Written for my 1997 Memoir Class

Linked from Mount Rushmore and Bill Graham

Thirty years later it’s a little hard for me to believe how totally invincible I felt when I was 23. In 1967 we had a garage band called Mount Rushmore, in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. We were having a great time. The five of us, and a variety of spouses and communards, lived in a beautiful Victorian 3-story house across Oak Street from the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. We had been playing some small local gigs, building up a following in the neighborhood. Our big break came when we were hired for our first job playing at Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium in July, billed behind the Butterfield Blues Band and the great blind multi-reed man, Rahsan Roland Kirk. I was quite honored to be on the same bill with both of them. Haight-Ashbury had been big news in the national media, and people had been gathering from all over the world during the so-called “Summer of Love”. The crowds and the giddy outrageousness of this giant party, or social movement, or whatever it was, were expanding daily, with no end in sight.

We played really well the first two nights, which somehow gave me the confidence to think I’d like to take a tab of Owsley’s finest for the third and final night of the gig. Amazingly in retrospect, I didn’t think it was important enough to discuss it with anyone else beforehand. I remember popping the tab in my mouth on the front porch of the house as we were walking out to the car to go to the gig. The next thing I remember, sitting behind my drums getting ready for our first set, Owsley’s finest started coming on and my drum sticks were magically dissolving in my hands. I looked up to tell Mike, the lead guitar player, about this amazing occurrence, but he couldn’t hear me, he told me in a loud, booming voice that sounded like it was coming from hundreds of miles away. Suddenly Warren counted down the first song, and we were playing. I don’t remember much about that first set, but I guess it wasn’t too bad, because I don’t remember anybody having any complaints afterwards.

We adjourned to the dressing room while Roland Kirk went on for his first set. During the break I somehow became deeply engrossed in a conversation with Butterfield’s organ player, who seemed to me like he might have had some of the same stuff I did, because we were excitedly and diligently translating radio beeps that we figured were being received from outer space. Suddenly Bill Graham, with his notoriously fierce temper, was staring at me, angrily asking, “Young man, do you realize what time it is?”

“Yes, it’s now, it’s always now,” I replied.

“You get down onto that stage or you’ll never play in this hall again!!” Graham threatened. “You were supposed to be down there five minutes ago! You’re not a big enough star to make these people wait,” he roared.

OK, down to the stage. But somehow I couldn’t quite adjust my drum stool so my foot could reach the bass drum pedal. I must have worked at it a long time, because Warren couldn’t wait any longer, and counted off the first tune without me! As my four buddies gamely played their parts, for the first time without drums, I sauntered around the stage adjusting microphones. Flash bulbs were snapping like crazy. “Look Marge, a live freak. This is the real thing. Quick, let’s get a picture”. I spent most of the set blissfully engaged in a fantasy that we were generating a broadcast beam from the top of a giant radio tower, sending and receiving waves of cosmic bliss from our San Francisco dance hall to the rest of the world.

I finally found the drums, but all I could remember about playing them was the exercises for double-stroke rolls I had learned in my drum lessons. While the band continued gamely playing the arrangements, I played snare drum crescendos climaxing in huge cymbal crashes, beautifully synchronized with what I was certain were the energetic wave patterns of the tunes. Once or twice I saw Graham or my manager standing in the audience, near the stage, glowering something about consequences.

After the set quite a crowd gathered in the dressing room. I remember my old friend from college days, who was now the bass player in Janis Joplin’s band, coming up to me and saying, “Wow, how were you able to keep it together like that? I can’t play at all when I’m tripping like that”. It struck me a little odd that he thought I had kept it together.

Over the years I’ve tried to domesticate that indomitable character within me who played drums for Mount Rushmore, and integrate his voice. It’s a huge energy, breaking boundaries, thumbing it’s nose at convention, intensely idealistic, incredibly impractical. My life since then has included long courses of discipline that have somewhat helped with this integration: zen training, therapy, years as a corporate manager, a very rich ongoing marriage, and raising two daughters. But dipping back in to tell these stories I sense for the first time an access to that raw energy in a way that is usable in the present, that empowers and enriches. I begin to remember that he started out as a product of the story-teller’s art, and I think that’s where he may finally find his happiness and opportunity to serve.