by Paul Gerald
Two signs of the times, fresh from San Francisco: The corner of Haight and Ashbury now hosts a Ben and Jerry's and a Gap, and there's an ATM at the old Fillmore Auditorium.
I went to San Francisco to follow the trail of the hippies. But being only 30 years old, I've never known exactly what the hippie thing was supposed to be all about. Drugs and music? There's still plenty of that around. Random, carefree sex? AIDS has squashed that. The spirit of protest? I'd say we're all used to marches and sit-ins now, so it's no big deal, and this generation has no Vietnam War to rally against, anyway. Sharing and love and spirituality? I'd like to think that's still available to us, even if you have to look harder to find it.
But, determined to at least visit the old haunts and see if I could hear any echoes, I plunged into "The City." I read that the first big flash of the psychedelic scene was a thing called the Trips Festival at Longshoreman's Hall -- a night of LSD and music and weird lights and freaks discovering each other -- but when I went to the Hall I encountered surly Union Men who "don't let just any ol' body come in here, especially reporters."
No hippie echoes there, to be sure, so I jumped a bus to Golden Gate Park, where the Polo Field had hosted the Human Be-In back in 1967. That day saw the Jefferson Airplane and Allen Ginsberg; this day there were only tourists riding horses and joggers wearing headphones and pushing strollers. A beautiful day in an amazing park, which includes a golf course, archery range, fly-casting pond, art museum, beach, Japanese meditation garden, and countless meadows full of flying Frisbees, but few if any hippies.
One place I knew would be all hippied-out was Haight Street, so I headed that way next. At the far end of the park I saw some actual young longhairs lounging on the grass, but instead of inviting me to share in their loving, spiritual scene, they asked me for spare change. There's a lot of that in The City.
On Haight Street, I finally began to think I was onto something. Head shops! The smell of incense! Huge murals of Bob Marley and Jerry Garcia! People smoking pot on the street! Tie-dyes! Hindu artwork! Original '60s concert posters! A meditation-and-art bed-and-breakfast?! But by the time I got to Ashbury Street and the Gap, a sort of sad thought had occurred to me: It's my impression that the hippies were into something new and exciting, and these folks are into something old. It's kind of a weird sentimental trip to be on, but then again, imitating the hippies beats imitating, say, punk-rockers or Pat Boone.
I went on a brief tour of some of the old concert halls in San Francisco. The Winterland, where The Band played "The Last Waltz," is gone, replaced by condominiums. The Carousel Ballroom (later the Fillmore West) is gone, too. The Avalon Ballroom, at Van Ness and Sutter, is now the Regency II movie theatre. They hung curtains over the wall-sized mirrors and turned the full bar upstairs into a projection room, but it's still a nice place to see a movie.
I went to the City Lights Bookstore, which was founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In its basement Ginsberg first wowed the world with his poem "Howl," an event which supposedly kicked off the whole Beat thing and which is chronicled in Jack Kerouac's On The Road. City Lights is more of a beatnik place than a hippie place, but the beatniks sort of begat the hippies, and besides, I'd been looking for some Middle East fiction, Phillipine poetry, the latest titles under the heading "Commodity Aesthetics," and 37 different books about Kerouac, so I had to go there.
I also swung by the Psychedelic Shop, which moved from Haight to Market Street long ago. If it's hippie paraphernalia you're after, you must go to this place. Some of it was over-the-top -- like the dollar bill with Garcia in the middle -- but they've got all the posters and shirts and stickers you could ever want, and they somehow wound up with the 30-foot-tall dancing skeletons that occasionally adorned the Grateful Dead's stage. I managed to escape with just a Phil Lesh postcard for my brother.
It was on my last night in San Francisco that I think I discovered what remains of the social wing, at least, of the whole Hippie Thing. I went to the original Fillmore Auditorium for a Mardi Gras celebration with a band headlined by Vince Welnick, the Grateful Dead's last keyboardist. The Fillmore is what they call the primal venue, the place where Bill Graham hosted all the shows in the Old Days.
These days, the Fillmore is a 1,100-person venue that's a dance floor downstairs, bar and restaurant upstairs, with photos and posters on every wall. There's Jim Morrison from 1967 and Eric Clapton from 1994, and what appears to be a complete collection of those tripped-out 1960s art nouveau concert posters that you can never really read.
On Fat Tuesday, with the whole Deadhead Family out in force, the Fillmore was filled with tie-dye, marijuana, and rockin' tunes. Balloons bounced, a flag-and-costumed-dancer parade snaked through the crowd, and the frosty-white chandeliers looked like they were made of snow. Dancing in that old place with those old memories, enjoying the friendly company of strangers and a little buzz, then heading off into the cool San Francisco night I may not know what it really meant to be a hippie, but I was sure glad to be alive and in The City on that night.