Written for 1997 Memoir Class

So here I am, it’s early 1967, the Human Be-In was just a few weeks ago, and all of a sudden everybody wants to know what’s going on in this neighborhood in San Francisco, and there’s this film crew that’s walking around the neighborhood trying to document some of what’s going on. And here we are, this great brand-new garage band, and we’re standing on the sidewalk in front of our garage taking a break, maybe we haven’t even come up with the name Mt. Rushmore yet. We might still be calling ourselves the Mt. Rushmore Electro-tonic Tingle Guild, which is what Expando named us, and we actually played our first gig under that name, with the Turtles, at some high school dance in San Francisco. Expando is really Dan Smith, a young guy from Illinois who came out to the Haight and played drums for Warren’s previous band, the Blue House Basement. Which was called that obviously because they practiced in the basement of this beautiful three story Victorian on Oak street, across from the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park And I’m talking like this, completely free associating, weaving various strands in and out, while the camera comes up close to my face to document me as part of what’s going on in the Haight-Ashbury, and I’m explaining to them how Neal Cassady was the inspiration for this kind of talking that weaves all these various strands into one conversation at break-neck speed, because it’s all happening now at the same time anyway.

 

Warren is the songwriter, singer, rhythm guitar player, and he’s watching all this with some amusement because he’s known me for a couple of years now, all the way from when we first met when his band, which was then called The Vipers, after him, because he was known as The Viper then, when they invited me to come play with them the first time, up at Homer Lane, behind the campus, because they had their band together but they really needed a better drummer. It was great the first time we played together because it was probably also the first time a San Francisco rock band ever played with a light show, which of course became a very big thing. Roy Sebern had been working on mixing colors in big dishes which he would project up onto a screen while he was mixing and swirling them, and he figured it would go great with rock and roll. He was with the Pranksters, up in La Honda, at Kesey’s place, but they hadn’t really connected with the Grateful Dead yet, who might even have still been called the Warlocks. Anyway, somehow Roy found out Warren was going to be auditioning a new drummer and they put it together to do it in an abandoned shed at Homer Lane, so Roy could try out his light show idea. It was great playing along with the colors, and he swirled along with our music, and it all started flowing in together in a most amazing way. We knew we were on to something.

Warren knows I hadn’t even met Neal yet at that time, but I was really caught up in the ideas about him Kerouac had put in On the Road, which I read in high school, even before I came up north to start college. And then amazingly, not too long after that first encounter with the Vipers, it turns out one day my other buddy Norman and I go up to Kesey’s place in La Honda to try to get Norman’s guitar back, because Kesey borrowed it when the Pranksters took off on the bus to go across country and now Norman would really like to get his guitar back. (I’ll have to tell you more about Norman later, and the gang that came out from the University of Chicago, and became the Anonymous Artists of America). So we go up to La Honda, and while we’re there, maybe the most amazing thing that ever happened in my life happened, because reality crossed over with fantasy, or imagination, or literature, or whatever it was, because up pulls this Volkswagon Micro Bus, comes to a stop in the big dirt parking lot in front of Kesey’s place, still in the middle of the woods, and out pops Alan Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Neal Cassady. Neal is carrying a six-pack of beer and walks over to me and whispers in my ear really loud and frantic, “Hey man, got any amphetamines?” which I didn’t, and of course I said no. But now I don’t know if I’m reading Kerouac’s fiction, where he takes his real friends and turns them into mythology, or if I’m in my real world, awake, which of course I was, but it was a little confusing. Not confusing but very affirming that, yes, you could just use your imagination and make it up as you go along, and it will all be a gigantic story that fits together and includes having the most incredibly wild times you could imagine.

So Warren’s watching me talk while the film crew is filming, and we haven’t even played any big gigs together yet as Mt. Rushmore, although we had been playing in the park. We didn’t even have to use a generator the first time, because we could stretch a long extension cord from the house across the street to power our amplifiers. Then of course people started bringing flatbed trucks and generators for us to play on, but that hadn’t happened yet, but I’m telling this story to help make things like that happen, and I finish by walking around behind the cameraman and telling him that this kind of energy completely surrounds you until you don’t even know how to separate yourself from the exciting, pulsing, energy of life, and you just give up and dive in and enjoy the ride, and before you know it that’s the end of the little film clip.