More than Ecstacy, MDMA is Medicine

 

Celebrants at the MAPS conference, April 2017

 

Walking around the Marriott hotel ballroom in downtown Oakland, amongst swirling images of hallucinogen inspired paintings, dozens of clinical study bulletin boards, and bean-bag chairs, I had a natural flash-back.   The colorful denizens of this conference reminded me of  my psychedelic-infused college days in the 70s at nearby UC Berkeley, except this time they came from all over the world and were all generations from Millennials to Boomers.  Except, in this crowd,  you couldn’t tell the straights from the freaks.  But times have changed, most overtly in the toking space outside of the Marriott Hotel in downtown Oakland, where bongs and vapes were freely passed around in the open.

Coinciding with this year’s 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love and prohibition of LSD, the worldwide  community of psychedelic therapists, researchers, and enthusiasts emerged from the shadows.  I joined over three thousand  at the quadrennial MAPS (Multi-disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) conference in Oakland, CA last April. From the large conference halls to the smaller workshop rooms to the marketplace of psychedelic art, I experienced a new confident exuberance. No longer confined to secretive latter-day hippies or the laboratories,  psychedelics came out this year. For this old Sixties psychonaut, it felt like reconnecting with my long-lost tribe. We spoke freely about inner journeys without couching personal stories in the third person or providing a lot of explanation.

 

Psychedelic inspired painting, MAPS

 

But more than a party, data dominated the conference.  I attended several lectures that elucidated the therapeutic benefits of MDMA, ayahuasca, ibogaine, LSD, and cannabis. MDMA has shown promise in treating PTSD and addiction in numerous studies both here and abroad. First synthesized by Merck chemist Anton Kollisch in 1912, former Dow chemist Sasha Shulgin discovered its’ relaxing properties accidentally and used it as his evening cocktail.  Soon it occurred to Shulgin that MDMA may be helpful with psychotherapy and shared it with therapist friends. Quickly spreading within that community, it proved too much fun to keep in the doctor’s office. Perfect for the 80s party culture, it became a staple of  rave culture worldwide from Ibiza to Dallas.  The genie had again escaped from the bottle.  The liberated and joyful mood generally experienced attracted the attention of the DEA,  placed MDMA in Schedule 1. Schedule 1 drugs are deemed to be of no medical use and pose serious health risks. Included in Schedule 1 are cocaine, heroin, cannabis, and MDMA. That effectively ended its use in therapy until MAPS associates began to use it with Iraq War vets suffering from PTSD.

The recent approval of MDMA (also known as Ecstacy, Molly, Adam, and dozens of other names) for study by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for phase three clinical trials culminates a long struggle for scientific support of its efficacy. If these are successful, then the possibility is for doctor prescriptions with very narrow guidelines. If approved,  it would have limited availability.  But that is how medical marijuana opened, first approved twenty years ago in California the door for legal cannabis . Regardless, not only a new found respectability, but I noted a new honesty  with researchers reporting the results of studies of psychedelics from Brazil to Israel some of  which have not been met expectations.  Seeking to not repeat the mistakes of the Sixties of overpromising the virtues of the drugs and incurring a the backlash from conservatives, MAPS and its executive director, Rick Doblin, proceed methodically .

Attending the MAPS conference was like visiting a long ago friend who had been on a long odyssey: She had changed, wiser and more nuanced, but still offered a familiar essence—freedom, expansion, and bliss. One thing has changed now, fellow-travelers include science and business types, along with the counter-culturalists, the artists, and the curious.   Perhaps Doblin is on the right track and going through channels will lead to respectability.   And that we can learn from the past, and treat these entheogens (god chemicals) with the respect and love they deserve.

 

RW enjoying a toke of the sacrament at the Marriott, April 2017.  It took over forty years, but societal change is often slow

 

Strawberry Alarm Clock Is Still On Time in 2017

Strawberry Alarm Clock plays Venice, CA—2017

One minute I’m a 17 year old kid in the high school gymnasium listening to the coolest sound of the year, the next I’m on Venice beach with mike in hand interviewing them—50 years later. Out of the mists of history and the utopian haze that enveloped our generation reappeared this summer. Wearing the flowing kaftans with brightly swirling flower and paisley designs, the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s sound hasn’t changed. Rare among old rock bands that do the legends thing, the majority of its members were there at the beginning. But more importantly, they sound the same. Even the new songs are in the pocket of Incense and Peppermints, their number one hit.

 

Strawberry Alarm Clock’s first album—1967

Last year all over the San Francisco Bay Area 1967’s Summer of Love was celebrated with numerous art exhibits, concerts, and tours. Heavily supported by the local political establishment, weekly reports of happenings were published in the San Francisco Chronicle. Notables from that era were so heavily interviewed that Peter Coyote (one of the original Diggers) said, no mas. But here in LA hardly a whimper was heard.

 

But being a Venetian (LA local) and life-long fellow-traveler with the hippie movement, I can verify we had a scene and we are celebrating the LA hippie era. The epicenter of LA hippie was Venice/ Ocean Park with local faves; the Doors, Canned Heat, Spirit, Chamber Brothers, Love, and many more.

Venice hasn’t forgotten the Sixties. For the past twelve years the Venice Music Festival has hosted hippie era performers the Chambers Brothers (‘Time Has Come Today’), Country Joe and the Fish’s Barry Melton and last year the Strawberry Alarm Clock headlined. As the sunset and a marine chill settled in, I smelled patchouli and herb in the air. It felt like we’d taken a magic carpet ride back in time fifty years.

Before the show, representing the legendary LA Free Press, I interviewed the band. Friendly and natural, they could have been your local BMW sales agent or fish store owner (which are the day jobs of a couple of the guys). In response to my inquiry on changes to their music, Greg Bunnell (the bassist) said it is the same. I can vouch for that— flute and organ highlights and ethereal harmonies replicate the sound of fifty years ago. New songs contained a gentle social commentary, just as the old songs were played with passion and fidelity.
The Alarm Clock insists that psychedelia lives and they do a great job of maintaining that vision of flowers, peace, and love. At least for a couple hours in Venice time-travel was possible.

 

50 years on, RW & the Alarm Clock pose with a copy of the original LA Free Press ad for their 1967 show at the legendary Cheetah Club, Venice

In search of hippie, I’ll be on the look-out for revivals of the hippie era through-out 2018.  If you know of an event you think might fit, please send me a line and I’ll gift you a free copy of my memoir, Living the Dream Deferred.

There’s Still Love-In the Park

Just loving in the park fifty years ago, even ‘The Man’ had fun

Rummaging in my souvenir clothes, next to the glitter cowboy shirt and the Moroccan jelaba, I found my 1967 paisley shirt and multiple-patched bell-bottoms. Somehow without popping the buttons, I squeezed into the shirt with only my belly exposed (After all it’s been fifty years.) Properly outfitted, I gathered a friend who dressed the part too with a flower crown and ripped jeans and my brother, the cameraman and experimental musician, and journeyed back to the merry-go-round in Griffith Park, Los Angeles.

Over the decades the Sixties has achieved a kind of mythic reputation for its music, drugs, free love, and protests, but at the core of it was something more organic, more timeless, and more ephemeral—Community. That deeper impulse of the movement has often been forgotten in last year’s 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, 1967. What brought it all together was the almost pied-piper like call and mass response by the youth of the day. No social media to provide an ersatz sense of connection, a gathering could only be physical; the only virtual experience was on TV or in some kind of psychedelic haze.

We young people wanted to be with our tribe, whether at an anti-war march, a concert, or a love-in. In the late Sixties and early Seventies in LA’s vast Griffith Park, around the merry-go-round, hosted a weekly Sunday love-in. At the love-in (as long as you were cool without bad vibes) you could get a free meal provided by Cleo Knight and his Green Power, play bongos and guitar, share a joint (no bogarting allowed), and essentially just hang-out without supervision. Going from my suburban home to the love-in meant leaving a world of tract houses, shopping malls, and stifling conformity, and entering a place where friendliness, love, individuality, and kindness ruled.

Love-in Griffith Park, 2017 by RW

Connection with like-minded individuals fuels many gatherings, but our zeitgeist called for personal expression and freedom as well. I recall snide comments by college professors (who mostly wore white shirts and ties) back then that we hippie youth were conformists. Nothing could be farther from my experience. In fact, within certain parameters (long-hair, jeans, beads) we created our own styles. Like the bell-bottom jeans I had patched or the military jackets that I confiscated from my father. Almost anything old, different, or colorful could qualify as hip. Special clothing stores popped up that catered to the new styles. Expressing a rebellious streak, for a season or two, the American flag inspired shirts and accessories. Anything that pushed boundaries of ‘normal’ was OK.

Photos from LA Free Press, 1967

 

In August, 2017, dressed in my authentic hippie clothes, I attended the fiftieth anniversary of the first LA love-in hosted by Georgianne Steele-Waller. I expected to see a few dozen old hippies nostalgically rewriting history, but the majority of the 150 attendees weren’t even born until the 80s. I met a twenty-something young woman from Australia who called herself Serenity, a serious young Latino man from Garden Grove who came to make a political statement, a thoughtful thirty-something man, Alejandro, and an assortment of millennial generation vendors selling Indian trinkets and incense and organic ‘wonder’ potions.

Most of the young people didn’t even know there had been love-ins fifty years ago. By way of introduction, I shared the front page of the LA Free Press from those days to one circle of young people; one would’ve thought it was precious artifact from a lost civilization: Passing it around, someone asked if it was real. “Not only that,” I explained “20,000 showed up on that Easter morning, 1967.”

A spontaneous eruption, the original love-in went off without a hitch to the surprise of the mainstream media of the day. A simple announcement in the Free Press, LA’s underground weekly, got the word out. From sunrise to sunset a variety of rock bands played, people danced, and loving community prevailed. Even the few LA PD officers went along with the vibe and accepted flowers from the hippies. Good vibes wafted in the air, like the patchouli incense and marijuana smoke.

Young people want to congregate and party in any era, but in those days teenagers were just discovering the freedom to hang out and the opportunities were rare. Not like now, when an outdoor concert such as the Twilight Concerts on the Pier in Santa Monica, attracts 10,000 partiers and the police worry about security to the extreme.  In 2017, Santa Monica Police marked lanes in the sand to be able to make quick incursions into the crowd for ‘emergencies.’  Too much of a good thing, the Santa Monica City Council has terminated the annual pier concerts.

LA’s original love-in followed the previous year’s police riot on the Sunset Strip. Heads were banged and many youths arrested, while protesting the demolition of a popular teen hang-out (Pandora’s Box). Immortalized in Steven Stills’ For What It’s Worth by Buffalo Springfield, the song announced a new, assertive attitude from teenagers. Rather than turning up the pressure, the police took a different tack at the Easter love-in a year later, very few arrests were made and even the Los Angeles Times gave a neutral, if muted report.

San Francisco paved the way with its’ Human Be-in. (The suffix –in came from the civil rights movement where protesters would stage a sit-in at a segregated café and then in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley which held teach-ins). At the January 1967 Be-in a line-up of notable speakers that included Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and others heralded a new era of the various counterculture ‘tribes’ of liberal San Francisco coming together. In keeping with ideals of freedom and community, the Diggers (one of whom would later become a well-known actor under his assumed name Peter Coyote) distributed free food, clothes, and sometimes crash pads (place to sleep). SF planted the seed with the Be-in, but LA’s version kept up the tradition for many years.

RW & Richard Easton from the Hollywood Hemp Museum

And now, fifty years later some of the originals returned. Mercy from the GTOs (Girls Outrageously Together, a Frank Zappa group) shared some of her memories and her friend, Corby reported how she used to hitchhike from her home in the Valley until the Hells Angels began to disrupt the scene.  Johnny Echols from the seminal LA interracial progressive rock band, Love, expressed his concern that the goodwill and racial unity of that time has regressed, but he remains hopeful for a renewal.  A wild guy dressed in cannabis inspired clothes and hat promoted the marijuana museum on Hollywood Blvd.  One slightly drunk/ stoned fellow claimed to have attended when he was a kid and his aunt brought him.  Everyone had a big smile.

 

For that one day in August 2017 the ideals and dreams of the hippie movement lived again. Cross-generational, inter-racial, and un-commercial, people of many backgrounds came out and fanned the embers of a long ago time, when anything was possible together. Not a mirage or a myth, the Love-in expressed the yearning that dwells in many; not a brand, not a programmed show, and not a celebrity showcase, just the authentic yearning of people for community, expression, and freedom.

YouTube and social media may entertain, but the desire for live human connection still exists. The human spirit wants community. Events like the Griffith Park Love-in peep into that part of us that yearns to reach out of boxes and labels of generation, nationality, race, and class. And come together in love and harmony.

Ad from the LA Free Press for the Love-in hosted by Cleo Knight

Inner Journey:

Where did you find community in high school or college?  If you were around in the Sixties, where did you connect with like-minded young people?

Action Steps:

How do you find community these days?  Is it commercial or organic?  Step out and try a new activity with the only goal of enjoying yourself.

FOR VIDEOS FROM THE 2017 LOVE-IN, PLEASE CHECK OUR FACEBOOK PAGE

Going back to Paradise, Elysium Fields: Topanga’s Clothing-Optional Club

 

Gate to Elysium Fields site, 2017

“Five dollars please young man,” requested the mustachioed thirty-something man wearing only flip-flops and beads.  I handed over the money and proceeded to the men’s changing room.   Slowly I undressed for this first time in public nudity, anticipation rising I joined the crowd in the park-like grounds.  Even though it was 1971, still a bold act for a 21-year-old kid from the suburban conformity of the San Fernando Valley.  Just ten miles from my childhood home, I had landed at Los Angeles’ haven of the liberated human body and mind.

Given the zeitgeist of these times of building twenty-foot border walls, ethnic registries, and 24-hour surveillance, I wondered ‘could that memory have been real?’  Not just the practice, but the ideals. Audaciously the founder, a journalist and father-figure of American nudism, Ed Lange called his human potential naturist (or nude) club—Elysium Fields referencing the classic Greek mythology of the after-life playground.  In the Sixties such idealistic names were the norm.

I learned about Elysium in a purloined copy of Playboy magazine, but it took several months for me to find out its exact location.  Being young and fairly inexperienced, I was curious and excited about the expanding sexual/ social revolution and Elysium sounded like a perfect place to join it.  Being a hippie radical, I regularly visited the Free Press Bookstore (ground zero for the counter-culture in LA) on Fairfax Ave, and one day someone slipped me the directions to Topanga Canyon’s clothing-optional club.   The two canyons that mattered in Los Angeles back in the Sixties and early Seventies were Laurel and Topanga.  Over-looking Hollywood, the former was the vortex of the burgeoning hippie rock scene of LA, whereas the hard-core back to the land hippies landed in Topanga.  LA’s closest alternative to San Francisco’s Marin, Topanga hosted love-ins, festivals, and other hippie events back then (and still does to this day).  With lots of open space, it epitomized local favorite, Canned Heat’s hit song, ‘Goin’ Up the Country.’

 

 

In those revolutionary times, a few experimental communities, each with its own flavor, emerged in Topanga,.  The most notorious, Sandstone required a special invitation due to its partner-swapping parties.  Another was known for esoteric spiritual rites like yoga, incense, séances, chanting and so on.  And then there was— Elysium Fields.

After numerous successful lawsuits the LA County Supervisors gave final permit approval, and Elysium Fields flourished as a private membership-only club until the 1990s.  A good neighbor, the club was well-respected member of the Topanga community.  Unfortunately, after Ed Lange died in 1995 his two daughters sold the property for $2.5 million.  The executive director, Betty Meltzner and her husband poured their personal money into a new property in Malibu, but it soon floundered.

On a hot summer’s day, I enlisted my buddy, the Silver Tongue, (whose soft, understated voice was like a FM DJ) and raced  through the mountain curves in my Triumph sports car (top down), a potent mix of anxiety and fear kept my pedal on the floor.   Just north of the center where the Post Office, a head shop and the general store served local residents, a plain street sign announced Robinson Rd.  Twisting and turning uphill for a couple miles, we arrived at a solid, wooden 10 foot fence with a regular house gate and purchased our temporary memberships.  Forking over the high admission charge (in those days $5 would buy two record albums or a ticket to see the Animals at the Hollywood Bowl), we summoned as much cool as possible for a two horny, young guys from the Valley.

Once we got over the initial jitters, we had fun sipping wine, looking at the girls behind our sunglasses, and cooking in the hot tub.  I envied the regulars who had booked the private meditation room in advance.   I made a few contacts but didn’t get lucky that day.  In addition to the recreational activities, human potential workshops (a la Esalen) were offered on various days.   I planned to come back for enhancing my aura, thinking it may help me get girls, but I never did.  My consciousness was still wrapped up in my Berkeley college days and the political revolution, not personal enlightenment.

Although I embraced the counterculture ethos of skinny dipping at youth hang-outs like Tahquitz Falls in Palm Springs, Elysium was more than kids self-consciously jumping into the water.  Distributed around the lush lawn a couple dozen ‘grown-ups’ ranging in age from 25-50—all naked—‘frolicked.’  Not just lying around, but playing volleyball and shuffleboard or chatting and sipping wine, while several waited for a turn in the sauna/ hot tub.  All in all, a civil, calm adult scene.  We meandered on the look-out for young women to ogle among the mostly ‘mature’ women in the grounds.  Feeling quite exposed and nervous the whole time, it felt like a dream, a Maxfield Parish painting from the 1920s, all fuzzy and ethereal.  Mentally I took notes:   Life lesson #1 most bodies are average, more or less, without clothes.  Lesson #2 when nudity is the norm, it isn’t titillating, but actually relaxing, pretense is dropped along with clothes.

Harbin’s Temple before the fire

Both lessons were regularly affirmed for me years later during my annual trips to Harbin Hot Springs, a clothing-optional neo-hippie resort north of San Francisco, until it burned to the ground in 2014.  On the other hand, non-participation invites the voyeurism seen at Black’s Beach near La Jolla in San Diego in the 70s.  When the word got out that people were disrobing at Black’s, the cliffs above soon became a magnet for all kinds of  with binoculars.  The scene was ruined.  That never happened to Elysium.  Maybe it was the admission fee and the secluded location, but it exemplified the highest hippie ideals; free love (not just physical), community, consciousness expansion, and fun.

Fast forward to 2016 and the emergence of my seniority in age, if not maturity, one of my interests now is pilgrimage to the old counter-cultural scenes.  What was the back story?  What was it about?  What did it contribute to my life and others?  What, if any, survives the decades?  We live in a continuous present with ever thickening layers of experience over experience, which often results in embellishment, denial, and puffery.  With that in mind and wondering if I could find any artifacts and spirit of the old Elysium Fields of Topanga, I drove up there recently.

The Robinson Rd sign still points to the highlands where bucolic spaces welcome dogs and beat-up old vehicles.  I passed fancy restored homes closer to the highway, and then higher up, California oaks thicken and the yards get bigger and some with old trucks and equipment rusting in the weeds.  My thoughts drifted back to that day decades ago and the spirit of possibility I felt.  This day I sensed or saw nothing evocative of that magical day in 1971, just a few Buddhist prayer flags and a phone pole with a flyer announcing a lost dog and guitar lessons.  Your classic Topanga life that could’ve been 1991, 1971, or 1951, still expressing eccentric individualism and California country living.  Although in my Porsche Cayman (still in a sports car), I drove slower this time taking it all in.   At the assigned address, a foreboding gate blocked the entrance.  My only option to get closer was farther  up Robinson Rd around the backside where I saw the familiar lush, green lawn, surrounded by a few out buildings.  And empty.  No people.  No dogs.  Like an empty movie set.  I tried to imagine that day with the hip, exploratory young and middle-aged adults of LA who came up here to explore consciousness and sexual freedom, but no ghosts appeared from the oaks and the luxury cars.

Today that site and most of Topanga look the  same, but the visit revealed the lessons of Elysium.  A significant element of those free-wheeling times in the Sixties/ Seventies, Elysium made a mark as a real-world example of progressive culture that transcended ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation.   For me, my vision of community, creativity, and expression was solidified in the rustling leaves of the oaks.  Now, I realized it is my turn to share the hope and the ideals that I tasted that day over forty years ago.  Even in these potentially dark days of moralistic, hypocritical family values national leaders, experiments in liberation and community continue and always have.  Deep in my heart and many others of my generation, the experiments of those days aren’t forgotten.     Its seeds continue to sprout in healthy, consciousness-expanding, uninhibited resorts and communities all over the world.   Elysium was a dream, but the dream didn’t die.

Falling to Earth in New Mexico

 

picnic benches all in a row 102 degrees

David Bowie’s recent passing prompted tons of commentary on his unique contribution to pop culture.  More than a rock star (he never won a music Grammy), and not quite a movie star, his variety of personae invited the public to observe the variability of our personal identities.  His first film, The Man Who Fell to Earth established him as an actor (he studied acting before becoming a pop star) and as a shape-shifter.  Not unlike how we saw him shape-shift in public and musical life.  In it  Bowie portrays an alien who crashes to earth alone, a stranger in a strange land.  He soon finds ways to capitalize on his advanced knowledge and becomes an international economic power.  But his character always seems out of sorts, not fully present even as he takes on human characteristics and relationships.

During the film Bowie gets homesick and remembers his wife and kids and we see footage of their hollow faces and chapped skin.  Their world had dried up, gotten too hot and they sent Newton (Bowie) out to our water planet on a scouting mission.  We never really learn what he intended to do, because  while using his special knowledge and  powers to build  the world’s greatest corporation, the authorities catch on and he gets grounded on earth  and can’t go home to his dying  planet.

Released in 1974, it predicted the global warming, we’re grappling with now.  Directed by Nicholas Roeg  with many hard camera angles and cuts and populated by sharp-edged, one-dimensional characters, the message is clear: We’re too dumb to do what’s  good for us.  That contrasts with 2015’s trite,  all-American solution,  to earth’s drying up, Interstellar—planets are disposable, build on a new one.

I can see for miles and miles

The Man Who Fell to Earth uncovered the emotional nuance of  losing or leaving one’s home and its preciousness— where ever it is. Bowie played the role so well, as in most of his personae,  one can barely distinguish the character from  him.  In the film he slips into various guises, never ages, but ultimately falls into futility, wry cynicism, and drunkenness.  He fell to earth and found out we too were barren, but we hadn’t yet faced a reckoning.

Bowie is famous for his variety of characters and styles in music.  So good at it he convinced most of us that those roles were actually him.  The popular perception was that he had changed and become the Diamond Dog, the Thin White Duke, the alienated Brit in Berlin, and finally just disappearing until his recent album was released two days before his death.   Bowie kept us guessing all the time, but we put on him more than he really was, or perhaps he revealed something inside all of us that we didn’t know existed.  I attended his show at the Universal Amphitheater in LA during the Diamond Dogs tour.  And like most concerts it started late. Eventually, from  stage left, he floats down in some kind of a crane in full space costume, and if I’m remembering correctly singing ‘Uncle Tom  to ground control.’  So, Bowie.  He  proceeded to blow our  minds with staging that referenced the dystopian novel 1984 (mind the actual date loomed ominously in the near future in  those days).

Beer allowed in summer.

Thinking about Bowie and the film, my recent trip to south-western New Mexico’s White Sands National Monument came to mind.  Driving through the gates I felt like I had fallen to another world.  Whiter than Vail in a good snow blizzard, even the road was a white out. Wary of striking out into the desert alone, I stopped and had a beer since  it was in season according to a sign.

Hot and tired after driving for five hours through some of the  most empty land in New Mexico, and eating an astro burger in the  military-oriented town near the park.   Sipping on the beer, I decided to stay close to the  car and shade in  this heat and did a few sand slides utilizing the technique I picked up in 2014 in Swakapmund, Namibia. Big fun,  but not so much fun to climb the hill in the heat.  I later learned that a German couple and their son died not far from the road the month I was there.  I guess Germans aren’t used to such heat, and the precautions required thereby.

Unexpected, unusual, and uncomplicated, White Sands feels like another dimension.  Totally unlike any other  place I’ve seen, expect  for the red sands of Namibia.  I felt Bowie-esque, alone,  a stranger in a strange land.  But that’s what I travel for,  the thrill of discovery of unique, beautiful, mind-blowing, heart-opening, experiences.

A blank white board invites the visitor to the empty world

 

 

 

 

 

 

Old Songs, Young Souls, & a Final Flight for the Airplane

Spectators sit on the beach during the The Santa Monica Pier Twilight Concert Series 2015/ photo credit Corsair

“Take another whiff of fresh air,” the gray-bearded bear of a man whispered from the stage.  An authentic, original San Francisco hippie, David Freiberg (Quicksilver Messenger Service) fronted the 21^st century version of a rock institution on a late summer evening in 2015.  The usual motley crowd of several hundred free entertainment seekers milled around the Santa Monica Pier, while the classic guitar riffs of an old Jefferson Airplane tune cut through the cacophony of music and chatter.

Almost 50 years since the Summer of Love in San Francisco, their original incarnation proclaimed, ‘When the truth is found to be lies.’  Well the truth of 2015 is that they are a mere shadow of the Airplane.  But those riffs were just enough to provoke grins of recognition between me and an old friend from college days at Berkeley.  He had made a special pilgrimage to LA to see the last surviving member of the iconic group that epitomized the San Francisco hippie sound in the sixties.

Known back in the day under a pseudonym of Jack, he is one of those rare Boomers who now in our later days still follows music.  Loves it so much he seeks out new bands as well as celebrating the classics.  We shared many great music adventures back in the day with weekly visits to the Fillmore West and Winterland in San Francisco to hear bands like Van Morrison (who we saw twice in one week) and the Grateful Dead, hit a lot of local venues.  Live music seemed to be everywhere and Jack led our cadre to the best vibes in town.  I recall his mastery of air guitar singing ‘Everyone Knows This is Nowhere’ by Neil Young, while walking around the student residential co-op where we lived.  One time he led the gang to downtown Berkeley to a free concert by the Youngbloods in the central park, which the kids had named Provo Park.  Not like Jack whose real name I now know but don’t use, I still don’t know the official name of the park.

Alas, on that balmy Santa Monica night, after two songs the small guy, with wispy blonde hair who played those distinctive licks disappeared from the stage.  The music continued, but Paul Kantner couldn’t continue, he’d made an appearance, but that was about it—a recent heart attack had taken its toll.  Sadly, Kantner died this week at the age of 74 after another heart attack.

At the pier, the band consisting of four young musicians and Freiberg carried on with the classic band’s tunes.  Although they were essentially a tribute band, competently covering the old songs, when I closed my eyes I heard Grace Slick singing White Rabbit and Miracles.

Those old songs evoked the vibe, like a time-tunnel to the mood, spirit, excitement, and freedom, of the original hippie times.  Like an invisible virus music from our formative years rummages around in the memory banks and finds the young soul that lurks deep within the ever-aging mind and body.  A remembrance, more than nostalgia, it’s like a secret, authentic self that is hiding in a closet coming out for a cameo.

Oldies music is not new, but the attitude about it is.  In 1969 I attended a wild concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco, Sha Na Na came on and drove us young hippies wild with their fifties cover songs.  In those days a heavy dose of camp and sarcasm fueled our enthusiasm.  We thought we had evolved so much that oldies music from ten years before was corny and hilarious.

That doesn’t happen now with oldies music.  Now, even millennials like and respect music from the sixties and seventies.  The generation gap that was so glaring back in the day has closed.   That night on the Santa Monica Pier all ages swayed to the classic rock of Starship/ Airplane.  Cruising through the time-tunnel, I recalled a free concert I saw by Jefferson Airplane at the Los Angeles’ Griffith Park Merry-go-round area in 1969.  The impromptu show happened because somehow a planned concert at a real venue was cancelled by the ‘Man’.  The word spread through the hippie underground and hundreds converged on the spur-of-moment show.   A grand time was had by all and no sign of ‘The Man.’  Radical politics of the time inspired their new album, Volunteers, and the kids shouted out in unison with lyrics that confronted the ‘system’ with words like ‘Up against the wall motherfuckers’ and ‘We can be together.’  Reminiscent of the spirit of millennials today in  their support of Bernie Sanders.

For us Boomers the music was often more than entertainment, our lives organized around it.  Like today’s smart phones, it was our social media sharing political views, clothing and artistic styles, in addition to entertainment. Even today forty plus  years later, those same performers and songs can resuscitate the old spirit of community, justice, and freedom.  Well-proven neuro-science states that our minds are still forming into the mid-to late twenties, so it makes sense that the imprints we experience at that age stay with us and continue to excite us.  It might even be a clue to the strange black hole of the age of 27 for many rock stars flare out via drugs.* (I’ll save that for another column).

The Who on  stage at New Orleans Jazz Fest 2015

My friends and associates, except for the few hard-core music aficionados like Jack, listen to the old music from our formative twenties. Especially, the original bands like the Who, Stones, or Starship, who replicate the originals with new players.  At the 2015 New Orleans Jazz Fest, the Who’s two remaining original members, Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey performed the classics like ‘Won’t  Get Fooled Again,’ with gusto, but what blew me away was how the replacement drummer (Zake Starkey, son of Ringo Starr) didn’t miss one of Keith Moon’s original licks.

Experiencing tribute or classic bands (even in the disguise of one original member like the Starship) opens that deep mine of soul, freedom, and adventure hidden by by the march of time.  It still resides inside somewhere and the music can bust into Rumi’s wine house and imbibe the sweet grape of freshness and spontaneity.  After getting drunk on this strange elixir from the past, something wakes up in me and I want to, ‘bang a gong, get it on.’  Who hasn’t felt that from a cherished oldie?

Discovery and adventure are integral to my post-work philosophy of Living the Dream Deferred, but the old hippie music satisfies in a way that new can’t.  Like a fine pair of old jeans and tennis shoes and scratchy 45s, they’re well loved.  We’ve known it for forty years and like an old friend, it awakens the spirit of youth regardless of who is playing it.

Sadly, Paul Kantner didn’t return to the stage that night at the Pier, but his daughter by Grace Slick, China Kantner sang harmony on Somebody to Love.  The lineage received due honor.  Paul Kantner reportedly never renounced his Summer of Love principles of peace, love, and a positive future.  A stalwart icon of the hippie movement, his vision lives on in the music of the Airplane/ Starship and in the souls of the older ‘kids’ who took a breath of that fresh air of a Utopian generation.

*Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Gram Parsons (almost 27), Alan Wilson (Canned Heat), Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, and many others.

Getting Called Out at Little Beach, Maui (creative expression/ community)

Descent to Little Beach

“Hey man, why you reading the paper?  It’ll bring you down,” said a young man at the weekly celebration at Little Makena Beach on the Hawaiian Island of Maui. Awoken from miasma, his words blasted me back to the present.  I came all the way here from LA, to change my routines and attitude and after only two days, I fell into my pattern from home:  Distracting my ‘here and now’ with reading.  In front of me a crowd of 20 free-spirits danced, drummed, twirled batons and hula hoops and surrounding them a 100+ multi-generational crowd mostly indulged in the clothing optional-custom of this hidden beach.

Wild ones on the Beach & a stray old hippie

 

My accuser was a skinny guy, about 23, with long, blondish hair wearing a headband and glistening smile.  He moved easily and quickly from one group or individual to another like he was the host of the event.  Of course no one leads this neo-hippie scene, the whole event emerges ad-hoc.  But this man, Joshua, played the maitre de of Little Beach, first drumming, then pulling a six-pack of beer out of a cooler and passing one to whoever he meets, myself included, then stopping for a hit off a joint and talking with a group of three young women, and then prancing down to the beach for a chat with an older guy with a long,  gray beard.  No generation-gap here.

The tropical sun blazed down on the revelers and I desperately sought some shade.  Back home I enjoy hot, sunny days, but this was too much and I hid in the shade of trees on the periphery of the beach.  That’s when the young host zapped me with the lightning bolt—‘Be here now.’

After miles and miles of jumble of big condo developments and tourist shopping centers in Kihei, the road goes through the antiseptic, planned community of Wailea with  its luxury hotel resorts and golf courses and the speed limit ratchets down inexplicably to 20 mph.  Not surprisingly hiding around corners and in  the bushes police wait for the celebrating Little Beachers.  I’ve been coming to Little Beach for decades on my many trips to Maui.  As in most cool places I’ve visited all over the world, the original tip came by word of mouth.  Someone in the tourist center said, “You might like Little Makena Beach.  You get there by driving past the luxury Makena Resort to Makena Beach State Park south of Kihei and park at Makena Beach State Park.”  Makena Beach offers a wide comfortable beach and some basic facilities, but  you have to know that somewhere over a lava outcropping lies a hippie haven.

Carefully edited view of the Beach

 

Back in the day the original hippies crawled over the rocks and in the secluded cove let go of clothes and inhibitions and ‘cleverly’ named it Little Beach. The word spread and the Sunday afternoon bacchanal grew into a tradition and legend in the hippie world.  Nowadays one sees mostly younger folks like the young man who woke me up that day, but mixed in the crowd are many gray-haired celebrants.

Maui is like that now.  My first visit in 1976 etched the placed in my soul as a tropical idyll.  Beautiful scenery ranges from volcanoes to deserts to rain forest to tourist beaches , while at  the same time it is a typical American small city with all of the conveniences from Home Depot to Costco. But in those days for us Maui was a nature adventure.  A company called Beach Boy Camper Holidays rented converted pick-up trucks that we parked at any beach park and camped for free.  It was the anti-tourist tour of Hawaii.  That freedom of movement combined my priorities, freedom of movement and comfort.  Stop where and when you feel it and relax.  Maybe that underlies the appeal of the RV culture of today, freedom and comfort.

Firesticks and dancers at sunset

 

Of course, the whole world is a lot more packaged these days.  Finding and participating in the free expression of Little Beach revived the part of me that is still 25. But it is difficult to find, since I just don’t travel in those globe-trotting young peoples’ circles these days.  No hitch-hiking, not much hanging out in bars, and needing a bit more comfort (bed and warm shower).  Stoked I stayed til almost sunset, and as I left groups of people were just arriving with their drums and batons and ice chests.  The night  brings on a wild fire dance I’m told.

On this trip to Maui I had the good fortune to drop into a group of free-spirited young people.  I rented a room via AirBnB, because I wanted to stay in a locals’ neighborhood.  The room and the house provided what I needed, plus the unexpected benefit of hanging with free-spirited youth.  As it happened, the owner was out of town and he had a friend stay to supervise the rooms.

About 24, she quickly invited her new boyfriend to stay.  About 22 with long hair with an occasional penchant for wearing long dresses, he had recently left a work/ stay arrangement at an organic farm and now was looking for work as a waiter.  Another day, a friend of his from home (Grand Rapids, MI) arrived who worked as a tree-cutter.  Finally a third guy who is a medical marijuana care-giver came from Michigan for a short visit.  So, we had an instant communal crash pad, just like I experienced in the seventies.  Someone scored a place to stay in a cool place, and the crew showed up.

Pondering the ephemeral aspect at Buddhist cemetery

 

Like me, they had come to Maui searching for something different from home and its routines.  My Venice home serves me well, but it gets old after awhile, more so since I jumped out of the rat race.   Some older, retired people share this with young people:  We’re both free of most responsibilities and the adventurous ones break out:  The world calls, wanderlust hits and at the slightest hint or suggestion, it’s off to on a new adventure.  Even in touristy Maui.

Maui hit the spot for an easy break from the mainland routine.  The weather is almost always perfect, spectacular natural sights await, and has all the comforts of home.  For me as an adventure traveler it takes some adjusting, because the edginess that appeals to me is hard to find. But the revelry, expression,  and connection of Little Beach made it for me.  Don’t miss it, even if you weren’t a hippie.  Fun can be infectious.