Another Little Piece of My Heart (12 page)

I didn’t regret running those sketches. Crumb was the most important visual artist of the counterculture, as serious an explorer of the crannies of consciousness as Dylan was. His skill at rendering lifted his work out of its time, as did the primal sex fantasies he portrayed, some of which verged on what would now be considered child porn. Even if you didn’t share his wet dreams, their relationship to your own was so vivid, their candor so intimate, that you could only gape in glee. The dominant feeling in these cartoons was delight, though they trafficked in all sorts of stereotypes, racial and otherwise. It felt like a minstrel show without the power relations. Everyone was the butt of the joke,
and so the libido was free to play. This was a major theme in sixties culture—infusing the forbidden with new meaning—and it’s directly related to tripping, images of which abound in Crumb. I still own some of his sketches, and they’re quite disturbing. One of them shows a man, presumably on acid, with a lightning bolt splitting his head in two. When I look at it today I don’t just see a bummer. I see the ripping open of consciousness, which is the story of my youth, and it wasn’t always pleasant. Crumb captured the dominant mood of the time, the duality of ecstasy and horror.

Meeting Crumb and his fellow cartoonists was further proof of what I’d noticed in New York. So much was possible once you grabbed hold of a degraded form like comic books; so much quality was hidden within it, waiting to be mined. All sorts of innovations could appear when the boundaries between high and low art were smashed. And in California this process was taking place where the traditions that dominated the East Coast barely had a toehold. At any moment you might see something that should have existed only in a trip—perhaps a hot-dog stand shaped like a hot dog. The popular, drenched in an absurd innocence,
was
culture. The music, the posters, the light shows, and the comix all expressed the texture of daily life. In New York, this communalism was missing. Bohemians existed as a special order in an indifferent city, and every transgressive act was performed with one eye on the media. But out here there were no experts on the trendy. It felt like freedom to me.

If you want to understand the difference this chaotic spirit made, compare the music of the Velvet Underground, which sounds highly considered even when improvised, and the sonic mash-ups of Frank Zappa, which blaze in all directions. The Velvets are cosmopolitans; their songs work as well in Paris as in New York. But Zappa’s compositions are site specific. They flame with the spirit of California in the sixties. Not that he was part of the hippie scene. He shunned San Francisco, and he lived in a rather ordinary house in a desert town. I visited him there once. I recall a small recording studio in the basement, and a child called Moon Unit scrambling around my feet. (The name didn’t faze me; I knew babies called Ocean and Sprout.) Zappa was venomous about the record industry, and the feeling was more or less mutual. His albums were over the line even in that lineless time, with brazenly disrupted melodies and lyrics beyond the enigmatic. But,
though his pieces were as tightly erudite as the Grateful Dead’s were meandering, Zappa shared with them a sense of abandon that was pure West Coast. In New York you worked hard to achieve this feeling. Out here it was as breathable as a contact high.

Despite my dabbles in hip living, I was far from sloughing off my personality. I would relax to a certain point, and then I’d flash on committing some infantile error, such as drooling. I realized that this intense defensiveness was the reason why I was drawn to Groovy. He seemed to live without doubt, and I kept thinking of what he’d said to me at the Grateful Dead house: “I’ll get you there.”

That was why I tagged along with Groovy and two of his friends on a trip to Lake Tahoe. I suspected that this expedition would culminate in dropping acid, and I remained uncertain until the moment when I decided to swallow the tab of acetate that he offered with a grin. I was on vacation from my vacation, with someone I trusted, so … what the fuck! Half an hour, and nothing. Maybe I was so uptight that not even LSD could subvert my ego. “Nothing’s happening,” I groaned. And then I got hungry.

Acid is supposed to diminish your appetite. A hamburger will look like what it is—charred flesh. A section of orange can feel like a feast. But the drug didn’t have that effect on me. I was famished. Ravenous. And I realized that I’d felt that way from a very early age. Someone offered me a hard candy. I started to unwrap it, but the crinkling was like loud static, and when I popped the candy into my mouth and chomped down, it felt like shards of broken glass. I spat it out. There was nothing to do but suffer. I decided that I would always be hungry, never satisfied. This was my karma.

Gradually the hunger faded. I don’t know how, but I clambered up a tree (something that seems impossible, since I’m afraid of heights), and I sat on a high branch, looking down at the lake. The bark was vibrating. I realized that it was alive. Wood was more than just a product, and so was I; more than the sum of my neuroses. I was human, no more or less. Groovy and his friends, with their forest of hair—they were animals like me. I watched them crowd into a small boat that had mysteriously appeared on the bank. They urged me to join them. I held back. I was sure they would attack me, but I was cold and beginning to shiver. I needed the warmth of their bodies more than my defenses. So I climbed down from the tree and stumbled into the boat. The water
swirled around us, prismatized, like the colors in an abalone shell. It wasn’t a hallucination. The play of light actually produced all these shades in the water; it was my mind that assembled them into blue. Acid disrupts the ability to organize stimuli into functional patterns. But it reveals reality.

That night we ended up in a casino. I have an enduring image of us sitting on the floor, still stoned, while gamblers stepped around and over us. At some point, Groovy reached into his back pocket and pulled out a picture of a little girl. It was his daughter from a previous marriage. I tried to reconcile the image of him as a father with my memory of his qualities as a stud. Just then he put his arm around me. The smell of his sweat was faintly nauseating. I began to shiver. It wasn’t just a latent-homosexual panic but something more primal, the fear of vanishing into the body of another person. If he’d been a woman I might have been able to discharge my terror in an erection. As it was, I sat there shaking until he took his arm away.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “You’re safe.”

When I got back to San Francisco my skin was itching badly. I realized that I could no longer live without a shower, so I got a motel room. I also called Judith. She arrived the next day, and I began fielding calls from publicists. One of them made an impression on me, probably because he wore very tight pants. This was my first encounter with a music-industry type known as the company freak.

These go-betweens were hired by baffled record labels to serve as liaisons with the cryptic music scene. It was a job for hippies willing to put in the time, and it mainly consisted of scouting for promising unsigned bands. It also involved relating to rock critics, who were more numerous by that time. My new friend wanted me to meet two typical San Francisco bands—that’s how he described them. I realized that I had only interviewed musicians who were well-known, so I accepted his invitation, and the next day he picked up Judith and me and drove us to a strange place called Daly City.

I’d heard of this suburban development because it was the subject of a mocking folk song by Malvina Reynolds, called “Little Boxes.” The homes looked alike, and they were made of what the song called “ticky tacky.” We pulled up to a house like all the others. The front door was
ajar, and inside we were greeted by a farrago of hair and guitars. That was how I met Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding Company. They hadn’t released any records yet, so I’d never heard of them. In the corner I noticed a rather chubby woman holding a baby close to her chest. Someone introduced us to Janis Joplin. I’d never heard her sing—no one outside the local scene had—but she looked like someone who could belt the blues.

While I busied myself with the other musicians, Judith and Janis shared a joint. They talked about growing up pudgy, about their alienation and pain. I talked to Janis as well, though much less personally; I was interested mostly in quotable lines for a story. More to the point, we all grokked, to use the sci-fi term that meant communing. I took notes, naturally, but when I looked at them later they were circles and curves. I retained enough to produce a piece that ended with the words I’d blurted as we all left the house in Daly City. I watched a vanful of musicians careen away, long hair flying from every window. “We shouldn’t be interviewed,” I shouted after them. “We should be friends.”

I was still having acid flashes when I got back to New York. It wasn’t unusual that summer to see young people roaming the streets in an advanced state of distraction, and I didn’t want to look like that. But it took several days to banish the perception that the wood in my floor was a living thing. Trees pulsed before my eyes, and, yes, I wanted to hug them. I’d become a hippie trapped in the body of a hard-driving, working-class Jew, not an easy fit.

The only thing that tethered me to reality was journalism. Writing had always served to cohere me, and now it came in very handy. I filed a celebratory piece about the local hippie scene, with no mention of my acid trip. I didn’t want to describe the feelings it had awakened in me. I was sick of reading about finding God in a flower, and there was nothing admirable about melting in the California sun. New York didn’t reward such states of being, so I kept myself out of the article. But I couldn’t keep reality at bay, and I was haunted by the feeling that there was a bigger story than flower power out there, something that would shock the counterculture away from its beautiful aspirations. The onslaught of rape and hard drugs in the Haight was part of it, but the real impediment to building a society of love was the war in Vietnam.

There were already close to half a million American soldiers there, but the hippies I’d hung out with believed that the violence would end on its own once people dropped acid and expanded their consciousness. It was still possible in certain drumming circles to speak of summoning the Aquarian Age, and the Beatles were chanting, “All you need is love.”
The deranging experience of combat was as foreign as Communism to these kids. Either they were too young for the draft or they managed to evade it one way or another. It wasn’t hard for children of the middle class to do that—a note from a sympathetic shrink was usually enough—but the boys I’d grown up with in the project were shoveled into the military, and some of them would never come home. At the
Voice
I got letters from soldiers in Vietnam, often with peace signs on the envelopes, letting me know how much rock music meant to them, how it was all that kept them alive. The knowledge that I was safe and free to pursue my career while those guys were in mortal danger left me with a gnawing sense of guilt. It was clear that, at some point, I would have to write about Vietnam. But the antiwar movement was still largely a campus phenomenon, and I wasn’t a student anymore. The counterculture was my area of expertise, and my shelter from the firestorm.

By 1967 the music industry had mastered the art of appealing to writers like me. Record executives wore their own version of the hippie look: a requisite Nehru jacket with a discreet string of beads. Publicists would flash a peace sign at the end of a pitch. At the major labels, there were rooms set aside for previews of albums not yet released. I remember being invited to one of those special private concerts. The president of the company, which specialized in rock with vaguely folkie credentials, greeted me personally. He ushered me into a sound-baffled chamber with huge speakers and plush chairs. He pointed to a butterfly-shaped box on the table, and then he left the room. Inside the box was a small pipe and a block of hashish. The music started. I sank into a chair and lit up. It was much harder than payola to resist freebie drugs.

I was beginning to feel apprehensive about where rock was headed. Some of the musicians I’d met in San Francisco were being offered advances of $100,000, the equivalent of about $700,000 today. Still, I told myself that Bob Weir was right: as long as the bands controlled the product, money wouldn’t change anything. After all, the lyrics were as subversive as ever. Sexual references and allusions to drugs were no problem as long as the message was couched in code. If all else failed, the band could deny that the double meanings were actually double. (I was particularly amused by the Byrds’ insistence that their song “Eight Miles High” was merely about their trip to London.) Code words for marijuana were constantly being invented, and as long as the FCC was happy, the record labels looked the other way.

I, too, was riding high.
Life
magazine had commissioned me to write an essay on rock lyrics, to accompany a set of pictures of the top bands. You could tell that these photos were psychedelic because they were shot with wide-angle lenses. (Heavy!) The words didn’t really matter, so my anxiety about the Time-Life house style was unneeded. My piece appeared pretty much as I’d written it, but the title got changed. My valiant attempt at cultural synthesis was now called “Wiggy Words That Feed the Mind.” The loss of control was devastating; I fell into another media-inspired depression, and it led me to conclude that I had to back away from the mainstream, not just in the assignments I took but in the things I wrote about. Acid rock was getting all the attention it needed. The real story was how the music actually got made. Notwithstanding the San Francisco attitude about playing live, in the new era that
Sgt. Pepper
had created, the recording studio was where the real action was.

If you’re not interested in the men who turned Neumann mikes, Pultec equalizers, and eight-track tapes into an instrument, you can skip the rest of this section and go right to the stuff about celebrities. But any backstory of pop music in the sixties has to acknowledge the key role that producers played. They did everything from arranging and mixing to discovering acts. John Hammond had a major impact on rock by signing Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. The Beatles could never have realized their sonic fantasies without George Martin. And then there were the girl-group classics created by Phil Spector. His Wall of Sound was as close as rock ’n’ roll got to being Wagnerian. His production of “Unchained Melody,” with the Righteous Brothers, is impossible not to sing in the shower. But Spector’s greatest masterpiece was “River Deep, Mountain High,” with vocals by Tina Turner. She was still under the suasion of her husband Ike when the song was recorded, but Spector banished him from the studio, and he virtually imprisoned Tina, putting her through so many takes that she quipped about singing the same lines five hundred thousand times.