I was called for an interview the other day and I found myself trying to explain the difference between how we felt about acid when we were the Revolution and it was fun to freak 'em out and how it felt when we were trying to hold our own civilization together here on the Farm. We didn't take acid on the classic Farm from 1970 to 1983, and it is still not our policy on the new Farm.
I am quite concerned about the lack of good contemporary tripping instructions in this Acid Renaissance. The medical establishment is still likely to label teenagers with a temporary acid psychosis as "bipolar paranoid schizophrenics," load the poor kids up on Haldol or Thorazine until they twitch and drool, and mark them for life with a label they will never live down. You would think that they would know by now that most LSD-stoned people dry out over a period of time and don't need heroic measures as much as they need support and love while they re- enter ordinary life.

Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Summer of Love by Paul Krassner

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:16:39 -0400

Actually, the Summer of Love in 1967 was born on October 6, 1966, the day that LSD became illegal. In San Francisco, at precisely two o’clock in the afternoon, a cross-fertilization of mass protest and tribal celebration took place, as several hundred individuals simultaneously swallowed tabs of acid while the police stood by helplessly. Internal possession was not against the law. The CIA had originally envisioned using LSD as a means of control, but millions of young people became explorers of their own inner space. Acid was serving as a vehicle to help deprogram themselves from a civilization of insane priorities. The nuclear family was exploding. Extended families were developing into an alternative society.
There had always been a spirit of counterculture, taking different forms along the way. Just as the beats had evolved from the bohemians, the hippies were now evolving from the beats. No longer did you have to feel like the only Martian on your block. There were subcommunities developing across the country. “Make love, not war” had become more than a simple slogan. The banning of LSD also affected Bay Area underground papers. The political Berkeley Barb got psychedelicized and the psychedelic San Francisco Oracle got politicized. The CIA’s scenario had backfired.
The blossoming of the flower children--encompassing sex, drugs and rock’n’roll--was at its core a spiritual revolution, with religions of repression being replaced by religions of liberation, where psychotropic drugs became a sacrament, sensuality developed into exquisite forms of personal art, and the way you lived your daily life demonstrated the heartbeat of your politics. There was an epidemic of idealism. Altruism became the highest form of selfishness.
Greek philosopher Socrates said, “Know thyself.” Novelist Norman Mailer said, “Be thyself.” And the ’60s counterculture said, “Change thyself.” Comedian George Carlin--who had entered show biz in the late ’50s, wearing a suit and tie, performing traditional stand-up schtick--started surfing on that wave. He reinvented himself visually--jeans, T-shirt, beard, ponytail--and acknowledges that smoking marijuana really helped him to fine-tune his material.
“My comedy changed because my life changed,” he says. “The act followed what was going on in me. Humor is very subjective, and what I was doing on stage didn’t match up with what was going on in my life or the country--1967 was the Summer of Love, it was the height of the cultural revolution--love, peace, free sex, all crested that summer. Everything was changing. I was playing big shows like Jack Paar and Ed Sullivan, but inside I was anti-authority and I hated that shit. Parents might not have been able to relate, so I went to the kids. I was using my act to further my ideas about the times.”
The mainstream media began to catch up with a whole new generation of pioneers traveling westward without killing a single Indian along the way. San Francisco became the focus of this pilgrimage. On Haight Street, runaway youngsters--refugees from their own famlies--stood outside a special tourist bus--guided by a driver “trained in sociological significance”--and they held mirrors up to the cameras pointing at them from the bus windows, so that the tourists would get photos of themselves trying to take photos of hippies. When Time magazine decided to do a cover story on hippies, a cable to their San Francisco bureau instructed researchers to “go at the description and delineation of the subculture as if you were studying the Samoans or the Trobriand Islanders.”
This was at a time when a rumor that you could get legally high from smoking dried banana skins was eagerly spread across the country. In San Francisco, there was a banana smoke-in, and an entrepreneur started a successful banana-powder mail-order business, charging $5 an ounce. Agents from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs headed for their own laboratory, faithfully cooking, scraping and grinding thirty pounds of bananas, following a recipe published by the underground weeklies. For three weeks the FDA utilized apparatus that “smoked” the dried banana peels. The Los Angeles Free Press promoted another hallucinogenic--pickled jalapeno peppers, anally inserted. All over southern California, heads were shoving vegetables up their asses. After I mentioned on stage that the next big drug would be FDA, sure enough, Time reported that there would be “a super-hallucinogen called FDA.” Silly me, I thought I had made that up.
And then there was Newsweek. Kate Coleman, who, before graduating from UC-Berkeley, was busted at a sit-in by the Free Speech Movement, got a job there in New York.
“In the summer of 1967,” she recalls, “Newsweek indirectly bought enough grass and paraphernalia to warrant a felony sentence in New York of one to 15 years. Only three years behind the times, it was decided to do a cover story on marijuana, and naturally I was assigned to the story. I went down to the Lower East Side’s Psychedelicatessen and purchased two beautiful water pipes, a hash pipe, roach holders, a dozen packets of cigarette papers, and a few little psychedelic toys. What a haul!
“I also bought two ounces of Acapulco Gold and one ounce of Panama Red from my favorite exclusive downtown dealer. Newsweek footed the whole bill without a ripple, and I got the payola of a lifetime. But it didn’t end there. The fact that marijuana was to be legitimized twixt the pages of Newsweek gave rise to unexpected curiosity on the part of both the senior editor and the writer of the piece, both of whom decided, independent of each other, that their respective editing and writing would lack verisimilitude unless they tried the stuff. I was approached by people all over the magazine, asking me to get them some pot.”
* * *
A highlight of the Summer of Love for me was an acid trip at the 1967 Expo in Montreal. I had been invited to speak at the Youth Pavilion and also to give my impressions, on Canadian TV, of the United States Pavilion, a huge geodesic dome engineered by Buckminster Fuller. Before entering the U.S. pavilion, which was guarded by marines who had attended a special Protocol School, I ingested a 300-microgram tab of LSD.
“This pavilion is really beautiful, with all these flowing colors,” I said to the interviewer. “You don’t see them, but I do. There’s an interesting kind of symbolism, though. These military men, combat marines, I don’t see that in any other pavilion, military men guiding you around, saying, ‘Yes, there’s the Little Girls room’ or ‘Would you like to touch my medals for killing Viet Cong?’ I think it’s very appropriate that we should be standing right here by the largest escalator in the western hemisphere, since my country is the greatest escalator of the war in southeast Asia....What I would like to do, as a gesture of my commitment--since I feel there’s something lacking in the American Pavilion, which is a certain recognition of the fact that the country is really split in two--since we’re a nation of symbols, I would like to indulge in a symbolic act. I have my draft card here.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Would I kid about a thing like that?”
“It’s his draft card.”
(It was really a photostat of my draft card, since I burned one each time I was invited to speak at a college campus.)
“And I’ll hold a match here.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“If I may.”
“He’s burning his draft card. How about that for a scoop, hey?”
“Now, the reason I’m doing this is, again, because we get hung up on symbols. People will be more upset about this than about the fact that children are being burned alive in Vietnam....”
The marine lieutenant called his captain. When the interview was finished, the captain told me it was against the law to burn my draft card. So I took out my draft card and showed it to him.
“But he burned it,” the lieutenant insisted. “I saw him, sir. He burned it.”
“I burned a photostat of my draft card. So I lied on television. That’s not a crime. People do it all the time.”
“It’s also against the law to make a copy of your draft card,” the captain said.
“Well, I destroyed the evidence.”
I knew that political demonstrations were barred at Expo, but I had managed to smuggle one in, along with the acid. The interview was labeled an “incident,” and there was a heated argument between the U.S. Information Agency and the Canadian Broadcasting Company, but the incident was already on tape, so now it had become a free-speech issue. It would be shown on TV that night and become front-page news in Montreal papers the next day.
Just as I was leaving the pavilion, a band struck up a fanfare. I made the mistake of projecting my own feelings, and suddenly I was convinced that LSD had been sprayed into the air, that everybody was tripping, that peace and love were breaking out all over the world at that very moment. As I was walking along, I started smiling at families and waving to them, and they were smiling at me and waving back. But then a core of reality came to the surface, the force of my own feedback made me turn around, and I saw that those same people were now pointing at me. What an asshole! I still blush with embarrassment.
Now, a non-profit organization, the Council of Light, has organized a free 40th Anniversary all-day concert to be held at Golden Gate Park on September 2 “intended to not only celebrate the music, but also resonate with the consciousness raising of the ’60s as represented by eight goals chosen to receive donations and publicity from the concert. They are: Environmental Sustainability, Relieve Poverty & Hunger, Raise Education, Promote Gender Equality, Reduce Child Mortality, Improve Maternal Health, Combat AIDS, and create a Global Partnership for Development in undeveloped nations. Charities chosen by the Council representing these eight goals will receive all money raised beyond basic costs of the production.”
For information, check out summeroflove40th@yahoo.com. But you don’t have to be present at the concert to celebrate this phenomenon that occurred four decades ago--an evolutionary jump in consciousness--exploding out of the blandness and repression of the Eisenhower-Nixon years. Currently, a mass awakening, exploding out of the blandness and repression of the Bush-Cheney years, seems to be happening again. Or is that just wishful thinking?
* * *
I asked several folks to recollect an aspect of what the Summer of Love meant to them.

Stephen Gaskin--author of Cannabis Spirituality:
When the Human Be-In of January 1967 at Golden Gate Park was conceived, it was against the background of sit-in’s and teach-in’s and was somewhat inspired by the civil rights movement. It was like a true rumor when the word on Haight Street was that all the hippies were supposed to come out to the Polo Field and see us all together.
I walked up to that gang of hippies filling the meadow, and I had to sit down and lean against a tree as if I was coming on to acid. While I was coming on, a mounted policeman rode up to look at the crowd and was addressed by a woman, also surveying the crowd.
She said, “Officer, my son is down there. Help me find him.”
The officer replied, “Ma’am, everybody down there is smoking marijuana. I can't go down there.”
Later on, down by the stage, I saw a guy who seemed to be trying to hypnotize a young woman who was on acid by waving an incense stick in her face and rapping on her intently. I thought he was messing with her mind and she seemed to be in trouble. I tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention and said, “Do you need to be rescued?”
She said, with evident relief, “Yes, please!”
She and I walked over to the edge of the crowd and sat on the grass and she laid her head on my knee and finished coming on until she felt strong enough to go dig the rock and roll.
It was the first time we got to see how many of us there were.

Stewart Brand--publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog:
As I recall, it was either late in 1967 or early next year that just the torso of the lovable dope dealer Superspade was found hanging from a tree out by Ocean Beach, signalling that the Mob was taking over from the amateurs, and the high times were not over, but the luv was.
The displaced amateur dealers, now skilled entrepreneurs, took their budding business acumen elsewhere in the 1970s, starting all manner of companies, such as Whole Earth Access (same name as my Catalog, quite different people).

Roberta Price--author of Huerfano: a memoir of life in the counterculture:
In the summer of 1967, between junior and senior year, I got job in London as assistant to the Young Ideas editor at British Vogue. I was a very young 21, but nobody asked if I had any ideas. I got sandwiches for Mandy Clapperton, the acting Young Ideas editor (the previous one was out with hepatitis). I went for clothes at Mary Quant and peeked over the office partition as a Beatle or Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful walked through the office. They all seemed frail and vulnerable in person.
My U.S. friend Pam was studying in London that summer, and at night we swung through Swinging London together. At Granny Takes a Trip, I bought a white crocheted dress that stopped a few inches below my crotch. Pam bought dope from a young Englishmen. We couldn’t find rolling papers, so Pam used tampon wrapper paper to roll joints, which worked. On Carnaby Street, we bought bubble dresses for us and Nehru jackets for the guys back home.
On weekend nights we went to the UFO, which had a constant light show and a staff who sold acid. The Liverpool Love Festival, Procul Harem, Tomorrow, the Pink Floyd, Arthur Brown, Eric Burdon and Fairport Convention played. We danced with men but couldn’t hear their names; the flashing lights were enough to give you an epileptic fit. The crowd was a bit international, the space was dark, flash lit, grimy, vast.
Pam and I got $79 round-trip tickets on a German student train from London to Athens. It took three days, and all day long they piped American rock music over the sound system. Their musical taste wasn't as good as at the UFO. I heard “When you go to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair” at least 50 times. We danced in the aisles anyway.
In Greece, we rented a VW bug with two young Englishmen we met on the train. We drove around for a week, camping out at Delphi on the full moon. I was restless and dreamed of the Oracle. She was younger than I but looked like a hippie with her ethnic leather sandals and the wreath in her hair. She told me that after that summer, everything would be different. I already knew it.

Darryl Henriques--author of 50 Ways to Pave the Earth.
I began my professional show business career in 1967 when I joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, earning the princely sum of $5 a performance. We were doing an antiwar Commedia play called The Military Lover. The Fillmore, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, the Doors, the Beatles, the Stones, the Byrds, the Animals--all of God’s creatures--you remember, don’t you? That was the year Captain Kirk hot-rodded around the galaxy in the Starship Enterprise and Dustin Hoffman graduated with Mrs. Robinson. Allen Ginsberg was Howling, Paul Krassner was realizing, Abbie Hoffman was freeloading, and Scoop Nisker on KSAN in San Francisco was telling everyone, “If you don’t like the news, then go out and make some of your own!”
We took the show on the road ($65 per week, a 1300% raise) and traveled across the country performing in theaters and colleges. It seemed every time we got to a college Dow Chemical had just been there, was coming there or, in the case of the University of Wisconsin, they were there. Dow was going to colleges across the country to recruit students to assist them in the crucial task of fabricating napalm to be used in Vietnam.
Next morning we went to the demonstration at the Commerce building, and at one point someone picked up a bugle and blew the signal to charge. The students immediately surrounded the building, and a group of them went in to conduct a peaceful sit-in. The campus police were unable to convince the protesters to leave, so the Chancellor called in the city police who took it upon themselves to beat the students with their nightsticks and spray them with tear gas, sending 30 of them to the hospital. It was officially the first violent protest against the peaceful protesting of the Vietnam War and Dow Chemical.
The irony was that according to the public relations director of Dow, they “could not have gotten better advertising” than student protests. They even started a company publication called the Napalm News. Not only that, but more students signed up to be interviewed, and on many campuses it became a “badge of honor” to be interviewed. Dow was justifiably infamous for their production of napalm, but their product that did more damage to people and the environment was Agent Orange. It was an equal opportunity weapon since it poisoned American servicemen as well as Vietnamese peasants. Better death through chemistry.
Little did I know how crucial it was for America to stop the Vietnamese from invading America. But thank God, in the end we won and now the Vietnamese are busy making our running shoes and sewing our T-shirts. You have to admit that killing over two million people to get them to make our running shoes was a bit extreme, but such are the pitfalls of the global economy.

Ken Babbs--Merry Prankster:
Where were Ken Kesey and the Pranksters? They had already gone, as Peter Coyote put it, “under the asphalt.” The previous year, after two busts for marijuana, Kesey had faked a suicide and disappeared into Mexico, leaving me in charge of the bus and ramrodding the Acid Tests in LA which came to a screaming halt the day before LSD became illegal when the bus and the Pranksters slunk out of town and hied off to Mexico to join up with Kesey, everyone to return to the Hoo Ess Ay when Kesey gave hisself up to the FBI and was sentenced to six months in jail.
Kesey and Paige took the fall so the Pranksters could go free, reason being to keep Neal Cassady from going to trial. He’d already been busted twice and had done two years in the Big House for two joints, and with one more conviction he’d be up for a life sentence. In the high days of the Summer of Love, the whole fershlugglnger crew cranked up the bus and drove down to the sheriff’s honor camp to visit Kesey and Paige. They parked in the lot next to the camp, speakers playing James Brown, Pranksters in their Day-Glo regalia, lined up at the gate to be checked in.
At the end of the day the bus pulled out, “Hit the Road, Jack” blaring, up the Bayshore into San Francisco to the Haight and a stop at 711 Ashbury to visit the Dead before they, too, got busted, the only appearance of the Pranksters in the Summer of Love carnival, and then it was back to Oregon, to gardening, building, kids in school, digging under the asphalt, deeper, joined by Kesey and Paige in the leaf-changing days of fall.

Mountain Girl--author of Primo Plant: Growing Marijuana Outdoors:
Before the moon-shot, before Watergate, one summer a long long time ago, there was The Hippies. They came to our Fair City, from every town, every place in the country, from near and far, looking for the Haight-Ashbury. They were young, gripped with restlessness and seeking a higher way of life. They filled the sidewalks of the old neighborhood--looking, seeking, clutching old suitcases, barefoot and hungry, with no particular place to be. Girls with raccoon eyes wept in the arms of boys just out of the Scouts, as hope faded for hot food and a safe place to sleep. Exhaustion and grime settled over them, and as weeks passed, more and more came.
The local shopkeepers tried to cope, and the young stole and carried off whatever they could. Puppies on strings and kittens stuffed in pockets accompanied the march. The good folk were moved to give food, some helped the mob find sleeping space, but crime soared and frightened them. The mayor of Fair City awoke in a foul mood and ordered sweeps, and the police raided freely. Tear gas rolled over the crowded street as thousands of lives touched and found each other and eventually themselves Music and songs from sidewalk songwriters filled the smokey air as joy spilled over and changed Fair City into Hippie Heaven.
And even today, Haight Street is filled with signs, clues, artifacts, reminders of the glory days for sale in a hundred shops. Go there and see for yourself.

Selling the Bird

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 22:36:27 -0400

In 1968 Great Speckled Birds were mailed to me at Oxford College and I sold them in the cafeteria evenings. It was considered uncool to not pay over the stated price and magnanimously say, “Keep the change!”
Fridays I would race in my slow but steady Celestial Omnibus VW in I-20, up I-75 to the Birdhouse on 14th, to start. If I had money, I’d buy Birds. If not, they would front a few to sell, return and repeat until you had cash to buy Birds to carry wherever to sell.
Weekends I’d try to get 14th and Peachtree where the Uniform company had a lawn shaded by huge trees. People would hang out and talk to you or nap in the shade. The job was to barker Birds. You could walk along the edge of the street holding the latest cover up to see and try to catch the eye of each driver. Acting a bit for the tourists always got extra money.
It was always a a trip. Friday and Saturday nights young, rich hipsters headed to The Strip would pay not 25 cents, but $5 to the “real” hippie selling Birds. Determined to be wild suburban middle aged couples came by looking to “score. The woman wanted to “kiss a real hippie”, the husband wanted to show off for the wife by leeringly asking for marijuana by some cool, unknown nickname he had heard who knows where, and ask if it was true it was an aphrodisiac. Or people would pass you party favors of one style or another to be hidden under the tree until you were ready to leave.
Once three already glowing 30ish women asked if I could get some Chiba (?) and go screw all of them. One said, “Spread me and spread some of your free love.” Madly in love with my lady Gabi I tried to explain why I wasn’t interested and suggested my friend Ricky who was under the tree. He went off with them for several days being snuck about to avoid husbands while spreading free love around the neighborhood. It couldn’t have happened to a better guy. But why is another story. You also met a lot of good friendly folks.
Cops would come by and stop. Some decently friendly. Some on power trip staring and trying to make you nervous enough to step in the street and be arrested for “impeding traffic” even if the street was empty. My worst experience came on my second day selling at that corner. A really fat young crewcut cop on a tricycle pulled up stopping just inches from my feet. he took his time standing up on the trike and swinging over one ham leg and stepping down. A moment to work that gunbelt around and up to where there should have been a waist. straighten his cap. Then suddenly pull his gun and crouch pointing it at my face a few inches away. I had grown up in a small town and until that very minute I had thought all cops were peace officers just making everyone safe. This cop changed my mind when he said a word aloud I had only seen in print before, and rarely then.
“Come on MotherF__ker! Give me a reason to shoot! Please, you hippie Mother___ker!” he screamed blowing spit like some redneck sheriff caricature in a drive-in movie. His manner, the gun in my face and what he had screamed outloud scared me to death, and it showed. He held the pose oblivious to the horrified faces in cars streaming by. He held it through a stoplight cycle and a half as judged by cars stopping, laughed cruelly and put up his gun. Chuckling he walked back and laboriously swung his ham back over the trike’s gas tank. Like any good silly movie, it wouldn’t crank till the third try then sputtered alive. He charged forward and I had to jump aside as he rode off very pleased with himself.
This was absolutely shocking to me and was a step in radicalizing my view of mindless authority.
One of the best days was before the start of the Second Atlanta Pop Festival. There was no bread to spare at my house so we were not planning to go down to Byron. Then a parade of incredible vehicles of hippies just checking out The Strip before heading down to Byron proceeded down Peachtree. Amazing painting and schoolbuses revamped into sculptures on wheels. A sparkling city dump truck with music coming from inside. The driver laughed, pushed a lever and the tail end rose open. Inside was furniture, an 8-track blasting and about ten stoned laughing people trying to run up the curved shiny insides.
By dark I raced home and told Gabi to get some stuff and let’s call some people and head down to this party. We’ll just play in the parking lot, we don’t need to get in front of the stage to hear the good music. Anyway there is suppose to be a free stage off in the woods a bit. We packed the Celestial omnibus and drove through the night to Byron. The expressway was clogged as we got near.
We crossed the median and went back an exit and drove the wrong way down a parallel access road with lights out then turned out through a field towards lots of lights. Soon we had stumbled into the festival past cops trying to turn back the multitudes already peacefully ignoring them.

Beatles Tour

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 20:18:03 -0400

May 11 Be-In in Piedmont Meet The Allman Brothers Atlanta!

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 18:30:09 -0400

Where Penn ends at 8th Street is an apartment house. In 1969 and a bit, it was called The Zoo. Jan Jackson, Tom Jones and Dave Hoffman, friends from college, lived in an upstairs apartment. I was visiting on a Sunday morning in Spring 1969, May 11th.
Three guys came in the front door. I recognized one as Berry Oakley, the bass player from The Roeman’s who’d played in my hometown in South Georgia. Someone said one of the other hippie guys played guitar with Aretha Franklin. They announced they were a new band up from Macon to play in Piedmont Park. The other guy had led them to a friend at The Zoo for attitude adjustment prior to the gig.
Free music in Piedmont Park was starting to be a regular Sunday event at that time. We wandered over eager to see who would play today. The stone steps were like hip hullabaloo. Some of the best musicians Atlanta had to offer had graced the steps, but so had some neophytes not yet ready for the stage, and even some who would never be ready.
The Allman Brothers looked like just another group of longhaired hippie musicians, but they had two drummers and one was black. That was unusual in 1969 Atlanta. The instant they started to play two more things became obvious. Two guitars were playing leads that intertwined around each other seductively, and these guys were so much better than anything we’d ever heard live. The bite and snarl of the blues rocked along on propulsive rhythms. The songs were old blues and originals, but all were like nothing heard before. Recognizable fragments of other songs were sneaking through, but as soon as recognized they submerged again to let something else arise. “Wasn’t that Donovan’s song about a mountain?”
Usually when bands played people walked dogs, threw Frisbees, barbecued, and just enjoyed Atlanta’s park on a Spring Sunday. Today everything else came to a halt. White, black, young, and older all focused totally on the Allman’s music. The crowd was a dancing party focused towards the stone steps.
The next week’s community newspaper, The Great Speckled Bird, devoted the cover to a picture of Duane Allman in his STP t-shirt playing on the stone steps at Piedmont. The accompanying article stated that everyone there that day knew they had experienced something extraordinary and unforgettable, and it was too big to stay just in Atlanta, or the South, or the US.
The community followed The Allman Brothers to gigs both free and paid; they were a guarantee of an outstanding musical experience.
The Brothers again played Piedmont Park July 7th, 1969 with The Grateful Dead for a free concert after the First Atlanta Pop Festival. Their set amazed the festival goers still in town. Then they joined the Dead to jam at the end of the evening and more than held their own. Now they really found their musical niche, and the secret was out.
The Brothers recently returned to play Piedmont 9/8/7 and the infusion of new blood plus the vets, made the groove live again.
Check a more complete story of that evening at www.thestripproject.com
http://www.thestripproject.com/Hippies_Stories/Entries/2007/5/19_Dead_in_Piedmont_Park.html

Miami Pop - 1968 Experience

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 14:48:22 -0400

After High School graduation, Gabi had moved to Atlanta to start Georgia State just as Fred was planning to do while living with his benefactors, Uncle Paul and Aunt Evalene. Gabi's sister, Pixie, had an apartment off North Peachtree so she didn't have to look for apartments for rent. I was going to be nearby at Oxford, a small country town east of Atlanta, in the fall.
Pixie realized that with Gabi came me, her boyfriend. Pixie drove her light blue Dodge dart down to Oxford almost every weekend to get me for her sister Gabi, then drove us back on Sunday night. Often we gave rides to other weirdoes I was meeting at Oxford. Pixie didn’t suspect that she had become a stop on the hitchhiker’s trail through Oxford.
We had become friends with Dan del Vecchio at Oxford. His brother Jeff had hitchhiked down to visit him. Dan and Jeff are both skinny. Jeff is tall; Dan is medium like me. Dan wears an old-fashioned tuxedo coat with split tails. Jeff has wide glasses and was just out of the Navy and still wore navy bells. They both went to Atlanta and of course came by Pixie’s. Jeff Del Vecchio came by one Sunday and seemed to really tickle Pixie’s fancy, which was great as she had been so down for so long.
December 1968 I had finished one quarter of Oxford and returned home to scandalize Tifton and my father. Gabi of course came with me. We, also of course, came prepared to turn on our old high school buddies and spread the enlightenment.
Meanwhile Pixie had to move, but would not look for a place. Then she called for Gabi and me to come help her move. We came up and went through want ads and called at pay phones and drove around. Finally she found a place in Decatur. Some poor old lady had split off the up stairs of her house on Adams Street, but never knew what was up when she rented to Pixie, her mother and Gabi. A hint should have been when everything besides furniture was just carried in big sheet bundles.
I had to get the family car home for Christmas. We had been talked out of sending for tickets to the Monterey Pop Festival the previous June, so when our Oxford friend Jan Jackson had heard about a similar music festival in Miami at Christmas and had volunteered her boyfriend from UGA, Martin’s VW bus as transportation, we mailed off for four tickets. The day after Christmas, Martin, Jan, and Gabi were to drive to Tifton to pick me up for the trip to Miami in Ol’ Baby, the faithful blue VW bus into which Martin had built a double decker bed.
My parents and siblings were very curious when Ol’ Baby pulled into the carport and Gabi and this couple got out. I was surprised to see Jeff DelVecchio and another guy, Mike Smith, also climb out. Seems they had heard of the festival and being inveterate hitchhikers had headed to Atlanta. They surprised Mrs. Ujhelyi when they came knocking at Adams Street late at night. Now they were in the mix and Jan also had promised a woman from Oxford we’d stop by Leesburg, Fla. and pick her up to go to Miami.
Thus was our merry band to be. Later we would be joined by a woman from Miami Mike had planned to see. She ran away, sort-of, to go with us. Later they got married and came to Atlanta to honeymoon at a big hotel and called Gabi and I to “get stoned and fuck up the plot of Streets of San Francisco on this big color TV with us to celebrate”. We’d already fucked in sleeping bags beside each other in the Indian Reservation dump; kinda creates a special bond.
Almost as soon as we pulled out of our driveway Martin asked Jeff,” Where did you hide that acid?”
“Up here in the light. All the grass is in the toolbox.” He answered from the top bunk. After this exchange I was aware I was leaving Kansas.
We were passing around a joint as we headed down I-75 at a steady purring 55 – 60 mph. Gabi and I took turn chattering like magpies, stoned ones at that, in the bottom bunk. We had been apart for a few days so had lots of information to exchange. We were almost two receptors of the same brain it seemed at times.
The radio stations came and went. It rained and the windshield wiper on the passenger side stopped. Martin told Jeff to bang on it. He did until he broke the windshield, which annoyed Martin a bit. I had brought Rolling Stone. I had subscribed and got my copy early. It was on groupies. I believe we all read it cover to cover over the trip since it was the only reading material we had.
Finally we turned off to pick up Laura. Her suburban parents eyes were filled with horror at the thoughts of her getting in that bus even with Gabi and Jan, but they were polite. I do believe she inhabited both Jeff and Mike’s sleeping bags before we returned her home.
We drove into Miami and called some friends of someone. They directed us to meet them at Coconut Grove which was full of hip shops and people. Stopped to see Michael Lange, who someone knew, at his head shop. We bought a leather headband and bag he had made. He later ran another festival in Miami then the Woodstock festival.
We sat in the sun under palm trees and watched the people flow. Later we worked our way back to a campground nearer the festival spot. The people were very wary of our crew checking in to a family campground. Little did they know of the collecting invasion forces.
Awoke, used showers and went searching for a Huddle House for breakfast. Martin has high metabolism and must eat regularly. Then we went and got high to await the start. We then waited outside the racetrack at Hialeah for the gates to open. Martin starts talking to a man by a van. He is a professional photographer and gets to drive his van of cameras inside. He invites us all for the ride. We saw him all through the festival and saw pictures we’d seen him take in Rolling Stone. We were quite impressed.
The festival began at 1PM and lasted until 10PM each day for three days. Saturday December 28th Jose Feliciano, Procol Harum, Buffy Sainte Marie, Country Joe and the Fish, Three Dog Night, Chuck Berry, The Infinite McCoys, Booker T and the MGs, Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green, Pacific Gas and Electric, The Blues Image.
Some acts performed more than one day. Also some brand new groups were slotted in as The Amboy Dukes with Ted Nugent still an acidized hippie in tight velvet pants. The ads said “a thousand wonders and a three day collage of Beautiful music”. That was an understatement. There was a stage on the racetrack with all the seats then another stage way out in the parking lot. You could walk from one and be at the back or plan ahead and be right at front for special acts.
Art works from the Coconut Grove art school had been strategically placed throughout the grounds. Tripping people were constantly discovering them and getting hung up in examining the art and never leaving its tiny alcove in the hedges for hours.

There were milk cartons like kids use at school, except made of plywood and so big the mouth is a full size door entrance. We were walking one time and saw a group of people collected around one and we could hear music. Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix were playing acoustic guitars and harmonizing. Duane Allman, then unknown except to Georgians, watched from the crowd.
When Joni later performed at the fest Hollies singer-songwriter Graham Nash, whom Joni had met through their mutual friend, David Crosby, accompanied her.

But we were in a hurry to see County Joe and the Fish, of whom we were big fans, for the first time.
Later we found out Hendrix was involved in the financing of this festival and held one of his own at this raceway later in the spring of 1969. His other partners in putting on this one got emboldened by the great success and started planning one at home in New York state where they were from. They later did it as Woodstock.
Also Duane Hanson http://arted.osu.edu/160/18_Hanson.php
had his realistic looking people in unusual places to be found. Once I’m stumbling along with the crowd which parts and leaves me hanging over the most realistic bloody motorcycle wreck!
Then there were the stereotypical old tourist couple standing and pointing out something.

Most performers hung around the grounds and enjoyed themselves as long as they could stay. Other famous people had just come to experience the east coast Monterey.
We realized the campgrounds would probably be filled or closed by the time the crowd exited for the night. We asked around and heard the Indians were coming to the rescue of their brothers the hippies.
Yeah, and scalp them! The Seminoles motioned the line of campers with signs, “camp cheap. This Way.” with an arrow. We should have learned to beware American Indians bearing arrows.
We followed in the dark out into areas looking swamp even in the darkness. Then a campground, but the arrows sent us further. Phantasmagoric sights to exhausted people. Finally. You can stop. Sleeping bags plopped and people were asleep on hitting the ground.
Upon awakening in the morning we found ourselves in the dump for the reservation campground. A garbage filled swamp surrounded this tiny isthmus full of cars. Lots of bugs and we heard gators grunting in the bushes around the water. They would only allow hippies access to a standpipe for water, so no shower. Also wouldn’t allow access to the laundry. Why are hippies so dirty?
Jeff’s experience in naval matters had him direct us to a big marina. We hung outside the clubhouse until we saw a hip looking kid. He let us in and lent us his key so we could get in both genders for showers and hair washing. He left telling us which boat, yacht actually, to return the key. It felt good to wash off the Seminole dump. We were a clean but scraggly still collection of beatniks.
When we returned the key, the kid’s father came out and we thought he would be mad, but he invited us aboard and kept filling a pipe of high quality hash to smoke before we left. Wow, is this world changing or what. We hurried to eat ravenously. Everything, even salt crystals were exquisite in their tastes and textures. As hunger slacked everyone went from wolf to aesthetes enjoying the very essence of the act of eating. And we had a Pop Festival to go yet today!
Sunday December 29th Steppenwolf, Marvin Gaye, Grateful Dead, Hugh Masekela, Flatt and Scruggs, Butterfield Blues Band, Joni Mitchell, James Cotton Blues Band, Richie Havens, The Boxtops.
The second night we would not fall victim to Seminole arrows. We went to look for the girl Other Jeff knew. He called and she told us to come quietly. We drove stealthily into the Miami suburbs and cut the engine to drift into the driveway of a split-level suburban manse with a large lawn. Again exhausted sleeping bags deployed.
We awoke to the sun and a small girl walking around looking at us. She ran back into the house and we scrambled to collect ourselves back into Ol’ Baby to make a get away. Before we were successful, the girl returned. “Mama wants to know how many of you want eggs?”
Mom invited us inside and made a big spread. Biscuits, honey, orange juice, eggs, ham, lots of coffee. It was like being home something my mother would do. “Invite your freaky friends in dear and introduce them!” Mom even made sandwiches she put in a pack and handed the women in the group before sending us all off to the festival.
But first we had to make a stop for her teenage daughter to pick up a sack of acid for she and Other Jeff to sell today. I had never knowingly been around tripping people or certainly so many varied drugs, but still Gabi and I were fine with Cannabis forms alone since we didn’t even drink.
Monday December 30th Iron Butterfly The Turtles, Canned Heat, The Grassroots, Jr. Walker and the All Stars, Ian and Sylvia, Charles Lloyd Quartet, Sweet Inspirations, Sweetwater, The Joe Tex Revue.

Dead in Piedmont Park

Sat, 19 May 2007 13:51:56 -0400

(c) 1998 Patrick Edmondson
(Excerpted from a longer work in progress)

You have to understand; it was the sixties. Things were different then. In Atlanta there had started to be free concerts held in Piedmont Park. At first they were only for special holidays, then there were concerts nearly every weekend. Soon someone figured out how to “liberate” electricity to the Pavilion and there was some music in the park almost everyday, officially permitted or not.
The quality varied widely from garage bands needing lots more practice to local heroes such as Radar or the unbelievable Hampton Grease Band, to up and comers The Allman Brothers. National acts showed up, too; which brings me to the point of the story I’m setting up here.
I have meant to write this down for a long time. Finally I did on 7/7/98. Days later I checked on the exact date of the concert. It was 7/7/69! (insert Twilight Zone intro here...)
The Atlanta International Pop Festival was held at Hampton Raceway in July 1969. It was such a large crowd - in Atlanta! Lots of famous musicans of that day and all days performed. A great time was had by all.
We were about to leave and saw a guy in a leather jacket. Painted on the back was, “I came from England to hear Led Zeppelin!”. Somehow it impressed us enough to stay to hear the unknown Led Zeppelin close the show; amazing performance!
People began to wind their way slowly back to the campground just lingering in the vibe of the evening, the music, and there being SO MANY HIPPIES; we aren’t alone!
Passing among the crowd were leaflets declaring simply, “Come to Piedmont Park Monday 1 PM”. Another band trying to get started we thought; but we had a feeling...and no one had work or classes Monday afternoon .
Monday about lunchtime we loaded up the Celestial Omnibus with our small circle of friends and headed off to the park, joining lots of other small circles of friends coming together in a temporal free-zone, our community, beginning to coalesce around the park. The Strip was for commerce with straights and all; the Park was for letting your freak flag fly without fear of the attacks still common from rednecks. Here, if only for the moment, weirdness was the standard, and we reveled in it.
The Celestial Omnibus was a hippie VW bus. My fourth bus experience. My first bus experience had been when a fellow Beatle maniac’s mother had agreed to drive the two of us 30 miles to the theatre showing “A Hard Day’s Night” a year before it would drag to our town. We went in a VW van, rare in South Georgia. On the way home we were in dreams of being the Beatles going to a gig; a great time! I thought this was the coolest mother to appreciate how much it meant to the two of us, even if adults sneered at her stupidity in indulging us. It wasn’t normal.
My second “bus” experience was years later. Not too much out of the ordinary happened in Tifton. The expressway was a new link to the outside world bringing the outside world in greater force than old Highway 41. I was killing time waiting on my friend Fred to finish work at the Royal Castle, currently THE In spot for burgers and fries after school, just off Interstate 75. Our band was to practice that night and I was impatient for him to come on.
“Man, you gotta come see these guys! “, a friend rushed in yelling. “A wild old school bus full of crazy people and loud music is stopped for gas next door. Hurry before they leave! You gotta see this!”
We all ran over to see. A commotion seemed to be erupting from this strange old traveling bus that was gassing-up at the Phillips 66 station. The bus itself was colored like a circus vehicle, which was what I had naturally assumed it was since this was still living under the spell of the button-down fifties. Anything so colorful just had to be part of a circus or a fair. And there were certainly people that looked like they were in a circus swarming out of and all over the bus. Most wore these coveralls. People would probably have been scared since they were acting so unusual if they hadn't assumed from the vehicle and clothes that they were entertainers headed somewhere on the expressway. I just remember these weird expressions and some kind of excitement they generated.
Was it...? I wondered when I later read “The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test”. The chronology seems to fit but I am unsure, it was at least similar minded folks; still it was a seed. I thought how it would be neat to carry your friends in a rolling party.
Christmas after starting college came the third bus experience, Christmas 1968. A VW bus driven by Martin the beatnik gnome, the Cassidy figure in my life, spirited me from home. Friends from college headed to the Miami Pop Festival, living on the fringes. Incredible adventures. I lived them and I barely believe it all.
Now I acquired my first car. A 1959 VW microbus that cost $100 and came with $150 worth of camping equipment, but could barely climb a big bump; my long bus trip begins. With Martin’s mechanical wizardry we gave it a motor and everything else transplant. My part was to paint the bus.
The name in psychedelic bubble smoke letters was “The Celestial Omnibus”. In Senior year English class we had read an E.M. Forster story, “The Celestial Omnibus”, about a bus that literally took you to literary heaven ; it remained corporeal as long as you didn’t doubt , but if you had doubt. It would come crashing back to normal life. That was much the aim I had for this vehicle.
Two fish twirled in the yin-yang replaced the VW circle to lead the way. The driver’s door got the zig-zag man, still hip code then. The opposite side doors got a reclining Mr. Natural with a speech balloon declaring, “Mr. Natural says...”. Fill in your own sage advice if you have any, Mr. Natural said only a fool would follow his advise anyway. We were subtle stealth hippies. We loaded up the bus and headed for the hills of Piedmont, park that is.
Upon arriving at the Park and parking by the Pavilion, we found...nothing happening. A beautiful July afternoon even if it had been a hoax. We were grooving on the park as other groups of our friends and acquaintances arrived. Many folks were left over from the Pop Festival still meandering onward.
The crowd was growing. Drizzling rain was welcomed. A community formed. Someone brought out a giant clear plastic tarp and threw it out for people to crowd under. The edges were tucked down and, this being the sixties, joints came out everywhere. Vision was soon obscured and it became a personal challenge to see how long you could stay before scrambling to the edge, poke out your head and gulp purer air before returning under the plastic.
The rain stopped and on a count the plastic was quickly pulled back at once. A smoke signal was released to Atlanta and everything began to shift.
Lovely hippie women in long skirts swirled and danced through the crowd stopping at various individuals. “Please open your mouth.”, they beatifically smiled. A bit of paper was placed on the tongue & and with a cheery, “Enjoy!” they would sashay away. There were also jugs marked “acidophilus cider” being offered for swigs.
Legend has it that this was a going away party for a certain teddy bear that had to be held a coast away from local authorities. After twenty minutes it was indeed a party with the only music coming from someone’s portable eight-track in the pavilion.
“Make way for equipment!” The crowd was parted so trucks and funky vans could drive up to the pavilion. As they were unloaded we watched for stencils to identify the bands. The Allman Brother’s mushroom, of course; Spirit; Delaney and Bonnie and Friends; the Chicago Transit Authority; The Hampton Grease Band; and some lighting bolt through a skull design.
When our friend Dan, just back from Fran Sanfisco, saw this,
he lazily smiled slyly beneath his round blue-smoked glasses and droopy ended mustache. His laconic drawl informed us, “Ya’ll are in for a treat. It’s the Dead.”
The Dead! San Francisco musicians, emissaries from the Tribes on the West Coast, free, here on a Summer Day in Piedmont Park! The Dead were of our culture, but we really considered them as of us rather than stars, an antithesis to the new culture.
Sixties roadies really worked. From installing the exact setup on varied stages once or twice a day, they evolved the process into balletic precision. Zen masters at work in a dance of their own devising. Barely giving each other a notice, they knew just when to put out a hand needed to help get amps, cords, drums and all into place. Everything seemed to grow almost organically as layer after layer of equipment was installed for various bands.
Soon Glenn Phillips prescient-electronica guitar yelps and Harold Kelling's sweet melodies wove threads around sonic blues riffs from attacked guitars. Mike Greene, now the president of the Grammies, played and sang sweet harmonies to counter Bruce Hampton’s fabled screamed/sung dada linguistics and insane stage antics. Hampton and Martin had first met when they had been the weird kids at Georgia Military Academy where their parents had sentenced both to do time for being weird; a threat I also received.
With a little help from their friends with the paper and cider, this crowd was really getting into the music driving the musicians to redoubled efforts. Everyone was dancing and strolling about meeting or just smiling at people. Some sat in groups and communed with the music.
The Allman Brother’s blues flowed in accompaniment to a glorious sunset. The multi-rhythms of Berry, Jaimoe, and Butch set waves of energy moving through the people. Duane’s heartbreaking solos merging with Greg’s plaintive vocals touched your soul.
Strange trap set on stage; two big bass drums mounted slanted sideways over the regular trap set. Older bald head, eyes electric- Ed Casady pounded like a spirit possessed wailing the enigmatic Spirit lyrics. “Fresh Garbage” introduced by stepson Randy California’s tasty guitar licks interwoven with keyboards and mingled voices created a feeling like a strange and enveloping tapestry.
Bonnie Bramlett with husband Delaney led a band of friends. The Friends featured Jim Keltner's horn section and Merry Clayton leading the backup vocal trio. Excellent Gospel tinged southern rock.
The party was in full swing as Chicago Transit Authority’s brass led melodies created “Saturday in the Park” on a Monday evening.
With the night came more magic. Dan got a cot from the Celestial Omnibus and lay in the open with a sign saying “Feed Me.”. Throughout the rest of the evening innumerable paper bits, a few joints, and a few female breasts were inserted in his smile. Gabi and I being purists who endured eating Morning Glory seeds to get to the natural source, passed on over five hits to he and Ronnie.
Now the Dead began to tune. Word spread through the telephone pipeline to the suburbs; A beckoning from the bathhouse pay phones.
As the crowd grew the officers of the law had at first grown tense. Since the crowd was all peaceful and grooving together; a gathering of the tribes, they relaxed.
Love really began to prevail. Dealer’s opened their stores and set phalanxes of joint rollers to work. Cops asked for some of the cider, were warned and tried it anyway. They let pretty women try on their hats. They danced and let people decorate them with flowers and incense. They winked at people passing joints and even took mostly ceremonial hits at first. Cops got kissed. Soon cops were joining the circles around water pipes.
“I can’t do this any more!” yelled one young cop as he tore off his uniform. For his trouble two hippie women soothed him under a hedge by the stonewalls. Giggle, moans, and body parts occasionally protruded from the shrubbery during the rest of the evening.
The Dead began playing I watched a skinny longhaired guy in hanging jeans climb a scraggly elm in front of the Pavilion. He sat on the one branch protruding vertically about 15 ft. from the ground. It didn’t look like it could possibly hold even his weight. We watched in expectation of his imminent descent
The rhythm seemed to get him before gravity. Unbelievably he let go of the main part of the tree and stood erect on the limb. He began to sway with the music and shift from foot to foot. Then he jerked still and stayed as paralyzed for a few minutes. Just as suddenly he began to prance and gyrate wildly breaking laws of physics.
I glanced at him every few minutes from then on. He continued to be a marionette pulled by every chord Jerry played. Finally I looked back and he was gone without a trace. I asked but no one around saw him ever come down...
It was midnight and Dead had played most of the songs for which they were becoming known and they stopped after about three hours. But now more equipment was added to the stage?!
Most of the musicians retook the stage to play with the Dead. Big horn section, background singers, eight drummers, a bass quintet, and Harold Kelling, Glenn Phillips, Duane Allman and Dickie Betts, Delaney Bramlett, Chicago’s guitarist, Randy California, and Jerry Garcia trading and interlacing lead lines.
This was a two-hour shakedown song before they settled into “Dark Star” experimentation. This became a rock symphony full of the once and future hits of all concerned.
About 3:30 AM Jerry’s guys shifted to their closing song. Coda after coda rang into the darkness of Atlanta’s late July night stillness.
The musicians hung out a while. No one wanted to leave and break the spell. We watched the roadie’s performance as they prestidigitate loads of equipment into their small spots within the trucks and vans. When loaded, these spirited away into the night. Only naked bulbs over the pavilion competed with the moon. Light around both seemed to hang in solid Van Gogh visions of colors streaks.
Cops and the crowd felt the shift back almost to the normality we had forsaken for a while. All our faces had been stolen.
We collected our stimulated to satiation group into the Celestial Omnibus. Dan’s face became animated, “Was I right?” He had been. it had been a night to live in memories. We’d forever know that skull split by a lightning bolt.

(c) 1998 Patrick Edmondson
(First published in Smash magazine, Excerpted from a longer work in progress)

Wanna Tell your story?

Mon, 9 Apr 2007 00:09:38 -0400

This is the place to collect your memories about Atlanta’s hip community from about 1967 to about 1977 -
“Something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear”. Whatta Decade! How was it for you?
We need other perspectives to get it right.
What was it like to be a gay man or woman in Atlanta before 1967?
What was it like to be a hip African American in Lester Maddox Georgia?
What was it like to be a biracial couple in Lester Maddox Georgia?
We don’t know, but you might be able to tell us.
Did the ch-ch-changes change your life?
Curious minds want to know.

Here is what we want to know to start- (digress freely)
1.When did you first come to Atlanta and what brought you here?

2. When did you first visit The Strip?

3. What was your best experience associated with The Strip and the hip community?

4. What was your worst experience associated with The Strip and the hip community?

5. Did your experiences at that time effect your life? If so, what did you learn or take away from it all?

6. It seems everyone around in that time and place has an Allman Brothers story. Share your Allman Brothers story if you have one please.

Tell us to what name you wish your story accredited. If you wish to use a “street name” or be anonymous, please give us a way to contact you for furthur information.
If you are in the Atlanta area, we can arrange to digitally tape your interview if you prefer.
Where are you now and whatcha doin?

send to:
mystere2@bellsouth.net