If You’re Going to San Francisco
THE 707’S WHEELS touch down at San Francisco International Airport and with few regrets I leave behind the East, where my mother’s family has lived since they arrived on the New England coast aboard a vessel that followed in the wake of the Mayflower. There they landed and there, for the most part, they stayed, close by the Atlantic shore. In five hours I’ve covered what it took the emigrants of the nineteenth century’s great westward migration months of peril to travel. Like those earlier travelers, I’m casting off the old and hoping to find in California the magic pathway to the rest of my life.
Go west, young man.
In my case, it is Albert Grossman, not Horace Greeley, who points the way.
The southwest wind is roiling the shallow waters off the airport runway, turning them muddy emerald. It has been a cold fall in the East. By comparison, the California air feels springlike as I cross the tarmac to the terminal. The hills that surround the Bay are greened by the rains that return to the coast with autumn. Autumn in the East forces the flora into retreat and quiescence. To an easterner, green hills in November signal rebirth ahead of its time, a resurrection that fills me with hope. The breeze carries the scent of growing things. Mixed with the jet fumes, I can smell salt water, and something more exotic—patchouli oil, maybe, or pot.
Peter Albin greets me at the gate. We have talked on the phone in recent days, to discuss logistics (“My flight gets in at . . .” “I’ll pick you up and we’ll . . .”). I know Peter by sight because I saw him, back in June, at the Monterey International Pop Festival, standing his ground at stage right as a member of Big Brother and the Holding Company, the band that knocked the audience back on its collective heel. Peter’s feet don’t move much when he plays the electric bass. His body sways to the beat, sometimes curling over the instrument to wring from it insistent riffs that propel the songs forward, sometimes standing bolt upright, his back arched, shaking the bass so the notes fly from the stage with that much more force.
In the airport, face-to-face, Peter is friendly, open, welcoming. He moves with angular looseness and has a lopsided smile. At twenty-three, he’s the youngest in the band. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I have lived for the past nine years, Peter’s shoulder-length hair would earn him derisive shouts of “Hahvahd fairy!” from the townies, their ducktails rigid with Brylcreem. In SFO, he attracts surreptitious glances from the servicemen emplaning for Vietnam and the businessmen in their suits. It would surprise them to know that Peter is a junior executive, dressed for rock and roll. He is the member of Big Brother who signs the contracts, the one who comes to pick up the guy dispatched from New York by Albert Grossman—creator of Peter, Paul and Mary, manager of Bob Dylan and a host of lesser folk luminaries—to oversee the band on the road. As the music of the counterculture has evolved from folk to folk-rock—the Mamas & the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Buffalo Springfield—to full-bore rock and roll, Albert has kept pace.
When Peter’s car crests the rise where Highway 101 leaves South San Francisco behind and comes in view of the city proper, I see the white houses dancing up and down the hills and I feel at home. San Francisco is my favorite American city. I have been here often over the years, most recently in June, when I landed at SFO as part of D. A. Pennebaker’s film crew, on my way to Monterey for the Pop Festival, fired then, as now, with the sense of moving toward the promise of things to come, ready to do my part to make the promise come true.
I have a family connection to the Bay Area, an uncle who is a professor of botany at UC Berkeley. When I drove across the country for the first time, in the summer after my sophomore year at Harvard, my uncle’s Berkeley home was my destination. In recent years, it is music that has brought me often to the cities by the Bay. From the first time I stepped into the Club 47 coffeehouse in Cambridge and heard Joan Baez sing, music has defined my friendships and my life. I discovered bluegrass music and became a member of Cambridge’s homegrown bluegrass and old-time band, the Charles River Valley Boys. In the spring of 1963 I drove across the country again, this time with two friends from Cambridge, and we discovered in Berkeley a folk community that was welcoming and familiar.
In the folk music revival, Berkeley and Cambridge were united by enthusiasm for the traditional roots of American music, black and white, and the innovations that creative players could derive from those themes. Some of my Cambridge friends made the journey to California regularly. A few moved here. The kinship forged on the Cambridge-Berkeley axis was based on sharing the music and shunning competition. We believed ourselves to be quietly superior to what we saw as the more commercially oriented pickers in New York and L.A. Our image of the prototypical New York guitar player was a guy who turned toward the wall when he played his hottest licks, so you couldn’t see how he did it.
Since that first visit to the Berkeley folk scene in 1963, I have come back whenever I can, to play music and smoke dope and drink Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey and Rainier Ale—Berkeley’s preferred boilermaker, known locally as JD and Green Death—and to experience the brilliant, preternaturally focused California days that inspire us to throw some bread and cheese and wine into a backpack and take acid and spend the day somewhere on the coast.
A couple of years ago I moved to California for what I thought would be forever, but it turned out I was chasing the Wrong Girl. This time, I’m here to stay. I have left behind the life of a performing musician in the interest of getting serious about the rest of my life. For now, I will help others devote themselves more fully to their music while I handle the money and logistics. I have exchanged my guitar for an attaché case. It contains itineraries, contracts, and the promise of loud music, late nights, and loose women.
To Peter Albin, I reveal none of the giddy high that the waters of the Bay, the sight of Coit Tower, a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge, arouse in me. With Peter, I’m all business. I’m cool. He takes me to a motel on Columbus Avenue, in North Beach. A few years ago, the North Beach coffeehouses were the focus of San Francisco’s folk scene, and before that, the home of the Beats. I wonder if any unamplified music survives in the city that has become the wellspring of American rock and roll, but satisfying this curiosity will have to wait. Right now, I’ve got to pass inspection by my prospective employers. Peter gives me half an hour to come down from thirty thousand feet, then picks me up again and takes me to meet the band.
They rehearse in a third-floor loft in a building they call the Warehouse, close by an off-ramp where the Central Freeway dumps traffic into the city streets. When Peter and I enter the loft, the four other members of the band are sitting at a round oak table by the windows. There’s a bed covered with a madras spread, the ubiquitous, versatile fabric by which a generation of bohemian youth is enriching the textile magnates of India. There are amps and instruments and a drum set off to one side, random sticks of furniture, and enough floor space to hold a dance competition. A few oil paintings adorn the walls. They’re by the drummer, David Getz, I will learn. David has set his painting aside for a venture into rock and roll.
The space could be any number of artists’ lofts where I’ve been to late-night parties in New York, but, except for the paintings, the art in progress here isn’t visible, and the quintet scrutinizing me now is pure San Francisco. This is the moment of truth. The truth is, I’m nervous, which is a condition I customarily conceal beneath a reserved exterior.
I recognize Janis, of course, but Peter is a polite fellow and he introduces her first. It was Janis who took the audience’s breath away at Monterey, this Texas white girl who belts the rocking blues like no one else, propelled by one of the founding bands of the San Francisco Sound.
Sam Andrew and James Gurley are the lanky guitar players, sprawled in their chairs with legs askew. Tight-fitting black jeans. Pointy-toed boots. Long hair. Way longer than any East Coast beatnik’s. Theirs is down past their shoulders, combed straight like Janis’s. I’m six-feet-one-and-a-bit, and I judge that Sam and James, upright, will inhabit the same altitude. Peter is a couple of inches shorter. David is more compact. He falls into the range that eyewitnesses describe as average height. At this meeting he sits squarely on his chair, all his attention on me, just as he sits at his drums onstage, centered and balanced. David’s hair, and Peter’s, is a little shorter than Sam’s and James’s, pageboy haircuts gone to seed.
Janis is watchful. In repose her face is unremarkable, not what you’d call pretty. Only her eyes betray the vitality she releases in performance. They are clear and alert, and when the introductions are over it is Janis who speaks first.
“What sign are you?”
“Libra.”
“That sounds just,” James says. This is a generous reaction and I’m grateful to him, but Janis is looking me up and down with all the distrust appropriate for greeting a newcomer from the East, a road manager imposed on the band by Albert Grossman, the personal manager they barely know and for sure don’t fully trust.
Janis shrugs. “I don’t care much about Libras one way or the other.”
But I’m cool. I take no offense, because they accept me. Cautiously and with reservations, to be sure, but they accept me. I’m a rock-and-roll road manager. When I got off the plane it was only make-believe.
Now it’s real.