Bob Weir, in an interview with our intrepid leader, Haight Street Voice Editor-in-Chief Linda Kelly, was asked if he had any advice for modern-day denizens of the Haight.
“The Haight Ashbury is a special place,” Weir answered. “It has always had a certain magnetism and magic. There is always an upswing. Stay away from the bad drugs. You’ve found your home. Make it pretty and keep it clean.”
I remember what it was like when I first showed up here in 1976. The Summer of Love might have been over, by a few years, but it was a history that was still recent and I thought I’d landed somewhere between Oz and Deadwood after the gold had dried up in the Black Hills. The miners had all left, leaving only the gunslingers and gamblers in a lawless society.
This little Valhalla was full of renegades and runaways, people hiding from the Draft, others from the law — and lots of musicians and weirdo collaborative artists. I felt like I was the last one over the wall, falling into a secret place, one that took me in, right away. I had a place to sleep within my first hour. The place was fantastic. They dosed me from their communal stash of Owsley and I stayed the night. I’d taken acid before but nothing like that. It wasn’t until I got to the Haight that I had access to the real thing. That’s when I realized that the acid experience wasn’t about seeing trails, partying and feeling weird for 8 hours, it’s more about dumping the jigsaw puzzle that is your mind all over the floor, and when you come back down, you have to put it all back together, but you find that the pieces fit a little differently, and that changes you, changes the way you think.
I’d flown in from Guam with a duffel bag containing two-thousand opiated Thai sticks and I traded a cabdriver at SFO two of them for a ride to the Haight. I awoke the next morning to tinkling bells and gauzy sunlight streaming in through sheer fabric covering leaded glass, little rainbows of refracted light through crystals, the smell of incense and strong black coffee, and the soft drone of sitar music coming from somewhere. Where the hell was I?
It …was … fantastic.
I opened my eyes and the realization started to hit me in jolts: I was somewhere very strange, I had no idea how I’d gotten there or if one or two days had transpired. But it dawned on me that I was now completely naked, I didn’t know how or why, on a beautiful Victorian settee in this incredible room with lush hanging Spider plants and Fuchsias and a thick Persian rug. Someone had covered me in blankets and just let me sleep.
A large, jovial and somewhat effeminate man appeared. He was wearing a sari or a sarong, and was now sitting at my feet and offering me coffee. It seemed apparent that he was the house-mother and in charge of this little world, as other hippies began to slowly appear, like Munchkins popping up in Oz. And it was obvious that they were all worker bees in this patchouli-scented hive. They seemed almost Amish in their work ethic and THIS, I was slowly beginning to grasp, was a hippie commune in the Haight Ashbury. As I took it all in, the events leading up to this were starting to come back to me from the night before. These were real hippies and they’d taken me in right away.
Out on the street, everyone seemed to be about my age and no one seemed to have a real job. There were buskers and beggars, but they all got by somehow, and there was a palpable and pervasive spirit of camaraderie and a vibe of artistic collaboration and experimentation in the air. It was a world of art and music, of revolution and societal change, it was happening all around me and I was walking in the still-fresh footsteps of Janis, the Airplane, the Dead, and I could feel it, a living history at the intersection of art and rebellion. And, just like that, I was Home.
Now it seems like another world trapped in amber. But it became a part of who I am, one that informs me still. It left me with a lasting impact of kindness and connection. We were the dreamers of dreams and I made the discovery that the Haight Ashbury isn’t just a neighborhood. It’s a state of mind.
Make it pretty and keep it clean.
