Over the moon (ayooo!) to hang with and listen to that beautiful voice of Peter Coyote: Digger, activist, author, actor, musician and … lovely soul. We explore all things Haight-Ashbury, counterculture, the world then, today, and beyond.
Here are Parts 1 & 2 (videos and transcripts) chock full of wisdom from our new pal. Grateful!!!
Peter Coyote: Haight Street is gonna mean something very different to me than it means to somebody comin’ in 2022. That particular moment in history won’t ever be recreated, but this moment in history has all the same potential to express itself in the same breadth, the same complexity.
Haight Street Voice: [pointing to cover image of flower down gun barrel] What’s going on in Ukraine … it’s still coming down to this, all these years later. Why can’t the flower overpower the gun? Isn’t that the message that [the Diggers] were about?
PC: No, we were armed! [laughs]. The Diggers were not hippies and flower children.
We were not foolin’ around. The flower can’t overpower the gun because both exist eternally. Right? And both come from the human interior. Both are possibilities of the human mind. If you think about what a human being is, it’s a body, it’s form, feelings, impulses, sensation and consciousness. So it’s always all there. History is not a straight line. Time goes in two different directions at once, you know? When the Grateful Dead and … the Charlatans were all the cutting edge of the moment, they were all dressing like old-time cowboys. So nothing’s controllable in that sense. Time is going like a nebula in every direction. So this [points to flower] was an idea of innocence which was untested, the flower in the gun. And this [points to gun] was an idea of patriotism and duty and following orders and social organization that was untested, and it was working itself out. They were in dialogue. And, you know, the rabbit doesn’t blame the hawk for eating it. I may blame the soldiers who killed their own citizens at Kent State, but they both existed in the same moment and they were both expressing different visions of reality. And had they known that they were visions, that they were ephemeral, that they were soap bubbles that wouldn’t last, they might not have taken them quite so seriously and so violently.
HSV: What do you want to say to everybody in the Haight — and globally?
PC: Sit down, stop and get acquainted with your own inner life without any distractions. Just try to be yourself.
Every other role is taken.
END OF ARTICLE in PRINT EDITION #11
Want more? Well here ya go! Continue on for Part 1 of our video interview, along with the corresponding transcript. DIG!
Peter Coyote: Okay!
Haight Street Voice: [Fiddling with audio recorder] And then I just say, okay, screw it, we’re outta there. And then stop, and we’re just gonna start it.
PC: Okay.
HSV: And we’re gonna go to 89. Alright! Here we are! 89! [laughs] So here’s the gist: Now first of all I have gifts for you. Here’s the latest edition of the Haight Street Voice.
PC: So this is how it comes out? This is the format …
HSV: This is it! My little format. And there’s … I can’t give you these …
PC: No, no, no, it’s okay.
HSV: And it’s of course on Facebook and I have a website and I print out about 2500 of these and I have a subscription list.
PC: No kidding!
HSV: And it’s gettin’ legs! And I sell these ads. Dr. David E. Smith bought this back ad.
PC: Good for him. I’ve known David for a long time. He took over the Digger Free Medical Clinic. He made it actually happen after we got it started.
HSV: He’s become a dear friend and a great supporter of the magazine and I’m working with him.
PC: This is really nice! I like this little format.
HSV: Thank you, thank you! People dig it. And then QR codes, I call it liquid journalism cuz you can go with your phone to the QR code, I call it “liquid journalism”, you can go with your phone to the QR code and go to the full-length version. And that’s Dr. Dave who bought that back ad cuz we’re opening the Haight-Ashbury Psychedelic Center in a couple of months.
PC: Okay! Alright!
HSV: So that’s the latest.
PC: Are you reporting news or are you working towards something that I can help with?
HSV: Here’s the deal.
PC: Okay.
HSV: It’s “hyper-local with a global perspective.” It’s about community. It’s about taking care of your community no matter where you are in the world.
PC: Perfect.
HSV: Just taking care. You step over a homeless person, you say, “Are you okay?”
PC: Perfect.
HSV: “Do you need water?”
PC: Got it.
HSV: You know your local grocer, you know the local … Dr. Dave! You know your neighbors …
PC: My philosophy.
HSV: So here we are, I was doing the math — not the math, I’m horrible at math! The Sixties were 60 years ago, right?
PC: Yes they were.
HSV: And I’m gonna be 60 on Sunday.
PC: Okay.
HSV: And the whole theme of this next edition coming out in a couple of weeks before 4.20 and Bicycle Day, Albert Hoffman day, 4.19 … it’s about cycles and where you came from and everything you guys were going through — it’s starting to come back around. Fayette and I were talking about because the psychedelics are being …
PC: Re-introduced.
HSV: Re-introduced, the renaissance is here but in a much more — maybe not mature, but a much organized way. Everybody’s — Mountain Girl as well, the people who were there then and the people who are here now want to converge and sort of get this wheel really moving forward … and Dr. Dave. So that’s kind of the gist of this whole edition. And the cover of this edition — I think I emailed you that but I printed it out for you to look at [hand him cover image], we can talk about that. And this is just for fun [Dorothy etc, reading Psychedelic edition), shits and giggles. And I just wanted to point out that I’ve had Jerry on the cover, I’ve had Stanley on the cover, I’ve had Ramblin Jack on the cover, Bobby and I are dear friends …
PC: Yep.
HSV: China Kantner, Paul Kantner’s daughter. And this is the latest, and I’m gonna have …
PC: And this is paid for by the ads? Do you sell it? How do you …?
HSV: [hand gesture and facial expression to say barely get by!]
PC: Hook and a crook, huh?
HSV: Yea, but it’s getting there. People … I have a fiscal sponsor now.
PC: I see.
HSV: So I’m not nonprofit but I’m starting to apply for grants …
PC: Cool.
HSV: … to help support the local community, right?
PC: Cool, I get it.
HSV: So that’s the deal. So thank you for being with me, first of all! That’s for you [latest edition].
PC: Nice to be had!
HSV: So, again, coming back to the whole … cycles and here we are in 2022 and everything is coming back around. You came from New York in 1964 …
PC: Well actually I came here from Iowa in ’64. I went to school in Iowa and I came out here to go to graduate school.
HSV: At SF State.
PC: Yes, to study with a poet named Robert Duncan that I liked very much.
HSV: Right.
PC: And the lure of the street — there was too much happenin’! I stumbled into this little theater, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and that was just a bunch of fun. And we were all pretty dedicated revolutionaries with all the fervor that young men and women can have.
HSV: Mmhmm.
PC: And these 2 guys came out from New York: Billy Murcott and Emmett Grogan, and they kind of inspired us to say, “You guys can do more. Right now you’ve got an audience and you’re on the stage and you’re controlling the stage but you’re not really changing anybody’s mind. You’re playing to the choir, to the people who come to you and laugh at your stuff. They already agree with you. And so we learned how to create acts of theater that people wouldn’t know were theater, that would actually help create community.
So for instance, my first apartment was at Haight and Clayton and there was nothin’ here. It was before the Psychedelic Shop opened, it was before Mnasidika opened. It was September of 1964. And I forget exactly when Mnasidika opened but I think the Psychedelic Shop opened in January of ’66, and I met Ron Thelin.
And at that time it was just sort of a blue collar community, sort of a nobody’s community, kind of neutral cuz a lot of people who went to SF medical school — UCSF medical school would find cheap rooms there. So there was a bank and a hardware store and a five-and-dime. And Ron Thelin’s father used to be the manager. Ron and his brother are like inveterate Haight Street people. So what happened is kids started to come, Mnasidika opens, Psychedelic’s open, kids started reading about it. San Francisco became a media event.
HSV: Pacific Ocean Trading Company — wasn’t Stanley Mouse’s place, POTC, wasn’t that part of that too?
PC: Probably was, but I’m not a historian. Stanley and I went to England to see the Beatles. I’ve known him a long time. He lives here, he lives in this town.
HSV: Yes. Sorry to interrupt!
PC: Not at all! So what happened is a scene began to develop and the scene was fueled by psychedelics but it was also fueled … there was something coming out of the Beats. The Beats were the first critics of the ‘50s and ‘60s that we grew up under. And folk music was the first movement that led people off the asphalt. And you started to hear voices that were really authentic, other realities: Appalachian singers, old Blues singers — not Paul Anka, not these smoothie, you know, kind of guys.
And then, according to Bob Dylan, it was the atom bomb that really gave the impetus to rock and roll because suddenly kids realized, “Hey, we might not be here, so we’re not gonna wait for sex, we’re not gonna wait for fun, we’re not gonna wait for all this stuff.” So things began to gather speed and mass, and one of the ways it happened is the media would report on the Haight-Ashbury, and there’s a funny way the media thinks it’s really controlling things. They take a picture of a couple of kids smoking a cigarette and looking furtively around the corner, and they’d say, “These poor homeless kids.” And kids in Nebraska are looking at that and thinkin’, “There’s 2 kids, free, doing whatever they want out on the street. Let’s go there!
HSV: Yeah.
PC: So when they began to come here, the scene got very dense and very packed and you had a whole bunch of poor kids and runaway kids, and the Diggers decided, “Let’s just show what bullshitters the cities are. Let’s feed ‘em.” So we went to the Farmer’s Markets, we actually had to send our women because the Italians wouldn’t give grown men any food.
HSV: Wow.
PC: We sent the women with babies in their arms, we got food that day ready, you know, they couldn’t sell it the next day, and we’d put it in big milk cans and cook these huge stews and we said, “Just bring a bowl. Come out to Golden Gate Park, 5 o’clock” or whatever it was. And we built a huge yellow rectangle, 6 feet by 6 feet, and that was called “the free frame of reference.”
HSV: Yeah!
PC: In order to get your food, you had to step through that frame. It wasn’t about the “free” … like people would come up and say, “I have money, I can afford to buy food.” And the answer would be, “Do you want to live in a world with free or don’t ya? It doesn’t matter if you have money.” So people would step through the free frame of reference and they’d get a little 1-inch by 1-inch one on a shoelace and we’d just invite them to look at the world: suppose it was free, suppose it was free.
Then we built the Free Store, and the first ones were really funky, they were just piles of garbage that nobody wanted. But we got this site on Cole at Carl Street, it’s kind of a nice little restaurant now. It’s on the west side of the street. Anyway, we got all this stuff and we fixed it up, everything worked: TVs, furniture, bicycles, tools, clothes, we hung it all up nice — looked just like a store. And the piece of theater that we were engaging people in that they didn’t know about was “Why do you want to be an employee to make the money to be a consumer? We’ll give you shit. Now what do you want to do with your life?”
So people got it. For instance one day I was in there and there as a black woman, older black woman, maybe 60s, and she was stealing stuff …
HSV: [laughs] Is that possible when things are free?
PC: My point. So I went her and I said, “M’am, you can’t steal in here.” And she said, “I’m not stealing!” I said, “I know you’re not stealing. You can’t steal. It’s a free store. But you think you’re stealing. So you don’t have to sneak stuff into your purse. You can just take it over your arm and walk out with it.” She said, “You mean it’s free?” I said, “Yeah, it’s free.” She said, “Well then get outta my face!”
HSV: [laughter]
PC: So 2 days later she came back with a flat of 2-day old donuts that she delivered in the car — I mean the store. So she got the gift economy. Then a little later on we had a bunch of stolen draft cards and we had to the codes to draft boards in Georgia and Ohio and all these different places. We knew how to fill them out. And soldiers were coming through here being shipped out to Vietnam, and with a little bit of talk, Bobby from Chillicothe could hang up his uniform, get on some other clothes and leave here as Billy from Albany, Georgia.
HSV: Wow.
PC: That was our war resistance.
HSV: Fayette was telling me the story of — and you were around when it was going on, but if the guy was getting drafted they’d some, “Come by, come in the van, we’ll give you a blowjob …”
PC: That was the Cockettes.
HSV: Okay, that was their whole thing.
PC: That was the Cockettes. They were just like another family.
HSV: Brilliant.
PC: These were gay guys but sort of weirdly transgendered: tutu’s, hairy legs, beards, whatever, but way out there. They came out to Olema, one of the houses where I lived, for a week and I had never felt like a square before.
HSV: [laughter]
PC: These guys would walk up to Pt. Reyes sucking popsicles that were molded as penis’s, you know, in their skirts and stuff and the town was like, “We ain’t ready for this.” [laughs]. Anyway, so the Diggers whole thing was, “You can change life in a minute.” And our whole thing was we did everything for free and we did it anonymously, meaning, if you’re not gettin’ rich or you’re not gettin’ famous, you’re probably mean it. And we urged people to be authentic.
HSV: Who was funding it though?
PC: There was no funding.
HSV: So you get it free from the market and all that …
PC: Yeah, so we get that. There’d be a lot of theft. If they were building houses on the top of Twin Peaks. If they were building houses up on the top of Twin Peaks we’d go and we’d steal enough lumber to fix up an apartment so that we had 6 bedrooms in it or shit like this.
HSV: What about the rent on the building for the Free Store?
PC: Okay, mothers with dependent children, so if a girl had a baby she would get — not SSI but A.. AD … it was welfare for mothers, right? So one mother would have the rent for the building and we would have to hustle, sell weed, trade, whatever to get your actual money and cash. And then people would give us money because they liked what we were doin’ but we had to be careful that we weren’t selling access.
HSV: Yeah.
PC: So here’s a great story: We were in Hollywood raising money, Emmett and I, and some slick producer came in and gave us $2500. And we were staying at the house with a guy named Benny Shapiro who was Ravi Shankar’s manager.
HSV: Oh wow!
PC: And he knew the Diggers, he liked us. So this guy gave us $2500 and it was great. Emmett picked up the phone and he called Huey Newton [co-founder of the Black Panthers]. And he said, “Hey Huey, I’ve got $2500, do you need it?” And he gave it away right in front of that guy just to show you can’t buy your way in here.
HSV: Wow.
PC: And the Diggers were never infiltrated. We we were never, you know, wormed in, we never had snitches because there was no leadership. So we would do theater pieces. So, for instance, there used to be at the bottom of Fell Street there used to be an on-ramp to the freeway.
HSV: Yes, I totally remember that.
PC: So one morning, Thelin set up a table and 4 chairs just in the gravel off the edge of the road, linen table cloth, breakfast for 4, orange juice, coffee, croissants and all this. He and I were out there just reading the paper, this far from rush hour traffic. And there were 2 empty chairs there, so anybody could’ve gotten out of that car and changed their life.
Peter Berg created this flatbed truck and we went down to Montgomery Street, 4 o’clock when the stockbrokers were breaking out, we had bare breasted women dancing and guys playing conga drums and we would just say, “Come on! Get on the party!” And anybody could’ve grabbed it and changed their life at that instant.
So we did this for a long time, we did this for about 3 years, 2 or 3 years. And then, you know, running the soup kitchen was not my highest aspiration, so we wanted to notch the game up a little, so we began living collectively. We were living collectively because it was the cheapest way to live: 2 women in a household and you’d have electricity and rent and staples enough to carry 15 people.
HSV: Wow.
PC: So we began moving out to land-based communes in Forest Knolls, in Olema, in Trinidad. The Diggers bought a place called Black Bear way up in the Trinity Tisque (?) Wilderness. And we all thought that America was gonna collapse in 5 years and we wanted to develop models on how we could live sustainably using much less. Cuz if you think about it, a modern refrigerator or a modern stove can feed 10 people, you know, or 20 people. So began learning these things, we began meeting Native American people, finding out how they used to live here. One way we made money is we went to the dump in Pt. Reyes and we got deerskin the hunters threw away and we’d tan ‘em and smoke ‘em and buckskin and trade ‘em for cash to seamstresses and people like that.
HSV: So you were done with the City now, you were done with the Haight?
PC: Yeah.
HSV: This is probably ’70?
PC: Late ’69. So it ’69, Rock Scully …
HSV: Aww, he was a dear friend of mine.
PC: So Rock Scully wanted to bring a group of Californians to London to meet the Beatles. They wanted to show off the California scene to the Beatles. And so they got Ken Kesey and some of his people. They got me and Emmett and Paula McCoy who lived across the street from the Dead house. And they got 2 Hell’s Angels and 2 motorcycles, they got Stanley Mouse, and we went over there for a month. We rented a flat and we spent a month over there, and hipsters came in from all over Europe …
HSV: Wow.
PC: To get the 411 on what was going on in the Haight. I mean, I don’t know if you ever read either of my books but …
HSV: I sadly have not.
PC: It’s okay!
HSV: I apologize!
PC: No! It’s not an apology! But it’s good history. I mean this whole story of this trip to England is in there, all the scenes. Unfortunately heroin was legal when we were there, so you could go into a drugstore for 3 bucks and buy pharmaceutical heroin and a syringe and shootout right there, which of course I did and Sweet William did, and that was 10-year journey.
HSV: And probably why Keith Richard was so fucked up on it …
PC: Yeah. So anyway, the Haight was like a staging ground and if you think about …
HSV: Hang on one sec — but didn’t George Harrison come out here and think the Haight was full of a bunch of scary people? They didn’t dig it.
PC: He did. So here’s the thing. When we went to England, the English had 2 poles and we had 2 poles: The dark side and the light side. So on the evolved side, the English were very educated, they were very sophisticated, they were much more urbane than the American kids. On the negative side they were very class conscious, status conscious, very kind of keeping to themselves, a little prissy. On the positive side, we were experimental and freewheeling and ready for anything. On the negative side, we were a little wild and wooly and a little rough. I mean I saved John Lennon from getting his teeth knocked out by Pete Knell who was the president of the Hell’s Angels.
HSV: Wow!
PC: I mean, no nonsense! So the thing about the Haight was, and the thing about the scene that was emerging globally was that people were being given the opportunity to express themselves authentically. They were slipped of family history, they were slipped of everybody that knew them, they were slipped of expectations. ‘Once upon a time you dressed so fine, you did the bump and grind [“threw the bums a dime”] in your prime, didn’t you? Never understood that it ain’t not good to let other people get their tricks [“kicks”] for you.”
And so for them to be saying “How does it feel to be on your own like a complete unknown like a rolling stone …” it was like people leaving their history behind.
HSV: No direction home …
PC: Yeah! So not everybody played for keeps. I mean when I think of — remember the mullet?
HSV: Yeah, of course.
PC: Yeah, so I think of the mullet as a guy who when he looks you straight on he’s working at the bank or working in the office, but on weekends he turns his head and he’s got a ponytail.
HSV: [laughter] The quick release!
PC: [laughing] Yeah.
HSV: But it was accelerated or fueled — not fueled by, but accelerated by the psychedelics wouldn’t you say? I mean that’s really helped [gesturing mind expansion].
PC: Absolutely. The psychedelics were like a dividing line. Like, you couldn’t even read the rock n roll posters if you hadn’t had weed. And you remember Dylan had a song, “Something’s happening here and you don’t know where it is, do you, Mr. Jones” …
HSV: Yeah.
PC: So it was a dividing line. The problem that a lot of people made, myself included, was that we felt that this is what enlightenment was and that it was a one-stop shopping, that you had this experience and from then on your life was, you know, perfect.
HSV: I was reading that, there was a quote from you saying, well, that all ends. The trip ends and then you’re, uh …
PC: Yeah, the trip ends!
HSV: You were talking about Zen Buddhism and all that, and meditation.
PC: That’s right.
HSV: That’s a “practice”. You’ve got to do it every day.
PC: That’s right. And if you don’t practice the weight of your personal habits will drag you back down. I mean look at my buddies in the Dead: Jerry overdosed, Phil Lesh has a new liver, Bobby was fallin’ down drunk onstage — nobody’s had more psychedelics than those guys.
HSV: Yeah.
PC: So between — let’s say the ‘60s ended around 1973, ’74, and the reason it ended wasn’t Altamont. The reason it ended was because, first of all, we didn’t own any land bases. So we couldn’t — only rich people that had rich communes could keep a land base. The second one was children. That children needed order and you couldn’t have Wino Eddie playin’ the tom-tom at 4 in the morning when mothers are waking up to nurse at 5.
HSV: Right.
PC: So we had to start making rules and as soon as rules were made, a lot of people jumped ship. So if you look at the Diggers today, there are 108 people on the Free Family union, chippin’ in money every month to take care of about 15 of our people who got old and don’t have any money.
HSV: Really?! Is “108” is on purpose cuz I know that’s a very spiritually powerful number.
PC: No. But yes, there are 108 beads in the mala. No, it just turned out that way.
HSV: Naturally.
PC: So I want to make it clear that we didn’t abandon our values. We adjusted to what we had to do to raise our kids, to have a life, and stay happy and healthy. But all those initial values: community, bringing everyone with us, were still there. And when we went to New York in the 60s. I went to New York in ’69, Emmett and me — that’s where I met Peggy at the Chelsea Hotel.
HSV: Ah yes! You met her. You really did meet her [laughter].
PC: Yeah, we met all those people from New York. Met Leonard Cohen, met Andy Warhol, met Ultra Violet, met Lou Reed, and all these people. And they were superlatively talented, there was no way about it. But I didn’t give a shit about them because they were just for themselves. They were ambitious. And the Diggers wanted to take everybody with us. You know, Leonard Cohen wrote this song: “I know you well, you were at the Chelsea Hotel, you were talkin’ so brave and so sweet, givin’ me head on the unmade bed while the limousines wait in the street, that was the season and that was New York, we were runnin for the money and the flesh.”
HSV: Wow.
PC: Right? That was the scene. And that was not my scene.
HSV: Well it’s interesting to bring that up cuz I’m born and raised here, I’m Linda from Orinda, you know, horse girl, mom died when I was 17, great family, baby of 4, got out of SF State, Ben Fong-Torres was my teacher …
PC: Ben and I were classmates.
HSV: Ben is a dear friend.
PC: He’d remember me. We went to school together.
HSV: Very supportive of the magazine. Anyway, but the time I graduated I was like, “I need to get the heck out of the Bay Area, I need to get out of here.” Because it was too hippie, it was too “whatever” for me. I needed the New York …
PC: Right.
HSV: Linear, fast.
PC: Gotcha.
HSV: I knew what I wanted to do and I spent 9 years there and it really sharpened my edges — but I came back. And I know so many people from New York that needed to come out here. I love that whole crossover of the intensity of New York.
PC: Me too. I grew up outside New York.
HSV: It’s the whole [gesture the infinity sign]
PC: My son lives in New York now and I appreciate the edge of New York and the straightforwardness and all of that. But I’m a westerner now.
HSV: “New York’s got the ways and means but just won’t let ya be” right?
PC: Yeah, right, exactly. [laughs] But here’s the difference. If I come to your house for dinner and I have an off night and I’m just duller than shit. And when I leave you’ll say, “Wow, what was up with Peter?” If that happens in New York, I’m never invited again.
HSV: Oh yeah! Yeah, Barlow — John Perry Barlow, I don’t know if you knew him very well…
PC: I knew him very, very well.
HSV: Okay, so he was a dear friend too! He was after my tail for years, I’ll be honest, but I was like, “Barlow, I love you but no!” But he said, it’s in my book — I wrote a book on the Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary was a dear friend, he’s in it. Waylon Jennings is in my book … I wrote it in ’95. Anyway, Barlow says, “If I had to choose between New York and San Francisco I’d have to say New York cuz I’d much rather have somebody say ‘Fuck you’ and mean ‘Have a nice day’ than the other way around.” Cuz in San Francisco it’s “Have a nice day” but there’s this little weird area in there.
PC: Well what do they say in New York? The people are sharks, they dress like sharks, and they play like sharks. In California, they dress like dolphins, they play like dolphins, and they feed like sharks.”
HSV: Yeah! That’s beautiful. I wonder who said that.
PC: I don’t know.
HSV: So bringing it back to … this is the Haight Street Voice. This whole thing about cycles, which Fayette and I were getting into yesterday. So what you were doing then, here we are now …
So if you look at the Haight-Ashbury now, the magic that was coming out there … okay, I guess I should start with: Do you think there’s an actual vortex or a magical energy to those blocks on the Haight? What is it about that particular junction on the planet that was this Mecca?
PC: No, so here’s what I think — and this is not an original …
HSV: Bobby Weir thinks that energetically it had some sort of vortex.
PC: Yeah, well, I don’t think that way.
HSV: Okay.
PC: So Gary Snyder has a great metaphor and he calls it “The Great Underground”. And the Great Underground is like a river that surfaces from time to time. And when it surfaces, all the earth-worshipping, life-affirming forces come to the surface. All the female loving, the poetry, the yogis, the shamans, the priestesses, the artists. So you can look back, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau, that American transcendentalist part. It came up again in the ‘20s in Paris with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and all these people. And it surfaced in multiple places in the ‘60s, it wasn’t just the Haight-Ashbury. The Haight-Ashbury was the tabula rasa because we were not displacing people who lived there. But the real thing was that first of all a new generation was coming into maturity, we were very hopeful, we hadn’t yet been bruised by the lengths to which the elites would go to maintain power. And we were full of “God! There’s a better way to do this! We can just do this!”
Some of the things you could do were astounding! When I was in college, I was a group of 14 people right during the Cuban Missile Crisis and we said, “This is crazy! These motherfuckers are gonna blow up the world.” And we planned for about 10 days, we hustled the money to buy 2 old cars, we took 13 people to Washington to go on a 3-day fast in front of the White House. We dressed in jackets, we cut our hair short, we did not eat. Kennedy saw us and invited us in the White House — the first time in the history of the White House that protesters had been invited in. And we took that opportunity, we wrote to every college in the United States and we kept protests going for an entire year up until February of 1963 when 25,000 students assembled in Washington. And Tom Hayden said that the Grinnell 14 was the beginning of the student protest movement.
So you could just do something that was important to you. Bob Dylan just sat down and he spoke the way he wanted to speak and he wrote and he had this spinal telephone that was wide open and he just coined the moment, moment after moment after moment.
HSV: Yeah.
PC: So there was a hopefulness at that point, which I felt disappeared. By the time I was seeing kids with needles through their eyebrows and through their nipples and chin, I’m thinking, “These kids are hurting and they’re showing me they’re hurting. So I’m not a big believer — first of all as a Zen guy, I know that time is an idea. There’s only place we are which is in this moment [snaps fingers].
HSV: Exactly.
PC: And once we’re not in this moment, everything is either a memory or a hope or a fear of what’s gonna come. So cycles? The universe is cycles.
HSV: Right.
PC: It takes 365 days for the Earth to cycle around the Sun. You know we have the Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice and blah blah. But I think that cycles of people are less predictable. What it really is is that we have immature ideas about human nature.
HSV: Okay.
PC: Human nature is all of it. Think of human beings like a radio that’s tuned to the human frequency. Anything that any human can feel, think or do, we can do. Meaning you can be Hitler, you can be Mother Theresa, you can be Muhammad Ali, you can be … all those thoughts and impulses are part of being human. We think of ourselves as good guys and then we cut off the shadow sides and we project them on other people and make them our enemy. So there’s a point when you’re young and you’re free and you’re unencumbered where it’s easy to be bold, it’s easy to experiment.
HSV: I moved to New York on a dime when I was young, like zzzzzztt!
PC: As you get older and you have people … you’re responsible for people. You know, I became a movie actor, not because I wanted to become famous — that was the part I hated. That’s why I quit movies. I became a movie actor so I could support myself as a writer, so I wouldn’t have to write for money and write bullshit.
HSV: Right.
PC: So once you get children, you know, I would do a movie and then I might be out of work for a year. But my tuition didn’t stop, my rent didn’t stop. So when you take on the responsibility of a family and commitments, your life gets compressed.
HSV: I would say even without the family, I mean I have a cat, but it still gets compressed.
PC: That’s right.
HSV: I think aging, it just [compress hand motion]
PC: That’s right. You have to focus your time to get anything done.
HSV: I think that’s called evolving and getting wiser, because you’re not out — the exploring sort of slows, you don’t have to go out to the edge everyday anymore cuz you already sort of went out to the edge.
PC: That’s right. And don’t you think that you get more in tune with what you really want?
HSV: Oh absolutely!
PC: Yeah.
HSV: You peel away the layers and this is it. Like Fayette was saying, she really knew who she was when she was a kid but she had to peel away all the layers and then she got to land in San Francisco shine! This thing she always knew she was when she was a kid. That’s the beauty I think of the Haight and the whole thing that we’re speaking to today.
PC: So here’s a funny thing to think about: As soon as you make something an emblem, you freeze it.
HSV: Mmmhmm.
PC: And one of the problems is we use emblems to help us remember — like I used to argue with the Grateful Dead about it all. Like Barlow used to be talking bad about the fans and all the people following stuff around. And I’d say, “Why do you give them so much shit to hang their hat on? All these skulls and lightning bolts and teddy bears and all this mythology? If you don’t want them around, stop selling that shit.”
So Haight Street [taps latest edition of HSV on table] is gonna mean something very different to me than it means to somebody comin’ in 2022. And so, I mean if I just look at this [cover of HSV #10]: There’s people dancing in the street, there’s improbable psychedelic art, there’s electric guitars, there’s girls dancing …
HSV: Dr. David E. Smith is on there …
PC: Yeah, and it’s kind of that gingerbread architecture of San Francisco. Well, that particular moment in history won’t ever be recreated, but this moment in history has all the same potential to express itself in the same breadth, the same complexity.
HSV: Polarization — that’s why I have this image that I brought for you [cover of #11, flower down gun barrel] is … I mean with Ukraine, here we are — and everybody on the camera, and this [check tape recorder] I hope it still going, yes … This image, I feel like with what’s going on in Ukraine it’s still coming down to all these years later. Why can’t the flower out power the gun? Isn’t that the message that you guys were talking about? Let nature, let …
PC: No! We were armed. The Diggers were armed [laughs]. The Diggers were not hippies and flower children.
HSV: Alright! This is why …! [laughing]
PC: We were not foolin’ around.
HSV: Okay.
PC: The flower can’t overpower the gun because both exist eternally.
HSV: Okay, this is great.
PC: Right? And both come from the human interior. Both are possibilities of the human mind. If you think about what a human being is, it’s a body, then it’s form, the body; feelings, impulses, sensation and consciousness, so it’s always all there. History is not a straight line. Time goes in 2 different directions at once, you know?
When the Grateful Dead and the Sons of Champlins and the Charlatans were all the cutting edge of the moment, they were all dressing like old-time cowboys. So nothin’s controllable in that sense. Time is going like a nebula in every direction. So [points to flower in gun cover] this was an idea of innocence which was untested, the flower in the gun. And this [pointing to gun] was an idea of patriotism and duty and following orders and social organization that was untested, and it was working itself out, they were in dialogue. And you know, the rabbit doesn’t blame the hawk for eating it. I may blame the soldiers who killed their own citizens at Kent State, but they both existed in the same moment and they were both expressing different visions of reality. And had they known that they were visions, that they were ephemeral, that they were soap bubbles that wouldn’t last, they might not have taken them so seriously and so violently.
END OF PART 1, but don’t worry. Here is … PART 2! Along with transcript … enjoy!
PART 2
HSV: And what do you think about — this is a little bit of a tangent but we’ll go there: Ukraine. Even the Dalai Lama said it doesn’t make sense, I mean war never make sense, but the bombing … it’s so out of … I mean we just survived a pandemic and now we’re bombing. What’s your reaction to this whole craziness?
PC: My reaction is that 60 years ago we told you that nuclear weapons were unworkable, and now the Ukraine is being sacrificed to NATO because Putin has nuclear weapons and everybody is afraid to step in for fear that Putin will use nuclear weapons. So it’s not even who has the bomb, it’s the bomb itself. These weapons are so destructive that technically they can’t be used and yet we’re spending billions and billions of dollars.
Men like to fight. They’re gonna fight. If there were no atom bombs, the 30-nation alliance of NATO would’ve taken care of Putin in a minute. But he’s the guy that says, “I’ve got the end of the world here. You wanna pull this switch?” Because remember, 10-15 years ago, the RAND Corporation did a study of a hypothetical war between India and Pakistan in which 50 Hiroshima-style nuclear bombs were thrown. 50! The new weapons are 50-times more powerful than those bombs. Those 50 bombs created what was called “Global Winter.” They threw enough dirt and smoke and ash up in the air to block the sunlight for 10 years.
HSV: Jesus.
PC: Which would mean no harvest, no crops, mass starvation, mass migration. So that’s what we’re bluffing with when we bluff with nuclear weapons. So Putin is just expressing some, you know, bullshit empire idea, wants to set his ego in his idea of history, and will empty Ukraine of all the people. That’s why they’re coming the cities. They know they’re not gonna do house to house fighting like they did in Syria. So they’re emptying the cities, they’re gonna try to break the spirit of those people, but what’s more important is that the 30 nations are rendered impotent by the existence of these nuclear weapons and no one’s talking about it. So the real issue is the abolishment of nuclear weapons because without it, no alliances mean anything.
HSV: Right.
PC: No international law means anything. He’s using phosphorous bombs, he shooting civilians, he’s bombing civilians — he’s a war criminal. Fine. He’s got the end-of-the world switch in his hand. And the nuclear weapons in Russian and the nuclear weapons in the United States and all over the world are called “Fire Arm Warning”. They’re set on hair trigger. So if something happens and they mistake a weather balloon, they mistake a dirigible and they set their weapons off, ours go off — and that’s civilization. The rodents may live, the rats may live. That’s what people are bluffing with just by having these weapons, just by being chesty and macho and we got these weapons that they can’t use without destroying everything.
HSV: Ahhhhh! [deep sigh, shake off the negative with hands]
PC: [calmly, smiles] Well you asked.
HSV: I know. But, the good news is and Fayette and I were talking about that that the Russians and a lot of people in the world not supporting that madness.
PC: Yes.
HSV: They’re saying, “We don’t … this guy’s loco.”
PC: So am I being helpful when I suggest that everything is being projected out of the energy of the universe at the same time, always. There’s Putin, there are the good people, there are the dove-niks, the peaceniks — it’s all here all the time.
HSV: Okay …
PC: One of the things that’s made it worse, made it uncontrollable, is nuclear weapons. It’s not like there’s … you could have everybody being a peacenik and have a crazy guy with an atom bomb …
HSV: Yeah…
PC: What are you gonna do?
HSV: Well, I mean I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do Peter Coyote, that’s why I’m doing this magazine …
PC: Yeah!
HSV: All I can do is be good and do my meditation and do my kundalini yoga …
PC: That’s right!
HSV: Talk to my neighbors, say hello to the post lady …
PC: That’s right!
HSV: You know, spread some good vibes. I’m not a peacenik, you know, but be kind.
PC: That’s right.
HSV: Evolve within my own interior.
PC: That’s what you can take care of.
HSV: Right.
PC: And you do that. That’s what I do.
HSV: That’s it. That’s all I have.
PC: But …
HSV: But back in your day when you were doing the Diggers, didn’t you feel like you were really trying to help the world?
PC: I did. I did.
HSV: And do you look back on yourself and think, “Oh man, that was … “ or do you think, “That was great …” or was it the time, or …
PC: No. I think I was a mixed bag and I didn’t see myself as a mixed bag. I mean how many times have you been in a room with somebody screaming for peace?
HSV: That’s kinda dumb …
PC: So what I’ve learned how not to do is create the condition in my own behavior that I’m pretending to cure, you know what I mean?
HSV: Right.
PC: “Capitalist Pigs!” Well, my parents were Capitalist Pigs. They were lovely people, they fought for civil rights, they fought for civil liberties, my dad had a genius with numbers, he made a lot of money, he lost it all. I didn’t get anything.
But I couldn’t just go through life and [gesturing with fist]: “Capitalist Pigs!”
HSV: That reminds me of that line in Dr. Strangelove: “Gentlemen, we can’t argue in here, this is the War Room!” [laughter]
PC: Yeah.
HSV: One of the best movies. When he’s flying …
PC: … on the bomb, yeah!
HSV: Slim Pickens, “Woohoo!” Swingin’ his hat.
PC: It was a great movie!
HSV: It really was.
PC: So here’s the other thing …
HSV: Yeah, keep going!
PC: And it’s the last thing I’ll say about politics.
HSV: Yeah, I know I get a little weirded out.
PC: The real problem that no one else wants to talk about either is that we have a political system that’s organized around money.
HSV: That’s one of your quotes that I have written here, it says, “The world offers us 2 options: The world of love or the world of power. A world without power is flaccid and a world without love is vicious.”
PC: Yeah! So follow it through: A political system that is organized around collecting money, the interests of money always trump the interests of the people. So for instance imagine what our government would be if we said full federal funding of elections. We’re gonna give every candidate the same, there’s no raising money, if we said it is unfair for corporations to spend their treasure changing public policy for their shareholders, no corporate donations, and illegal to give money from lobbyists to legislatures.
If that were the case, our government would be listening to us because we would be paying to put them in office. And the fact that we don’t means they say whatever we want to hear with their buzz groups and focus groups, they go into office and their real business is repaying their donors. And now we’re seeing the division in income and labor and resources that that has produced. And we’re still not talking about the money. It’s just never even up for discussion. Why is Ted Cruz and these guys allowed to vote to overthrow the elections and still be in power? Because the that people have made the Congress a wholly-owned subsidiary of money are keeping them there.
HSV: Well I say poo to those guys.
PC [laughs] Good!
HSV: And you’ve got a nice Meyer’s lemon tree, wow!
PC: No, that’s a tangerine tree. I’ve got lemons in the back, which you’re welcome to.
HSV: I love Meyer’s lemons.
PC: And then I’ve got an orange tree. I’ll give you some of my jam before you go because you’re sweet. You should have some sweet jam.
HSV: Awww. [blush blush].
Alright! So going with this whole thing about cycles and Joseph Campbell and the whole Hero’s Journey and the going into the darkness … when I think about where we are and what’s going on, and I feel like — maybe just cuz I’m getting older — but I mean I didn’t live through the ‘60s but I feel like I’m meeting all the people that were there then and I am so grateful to be living in the Haight-Ashbury and having this magazine and sort of like being the liaison for the stories and the information that come from the people that were actually there and sort of sharing it with the young kids that are still coming there looking for something, for the people that live in the neighborhood. It’s, again “hyper-local with a global perspective”.
PC: Mmhmm [nods yes].
HSV: It doesn’t have to be the Haight. It’s about community.
PC: I get it.
HSV: I have a subscriber in Finland because he loves the energy of community that the Haight really represents.
PC: Do you live in the Haight?
HSV: Yeah, Page and Masonic.
PC: Oh yeah, okay!
HSV: For a long time, 35 years, yeah.
PC: So I think it’s wonderful. And I think just representing your place, and the history of your place, and making sure it’s okay and making sure the hungry guy on the corner has something to eat, someone to talk to … I mean I think that’s taking care of your little square inch.
HSV: But what would you say to those people who are there that really do respect you? I said, “I’m going to interview Peter Coyote” and there are young kids that are “homeless” — whatever they are — that came … they’re getting away from wherever they’re from, some of them are just fucking around, some of them are just trying to find peace within themselves …
PC: Fleeing bad families.
HSV: Yes. What would you say to these kids on a loudspeaker — even the residents and the merchants, you know, driving down the road like the Merry Pranksters did with the loudspeaker, you know? What do you want to say to everybody — and globally?
PC: [laughs] Well, the first thing I’d say is sit down and stop and get acquainted with your own inner life without any distractions. What meditating is is it allows you to drop below your personality. Your personality only gives you 3 choices: You can like, you can dislike, or you can be neutral. But your personality is just like a little bread in a big bowl of soup [big arm gesture].
HSV: [laughter]
PC: You want to reach the energy in the big bowl of soup.
HSV: Mmhmm.
PC: So I think to take time off, to be homeless is fine, to be scrounging is fine, but don’t waste the time. If you don’t keep yourself healthy, you’re gonna have a crummy old age. If you don’t time to really understand how much you can be snagged by your mind and jerked around and learn to control it, you’re gonna be like a leaf blowin’ in the wind. So just, you know, try to be yourself. Every other role is taken.
HSV: I mean, they do want to take the psychedelics, you know, they do want to take the drugs. They’ll say, “Well those guys did it — why can’t we?”
PC: Well here’s what I’d say about it, okay, fair enough. Nothin’ wrong with psychedelics, but it’s like taking a helicopter to the Grand Canyon. You’re gonna go there, it’s awesome, it’s mind bending, it may shake up — it will shake up your perspective. But you got there in a helicopter, you can’t get yourself back. If you get there by walking — meaning meditating — if you get there by walking you leave breadcrumbs as you go. You find your way back. So it’s like having a crutch that you can’t do without.
So … and on top of that, a glimpse of enlightenment that’s not backed up by practice — learning how to control your anger, your fear, your envy, your jealousy, all the negative sides of us that we don’t like to look at, that’s what keeps us out of happiness and enlightenment.
So, yeah, go out to the woods, have a nice day, take a trip. But, you know, my friend Brooks Butcher, I’ll show you his picture inside, he’s one of the earliest Diggers, he clawed out both his eyes on an acid trip and he drowned trying to escape from the insane asylum.
HSV: Ah jesus.
PC: I mean, Timothy Leary asked me to go on a speaking tour with him — I thought he was a fucking jerk to tell everybody to take acid. I mean it’s just irresponsible unless it was an experiment for the CIA. You know he married a CIA agent.
HSV: I know. He was a friend of mine.
PC: Well my friends broke him out of jail and he dropped a dime on ‘em and they went to jail. So I don’t have a lot of …
HSV: Yeah, I hear you, I hear you, yeah.
PC: … fond feelings about him.
HSV: I know he was a lot. Anyway, I don’t wanna put that in there.
Okay, going with the cycle thing, if we were gonna call this cycle of the ‘60s this sort of renaissance of psychedelics is happening now — how can we do it better or stronger this time around? Is there something we could do differently now? I mean mushrooms were on the cover of Newsweek a couple months ago. I mean that’s pretty fucking amazing really.
PC: Well, not really considering they’ve been around for 3000 years and people have been using them.
HSV: Right, but in an accepted way, you know?
PC: Yeah, we’re the last ones catching up.
HSV: Yeah.
PC: So, once again, there’s an aspect of psychedelics that get harnessed to personal greed. You know, “I want to create my perfect inner state!” That’s not the enlightenment that the Buddha taught. The Buddha taught that our job is to control ourselves and take care of other people. [Rooster crows in background … Chico the dog starts barking …]
So there’s a part of the psychedelic revolution which I see just like EST, just like every other kind of thing where people want to be mellow all the time and they want to not have any problems. There’s another side where serious minds are looking at it judiciously and in a controlled way to try to be helpful to people and give them a safe space to work on traumas and stuff like that, and it’s all for the good.
HSV: Psychotherapy — psychedelic-induced therapy.
PC: Yes, but it’s this American idea that you’re gonna drop a pill and be enlightened and then go out and be a better executive, which is just an example of greed. It’s just me wanting it all.
HSV: Looking for a miracle [hold up finger], that whole thing.
PC: Yeah! Yeah, and if you’re not ready to do the work… [dog barking] Chico, thank you. Thank you, honey.
HSV: Hi Chico!
PC: If you’re not willing to do the work, you know, you’re just fooling yourself.
HSV: Well, Dr. Dave, he is opening this [Haight-Ashbury] Psychedelic Center, which I’m gonna be the archivist in …
PC: So what’s it gonna be?
HSV: It’s gonna space, he owns the building, it’s on Stanyan, it’s Stanyan and Waller, and it’s a storefront. Starting, it’s going to be a library where you can learn about psychedelics.
PC: Uh-huh. That’s how the Psychedelic Shop opened.
HSV: A reading room, images, photographs, all of that where you can learn about it. And then when psychedelics are decriminalized it will actually be a place you can come in and get treatment.
PC: I see.
HSV: That’s the goal.
PC: Well, he’s a doctor, he could treat people now …
HSV: Well, they’re not legal, to do psychedelics.
PC: Oh really? Uh-huh.
HSV: Yeah, there’s too many … red tape. But yeah the UCSF doctors are right behind him. So he’s creating the space — I mean he’s 83 or 84 now?
PC: Oh yeah, I see.
HSV: So he wants to have — this is his last legacy, he wants to create this space before he splits.
PC: That’s nice.
HSV: And he brought me on as the, you know, editorial, archivist …
PC: How nice! That’s fun!
HSV: So one of the things is — if we get more testimonials from people it helps decrim happen faster — how have psychedelics enhanced your life. [Rooster crowing]
PC: Well, so, there is a part of the [his phone rings]. Sorry! Let me just see what ..
HSV: God your ears are good, I didn’t hear that! Go ahead, no worries.
PC: [puts phone away] Um … So there’s a part of the human brain called the “default mode network” …
HSV: Yes, I remember reading that. [Chico barking …]
PC: And the default mode network is what keeps us from being high. Just imagine that 25,000 years ago we were so entranced by a luminous butterfly that we didn’t pay attention to the sabertooth tiger comin’ behind us.
So the default mode network is relaxed by psychedelics and by meditating. It allows the brain to make new connections and nodal connections and utilize some of the enormous power of the brain, which we don’t use all the time because by recognition, by sight, we look at that, we say “plant” “leaf” “flower”. And that language is a shorthand and it actually gives us a kind of efficiency but we don’t actually feel [points] that flower, we don’t actually go fully into it like we do on psychedelics.
HSV: Right.
PC: So psychedelics are really good for softening the ego and allowing you to merge with the object of your attention and to really be in touch in your body, in your feelings, to be, in a way, optimally human. But if you don’t frame that experience with a sober, disciplined life that is also investigating your own weaknesses as a human, you will always be drawn back into your old problems.
HSV: Do you remember your first trip, or your early trips?
PC: I do! Oh yeah, I do. [nodding head]
HSV: And what was the great revelation, the great reveal that you experienced?
PC: The great revelation was, there’s nobody home.
HSV: [laughter]
PC: [laughter] Ya know?!
HSV: Yeah!
PC: So, and that, you know, I was whatever I beheld.
HSV: Mmhmm.
PC: And I remember saying to my friend who was just watching, you know, guarding me on the thing …
HSV: Tripmaster …
PC: … that I wanted to call everybody I knew and tell ‘em!!! [laughing]
HSV: [big laughter]
PC: Oh hey! Guess what!?
HSV: I’m not here!!!
PC: Yeah, yeah!
HSV: That’s great! Okay … let’s see, I think we covered a lot there.
Oh, where we are right now. Could your 18-year-old self ever imagine that you’d be where you are right now? Do you think you had the foresight to see … all this?
PC: No. I had … I could not have. I mean really I could not have thought. Especially when I did, like, 10 years of heroin and led me to all sorts of things: I lost a lot of people. I turned 65 and 75 and buried 18 friends. And so, you know, I just …
HSV: Wow.
PC: When the counterculture ended, a whole bunch of things happened at once: my dad died. He died so far below broke, all I got was his fountain pen.
HSV: Wow.
PC: I mean this is a man who minted money. Had 3000 acres of cattle ranches here and president of a railroad and oil business. And he used to always tell me, “Don’t worry about money. I’ll give you money. You’ll go and you’ll teach at Harvard and I’ll give you the money to get your suits made, and fly-rods [gestures fishing pole], good fly-rods made.” So okay. He never talked to me — I might say, “Dad how much did that cost?” “A dollar! Don’t worry about money!”
HSV: How the heck did he lose all his money?
PC: One mistake, one mistake. He used to have all of his peoples’ money in safekeeping in American government bonds, but he had it on margin. Do you know what that means?
HSV: Mmm, not really.
PC: Okay, so let’s say you have 100 shares of stock that are a dollar each, I give you $10 and you give me all the stock.
HSV: Okay.
PC: You loan it to me.
HSV: It’s like a retainer.
PC: Yeah, but you know that the stock is worth a dollar each. I’ve got $100-worth of stock, you have $10, right? And the stock I have is still worth $100. Now if the price goes down and it’s no longer worth a dollar a share, but it goes down to let’s say 50 cents a share, you’re gonna ask me for money to make up what I don’t have in stock cuz I don’t have $50 worth of stock, so you’re gonna ask me for $50 so that you’re not holding the bag.
So what happened is my dad was so facile with money, he put all his relatives safekeeping money, all his … everything, in these bonds, American government bonds. And in 1962 when we invaded Cuba, the bottom fell out of the American government bonds market, and he got a $20 million margin call. That’s 1962 dollars. That would be $500 million today.
HSV: Wow.
PC: And he kept going somehow for 10 years. We didn’t know about it. My sister and I had to sign papers and things, he got my ranch, she got her ranch — you know, all of it. And when he died, people were tugging my mother over the coffin: “We want our money!”
HSV: Wow.
PC: And luckily, I had been a Digger. I lived without money. I never made [more than] $2500 a year for 10 years. And so when he died I was already living marginally and I knew I was never gonna be a business man, but I was, you know, I was feeling underused by that time.
You know, I still don’t think about money much. As soon as I had enough to get my kids to graduate school debt-free, I quit the movies. I mean I got tired of people coming up to my table at a restaurant or buggin’ me.
HSV: I dated Richard Gere for awhile and it was really weird, like, how do you deal with that? I mean I was just like, eech.
PC: Well he is a lovely guy.
HSV: He is a lovely guy. He was wonderful.
PC: Another Buddhist.
HSV: Yep. I got to meet the Dali Lama through him. I couldn’t speak for a day when he shook my hand. Incredible energy. Anyway, yeah …
PC: It’s okay! I’ve done 4 events with the Dalai Lama. I did the opening ceremonies and he’s in the audience and I’m thinking, “Wait a minute, what’s wrong with this picture?”
HSV: [laughter] Right? What’s he doin’ out there?
PC: Anyway, I forget how we got on him …
HSV: Money, how money has kind of been irrelevant. I asked you would your 18-year-old self be able to look at yourself now.
PC: No, I couldn’t have.
HSV: What would you like to say to your 18-year-old self now?
PC: Well, what I would say is what my father said to me. My father’s last words … we did not get along very well when I was young. I was afraid of him. He was very violent. He called me shit for brains, just thought I was an idiot, or acted like he thought I was an idiot.
He was actually a great man but he wasn’t a great father. But he came out to Olema one weekend in the blizzard of ’69, the rainstorms that were washing everything around, and this rental car shows up, and my mother who’s like somebody out of a 1940s film noir [feigns smoking cigarette]: “Lovely to know you, darling.” And my dad [mimics carrying box on shoulder] with a case of scotch and a thousand Seconals, red barbiturates, pulls up. We’re all inside. There’s 4 Hell’s Angels there, there’s everybody — there’s 25 people from Olema, wood stove, no electricity, a 5-gallon hot water heater …
HSV: Probably weed goin’ around …
PC: Weed goin’, people passing joints to my Mom and she’d go, “No darling, I’ve got my Viceroy, thank you.”
HSV: [laughter]
PC: And so, you know, it’s like crazy time. And my Dad, when the Hell’s Angels get too close, he’s just like, “Get the fuck outta here!”
HSV: Wow!
PC: Well, he was a killer. He was really a dangerous guy. Anyway, at the end of the day, my dad’s sitting in the kitchen, it’s about 11 o’clock at night, there’s Hell’s Angels on either side of him, he’s punching holes in Seconals. The Hell’s Angels call them “Belligerents” — they take them when they’re gonna fight, you know, like a barbiturate.
HSV: Yikes.
PC: They say, “Why are you punching holes in these things?” And he says, “Cuz when I want ‘em to work I want ‘em to work fast.” And he’s giving them reds. And, so, I come out there and I’m just checkin’ in, everybody’s asleep, and he says, “You’re a better man than I am, son.” I said, “What are you talkin’ about?” He said, “All this” [gestures with hand]. And this was squalor! This was too many dirt-poor people in a wet and steamy shit-bag little farm. I said, “Dad, this isn’t even a dress rehearsal.” He said, “I know, I know,” he said, “but you take care of each other and you share what you have.” And he was looking at his own life. He was like a new-style Robin Hood: he stole from everybody and kept it. So I was blown away.
HSV: Dyslexic Robin Hood.
PC: I said, “What … well, how about a little advice?” He said, “Okay …” and he passed out. [laughs] And I just sat there. And he woke up and this is what he said, and it’s almost verbatim 50 years later, 60 years later, he said: “Capitalism is dying at its own internal contradictions. And I oughta know, I’m one of ‘em. You think it’s gonna take 5 years. It’s gonna take 50. When the sons of bitches running it don’t give a shit about you or your children or their own children. They’ve paid their dues, they’re gonna sell down everything that’s not nailed down to get theirs out of it. So there are huge historical forces at work. Keep your head down. Look after your family. Don’t let this machine roll over and crush you. Stay healthy.”
HSV: Wow.
PC: That was 1969 — no that was 1971, okay? So 30 years would’ve been 2001, and then 20 … so it’s been 51 years, and I have never seen anything in that interim that proved wrong anything that he said.
HSV: Right, right.
PC: So that’s what I’d say to kids: Life is gonna be so much longer than you possibly know. Don’t blow your health thinking you’re gonna die by the time you’re 20 because you’re gonna have a shitty old age. Take your time. Think about what you really want. Think about who you really are. Don’t … Everything’s perfect until you compare. Don’t try to compare yourself to other people and see yourself from the outside. See yourself from the inside. What do you want? Who are you really? Forget the imagery. Forget the be all you can be and go to an old country and kill people. So … life’s a lot longer than you think, and that’s what I would say. And be patient.
HSV: It’s hard to follow your bliss, though, in general because you’ve got to be able to survive, you need to eat …
PC: It’s bullshit! Nobody can be blissful all the time.
HSV: Exactly.
PC: And one of the things that meditating teaches you is your moods are gonna change. They’re like weather. So don’t be partial. We don’t fall apart when it rains outside, we cozy up and we build a fire. When you’re conversant enough with your interior life, you’re on a bummer? I’m on a bummer. It won’t last forever. Look at the people that run away from what they feel: the bars are full ‘em, the dope houses are full of ‘em, they’re overshopping, they’re sex addicts, they’re status addicts, they’re greedy, they’re … you know? That comes from being afraid to face what you feel and your own inner junkyard dogs.
HSV: What is it … Fuck Everything And Run, F.E.A.R.
PC: Yeah. Oh, I never heard that! That’s good, that’s good.
Anyway, so sometimes you only learn — I would never have learned … when I came out of the ‘60s, I lost everything. I mean my family, my inheritance, I was a single father of a daughter. You know, it’s like, my friends had moved away, there was no more land, we had nothin’. And I had to really stop and figure out, “What am I gonna do?”
I started meditating and I found a psychiatrist, I found a doctor — a friend — who got me off heroin, gave me enough drugs to stop heroin, and then I knew I had to change my life or my daughter was gonna wind up in a state home cuz I was gonna overdose. I came back to San Francisco to bring her to her mother’s and I went out and met a dude and we went back to his crib and we got high on really strong dope, and when I woke up he was dead across the table.
HSV: Oh shit!
PC: And I just let myself out in the hall and closed the door and I realized that if that was me, my daughter would be in an orphanage. And I thought, “That’s it.” That was the last shot of dope I ever took.
So once you know that you’re the problem, then you can start fixin’ it. So I interviewed about 10 therapists, I met one I’d like to be like, I worked with him for 2 years, he gave me a special deal. He died. I started all over, and in the meantime I’d also started going to the Zen Center and sitting Zen.
HSV: And you were doing voiceovers too? I remember reading that somewhere.
PC: Not yet, not that early.
HSV: Okay.
PC: A little later than that. But …
HSV: How were you getting by? I’m only saying that because at my age, I’ve always — I worked at NBC, I’ve always had a good job. Then covid hit, you know, the money thing …
PC: Well here’s what happened: when I came back to San Francisco — do you know Danny Rifkin?
HSV: Yes, I do! Rohan introduced me actually. We all had lunch.
PC: So when I came back to San Francisco, Danny Rifkin gave me his unemployment.
HSV: Oh wow, that’s [pray pose]
PC: So for 6 months I had an unemployment check.
HSV: Because you were taking care of yourself, something came to you, right, energetically?
PC: I guess, I guess. I had know him a long time.
Anyway, then a guy named John Kreidler developed something called the CETA Program, the “Comprehensive Education Training Act” and he got the government to give training money to artists. And I heard about it, I joined a line of a thousand people auditioning for a hundred jobs. And I didn’t know anything about it.
I walked into this room and my saint angel, a guy named Steven Goldstein, who was the head of the neighborhood arts foundation. And there was 3 people and I didn’t do anything, I didn’t have anything and he said, “Do something.” So I started to drum and I made up a song about the Haight-Ashbury and showing up for a job and I’m good and clever at rhymes, so they hired me. So I got $600 a month. And then we had to think up something to do and in the meantime I was teaching at, like, third-world schools in South San Francisco and stuff like that. And then my friend, Gary Snyder, the poet, you know who he is?
HSV: Yes.
PC: Gary Snyder won the Pulitzer Prize in ’75 and Jerry Brown got him to start a state arts council made of all working artists and he asked me to join him.
HSV: Wow.
PC: So suddenly I was in charge of the money that the San Francisco neighborhood arts program could get so I could get my shitty supervisor off my ass. And it turned out that I had a really good head for politics and policy and I was elected chairman of the arts council the next year. It was unpaid. I was still on my $600 stipend, but I’d found something to do …
HSV: Besides heroin …
PC: … and under my watch, the budget went from one to five to eight to eleven to sixteen million dollars a year. And we started hiring artists, we had relationships with 14 departments of state, getting them to hire artists to solve problems within. Because instead paying artists to make art, let’s sell them creative problem solvers. Let’s give them a full-time salary for half-time work, they’ll make the art for free.
HSV: Wow.
PC: And we did it. And we won the legislature over, and my success at that … you know, my last Department of Finance committee hearing was in front of 3 rock-ripped conservative guys from the Central Valley who ran the Department of Finance. And I had been fighting with these guys, but I’d also made relationships with them.
HSV: Mmhmm.
PC: We disagreed but I never judged them and stuff. And so just before I did my testimony, these guys pulled out hippie headbands and put ‘em on. I swear to god! I almost lost it. My eyes teared up, it was like saying, “Good job!”
HSV: Wow.
PC: And that’s [clapping hands] what gave me the confidence to try the movies. I said, you know, I’ll give myself 5 years and if it doesn’t work, I won’t die with the “what if” and, you know, and I got lucky. I got in at a time when the movie — the female movie stars were just starting to hit their sell-by date …
HSV: Oh yeah, Sharon Stone? No, not yet.
PC: Well, they wanted to be seen with older guys.
HSV: Okay.
PC: So, like … oh god, don’t get me on names. So Jean Smart and I did a film together and Ellen Burstyn and I did a film together.
HSV: Oh yeah, I love her!
PC: Yeah.
HSV: Love her!
PC: Yeah, she’s a monster!
HSV: Love her!
PC: So anyway, I got in the door, and I was very lucky. I never was a genius actor, but I did 160 films and I traveled the world, and then I’ve been on the cover of every magazine in Europe. I mean I had my taste of fame. But it’s not where I live. And I never was comfortable — as a Digger, I was never comfortable with being the center of attention all the time cuz I always knew it’s everybody.
HSV: Yeah, I’ve been in a lot of bands … I’d much rather be the backup singer or the piano player in the background than the front person.
PC: Yeah! You know, in the movies it’s always the star that does everything, and that’s not what life is. So I’m not badmouthing it, it gave me a great life. I mean I bought 2 houses for 2 wives, I had enough left to get this for myself, my kids have no debt, they’re out of school.
HSV: That’s beautiful.
PC: And I’m happy as a clam!
HSV: Are clams happy?
PC: I think so!
