MY FAVORITE ROCK N ROLL STORY

Another offering to take our minds off what we’re obsessing over today.

A story that still has echoes today.

I came to Los Angeles for the first time in the summer of 1967, after spending time in San Francisco. Drove down with another guy who was visiting a girlfriend. Through her we ended up crashing at The Compound, the apartment complex on Stanley Avenue just south of Santa Monica managed by Karl Metzenberg, one of the coolest people and best judges of people I ever met.

Karl took an interest in me when I found out he was a serious photographer, something I had dabbled in in the Navy. He let me use one of his cameras and I took some shots one weekend of the Be-In in Griffith Park that happened every Sunday. He liked the shots when he developed them, told me I had the one thing that couldn’t be taught, “an eye.” That was my start in becoming a writer who sees pictures.

Another Compound resident happened to mention that the L.A. Free Press was looking for writers. That was just a ten minute walk away, down Fairfax Avenue across from Canter’s then. My background of writing for the college paper back in Colorado and being an antiwar Vietnam vet got Art Kunkin interested enough to give me an assignment to see if I was any good: do an article about ‘backstage” at the Whiskey A-Go-Go. Karl suggested I take the camera he’d let me use. With the Freep card, I got in, and got upstairs. Where I immediately wondered if I should use the camera at all, given what was going on up there, but nobody seemed to mind, so I just exercised some “good taste” and didn’t shoot everything.

I wasn’t sure how good the article was but Art liked it and liked the photos even more, so I got hired. $45 a week. Actually not that bad then, the minimum wage was $1.25/hour and in those days that provided a “living wage,” unlike nowadays even at $15/hour. A guy was moving out of one of the apartments at the Compound and Karl rented it to me. Furnished. One bedroom. $40 a month. You can’t do that now.

So, a month later, it was early October, the Music Editor - Susan, whose last name I cannot remember now, but she was a woman I was in a fair awe over for her writing ability, her smarts, and the fact she was one of the coolest “L.A. Hippie chicks” I had come across - told me she was going to cover the Doors Concert that Saturday at Fullerton State College and would I like to come along and take photos? Yes, I would definitely like to do that. We went in her car, and she drove the L.A. freeways as well as she did everything else (this was back when the freeways were, well... free’… not the parking lots they are today).

Fullerton is down in what was then to us deepest darkest Orangatang County, Capitol of Everything We Weren’t, “New Jerusalem” of the American Far Right, land of the Birchers, birthplace of Richard Nixon. A place where a hippie walking down the street at night might pay extra attention to any car full of teenage boys that slowed as it passed, since they might be out looking for a hippie to beat up and prove what “Real ‘Murrikins” they were.

Fullerton State College, a part of the California State College system (now Colleges and Universities), wasn’t exactly a “cow college” but you get the idea. We got sidelong glances when we got to the door where the show was being put on in the gym.

The show was sponsored by the local chapter of Sigma Chi Fraternity. In those days, the organization was even more fascist-adjacent than it is today. The brothers were all in “uniform” - Marine boot camp buzz cut hair, blue blazers, blu “monk” shirts, red ties, khakis, black wingtips. Come to think of it, that is still the style of Republican far righties today. Basically, think Kevin McCarthy 40 years younger with a crewcut. Future Nixon campaign ratfuckers.

We were told to sit in back, a seating assignment that turned out to be fortunate as things happened. Unfortunately, since they were not going to let me near the stage, show photography coverage was going to be “thin.”

Like I said, the show was in the gym. Think 1950s high school sock hop with the audience in folding metal chairs. The stage was about ten feet by eight feet, three feet above the floor. Not much room for a Sixties rock band and their amps.

The first two rows of chairs, which were about six or seven feet from the stage, were occupied by the Sweethearts of Sigma Chi. Cheerful Aryan sorority girls also in “uniform”: little black cocktail dress, three inch heels, single strand of pearls. Bleached blonde “beehives”

Considering who was going to entertain them, it was definitely “Cap’n 1957, meet Cap’n 1967. Cap’n 1967, meet Cap’n 1957. Please endeavor not to laugh.”

The opening act was The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who had formed in Long Beach the year before and had a reputation as a good stepped-up “garage band” who did what was coming to be called “rockabilly.” This was the band Jackson Browne got his start in, but by this night he was long gone. The two leads were Jeff Hanna and Bruce Kunkel. Their first album had come out that summer and had a hit, “Buy For Me The Rain.”

The band came out and with their amps there wasn’t much room. Hanna and Kunkel broke out in laughter they had a hard time stifling when they looked out at the audience. They later told us they hadn’t realized they’d taken a time trip back to high school.

They did a good job and I wished this really was a sock hop because they were (and still are in the current iteration) a danceable band.

Then the Doors came on. Morrison was all in black. Basically the show was the first album, and he was having fun with the audience.

And of course the final song was “The End.”

And when he got to the final line - “This.... is.... the... end...”

He did a front flip over the mike stand to the gym floor, coming up perfectly and giving that yell at the end.

The Sweethearts of Sigma Chi had not been expecting that.

With a collective shriek, they all leaned back.

And their chairs started folding as they fell back.

And then it was the next row, and the next.

The “domino effect” finally ended about three rows in front of us. Like I said, the Brothers of Sigma Chi had seated us properly.

Chaos! Girls screaming!

Brothers of Sigma Chi trying to help their girlfriends to their feet.

Everyone else trying to pick themselves up off the floor.

By the time semi-order was restored, Morrison and the band were off stage. We later caught up with them and the rest in the gym locker room they’d been given as a dressing room. Everyone was laughing.

It took awhile before the roadies could go out and retrieve the equipment.

It was the greatest literal “culture clash” I ever saw.

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