Avalon Ballroom and the San Francisco Anti-War 60's Trip

Avalon Ballroom, and the San Francisco Anti-War '60's Trip

“Would you like to go to San Francisco with me? There’s an anti-war march this weekend.” The strange, pudgy-cheeked girl in the pea coat asked, in an intense tone of overwhelming importance and commitment.

I was fumbling my way through junior college – trying hard to avoid the military draft. I'd never been invited to an anti-war march before. Yet, it wasn’t uncommon in the 60’s for students to invite complete strangers along on crazy trips to share rides and expenses. Many colleges even sponsored “ride boards” that gave departure dates of students looking for companionship or help with gas money. Back then, everyone seemed to be on the move – even if we didn’t know where we were going.

For me, San Francisco was a magical place that I heard of only through rumor. Friends, or friends of friends, would return to our small, conservative southern California community with their stories of the Haight-Ashbury, flower children, or Ken Kesey’s merry pranksters and acid tests. Escaping to San Francisco could offer a temporary relief from my less-than-perfect home life, and an opportunity to witness firsthand the peace and love movement that was sweeping the nation. The idea was liberating. San Francisco was the heart and soul of the anti-war, pro-peace movement and I wanted to be a part of it. I'd heard of the slogan “Free Love.” Since I had recently turned 19, I figured it was time to check out what it was all about.

The San Francisco Trip

So, with $40 in my pocket and a handful of my mom’s diet pills -- my contribution to the drive, I took off in a baby blue 1963 Volkswagen bug with two people I didn’t know: the girl in the pea coat and a red-haired, goateed guy I assumed was her boyfriend.

We drove up the coast, stomping our feet to the music on the radio, talking freely, and getting acquainted. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I do remember the conversation was enthusiastic and fast. The diet pills gave us a rush. Everything felt fantasic. For a few hours, in my euphoria, I forgot about the looming military draft and the domestic disharmony I'd left back home. Everything was great. Getting away felt liberating as the wind blowing through the wing vents of the '63 VW.!

The Haight-Ashbury

“Groovin” by the Young Rascals was playing on the car radio that afternoon as we cruised into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. It had just rained. The streets were wet, and everything reflected unique colors and sounds. The air was filled with spring, love, incense, and the heavy aroma of pot. The sidewalks were crowded with people, walking, talking and singing. There were guys with really long hair that accentuated their long, skinny faces. They wore funny hats and leather boots. The girls had on long flowing dresses, granny glasses, and some wore flowers in their long, frizzy hair. There were so many young people, and everyone looked like they’d traveled a ways, like us, to discover if there really was free love on Haight Street in San Francisco.

We found sleeping quarters in the basement of an old Victorian house on the 1700 block of Haight Street. It was the home of the Diggers, an odd anarchist art group that took breaks from writing Dadaist manifestos to give free food and shelter to the increasing numbers of travelers and peace demonstrators drifting into the Haight-Ashbury. One of the diggers actually slept in a coffin at the bottom of the basement stairway. It seemed bazaar to me – though he wasn’t trying to play vampire. The coffin was simply a cheap, warm, comfortably-padded bed. The Diggers had made their basement into one giant bedroom for participants of the peace rally. They provided privacy for us by hanging tabletops sideways from the overhead floor joists. Even though there were hundreds of us sleeping on mattresses on the cold floor of a very crowded basement, we all felt as though we had a little cubicle of privacy.

Since we arrived late in the day, and there were so many people coming in for the Peace March, the three of us had to share a cubicle with a single-bed mattress. Sleep didn’t come easy -- courtesy of the diet pills. I lay there, pretending to sleep, while my mattress-mates (the girl in the pea coat and the guy with the red goatee) humped and groaned noisily throughout the night. They probably woke up everyone in the basement. I tried to make myself go to sleep by imagining I was on a log raft bumping down a stream where the water gurgled and made moaning noises: unnh, unnh, unnnh, unnh . . .

Early the next morning, the Diggers sponsored a pancake breakfast in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park. We wondered around listening to the sounds of the bands warming up at the stadium. The guitars faded in and out like the morning fog that drifted in and out on the breeze off the bay. Again, there was the thick smell of incense and marijuana, but there was something else in the atmosphere as well: the air was glowing electric with excitement and anticipation. Everyone felt that we were about to be part of something really big.

The 1967 Peace March

We took the old electric streetcar from Hayes Street to begin the march somewhere downtown, near Market Street. The streetcar was full of crazy hippies passing marijuana joints from person to person as we headed toward our destination. Everyone took a toke – and much to my amazement – no one seemed to care. At the start of the march I saw every type of person imaginable. Not just the long-haired hippies and students that I expected, but Quakers, Orthodox Jews, average-looking working-class types, well-dressed business people, and families with young kids. There were people of all ages – some even looked like my parents. We were all there with a unity of purpose, and we marched together through the city, holding hands and chanting: “No more war! No more war! No more war!”

There were people marching as far behind me as I could see, and as far in front of me as I could see. It was an ocean of people moving peacefully and happily together through the cool, breezy streets of San Francisco, with the gingerbread trim of the old Victorian buildings smiling in surprise. What an amazing experience! More than a peace march, or protest, it was a celebration. As a nation we were on the verge of a momentous awakening. It was as though we had just discovered a truth that had been kept from us: We were huge in number, united in mind and spirit, our cause was just and we were determined to make our voice heard! We were no longer going to blindly send us youth off to foreign lands to be slaughtered like sheep. We wanted the Texan red neck LBJ out of the White House and our troops out of Vietnam . As we exercised our right of free speech and assembly, the FBI was busy photographing us (and, I assume, labeling us as radicals and communist sympathizers).

The march ended with a rally in Kezar Statium. And there, Dr. Benjamin Spock, every mother’s favorite baby doctor and advisor, spoke out against the war, and those in power. I couldn’t believe he could get away with the statements he made. I thought he was so “establishment”. Other people, like Jane Fonda and Dick Gregory who were known for their “radical” views, were taking a stand against the war, but there was nothing “radical” about Dr. Spock. And yet, there he was, giving an enthusiastic speech against the war that was not only accepted, but cheered and encouraged by this eclectic crowd of revelers.

In one magical epiphany, I realized that there was a lot more to my world than the small town I had grown up in. I was part of a huge collective -- the human race. And, as Country Joe & the Fishs' deafening guitars sent shivers up and down my spine, I felt as though everyone around me felt the same way. For this brief moment, there was hope and love and caring flowing out, from one person into another, in an enormous outpouring of joy and good will. It was a defining moment in my life.

The Avalon Ballroom

Night was falling when the rally ended. Feeling totally hyped on the love and anti-war experience, we decided to go to the Avalon Ballroom. The Avalon was an old Victorian ballroom on the corner of Sutter and Van Ness. It was managed by a group of hippies known as “The Family Dog”. The Avalon was the hippie’s answer to Bill Graham’s famous Fillmore. While the Fillmore had a slick leatheresque tuck-and-roll Tijuana-type interior, the Avalon had the classic decor of an authentic Victorian Ballroom.

In our stoned search for the Avalon, we picked up a pair of hitch hikers. They not only gave showed us how to get there, but offered up a little mixing bowl and invited us to sample its contents. “A little dab will do you,” they joked, sounding like a 1950’s Brylcreem hair cream commercial. The mixture looked like cookie dough but tasted strange. They laughed and explained that they made it by cutting LSD with mother’s milk. As the mixture started taking affect, I wondered, “Does my breath smell like mother’s milk?” or “Who are the mothers that provided the milk?” Visions of mothers donating their milk for a drug mix kept running comically through our heads the rest of the night, causing eruptions of spontaneous laughter.

Waiting in line to pay for my entrance into the Avalon Ballroom, I felt like a kid waiting for an “E-ticket” ride at Disneyland. Throughout the line improvised comedy happened spontaneously, sending us into spasms of laughter. The evening turned magical and dreamlike.

We paid our money and entered into a parlor filled with old Victorian velvet couches and lamps that illuminated a magic persian rug. There were people sitting there in Victorian attire. Men had on top hats. Women wore Victorian dresses and hats. Everyone seemed friendly and happily welcomed us. On the other side of the parlor, we passed through an arched doorway into the darkened ballroom.

Revolving above the doorway was a full-bore hundred-mile-an-hour strobe light, or so it seemed. Every movement froze in time, and then jerked rapidly into the next movement. It gave us the illusion of totally participating in an early flip-card silent movie. To the right was a group of people painting their faces beneath a black ultraviolet light, the fluorescent designs glowing oddly in the darkened ballroom.

The ballroom seemed to be the size a huge ornate skating rink. There was a raised stage in the corner and a balcony on one wall opposite the stage. You could easily imagine an elegant ball there, with beautiful couples spinning around the room to the music of an Austrian waltz. The 24-foot high walls of the ballroom were divided up into eight or ten sections and covered with white sheeting. Each section had a different slide show projected onto it. One section had American Indian Chiefs, another had vividly colored Hindu Gods, another had mean-looking Tibetan Gods, another had beautiful paintings of angels, another had U.S. Presidents, and another had an endless film-loop of well-endowed topless girl running through it. The pictures flashed over and over and over in what seemed like three-second intervals. The effect, with the strobe light, was dizzying. Or maybe I was just dizzy. Maybe the walls weren’t 40 feet high and maybe Geronimo really wasn’t lip-synching to Janis Joplin’s “Ball and Chain”. Though, at the time I could swear he was looking straight at me with his tight-lipped mouth going wahhhh-aw-wahhhh aw- wahhh!

The room was swirling in squiggly water-colored-bubbles that squished in time to the beat of the music before they broke up into alphabet soup patterns and headed into the darkness of outer space. And somewhere in the midst of the flashing lights and colors were the bands. That night’s entertainment opened with the Steve Miller Blues Band, followed by Janis Joplin with Big Brother & the Holding Company, and the Doors closing – all for our $3.50 admission! Of course, we didn’t know at the time that we were watching history in the making – for us, it was just a big dizzy party night!

The Steve Miller Blues Band had already started when we floated in. They seemed to emanate a droning wall of sound from the corner stage. I really couldn’t figure out who Steve Miller (later known as the Space Cowboy) was, but I think he was pounding on the drums and singing. Everyone’s faces seemed obscured by the light show. Steve Miller hadn’t yet developed the distinctive voice that would later define his style. It was just the pounding drums and the electric guitar that made us ever-conscious of his presence.

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Avalon Ballroom, and the San Francisco Anti-War '60's Trip