Pro Commerce

Category: Hippies

  • I Was There

    I was there at the beginning of the Beatnik movement, the hippie movement, and the Whole Earth Catalog.

    BeatniksThe Beats were mostly in New York and San Francisco.  I went to the U. of Chicago, in the geographic middle, in August of 1955 and was in the male dormitories in 1957 for six months. For reasons I still don’t understand, I was a widely known radical organizer with a sweatshirt, blue jeans, disheveled hair and a full beard. The Beats were visible in the youth population of the time.  As they traveled from Coast to Coast they stopped in Chicago at the University where I got them dorm rooms to stay in.  I knew about a dozen of the Beats at the time.  An article in Time magazine in 1959 said I was one of the Beats.

    When I returned to San Francisco in 1960 to go to grad school at U.C. Berkeley in economics, my wife, Helen, and I lived in San Francisco on Broadway a few blocks from North Beach. The Beat scene was centered around City Lights bookstore owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There were five other Beat businesses.  The most important was a small restaurant at approximately 575 Pacific Ave. that had a monk’s bowl of rice and meat and some veggies. Across the street at the Columbus Tower was a street level window with a few seats that had a chrome Italian espresso machine, the first I ever had in the U.S. In the next block North on Columbus was a second-hand bookstore, a bar on what is now Jack Kerouac Alley and City Lights. In the next block of Grant across Broadway was The Saloon where heavy beatnik drinkers hung out.

    RazIn 1963 Salli Rasberry arrived with her boyfriend. They went immediately to North Beach where the Beats had created a jazz and comedy scene. Raz, whom I didn’t meet for seven years,  moved to Masonic Boulevard in the Haight-Ashbury. Jazz was the overlap of the two youth cultures. Both smoked pot. The Beats had speed which was sold to students and truckers.  Raz and her bunch, later called hippies, soon got LSD from the gang around Stanford that got it from psych researchers.

    The Beats were a little older than Raz and her bunch; most were in their mid to late 20’s.  The Beats wore d ark clothes and had long hair.  Their view of the world was summarized perfectly in Ginsberg’s poem, Howl. Grim, rejectionist and hopeless.

    Raz and her crowd were also rejectionist about the stultifying society around us, but they were ecstatic, joyful, optimistic, and full of color and vitality. Their clothes were rainbow-exciting, their music loud and wild. They intended to change everything.  Starting with food, sex, and living arrangements.

    On-the-busNorth Beach was the primary overlap of Beats and hippies.  On a personal basis they met at a house off Kings Mountain on the road over the top, from Palo Alto to Pescadero.  It was a fairly large primitive house just a mile west of SkyLonda coffee shop. That was where Hippies, the Rainbow Bus, Kesey, the Beats, and the outlaw gang of Hell's Angels bikers hung out.  I went there twice with Portola Institute (the core of the Whole Earth Catalog) friends to hang out.

    I was well known in the hippie crowd as the banker at Bank of America from 1964 to 1966 and later as VP of the Bank of California who invited all the hippie movers and shakers to a Japanese lunch on Fridays from 1967 to 1970. When the first Trips festival was organized by the Beats and Stewart Brand in January 1966 at the Longshoreman's Hall, Stewart asked me to handle the ticket sales and money collection at the door.

    I collected the money for an hour, but the whole scene was too exciting and too many of my friends were there, so I asked the one person I trusted, Bill Graham, to take over the door for me.

    I finally met Rasberry officially in Spring 1971 at the Demise Party of the Whole Earth Catalog. We had met many times but that night we sat on a bale of hay talking from 3 am till sunrise at 7am and became lifelong friends.

    This is a good place to point out to the historians of the future that the political Left never was connected to the hippie movement.  Hippies joined all the parades of the anti-Vietnam era for the dancing and music.  I know because I knew the Lefty organizers.  I started the Graduate Student Union at U.C. Berkeley and Mario Savio was my Treasurer in 1963. He became famous in 1964.  

    Tom Hayden used my living room in San Francisco to try and organize the East Coast media to cover a hippie be-in in Golden Gate Park.  I was opposed to any official publicity and stopped it.

    Abbie Hoffman was a colleague who helped me put on a fundraiser for some forgotten cause but he pulled out when stoned and paranoid. I handled the gate myself and returned the money to anyone who wanted it.

     

  • Hippy Successes and Failures

    One of the hippy successes was the Whole Earth Catalog. It was a masterpiece of a new form of encyclopedia and was the first version of the future Google.

    OffshootI’ve written about many of the hippy successes and of the great social changes that hippies invented.  They include the modern universal bicycle, hang gliders and their offshoots, comfortable beds and countless artifacts that are too numerous to mention here.

    The greatest impacts were in the extraordinary expansion of the American urban diet and cooking methods, the vast expansion of unusual religious orders and related thinking as well as the love of flowers and craft skills.  While not discussed openly, a wide range of psycho-active drugs gained widespread acceptance. Non-religious simple living and right livelihood gained ground as did homeschooling.

    But what were the failures?  

    The greatest hippy failure was their inability to promote the optimism that engulfed the hippy world view.  The hippies were joyous; the modern American world is grim and depressing.

    The hippies loved hitchhiking. It couldn’t succeed because there is a small criminal underclass that can never be ignored. 

    The biggest failure was in finding new social organizations.  Americans just can not live comfortably together in groups.  Communes, group houses and every form of communal living failed.  Many pairing and mating structures failed as well, whether it was open marriage or any of the various forms of polyamory.   

    Hippies never indulged in politics even though the press confused them with the anti-war Left.  The worst hippy legacy is the modern street people who have destroyed San Francisco and a few other cities. Hippies made living on the street and in publicly visible areas a tolerable behavior that the future social outsiders, hobos, made a serious public nightmare.

    The hippies founded environmentalism but focused heavily on the population explosion which later changed into human caused global warming eschatology.  The hippy fear of nuclear power made the situation worse.

    All in all, it is too early to make historic judgments about the hippy era.  And I was too much of a central figure to also be involved in the historic evaluation.

  • Gays and Jobs

     

    I tried leaving a comment to your blog posting "Gays and Jobs" but comments are closed. Here's what I wanted to leave:
     
    You might be interested in John Waters' comments at the 50th anniversary of the Cockettes and Angels of Light:
     
     
    I agree that the gay liberation movement owes much to the hippies.
     
    Salud,
     
    Eric Noble
    The Digger Archives

  • Me and Jann Wenner

    In late 1968 I took Jann Wenner to lunch on the Bank of California’s expense account.  I was head of Marketing Research but not yet a vice president.  

    JannI was doing research on the future of the music business in San Francisco.  I knew of Wenner as a ski bum who, with the help of Ralph Gleason, had started an every-other-week newspaper called Rolling Stone.

    Jann brought me up-to-date on the finances of his fast growing newspaper and told me he wanted capital to expand and to buy out Gleason.  He wanted a loan from the bank of over one hundred thousand dollars.  At the time Gleason had put up more than half of the capital used to get started.  Wenner planned to give Gleason a small percentage of the new cash infusion.

    I was offended.  I told Wenner that the bank would not make such a loan; that it was immoral to cut out such an important founder as Gleason who was the music critic for the major local daily newspaper.

    The reality was that I could not personally make bank loans nor could I convince a bank loan officer to do so.  Banks, no bank, would make a large loan to a start-up without 200% collateral.

    Wenner remembered this offense six years later when my first book, The Seven Laws of Money was published by Random house.  He told a staffer, Ben Fong-Torres, to write a nasty review.  It was the only negative review the book ever got.

  • Ridiculous, Absurd

    What could be more absurd or ridiculous than to give advice on aging?

    MaxresdefaultI have never paid attention to people giving advice on aging.  Why should you?

    To get to 100 years old, your heart must beat 3 billion times.  That is a lot, more than any living human can understand or explain.  Thinking someone knows how to get to 3 billion heartbeats is absurd.

    My advice is about making old age comfortable.  In my early thirties I learned how to practice zazen, which is sitting meditation with an empty mind.  I have continued to do this practice ever since, daily (weekdays) for a half an hour.  Now in my old age I can sit comfortably doing nothing for hours or days on end, comfortably.  

    That is a very helpful practice when your energy is low and nearly all your close friends are dead.  I’m glad I can do it.  I have led a very energetic life; now is the time for serenity.

    I am not advocating for any specific form of meditation nor for any of the ideas, like enlightenment, that presumably are attendant.  Most rewards for meditation, such as enlightenment, seem overrated.  But being serene in old age is a great payoff.

  • Lowell Again

    When the new campus for Lowell High School was about to open in the Fall of 1963, the San Francisco School Board voted to end the century-long history of Lowell as an academically select college prep school that fed graduating students into U.C. Berkeley and Stanford.

    Lowel1That set in motion a 25-year sequence that included me.

    The current School Board has voted to do the same thing again. Will it have similar repercussions?

    Nearly sixty years, ago, Ruth Kadish organized the alumni of Lowell to stop the downgrading of the school to ordinary status.  She succeeded with the help of many illustrious alumni including the Governor of California, Pat Brown, (who was in the Lowell class of 1923 with my father,) along with Walter Haas, Cyril Magnin, Alexander Calder, William Hewlett, Art Hoppe, Dian Fossey, Warren Hellman and many other prominent and well-off alums.

    RuthAt the same time Ruth created SCOPE, (the blue ribbon Service Committee on Public Education) to lobby the S.F. School Board to improve the entire S.F. public school system.  

    SCOPE was influential in significantly improving the schools for the next decade until Mayor Joe Alioto, in a pique of racist anger at the court-ordered school integration, made the school board elective.

    My three children went to Lowell. My son left to go to an early charter school called The Urban Pioneers where he was usually outdoors and comfortable as a hyperactive young man.

    Ruth made me the second president of SCOPE in 1964-65.  I was president of the Young Republicans and a banker. Very respectable.

    With little to do, as Ruth ran the political side of the organization, I decided to create an Education Fair to show teachers the latest teaching tools available on the market.  The Fair was held on a weekend on the campus of San Francisco State College.  Teachers at Lowell each had a budget of $200 and the Fair was very successful.

    StewartOne of the attendees was Stewart Brand. Stewart was so impressed with the educational tools he saw at the Fair, that he spent the next year trying to raise foundation funds to take the Fair national.  He used Dick Raymond’s non-profit, Portola Institute, across the street from the Menlo Park train station, as the potential funding recipient. 

    He gave up on getting grants and took his 1963 Dodge truck, with the resources he found at the Fair and much more on a trip around the U.S. to the many hippie communes springing up in 1965-67.  Based on the needs he saw on his travels he decided to return to the Portola Institute and publish a magazine with the relevant information and tools. He opened a store, warehouse and publishing venture next door to Portola called the Whole Earth Truck Store. 

    HippiesThe newsprint magazine became the renowned Whole Earth Catalog. When Stewart closed the Truck Store and published The Last Whole Earth Catalog in 1972, he took the money to create the Point Foundation which funded hundreds of projects in the hippie world, the environmental movement and the socially -responsible-investment movement.  

    I was on the Board of Portola and conceived of Point as a non-profit alumni association of Portola. Stewart put me on the Point Board and made me President two years later.

    The rest is history.  That was a seminal point in American history. Very little of that history is covered in Wikipedia but will be the subject of many books over the coming half-century. 

  • Bill Graham

    Bill Graham already had a reputation when the first Trips Festival occurred at Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco in early 1966. He was connected to the Mime Troupe.

    I was there at the gate taking the money on the first night at the request of Stewart Brand, one of the three organizers of the Festival ( the others were Ken Kesey and Ramon Sender).  Stewart knew I was a banker and we knew each other from the Portola Institute and the San Francisco State College Education Fair that I had put on.

    BillgrahamThe festival was too exciting.  I couldn’t be at the gate taking money when there was so much fun going on.  I asked Bill Graham who I knew as the business manager of the Mime Troupe to handle the money.  He was known to be honest about money.

    When he saw the overwhelming size of the hippie crowd and the wild music from the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Jefferson Airplane he was hooked.  He joined with a good friend of mine, Chet Helms to start putting on hippie concerts.  Graham continued that direction the rest of his life.

    Chet was a gentle, tall, kind true hippie who brought Janis Joplin to San Francisco.  Graham promptly screwed Chet when Graham got control of the Fillmore Rock Auditorium and told Chet to go to hell.

    A few years later, after Chet had been running the Avalon Ballroom successfully, he came to me with a political problem.  The City wanted to shut down his ballroom because the neighbors (imaginary people) said the noise was too loud and the crowd was making a mess.  (All untrue.  The building had super sound insulation and Chet cleaned the sidewalks meticulously.)

    Chet had already hired a lawyer to fight the issue at the Board of Permit Appeals. The lawyer was Michael Stepanian who was a partner with Brian Rohan.  Both were stoned hippies and pretty much useless.  I told Stepanian to keep his mouth shut and say what I told him to say.  Which he did.

    I knew the Board members and approached several of them, me, a bank vice president, and explained that Chet Helms was a hard-working decent honest guy.  His operation was clean and well run.   I had the majority of votes for Chet at that point.

    Then, into the Board room walked Bill Graham in a hippie clown outfit and said boisterously that he was the leader of the hippie music scene and said he had a handful of telegrams from prominent bands who supported Chet and the Avalon Ballroom.  He threw the telegrams at the Board chair and walked out.  

    The Board was made up of ordinary San Francisco straight politicians. One was the president of Olympic Savings and Loan.

    I knew at that moment we had lost. And we had.

    Nearly a decade later the lead minister at Glide Memorial Church, Cecil Williams, where I was the business manager, had arranged with Quincy Jones to put on a concert on behalf of Glide Church.  We got the Cow Palace that can hold 10,000 comfortably.  It was certain to be a sell-out.  

    Cecil assured me that Bill Graham, a good friend of his, would not put on any competitive performance the same night.  Of course Graham did just that with another black pop-jazz composer.  We had to scramble to get 5,000 people just to look decent.  Most of the 5,000 were from Jim Jones’ People’s Temple brought in buses.

    In the end Bill Graham died by his own hand in a helicopter accident.  Flying with his girl friend, Melissa Gold, wife of Herb Gold a friend of mine, on a very foggy night when his salaried pilot said it was too dangerous to fly; Bill told him to fly or be fired.  They ran into a 115,000 volt power tower and were fried.

  • Abbie Hoffman

    Some friends of Abbie's asked me to put on an evening talk for him.  

    I expected about 1,500 and hired a hall that later became a cooking school on Polk and Turk.  This was sometime in the mid 1970’s.  I mark time by the main girlfriend of the time.  Since the one at that time lived in Marin, Annie, I know why I didn’t have a girlfriend with me that night.

    It was very easy to do anything in the hippie days.   I reserved the hall, booked a few bands and got out the PR.  I don’t remember doing it.  It was so easy and automatic.  

    Abbie hoffmanThe night of the event, the bands were playing, the crowd was dancing.  I had someone on the window taking the $5 or $10 that was the admission.

    Then I was called away to talk to Abbie.   We knew each other from encounters over the early hippy years.  Abbie was around the corner in the back of a dark van on Eddy.  It was about 7:30 in the evening.  Abbie told me he was terrified of some danger and refused to come in and speak.  

    I said that I had gone to a lot of trouble to set up this event and he couldn’t back out.  He said he was not going to speak and that it was dangerous for him.

    He had all the outward appearances of a paranoid. A little shake and an agitated head.

    So I walked back to the hall, made the announcement without explaining what an asshole Hoffman was.  I told everyone they could get a refund at the front window.  Which is where I personally went.  

    Giving out money is not a job for someone else.

    It turned out that only one-third wanted a refund.  The rest were happy dancing.

  • Taking dope

    I went to a panel discussion of ‘5 powerful women’ who shaped the hippie era.

    The world outsideIt wasn’t true.  The panel was put together by an academic who laid her Marxist nonsense on a great historical event.  Only my co-author, Salli Rasberry who was one of the five, qualifies as a woman who was powerful and shaped the hippie era, on the panel. Rasberry was the mother of hippie.  She is a force of nature.

    The whole panel repeated what Rasberry said, so it was a good panel.

    Two things came up for me.  The hippie world began with smoking dope (pot).   It was illegal, fun and not addicting.  This truth created the world of pot smokers as a cohort of outlaws.  Hippies became one coherent group of outlaws, with pot as the membership ritual and pot smoking the common symbol of camaraderie.  My son calls this ‘ the hot tub people’.

    Pot led to other drugs, psychedelics such as LSD and mushrooms.

    Which is an important point.   I took psychedelics so I know what happens when you take them.

    You learn that the world we live in is a created world.  We have an agreed upon consensus.  This led to several outcomes for the hippie world.

    One was the hippie sense that we can create a better world than the currently agreed upon consensus which the hippies set about creating.  After about 15 years the hippie-created world merged into the previously created consensus world. Both worlds changed significantly.

    A few people stayed in the hippie world.  A few others tried to stay in the hippie world and fit into the agreed upon world.  They smoke a lot of pot and hold down day-time jobs.  Still others fully joined the agreed upon world and set out to make changes in it.  That group includes me.

    Those who joined the agreed upon world have never forgotten that this is a human constructed reality.  Many of us recognize it as a cultural creation.  This is also a perspective that one can get from meditation.

    Just reminding my readers: There are many worlds.  Ours is only one of many constructed worlds.   

    At the moment we have two different politically created worlds.  Maybe someone will remind us of that.

  • The current American obsession

    In discussing the current techie paranoia about robots putting people out of work, I wrote that the hippies prove the opposite.

    3-3 stoned“20 hippies living together could live on the income from one of them working, and they did.  And plenty of them did and stayed home smoking pot the rest of the time.”

    We may have some of that again.  At its peak in 1998, 67% of eligible workers were in the labor force.  That has dropped to the current 62%.  Compared to the past, 3 million more people of working age 25 to 54 are not working.  I think they are staying home smoking pot and playing computer games.

    As I said in the same earlier blog:  “Hippies were Americans.  The truth is we used our free time to create a new world.  We created home-schooling, comics,  bakeries, organic farming, organic groceries, cheese, new sports (mountain bikes) and thousands (yes thousands) of new businesses including the home computer industry.”

    Simply put: we live in an incredibly rich society and many people can chose not to work.  But because the American spirit is restless and always imagining a new and better world, we Americans create new desires, new industries and we are always pushing commerce ahead of us.

    Americans, left to their own devices will always create new demands and new businesses.  That is very American and a driving source of global commerce.