Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

—former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman, interview with Harper’s writer Dan Baum

In the final year of the unsettled Sixties, several milestones marked the era. In January, Richard Nixon became the thirty-seventh president of the United States. Later that year, Nixon addressed the nation, asking the “silent majority” to join him in solidarity with the Vietnam War effort, and attack-dog Spiro Agnew, his vice president (who later resigned after being investigated for conspiracy, bribery, extortion, and tax fraud) denounced the president’s critics as “an effete corps of impudent snobs” and “nattering nabobs of negativism.” In May, an American teenager died in St. Louis, Missouri, of a baffling medical condition—later confirmed as the first known case of HIV/AIDS in North America. In June, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio once again caught fire, leading ultimately to the Clean Water Act and the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Also in June, a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a Mafia-owned gay bar in New York City, led to days of rioting as the gay rights movement went public in a big way. In July, the lunar module Eagle/Apollo 11 landed on the moon. That fall, journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai Massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops, and in December, the Selective Service conducted the first draft lottery to conscript new troops for the war. Also in December, Black Panther Party members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were shot dead in their sleep during a raid by Chicago police officers.

Perhaps of more import for hippies, trying as they might to establish an alternative universe, two August events signaled significant change to their prospects. The first, the Manson murders, played in the media nationwide, a lurid story of a drugged-out “hippie” family killing seven California people as a prelude to what they envisioned as an apocalyptic race war. Unfortunately, this played into the conservative notion of sex-enslaved stoned longhairs fomenting havoc in sober Middle America. Conversely, though, in some twisted way, it provided some measure of protection for those targeted for physical abuse and worse: Suddenly the whole nation knew that there were some real fucking crazies out there. Now it wasn’t only in New York City and other big environs where some hippie could possibly go ghetto on you. Though never remotely connected with any real hippie notion and alternative lifestyle, Manson nevertheless impacted the scene through his unconscionable acts.

The second momentous event in August 1969, Woodstock, saw a half-million young’uns show up for the rock phantasmagoria on Max Yasgur’s farm in Upstate New York. Upon hearing of the planned festival, locals had posted signs declaring: “Stop Max’s Hippie Music Festival. No 150,000 hippies here.” But Yasgur persisted, reportedly saying “if the generation gap is to be closed, we older people have to do more than we have done.” Quite a noble sentiment for the time, though nobody had any idea it would prove to be such a gathering. Originally scheduled over three days, August 15 to 17, it ultimately ran four days long, ending on a Monday with a two-hour set from Jimi Hendrix.

The event led to joyous celebration of the hip ethos, immortalized in the Joni Mitchell anthem “Woodstock” made popular by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Despite heavy rains that turned the fields into a quagmire and sundry logistical nightmares for basic human needs, the festival remained peaceful, with only two recorded fatalities: one from an overdose and another when a tractor ran over an attendee sleeping in a nearby field. As Joni Mitchell later intoned, “Woodstock was a spark of beauty” where half-a-million kids “saw that they were part of a greater organism.”

Ricky V. and a number of other Fillmore employees were employed strategically in and around the stage because of their familiarity with many different band members. He remembers mostly getting about eight hours of sleep over the course of five days. Sis and a number of the Canandaigua crowd made it as well, but I missed it. I had moved on. My move out of the big city “back to the country” (a byword of the time) proved to be stymied by the lingering hostility in small-town Canandaigua. Like many other hippies, I looked to get out of the big-city madness and find a place where I could figure out who exactly I would be.

Disenchanted with my prospects in Canandaigua, I got in touch with Bro. While in San Francisco, Bro had begun hanging out with a group of folks from Texas, who extolled the virtues of laid-back Austin, the state capital and home to the University of Texas. He had settled into a cheap rent house there with friends and offered me a place to explore my inner space, insulated by a small but growing community of the hip in and around the university campus, the defensible perimeter allowing for a modicum of security. He survived by selling lids of pot to the like-minded, buying a pound and peddling enough to pay rent and buy food. This was made possible because Austin remained at the time one of the cheapest places to live in the country.

So I booked a flight and deplaned right onto the tarmac of the old Austin airport—at not yet eight in the morning but with the temperature already climbing through the eighties with ungodly humidity. I wondered what I had gotten into. Then lugging a large chest of all my worldly belongings, I hit the road and stuck out my thumb to hitch a ride to wherever Bro lived. I had no idea. Almost immediately a young hipster, Lynn, picked me up. He knew my brother and took me right to his house, miles away. Such was the bond of kindred spirits at the time.

I quickly settled in to a new ascetic lifestyle, living in the unairconditioned old house with a fan in the window pointed at my mattress to cool off at night, a daily morning ritual of yoga, and a diet of wheat germ in the morning and rice and vegetables at night. I read whatever books I could find or borrow, exploring new chords on an old guitar there. I kept mostly to myself, monastic to the point that Bro’s live-in at the time, Nance (ultimately mother of his first two kids), remarked that I was getting too skinny, going too far in my self-deprivation. But I thought I was “getting it.” We managed to see a show or two at the hippie club downtown, the Vulcan Gas Company, but quite the music snob, I wasn’t impressed: It seemed a far cry from the big-time glitz of the Fillmore. And anything short of the Beatles failed to impress. But the funky club did allow sanctum for the small but growing number of hipsters settling in town, morphing into a sanctuary city of sorts much as it would in another time.

Austin provided something that small towns like Canandaigua lacked—a certain anonymity, a chance to be left alone to “do you own thing” (another watchword of the time). Just leave me alone to find my own way. Austin was big enough to allow a person to hide away from the muddle and mayhem of 1969 yet not given over to the dark aspects of a large city seen in New York and San Francisco.

As summer heat seared the capital city into somnolence, time slowed and life proceeded at a more measured pace. This time of year also marked when the marijuana harvest season ended, an annual ritual when the supply of pot dried up—immortalized in the song “Henry” by the New Riders of the Purple Sage (“Every year along about this time it all goes dry / Nothin’ round for love or money that’ll get you high”). With money running short, I tried to do my part by getting a gig driving an ice cream truck.

My first route fell on the east side of the north-south Interstate 35 in a predominately Hispanic neighborhood, where I got a taste of discrimination Texas style. Then, and still apparent now, the “others” in Austin society were segregated in neighborhoods east of I-35, with blacks mainly in the northern portion, Hispanics the southern. Houses in the ramshackle neighborhood I drove as I ventured forth were nevertheless neat and clean, obviously maintained with care, though the overall asperity of living conditions—and the life it bred—quickly became apparent.

A small group of kids appeared and hailed Mr. Icecream Man, and I pulled over for the sale. Before I could park the truck and step back to attend to the tykes, they had leaped on board and begun rifling through the cooler, grabbing what they could and hightailing it when I roared into action. After an agitated day with few sales, I returned to home base ready to chuck the job. Faced with losing a driver, the boss switched me to a safer route, one down by the university’s married-student housing on the west side of I-35. Though also economically challenged, the area did hold a number of hippie families with kids attuned to the jingle of the ice-cream truck, and allowed me to eke out enough return to help restock the larder at home.

Life seemed to settle into a blissful and peaceful pace, allowing for a modicum of contentment. Bro, more accomplished on guitar than I, worked to put together a small band to play the few clubs catering to the hipsters clumped in neighborhoods around the university. I worked on that happiness thing.

But just when everything seemed to be headed in the right direction, reality intruded, as it often does. Since leaving school, I had avoided the draft by happenstance, merely by relocating my draft board. I had gone from my initial notice for induction in NYC, moving my board upstate, then moving it again after I flew to Austin. Then the dreaded day came when I received a letter: Selective Service was inviting me to Dallas for an induction physical. This was not good.

Aside from the general fact I sought a peaceful, monastic existence removed from the surreal reality of life in these United States, I had more specifically grown even more increasingly radical in my opposition to the war. My foray into political science had hardened my resistance to the politics of the status quo—and to what I perceived as a colonial war against an independence movement in Vietnam. Before leaving Canandaigua, I had been enlisted to speak in opposition when a representative of the draft board spoke at the local community college. Someone who must have thought I looked intelligent or at least sane asked me to get the ball rolling in the question-and-answer session that followed. Emboldened by this trust, I launched into a diatribe questioning the very legality of the war, given that the U.S. had abrogated the Geneva Accords of 1954 proclaiming that Vietnam should hold an election to determine who should govern after the French colonial regime had been whipped. That started the ball rolling on a raucous discussion—and no doubt added to the file law-’n’-order compiled on me.

So when faced with the inevitable draft notice, I mulled over my limited options. I didn’t know anybody in Canada or Mexico (and didn’t speak a lick of Spanish anyway), so I didn’t see leaving the country as viable. I couldn’t countenance the rigmarole of declaring myself a conscientious objector, consigning myself to some indeterminate number of years enmeshed in the system—and an unforeseeable future at that. I elected instead to employ the method used by a number of family and friends, the much-reviled Ted Nugent two-step: ragging out and going to the induction physical as a smelly, discombobulated, drug-addled hippie (in keeping with the commonly held public perception).

Spud had done as much when called to Whitehall in New York City, bolstered by a psychiatrist’s note paid for by the Fillmore, which strongly supported its beloved staff members. When he arrived at his scheduled physical, a disheveled mess strung out on speed, the crisp Marine sergeant up front took one look at him and pointed to the psychiatrist’s office, barking, “In there, maggot.” Carlito had taken a more ballsy route in New York, showing up in a see-through shirt, powder-blue pants, and loafers. When the inductees were instructed to strip to their skivvies, he remained clothed, and when confronted by a military man and harshly instructed to disrobe, he demurred in a most effeminate voice: “I can’t do that. There are all these men in here.” He quickly earned a trip to the shrink.

So I steeled myself for a weeklong trip into the pits. This would be a test of mind over matter, of determination to persevere in face of spiritual self-flagellation. But as fate would have it, that didn’t happen. A call came to Bro from Dad: Mom was in trouble. She had sold the house to buy a car and moved into a trailer, but then got blitzed and totaled the car, leaving her destitute and desolate. She needed help. Sis had moved on to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and Bro had begun playing gigs with his new band, so Dad figured I was the logical one to help her get back on her feet.

He ponied up for a plane ticket that saw me returning to Upstate New York, where I once again transferred my draft board. This didn’t sit well with the draft folks, and though I now qualified for a hardship deferment, having to support Mom, they had me head to Syracuse for a pre-induction draft physical in case I lost the deferment and they could grab me up. They tested this, they tested that, and I sat down to fill out the paperwork. Have you ever had yellow fever? No. Diphtheria? No. Typhus? No. Yaddah, yaddah, yaddah. No, no, no. Are you homosexual? . . . Yes. I wasn’t going to give up without a fight.

The person reviewing my answers sent me down to the psychiatrist’s office, where the doc asked me a few questions and told me to bend and spread ’em. I guess my asshole passed, because he told me that if and when my hardship exemption expired I’d be classified 1Y—but that I’d then have to return six months later with a letter from a psychiatrist affirming my sexuality. (Before that ever happened, though, President Nixon, under increasing pressure from the antiwar movement, reclassified all those tagged 1Y as 4F—“unfit for military duty.”)

Clear at least for the time, I cast about for some sort of job in Canandaigua to buoy us and, finding little, applied for an opening at a factory that had opened up in town. Boss Bob saw on my application that I had spent a year and a half in college and allowed as how I might be over-qualified. I simply said, “I need a job.”

So that fall and into winter, I made my first foray into basic hard labor: I worked making outdoor siding for commercial buildings from a heavy-duty type of sheetrock, loading it onto a conveyor belt to be sprayed with adhesive then coated in small pebbles. The job involved mindless drudgery, shoveling pebbles into a giant hopper, manhandling finished boards onto an industrial saw for trimming, then offloading and stacking them.

My coworkers initially consisted mainly of young redneck grunts with little get-up-and-go, and they soon got up and left one at a time, ultimately to be replaced by hippie friends in need of a job. Those new hires proved to be as diligent a worker as I, and over time I found myself as some sort of work leader for the boss, deciding on the relative merits of those hired on for the unforgiving job. Yet another, Jake, an aging punch-drunk boxer given over to paunch, proved to be a hard worker, uncomplaining of the hand life had dealt him. As has been said, the stupidest man in the world has something to teach you, and in Jake’s quiet sturdiness I learned a lesson never forgotten.

Jake exhibited a stoicism I tried to emulate. I didn’t have much choice, after all, and resigned myself to my lot. But by chance of birth, neither did Jake. Not born smart or sharp or clever, he was hemmed in by his ever-limited prospects, something I had never seen let alone understood. He introduced me to a whole strata of the population I had been shut off from in my upbringing. This was that chunk of society relegated to holding on to the bottom rungs, forever locked in place. I found myself really liking the guy, an empathy that would forever color my politics. When I hear someone pontificating about all one had to do in America to succeed was grab on to your bootstraps and tug, I think of Jake and his worn-out sneakers, quietly pitching in and doing his job—and more.

At one point, Bob hired on a young kid attending the local community college, a morose sort obviously forced by his parents to work and enraged by the injustice of it all. In his funk, he made the job harder on everybody else by not pulling his weight, irritably giving minimal effort. When it came to hefting the ponderous sheets of siding onto the industrial saw, for instance, a job requiring two men on each side, Jake would be carrying two-thirds of the load on his side, softening the impact when the kid would moodily let go a foot above the conveyor belt. A word to Bob and college dude hit the road.

Life settled into a dull tedium that winter of 1969–70, as I was left to my own thoughts generally while encased in headphones and facemask against the riot of noise in the factory. I bought a beat-up old Dodge Dart from a farmer for $100, and it ran well enough to get me around town. Mom sobered up to this new turn in life, appreciative of what I did to keep us afloat. She dutifully cooked meals that helped me bulk up for the job. She knew I would ultimately move away but soldiered on, rebuilding her own life and even going out with an old flame who worked his way through divorce.

As a hard winter gradually showed signs of giving way to a spring thaw, work at the factory slowed. Siding sales for the company, never robust, slackened considerably and production began to drop off, leaving our crew manning brooms, moving dust from one end of the factory to the other or, ultimately, to day-long furloughs. The end was near. And I grew increasingly antsy about life in small-town Canandaigua.

A couple of local hipsters came by the trailer one day, primed to drive to California by way of Austin. They really wanted me to come along and share the driving as far as Texas. I perked up at the chance, but the hurt showing in Mom’s face made me realize she wasn’t ready for me to depart, even though she gave me leave to go. So I demurred and went back to work in the factory—part time, as production would soon shut down entirely. By then, we had both come to terms with it: I had to get out of Canandaigua.

I had remained in touch with Ricky V. in the city, though, even as Carlito headed out to California. Spud had moved into Third Street with Ricky V., both working at the Fillmore, and picked up the bass guitar. And yeah, they needed another guitar player to get the band together again. C’mon back. Another month had passed since my ride to Austin fell through, and Mom was reconciled to the inevitable. I caught a Greyhound back to the city.

The crew had changed since I worked at the Fillmore, with many unfamiliar faces. As someone with a bit of a track record herding cats there, I caught the eye of the new crew chief, who’d worked with me before, and he anointed me a “head usher,” responsible for a sector of ushers. I fell right back into the rock’n’roll routine. On days off, we’d sit and play, listen to songs and pick up on chord changes, and sometimes even practice onstage at the Fillmore, allowing members of the light show and sound crew to try out new equipment. And boy, that felt real, and it rekindled a desire to rock out.

I felt more comfortable in the role of just another guitar player in a band, plugging into the old Rickenbacker Carlito had left behind and working in earnest to play and sing in tandem with Ricky V., the far more accomplished guitarist and a good singer in his own right. Spud, a cute self-effacing little guy very popular at the Fillmore, fit right in on bass, and we were soon joined on drums by Melon, a classmate from Canandaigua High and a practiced flailer on his setup.

Though definitely not Fillmore material, we still could rock. Given some time perfecting our show, who knows—maybe we could be. And what better place to try out our chops than Canandaigua, something of a desert for music. Some bands from nearby Rochester might venture into town, and the local fledgling community college occasionally hosted a touring show. But not much happened locally catering to the nascent hip scene—a captive audience of sorts. We had no contacts for gigs in the city, so it seemed the logical choice ultimately to move back upstate. So in the spring of 1971 we headed north.

Just before leaving, I got a disconcerting call from Dad, now living in Virginia Beach. Bro had gotten busted. A time or two before, he had flown north from Austin with a load of pot for entrepreneurs in the city. This time he had called me to let us know he was coming (perhaps the fatal error, though we were oblivious to the lengths Texas cops would go to crush the hippie horde). Who knew about wiretapping back then, other than mobsters and G-men? Well, apparently the chest carrying the goods miraculously popped open at the airport—despite being securely bound and all but nailed shut. Dad bailed him out, and so began a years-long trek through the courts. But facing a long stretch in a Texas prison, Bro began serious efforts to put a band together.

Meanwhile we headed back to Canandaigua and set up shop in the basement of Melon’s mom and began practicing in earnest, working on the type of song we liked hearing at the Fillmore—a blend of old-style rock’n’roll (Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis) and popular cover songs (Beatles, Stones) locals would recognize plus a few original songs sprinkled in. Mom had tied the knot with her old flame and they moved off to Tucson to settle in, so I fell heir to the trailer. Ricky V. and his paramour, Gigi—not welcome at home in their unmarried state—moved in with me, soon to be joined by Sis, who moved back upstate. Wedged into the small trailer, we found ourselves headquarters for a small band of Canandaigua misfits, hosting a nightly gathering of assorted freaks and disconnecteds.

We subsisted on whatever offerings people contributed plus a small amount of food stamps, trying out our songs at an occasional impromptu party. Our first paying gig in a club just outside town was quite the event. Art-school Sis designed a flyer to distribute throughout town, and all our aligned friends made the scene. We suffered through an initial case of nerves, struggling with new guitar strings that slid quickly out of tune, but retired to a side room at break to stretch out the recalcitrant strings—and let the diet pills we’d taken kick in. Bolstered by guitars that stayed in tune and artificial energy, we returned to the stage with new-found confidence and pulled off what felt like a rollicking success. The vibe was good.

The audience contained a whole new subset of locals, those not totally in accord with the alternative developments yet curious about the changes going down. Some had already gone through a massive transformation: One of the original bad boys from Canandaigua, Bob, a much-feared member of the wrestling team who you didn’t want to cross, had made a psychedelic switcheroo and became our buddy, borrowing his dad’s truck to help us load in and out for our shows in the area. These included a dance in the high school gym (which paid well but was somehow unsettling) and a gig or two at local clubs, one in a ski lodge outside of town. In all, the response seemed quite good, especially when we played recognizable covers of Beatles or Stones tunes, though our forays into the uncharted territory of original music were often met with polite applause at best. We didn’t seem to be making much headway. It became apparent that if we wanted to make it in Canandaigua, we’d have to resign ourselves to being a cover band.

A taste of the big time in nearby Geneva reinforced that perception. One of our favorites from the Fillmore, Procol Harum, played at that town’s community college. So we donned our green Fillmore football jerseys, purloined from the usher closet before leaving (we figured we had paid for them with our sweat and blood), and wangled our way to the front of the gymnasium and plopped on the floor right in front of Gary Brooker, the lead singer and keyboard player. The band’s set featured their usual hits and impeccable musicianship, but the crowd didn’t show much sign of life, the “polite applause” thing. These uptight upstate students didn’t know how to rock’n’roll yet.

And as we well knew, if the crowd showed real enthusiasm, the Harum could be enticed into playing an incredible encore of old boogie—something they rocked. We quickly penned a note, pleading for the band to play some of their old-time music for their biggest fans, the Fillmore gang come upstate to hear them, and slipped it onto the piano. As the set concluded and the band walked away, students stood and gave the requisite rolling applause seeking an encore. We watched Brooker read the note, then stop his mates (Robin Trower et al.) and show it to them. They looked at us, then bounded back to the stage and lit into “Great Balls of Fire.” And the joint jumped. (With some encouragement: As the first song ended, some proper, polite young student shouted out, “Sit down!” To which we hollered: “No! Stand up!”)

This was rock like it oughta be. Settling back into trailer life in Canandaigua totally bummed us out. We couldn’t see scrabbling to make a living as a cover band playing high-school dances. We determined to strike out on our own—in Texas, bringing rock’n’roll to a scene that promised anonymity and a fresh start. So how to make it happen . . .

I put the trailer up for sale to fund our trip, selling it dirt cheap to a young Mormon couple moved up from Pennsylvania. That in itself proved to be something of an eye-opener. The young husband appraised the trailer with a practiced eye, noting a few things I hadn’t figured out how to fix in the old structure, pulling a tool chest from his trunk and going to work. In minutes, he had everything working. The guy knew his way around a screwdriver. It gnawed at me, watching him diagnose problems and quickly grab the right tool for the job. I had sold the Dodge Dart for pennies when it began to run rough, and a local kid replaced the points in the distributor and happily drove it off—to my chagrin, as I realized how dim I was at doing the simplest mechanical repair. I resolved to learn better how to do these things.

But at least now we had the wherewithal to attempt the trek to Texas. Ricky V. and Gigi gained sanctuary at home until we could depart, Sis stayed with friends, and Spud’s parents let me crash in Carlito’s old room while we prepared. For $100 I bought an old rusted-out van at a school-district auction, and we found a serviceable bread truck for another $400.

At the end of April 1971, Ricky V. and I rode the Greyhound to New York to tie up loose ends at the Fillmore and pick up some equipment left stored there. It saddened us to see the state of our old stomping grounds, as the Fillmore was obviously not long for the world. We ventured in to watch a Grateful Dead show and saw freaks hanging out unhindered in previously sacrosanct spots, smoking dope as well as cigarettes in the lobby, a general malaise gripping a staff sunk into torpor. It did, however, stiffen our resolve to strike out for new worlds, and we returned upstate determined to embark on our new venture.