I thought I would look at something in the collection of stuff I have recorded now that I have this humongous (to me anyway) 50-inch big screen TV while I was eating lunch, having finally gotten through clearing all the quotes that will show up in “Turning the Tide” to satisfy the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act. I scrolled through what was there and realized that TCM had put on “Monterey Pop” this past week and I had recorded it. So I decided to watch it.
You just vividly took me back to those days almost 60 YEARS AGO—egads! While you were relishing those performers, I was going to concerts at Carnegie Hall, or, yes, going to the Village to listen to the inimitable Sarah Vaughan, singing in a smoke filled room, her voice undaunted by the cold she had the night I was there. I wish I had your amazingly detailed memory. Thank you for sharing it.
I was writing scripts about grocery prices in NYC neighborhoods which the then-Deputy Mayor would read on daily broadcasts. nights, I was involved in my first experiences with LSD. rather ill-advisedly, I talked about this stuff at work. it was a summer job. I DID read Richard Goldstein (much later, a casual friend) about Monterey and wished I'd been there...
but I do remember a LOT of concerts in Central Park that summer and a few in Tompkins Square (most notably, Country Joe and the Fish), so I wasn't completely out of things.
this was the time when, with my next-door neighbor, who was a jazz fanatic, we spent a great deal of time in the Village, going to jazz places (mostly the Village Gate, where we'd discovered back in high school that the Gate NEVER carded anyone, which wouldn't have mattered in '67 because we were legal that year). we caught Sarah Vaughan a few times, even if Blossom Dearie seemed to be the "house vocalist." I once played Chinese Handball in the men's room with Elvin Jones between sets (obviously, we were both under some kind of influence). the most amazing guy to watch was Rahsaan Roland Kirk with his multiple saxes (am I correct when I remember he had three? or was it just two?). we never caught Coltrane, although he was still alive when we'd started going.
and, as I keep telling everybody, you could do all this on very modest sums of money.
when I was twelve, I started going to standing room at the old Met...the tickets were $2.85. and a very nice lunch at the automat was less than a buck.
TC, you opened up an attic of memories. They dance in my mind; such strong sensations and vibes from growing up in America during the 50's and 60's. A jumble of memories: JFK, the Bay of Pigs and the pillbox hat. The Vietnam War, anti-war demonstrations, LBJ, Abbie Hoffman, the Chicago 7. Malcolm X, the March on Washington. Cesar Chavez and migrant workers. Jimi Hendrix, Diana Ross, Brenda Lee, Elvis Presley, Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone and the Drifters. Alvin Ailey, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Paul Taylor, Martha Graham and Twlya Tharp. Jackson Pollock, Any Warhol and Jasper Johns. The NAACP, The Black Panthers, suburbia, dingbats and Levittown. LSD, long drives on marijuana, credit cards, foreign films, Greenwich Village and San Francisco. Lots of choices: serious, exciting and alive!
I am not sure which chapter this ought to be but it will be a great one in the book you must write!
I absolutely loved reading this since from 63-70 I was tucked away in a convent having a different kind of "high" experience. But the music and the politics seeped in even to our lives. After I survived ( barely-- being an extrovert! ) a very cloistered novitiate year I emerged into the mid- 60's in a social justice way. Was secretary of the NAACP in our rural area in Florida, worked with farmworker children ( post convent, as a TV news reporter, had privilege of meeting and interviewing Cesar Chavez) and taught school in the heart of KKK country. Your great memories and writing filled in some of the lacunae I have of those times.
You have had such an interesting life....and it is far from over. Good things ahead. You may have lost your good friend Richard but now you have all of us!! Thanks, TC.
**loved your upside down/right side up image! How very true for all of us at different times.
I want to be sure that my put-down of a large chunk of the teaching profession does not include teachers like you - and the other ones who come here - if I had been in your classes, my view of the world would be different.
Not to worry. I know people had different school experiences. I am confident about my past and the way I treated my students. Confirmation for me is that 4 girls from my 4th grade class in 1970 have texted to have lunch together soon. And one of my most problematic boys from that class showed up at a campaign stop to support me when I ran for Congress in 1984. So, while I really sympathize with those who had awful experiences with teachers I know I was not guilty of treating children disrespectfully and tried very hard to respond to their different needs. It helped that I had 13 younger siblings growing up-- all very different!! But thank you for checking in on this. It is always hard to be generalized!!!
There are some really great teachers. Sadly, they are far too out numbered by the lousy to downright harmful ones. Sometimes, the one (or for the lucky kid two) great teacher(s) save something in a kid or spark something. When people go into how teachers' pay is so bad and if they got paid better we'd have better teachers, I feel like that is too simplistic. Just paying lousy, unimaginative or even cruel teachers more is not going to make them great teachers. It might attract more of the better ilk but it's not going to cull the herd.
I had several great elementary school teachers. One of them, I looked up nearly three decades after the last time I'd seen her, when I was in elementary school. We met at grand central station. Almost immediately, it was like old friends picking up from where we'd left off. Alas, she died two years later of breast cancer that she'd had at that point for a decade, at 54.
It’s pretty amazing how significant events seem to come together. This is great TC. I never made it to the Monterey Pop Festival. But did see Janice many times at the Avalon in San Francisco. She was a ball of fire. I loved her. I saw Jimmy Hendrix at a concert in San Jose and at the Fillmore in SF. Unbelievable talent that I can’t even describe. I never saw Otis Redding live but wish I had. His songs stir my heart and soul. They are beautiful and timeless. Thank you for sharing this great story of a great piece of your life.
"It’s funny, how I seem to have tripped and fallen into just about every good thing that ever happened to me"---This from TC seems to fit a lot of us. Me for sure. I also agree about 12 years of school as for me it was like prison.
I was lucky to have been sent to private schools after one bad (first grade) and one mediocre year in public school (third grade). (Second grade was a private school which my parents chose for us because the local public school was ~80% black, which they didn't think was a good idea for us. My mother's early diagnosis of me being on the spectrum probably figured into that decision).
I also did very badly in elementary school (until the fifth grade, when my brilliant teacher worked his ass off to get me on some kind of path). fabulous standardized test scores, and precocious reading, but with absolutely no semblance of "good behavior." there was just more exciting shit to do, like sneaking out of class and wandering the halls. it was the '50s, when nobody knew 'nothin' 'bout no spectrum. I was just a "behavior problem" with a nasty stammer (I still get nervous when I'm in any group in which I know I'll have to say my name).
I frequently find myself wondering whether or not I am more or less fortunate for having grown up when I did...
I think we're fortunate because, had they known about aspergers/autism then, they'd have done what they did with every other "disease" - institutionalized us, which would have made the problem worse if not destroyed us.
back then, you're probably right. in fact, I knew one or two quite well-heeled families who had VERY autistic kids and the reaction was to throw up their hands and find a "nice place."
a close friend of my father (and a family we all were friends with) had a kid who was as asperger as you can get. from the age of three he could tell you on what day any date occurred and, later, when he was old enough to gamble, his card- counting skills got him banned from every casino in the country. his parents ran around maniacally trying to find out "what was wrong." finally, about forty-odd years ago, a very "well thought of" psychiatrist decided he was a "highly functional schizophrenic." about fifteen years ago, my mother was talking about him and repeated the diagnosis. at that point, I'd worked with a good number of aspies and told her that the schizophrenia diagnosis was idiotic. she argued that after all, I was merely a psychiatric social worker and this guy was a big shot. I tried to explain to her that when the diagnosis was given, the entire profession was almost completely ignorant about the spectrum. I think she "humored" me because, as my mother, she knew that I could sometimes seem a little grandiose about what I "thought" I knew (notice I said "seem"...in these discussions, I was usually right).
in any event, Danny (the kid's name) managed to have a pretty nice life on his own terms, minus the neuroleptics he repeatedly rejected. of course, his father's financial legacy has been a big help, but I've heard that his gambling skills contributed to his resources a great deal.
did I ever tell you about the aspie kid I worked with who wanted to be psychiatrist and whose special skill was knowing immediately what anybody's psychological state was at a glance (disproving the common misconception that aspies are in some way "emotionally deficient.". he wanted to get into Bronx Science and did. this was about fourteen years ago, so he's probably in the middle of his residency. the only other being who possessed that particular skill was my late English Shepherd, Meg.
that was in no way meant to downplay the kid's genius...Meg's skill is not uncommon in dogs but extremely uncommon in homo sapiens.
Yeah, what I was thinking was that they'd probably not have institutionalized a child with Asperger's syndrome, they'd probably have stuck you on drugs, and not any that would have been actually helpful (or even any fun) and some that would have had long range negative effects.
I did fine in the private schools I went to, and I actually did fine in third grade, but it wasn't fun. In fact, when I got switched permanently to private school in 4th grade, the first few months I didn't think I was learning. Why? Because I wasn't having an unpleasant time, a condition I associated with learning. Yet, more than 60 years later, my learning in fourth grade, and after that, has stuck with me.
My mother diagnosed me as being on the spectrum probably when I was 3. I learned about the diagnosis less than five years ago, from the daughter of family friends--Amy--whose mother I suspect was the only person my mother told, and she told Amy. (I asked one of my mother's best friends if she knew about it, and she didn't.)
At the time my mother made the diagnosis, she was a grad student in psych at the University of Washington, and I think the only--or one of a very few experts--in the US was in that department.
if you're at all close to me in age (and you seem to be not that far), I have to give your mom a lot of credit for her prescience. pretty fucking brilliant. if she's still around, please quote me to her.
Alas, she's been gone for 23 years. If it hadn't been for the MS, she might still be around. Her couch potato sister with the decadent diet (as a kid I LOVED visiting my aunt and uncle's house) lived to be 90, and a cousin of theirs made it to 104. (My mother exercised until the stroke, despite the disability--swimming, and riding a British racing tricycle, with help getting on and off from my father, who rode with her. And, yes, my mother was brilliant. Brilliant family. My mother and her sister both had PhDs (and my mother could easily have had a second one). Their mother had a PhD (labor relations, 1915).
As for my age, I was born in the first year of the Eisenhower Administration.
Like my friend Burl used to say “If you remember the 60s, you weren’t there!” Some great music and acts, but the brightest lights burnt out the fastest and Hendrix was the best rock guitarist ever. The first time I heard Purple Haze on the radio I was hooked. My buddy and I were on our way home from fishing when we heard tracks from Are You Experienced…we went to every record store in downtown Honolulu but no luck finding that record. Finally at the last hole in the wall store we found one remaining album. We flipped a coin to see who got it but I lost and had to wait another week until the next shipment of LPs came in. He played some concerts locally on Maui and Oahu, including one just before he ODed…such a fantastic talent.
that old saw about not having been there if you remember the '60s is still sorta funny, but has NEVER applied to me. this very well might be what Tom refers to as our "Aspie memory," but I've forgotten very little...to the extent of being able to recall a lot of conversations word-for-word. in fact, I freaked out an old friend a few months back by recalling every exchange we had during an unpleasant conversation in 2003 during which he tried to justify the invasion of Iraq.
needless to say, he wasn't very happy about this but he's gotten over it. he'd felt like he had a sort of "special relationship" with 9/11 because on that day, he went to pick up one of his kids in school and the office told the teacher in the classroom that Jake (the kid) should just "report to the office." so, for about two minutes, Jake was sure his dad had gotten killed. I get it, but let's face it: it's a pretty slender reed to lean on when you're talking about starting a WAR.
so, in any event, yeah, I was very much in the '60s and remember most of them very, very well.
So evocative of a better time! And how I wish I'd seen Hendrix. We lost a lot when he died. And I don't think it was just music. Excellent as his music was, I always sensed there was more to him than music. Had he lived, I don't know what we would have gotten along with the music, but I always knew he had a mind, and when I finally read two bios of him, I found I was right.
The bios, by Charles Cross and Sharon Lawrence, and that's the order I recommend reading them in--Cross does the big picture, journalism style; Lawrence was Hendrix' confidante, a role someone else had chosen for her, because that person felt he needed one, and she was an excellent choice. (There are parts of Lawrence's book you can skip--the latter parts, because those aren't about him, but about the step sister who used his legacy and a lot of falsehoods about her relationship to him to make money.)
As for Ken Kesey, I lived on Perry Lane the summer of '57, a highly googleable two blocks in Menlo Park, a year before Kesey arrived there. I was 4 years old and highly impressed by the big live oak in the middle of the street. It was a magical place, but the magic is gone because Perry Lane was too close to Sand Hill Road, which became Venture Capital Boulevard. I realized I was never going back in the '00s when, looking up houses I'd lived in on Zillow, I found that #2 Perry Lane, which had been a charming 800 sq foot cottage, was now worth 1.2 million, and then, when I looked a little further, it said #2 Perry Lane had been built in 2002.
Ken Kesey retired back to Oregon and lived on a farm/ranch outside of Pleasant Hill. He lost his son Jed in a vehicle crash when the van carrying the U of O wrestling team crashed after sliding on an icy road. He bought the wrestling team their own van the following year.
There’s a bench downtown where Olive and Broadway intersect where there’s a small (30’by 50’) brick patio for food carts and a small performance venue. It depicts Kesey reading a book to small children.
I HATE when that happens. and I betcha the new place is a shithole with walls about as durable as matzoh.
it seems like every day in NYC you hear about another super-luxury building in Long Island City that's starting to fall apart before it's even occupied. and LIC had amazing potential to become a genuine mixed-income COMMUNITY (the paradigm being Sunnyside Gardens, which is actually also in LIC).
Thanks for watching and telling us all about it. Great stories like this are why we all love TCinLA, if I may be so bold as to speak for everybody else in this literary cyber-neighborhood!
I needed this Totally TC today. Signing papers for long-term care calls for a trip back in time when hair was long, skirts were short, and everything was in full-on color and music was to be remembered for 60 years. Good one.
on Criterion, they feature Otis's magnificent set two or three times, each time with a different, excellent commentary. the best one, pretty predictably, is Peter Guralnick's. he says that the Monterey set was the first time Otis did ANY of that stuff and prior to that, his performance style was just to plant himself behind the mike stand and SING. so there was definitely something in the air. or water. or weed. or...whatever.
my least favorite record executive, the miserable, lying, smug Clive Davis got his reputation as "the man with the million-dollar ears" by simply hiring all the acts at Monterey. a producer I know who worked with Clive told my songwriting partner (an Arista artist and the guy singing on my avatar) about a lunch they were having when TFF suddenly showed up. he and Clive literally got into a whole thing in which they took turns calling themselves "The greatest" whatever it was they considered themselves. this went on for, like, five minutes, which is a very long time when you consider the conversation's rather anemic content.
I did not like what you wrote here, I loved it! My ears perked up when you started talking about Redondo because I lived there from 1963 to 1976, went to high school at Redondo Union. I can tell that you had a good time writing this. I am jealous as hell that you were at Monterey. Thanks again for being so generous with your memories.
At first I just did freelance stuff for them while at the E-T. Then went to Texas and ran the Oleo Strut coffeehouse in Killeen outside Fort Hood. Came back to SF and RS was moving to the offices at Third and Market (their last in SF) and did features on politics. Finally some people questioned the way Wenner was running things, and he fired the lot of us, saying "I'll hire 10 for every one of you!" He went to NYC and did so, and I was in a funk that led to going back to college at SF State, then wasting the 70s in politics before my life got turned upside down by a great lady so I could realize I'd been living upside down and thinking I was right side up, and came down here and the rest is history. And amazingly enough, I think that lady is re-entering my life (if I'm really lucky).
Also a "1" to my "11" which according to numerologists is a match made in heaven if you have your eyes open and your brain turned on (which we now do).
I was pretty much in love with a Karen (who has shown up recently but told me we'd better not talk when I expressed an eagerness to do so--she's unhappily married, but still married and I was soooo flattered when she said this) and I've had a lifelong crush on another. so for me, it's a lovely name. the whole "Karen" thing is an unfortunate twist of fate. I wish that woman in Central Park had been named something like...I dunno...Amarilla or something.
That was fun, and I’ll return later to read the rest of the comments and maybe insert one of my own about that point in time. Lots of memories you unearthed.
I was in the parling lot at Monterey Pop and ran into two old friends from the drama department at the University of Houston, I asked them what they were up to and they said managing a rock group, wanna come back stage and meet them. In their dressing room I met the band and their lead singer, she offered a few hits from her whiskey bottle as they went on stage and I out into the crowd to witness Janis and Big Brother. Magic was in the air!
Speaking of back stage whiskey. Somehow I ended up backstage at a Doors concert in San Jose in 1968. Jim Morrison was slinking around in his leather pants and no shirt and offered me his whiskey bottle. He called me “little girl”. It was a memorable experience for sure.
by all accounts (and I'm talking people like Bruce Botnick), he was quite an asshole. the late Eve Babitz wrote in a few places that she'd been his girlfriend before The Doors happened and that his whole deal was that he'd grown up as a fat kid, lost a lot of weight one summer by the usual means and was thereafter inclined to believe his own press.
I was a Doors fan for the first six months after the album came out, was very excited by their Fillmore East debut but for me, they lost their bloom very quickly after that.
He was widely known in LA as a supreme asshole. I do, however, have one good memory: in early October 1967, Sigma Chi Fraternity at Fullerton State College down in deepest Orangutang County, put on a concert with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Doors. It was held in the school gym, with a "stage about 7' x 5', a whole 3' high, and the audience sat in folding metal chairs. The Brothers - all wearing crew cuts, blue blazers with white shirts and regimental ties, tan slacks and Oxfords - glared at us "hippies" from the LA Free Press who were there to cover it, and made sure we were in a rear row. The Sweethearts of Sigma Chi, all Aryan blonde sorority chicks in little black dresses with a single strand of pearls and high heels, were seated in the front two rows. (all of this is important in light of what happened)
The Doors gave a good show. And the final song, naturally was "This Is The End." And when Morrison got to the final line, he sang: "This... Is... The... End..." as he did a forward flip over the mike stand, off the stage, to land on his feet directly in front of the Sweethearts. All of whom shrieked and leaned back in their chairs. Which toppled over into the rows behind. Which all went down like rows of dominos, spilling the audience onto the floor accompanied by more shrieks and yells.
The "domino effect" ended two rows ahead of our rear row seats. We, however, were laughing so hard that we also fell out of our seats.
I knew Oliver at the time (Platoon and In The Year of the Monkey were at one time for about six weeks in competition to see which one would go to the Philippines first), and told him the story. He even laughed when I got to the punch line. It might have saved the movie, and certainly was an "Oliver Stone joke."
I believe he was an asshole David. Just going by my one account of his behavior/demeanor that evening back stage. I really liked The Doors when they first came out. But they lost their appeal after awhile. In fact I still listen to a lot of music from that era, but not the Doors.
I don't either. and I also still listen to plenty of late '60s stuff. The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield get played a lot. and I will always maintain that The Band was the greatest group in the world for their first two albums (especially the second). the guy singing on my avatar was involved in a fabulous album that came out a long time ago called "Largo" on which he got to play with Levon Helm and Garth Hudson. if you don't know it, check it out. I had nothing to do with it, alas.
see, that's the kind of shit that NEVER happened to me. this might be because I was ALWAYS the first one to pass out. there's a trick to it: slug back the first half pint on an empty stomach before you start to dance and the last thing you'll remember from the second half pint is that you were dancing and then something bad probably happened, but you won't find out what it was until the next day's phone calls. there are still one or two people who don't want to talk to me because of something that happened fifty years ago...
I DID once walk into a party not too drunk to walk, saw somebody, kissed her and we were engaged by the end of the week and six months later, she broke my heart for the first time. she managed it again, twice. she's still around, writing frequent letters to various editors about the paucity of good services for her Aspie son.
she's an Aries. the fire and air thing...and the air is the one immediately consumed, right?
hey...when I actually got married, it was the best possible choice and easily the best possible person. which, needless to say, I didn't appreciate.
the stuff prior to that was "practice."
whenever I object to misogynistic things I hear from friends, they tell me to shut up because my wife was "different" and, unlike most guys, actually "like" women.
I think there's some unfortunate truth about the first part; the second part I'm in no position to comment on, being the subject.
I wasn't drinking when the make-out happened. I mean I hadn't taken up drinking. That was around six years in the future, and I was never a big drinker. (I've only had two hangovers in my life, one xmas day 1974, and one in November of '89.)
And, in my senior year of high school, I had this friend, a black girl, who did astrology, and consoled me when something didn't work out with someone telling me that the someone was an Aries and that one doesn't want to get involved with an Aries.
You just vividly took me back to those days almost 60 YEARS AGO—egads! While you were relishing those performers, I was going to concerts at Carnegie Hall, or, yes, going to the Village to listen to the inimitable Sarah Vaughan, singing in a smoke filled room, her voice undaunted by the cold she had the night I was there. I wish I had your amazingly detailed memory. Thank you for sharing it.
I was writing scripts about grocery prices in NYC neighborhoods which the then-Deputy Mayor would read on daily broadcasts. nights, I was involved in my first experiences with LSD. rather ill-advisedly, I talked about this stuff at work. it was a summer job. I DID read Richard Goldstein (much later, a casual friend) about Monterey and wished I'd been there...
but I do remember a LOT of concerts in Central Park that summer and a few in Tompkins Square (most notably, Country Joe and the Fish), so I wasn't completely out of things.
this was the time when, with my next-door neighbor, who was a jazz fanatic, we spent a great deal of time in the Village, going to jazz places (mostly the Village Gate, where we'd discovered back in high school that the Gate NEVER carded anyone, which wouldn't have mattered in '67 because we were legal that year). we caught Sarah Vaughan a few times, even if Blossom Dearie seemed to be the "house vocalist." I once played Chinese Handball in the men's room with Elvin Jones between sets (obviously, we were both under some kind of influence). the most amazing guy to watch was Rahsaan Roland Kirk with his multiple saxes (am I correct when I remember he had three? or was it just two?). we never caught Coltrane, although he was still alive when we'd started going.
and, as I keep telling everybody, you could do all this on very modest sums of money.
when I was twelve, I started going to standing room at the old Met...the tickets were $2.85. and a very nice lunch at the automat was less than a buck.
TC, you opened up an attic of memories. They dance in my mind; such strong sensations and vibes from growing up in America during the 50's and 60's. A jumble of memories: JFK, the Bay of Pigs and the pillbox hat. The Vietnam War, anti-war demonstrations, LBJ, Abbie Hoffman, the Chicago 7. Malcolm X, the March on Washington. Cesar Chavez and migrant workers. Jimi Hendrix, Diana Ross, Brenda Lee, Elvis Presley, Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone and the Drifters. Alvin Ailey, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Paul Taylor, Martha Graham and Twlya Tharp. Jackson Pollock, Any Warhol and Jasper Johns. The NAACP, The Black Panthers, suburbia, dingbats and Levittown. LSD, long drives on marijuana, credit cards, foreign films, Greenwich Village and San Francisco. Lots of choices: serious, exciting and alive!
I am not sure which chapter this ought to be but it will be a great one in the book you must write!
I absolutely loved reading this since from 63-70 I was tucked away in a convent having a different kind of "high" experience. But the music and the politics seeped in even to our lives. After I survived ( barely-- being an extrovert! ) a very cloistered novitiate year I emerged into the mid- 60's in a social justice way. Was secretary of the NAACP in our rural area in Florida, worked with farmworker children ( post convent, as a TV news reporter, had privilege of meeting and interviewing Cesar Chavez) and taught school in the heart of KKK country. Your great memories and writing filled in some of the lacunae I have of those times.
You have had such an interesting life....and it is far from over. Good things ahead. You may have lost your good friend Richard but now you have all of us!! Thanks, TC.
**loved your upside down/right side up image! How very true for all of us at different times.
I want to be sure that my put-down of a large chunk of the teaching profession does not include teachers like you - and the other ones who come here - if I had been in your classes, my view of the world would be different.
Not to worry. I know people had different school experiences. I am confident about my past and the way I treated my students. Confirmation for me is that 4 girls from my 4th grade class in 1970 have texted to have lunch together soon. And one of my most problematic boys from that class showed up at a campaign stop to support me when I ran for Congress in 1984. So, while I really sympathize with those who had awful experiences with teachers I know I was not guilty of treating children disrespectfully and tried very hard to respond to their different needs. It helped that I had 13 younger siblings growing up-- all very different!! But thank you for checking in on this. It is always hard to be generalized!!!
There are some really great teachers. Sadly, they are far too out numbered by the lousy to downright harmful ones. Sometimes, the one (or for the lucky kid two) great teacher(s) save something in a kid or spark something. When people go into how teachers' pay is so bad and if they got paid better we'd have better teachers, I feel like that is too simplistic. Just paying lousy, unimaginative or even cruel teachers more is not going to make them great teachers. It might attract more of the better ilk but it's not going to cull the herd.
I had several great elementary school teachers. One of them, I looked up nearly three decades after the last time I'd seen her, when I was in elementary school. We met at grand central station. Almost immediately, it was like old friends picking up from where we'd left off. Alas, she died two years later of breast cancer that she'd had at that point for a decade, at 54.
It’s pretty amazing how significant events seem to come together. This is great TC. I never made it to the Monterey Pop Festival. But did see Janice many times at the Avalon in San Francisco. She was a ball of fire. I loved her. I saw Jimmy Hendrix at a concert in San Jose and at the Fillmore in SF. Unbelievable talent that I can’t even describe. I never saw Otis Redding live but wish I had. His songs stir my heart and soul. They are beautiful and timeless. Thank you for sharing this great story of a great piece of your life.
One night in Winterland, when she was drunk, she hit on me in the bar. Fortunately my wife reappeared and I was saved. :-)
Saved by the wife!😹
Narrow escape, ha
Cool stuff, TC! (And you had a WAY better trip through the 60's than I!)
Me too Pat.
"It’s funny, how I seem to have tripped and fallen into just about every good thing that ever happened to me"---This from TC seems to fit a lot of us. Me for sure. I also agree about 12 years of school as for me it was like prison.
I was lucky to have been sent to private schools after one bad (first grade) and one mediocre year in public school (third grade). (Second grade was a private school which my parents chose for us because the local public school was ~80% black, which they didn't think was a good idea for us. My mother's early diagnosis of me being on the spectrum probably figured into that decision).
I also did very badly in elementary school (until the fifth grade, when my brilliant teacher worked his ass off to get me on some kind of path). fabulous standardized test scores, and precocious reading, but with absolutely no semblance of "good behavior." there was just more exciting shit to do, like sneaking out of class and wandering the halls. it was the '50s, when nobody knew 'nothin' 'bout no spectrum. I was just a "behavior problem" with a nasty stammer (I still get nervous when I'm in any group in which I know I'll have to say my name).
I frequently find myself wondering whether or not I am more or less fortunate for having grown up when I did...
I think we're fortunate because, had they known about aspergers/autism then, they'd have done what they did with every other "disease" - institutionalized us, which would have made the problem worse if not destroyed us.
back then, you're probably right. in fact, I knew one or two quite well-heeled families who had VERY autistic kids and the reaction was to throw up their hands and find a "nice place."
a close friend of my father (and a family we all were friends with) had a kid who was as asperger as you can get. from the age of three he could tell you on what day any date occurred and, later, when he was old enough to gamble, his card- counting skills got him banned from every casino in the country. his parents ran around maniacally trying to find out "what was wrong." finally, about forty-odd years ago, a very "well thought of" psychiatrist decided he was a "highly functional schizophrenic." about fifteen years ago, my mother was talking about him and repeated the diagnosis. at that point, I'd worked with a good number of aspies and told her that the schizophrenia diagnosis was idiotic. she argued that after all, I was merely a psychiatric social worker and this guy was a big shot. I tried to explain to her that when the diagnosis was given, the entire profession was almost completely ignorant about the spectrum. I think she "humored" me because, as my mother, she knew that I could sometimes seem a little grandiose about what I "thought" I knew (notice I said "seem"...in these discussions, I was usually right).
in any event, Danny (the kid's name) managed to have a pretty nice life on his own terms, minus the neuroleptics he repeatedly rejected. of course, his father's financial legacy has been a big help, but I've heard that his gambling skills contributed to his resources a great deal.
did I ever tell you about the aspie kid I worked with who wanted to be psychiatrist and whose special skill was knowing immediately what anybody's psychological state was at a glance (disproving the common misconception that aspies are in some way "emotionally deficient.". he wanted to get into Bronx Science and did. this was about fourteen years ago, so he's probably in the middle of his residency. the only other being who possessed that particular skill was my late English Shepherd, Meg.
that was in no way meant to downplay the kid's genius...Meg's skill is not uncommon in dogs but extremely uncommon in homo sapiens.
Yeah, what I was thinking was that they'd probably not have institutionalized a child with Asperger's syndrome, they'd probably have stuck you on drugs, and not any that would have been actually helpful (or even any fun) and some that would have had long range negative effects.
I did fine in the private schools I went to, and I actually did fine in third grade, but it wasn't fun. In fact, when I got switched permanently to private school in 4th grade, the first few months I didn't think I was learning. Why? Because I wasn't having an unpleasant time, a condition I associated with learning. Yet, more than 60 years later, my learning in fourth grade, and after that, has stuck with me.
My mother diagnosed me as being on the spectrum probably when I was 3. I learned about the diagnosis less than five years ago, from the daughter of family friends--Amy--whose mother I suspect was the only person my mother told, and she told Amy. (I asked one of my mother's best friends if she knew about it, and she didn't.)
At the time my mother made the diagnosis, she was a grad student in psych at the University of Washington, and I think the only--or one of a very few experts--in the US was in that department.
This story elicited the revelation from Amy.
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/The-home-forum/2020/0805/heeding-her-invitation-six-decades-later
if you're at all close to me in age (and you seem to be not that far), I have to give your mom a lot of credit for her prescience. pretty fucking brilliant. if she's still around, please quote me to her.
Alas, she's been gone for 23 years. If it hadn't been for the MS, she might still be around. Her couch potato sister with the decadent diet (as a kid I LOVED visiting my aunt and uncle's house) lived to be 90, and a cousin of theirs made it to 104. (My mother exercised until the stroke, despite the disability--swimming, and riding a British racing tricycle, with help getting on and off from my father, who rode with her. And, yes, my mother was brilliant. Brilliant family. My mother and her sister both had PhDs (and my mother could easily have had a second one). Their mother had a PhD (labor relations, 1915).
As for my age, I was born in the first year of the Eisenhower Administration.
A mere child! :-)
my sentiment exactly. I have four years on you and Tom has four on me. do you think this might somehow be...MEANINGFUL?
Hardly. I'm 154 in base six.
Like my friend Burl used to say “If you remember the 60s, you weren’t there!” Some great music and acts, but the brightest lights burnt out the fastest and Hendrix was the best rock guitarist ever. The first time I heard Purple Haze on the radio I was hooked. My buddy and I were on our way home from fishing when we heard tracks from Are You Experienced…we went to every record store in downtown Honolulu but no luck finding that record. Finally at the last hole in the wall store we found one remaining album. We flipped a coin to see who got it but I lost and had to wait another week until the next shipment of LPs came in. He played some concerts locally on Maui and Oahu, including one just before he ODed…such a fantastic talent.
that old saw about not having been there if you remember the '60s is still sorta funny, but has NEVER applied to me. this very well might be what Tom refers to as our "Aspie memory," but I've forgotten very little...to the extent of being able to recall a lot of conversations word-for-word. in fact, I freaked out an old friend a few months back by recalling every exchange we had during an unpleasant conversation in 2003 during which he tried to justify the invasion of Iraq.
needless to say, he wasn't very happy about this but he's gotten over it. he'd felt like he had a sort of "special relationship" with 9/11 because on that day, he went to pick up one of his kids in school and the office told the teacher in the classroom that Jake (the kid) should just "report to the office." so, for about two minutes, Jake was sure his dad had gotten killed. I get it, but let's face it: it's a pretty slender reed to lean on when you're talking about starting a WAR.
so, in any event, yeah, I was very much in the '60s and remember most of them very, very well.
So evocative of a better time! And how I wish I'd seen Hendrix. We lost a lot when he died. And I don't think it was just music. Excellent as his music was, I always sensed there was more to him than music. Had he lived, I don't know what we would have gotten along with the music, but I always knew he had a mind, and when I finally read two bios of him, I found I was right.
The bios, by Charles Cross and Sharon Lawrence, and that's the order I recommend reading them in--Cross does the big picture, journalism style; Lawrence was Hendrix' confidante, a role someone else had chosen for her, because that person felt he needed one, and she was an excellent choice. (There are parts of Lawrence's book you can skip--the latter parts, because those aren't about him, but about the step sister who used his legacy and a lot of falsehoods about her relationship to him to make money.)
As for Ken Kesey, I lived on Perry Lane the summer of '57, a highly googleable two blocks in Menlo Park, a year before Kesey arrived there. I was 4 years old and highly impressed by the big live oak in the middle of the street. It was a magical place, but the magic is gone because Perry Lane was too close to Sand Hill Road, which became Venture Capital Boulevard. I realized I was never going back in the '00s when, looking up houses I'd lived in on Zillow, I found that #2 Perry Lane, which had been a charming 800 sq foot cottage, was now worth 1.2 million, and then, when I looked a little further, it said #2 Perry Lane had been built in 2002.
Ken Kesey retired back to Oregon and lived on a farm/ranch outside of Pleasant Hill. He lost his son Jed in a vehicle crash when the van carrying the U of O wrestling team crashed after sliding on an icy road. He bought the wrestling team their own van the following year.
There’s a bench downtown where Olive and Broadway intersect where there’s a small (30’by 50’) brick patio for food carts and a small performance venue. It depicts Kesey reading a book to small children.
What a wonderful thing to have done after losing his kid--to buy the team their own van!
He was a good man and a great community member.
That's really nice to hear!
I HATE when that happens. and I betcha the new place is a shithole with walls about as durable as matzoh.
it seems like every day in NYC you hear about another super-luxury building in Long Island City that's starting to fall apart before it's even occupied. and LIC had amazing potential to become a genuine mixed-income COMMUNITY (the paradigm being Sunnyside Gardens, which is actually also in LIC).
grift, grift Horatio...
Thanks for watching and telling us all about it. Great stories like this are why we all love TCinLA, if I may be so bold as to speak for everybody else in this literary cyber-neighborhood!
Great stories. Treasure those memories!!
I needed this Totally TC today. Signing papers for long-term care calls for a trip back in time when hair was long, skirts were short, and everything was in full-on color and music was to be remembered for 60 years. Good one.
Good luck with that. I hope you found a place as good as the hospice that cared for Jurate in her final 18 months.
We think we have. Time will tell. Be well.
“I was there” stories are always fascinating
History bends to circumstance
on Criterion, they feature Otis's magnificent set two or three times, each time with a different, excellent commentary. the best one, pretty predictably, is Peter Guralnick's. he says that the Monterey set was the first time Otis did ANY of that stuff and prior to that, his performance style was just to plant himself behind the mike stand and SING. so there was definitely something in the air. or water. or weed. or...whatever.
my least favorite record executive, the miserable, lying, smug Clive Davis got his reputation as "the man with the million-dollar ears" by simply hiring all the acts at Monterey. a producer I know who worked with Clive told my songwriting partner (an Arista artist and the guy singing on my avatar) about a lunch they were having when TFF suddenly showed up. he and Clive literally got into a whole thing in which they took turns calling themselves "The greatest" whatever it was they considered themselves. this went on for, like, five minutes, which is a very long time when you consider the conversation's rather anemic content.
I did not like what you wrote here, I loved it! My ears perked up when you started talking about Redondo because I lived there from 1963 to 1976, went to high school at Redondo Union. I can tell that you had a good time writing this. I am jealous as hell that you were at Monterey. Thanks again for being so generous with your memories.
Hilarious account of Monterey Pop. I’d be interested to hear more about your time at Rolling Stone
At first I just did freelance stuff for them while at the E-T. Then went to Texas and ran the Oleo Strut coffeehouse in Killeen outside Fort Hood. Came back to SF and RS was moving to the offices at Third and Market (their last in SF) and did features on politics. Finally some people questioned the way Wenner was running things, and he fired the lot of us, saying "I'll hire 10 for every one of you!" He went to NYC and did so, and I was in a funk that led to going back to college at SF State, then wasting the 70s in politics before my life got turned upside down by a great lady so I could realize I'd been living upside down and thinking I was right side up, and came down here and the rest is history. And amazingly enough, I think that lady is re-entering my life (if I'm really lucky).
Waiting 56 years, had someone re-enter after 44 years, but that’s another story. Aren’t they all…. Good luck
Best of luck on that!!!
She’s not the Scorpio is she?😹
Nope. Karen's a Virgo.
Also a "1" to my "11" which according to numerologists is a match made in heaven if you have your eyes open and your brain turned on (which we now do).
That’s good and I say that as a Scorpio. She has a great name. Even though we Karen’s get a bad rap. It really is unfair.
Ohhh.... I hope I never meet you in person. You do know what they say about Cancer males and Scorpio females? (kidding)
I was pretty much in love with a Karen (who has shown up recently but told me we'd better not talk when I expressed an eagerness to do so--she's unhappily married, but still married and I was soooo flattered when she said this) and I've had a lifelong crush on another. so for me, it's a lovely name. the whole "Karen" thing is an unfortunate twist of fate. I wish that woman in Central Park had been named something like...I dunno...Amarilla or something.
It is really cool that you two have reconnected. I hope everything works out well for you.
Well yes...it can be dangerous. Best keep our distance and limit our communication to Substack.😹
I laughed out loud.
Tom,
That was fun, and I’ll return later to read the rest of the comments and maybe insert one of my own about that point in time. Lots of memories you unearthed.
You danced with Michelle and I made out with Mackenzie.
I was in the parling lot at Monterey Pop and ran into two old friends from the drama department at the University of Houston, I asked them what they were up to and they said managing a rock group, wanna come back stage and meet them. In their dressing room I met the band and their lead singer, she offered a few hits from her whiskey bottle as they went on stage and I out into the crowd to witness Janis and Big Brother. Magic was in the air!
That is truly one very cool story.
Now, that's a cool story.
Speaking of back stage whiskey. Somehow I ended up backstage at a Doors concert in San Jose in 1968. Jim Morrison was slinking around in his leather pants and no shirt and offered me his whiskey bottle. He called me “little girl”. It was a memorable experience for sure.
You're lucky you escaped safe, in 1968.
by all accounts (and I'm talking people like Bruce Botnick), he was quite an asshole. the late Eve Babitz wrote in a few places that she'd been his girlfriend before The Doors happened and that his whole deal was that he'd grown up as a fat kid, lost a lot of weight one summer by the usual means and was thereafter inclined to believe his own press.
I was a Doors fan for the first six months after the album came out, was very excited by their Fillmore East debut but for me, they lost their bloom very quickly after that.
sorry if I'm offending any Doors fans...
He was widely known in LA as a supreme asshole. I do, however, have one good memory: in early October 1967, Sigma Chi Fraternity at Fullerton State College down in deepest Orangutang County, put on a concert with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Doors. It was held in the school gym, with a "stage about 7' x 5', a whole 3' high, and the audience sat in folding metal chairs. The Brothers - all wearing crew cuts, blue blazers with white shirts and regimental ties, tan slacks and Oxfords - glared at us "hippies" from the LA Free Press who were there to cover it, and made sure we were in a rear row. The Sweethearts of Sigma Chi, all Aryan blonde sorority chicks in little black dresses with a single strand of pearls and high heels, were seated in the front two rows. (all of this is important in light of what happened)
The Doors gave a good show. And the final song, naturally was "This Is The End." And when Morrison got to the final line, he sang: "This... Is... The... End..." as he did a forward flip over the mike stand, off the stage, to land on his feet directly in front of the Sweethearts. All of whom shrieked and leaned back in their chairs. Which toppled over into the rows behind. Which all went down like rows of dominos, spilling the audience onto the floor accompanied by more shrieks and yells.
The "domino effect" ended two rows ahead of our rear row seats. We, however, were laughing so hard that we also fell out of our seats.
now THAT is truly a fabulous story. and jeez...it never made it into the wretched Oliver Stone movie. I wonder why.
that was an Oliver Stone joke.
I knew Oliver at the time (Platoon and In The Year of the Monkey were at one time for about six weeks in competition to see which one would go to the Philippines first), and told him the story. He even laughed when I got to the punch line. It might have saved the movie, and certainly was an "Oliver Stone joke."
😹😹
I believe he was an asshole David. Just going by my one account of his behavior/demeanor that evening back stage. I really liked The Doors when they first came out. But they lost their appeal after awhile. In fact I still listen to a lot of music from that era, but not the Doors.
I don't either. and I also still listen to plenty of late '60s stuff. The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield get played a lot. and I will always maintain that The Band was the greatest group in the world for their first two albums (especially the second). the guy singing on my avatar was involved in a fabulous album that came out a long time ago called "Largo" on which he got to play with Levon Helm and Garth Hudson. if you don't know it, check it out. I had nothing to do with it, alas.
I was such a "good girl" growing up in the '50s, the only famous person I once danced with was Lawrence Welk. Love these stories!
And I made out with the mother of a very well liked figure on Capitol Hill--back in the early '80s. That's how I know I'm old!
I got a BJ from a local newscaster once in the bathroom of the station. She died a few years back.
see, that's the kind of shit that NEVER happened to me. this might be because I was ALWAYS the first one to pass out. there's a trick to it: slug back the first half pint on an empty stomach before you start to dance and the last thing you'll remember from the second half pint is that you were dancing and then something bad probably happened, but you won't find out what it was until the next day's phone calls. there are still one or two people who don't want to talk to me because of something that happened fifty years ago...
I DID once walk into a party not too drunk to walk, saw somebody, kissed her and we were engaged by the end of the week and six months later, she broke my heart for the first time. she managed it again, twice. she's still around, writing frequent letters to various editors about the paucity of good services for her Aspie son.
she's an Aries. the fire and air thing...and the air is the one immediately consumed, right?
LOL. That's almost as bad as me. Mine got a house and left me homeless and bankrupt.
hey...when I actually got married, it was the best possible choice and easily the best possible person. which, needless to say, I didn't appreciate.
the stuff prior to that was "practice."
whenever I object to misogynistic things I hear from friends, they tell me to shut up because my wife was "different" and, unlike most guys, actually "like" women.
I think there's some unfortunate truth about the first part; the second part I'm in no position to comment on, being the subject.
Right.
I wasn't drinking when the make-out happened. I mean I hadn't taken up drinking. That was around six years in the future, and I was never a big drinker. (I've only had two hangovers in my life, one xmas day 1974, and one in November of '89.)
And, in my senior year of high school, I had this friend, a black girl, who did astrology, and consoled me when something didn't work out with someone telling me that the someone was an Aries and that one doesn't want to get involved with an Aries.
OMG!!!
My partner in the make out is alas, long gone.
this is sounding more and more like a game of...is it "Botticelli?"
???
that game where you think of someone and give hints for the opposing player to guess that person's identity.
I THINK...