Other Boomer Tales
The San Francisco Anti-War, Avalon Ballroom Adventure
The Secret Wigwam of Chappaquiddick
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Avalon Ballroom, and the San Francisco Anti-War '60's Trip
Big Brother & the Holding Company came up next. Their electric guitars pierced the night air like knives through the rainbow butter of our imaginations. They were great. All the band members had really long hair – longer than I had ever seen on guys. Their hair flopped like big dog-ears as they jerked their heads to the music. Their ears seemed to grow larger and longer when they sang about watching Huckleberry Hound on TV. It was so funny to me. Janis Joplin screamed and wailed like a cat getting its ears pinched, her raspy, blues-driven voice somewhat mellowed by the floppy-eared band accompanying her. They all seemed to be having a great time on stage. Janis, not yet famous, seemed really happy. It was as if they were at a big party – and that feeling spilled over into the audience. We were all laughing and dancing as though we were part of their party as well.
When the Doors came on stage, and played “Break on Thru to the Other Side” someone grabbed my hand and yanked me back out onto the dance floor. I was gone, totally immersed in the rhythm, dancing like an Indian amongst my tribesmen whose anti-war paint glowed florescent in the black light. A group of dancers pulled us into a snake dance that looped and wound its way around through the room like an Indian Pow-Wow. Everyone danced, even to the Doors “The End”, which stretched on for an eternity. Jim Morrison was singing with his back to the crowd. Maybe he didn’t like the squiggly lights, or maybe he had a case of the giggles, too, but he faced away from us and sang, his haunting voice filling the room. I’d never heard a song like “The End” before. It seemed to go on forever, yet it had a strange and exotic appeal. As Morrison sang “Ride the snake, to the lake, the ancient lake,” the light show produced images of an undulating lake moving up and down to the music, and we in the snake dance rode our way to the lake. We connected fully with the strange music as we traveled through time and space -- riding “to the lake, the ancient lake . . .”
We left the Avalon Ballroom around 2 a.m. to make our way back to the Diggers basement, only to discover that someone had broken into the car and stolen our blankets and what little money we had. We borrowed blankets from our hosts, and I shared a mattress and a wool blanket with a Canadian guy about my age. At least that night I slept well. By the time we were bedded down for the night, our euphoric impressions of mankind were fading fast, like the alphabet soup patterns, into the cold d arkness of space and reality.
The Long Trip Home
The next morning we started home. Without money, we took on a couple of hitchhikers whose contribution was a tank of gas and an LSD trip for those who wanted to make the ride home more interesting. I was jambed into the back seat of the Volkswagen bug between strangers who were traveling on a trip of their own. A large, hairy woman with bad breath sat on my right. She took my share of the acid before I had a chance at it. From the scary way she was breathing, and the way she stroked my leg, I had the uneasy feeling that she wanted to do more than “touch my body with her mind” as we rolled south towards home.
Somewhere around Monterrey, the VW pulled over and the chubby-cheeked driver got out of the car and started coughing. I climbed out to check on her and she confided to me, in a soft, but very earnest tone, that she had swallowed her brains and she thought she might have just thrown them up. She was looking around on the ground as though her brains might be lying there somewhere on side of the road. It appeared that I was the only non-stoned person in the group. After a few minutes, she got into the back seat and I slid behind the wheel. I was relieved. Not only did I have a whole complete seat to myself away from the hairy woman, I would be the “captain trips” for the rest of this journey. It felt good, really good, to be in the driver’s seat.
As fun and exciting as this trip was, I felt a little unnerved by the way events seemed to have been reeling out-of-control. Maybe it was because of what I had experienced over the past few days or maybe because I was headed home to reality, but for the first time in my life, I relished being in control. Our guests left us in Santa Barbara, and after that, the ride became eerily quiet. It was a long drive; the others slept or tripped, but I was strangely awake and happy. Back home I’d still have my parent’s divorce, the draft, and my classes to deal with, but that was then and this was now. For the next couple of hours, it was just me and this 1963 VW bug, and the winding Zen of Highway 1.
-- William J.Grote
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