Peace, Man

I don't know if all Christian churches do this, but quite a few do: at one point during the Mass/services, everything stops for a minute while members of the congregation exchange handshakes and say "Peace be with you" or just "Peace" to each other.

Having been raised in a very old-fashioned Catholic church which of course didn't have any truck with that kind of Protestant nonsense, I was surprised to see that the handshake/sign of peace had become a standard part of the liturgy during my approximately 40 year hiatus from religion. At first I found it a little off-putting - I mean, unless you're a politician, who wants to shake hands with a bunch of strangers, right? - but I've adjusted, and have even begun to tolerate - if only just - prayers said in English instead of Latin.

The other day I was attending Mass for the first time in a while - I trust my new improved God is not going to send me to Hell for that, but I suppose one can never be too careful - and during the sign of peace, I noticed a slightly grizzled gentleman several rows ahead of me turn around and wave the old two-fingered hippie peace sign at those around him. Allergic as I tend to be to almost any residue of the 60s, my normal reaction would have been to think something uncharitable about the old coot, but being in an especially good mood today, I instead reminded myself that the old coot was very possibly younger than me and that regardless of his choice of symbols, his heart was obviously in the right place.

I was never a big fan of the V-for-peace thing, it's true. The first time I saw it being used was at the October 1967 antiwar march in Washington, the one where the hippies promised they were going to levitate the Pentagon. Being as high on drugs as I typically was during those days, I never did notice if the building had left the ground, but I did have my first experience - to be repeated many, many times - of being tear-gassed and - hopefully not to be repeated - being charged by troops with fixed bayonets.

After we'd been pushed back to a perimeter deemed acceptable by the military, bonfires sprung up at various points across the Pentagon lawn and protesters huddled around them against the autumn chill. I was thinking that the overall spectacle reminded me of a movie I'd seen as a kid about the Sons of Liberty and the American Revolution when I noticed people flashing the V sign back and forth from bonfire to bonfire.

I assumed they were reviving Winston Churchill's V-for-victory sign from the Second World War, and that this meant we had stopped demanding merely an end to the Vietnam War and were now in the throes of a full-fledged revolution. As I noted earlier, the drugs I was on - possibly an acid-and-Robitussin combo could have contributed to this perception, but it wasn't too many months later that everyone - well, everyone with long hair and on the same kind of drugs as me - was talking about a revolution. By 1968 or 69, when it had become common for hippies to flash the V-sign whenever they met, my gang started saluting back with the raised fist of the Black Panthers to show our contempt for namby-pamby "peace" activists.

A couple more years and the V had become completely institutionalized and co-opted, appearing in ads selling everything from waterbeds to "groovy" bank accounts. It was so ubiquitous that I couldn't even bother to be annoyed by it anymore, and eventually no one but the most diehard hippies and the most desperately ironic hipsters used it at all.

Which brings me back to what was presumably the diehard hippie in church today, which in turn got me pondering how I, who was once as obnoxious a flower child as any spawned by that obnoxious era, had come to feel so far removed from even the faintest vestiges of hippiedom. After all, the man flashing the V-sign could have been one of my comrades in the old days. We could have boogied side-by-side at the Fillmore or marched together through the streets chanting "Hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

So why do I think of him as practically an alien presence in my world (not in a bad sense, more in the "Oh, look, those people are from Uzbekistan; I've never met anyone from Uzbekistan, have you?" sense)? Or, maybe more to the point, how did I myself become so alienated from my generation and my (counter)culture?

But never mind - water under the bridge and all that - what I'm really wondering is what if anything of the 60s has survived in me? I've read enough statements from members of The Most Annoying Generation to the effect that "the 60s changed everything" or that "the world would never be the same again," and the massive egocentricity of baby boomers notwithstanding, there's got to be some truth to that. There's no doubt that the world I'm living in today is dramatically different from the one I grew up during the 1950s, and I have to believe at least some of that dramatic change resides in me personally.

I'd often prefer that weren't the case, however, especially when I hear the self-serving and self-satisfied encomiums to "the spirit of the 60s" constantly being served up by my fellow boomers. In the Jerry Garcia book I mentioned a week or so ago, members of the Grateful Dead camp sing praises to the spirit of liberation that permeated their culture and their music during that time, making it sound as though the proliferation of LSD and psychedelic music had ushered in a new Garden of Eden, and that if it hadn't been for the occasional interference of "the man" and his annoying drug laws, we all would have lived happily ever after.

Only trouble is, half the people making these sunny predictions are dead, and quite a more not much better than zombies, in large part due to the drug use that was supposed to set us free. "The man" had nothing to do with it; most of these casualties were self-inflicted.

Listen to Garcia himself (to be perfectly accurate, not a boomer himself; he was born in the middle of the war) on the subject of Janis Joplin's death at age 27: "It was just an accident, a dumb fucking accident. Accidents happen to everybody - driving a car or walking down a flight of stairs."

Well, yeah, Jer, but that presupposes that "everybody" is taking potentially lethal drugs as a matter of course, that injecting heroin is as normal an activity as driving a car or walking down a flight of stairs. Which in the realms of hippie rock stars may not be that far from reality, but wouldn't you have to be pretty addled to suppose a new and better world is going to be constructed by an army of half-dead junkies with needles dangling from their veins?

But rant as I may, I myself delved too deeply into the hippie drug culture (minus the needles and heroin but including almost everything else) to have been left unscathed. At 20 I deeply, earnestly believed that I and my LSD-taking buddies were far more equipped to run the world than the businessmen and politicians then in charge. I suppose some of this had as much to do with being 20 as with any great social movement, but also, there were so many of us: the largest population bulge in history, and a significant number of us were on drugs that made a mockery of "reality." Megalomania was an almost inevitable side-effect.

So I still seem to be dancing around the question, maybe because I don't know the answer. Whether I like it or not, the 60s were such a major part of my life that I undoubtedly carry part of their legacy with me, but what exactly that legacy is, I'm not sure I can say. I don't go flashing peace signs at people, and in fact will reluctantly support war or military action if it seems like the least bad way of resolving a situation, yet I still fervently wish and hope for peace. Some of the tactics and aspirations of the 1960s civil rights movement now seem counterproductive and self-defeating, but I still passionately support equality of opportunity for all.

I guess what remains most from the 60s is the spirit of questioning and, to a lesser extent, confrontation. I'm a pretty law-abiding citizen these days, and have been for quite a while, but if I think the President or the Pope is talking nonsense, I'm far more ready to say so than the average Joe would have been in the 1950s. And along with that comes a readiness to question anything and everything, including the leftist orthodoxy that prevails among most of my friends and contemporaries.

But is that really a legacy of the 60s? I was already driving myself crazy with questions - especially of the religious and philosophical variety - by the time I was in first or second grade, i.e., in the early to mid-50s. The 60s happened when a bunch of us thinking along similar lines were old enough to leave home and start meeting up with each other.

So I'm back to "I don't know," and for now I'll write off the 60s as one more of those youthful adventures that I'm kind of glad I had but would never in a million years want to do again. Like spending time in jail, hopping freight trains, visiting East Berlin, or tripping on acid and cough medicine. Did I learn anything? Well, finding out all the things that you don't want to do with the rest of your life is at least a start.

Killing The Music Business

I'm reading the first chapter of a biography of Jerry Garcia (don't ask; no, go ahead and ask, I'll tell you in a minute anyway), and have already learned that a) Garcia was named after Broadway tunesmith Jerome Kern; and b) that his dad, Joe (born José) Garcia was a professional musician and band leader until the 1930s, when, according to his brother, the rising popularity of "canned" (i.e., recorded) music helped kill off the industry.

I found this ironic considering that we're again in danger of drowning in the crocodile tears of those bewailing the umpteenth "death" of the music business, especially since today's situation appears to be the reverse: supposedly the problem now is that digital downloading has destroyed the sales of recorded music (or at least the ability to make large amounts of money therefrom) and musicians are being advised to make their living by through live appearances and the sale of image-related paraphernalia.

Could thing really have gone in such a circle? I'll have to acknowledge that although I don't feel good about getting free digital copies of the music and very rarely succumb to the temptation to do so, I am in a rapidly dwindling minority. But I'm not (and haven't been for a long time) in the prime music-buying (or shall we say "obtaining") demographic. What I buy these days is mostly limited to stuff by friends or, occasionally, a few songs from my antediluvian youth. Put it this way: I doubt I'm keeping any musicians in business.

The live music business does seem to be flourishing (though once again, nearly all the shows I attend involve friends or friends of friends), but is it realistic to expect musicians to again earn their living that way, as they had to all through all of history apart from the 20th century? I don't know, but it may be exactly what is happening. I can't - people far more technologically knowledgeable than me tend to agree - see any way of putting the digital genie back in the bottle in such a way that recorded music will ever be the license to print money it once was.

And true, a greater emphasis on tours and live music will disadvantage those who aren't young and good-looking, have family or other responsibilities that make travel difficult, or simply don't have the kind of extroverted personalities that make for good show business. Actually, I don't know why I'm worrying about this: neither the records my band recorded nor the shows we played ever made money, while most of my musician friends are talented enough that they'll be right (though maybe not get rich) no matter what they have to do.

Which brings me back to the matter of Jerry Garcia, who even in his heyday bucked the tide by focusing more on live performances than on selling records. Now I know I'm not supposed to like him (hey, I put out the Queers record that reviles "Jerry's ugly face" and probably a few others in that same vein), and if you read some of my writing from the 80s and 90s, you'll see I was quite vicious toward him myself. In fact one of the reasons that pack of Iron Peak dope growers threatened to burn down my house was my regular bashing of the Grateful Dead in Lookout magazine.

I saw the Dead a great number of times in the 60s and early 70s - about 25 times, I'm guessing. A big part of the reason was that they were always playing for free, but I kind of liked them, too, inasmuch as I was capable of making any rational decisions about what I liked in those acid-addled days.

I turned against them almost instinctively when I turned against the hippies, which I'd already done at some point not far into the 70s, and my disdain both intensified and became more vocal once I'd joined up with the punks in '77. From then on you can't tell me much of anything good about Jerry or the Dead without my getting right in your face and telling you how far from having any brains or taste you must be.

So it was kind of disconcerting when it dawned on me one day that I'd never really stopped liking my favorite Grateful Dead record, Workingman's Dead. Didn't listen to it for a decade or two, true, but when I finally checked it out again, this time when I was drug-free or nearly so, it sounded better than ever. In fact, I was able to appreciate it much more without the chemical enhancement that had always been an integral and inextricable part of any Dead-related experience for me back in the day.

And while I still haven't become a fan of most of their extended-jam stuff, Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, both from the early 70s, are and will remain classics in my view. If that destroys any shreds of punk credibility I may possess, so be it.

But that's not why I'm reading Jerry Garcia's biography. It's more because I like biography in general, but also because it covers times, places and people that, if not completely a part of my life, certainly intersected with it. I was startled, for example, to see one of my old Spy Rock neighbors cited as one of Garcia's lifelong friends, dating back to boyhood. I knew he - and a couple other neighbors - were affiliated with the Dead camp, but not to what extent.

And of course I like to read stories of the 60s so I can be reminded of just how degraded and debased the whole flower power, peace and love revolution was, not only when the "bad drugs" crept in post-1967 (which is how popular hippie legend would have it) but pretty much from the start. Even though this bio is written by a near-worshipful fan and hagiographer, Garcia doesn't come off as such a great guy on a personal level. Musically, yes; if you've got any appreciation at all for those who devote themselves to the playing of music, you've got to admire the guy for his near-limitless devotion to the craft. Personally, assuming you weren't part of his inner circle of family and friends, a bit of a jerk, I'm guessing.

Maybe I'll change my mind as I read on, but it will be an interesting experiment either way. I tend to avoid learning too much about my musical heroes because experience has shown me that it's usually the source of great disillusionment. Fortunately, Garcia isn't and never has been a hero of mine, just an enormously gifted musician whose music I can enjoy but probably wouldn't like to hang out with.

Some Pricey Guitar Strings

$16,800 for a collection of guitar strings? Oh, but they're Jerry's strings, as in Jerry Garcia, the drug-addicted guitar wizard and paterfamilias of legendary hippie band, the Grateful Dead. Jerry's name proved sufficient to inflate the value of two old guitars and a bunch of junk to $1.1 million, which would only seem over the top or downright loony if you'd never met any hardcore Deadheads. Having spent a number of my formative years in San Francisco, Berkeley, Marin and Mendocino, however, I've had an extensive exposure to Jerry's Kids.

Some of them are essentially good-natured, and I've even met a few who had the ability to laugh at themselves and their obsession, but there were others - like the one whose face turned bright red and who was literally jumping up and down with rage because I'd mentioned in a Lookout article that Jerry was looking a bit, well, obese - who bordered on the feral and/or demented. After the Dead's demise, some of these more unhinged individuals, no longer having a band to follow around, settled down in places like Garberville and Arcata, where they may still be infesting public space with pleas for spare change and impromptu stoned-out jamfests.

I'm assuming they weren't the ones forking over thousands of dollars for empty speaker boxes and similar miscellany, unless the spare-changing business is doing better than I'd imagined. Seriously, I've met all sorts of Deadheads who've gone on to become lawyers, professors, financial managers, even doctors and shrinks, and anyway, given my own somewhat unusual and obscure musical tastes, who am I to judge?

Anyway, while in the past I've gotten quite a bit of mileage out of ridiculing the Dead and their camp followers, I've had to have a bit of a rethink, to the point where a few songs from the band's country-ish era (American Beauty and Workingman's Dead) nestle happily amid the pop-punk, doowop, big band and Hank Williams in my daily shuffle. I don't think I'll be accumulating any of their memorabilia, though, since for the last few years I've been all about trying to get rid of junk rather than collecting more of it.

Giving me one more reason to kick myself when Green Day/Op Ivy/Lookout Records souvenirs start bringing in the big bucks, but hey, you're looking at the guy who once had a near-complete collection of 1954-56 baseball cards, all vanished into the dumpster or some even less salubrious destination when I "outgrew" that sort of thing. But hey, if it weren't for clowns like me throwing away all the valuable stuff, it would never have become rare enough to be valuable. So I think you rich collector geeks owe us a percentage.