late first rough draft of memory

Just reading the title of the book Positively 4th Street, I was reminded of Mimi Farina, who I met briefly during an historic whirlwind called approaching winter 1963 in San Francisco. Mimi was onstage with the Committee, a comedy revue beloved by the local intelligentsia and tourist alike, and once or twice the doorman for reasons I will never fully comprehend let me and my singing partner in to watch the show for free. Bizarro improvisations, "zany" is the word for them (they'd improvise poems in crossover styles of "Kates" and "Yeets", and the audience was literate enough then to be in on the joke).

Another of the Committee's memorable regular skits was about an execution. The convict was dragged in and buckled into an electric chair. The warden and the guards were adjusting the straps, and as the steel cap was being settled on the prisoner's head, he began cackling, spitting, and hurling hilarious abuse at his captors. The condemned man spewed his venom at last, believing he had nothing whatsoever left to lose. After a few minutes of this hysteric insult, the warden and his helpers glanced at each other, unbuckled the straps, pulled him from the chair, then beat and kicked him to death.

Back then I was a guitar picker in the smallest and most obscure of venues, and the City Lights Bookstore was my mailbox in the city, their bulletin board held my occasional pieces of incoming mail with a thumbtack. All of which might sound more poetic than it really was. Not of any kind of lost generation, but rather an in-between generation, I was too late for the beatniks and too early for the hippies. And to those who really might not suspect or know, should you care, there is no beach in North Beach.

Late November, I'd arrived at one of the small coffee houses for the scheduled gig guitar case in hand, floating on air, amazed and thankful to have a small paying j-o-b onstage in a slightly larger than the smallest and most obscure of venues. So amped up about this stroke of good fortune to have spent nearly the entire day in rehearsal and re-rehearsal. But arriving at the appointed time, the club was dark, the doors were locked; the little coffee house was shut up tight as a drum. I panicked internally and was wondering how we had blown it, showing up on the wrong day or date. As I stood disbelieving, I finally noticed a small framed portrait draped in black in the window. A photo of John F Kennedy had been clipped from a newspaper and placed into the small frame, and there was a candle burning next to it.

It was Eric Andersen folksinger happened by and told my singing partner and me that Kennedy had been shot and killed that day. That we didn't have the job that night though a financial hardship of profound proportion was scarcely noticed by either of us in view of the enormity of the news. The newsracks were all empty as we continued on, but one held a paper with a dark black headline. We went down the street to Mike's poolhall instead to share one cup of coffee and to get out of the chill. We read through all the newspapers littering the tables, and we sat there for what must have been hours. About that time, we noticed an energized person walking up to the front door, then back down the street obviously to talk to someone. He reappeared at the door and was identified to us by a man at a nearby table as Alan Ginsberg (sic). He was peering in through the windows, perhaps looking for a recognizable face. He decided to enter, and made his entrance by pushing quickly through the doors. He settled at a far table, back to the wall, his visage facing towards the people seated in the room, and within moments the floors squeaked with the sound of wooden chairs being dragged across linoleum. He was immediately surrounded by people who were pulling their chairs and scooting their tables to be closer to him.

Aldous Huxley (one of my personal heroes of that time) had also died that very day, but because of the ongoing news surrounding the President's assassination, Huxley's obituary was delayed nearly a week before even receiving space enough to be published in the local paper. That was doubly sad, but it seemed bigger and more metaphysically significant than that, like things were threatening to slip apace and descend quickly into an impending overall darkness.

In propinquity with some of the famous artists of the era, I'll tell you now that I never sought them out. Every one of them I ever happened to see or run into I watched from afar and I doubt more than two real words were ever exchanged with any of them.

While you might think that we were little insignificant coffee house players, you're right, we were; we were young, but our music act was actually so-so aspiring to be ok. In fact, my singing and picking partner, possessing a natural talent of some significance and just needing proper time for nurture, went on to make a respectable career in music for himself once he returned to Los Angeles -- back to the land where opportunities both held more promise and seemed to beckon more brightly; where there was a receptive and lucrative market for his songwriting and arranging skills, and his playing; he being native to the area, he knew better how to move through the scene and make use of his connections. I remained in the Bay Area, genuinely not experienced enough to go on as a solo act and finding it hard to round up another guitarist, much less a steady guitarist, let alone one as gifted as he; though I actually ended up playing backup guitar a few times for J.C. Burris, who immediately "borrowed" my three dollar Marine Band harmonica. He tricked me out of it forever and for all times by asking to see it, then played a little while on it. He then dramatically tapped it in his hand, and wiped his hand on the side of his coat. Then shook the harmonica towards the ground like he was still shaking his spit out of it and casually wiped the harmonica off on his pantleg. Then gave it an extra little polish on the arm of his coat before handing it back to me advising, "Never loan your harp to anyone." It was his harmonica after that. But I didn't really mind because (a) he was a nice fellow and played very well indeed, and (b) he was quite clever and humorous in how he got the instrument away from me; so we played together a few times, but we scarcely made any money.

A few years later, spring of 1965, (I first scribbled 1965, but in the clear light of day it was spring of 1964) in a small town at the far edges of the L.A. basin. Because of my limited connections to a concert, after the show, I met Bob Dylan. He shook hands like a dead fish. The promoter was a friend of mine and had asked me to invite the performer to a party after the show, and I obliged, but soon had to scurry back to the host of the party to advise that Bob Dylan had a large entourage of people traveling with him, "my friends", he'd said waving his hand towards the group in introduction. He wanted to bring all his friends to the party, too, and, he laughed as he told me, "I have a lot of friends."

At the after concert party, which was in a tract home rented by students in a suburban neighborhood on Kansas Street, we all were honestly amazed when they showed up. I was betting they wouldn't. Soon, I wished they hadn't. As I recall, Dylan arrived later than most. Within an hour, I watched in horror as Bob Dylan (in some kind of idiotic snit that people tend to make allowances for only when it involves the rich or famous) grasped a woman by the front of her blouse and then brutally backhanded her across the face not once but twice, SLAP! SLAP! knocking her offbalance, she staggering and dropping to one knee, holding a hand across her reddened cheek and sobbing. She was part of his entourage, and only the locals (i.e., we fools who had arranged to get the necessary dough coughed up to sponsor the show, and so had made the mistake of inviting these people in the first place) made our feelings known about this. I was there, I know what I saw, and how I felt about it then, which is how I feel about it now. I freely admit I did not sob or weep, for to let fall a single tear would have been a waste of salt, when Dylan snapped his own neck in his highly publicized loss of control, that one involving a two wheeler.

I never bought another of his records and to this day I have a hard time even being in the same room should one happen to come across the radio, if a radio happens to be on. I sneer mentally and viscerally, and disgust and negativity clouds my thoughts. Other people I know who have encountered this guy since tend to pontificate in deep baritone voices of respect: "I had dinner with him at a philosophy professor's house in Berkeley". (he's a genius, the professor's really smart, and I was invited there, so I must be pretty great, too) Or happy, hippy, birkenstock, and homespun, they recount in in waycool alto what a regular downhome fella he is: "I met him at his home in New York, and he brought out his guitar and everyone played music for hours." (per rainbow aquarius sunshine woman, he's gen-u-whine down to earth, like a friend, and plays guitar in his own living room like a friend). I remember differently and I know given the span of time that has already elapsed, that impression is not likely to change.

A year probably two after that concert debacle, back again in the Bay Area, I rolled on the floor giggling and holding my sides. A tape purporting to be made by Mimi's famous sister Joan (a twelve-string guitar was strumming and a female voice was mimicing Bob Dylan's nasaly clipped enunciation of the Coaster's song, "I'm Searchin "), was broadcast over the air by an underground FM radio station. This surely had to have been some kind of a hoax.

Because I am not a famous person, there is no reason for me to be around famous people. But based on what I came to know back then, in a limited but immediate way, Mimi and Joanie seem to be my idea of people. I've not read Positively 4th Street because I've heard from other people I respect that Mr. Hajdu completely missed the trip and misplaced their trust.

Ergo, it's painful to consider but easy to do: Dylan's whiny muzac gets clicked off. Because it touches on Dylan, I won't read Hajdu's book.

I'm not sure why I chose to share any of this today. I usually make it a rule never to write or talk about anyone I might know in show business until they're dead, because someone will just find a way to use them. And even being from real life, this would have been a pretty generic series of anecdotes, except for the name-dropping part. Drawn from real life, it doesn't make any kind of sense. Except that as you grow older, and experiences stack up, one thing reminds you of another and sometimes things intersect in strange ways.

With Mimi (bless her soul), I am always happy to hear one of her songs come across the radio, but it simply doesn't happen very often. The last time was the day she died. I heard her bright sweet voice and the sparkling sound of a hammered dulcimer as I followed the road by the river towards home. One of my favorite songs by her, one so textured and complex, it reminds me to forget even trying to figure out the big mystery of life when just one relationship can be so damned mystifying:

Reflections In A Crystal Wind

If there's a way to say I'm sorry, perhaps I'll stay another evening, beside your door, and watch the moon rise, inside your window, where jewels are falling, and flowers weeping, and strangers laughing, because you're dreaming that I have gone.

And if I don't know why I'm going, perhaps I'll wait beside the pathway where no one's coming, and count the questions I turned away from, or closed my eyes to, or had no time for, or passed right over because the answers would shame my pride.

I've heard them say the word "forever", but I don't know if words have meaning, when they are promised in fear of losing what can't be borrowed, or lent in blindness, or blessed by pageantry, or sold by preachers, while you're still walking your separate ways.

Sometime we bind ourselves together, and seldom know the harm in binding the only feeling that cries for freedom and needs unfolding, and understanding, and time for holding a simple mirror with one reflection to call your own.

If there's an end to all our dreaming, perhaps I'll go while you're still standing beside your door, and I'll remember your hands encircling a bowl of moonstones, a lamp of childhood, a robe of roses, because your sorrows were still unborn.



  ¶ 3/07/2003 01:59:00 AM