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One thing that could cut away at the cut-and-dried feeling, if you were crazy enough tochance it, was taking certain drugs that altered mental processes—marijuana,amphetamines and psychedelics such as LSD. Here was territory that seemed pretty new.In fact, if you wanted a model for mind-drug use, there wasn't much to find. The BeatGeneration had experimented with a lot of drugs, but the Beats were now dispersed—at themoment their old San Francisco neighborhood of North Beach was a tourist trap full oftopless bars. Then there were the hipsters, who followed black ghetto fashions in drugs aswell as slang, clothing, jazz and so on. But like the Beats, the hipsters were in their thirtiesand forties now, and the ones a young person was likely to meet preferred alcohol andheroin to mind drugs.There was a new generation of bohemian-minded kids who were very interested in thesemind drugs. They were also interested in such traditional bohemian subjects as art,psychology, pacifism, exotic religions and anything else that stretched the limits ofunderstanding. They had no name for themselves comparable to the Beat Generation,though the Beats derisively called some of them hippies (junior grade hipsters), and bydefault that group had started using the name itself. The Beats looked down on hippies asimitation bohemians who were only interested in getting stoned and having a good timerather than doing something serious, like writing poetry or playing jazz. Another grievancewas that while the Beats were always down and out, the hippies seemed to have money.Most of them were selling a little marijuana.Closest kin to the hippies were the folkies, the bohemian fringe of the long-established folkmusic scene. They were the same age as the hippies and had the same sense of beingdisinherited by their elders-in-nonconformity, in their case the "protest song" radicals whosaw folk music as a political tool rather than a way of life. Of course hippies and folkies haddifferent tastes in music. The hippies went for the rock and roll of the British Invasiongroups and of Bob Dylan after he scandalized the folk purists by adopting the electric guitar.A lot of hippies, in fact, were folkies who had followed Dylan in his switch to rock.What was unique to the hippies was their attitude—an expansive, theatrical attitude ofbeing cool enough to have fun. They called themselves dudes and ladies rather than catsand chicks. Unlike Beats in their existential black and folkies in their homespun and denim,they wore flashy Mod clothes. Miniskirts, patterned stockings and "Beatle boots" would do,and Beatles-long hair was definitely becoming the mode for hippie men. Even better thanthe English fashions, though, were the Victorian and Edwardian clothes you could get fornext to nothing at thrift shops. They were finely made garments, and you could wear themwith a mustache and a swagger.Better still was to do all this and live in a Victorian house. San Francisco was full ofVictorians, since much of the city was rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake, and like Victorianclothes they were now unfashionable and cheap. The best neighborhood in the city for theEdwardian-Victorian motif was an area where many San Francisco State College studentslived, a rather forgotten part of the city called the Haight-Ashbury district, which wasconvenient by trolley to the State College campus and full of once-expensive houses. Youcould rent two floors of an old mansion for 175 a month, and get leather wallpaper andexpansive window seats and art nouveau stained glass and scrollwork. Some of the Statecrowd were carrying the motif to the limit, dressing like Edwardian toffs every day,furnishing their apartments entirely in period style, even unscrewing the light bulbs andhooking up the old gaslights.6

Hippies were scattered around in other places in the country, too, mostly near collegecampuses. The scene blossomed best where there was a high concentration of hippies. TakePine Street: three blocks of the San Francisco street of that name where there were fullyhalf a dozen apartment houses full of hippies and grass dealers. Pine Street was whatpeople called outrageous—people there simply ignored the possibility that neighbors or thepolice would find anything suspicious about their dress or behavior. Pine Streeters had it allfigured out. North of Pine was California Street, part of the wealthy Pacific Heights area;south of Pine was the black ghetto, the Fillmore District. Pine Streeters believed the policewere turning a blind eye to their blatant weirdness and open traffic in drugs because theywere keeping the foothills of Pacific Heights from becoming entirely black.In April and May, the new LSD with the brand name Owsley began making its way throughthe psychedelic communities around the San Francisco area. However many people thatmight be.That was one of the mysteries of psychedelics. Taking LSD was like being in a secretsociety. Hardly anything was being said about it publicly. As a matter of fact, LSD was notan illegal drug, but people acted as if it were; it seemed illegal. About the only place wherepsychedelics were openly discussed was in a tiny magazine called the Psychedelic Review,edited by ex-Harvard professor Timothy Leary and some associates. Leary's own writingsreinforced the secrecy of the whole thing, though, because he dwelt on the importance ofavoiding a panic situation, so people who followed him took their LSD in isolation, in theirhomes or out in the woods. There was no way of knowing how many people might bemessing with psychedelics. If you thought about it, you might conclude the only peopletaking LSD were Leary and the Harvard crowd, some Beats, and a few others, possibly notmany more than your own circle of insane friends.Around the same time that Owsley's name was becoming a household word in somehouseholds, there were rumors of a project that seemed designed to alleviate the adventureshortage. Some crazies were opening a totally Old West saloon with folk music in, of allplaces, the semi-ghost town of Virginia City, Nevada.Virginia City wasn't actually such an odd place for a hippie saloon. The old boomtown capitalof the Comstock Lode silver rush already had a colony of exotic people, including somepsychedelic users. The latter group was centered around a second-generation bohemiannamed Don Works, a member of the peyote-eating Native American Church who had movedout to the Comstock country to be with his coreligionists among the Washoe and PiuteIndians.Works lived on a little plot named the Zen Mine after a pair of nonproducing mine shaftsrunning into the dusty hillside behind his cinder-block cabin. The idea for the Red DogSaloon had been formed there a few months before, when Works, a tall desperado typenamed Chan Laughlin (who had once owned a Berkeley folk music coffeehouse), and a richfolkie named Mark Unobsky were stranded in Works' two-room cabin by a blizzard. Withnothing to do but get stoned and play the board game Risk, they started fantasizing about afolk nightclub to enliven the mountain evenings. It actually sounded plausible, becausethere was no decent nightlife around for competition, and particularly because folkmusicians were always passing through Nevada on their way between the Boston-New Yorkscene and San Francisco-Berkeley. Some fairly big names might be willing to stop off andplay a relaxed night or two.That was the original plan, anyway. Unobsky bought the old Comstock House building on CStreet, near the original claim of the wild silver rush that financed the Civil War and droveGermany off the silver standard. Bohemian carpenters were called in from Marin County,and Laughlin was dispatched to San Francisco for antique red velvet drapes and brassfittings.7

On one of these buying trips Laughlin stopped off at Pine Street, where he'd hidden out fora while a few months before when he figured the police were after him for smugglingmarijuana. While he was talking up the excitement of this stylish folk cabaret in the hills toa Pine Street friend, he met a fellow with a long blond Dutch boy haircut and a missing fronttooth who was dressed to the nines in Edwardian duds. It so happened that this Edwardiandude with the elusive, slightly formal manner had put together a musical group that mightfit right in.His was not a folk group, though, but a rock and roll band called the Charlatans. Well, whynot? The Beatles, Dylan, this band in Los Angeles named the Byrds that was being called afolk-rock group—suddenly it was clear that a hip rock and roll band was just what the RedDog needed. And the Charlatans already had a following. Bob Hunter, the Dutch boy blondwith the missing tooth, was a culture hero in certain circles at State College for his elegantEdwardiana. The pianist, Michael Ferguson, had the same sort of stature and had once runan unheard-of kind of store at the edge of the Haight-Ashbury. Magic Theater for MadmenOnly had sold nothing but antique clothes, knickknacks, a little art and a lot of marijuanastash jars.The only problem with the band was that Hunter, an artist and boy-wonder architect, hadconceived the Charlatans as a sort of pop art statement, an American response to theBritish rock groups. At the moment it was really only the concept of a rock band; they hadhundreds of publicity stills, featuring Edwardian clothes and twenties rowing-crew uniforms,but had never rehearsed. For months now they'd been growing their hair down to theirshoulders—much longer than the Beatles' hair—and carrying on like a rock band at parties,and now it was time to get down to finding out what they could play. A lot of work neededto be done. Hunter, for instance, couldn't play anything but tambourine and autoharp, andthere were those who said he couldn't play that.The Red Dog became a sort of Pine Street project. A collage artist and one-time motorcycleracer named Al Kelly went up to Virginia City to work on the remodeling. Ellen Harmon, therangy woman who shared his tiny room in Pine Street where the walls were painted withpop art sound effects ("Poww!" "Bawannnngggg!"), went as a waitress. There was anabstract expressionist painter on Pine Street who managed two of the apartment houses, ashaggy-bearded Southerner named Bill Ham. His light shows, which were like movingabstract paintings projected in brilliant colors on a screen, were Pine Street's favoriteevening entertainment. He designed a light box for the Red Dog that would pulsate withcolor in time with the music.Altogether, a couple of dozen people from San Francisco moved up to Virginia City for theRed Dog project. After a number of delays and false starts, the Red Dog Saloon finallyopened on June 29, 1965, advertised by a poster drawn by the Charlatans' pianist in a sortof old-timey medicine-show style that described the band as "The Limit of the Marvelous."The band moved up to Virginia City on opening day with one loudspeaker and a ten-wattamplifier.The sheriff came to see opening night. The new place was the only nightclub in town, andpeople had been pushing him to look into it anyway. All these city people dressing in vestsand string ties and celluloid collars—and that sign out front, too, with the slavering red dogon it.8

But he had to admit they'd done a hell of a job as he mounted the plank sidewalk, rebuiltand roofed over just as it had been in the 1860s. As he pushed in through the swingingdoors, he could see they'd spared no expense on the interior, either. All period furnishings,red and turquoise velvet drapes with a lot of gold braid, the whole place painted red withblack trim. The bartender was in a striped shirt with sleeve garters, and the waitresses wereall in saloon-maid bodices and net stockings. Some of the customers knocking back the beerand bourbon were in old-time getups as well.A couple of things, you couldn't figure whether they were out of place or not. Maybe in the1860s there could have been a 380-pound Washoe Indian bouncer in a top hat and aRainbow Girls sash. The musicians in those days surely didn't play rock and roll, but maybethey did get as looped as these guys on the stage seemed to be, rolling their eyes andstaggering and trying to play each other's instruments.But all told, it was enough to touch a man's heart. The least the sheriff could do was tohonor the hallowed Code of the West, which held that when a man entered a bar hechecked all his firearms at the door. "Check my gun?"Without blinking an eye, Don Works plucked the pistol out of the sheriff's hand, threw apracticed glance down the barrel, spun the chambers, cocked the hammer and fired off twoquick shots into the floor. "Works fine, sheriff," he said.Rock and roll meets the Old West—the possibilities were staggering. The Charlatans' gigstretched on far longer than the planned two weeks. People told their friends about it, andsome of the posters made it back to San Francisco, where they tended to be handed aroundfrom person to person rather than posted. More and more people made the three-hour drivejust to see whether it could be true, an Old West Bar with a hip rock band in the Edwardianstyle.As a matter of fact, the Charlatans had started changing their style. Stuck in Virginia Cityweek in and week out, they and everyone else working at the Red Dog fell into the Old Weststyle. In a way it was the only thing to do: get a pair of chaps and a ten-gallon hat andspend the afternoons picking off jackrabbits. Owsley's LSD had been around since openingnight, and on Mondays, when the Red Dog was dark, the staff would have LSD parties. Thesense of the frontier grew stronger and stronger.Some of the people envisioned the Red Dog as a movie. Chan Laughlin would lecture aboutit: "This is an Old Western town, and we're more Old Western than anybody else.Remember, when your feet hit the floor in the morning, you're in a Grade B movie. This isthat saloon down the street where the manager has his office under the stairs and all thegunhands sit around out front and periodically he comes out and motions a couple of themto ride away and rustle some cows. It's that place, complete with fancy girls going aroundbending over tables and the music and people roaring and ordering more drinks andcarrying on."Yes indeed. Everybody started wearing the clothes and carrying fancy firearms. Eachbartender as he came on shift brought his own personally selected bar pistol. After a whilethe Charlatans had a set of matched-caliber Winchester rifles they would carry onstage andlean up against the amplifier before picking up their guitars. Now, what was all this fussabout the Beatles and their so-called flashy style?Back in San Francisco, a far-out new kind of nightclub opened on July 4, but nobody wasgoing to it.9

Actually, there were people who went: people in the music business. The club, calledMother's, was opened by a Rabelaisian rock DJ who went by the name of "Big Daddy" TomDonahue. He ran the local rock music scene—managed bands, put on big shows at the CowPalace for teenagers and even had his own record label, Autumn Records, which specializedin teen rock bands like the Tikis and the Vejtables. Before he opened Mother's, the 400pound Big Daddy had held court over a crowd of promo men, agents and other DJs at asidewalk restaurant up the block, and that crowd naturally followed him to Mother's.The new place was nothing like a sidewalk café. Donahue had spent a fortune on it. He'dhired Beat woodworkers from Big Sur, and the walls were covered with undulatingsculptured wood and sheets of plastic paneling that pulsed with colored light in time withthe music. There were collages in the bathrooms and a big curtain instead of a front door.Pretty far out for a rock DJ who was pushing pimple cream all day. But who did he expect tocome besides his music biz friends? The entertainment was his own teen rock bands, butthe club's liquor license kept teenagers out.Then, on August 4, Donahue booked the New York folk-rock band the Lovin' Spoonful, andall of a sudden the place was packed with non-biz people, dressed in Mod Hash orEdwardiana—rock fans who were old enough to drink but preferred to dance. There weremore of them than they themselves had realized. The music biz people had never evenknown such people existed.When the Spoonful left after its four-week gig (which had coincided with their first hitrecord, "Do You Believe in Magic?"), this bright-feathered tribe of fans vanished, leavingMother's so empty it started featuring its own semi-nude dancer ("Topless Daughter Maria")like the other North Beach clubs.Everybody of college age had heard of Ken Kesey, at least as the novelist who wrote OneFlew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. There were rumors that he'd written the book partly on LSDand that he'd taken all sorts of psychedelics since 1959, when he'd been a 75-a-dayguinea pig at Veterans' Memorial Hospital in Menlo Park. He was known as a sort of experton psychedelics. He'd set a fashion for calling LSD acid (short for lysergic aciddiethylamide), to the horror of religious LSD eaters.In 1964 he had bought a 1939 International Harvester bus with the advance money fromhis second novel and he

A History of Haight- Ashbury 1965-1967 . The Haight-Ashbury A History Author: Charles Perry Publisher: Random House Date: 1984 ISBN: -394-41098-X . Table of Contents