The line for breakfast in Martha’s on Church was long, stretching to the sidewalk. I ordered two decaf lattes and bagels to go. I was assailed by a grey, pig-tailed man around my age in Moody Blues t-shirt and crumpled check shorts, intrigued by my accent and “Closing of Winterland” t-shirt, he enquired:
“Do you live in the City?”
“I wish. But no, I’m staying in a cottage a few blocks away for a month”.
“Wow, you Brits really seem to love it here. Love your shirt by the way. I was there”.
“Thanks, and my turn to say wow. I have to make do with the CD and DVD”.
We stepped to one side as the line lengthened further.
“We’ve been going to concerts here for two decades. We were at the Great American Music Hall with Dark Star Orchestra last night”.
“Nice. Y’know, I’ve never seen them, but I’ve heard they’re pretty close to the Dead”.
“Yeah, they play whole shows and last night’s was the Fillmore ’69 which was view of music heaven. And Bob Weir joined them for a couple of numbers”.
“Double wow! They must have been awesome. It’s funny but you guys are wedded to the Dead, while I’ve travelled all over the UK pretty regularly to see concerts. I’ve seen the Stones, Pink Floyd and the Moody Blues, of course”.
“That’s weird but cool, because we’ve probably seen more gigs in the States than we would at home. In the past few years we’ve seen Crosby and Nash, Elvis Costello, the Doobie Brothers, Steve Miller Band, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir all in the city, and Eric Burdon in South Lake Tahoe”.
Another baby boomer further back in the line began to regale us of times following the Dead on tour in the eighties, but was cut short by the welcome announcement that my bagels were ready.
Many of our trips to San Francisco have coincided (intentionally) with the free Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park over the first, invariably warm, weekend of October.
There have been a number of high spots over recent years with regular performances in particular from Steve Earle (with a guest appearance from Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead), Emmylou Harris (who traditionally closes the festival), Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen, guitar gods from Jefferson Airplane, the Neville Brothers, John Prine, Robert Plant, the Blind Boys of Alabama and Moonalice who performed a set of songs penned by the then recently deceased Robert Hunter, principal lyricist for the Grateful Dead.
The atmosphere could not be further from the corporate, money-driven ethos of Glastonbury and similar events and fitting that San Francisco where, along with other Californian venues, the concept of free outdoor rock festivals effectively originated in the late sixties.
But the highlight for me came in 2019 with Judy Collins. But before that I need to take you back twelve months to San Rafael in Marin County. A store owner friend of mine in Folkestone asked if I could deliver a note to Phil Lesh, the former Grateful Dead bass player, at his performance/dining venue at Terrapin Crossroads (sadly now closed, though the music lives on).
Not only was I able to deliver the note, which stated that she had adored him since the Europe ’72 tour, successfully but I also had the opportunity of a few minutes chat with the great man, who signed a postcard of his own for me to pass on to her on my return.
So pleased was my friend that I had succeeded in achieving a task that might not unreasonably have been perceived as unlikely – after all, Phil didn’t rap with random British guys in his bar every day – that she set me an even more challenging task twelve months later.
It appears that she had been as besotted with Judy Collins’s music for more than half a century as she had been with Phil Lesh’s music over the same period of time. So she asked me to deliver a letter from her to Judy on the afternoon that she was performing.
Now walking across a barroom floor to request a quick chat with a music superstar is a piece of cake compared to gaining access to another legendary artist in the middle of one of the world’s largest parks and when there are tens of thousands of other people in close proximity.
The afternoon arrived, and as the appointed time for Judy’s set approached, I gingerly made my way to the front of the stage – there did not appear to be an obvious place to go “backstage” – I was accosted, firmly but politely, by a burly African-American gentleman who may have been thinking I was getting a little too close.
I explained my predicament – which, even to my own mind, seemed a bit odd. He listened carefully and took the letter from me without making any promises. I did not hold out much hope for a positive response, but around five minutes later he returned in a similarly measured way and informed me that “Miss Collins has received the note”.
My joy would have been unconfined had Judy referred to it whilst she was on stage, but she did not. She did, however, sing Both Sides Now to me – well, me and many others – on my birthday.
Now I trust that many readers, notably those of a certain age and transatlantic disposition, will recall that Scott McKenzie was the singer who advised the world in 1967 that, if they were going to San Francisco, they should “be sure to wear some flowers in their hair”. That song alone had a searing impact on an impressionable fourteen year old boy living five and a half thousand miles away.
But Alan Whicker?
In appearance, with his English grammar school upbringing, clipped accent, Saville Row suit, slicked back hair, thick-set glasses and brisk moustache, he was the antithesis of the young people flocking to the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood at the time.
Whicker was an English journalist and broadcaster who forged a career spanning nearly sixty years until his death in 2013. His finest work was Whicker’s World which he presented for thirty years, travelling the world and commenting in an inimitable ironic fashion on society, and interviewing many prominent figures of the time, including the Sultan of Brunei, reputedly the richest man in the world at the time, the Haitian dictator, “Papa Doc” Duvalier and numerous high profile actors and aristocrats.
His stiff upper-lip style made him the affectionate butt of many comedians, none more memorably than the Monty Python team who delivered a sketch entitled Whicker’s Island, in which a succession of Whickers would walk on and off the screen uttering in his customary hushed tones, the catchphrase “here on Whicker’s Island”.
On 9th September 1967, the day that Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Byrds headlined at the Family Dog and Fillmore Auditorium, two of the emerging and competing concert venues in San Francisco, Whicker broadcast a programme on the BBC entitled Love Generation. The episode was groundbreaking not least for the fact that it showed scenes of drug taking, despite the corporation’s “horror” of the practice, for the first time on British television, notably in 710 Ashbury, the Grateful Dead house (Phil Lesh and Bob Weir figured prominently). In the light of the recent Mick Jagger drug bust, it was put out very late at night. Among the individuals invited to expound their hippie ideals, emerging music promoter, Chet Helms, outlined his plans for taking music and light show “happenings” to London.
It was an incisive, literate and surprisingly sympathetic piece in which Whicker spoke over footage of the large influx of youth who had hitchhiked from every state to “Hashbury”:
In the States, pot is going middle class and spreading like prohibition liquor as more and more citizens get zonked out of their minds. The drug culture enters the blood stream of American life. Like it or not, we’re living in the stoned age.
Later he was to lament that the:
Summer of Love was a short outburst of happiness that lasted only a few months. When I returned a year later the flowers and the innocence had died.
I was, like the thousands of young people that sought escape from the drabness of middle America, inspired by the message of “tune in, turn on, drop out”, though I hadn’t the means of joining the tribes.
The broadcast also gave my first experience of the Grateful Dead in performance with a beardless Jerry Garcia taking the lead on the Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion). A song title was never more apt.
News bulletins featured scenes of Gray Line tour buses crawling down Haight Street with bemused middle aged, provincial passengers staring at the carnival on the street.
And then there was Scott McKenzie.
Another character with a splendid upper lip growth, it was his song, full title San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair), which topped the charts in the UK but not (quite) the US, that so enthralled that fourteen year old boy in what was, despite the emergence of “swinging London”, still a monochrome etched country.
I took to decorating my Beatle mop with an occasional fresh daisy or buttercup. I commandeered my mother’s chocolate and purple paisley print blouse to wear to the home games of my local football team, guaranteeing that I would be bullied as mercilessly on a Saturday afternoon on the terraces as I was already being five days a week at school.
But I didn’t care.
I was a hippie.
My home grown musical diet of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Kinks and a dozen other pop groups began to be supplemented by the weird, thrilling sounds of San Francisco. But it would still be another three years before I could get my hands on the music of the Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service (thank you Keith Mason wherever you are), and before I could justifiably claim to be aboard the bus – the magic, not tourist, version.
During those same three years, I became increasingly fascinated by American culture and society. My political awakening was borne more out of opposition to the Vietnam War and support for the blacks in the Deep South, and students at Berkeley and Kent State than with the Rhodesian question or devaluation of the pound in Britain. I chose American history as one of my “A levels” at school and later studied American literature at university.
Underpinning all this was the music – my adoration for the San Franciscan bands was extended to embrace the country and folk rock idioms of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, the Eagles and, of course, Dylan. I devoured every American film I could, especially those with a counter cultural bias like Easy Rider, Two-Lane Blacktop and Alice’s Restaurant, and read George Jackson, Angela Carter and Tom Wolfe.
Those enthusiasms have endured to this day, though it would take me another quarter of a century before I first gazed adoringly on the Golden Gate Bridge or strolled down the street that had been the epicentre of my cultural life for so long.
Tony Quarrington 