text:
ETHAN RUSSELL

AN AMERICAN STORY
ETHAN RUSSELL

AN AMERICAN STORY

IT'S YOUR HISTORY. HELP WRITE IT.

V 1.0

CHARLES BOOKS

This book is dedicated to my family: to my wife Shannon, to my stepson Gabe, and -- this time and this book especially -- to my son Lucas, with all my heart, with the unending love of his father.
Copyright

ETHAN RUSSELL: AN AMERICAN STORY

1. Memoir. American History. Rock music. Rock Photography. History and criticism.

I. Title Ethan Russell: An American Story. ISBN 0984929509

Cover design: Dolores Lusitana (situationbook.com) Information design: Ethan Russell

All photographs copyright © Ethan Russell unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. †† Photographs of The Beatles by Ethan Russell © Apple Corps, Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by Permission. †† Photographs of John Lennon by Ethan Russell © Yoko Ono. All rights reserved. Used by Permission †† Photographs of Yoko Ono by Ethan Russell © Yoko Ono. All rights reserved. Used by Permission

The author is grateful for permission to quote selected lines from the following works:

"The Dry Salvages" in Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot, renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

"Dear Mr. Fantasy" by Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, and Chris Wood. © 1968 and 1970 Island Music Ltd. and S.S. Music Ltd. All rights for the U.S.A. and Canada controlled by Island Music, Inc. (BMI). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

"Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" by Bob Dylan. Copyright © 1966 by Dwarf Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

"Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)" by Bob Dylan. Copyright ©1978 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

"Highway 61 Revisited Liner Notes" by Bob Dylan. Copyright © 1965 by Special Rider Music.

All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

"Blowin' in the Wind" by Bob Dylan. © 1962 Warner Bros., Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

"Masters of War" by Bob Dylan. © 1963 Warner Bros., Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

"Subterranean Homesick Blues" by Bob Dylan. © 1965 Warner Bros., Inc.

All rights reserved. Used by permission.

"Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan. © 1965 Warner Bros., Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. "Tomorrow Never Knows" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. © 1966 Northern Songs Limited.

"All You Need Is Love" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. © 1967 Northern Songs Limited.

"A Day in the Life" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. © 1967 Northern Songs Limited.

"Revolution One" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. © 1968 Northern Songs Limited.

All rights for the United States and Canada controlled by Maclen Music, Inc., c/o ATV Music Corp. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

"Gimme Some Truth" by John Lennon. © 1971 Northern Songs Limited. All rights for the United States and Mexico controlled by Maclen Music, Inc., c/o ATV Music Corp.

Used by permission. All rights reserved.

"Instant Karma" by John Lennon. © 1970 Lenono Music.

Used by permission. All rights reserved.

"#9 Dream" by John Lennon. © 1974 Lenono Music. Used by permission.

All rights reserved."Sympathy for the Devil" by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

© 1968 ABKCO Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

"Street Fighting Man" by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

© 1968 ABKCO Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

"Midnight Rambler" by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. © 1969 ABKCO Music, Inc.

All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

"Hotel California" by Glenn Frey, Don Henley, and Don Felder. © 1976 Red Cloud Music, Cass County Music, Fingers Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

"Wasted Lime" by Glenn Frey and Don Henley. © 1976 Red Cloud Music, Cass County Music.

All rights reserved. Used by permission.

"Victim of Love" by Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Don Felder, and J. D. Souther. © 1976 Red Cloud Music, Cass County Music, Fingers Music, Ice Age Music (ASCAP).

All rights reserved. Used by permission.

"Life in the Fast Lane" by Glenn Frey, Don Henley, and Joe Walsh. © 1976 Red Cloud Music, Cass County Music, Wow & Flutter Music.

All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Preamble

In the autumn of 2002 I was walking down a leafy Georgetown street with the English photographer Gered Mankowitz whose early album covers of The Rolling Stones were the kind of game-changing, iconic images that astonished me when I was a college student in sunny California in 1964. The sullen long-haired images of Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts were an assault on American youth that was still cast in the mold of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello (and came at a time when musical idols were not groups but solo acts, of which the king was Elvis who -- for those who don't know or may need reminding -- had gone into the Army in 1958). It was a different world.

Gered was and is a polite, lovely Englishman now living with his wife on the Cornwall coast, in a wistful image reminiscent of The Beatles' "When I'm 64." In 2002 we were both participating in a group exhibition on The Rolling Stones. In the decades between college and this walk I had become a photographer too, and often for the Rolling Stones. As we meandered, Gered matter-of-factly mentioned to me that I was the only photographer to have shot album covers for The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who.

Shooting the Stones

That this was true--and that somehow I hadn't put it together myself -- came as a shock to me. But it was that unlikely. Even knowing it to be the case it was still hard to imagine. But how could anyone have imagined it? You couldn't have planned it, willed it, or schemed it. Even to have dreamed it would have been borderline absurd. I was a boy from California. I didn't know anyone in England. At the time I first took pictures of Mick Jagger I wasn't really even a photographer. Yet, by the time I was walking down the street with Gered, I had shot the Let It Be cover for the Beatles, been on the roof with them for their last performance, at Altamont with The Rolling Stones, taken the cover for Who's Next and directed the last video with John Lennon the week before he was murdered.

An impossible journey and a great (but by no means always bubbly) ride.

But any life is more than its highlights and so is this book. Since--when I was in college--I couldn't possibly know the life I would have, I was trying to imagine a life I might have. It was entirely unclear in its outlines but inevitably influenced by the soil from which I had sprung: the American forties and the fifties, and the air that I was then breathing, which was, in 1964, filled with music.

In that music, as you will read, was all the promise and direction a young man might have wished. What happened in those years--and in the years that followed--is the story of this book. It is an exploration wrapped in a memoir wrapped in a history. The "history" is the history of the Baby Boomers: a history I believe that has been so badly mangled--especially in mass media --that it needs correction.

Shooting the Beatles

In American Story this plays out over the course of one long narrative, which is presented in two parts. One, "An American Lad," covers (roughly) 1947-1982 and two, "Watching the River Flow," from 1983 to the present. Part One is more event-driven and Part Two more reflective, but both parts include elements of the other.

The scope of the Baby Boomer's collective history is vast, including as it does:

Eleven presidents.

The birth and explosion of rock and roll.

The rise of television.

The invention of the personal computer.

The advent of the internet.

....to name only a few.

You can't have been alive through this range of time without living through some unbelievable excitement (the history of rock and roll alone is worth the price of admission), but also some tragedy.

From 1964-1990, for me, music was the heart and soul of it. I was not alone. Music was the glue of my generation. It held us together, told us what mattered, and urged us "further." Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers, and Little Richard were the vanguard, but it was the singer-songwriters who would come after them that would most deeply affect me.

They were a new and different breed in popular music, unique to my generation, and it is almost impossible to overstate their influence. While it had been common for years in the tradition of American Blues and Folk that the singer and the songwriter were the same person, in popular music the singer had previously been like an actor with a script, given a song written by someone else and told to make it fly (Elvis Presley, for example, or Frank Sinatra). When Bob Dylan "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the political and artistic thrust of blues and folk fused with rock 'n' roll. This new music was no longer just a singer singing a song; it was the artist speaking directly to us. We listened. The world-- you can't argue this--would never be the same.

The Beatles on the roof. December, 1969

I cannot comprehensively explore our history alone of course. The public events may be largely familiar, but the private ones are less visible and almost certainly more revealing about why the era mattered so much to so many. For this reason I have aligned this book with a dedicated blog hoping to have others contribute their stories. (For those who might be anxious to see how this works, the online video tutorials are here.)

At the time of publication the blog already contains over 400 hundred posts, mostly video, that bring to life such disparate moments as Winston Churchill delivering his "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton Missouri in 1946, the Beatles arrival in America in 1963, and the Chicago police at the 1968 Democratic Convention. All affected the lives of the Baby Boomers hugely.

I am aware that those who know me as a "rock photographer" or "music video director" might wonder about my preoccupation with our history. I will say that not to understand why this is important is to not understand at all what the (American) sixties were about. For me, they were essentially serious, while simultaneously delivering the most excitement I had ever had. It seems almost a dream today to imagine a time when engaging with your life could seem at the same time both meritorious and fun. Perhaps that is why-- despite efforts to diminish them--the sixties remain remarkable. American Story hopes to replicate that experience.

I am equally aware that this focus on the Baby Boomer's history will not always find a sympathetic ear. For every Boomer who may resonate with this book, there are other demographics which may be indifferent, or even hostile. In my research I ran across this plaintive cry:

"God, when will the Baby Boomers just die? They run everything, they're rich, and they stop us Gen X and Gen Y kids from getting our propers. And now this video thing! Mom loves it, okay, which drives me up the wall!" 1

My response was to smile. I can even say I was sympathetic. But not dead yet, I guess. So I say: Come on down. We're all in the same boat here.

I hope with American Story to have built a new kind of book. I am a big believer in the potential of the new eReader platforms, and American Story could only exist in its fullness as an eBook. I particularly hope to have successfully exploited what the new eBook platforms support: the benefits of the book (linearity, context, persistence) coupled with the power of the computer to deliver both audio and video, while connected to the global networks, which empower immediate, distributed commentary.

Let me give one small example of how a link to the blog may support what I am saying: during my travels I photographed John Lennon and during the first interview he was asked if anyone had influenced him. He responded,

"I'm still trying to reproduce 'Some Other Guy' or 'Be-Bop-Lula' and at that point the book links to 'Be-Bop-A-Lula.' In being able to witness Gene Vincent's performance in that immediate context (even for those who may know Gene Vincent and certainly for those who may not) is to be able to have--or at least imagine--an experience close to John Lennon's own. It is a wonderfully rich interaction not possible by either media alone. In American Story this happens with music, with historical events and wherever appropriate to the book's narrative.

I believe this combination allows the reader/viewer a way to experience and participate in history in a way never before possible and in some ways similar to how I experienced it myself. The potential to combine these "technology perspectives" (if you will) is tremendously exciting and a long, long time coming. The popularity of the computing tablet is surging and will continue to change the way we experience the book and related media.

1 Amazon.com comment about video: Baby Boomers: The Generation That Changed the World.
Foreword by Rosanne Cash

Ethan and I have been friends for nearly thirty years, and back a few of those years we were eating lunch in a small restaurant on Ninth Avenue in New York, talking about my latest work (Black Cadillac) and the struggles I sometimes had, worrying that my work was like a bell in an empty room, or how I sometimes felt too cautious to say the things I really felt, wanting them to be received in a certain way. Ethan listened for a while and then interrupted me to comment, "You have more to say and less time to say it." This book is Ethan's version of having more to say and less time to say it --an ambitious, startling, game-changing book about his life and our times called just "An American Story" because that is what it is. It is a work writ breathtakingly large, assembled with an enormous heart and an intellect to equal it: meticulous, personal and universal. It is a venture utterly new, but so evolved it feels like it has always existed.

In my mind, Ethan Russell is the only person who could have written this book. Those who were there don't have the objectivity. Those who have the objectivity weren't there. For some reason, he was like a time traveler, taking notes for the story as he lived it.

Ethan lived at the epicenter of a cultural storm of music, art, politics, power, change, evolution, violence and love that was unprecedented and will never come again in the way that it did, because we could never again experience such a quantum shift around us with such innocence and willingness to be changed. It has been a long time since we were unguarded enough to revisit the magnitude of that storm without cynicism.

The effect of Ethan's book is not just to be made aware of his experiences, but also to have the reader revisit their own. Refreshingly, this process is less nostalgia, and more vivid recall and deeper understanding.

The thrill of re-experiencing the complete psychic shift the Beatles caused in my pre-adolescent life is fully accessible, triggered by Ethan's immediate and singular photographs and recollections. In his book there are pictures and stories from the Beatles' era that have never been seen or heard before--which in itself is hugely important, given that every moment and sonic imprint they made has been meticulously documented. The effect is like an emotional depth charge for those of us who were fundamentally changed by that time and those young men.

But the book is not just music, it is the entire sweep of our history. The political upheavals--McCarthyism, the assassinations-- are strangely reassuring, as they remind us that we have lived through very dark times, and we have emerged and evolved. It's good to be reminded of the cycles, to relive them and explore, and to see the spirals that form in all cultural, social and political landscapes.

Ethan is our tour guide through our own history. The story of us, An American Story is like a scroll that unfolds as we write it. We know our history by our artifacts, our attention to detail, and our retelling.

\-- Rosanne Cash, New York 2011

Rosanne Cash's study. New York, 2005

You and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate, So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.

\-- Bob Dylan All Along the Watchtower (1967)
Introduction

I was a hunter before I was a photographer, really, before I was anything other than a young boy and a so-so student. I would hunt on my parents' ranch -- mostly for blue jays -- using a small, 22-caliber single-shot rifle. This was at the request of my grandmother. I was never quite sure why blue jays were singled out, but I was led to understand they were a disagreeable bird.

It was a solitary experience. I would go off, usually down to the orchard, and wait quietly in the heat. There were only, maybe, ten trees, and they didn't bear much fruit. But I would hide as best as I could, not moving a muscle, until a blue jay showed up. Then advancing slowly so I would not scare the bird, I would bring the gun to my shoulder, sight it, and squeeze the trigger. Years later I identified this set of skills -- an ability to scan a scene, move quickly, focus, and then press a release steadily-- as core skills for the kind of photographer I became, and at which I earned my living for years, a job I was never trained to do.

This book is also, in its own way, a hunt: a hunt to find a version of the Baby Boomers' history that might bear some resemblance to the times I lived through. This has been driven by my persistent and unpleasant perception that the era of the Baby Boomers has been reduced (sometimes opportunistically) to a simplistic and pejorative narrative that is in large measure misleading, but which nevertheless threatens to become our de facto history, to everyone's detriment.

While working on this book I often found ready agreement that our history has been badly simplified along with a desire to see something that might more accurately align with our experience. (I often refer to this experience as "our history" in a nod to the time when at least a large, vocal group of us saw ourselves as a unified generation, all in it together.) In this book I try to explore and reflect that history.

If one were to inquire, the current, popular conception of-- and response to-- the sixties might be to dismiss the entire era as drug-addled and delusional.

This perception needs to be challenged. Among other reasons, it dismisses out of hand the shared experience of millions of people, their commitment to it, and, less remarked-upon, their inherent self-interest. No generation consciously acts in a way that its members think is destructive to their own self-interest. On the contrary it has always been my opinion that not to have believed in the revolutions of the sixties (or at least been highly curious about them), would have required a suspension of one's sense and senses. When those revolutions were happening it seemed they were going on everywhere. If it is true that today the era is often relegated to an unfortunate sideshow in American history, then (one might ask) how did such a vastly differing view gain so much traction?

"Spirit" was the center of those years. It was inescapable, and I am not alone in noting it. Theodore Roszak -- author of The Making of a Counter-Culture -- writes, "that elusive conception the 'spirit of the times' continues to nag at the mind, since it seems to be the only way available to make even provisional sense of [it]."2 That something so central was so elusive speaks to the difficulty of trying to give weight to its reality. It is in part, I think, because so much of what was revelatory at the time was internal, as if in reaction to the extroverted materialism of the fifties.

Back then it mattered not so much that we could explain to an outsider what this "revolution" was, for the spirit within our shared experience was part of the warp and woof of our days. It was palpable in our growing, visible numbers, but in the end it was not easily measurable. Then again, maybe what was solid and measurable and tangible was not the benchmark of all there was?

Today something as elusive as the "spirit of the times" is shrouded in the mists of the past, and the cynicism that pervades our present makes the effort to describe it even more tenuous. It will probably not be persuasive to simply assert that it was real (or that we may be doing ourselves a disservice for discounting it). It might be illuminating to tell a true story. Some things difficult to credit through assertion can be convincing when understood as experience.

John Adams

Of course, before you can care about any history you have to connect with it, and for most of my life I wasn't connected at all. American history felt as lifeless as the faces on Mount Rushmore. The American Revolution? A few paintings. And then that changed.

In 2001, I was living in San Anselmo, California -- a small town in affluent Marin County with my wife and stepson when I picked up a book and started to read.

In the beginning the image that stood out for me was a pair of horsemen crackling through newly fallen snow. Had anyone chosen to turn and look at them -- an unlikely event since the landscape they rode through, Massachusetts, was for all intents and purposes still wilderness -- few, if any, would have known who they were. They were riding to Philadelphia, a journey that would take them two weeks. The date was January 24, 1776. This snowy scene is the opening of David McCullough's extraordinary book John Adams, a vivid and moving biography of one of America's Founding Fathers. What McCullough did for me in that scene and in the pages that followed was to make entirely real (as if I were living it with them) the unprecedented and monumentally unlikely experiment of self-government that John Adams and his fellow colonialists had embarked upon -- now well over two centuries ago.

Reading McCullough's John Adams was the first time these events -- and the people who propelled them -- ever felt real to me, and the experience was revelatory. John Adams' energy -- intelligent, passionate, yet still sober in the manner of an 18th-century New Englander -- reverberated with idealism for his extraordinary moment, which he recognized as something pivotal in human history. "How few of the human race," he wrote to his wife Abigail, "have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children? How few have ever had anything more of choice in government than in climate?"

Perhaps that is why I was so struck by McCullough's image: two solitary figures in the middle of their adventure, which had a monumental outcome, about which they could assume nothing. John Adams would go on to help create and then sign the Declaration of Independence, and become the second President of the United States. About his companion we know little. About the country their efforts spawned? We live in it.

John Adams (hand on hip) at signing of Declaration of Independence.

John Adams evoked in me a deep sense of loss for the ideals for which -- against all odds -- they fought. This feeling of loss resonated for me; it was one I felt for years about many of the promises of my generation, those born at the end of and after the Second World War in a "baby boom," an explosion of their parents' hope and optimism. The feeling had persisted remarkably, given that at the time I was reading John Adams -- 2001 -- I was 56 years old.

I found the John Adams book to be so motivating that I began to read biographies of our Presidents to fill out the timeline from Adams until today, with no clearly defined road map but with a sudden, renewed interest.

As I read my way haphazardly through American (and occasionally world) history, I read the lives of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt (A Traitor to His Class), and Harry Truman. I read a history of Jamestown, a biography of Franklin and Eleanor, Doris Kearns Goodwin's A Team of Rivals, William Manchester's extraordinary tale of the Pacific War, Goodbye Darkness, and his two volumes on the life of Winston Churchill. And during this process it dawned on me that the history with which I was most familiar, my own, did not seem to be represented in a way that did it justice; there was nothing that seemed to capture my own era in its fullness.*3 I wondered to myself whether I was alone in my sense that any of this mattered. But I found it mattered deeply to me, if only so I might leave something for my young son. And while I suspect that it is not unusual for people's interest in history to increase as they get older, my interest is not academic. I believe the history of my generation has been reduced to that of a cartoon. Steal my history? Steal my life.

So when I considered the history that I, my friends, and my cohorts have lived, I found I wanted something that rang true, a history that made sense of the times, that captured the spirit I and many others knew to be there, and which could, perhaps, create a bridge from that time to the present and explain some of the turns our country has taken since then. Today I struggle to be able to recognize the country of John Adams or even Eisenhower's America from my youth. I am confused. This, then, is the central question of this book: How did we get here from there?

\--Ethan Russell, San Anselmo, 2012

2 The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition by Theordore Roszak 1968 University of California Press

3 See Endnotes
"Time it was, and what a time it was. I have a photograph."

\-- Paul Simon "Bookends" (1968)

The Rolling Stones on stage. United States, 1972.

The Who, in rehearsal. England, 1973.
1. Applesauce

With my older brother, Jeremy. circa 1947.

NEW YORK CITY, 1952

When I was in second grade in New York City I was forced by my parents to wear short pants to school and an "I Like Ike" button on my shirt. I begged my father to release me from the short pants, but the button was okay.

Before Manhattan we lived in Westchester County. I walked with my mother down a tree-lined road to the local school. In kindergarten one Fall day I made applesauce, a taste I never forgot. It felt like magic, like I had just performed culinary alchemy.

My father was working as a producer on Your Hit Parade, the earliest music program on television. Over time he moved to Batton, Barton, Durstine & Osborne, one of the ad agencies for the show, which was sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes. My first words, I like to say, were "L.S.M.F.T" ("Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco"). He was, I suppose, a "Mad Man" in today's parlance. But he would have denied there was anything mad about it. It was a time when doctors did cigarette commercials. What other proof of sanity did he need?

During the Second World War my father joined the Royal Canadian Air Force before the United States was officially a combatant. He became an instructor, flying P-52s. He almost died, anyway, in a mid-air collision at about 500 feet. Photographs show only rubble, the single recognizable aircraft part from the two planes was six feet of wing. The other pilot was killed.

By 1953 my father had four children, of which I was the second. When we moved into Manhattan we lived on Central Park West in the 90s. I would go fishing in Central Park, so long ago it was.

My father, circa 1942

One day after a three-martini lunch (the story goes) my father went to his boss and demanded a raise. The boss said no, but that they did need someone in the San Francisco office.

(l to r) My brother Jeremy, Mom, me, and sister Linda 1948

My father was the child of a divorce and spent part of his boyhood traveling from coast to coast. Before we moved, I remember overnight flights from New York to California on propeller-driven planes, stopping multiple times: in Dallas in the middle of the night, the hot wave of humid air engulfing me when the door was opened. We were sitting on the tarmac of course, like the end of Casablanca.

When it was finally decided that the family would move, I was sent with my brothers, sister and the nanny across America on a three-day train ride. I remember liking it, the swaying of the sleeping car, pancakes every morning for breakfast, and the kind, black porter.
2. This Land Is Your Land

With my younger brother, Adam, San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO, 1953

San Francisco seemed quiet and empty after the bustle of New York. For our first lunch, we went with my mother to a local hamburger restaurant, and although it was lunchtime it seemed like there was no one else in it. We lived in a rented house on the side of a steep hill, and I can still see the San Francisco Bay stretching away like a blue jewel.

It was a year before my parents bought the house they would live in until my father's stepmother died. It was a three-story house on the top of a hill, and for the first time I had my own room. It was in the corner of the top floor, tucked away past the storage room where the suitcases were kept.

My brother and I roamed the top floor, our plastic flintlock rifles cocked, and ambushed each other. On television Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, the strong, serene American hero, told us, "Be sure you're right. Then go ahead." I was ten when Elvis came along.

Trying to smile like Elvis. Age 10

Before Elvis I used to lie in bed at night with the lights off, and listen to country music very low on the radio, the tiny orange lights of the tube amplifier shining through the slits in the radio's back. I sang his songs in front of the mirror. I imitated his smile, raising the corner of one side of my mouth. I tried to move like him, rotating one leg from the hip. And I tried to comb my hair like him. I used Vitalis, Butch Wax, and Brylcream, separate and together, pulling the comb through my hair and seeing little white globules of grease ooze between the teeth. Once I dove into a swimming pool, swam the entire length underwater, and surfaced at the other end without a hair out of place. Hair. In thirteen years it would be a musical.

One day my father, unable to stand it, took my brother and me to the local barbershop and told the barber to give us both crew cuts. Crew cuts! Prickly hair that grew from my skull like a 40-day stubble. I felt assaulted.

Elvis was my first musical hero, indisputably the King although he wasn't called that, yet. There was no need. His smile was charming, and America, as straight as a thin string tie, reacted in horror to his rotating leg. And there were the others: Jerry Lee Lewis (with his thirteen-year-old bride; these boys really were Southern) the Everly Brothers (with their mellow harmonies), the screaming Little Richard pounding the piano, and duck-walking Chuck Berry. My parents hated the music that I found so exciting (and which my mother in particular was certain would never last). In turn, I found that an afternoon spent in the car with them listening to Tony Bennett was more than I could endure. Their music (Cole Porter, Benny Goodman, wonderful music really) made no sense to me at all. When I was twelve, Elvis went into the Army. He was taken to boot camp, where they cut off all his hair. It was awful to see him lose his hair. But it never occurred to me that Elvis wouldn't go into the army. Why would it have?

("Elvis died in the army," John Lennon would later say. "The difference between Elvis and us is Elvis died and his manager lived. Our manager died, and we lived.")

Shortly after Elvis was drafted, I was sent to Cate School for Boys near Santa Barbara. It was scary for me to leave home when I was only twelve, but that was the way of it. My father had gone there, and my older brother. I was excited, too.

As soon as I was able, I grew my hair back, smothered it with grease, and combed it into as close a version of a duck-tail (aka "Duck's Ass") as a prep school would allow. I donned Roy Orbison glasses. With Elvis out of circulation, I was now listening to Bobby Vee, who looked like a cross between Fabian and Sandra Dee. On his album cover he was wearing a powder-blue cashmere sweater with puffy balls on it, like a girl. In 1960 I was fourteen. Eisenhower was President, and Richard Nixon Vice-President. Gary Powers, flying a high-altitude reconnaissance plane, was shot out of the sky by the Russians, and Eisenhower had to admit to the American people that the United States did, well, spy in peacetime. I was shocked. It was hard for me to believe that America would do such a thing. As I understood it, we fought the countries that behaved that way.

I played soccer and basketball and loved both. I was conscientious and worked hard as a student. Smoking cigarettes was my one infraction, though I was never caught. I would wander off into the scrub hills that surrounded the school and light up. When finished I would rub sage on my fingers so they wouldn't smell of smoke.

"The employers will love this generation," said Clark Kerr, president of the University of California (who would later resign in the wake of the Free Speech Movement). "They aren't going to press many grievances. They are going to be easy to handle. There aren't going to be any riots." In my room at prep school, Bobby Vee's voice was replaced by that of Joan Baez, swelling in nasal perfection. She sang "folk music." It was different from rock; it was simple, affecting. Time magazine put Baez on their cover.

Outside the window of my dormitory room, the California sun shone upon well-manicured lawns and brick pathways. The Cate School was a world of blue blazers and ties, an ordered life of small classes, study halls, and chapel. I liked it. Still, I was absorbed reading On the Road, caught up in the world Kerouac described: the manic Dean Moriarty careening across America, his injured thumb wrapped in an unraveling bandage. It was all very exotic.

Joan Baez on the cover of Time 1962
3. Cannery Row

Me, circa 1959

PEBBLE BEACH, CALIFORNIA, 1961

On the back of the sofa in the large living room, Joan Baez sat, still and peaceful. Her black eyes shone, her long hair fell over her shoulders, and she smiled happily, as if she was having a wonderful time in the houses of the rich. The occasion was a fund-raiser for a proposition on the California ballot to forbid discrimination in housing on the basis of race, religion, or sex.

I sat on the floor and watched, along with my high school friend Charlie Osborne, whose father, Richard, was hosting this affair. There were a lot of people in conservative Pebble Beach who felt that Richard had no business inviting a known radical singer into his house to raise money for a measure seen by them as a threat to property values. That Joan Baez was concerned and political was no secret. She sang at concerts, at political rallies, at sit-ins, and over American radio the lyrics of a new American songwriter. Bob Dylan. "How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man?" As she sang, she tilted her head, her brow furrowed, and her eyes took on a questioning look. "How many times can a man turn his head," she asked, "and pretend that he just doesn't see?"

To Charlie and me, of course, Baez's presence seemed magical. We listened to what she had to say, and it seemed sensible to us. How many roads did a man have to walk down, after all? But we were soon shunted upstairs, where we no doubt worked on perfecting our cigarette habit.

Downstairs Baez continued to sing with her strong, lifting voice. I was drawn to Baez and this folk music, as to Kerouac's On the Road and things bohemian, though my idea of it at the time was to buy a pair of sandals and a scarf.

Twenty-six miles south of Pebble Beach, where I sat listening to Joan Baez, lay the Big Sur, known as "The Coast" to locals. I had heard it vaguely referred to as a place where artists and "nonconformists" lived, but I had never been there until one day when Richard Osborne took Charlie and me for dinner. Before we left I overheard Richard ask someone, with a grin on his face, "Do you think he's ready for it?" And so I stared out the car window, wondering about the mysteries of this strange place.

We drove down Highway One past the pine forests that grew in Point Lobos; then the trees cleared, and the road paralleled the ocean, shortly to start a steep climb winding up the mountain. The hills were brown, dried by the summer sun.

Big Sur

Mountain lions still lived there, I was told. Streams ran down the hills, collecting at places into pools. Redwood groves grew in the canyons. In the sky, hawks circled endlessly. Out the car window, I could see waves crashing against the rocks below. As the evening approached, the sky took on a pink cast and the waters of the ocean turned a darker blue. The sun was low and the sunset had turned orange by the time we reached Nepenthe, a restaurant perched above the Pacific. There we sat outside on the restaurant's deck in front of an open fire, and gazed down the coastline that stretched twenty miles before us. Greek music played over a loudspeaker.

We were joined by people who lived in Big Sur: Caryl, who was a poet; Al, a jazz guitarist, who played with Nina Simone; LaVerne, an older woman draped in a shawl who wore purple lipstick and ran an art gallery farther down the Coast. Later in the evening, sitting inside around a wooden table, next to another fire, I looked up and in the dim light saw a dark-haired woman arrive, carrying a baby on her hip, followed by a man with a drooping mustache and chestnut hair that grew to his shoulders. I looked over at Richard, whom I still called "Mr. Osborne," to see if he noticed. Then I looked back. The stranger nodded to the people he knew and stayed at the edge of the crowd, gazing into the fire. He looked to me like "Wild Bill" Hickok, a living icon of the American past. In a way I couldn't explain I felt completely identified with how the man looked, as if there were more reality in his distillation of the past than in the whole world I'd grown up in. I said nothing at the time, but it sparked in me an attraction. I would go down the Coast again and again, seeking out people who were artists, who were different.

"Wild Bill" Hickok

These people from Big Sur became my friends. Later that summer I lived there, a good deal of the time naked, watching from their terraces as the Pacific waves rolled in hundreds of feet below, as the clouds formed in the sky and settled against the coastline, and I watched the almost imperceptible movements of the kelp and the currents. I was through with high school; in the fall I was bound for college. I slowed down so much that going into the small town of Carmel felt like stumbling into Manhattan in the middle of the Thanksgiving Day parade. One day my mother called. I said, not recognizing her voice, "Who's this?"

"It's your mother," she answered (as only a mother can), a mere thirty miles but behavioral light years away.

I stayed briefly with a woman painter on Monterey's Cannery Row. Years before their resurrection as a tourist destination, the canneries lay empty, like ghosts. No other humans lived nearby. In the evening the fog rolled in off the ocean, and it would be perfectly quiet, except for the rise and fall of the sea against the rocks.

Cannery Row in its abandoned years. Photographer unknown.
4. Cow College

College bound, circa 1962

DAVIS, CALIFORNIA

Davis, home of a campus of the University of California, is a flat town. In 1962 it was a quiet town, out in the middle of the Sacramento Valley. When I was still a junior in high school my father took me to visit the campus when school was out. I remember the grassy quad and the black shade under the oak trees in the hot summer sun. It was empty. We were visiting Davis because it was where the School of Veterinary Medicine existed in the U.C. system. When I was sixteen, the best idea I had for my future was I would become a Vet (my father owned a horse ranch, after all). I see this in retrospect as an Olympian achievement in total lack of self-knowledge. That I didn't like -- nor was I good at -- the sciences, and that I really wasn't much of an animal lover? Neither of these things seemed to register.

When I did arrive for "Orientation Week" in my Freshman year, I had matured enough to sense that a total lack of aptitude and interest in my chosen major was probably a bad idea, and I switched to English. (It was around then I began to say I wanted to be a writer). I moved into a dormitory, Bixby Hall.

By this time I had been living away from home for four years. Cate School had been tiny, and Davis had a student body of five thousand, which seemed to me immense, and daunting. For the first time since I was eight years old, I had a roommate, Dennis. He introduced me to the joys of small British sports cars. He owned a Triumph TR6, and I followed his lead and traded in the car my father bought me when I turned sixteen and bought an MGA Roadster. Dennis was friendly, really genial. We would talk for hours about our cars -- drive them around with their tops down -- and spend week-ends polishing them up.

Alongside my course work, I joined R.O.T.C. I simply assumed I would go into the Army. The instructor, in uniform, stood in front of the class, holding his rifle in one hand, and his crotch in the other. He recited, "This is my rifle. This is my gun. One is for fighting. One is for fun." In my dormitory room I "spit shined" my shoes until they gleamed. One afternoon each week we practiced, standing in formation near the tennis courts. Somehow, nothing in any of these activities rose to the level of reality for me; that is, that the rifle was real and that if pointed, aimed, and the trigger squeezed, it would cause a man to drop, suddenly lifeless, like the blue jays falling out of the tree.

I dropped out. It wasn't that I had any kind of conscious objection to ROTC, or the Army. I just seemed not to belong there. I told my father somewhat later, with a slight sense of failure, and a concern that he might be disappointed. He asked me why I felt that way. I said I felt I owed something to my country. But he was unfazed. He said, "The only thing you owe your country is to be the best person you can be."
5. Masters of War

Davis, 2nd and A

DAVIS, CALIFORNIA, 1963

Davis was a town with unimaginative street names, like "A" Street and "D" Street. It was in a house on "D" Street that I listened to the radio as President Kennedy was taken to the hospital.

I didn't believe that he would die. It was impossible for me to imagine an American President could be killed by something as simple as a bullet. Surely, someone would take the bullet out, patch him up and send him back to the Oval Office while the assassin was efficiently gunned down. Then, Kennedy died.

Like so many I pored over the photographs from Life magazine and then years later watched the shaky 8mm home movie showing Jackie Kennedy reacting in shock, crawling back over the trunk of the open limousine while confused Secret Service men rushed to help. All too little, too late. Life magazine published blowups from that film, the images almost indecipherable from grain, pictures of Jackie Kennedy in her pink suit stained with blood. Over the radio that day I heard the scene described: "The President was leaning forward slightly, his wife aware that he'd been the victim of a bullet. She was looking at his face when a bullet struck the President in the head, exploding in a pink-red glow of blood, brain matter, and skull fragments."

I felt empty and wanted to retreat into denial. None of this was supposed to be able to happen in America, but nothing, of course, could now bring him back

.

LAKE TAHOE, 1964

As it grew dark, the white MGA convertible roadster I drove slipped and slithered on the snow-covered mountain road. I was with a friend, and we were late getting back to campus. Still, I pulled into a roadside diner where a television set hung up in one corner because I really did not want to miss this new group from England on The Ed Sullivan Show. Ed Sullivan, swaying from side to side, told the audience, "Yesterday and today our theater has been jammed with newspapermen and hundreds of photographers. These veterans agree with me that the city has never witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool who call themselves The Beatles!" And as Sullivan swung his arm in an arc to welcome them, the screams rose from the audience, overtaking everything.

Meet The Beatles. Photo Robert Freeman

On the little black and white television they were unmistakably exciting. I didn't really know their names yet. Ringo wore the rings, right? And John was the "leader," Paul was the "cute" one. George, the youngest, was "serious." The first time I heard The Beatles it was I Want to Hold Your Hand. The sound had come wafting across a university lawn somewhere on campus. It sounded great, but it was a little disconcerting. There was no precedent. Rock 'n' rollers were solo performers, not groups. I went to the supermarket and bought the album. Meet The Beatles. On the cover four heads stared out from a black background, their heads floating in space. (In 2010 my six-year old son, seeing the picture, asked me, "Are they all the same person?") I played Meet The Beatles a lot. What was it about them?

Back in the roadside diner, on the little black and white screen Ringo shook his head, his hair bobbed. The girls screamed. Paul wiggled and smiled. The girls screamed. John Lennon bobbed up and down, singing into the mike, thin-lipped. Each young girl called out her favorite "JOOHHHNNN!!! ""PAAAAUUUWWWLLL!!!"

"Aren't those Beatles cute," say the Moms.

"Paul's my favorite," says Sis.

Maybe even Dad likes them, though with some reservation. After all, there's that hair. But then he would add, hopefully (perhaps remembering the fifties and juvenile delinquents)," Well, at least they're clean."

The Rolling Stones, just around the corner, weren't so clean. And they didn't smile either.

By 1965 an insolent and snarling voice would sing, "There's something happening here, but you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?"

NEW JERSEY, 1974

There was this guy named Ron whom I met through a fellow who worked at Warner Brothers Records in New York. Ron was a Beatlemaniac. When I met Ron in 1974, it had been four years since the Beatles had broken up. Ron lived in New Jersey with his brother and his parents. Both Ron and his brother were fanatical collectors: Ron of Beatles memorabilia, and his brother of Trini Lopez posters. Every square inch of Ron's bedroom was covered with items from his Beatle collection: the ceiling (Beatle posters), the bed (Beatle bedspread, Beatle pillows), and the walls (record jackets and photographs). In one corner there hung an eight-by-ten inch black-and-white publicity photo of the Beatles accepting a Mersey Beat award for their song "Love Me Do." Below the picture Ron had the award itself, slightly dusty.

Ron's Room, New Jersey, 1974.

He also had the most movie footage of the Beatles that I had ever seen, and by that time I had sat around in the offices at Apple where I'd been shown a lot of their library. Ron had film of the Sullivan shows, The Beatles in Japan, The Beatles at Shea Stadium, and The Beatles' first U.S. concert in Washington D.C, filmed the same week as The Ed Sullivan Show. Ron screened the Washington, D.C. film for me, and I watched as the Beatles performed on a stage that appeared to be no more than thirty feet square. Except for Ringo with his drum kit, each Beatle had one Vox amplifier and speaker. Every fifteen minutes the Beatles would stop and move their microphones, the drums would be shifted, and they would turn ninety degrees and play to a different quarter of the audience that swayed all around them in a lunatic frenzy. The screaming never stopped, peaking wave after wave. It was the single most intense display of energy I'd ever witnessed. Ron made his living selling, trading, and displaying Beatle memorabilia. When I last saw him he was leaving for Paris to screen one of his Beatle movies. He would (no doubt) go to Paris, spend most of his time in the projection booth, and never let the print of the film out of his sight.

Ron drove a winter-wasted American car that might have once been white but was now kind of an off-gray of a completely nondescript nature. His parents' home was in Passaic, New Jersey. The houses there were working- to middle-class, almost completely drab (but nonetheless certainly larger than their counterparts' in Liverpool, England.)

With Ron's room completely covered with Beatles, and his brother's room completely covered with the Hollywood colorings of Trini Lopez's publicity, this was nothing other than what the Beatles successfully exported: the story of a working-class lad in a black-and-gray England who had dreams of gold. As in Yellow Submarine, where the gray-drabness of the opening gives way to the color and adventure of the film, the Beatles brought sound and color into our lives. And although California (where I lived) could not compete with the sodden, brick grayness of Liverpool, all of the U.S.A. (the land of crew cuts and push-ups) could use a little lightening up, or so it seemed to me, the skinny kid. The Beatles were just good, clean fun.

The Beatles (from Ron's collection)

While the Beatles were singing: "Love, Love Me, Do," Peter, Paul, and Mary --along with Joan Baez-- were spreading the Word according to Bob Dylan. While they paved the way with the (in retrospect) surprisingly gentle "Blowin' in the Wind," Dylan moved on to write and sing increasingly angry and passionate songs: The Times They Are A-Changin', With God on Our Side and Masters of War.

In "Masters of War", accompanied only by his guitar and harmonica, Dylan sang,

You that never done nothin'

But build to destroy

You play with my world;

Like it's your little toy.

Dylan hit a nerve for me, opening a door into a trove of barely distant memories when I was a grade-schooler and would be told to huddle under my desk in case of attack. I had grown up aware of On The Beach, a best-selling novel about post World War III. Later, I would see the movies Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove and live through the endless grade-B Japanese horror films wherein everything was mutated from some form of radiation. I had seen the photo spreads in Life Magazine showing people who built bomb shelters in their backyards. The fact is I was frightened by it all. Now it was being put to me that there were people out there who were responsible for this. I started to get angry.

Dylan sang on, his voice raspy and aggressive,

You've thrown the worst fear

That can ever be hurled

The fear to bring children into the world.

Dylan's emotion resonated. His point seemed unanswerable, and I got angrier. (There's more power in these lines as sung than as read.) Someone out there was lining his pockets, creating weapons that could incinerate continents. And this had been going on all my life. Inexorably, it was getting to be our turn. I was born in 1945, right after Hiroshima. When I was almost seventeen I got to live through the Cuban missile crisis -- just one teenage American, terrified that I, my whole family, and my country would soon be a pile of dust. As the Russian missile-laden trawlers approached Cuba, I called my Mom. She told me it would be all right. The power of the mother: it helped.

I was nineteen when I first listened to Masters of War. It seemed like a reasonable age to start to protest having one's entire life pre-empted.
6. The Rush

Barbara, Art t.a.

DAVIS, CALIFORNIA. EARLY 1964

I spent all day with the Volkswagen salesman. It did not make sense to me that I could be trading in my sexy little MGA convertible for a used VW half-bus, half-pickup and not get any money on the deal. But he out-waited me, and I sputtered out of the car lot into a California storm, not realizing that I was soon to be one of an army of longhairs in VW buses drifting along the California highways, in no hurry at all, man; in mirrored contradiction of the hunkered-down cars from the fifties, when power and speed were everything.

1960 VW half-pickup

The bed of the pickup/bus permitted me to transport the canvases I had begun painting. I would soon paint the inside of the bus purple: purple dashboard, purple cab. (This prompted my father to comment that this might hurt the resale value of the bus. What resale value?) At the university I had switched from the English Department to Art. Davis had a great Art Department: William T. Wiley, Wayne Thiebaud, Bruce Nauman. My paintings were big: eight by ten feet, high-gloss, orange and purple, black and yellow.

One of my paintings hung on the side of a barn in Pebble Beach.

About the same time I dropped ROTC and moved out of the dormitory. I lived in five places in one year: In a one-room shack by the railroad tracks. Noisy. In the basement of a farmhouse in the country. Damp. Three other houses.

The Beatles' first film, A Hard Day's Night, came out. I could barely understand their accent. Pursued everywhere by screaming fans, the Beatles never stopped running. In the United States in 1965 The Beatles released four LPs. Fifty-seven songs. (The albums are The Early Beatles, March; Beatles VI, June; Help, August; and Rubber Soul, December.) By the time you were familiar with one record another had been released. The Beatles toured Britain, Europe, and America. Eight days a week, indeed. From England now came word of Carnaby Street, swinging London. Ferry Cross the Mersey, The Dave Clark Five, op art, miniskirts, The Yardbirds, and, of course, more on The Rolling Stones.

Hair started to sprout on people's heads like mushrooms after a rain. In Davis, we were all making stuff. Make a painting, make a photo. Make each other. It's all stuff. Make stuff. People were talking about Wylie. Someone came up with the phrase "funk art." Dan Welch made Zen paintings. Huge canvas chairs.

We were artists in a cow town, the California sun beating down on us. Welch drifted off to a Zen monastery. Miles Forst, a gentle, rambling madman artist from the Bowery in New York where people slept on fire escapes in the winter, told us, eyes bulging, "Look at all you beautiful people out here, whew!" People painted with meticulous craftsmanship, people painted with cans of Day-Glo. People painted each other. Every weekend there was a party where the new music was played. Dance. Smoke a little marijuana. Dance. "Love, love me, do." Beautiful, beautiful college women. John Lennon howling. Mick Jagger singing, "Time, time, time is on my side... Yes it is."

Time is on our side, 1964

The Beatles released their second movie. Help! I saw it multiple times. It wasn't Hard Day's Night, but the Beatles were as captivating as ever, and it was in color. The music was great, and getting even better. John Lennon lying on the couch in the Beatles' common house sang, "Here I stand, head in hand / turn my face to the wall." It seemed as though every album -- from every artist -- was a major creative leap further. In 1965 Bob Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home. He was on the cover with an unnamed woman in a red dress; he was holding a cat and looking like the head of SPECTRE in a James Bond movie. When I got the record home, I ripped the shrink wrap off and put the needle in the groove. Right away it was obvious that something very bizarre was up: drums, electric guitar, and Dylan singing, the words speeding out of his mouth, cascading: "Johnny's-in-the-basement-mixing-up-the-medicine / I'm-on-the-pavement-thinking-about-the-government/Man-in-a-trenchcoat-badge-out-laid-off / Say-she's-got-a-bad-cough-wants-to-get-paid-off / Look-out-kids-it's-something-you-did / God-knows-when-but-you're doing-it-again / You'd-better-duck-down-the-alleyway-looking-for-a-new-friend/Man-in-a-coonskin-cap-and-a-pig-pen-wantseleven-dollar-bills/You-only-got-ten."

The words pile on top of each other, speeding, surreal. Where was all this coming from? Did it matter?

"Bringing It All Back Home," Bob Dylan. Photo Daniel Kramer.

Unknown Student, Ellen
7. Acceleration

Me, Davis

DAVIS, CALIFORNIA 1966

Bob Dylan --"Everybody must get stoned."

The first time I smoked marijuana, I didn't even know that's what it was, or I never would have touched it. Drugs were not in any vision I had of my life. (They simply were not part of the landscape. You didn't have "Just Say No," since there was nothing to say "Yes" to.) It was in the artist's studio in 1961 on Cannery Row that a guy with a large drooping mustache offered me what I thought was a cigarette, and I took it. It wasn't that unlikely: he always smoked roll-your-own cigarettes, and I thought that's what he was offering me. (You might say I was an innocent). As I lay in the hammock I suddenly noticed the shadows in the room growing longer, and time seemed to move eerily slow. It was disorienting, and I didn't like it. But as marijuana became more common, and I tried it again, my experience was different. When my friends got together and smoked what would start out as a smirk would soon become uncontrollable peals of laughter with everybody holding their stomachs and rolling on the floor.

When I smoked marijuana, time slowed down and ice cream tasted better than it ever had before. If I listened to music, and closed my eyes, the notes would elongate, stretch, and the music would envelop me, then carry me away. In these reactions I was not alone: Our eyes got red. Our tongues got dry. But, unlike being drunk, we didn't stumble around, get sick, or wake up with a hangover. (As a generation we got a lot of mileage out of touting the apparently benign effects of marijuana when compared to alcohol.) I began to wonder why I'd been led to believe that marijuana was so harmful, addicting? Marijuana just seemed to make things better. Simple things. Apple juice. Sex. The great sunshine days of California. Alice in Wonderland? You thought you understood Alice in Wonderland? Read it stoned.

"Glad Day" by William Blake

Why all these guys must have been stoned. All the time. There was no other explanation; it was the undeniable conclusion: the conspiracy of the stoned, the fraternity of the stoned. Since marijuana seemed harmless to us, all our elders could finally say was that it was against the law. So? Stupid law.

Then came LSD.

I'd only heard about LSD through the media until one day a friend of mine said he'd tried it and it was great: "It's a trip." (A phrase we'd soon hear a lot.) There was no reason not to believe this: I'd been told that marijuana was dangerous and that had been proven false. Certainly LSD would prove equally benign.

I first took LSD in a little house in Davis. I sat around and waited for something to change. Nothing did, for what seemed like a long time. After a while I began to wonder whether anything at all was going to happen. I started to play darts with a friend. Then I noticed that the darts were not distinct objects as I'd always known them, but instead they left a trail after they'd left my hand. For that matter, my arm left a trailing image as it followed through.

I lay down and drew for what seemed like a long time, though of course I had no sense of time. I drew very slowly and with great concentration. I wrote in a childish scrawl, "It's all so simple."

Then a rainstorm broke, and I went outside. It was dusk and I watched a tall, leafless tree swaying against the darkening sky. Every limb, every twig of that tree was outlined by a thin violet line. It seemed as if it were swaying under water, like something you might see if you went scuba diving. Every so often one of the violet lines would break off and go spinning into the night sky, out into the stars. It was indescribably beautiful. I had an intense sense of the connectedness of life, of how things big and small were the same. The air was the ocean was the air.

My friend came to get me. In the small college town, we drove by a movie theater. People were buying tickets and going in.

"What are they going in the theater for?" I asked. The theater just seemed like a shoebox. Outside was Everything: The Storm, The Night. "Can't they see? It's all out here!" I said passionately. "Everything's out here."

"Sure. And I believe you're Jesus," said my friend, vaguely disgusted. I tried to think what he meant, although I was sure there was some truth in it.

Then I got scared. I can't remember what scared me, but suddenly I wanted it to stop. To calm myself, I went home and lay in the bath. But when I looked at myself I looked unbearably skinny, and I was aware of my own skeleton. I became acutely uncomfortable. I couldn't lie there: I got out of the bath. A musician friend came by. I told him I was having a bad time. He said, "If you smoke a joint you'll go right back up again."

I said no, I really didn't want to do that. I wanted to come down.

The next day I walked around with a somewhat eerie feeling. Although the hallucinations had stopped, I felt as if the entire world I lived in was somehow changed. Distinctions that I had known as reality had been dissolved, and their dissolution seemed to provide insights into truths that were greater. Spirit had been visible, manifest in everything around me.

In August 1966, the Beatles played their last live concert, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. That same month, Revolver was released. From Revolver the single was "Eleanor Rigby." "Eleanor Rigby" has no guitars and no drums. The track appears to be made up entirely of strings: violins, bass violins. It ignores all the previous basics of rock and roll instrumentally and lyrically, "Eleanor Rigby...lives in a dream," sings Paul.

"Eleanor Rigby" is the first in a series of Paul McCartney portrait songs "Penny Lane," "She's Leaving Home," "Lovely Rita" that draw on parts of English society to tell their stories, although at this stage people were not differentiating between a "Paul" song and a "John" song. It was all The Beatles, and The Beatles were already bigger and better than anything we'd ever known. The Beatles were, by now, bigger than rock and roll. They had taken all that rock and roll had to offer and fed it back to us in their own way. Now they were growing beyond that, going further. But how much further? Lennon would shortly proclaim The Beatles to be "more popular than Jesus," and sing, "Love is all and love everyone. / It is knowing, it is knowing."

"Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream" (the directive from "Tomorrow Never Knows" is no trivial gauntlet. The goal posts were moving. Music was growing beyond even its recent role of supporting social change. Now, enhanced by the visions of LSD, it challenged the nature of consciousness, of reality itself.

Like the creature erupting from the astronaut's breast in Alien, like a mammoth ocean liner released from its moorings, we (the "love generation," later to be demoted to the "me generation") had been launched.

Charlie (became an investment advisor) and Richard (became an architect) after "lift off."
8. The Best of Times. The Worst of Times.

Art students and professor on Lake Tahoe

CARMEL VALLEY, SUMMER 1965

In a time before my memory, my grandmother donated a small strip of land on Carmel Valley Road to a rural school, and they constructed a single-level, one-room house. It must have failed as a school because when I was first told of it, it had become a business that sold a poison-oak remedy.

In 1964 Joan Baez bought it and opened her "Institute for the Study of Nonviolence" there. Jack Colas, a man from Ohio who worked for my father, offered to climb the hill overlooking the property, and "shoot 'em." You have to love life's ironies. I became a student there.

In college I had picked up a book on the life of Gandhi and became enthralled with it, a remarkable story. Gandhi's dedication, his profound spiritual belief that truth and nonviolent resistance (loving your enemy, turning the other cheek, where had we heard this?) could change the course of events was riveting. And he succeeded, separating the British from their colonial rule of India. Winston Churchill hated him forever, dismissed him in arrogant terms. I am a huge admirer of Winston Churchill, but this was not his best moment:

"It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor." 4

Gandhi's life spoke to me, an idealistic youth, and it did so with both moral authority and humor: the image of Gandhi meeting with the impeccably uniformed representative of His Majesty's government while draped in simple, traditional garb? This upstart behavior -- if you thought about it -- was entirely reminiscent of those difficult colonials circa 1774.

The connection was more than serendipitous. Gandhi's attraction to America's past was explicit, as he noted in 1907: "I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau's essay, 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.' "

Baez Sisters

I didn't see either myself or Gandhi's philosophy as naive. That was an essential point of the nonviolent narrative: those in power would always furiously dismiss passive resistance as naive. But the British surrendered India, and in America Martin Luther King was organizing nonviolent protests throughout the South. We didn't yet know how that would turn out.

It seemed transparent to me that I would not fight in Vietnam. There was nothing about it that seemed to have anything to do with the America I thought I knew. The homilies dating back to Fess Parker and Davy Crockett held interesting sway, "Be sure you're right. Then go ahead." It was to me almost that straightforward. The war didn't represent any of the values I had been taught. It was that simple. Based on this--and my reading of Gandhi and, now, my short involvement with Baez's school--I decided I would register as a conscientious objector. I went to tell my father. I thought he would be accepting, as he had been when I told him I was dropping R.O.T.C, but I was wrong.

He insisted I could not do this, that it would ruin my life. I didn't understand. Didn't he understand? There was nothing about this war that had anything to do with the things he had taught me.

It was not trivial for me to fight with my father. I loved him. He was the charming hero of our house. He wasn't "Father Knows Best," but we were only moments out of the fifties, and he was the man of the house, and the authority. There was no resolution that night. What was he to do? I was nineteen.

I walked upstairs to my childhood room. I didn't know what I was going to do about my Dad -- I knew I had no intention of going to Vietnam.

DAVIS

On a hot, muggy night, in the attic room of an old school administration building, I struggled with a case of undergraduate angst: What am I doing with my life? Should I drop out? Get a job? My hair grew over the collar of my shirt. In the corner, a small AM radio played softly. I heard a sharp crack and then a drum, organ, electric guitar, harmonica, and the voice of Bob Dylan: Once upon a time, you dressed so fine

Threw the bums a dime in your prime

Didn't you?

People'd call say.

"Beware, doll, you 're bound to fall..."

My ears perked up. Dylan's voice was, as usual, snarling. But what was this backing? I rushed across the room and cranked up the volume. Dylan's voice rode over the sound of the organ.

You've gone to the finest school all right Miss Lonely

But you know you only used to get juiced in it.

Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street

And now you're gonna have to get used to it ..

As I'm walking quietly along a country road, a car screeches past and a beer bottle careens toward me, barely misses, and shatters on the street. "Get a haircut!" An arm is thrust out the window, the middle finger extended. "Asshole!" Voices yell, "Faggot!"

Dylan sings.

You say you never compromise

With the mystery tramp, but now you realize

He's not selling any alibis

As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes

And say "do you want to make a deal?"

I walk into a restaurant where a group of five jocks sit in a booth. Silence at first. Stares. Then, in a stage whisper, one of them asks, "Hey. What's that? A boy or a girl?" Gales of laughter. They slap each other on the back. (High fives weren't invented yet).

Dylan snarls:

You used to be so amused

At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used.

Go to him now he calls you. you can't refuse

When you got nothing you got nothing to lose

Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited. Photograph by Daniel Kramer

How does it feel

To be on your own

With no direction home

A complete unknown

Like a rolling stone?

The harmonica wailed into the distance. The Lone Ranger had never made such an impression with a single visit. On the record cover Bob Dylan sits holding dark glasses, wearing an open neon-bright shirt; underneath a T-shirt with a motorcycle on it. On Highway 61 Revisited there are no folk or "protest" songs as we had come to expect. On the back of Highway 61 he writes, "Your rooftop -- if you don't already know -- has been demolished." If there were signs (like the booing at Newport) that all this was not going to be easy, it didn't matter. If later on, Dylan sang, "Everybody said they'd stand behind me /When the game got rough. / But the joke was on me, / There was nobody even there to bluff," we didn't worry about it then. We were on a long roll.

Whatever all this was (and I wasn't completely sure, though I felt that I knew) I definitely wanted part of it. If I was going to join any Army, it would be the rag tag army Dylan sang about. Did Dylan mean a rolling stone like The Rolling Stones? Did these guys know each other? No matter. The impression was they did.

The truth was obscure Too profound and too pure To live it you had to explode.

Bob Dylan -- "Where Are You Tonight?"

Valerie had blond hair that hung to her shoulders and was cut in a flat bang across the front. She looked like Marianne Faithfull, or Françoise Hardy, the look of the time. I found her beautiful and, of course, assumed she would have nothing to do with me, so it came as a great surprise when we ended up in bed together, almost immediately.

Valerie 1966

Now when the crew-cut fraternity boys would hang their heads out the window, yelling, "Is it a boy or a girl?" I felt I had the girl on my arm, and they could yell all they wanted.

For months Valerie and I went out together, taking for granted all the good times. There were mornings lying in bed, the famous violet-rimmed tree out the window, when it seemed like heaven. I was falling in love. It was the best of times.

Six months later, after we had traveled California, gone into the mountains, gone to the ocean, and spent many more mornings in bed together, Valerie and I went shopping for some new sheets. The little old lady in the store looked at us, a glow of delight on her face, and said, "Oh, are you two getting married?" I looked at her expression and couldn't bear to hurt her feelings. Without thinking about it at all, without even meaning it, I said, "Yes." Valerie freaked, decided this was all entirely too serious, and disappeared.

I then freaked myself. In my fear and anxiety I knew where to turn. Love would be the answer here. It was simply a matter of its application. So with the same intense and painstaking commitment that I brought to my study of Gandhi, my commitment to pacifism, I turned all my attention to trying to save this love affair. I quickly became obsessive. Valerie, in turn, retreated, becoming silent and shutdown in the face of this intensity. I turned to my friends.

I turned to anybody. What was I doing wrong? I loved her. And love, I really believed, was all-powerful. That was a given, reinforced by all that was in the air. So there had to be a way to turn this around. I would just try harder.

It would become my personal experience of Endless Love as the obsession with Valerie grew to consume my life. I had little self-worth -- not enough to offset this loss. The search for relief took me to the East Coast and into months of work with a psychiatrist, trying to piece myself back together.

Before I left for the East, I discovered that my older brother smoked marijuana. Between the two of us, Jerry was the athlete, the guy with the Corvette four-on-the-floor, dual carburetors. This was pretty amazing. Jerry and I listened to music together. I soon discovered that it was not only Jerry who was smoking, but all his friends were, too, all the athletic crowd. Jerry's best friend, Roy Buell, nicknamed Hoppy, who used to be the terror of the neighborhood when we were kids, was getting high and listening to music. Though at this point all of them have short hair, and they're wearing madras shirts, they all seem to be going after this marijuana/music/ drug bug with both hands.

There was a lot of music now. An American group called The Byrds released their first album, Mr. Tambourine Man. They performed a lot of Bob Dylan songs and made them electric, with harmonies. I must have listened to that record two hundred times. I would listen to the last track, "The Bells of Rhymney" as Jim McGuinn, the lead guitar player, played the instrumental break, picking high notes over the backing of the band, suddenly jumping one octave so that the notes seemed to suddenly release, spiraling off like birds.

In the winter of 1966 I arrived in New York City sporting my father's overcoat, purple pointed-toe Beatle boots, and long hair. Walking down the barren streets, I felt like I was in the cover of Freewheelin'. Occasionally I'd hear from my brother out in San Francisco: he had moved into a house on Fillmore with a group of other people, mostly musicians. They were forming a band. Walking in Greenwich Village, I was accosted by a French film crew. They were doing a show on what was happening with American youth, and they interviewed me for French television. What is going on? I told them (in French that had consistently earned me a D in college) that love is all, love is what it's all about.

It's time to change, I'm told. In a cold apartment somewhere in the Village a strange girl I'd never met before cuts off all my hair, as short as I can stand it. Short.

4 From: www.kamat.com/mmgandhi/churchill.htm
9. Endless Love

Back in San Francisco

CONNECTICUT, 1966

Spring came and the trees blossomed. By summer they were full and green, and it came time to think about getting a job. In Westport, Connecticut, I walked into Klein's department store on Main Street because Klein's had the largest book department in the area. I asked Stanley Klein, the son of the owner, if there were any openings in the book department.

Mr. Klein: "No."

"Do you think there'll be any openings coming up?" I asked.

Mr. Klein: "No. Do you know anything about photography?"

"I know how to take pictures and develop them."

Mr. Klein: "We're opening a camera department. Go talk to Gene."

Klein's Westport

Gene was married to Katie. They had no children because, as Gene said, "There's only room for one baby." In Klein's camera department I sold a lot of little 35mm Agfa cameras to people who came in wanting to buy Instamatics, explaining to them that the Agfa had a glass lens (the Instamatic's was plastic) and a pressure plate to hold the film flat (the Instamatic's cartridge didn't). Gene taught me to do that.

Every morning I'd drive to work and every evening I'd drive home. It was a routine, and it brought in a paycheck. At lunch I would borrow a photography magazine and walk to the little diner on the corner. I read about the newest lenses and films; articles about how to take a portrait, articles asking whether photography was an art. (They still do.)

It was soon clear that I was no salesman, but the need for a career loomed. I was 20. Since I had taken pictures in the past, I thought I might try my luck as a photographer. I wrote to an old friend in California and asked to borrow the money I'd need to get started.

With my father's help I bought a white Buick station wagon with eighty-five thousand miles on it, and set out across the country. First I drove to Washington D.C. to visit my aunt and uncle. In a book-lined study I looked out the window at the gathering dusk. Suddenly, I realized it was my twenty-first birthday.

Washington, DC November 26, 1966

I woke up the next morning at 4 a.m. and drove off into a gathering snowstorm, which I tried to outrun. I almost didn't make it, spinning completely out of control in front of an onrushing semi, a full rotation and half before sliding off onto the shoulder as the truck flew by. But I survived. I was off on my journey Across America. I'd drive from before dawn into the night. I drove across Pennsylvania, through St. Louis, and down to the Southwest, where I saw mesas outlined against the rising sun. I drove along Route 66, made famous by the song, across the great California Central Valley, through Hollister (the location for Marlon Brando's motorcycle film The Wild One) and into the coastal foothills now green in the winter.

I was on the road (like Kerouac), back to California, finally arriving back in San Francisco, where now everybody had long hair. And not just the straight, hanging hair of the Beatles, but great, curling masses of unkempt hair, sideburns that grew down men's jaws, hair that was parted in the center and just grew straight out from there, sometimes parallel to the ground.

SAN FRANCISCO, 1967

In Haight-Ashbury (a part of San Francisco that I had never even heard of despite having grown up in the city) Victorian houses were taken over by longhairs now called "hippies." In these rambling houses people created one-room homes, placing multicolored tie-dyed sheets over the windows. Peacock feathers sprouted from jars. Layers of inexpensive Oriental carpets covered the floors. Beds were set on the floor in the middle of the room, blanketed with Indian paisley bedspreads and mounds of tasseled pillows. Wicker baskets overflowed with copies of Rolling Stone and The Oracle, the Haight newspaper. The Oracle was printed with swirls and colors, trying to supplant the linear logic that newspapers were said to represent. Posters advertising local bands were thumb-tacked all over the walls, each poster an image overprinted with the swirling lines of psychedelia.

In the windows, cut glass prisms hung from thin threads, casting rainbows against the walls when the sunlight struck them. Incense burned. Boxes of beads, with endless little compartments, were kept for stringing. These beads were purchased from the local head shop, which also sold cigarette papers, roach clips, hash pipes, and black lights. Under these lights patterns of violet would shine from anything painted with luminous paint. In every room there was a phonograph so the music, which held this all together, and promoted it, and urged it further, could be played.

At night people gathered at the Fillmore Auditorium. I went there with my brother to hear Jefferson Airplane. The Fillmore hosted Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), the Quicksilver Messenger Service, or the Grateful Dead. The bands stood on stage playing long, long songs, loud. On the walls all around them giant projections of various colored dyes, mixed together, swirled, merging into each other, like finger paints, like ever-reforming mandalas The music moved and the images moved and people on the dance floor moved, throwing their arms above their heads and swaying, all together. It was all very liquid, like my purple-rimmed tree. Almost everybody was high on one thing or another. Those who weren't high soon would be.

Blue Cheer, San Francisco 1967

Because of all the attention the Haight began to attract, the Gray Line bus company began running a tour down Haight Street. Tourists from Kansas, Oklahoma, Los Angeles (who knows?), would stare out of tinted windows, cruising through the Haight looking at hippies. On more than one occasion a man with hair hanging to his shoulders could be seen running alongside the bus holding a mirror aloft, reflecting these sightseeing faces directly back at them.

The band my brother lived with gave itself a name: Blue Cheer, which if you were of a certain age would remind you of a laundry detergent, but was known locally to be a brand of LSD. Jerry, my brother, who did not play an instrument, took on the role of their manager. At first, there were six of them, and various people who hung out or who planned to work with them. There was Gut, the ex-president of the San Bernardino chapter of the Hell's Angels. It was never quite clear what Gut was going to do for the band. He looked like an Italian Renaissance Jesus, with black, slightly curling hair just past his shoulders. Gut had a sign by his bed that said, "Welcome to my Cloud."

One afternoon at the Masonic Auditorium Blue Cheer played a brief opening set for Timothy Leary, who was in San Francisco to deliver his version of the Word; "Turn on, tune in, drop out," which he did.

Later, Leary went back to Blue Cheer's house, which was already famous in the Haight for consuming more drugs than any other. Leary wanted them to chant "Om," but, according to my brother, they told Leary to forget it. They were not into that. Leary left. There were no searching spiritual pathways here, just a bunch of inner-city boys who liked to play music and get high.

Blue Cheer

On January 14th, 1967 the people of the Haight staged the "Human Be-In." On this day thousands of hippies gathered in the Polo fields in Golden Gate Park, clustered under banners of their own making, tie-dyed pennants looking like the markers of an ancient crusade. Couples danced, totally engrossed, with their arms held out in front of them and each of their fingers extended toward the other's, almost touching, waving like tentacles. I could almost envision the little LSD energy waves flowing off each finger.

On this day Golden Gate Park totally lived up to its name. The sun streamed through the trees, shedding a golden light over everyone and everything. People were smiling and dancing. It was completely possible, even likely, that a stranger would smile at you, and you would smile back, and that fleeting exchange would catapult the two of you into bed together for at least one night of love, only to move on the next day, as you followed whatever was happening. It was a kind of freedom powered by the birth-control pill unimaginable in earlier eras. It seemed so much more sane than having to grope in the back seat of a car or neck in the back row of a movie theater, the standard petting rituals of the fifties. The Haight was diverging from the earlier political path of the sixties. A "be-in" (a clever name) was different from the more political "sit-in" or "lie-in;" you weren't there to do anything (sit, lie, protest) you would just show up and "be." The value of "being" was supported by a wealth of Eastern writing. Of this LSD convinced most of us. In a spiritual world all the dichotomies were superficial. While the new road of "being" was ostensibly more spiritual, it also ( at least as it was most commonly practiced in the Haight) made few demands on the practitioner beyond, arguably, doing whatever they wanted.

Robert Altman photograph "Celebrate!" from the Holy Man Jam, Boulder, CO Aug. 1970

As the day ended, Allen Ginsberg suggested walking to the ocean and watching the sunset. So the "gathering of the tribes" set off slowly through the afternoon glow, carrying flags and flowers, playing guitars and singing. They stood on the edge of the continent, feeling (no doubt) like so many before them, that they had come this far, here was the edge of America, and they were pioneers, come to watch the holy sun set into the vast Pacific.

But in the real world, as it were, things were not quite so sunny. By the end of 1966 more than 5,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam. According to the Pentagon, there were 380,000 troops there as 1967 began. Martin Luther King, Jr. was preparing to propose that the civil rights movement merge with the antiwar movement. In April, the largest antiwar demonstration to date had taken place in New York City. It was estimated as 400,000 by the organizers and as 100,000 by the police. Which one did you believe? It was like body counts. These had become the fiction of Vietnam, repeatedly shown to be incorrect, one of the many ways that Americans were discovering they were being lied to.

I was drafted while I was back East seeing the psychiatrist. He read me the draft notice and told me not to worry, that he had written the draft board a letter. Easier said than done I worried to myself, but I was eventually classified "1-Y," a temporary medical deferment. It was clear I could be drafted at any time after the deferment was up. I still had no intention of going.

For many of the people I knew their strategy was to get too fucked up to be draft-able. If they were called to report, they'd start abusing drugs about a week before the appointed date, staying up day after day, purposely warping their bodies and minds so that when they were finally called they hoped to be incapable of recognizing a question much less having the ability to answer it.

Some decided to take heroin, to become addicted, "just for the physical. When that's done, I'll kick. Beats going to Vietnam, man, and having your fucking brains blown out." Some never kicked. Some died.

One day I was tagging along with my brother as he went to visit some people he knew up the street on Fillmore. Jerry preceded me up the stairs. Though it was the middle of the day, all the windows were covered. A fellow in the corner with long hair looks at me suspiciously and asks, "Who's that?"

Jerry says, "It's my brother."

"Looks like a narc to me, man," says the guy. ("Narc," too, is a word we'll come to hear a lot.) Buffalo Springfield would sing, Paranoia strikes deep / Into your heart it will creep. Little pockets of darkness in the Haight.

But at this time, for a very large number of people the darkness was peripheral. Even with the war as a backdrop they were surrounded by hope. They were embarking on their own journeys, starting from the rooms they had set up, listening to the Word of music and what it promised. And the promises were big promises -- promises, as T.S. Eliot might have said, of not less than everything.

We had a dream, and it was it sometimes seemed almost literally a dream of a return to the Garden of Eden. It was a dream reinforced by visions made immensely real through LSD. Because these were shared visions, there seemed little reason to doubt their authenticity. The dream, the vision, was golden. It invoked God in all His/Her forms. It said we should love one another, as we had always been told we should. How radical. And so we all met, and ate, and traveled and loved, and got high together.

If all this seemed too magical, we would remind ourselves that magic was merely another, older science, and that, in any event, we lived in a universe where nothing happened by chance.

"In their hearts they turned to each other's hearts." Mendocino 1966

In our enthusiasm and excitement we welcomed back all the forgotten or discredited dreamers, from William Blake to Lewis Carroll, from the American Indian to Walt Whitman. Out of the overwhelming materialism of the fifties we tried to institute the abiding power of the spiritual, and we were not talking about going to church. Thedore Roszak would write later,

"It was a vision that, to one degree or another, drew the attention and fascination of passing many. More important than the size of the dissent was its depth. Never before had protest raised issues that went so philosophically deep, delving into the very meaning of reality, sanity, and human purpose. Out of that dissent was the most ambitious agenda for the reappraisal of cultural values that any society ever produced. Everything was called into question." 5

"On the brave and crazy wings of youth," Jackson Browne later sang about what, by then, seemed brave and crazy, we set out to try and fulfill the vast promises we collectively imagined.

Sometimes, as Brown also sang, this was political and sometimes it was a journey back to nature. If it seemed daunting, no one was alone. "In [our] hearts [we] turned to each other's hearts for refuge," sang Browne with a mournful tinge in "Before the Deluge." We were all (it was our basic premise) in this together. In this vision we were already part of one great family, the family of man, whether we chose to acknowledge it or not. We would affirm this. We would reject the life of the suburban nuclear family. We would reject the "reality" that rejected our "dream." And we never questioned which was the more powerful. For it was (indisputably! inarguably!) the dream that inspired reality, not the other way around. LSD told us that.

As everyone stood on the edge of the Pacific on the day of the Be-In, watching the sun go down, a single parachutist could be seen skydiving through the air. It was reputed to be Owsley, the Bay Area's most infamous manufacturer of LSD.

And then as if riding a common wave, on July 24, 1967, The Beatles released All You Need Is Love.

If somehow, somewhere there were some Promotional-Director-in-the-Sky who took care of these things; if somehow all of this were being done on purpose (as certainly we were sure it was); it could not have happened with more effect, nor at a more opportune time. The Second Coming could hardly have been more convincing. All You Need Is Love begins with a blast of horns and a snare drum, sounding every inch like the Queen's guard announcing her arrival. Then John and Paul, double-tracked in harmony, sing: "Love, love, love / Love, love, love / Love, love, love." Then bass violins enter in descending progression, and then John (once again it's John) sings,

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.

Nothing you can sing that can't be sung

Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game....

The song has strings, drums, choruses of horns like those in burlesque houses. The song bounces along:

There's nothing you can know that isn't known.

Nothing you can see that isn't shown

There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you 're meant to be

It's easy.....

All you need is love (all together now)

All you need is love (everybody) . . .

As the song closes, the melody diminishes as high-pitched strings, classical oboes, swing trumpets, whistling, yelling, all are mixed together into what is becoming a classic Beatle ending. The strains of Greensleeves are mixed up and then John sings, "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah," an allusion to an earlier Beatles hit. It's always been the same, John appears to be saying. It always will be the same. It's always been love. Throughout all of this the line "Love is all you need" is endlessly sung "Love is all you need, love is all you need."

As it turns out, the Beatles had been asked to represent Britain on a show called Our World, the first worldwide live satellite television broadcast. For this, they composed All You Need Is Love. More than 200 million people watched that broadcast, which was at that time the largest television audience ever.

Pictures of the Beatles at the time show them as having changed once again. No longer were they the four jolly mop tops. Now all had mustaches. John appeared with his distinctive glasses. Film of them from the time shows them walking down a Liverpool street following the release of "Penny Lane." They moved with the bearing of royalty in a land where royalty was an establishment long closed to them. Could it ever get any higher (the word that had come to replace better) than that?

That same summer, The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. On the cover they were dressed in bright satin costumes holding musical instruments; they were surrounded (in collage) by Marilyn Monroe, Karl Marx, Jayne Mansfield, Marlon Brando, and a host of others, placing themselves among, and in the center of, the major cultural influences of our time.

As an album, Sgt. Pepper is applauded by everybody. Once again Beatle music surpassed everything in popular music that had preceded it, including the Beatles' own work. It ended with a song called "A Day in the Life." The first time I heard it was over the radio as I was driving through Haight-Ashbury. The disc jockey had been hyperventilating for the previous twenty minutes. "I have here the latest from The Beatles! Stay where you are! This is going to Blow! Your! Mind! ! !" And over the airwaves came John: "I read the news today, oh boy."

John sings about a man who "made the grade," who "blew his mind out in a car." The news was sad, but "I just had to laugh." The second verse ends with "I'd love to turn you on," the words sung with vibrato as if they were spinning; then the guitars drop out and the surge of an orchestra comes in, but it sounds strange, somehow different (it's the tape being played backward), like a maddened swarm of bees that suddenly accelerate as if backed by some jet engine, and this sound just grows and swells until it peaks some thirty long seconds later with a high note, and then an alarm clock rings. Paul sings:

Woke up. Fell out of bed.

Dragged a comb across my head. .

Found my way upstairs and had a smoke

And somebody spoke and I went into a dream

("Had a smoke and went into a dream." Right!) Then John's voice again, after the word "dream," singing in falsetto, high and drifty. Behind John an orchestra plays, all drifting. Out There. Then John sings the last verse, ending, "I'd love to turn you on."

And here comes that maddened swarm of bees for an encore, growling, growing, surging (this is every bit the musical predecessor to Lucas's leap into hyperspace in Star Wars), peaking until it totally explodes, then silence for one beat, then one note is played, a low drone that is sustained for a further twenty seconds, until it diminishes to nothing. For once, a disc jockey was right. It did totally blow my mind. This comes as the last song of the album, the experience you're left with. It's almost exhausting.

To quote Joan Baez's wonderful line from Diamonds and Rust about her time with Bob Dylan in the early 60s ("Speaking strictly for me / We both could have died then and there"), speaking strictly for myself, it was as if all of music (as "music" then meant to us, the explosion of talent, and hope, and belief that somehow all of this was going to transform and make better the entire world) climaxed at that moment, rising as high as it was going to go. The Beatles, seeming to live the most magical of lives, were giving it all back to us. They were holding out this promise and hope if we would just pursue it. Remember, there's nothing that you can do that can't be done. It's easy.

Of course, as the drone faded into silence, and I marveled once again at what these guys could do, the workaday world came back. I was living in Berkeley, near the ghetto. I had set up a darkroom next to the kitchen. I was taking photographs.

Then I went to see Michelangelo Antonioni's movie Blow-Up. It is the story, set in "swinging London," of an immensely successful English fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings. He drives a Rolls Royce, and is surrounded by beautiful models and musicians smoking hashish. For me, as much as the actors or the plot, the life Antonioni depicts is powerfully seductive. Hemmings swings his convertible Rolls Royce around the roundabouts, drops into a pub for lunch, returns to his exotic studio lined with rows of seamless paper. The movie made London -- where all this music was coming from -- already appear even more attractive, if that were possible.

Who should be the star of this exotic movie but a photographer! Suddenly this fledgling, hardly even "business" of mine (if by business you mean something that makes money) was catapulted into hip respectability. So, for a while, I wandered Golden Gate Park, as Hemmings had wandered the parks of London, my camera always with me. As all bands ultimately do Blue Cheer decided it needed some pictures. So I took my camera, and we all walked through San Francisco. We went to Potrero Hill, walked through the Haight, into Golden Gate Park, down to Ocean Beach where Owsley had dropped out of the sky.

Blue Cheer on Portero Hill

In San Francisco hippies are everywhere. More are coming. The announcement of the "Summer of Love" frightens an already nervous City Hall. (Interestingly, the summer of 1967 was called the "Summer of Love" before it happened.)

Over the airwaves Scott McKenzie sang, "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair." Tens of thousands flock to San Francisco and the Haight, each with his or her own vision of hope and expectation. The San Francisco Chronicle worries, "Where will they sleep? What about drug use?" The kids arrive in endless numbers, many talking about love, looking for love. Along with my photographs, I also started to think, too, about making movies. Why not? Painting, photography, whatever, it was all making things. But I didn't have a movie camera. So once again I pored through magazines, reading, learning. Armed with a set of answers about costs versus features, I went to speak to my father about a loan.

My father listened patiently to me as I set forth my plans. When I was done, he asked, "Do you think you're spending your time as wisely as you can? `

"Short of going around the world," I replied, glibly. "Well, then, why don't you do that?" asked my father.

5 The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition by Theordore Roszak 1968 University of California Press
10. Sunny South Kensington

London

EUROPE, SUMMER 1967

At New York's Kennedy Airport, the cabbie took the tip from my seventeen-year old sister, Linda, counted it, counted it again, and then disgustedly hurled it to the floor, where it bounced around. New York. It was a hot and muggy evening. We gladly boarded the Scandinavian jet bound for Stockholm. Over the Arctic, the aurora borealis (the only time I have ever seen it) shimmered outside the window.

Early the next morning the plane landed in Stockholm. The clock said 10:30, but my sister and I couldn't tell whether it was morning or evening. After a period of looking out our hotel window, we deduced that the traffic was flowing toward what we figured was downtown. In half an hour, after eleven, the sun went down.

The next day Linda and I took a train across Sweden, swaying through the green countryside, arriving in Goteborg, where a brand-new green Volvo 122S waited for us at the factory. My sister and I drove off, headed for Copenhagen, searching out a woman friend of a friend from Berkeley.

The day we arrived we got in touch and, that evening, climbed a long circular stairway and were greeted by a blond woman. In her small room there were about ten people, talking quietly, standing around a table covered with food. She soon offered us a hashish joint and asked if we indulged. The joint was lit and passed around as music filled the room. Everything conspired to confirm my beliefs: the dream was real, people were high, and music was everywhere.

We talked about San Francisco and what was happening there. Later we danced, thigh to thigh. I was expectant and excited. We smoked a little more hash. Then, in the corner of my vision there appeared a girl with long, dark braided hair and a serious expression.

"Hello," she says. "They say you are American, yes? Well, I am from Russia." And she thrust out a hand. "You tell me what it is like in America?"

"America or San Francisco?" I responded, smiling, insufferably hip.

She does not smile, but shortly begins to catalogue the sins of the U.S.A. She says that we exploit our working class, that we keep our blacks imprisoned in ghettos, that we are military expansionists. She has her points, of course, but I am distracted and want to dance with my new Danish friend. Her questions seem to me to seek only their own answers. Anyway, how to explain "Let's Make a Deal" or "Eight Miles High"? I have a Haight-Ashbury reaction, figuring her problem is she's straight. I offer her some hash. She refuses. "It is an escape from reality," she says.

"Which reality," I ask?

"Stop that. Be serious." She is intent.

I am her first American. She, in turn, is my first Russian. She is not to be shaken off. How can I be like this? What about our two countries? What of the war in Vietnam? Of course she is right, but now is not the time. In the end, she shrugs. Bourgeois capitalist. If I have no time for her Russia, she has no time for my flickering realities.

To me she seems entrapped in a 19th century gloom. San Francisco has become the city of the flowering mándala. Relax, I think. Turn off your mind and float downstream, I intimate. It is Russia versus America on a new, unexplored level. And so, internally, I react as the Beatles have taught me. "Though she feels she's in a play, she is anyway."

The next morning we leave Copenhagen, speed through Germany, and then head for Amsterdam, driving along a flat dike, underneath a looming gray sky, with the slate-gray Atlantic on our right. Linda and I pass almost no one else on the road. The presence of England, just across the North Sea, is suddenly made real by a crackling of the radio and the voice of a BBC announcer. We can barely hear him as the signal drifts in and out. But how he speaks! And no commercials!

Linda and I take a ferry that docks in Southampton. We drive off in the dark, headed toward London, our copy of Europe on $5 a Day close at hand. We find a room in a boarding house on Old Brompton Road, a tree-lined street of three and four-story homes converted into flats. We are but a few blocks from the South Kensington tube station, which I know from the Donovan song. (Almost all my London geography comes from songs. "St. John's Wood" The Stones. "Sunny South Kensington" Donovan) A peppery-haired, stout lady of some European extraction lets us in and takes our money. For me, there is no question what I intend on our first night: we're going to go out and Find the Music.. Since we know nearly nothing, we decide to go to Piccadilly Circus. The name, at least, is familiar, and a it sounds like fun. So, we read the instructions in our tour book and take the tube to Piccadilly, fully expecting to surface into the English Haight Ashbury. When we emerge, it is raining. Despite all the lights, the buildings seem drab, fronted with wet, gray stone. Tourist shops sell buttons, teacups, postcards. On the back streets are strip joints and Wimpy Bars, a vestige of the American servicemen's culture from World War II, which sell "hamburgers." We hear no music. We see no hippies. If it feels like anything, it feels like a scene in every British war movie I've ever seen.

Linda and I go into a Wimpy Bar and order a burger: what arrives is a gray patty slightly larger than a silver dollar centered on a cold bun with a limp pickle. All evening the rain keeps falling. Where could the music be?

London Rooftops, 1967

The next day the first thing we do is purchase a stereo and a copy of Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced? To be "experienced" (I am certain what this means) is to understand purple haze, amplified feedback, and the extension of time. From the album cover Hendrix, flanked by two white British musicians, peers back at us wearing a cape, like a magician.

'"Scuse me while I kiss the sky," he sings.

Are You Experienced. Photograph by Bruce Fleming.

Soon, Linda and I find our way to Carnaby Street, emerging from the underground near Oxford Circus, itself a thoroughfare of English department stores. Carnaby Street reveals itself to be one clothing boutique jammed next to another. Music blares over hidden speakers. The clothes are colorful, but cheaply made. The walls are combinations of op art and psychedelic posters. The young Englishmen selling the clothes are abrupt and condescending. There is absolutely no revolutionary fervor. Linda and I leave, slightly puzzled.

As I looked for the promises I expected to find (the music, the excitement of the new age) there were endless disappointments. It was in the traditional that London was such an exciting town to me. The numerous vast parks with great avenues of trees shady in the summer: Hyde Park, Regent's Park, Green Park, Battersea Park, and Hampstead Heath.

There was the grandness of royalty and the Empire: the memorial to Prince Albert (from Victoria) across from the Royal Albert Hall, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the Tower Bridge, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Buckingham Palace, and St. James's Park.

Then there were the many mews, where structures that were originally stables had been converted into small houses. The pubs with varied English beers, with small-paned windows and inviting yellow lights inside. Even the rows of classic English housing, as in Bill Brandt's photographs, or Coronation Street were wonderful to me.

"Drugstore" is now a "Chemist"

I was completely captivated by the endless discoveries of a new place. No free matches (what!?). Gas was called petrol. Aluminum was pronounced al-yoo-min-ee-um. Apartments were flats. If I wanted warm water or heat in my little room, I had to put a shilling in the meter. The policemen didn't carry guns. They were called "bobbies" and were said to be friendly. It seemed so civilized.

The Royal Horse Guard in Hyde Park 1967

I was surrounded on all sides by the English, who spoke so wonderfully, saying "sorry" constantly when they meant "excuse me," saying "in fact" or "in actual fact" in every fourth sentence. The letter "z" was an entirely different animal, pronounced "zed."

"How terribly interesting," they would say, meaning something was utterly unremarkable. They were unfailingly polite. I decided to stay.

For a short time, Linda and I rented the basement room of a house in St. John's Wood. Soon after, we moved to a flat in South Kensington. We went to an antique market, where I bought (for two pounds) a four-by-six-foot black and white photo of a decaying mummy's face, which we called "Charlie." Charlie sat on our wall staring down at us. "No flies on Charlie," we would say. Since Charlie had cornered the market on miserable, all was gay by comparison.
I met a beautiful young English girl named Fiona. Continuing my search, I asked her where the music was. She took me to a private club around the corner from my flat. The club was in a basement. Steps led past a coat room, and then to a small table where we were greeted by the maitre d'. The room was low-ceilinged, with pink lighting, and jammed with young Englishmen wearing coats and ties and talking at the top of their voices. In one corner was the bar. When the music started people yelled louder. As the evening wore on, everybody became progressively drunker. In the wee hours, people poured out into the streets. Everybody was drunk and laughing, and seemed to be having a good time. They were young people but this felt like my parents' parties. Look where I might, I still couldn't find the music.

A walk by the Serpentine in London's Hyde Park, 1967

"You ask him," I said to my sister.

"Why me?" she responded, a good question.

We were standing at the door of a trendy clothes shop on the Earls Court Road, a slightly run-down section of West London with, at this time, a highly transient population. Rock and roll came blaring out of the loudspeakers. It transpired that trendy clothes shops were one of the few places where you stood a good chance of hearing The Rolling Stones, Hendrix or Cream. "Go on," I said. We were watching a red-haired salesman, about our age. He was wearing a jacket covered in a floral design and bright-red bell-bottomed trousers. Linda walked over and spoke quietly to him. I stayed at the front of the shop. Linda came back. "He says he can get us some hash. But we've gotta come back later." He said his name was Robin. He came from somewhere in the middle of England. "How did you know to ask me?" he asks. We were surprised. Didn't everybody smoke? Robin told us of London clubs, of the Marquee in Soho, the Roundhouse in North London. He seemed intrigued by this brother-and-sister act that just appeared in a clothes shop in London looking for hash. I asked him if he knew of any new groups I should hear. He answered "The Who."

"Listen to the drummer," he told us.

My sister, Linda, in Battersea, 1967.

The next day I bought the album. The drummer seemed to hit a hundred and thirty-two beats to the bar. The lead singer sang, "I can see for miles and miles" over the high, driving notes of the lead guitar. "Miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles." Right!

One evening Linda and I crossed the black Thames to the Royal Festival Hall, a modern cultural complex. I was excited because we had tickets to see Jimi Hendrix, (once I learned later, a back up musician for Little Richard) who crossed the water to London and re-emerged, psychedelically re-invented, at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Royal Festival Hall turned out to be an impossibly strange place for acid rock: brightly lit, the stage hidden by a turquoise curtain. The seating was tiered, and there was no place to dance, altogether a venue more suitable to a performance of Haydn's Symphony no. 6 in D major. So it was strange to witness Jim Hendrix here, thrusting his guitar forward with his pelvis, licking it with his tongue. Hendrix and his trio seemed impossibly small on the stage as they struggled to triumph over the fixed seating and the bright lights.

Filing out into the London night, the black Thames drifting quietly in front of us, Linda and I talked about how great despite it all Hendrix was. In America, where everything musical was seething like water boiling in a cauldron, Hendrix's show would have had people rolling in the aisles, but here in Britain his music seemed a mere speck in the eye of the Empire.

Slowly, a strange thing began to dawn on me: you never heard The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, or any of what would be the royalty of England's rock on their own broadcast radio. (Unbeknownst to me this had not always been the case. Pirate Radio had once filled that void, but had been shut down in 1966. The story of the battle to close Pirate Radio was made into a movie in 2010). Instead, there was endless insipid and saccharine "pop" music played by a series of insipid deejays, as if England was exactly in the same place as America was after Elvis went into the Army: stuck with the ersatz Fabian.

Tower Bridge6

To me England was the mecca of the new music, yet it appeared that England had no time for its own groups. How could this be? Where was the music?

The summer passed. The great elms of London's Hyde Park provided shelter for picnics. Late in the summer Linda and I are joined by my friend Gerard from the United States, and we plan a trip to France and then Italy, a small stash in our pockets. En route we pass through Switzerland, scanning the radio dial for music, so convinced we are that our rock and roll must be somewhere on the airwaves. (It is not. )We take a funicular to the top of a mountain peak and, climbing down, return to the hotel and crawl between huge duvet covers against the chill. Only years later do I learn that the Switzerland we pass through has yet to grant women the right to vote, and I shudder to think what would have happened had we been caught with our small block of hashish.

Switzerland. Photo by Gerard.

With the Fall, Linda decides to return to the U.S. She does not seem to share my penchant for the gray brick, the black and white romanticism of A Taste of Honey. Besides, she has never personally had to endure the terrors of the draft, the feeling that at any moment she might be plucked out of her life. She didn't leave America as if her brain had been on fire, the Southern drawl of Lyndon Johnson fanning those flames. The memory of it all was still too fresh for me. I felt there was no going back.

With Linda gone, it seemed strangely quiet. It was January of 1968. I rented what the English called a "bed sit," a single room on the ground floor with a tiny refrigerator and a hot plate. The window looked out over a small square. Each day I attempted to write.

I took day-long walks through London, from Kensington past the Tower Bridge and back again; to Regents Park and back again; across Hyde Park, 630 acres in the middle of London, where avenues of trees revealed perfect eighteenth-century vistas. I walked through Hampstead Heath, 790 acres in the north of London where Pickwick (of The Pickwick Papers) repaired for his day in the country. (Part of me was trying to find the park from Antonioni's Blow-Up. I never did find it.) I visited the Houses of Parliament, sat in the park next to them, and imagined the hundreds of years of English history. I had a great appetite for London and its history and felt like I couldn't get enough.

But after some time a nascent sense of guilt drove me to feel that I should be doing something more useful than simply participating in this great adventure. Because I was in England on a tourist visa, all work was prohibited. I was not even allowed to volunteer, although the absurdity of that restriction seemed like something that should be ignored, and this is what I finally decided to do. I am told of a hospital in St. John's Wood that cared for autistic children, and I arranged an interview.

Molly, head of Marlborough Day

There I met Molly, the head of the small clinic. She was surrounded by children. They stood with their backs turned to her and refused to make eye contact. But if Molly moved to another side of the room, they soon made their way over to her and slowly gathered around again.

Molly explained to me that she believed autism was caused by a traumatic separation from the mother during the symbiotic period of the child's life, when he or she has no distinct sense of himself separate from the mother. When the mother abruptly disappears, the child retreats at the intense emotional shock. Molly told me that the case history of each child in her program showed such a separation. Some of the symptoms are a withdrawal from all normal human intercourse, manifested by eyes out of focus, refusing contact, spasmodic movement, hands held in front of the face and wiggled there for hours on end, inability to speak, and acute anxiety.

Molly attempted to have each child, regardless of age (in the school the children ranged from three to eleven) regress back to the nursing stage, and then be re-reared. As a result, nearly grown children can be seen sitting in the laps of their surrogate mothers, as they attempt to get the children to cuddle, or to accept a bottle.

Some of the older children have progressed beyond this. At this stage Molly believes that a man can be as useful as a woman. I am introduced to a child called Christopher who will, sometimes, speak, though he doesn't speak to me for days, preferring to turn his back to me and wave his hand in front of his face for hours, lost in his fingertips, occasionally blubbering. But Christopher and I have a little secret, though he of course can't openly share it. Our secret is that I'm not always so sure that this reality business is all that hot either. I make no attempt to "fix" Christopher; we just hang out together.

Marlborough Day

Christopher and I enjoy each other. He sometimes smiles when he sees me in the morning, although he still refuses to recognize people if he's in a bad mood. Occasionally he lets fly a string of obscenities in a surprisingly deep voice, which always causes the "aunties" in the room to suck in their breath, much to Christopher's barely concealed delight. Each day I hope that Christopher may come a little bit further, accomplish a little more, so that, maybe, he won't have to be institutionalized all his life.

In a favorite memory one day I tell Christopher that he can do his lesson now and play later or play now and do his lesson later. A look of despair crosses his face. He stamps his foot. He glares. I repeat his choice: now or later? Christopher spins and hurls himself against a wall, head buried in his hands. "Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea," he moans.

Christopher

The mornings in the hospital spill into the afternoons, and the weeks in London turn into months. Occasionally friends from the United States come into town, telling horror stories of the war, or adventure stories of drugs. Many are on their way to Morocco or Katmandu, having believed their visions, following the drug trails, pursuing gurus. A friend arrives on her way to India. In Turkey she will be arrested for attempting to mail hashish back to the United States. She will spend a year in a Turkish prison awaiting trial before she finally becomes so desperate she escapes, staying underground until she can get back to central California.

The Beatles by now have made known their alliance with the Maharishi. Almost simultaneously they announce they are doing another movie: Magical Mystery Tour. On my way to pick up my car from service I am sitting on the top of a double-decker bus going around Trafalgar Square when I look down and see John Lennon's Rolls Royce. I know it is his because Lennon had his all-white Rolls entirely hand-painted in intricate, swirling patterns. As the car moves in and out of traffic, it is something to behold the ultimate car of richness achieved, the car of bank presidents and prime ministers, painted like a flagship for all the freaks. Go, John, I think. Nothing can stop us now.

John Lennon's Rolls Royce

On the night of the broadcast of Magical Mystery Tour I am visiting the estate of a wealthy English family. The broadcast is due to begin in five minutes, and the parents have us all still seated at the table with no apparent intention of finishing their port, or brandy, or whatever it is they're drinking. Once again I am unsettled by how little regard the English have for The Beatles. If need be, I intend to get up and leave the table. Whatever Magical Mystery Tour will be, it is certainly the latest Word from The Beatles, and as such I have no intention of missing it.

Finally, though, the father of the household gives us permission to leave, and I rush to the television and sit transfixed as Magical Mystery Tour unreels before me. It is a sinking feeling of almost disorientation that I experience as I sense that really it is no good, although I couldn't have told you why. The Beatles had long ago lost the privilege of fallibility

Back in London, Gerard--who had gone on to Spain after our Switzerland trip--returns. His physical for induction into the Army is imminent. His eyes begin to take on a hollow, distant look. Back in the United States the violence and divisiveness of the Vietnam war pervade everything. As Gerard peers into his future, all his choices seem to end in violence. Since he must confront this, he intends to take his physical in London rather than in New York or Berkeley where the draft boards are now presented on a daily basis with elaborate tactics of draft evasion. Perhaps here in London, the draft board will be more easily dissuaded from inducting him.

Beginning days before the physical, Gerard starts to stay up all night, night after night. The circles under his eyes grow darker. On the morning of his physical he shows me how, the night before, he has covered his body with scratch marks. His stare has a dangerous intensity.

But Gerard had guessed right. The psychologist from Kansas at the U.S. Air Force Base near London is sufficiently put off that he grants Gerard a temporary deferment that ends up lasting through the war, and until conscription is finally abandoned.

Recovery is not an instant process, however, and Gerard returned to America not knowing his future, hallucinating for weeks after the interview, the pressure riding with him, another young man stretched like a drum. But before Gerard left he introduced me to a friend of his, Jonathan Cott.

Jon was in London on a Guggenheim fellowship and -- it turned out -- was also the London correspondent for a new magazine, Rolling Stone. When Jon was first introduced to me, I was told that he once interviewed Bob Dylan at a press conference in Berkeley, which, as far as I am concerned, made Jon famous.

Jonathan Cott in London 1967

But, as it turns out, Jon was a kind, self-effacing man in his mid-twenties whose mother will, within a month, give him a haircut while he sleeps. "How do you deal with that, Ethan?" he asked me. Jon was always in a state of wonderment about the business of this world. A New Yorker to his marrow, Jon lived briefly in the San Francisco Bay Area before coming to London in the "swinging sixties" as they're being called. He was always saying, "Did you see that? That's incredible," and always about some woman he had dated, "She's beautiful, but she's crazy." I showed Jonathan some of my writing, about which he was kind, and which was a great compliment to me. I have completely forgotten how the subject of photography came up, but I also showed Jon some of the photos I had taken when in college. They are mostly of children but, among them, was a stray picture of Blue Cheer, my brother's group. Before Jonathan leaves he tells me he is due to photograph Mick Jagger in a couple of weeks and would I be interested in taking the photos? You could have knocked me over with a feather. "Sure," I say.

Blue Cheer on Ocean Beach, San Francisco

6 Which like every myopic American (well maybe not) I thought was London Bridge.
11. Nothing You Can Do That Can't Be Done

Mick Jagger, 1968

LONDON, 1968

The Rolling Stones' office, at 46a Maddox Street in the fashionable Mayfair section office of London, occupied the attic floor of an old building and was one nook opening into another cranny. To get to it you took a coffin-sized elevator capable of holding maybe two and a half people, if those two and a half were thin and friendly. Presiding over the Stones' office, from a high-backed Victorian wheelchair, was Jo Bergman, a diminutive American woman with a halo of black curly hair, whose feet, from her position on top of her chair, did not quite reach the floor. Jo sat surrounded by telephones, with a clipboard and note pad on her lap on which were written lengthy lists in minute handwriting, each list topped with a single, underlined name: Mick, Keith, Brian.

As Jon and I walked in, Jo was on the phone. She waved for us to sit on the couch. In a moment, she hung up, and issued forth a small shriek, "I can't stand it anymore. I think I'm finally going to go crazy." Then she smiles. Jon introduces us.

Jo surrounded by: Alan Dunn, Shirley Sone, Fiona Fraser, and unknown woman.

Jon and Jo discuss plans for the interview, which is going to be conducted some days hence. Jon and an American woman, Sue Cox, who works with Jo, will do the interviewing. Jo listens attentively, swaps stories with Jon, asks a few questions about me. She could not be nicer.

As I come to learn over time, Jo runs the Stones' office as calmly as circumstances will allow, trying to maintain a sense of order, efficiency, and humanity in a situation fraught with people intent upon getting to Mick or Keith or Brian, trying to sort out the professionals from the fans and at the same time satisfy the needs of the group, arrange a flight for Mick, a car for Keith, answer the cable from Brian, who is in Marrakech saying that he is sending something back with William Burroughs's nephew and could Jo make sure that it is looked after?

The Stones have just finished a new record, Beggar's Banquet. Their prior release, Their Satanic Majesties Request, came at the peak of acid mania: on the cover the Stones are pictured wearing capes and surrounded by castles and crescent moons on a cover reproduced as if in three dimensions. "Far out," we said.

I am not yet familiar with the process of making and marketing a record: write it, record it, mix it, arrange a photo session, design album cover artwork, conduct print, radio & television interviews, go on tour. If you want to talk to one of "the boys," best to wait until their record is coming out. Beggar's Banquet is about to be released. Mick is talking.

Mick Jagger from the first session 1968

So when the time for the interview rolls around I assemble my cameras, test the shutters, clean the lenses, and go with Jon to the Stones' office. Mick is not yet there. I have no real idea what to expect. I know The Rolling Stones only through their music, the pictures of them from their album covers, and their reputation in the press. All of which is a bit daunting. There is a famous story of the drunken lot of them driving into a gas station and, refused use of the restroom, pissing all over the pumps. The Rolling Stones were dirty and nasty, and that was the story. Today their behavior would hardly raise an eyebrow. But then it got a lot of attention, and so when Mick enters the room I am expecting someone at the very least surly and intimidating.

Instead, my first impression is one of the general neatness of the man, how his trousers are well tailored and crisply pressed. He sports a pinky ring on his finger.

Mick says hello to Jo. Then we adjourn to another room and Jon and Sue start the interview. Jon's questions presume what he (and I and a lot of other Americans) seem to feel: the Stones are not just musicians but important writers as well.

Jon: "For some reason people don't think about the fact that you and Keith are great writers and your lyrics, like 'Get Off of My Cloud,' which are really good..." Mick: "Oh! They're not, they're crap." Jon pursued, "Satanic Majesties is probably the most controversial LP you've had. It seems to be a personal statement rather than a collection of songs. What were your original ideas about putting it together?"

Mick demurred, "None at all. Absolutely no idea behind it....it took a whole year to make, not because it's so fantastically complex, but because we were so strung out."

At every question Mick deflected any inflation of the music beyond its simplest level.

Mick told us, "Pop concerts are just gatherings of people who want to have a good time, and I don't really think they have a higher meaning. The Rolling Stones on stage just isn't the Boston Pops. It's a load of noise. On record it can be quite musical, but when you get to the stage it's no virtuoso performance. It's a rock and roll act, a very good one, and nothing more."

In the face of the then highly accepted attention to pop lyrics, which were printed and included with every record, Mick said, "I don't think lyrics are that important This is serious. I read an article by Fats Domino. He said, 'You should never sing the lyrics out very clearly.'"

I moved around the small room as quietly as possible, taking photographs. The window was behind me, covered with a thin layer of lace. There was not a great deal of light, but with the film pushed to 1000 ASA, it was adequate. I shot three rolls of film, thirty-six pictures to the roll.

After the interview was over, I rushed the film to the lab, anxious. I asked for enlarged contacts. All of this was tremendously exciting to me, reminding me of Blow-Up. This fluke of a photo session suddenly had revitalized my fantasy of swinging London, with me an active participant. Imagine, Ethan photographing Mick Jagger. Really. Have mercy. The next day at noon the film is ready, and I'm at the lab early.

"How are they," I ask?"

Mick Jagger

"Good," says Nick Blatchley, a friend who works at the lab and who knows how excited I am.

I took the contacts and went to a nearby restaurant on Kensington High Street. I sat down and studied them. Again the rush of excitement swept over me, but as I studied the photos, I soon convinced myself that they were no good at all. As I'm looking, the waitress has been peering over my shoulder. "Did you take those?" she asks. "Yes," I say. "I don't think they're so good."

Partial contact sheet from the session

"Mind if I have a look?" she asks. I hand them to her.

"You're right," she says as she hands them back.

So now, in despair, I go back to the lab. "Nick," I say, "they're no good,"

"What are you talking about?" he asks. "They're fine. Don't worry, they'll print up terrifically. Come here."

Nick takes me into the darkroom. There in the dull, red right, under the guidance of Robert Horner, the chief printer, one of the photographs is enlarged and exposed. As it becomes visible in the developer, the picture is sharp and crisp. The lace over the window has created a wonderful, soft light. Several of them are strong portraits. By the end of the printing session I feel that maybe they're pretty good after all.

When I take the photos to the Stones' office, Jo, Jon, and Sue pore over them with delight. Sue says, "We had David Bailey in here the other day, and these are better than his."

Heady stuff.

Mick Jagger
12. John Lennon Calling

John Lennon, Montague Square, London 1968

MONTAGUE SQUARE, LONDON, 1968

I sent the contact sheets and one sample print to Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. He put the sample print on the cover. (I guess no one mentioned deadlines).

About two weeks later Jonathan called me again. This time he is going to interview John Lennon, and I seem to be his guy. We met in the outdoor garden of the pub next to my house. I ordered a Scotch and water to calm my nerves. It seemed to me one thing to take pictures of Mick Jagger but something of an entirely different magnitude to photograph John Lennon, and I was anxious. Jon and I rendezvoused with Robert Frazer, owner of the Robert Frazer Gallery, which hosted John Lennon's first art show, "You Are Here." Frazer took us to Ringo Starr's flat, where Lennon was staying. We passed through iron gates. Frazer rang the bell.

John Lennon answered the door. He was wearing jeans, a black shirt, and tennis shoes. He turned and led us into a cluttered living room, piles of records scattered about the floor. John knelt down and put on the first track of The Beatles' new record. The sound of screeching jet engines played over the speakers, followed by a squeak and then the pounding of McCartney's bass. And then the vocals: "Flew in from Miami Beach, B.U.A.C. [sic] Didn't get to bed last night." John said, "Really, I just like rock 'n' roll."

Though I'm amazed at how friendly and enthusiastic Lennon is ("There's nothing more fun than talking about your own songs. It's your bit, really"), he still seemed entirely too famous to be real.

John Lennon surrounded by 45s.

Very little daylight filters into the basement flat. What light there was from one or two standing lamps in the room, but it was really quite dark. Since nobody has ever bothered to ask me the extent of my experience, nobody knows that I have never had any reason to actually light anything. In the gloom of the London basement, the needle on my light meter barely registered.

If, at this time, I can be said to have any photographic approach at all, it was to be as invisible and quiet as possible, and to photograph as candidly as I could. The very thought of being in the presence of John Lennon was daunting enough. It would have been inconceivable to me to have arrived with a lot of lights and triggered them throughout the interview, though the truth was at the time I didn't know how to use them anyway. Still, there were certain adjustments that could be made in a low-light situation, and I did what I could.

Meanwhile, John was talking, answering Cott's questions. John appeared intrigued by this new American magazine Rolling Stone. After the release of Sgt. Pepper, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and rock music in general were, in America, being taken very seriously indeed. Unbelievably (to me) in Britain the music press still seemed stuck in the 1950s; its editorial inquiries still ran to questions like "What's your favorite color, Teen Throb?"

Lennon's wit was never far away. Cott asked, "Is there anybody you've gotten something from musically?"

John answered, "I'm still trying to reproduce 'Some Other Guy' sometimes, or 'Be-Bop-A-Lula.' We're influenced by whatever's going... Little Richard, Presley."

Cott: "Anyone contemporary?"

Lennon: "Are they dead?"

John Lennon listening to the White Album,1968

After about an hour, John announced that he had to leave for EMI, the studio where the Beatles recorded. As we crawled through the afternoon London traffic, I sat in the back of the station wagon with John. He reclined, his knees resting against the back of the front seat. I looked out at the other drivers, wondering if anybody will turn and look, notice, have some reaction. But, in sleepy London town, no one did.

EMI's main studio was a huge, high-ceilinged box. John said good-bye and disappeared. My sense of excitement was still running at flood level: inside that studio are The Beatles! I peeked in, glimpsing George and Paul. In the booth upstairs I could make out George Martin, their producer. I took a furtive snap of Ringo, a long distance away, almost hidden by a sound baffle.

Meanwhile, Jon Cott was talking to a Japanese woman I didn't recognize. They are seated in a canteen area with beige walls, beige tables, cups of tea, and bright overhead lighting. The woman is animated talking, explaining. At the time, I had no idea who she was. Nonetheless, I took pictures. Yoko Ono's relationship with John Lennon was not yet public in Britain, and the massive wave of resentment had yet to break. When Jon was finished speaking with Yoko, we left.

Yoko Ono Abbey Road 1968

When the film and contact sheets came back from the lab the following day, the lack of light in the basement apartment has had consequences. John's black shirt was a hole in the negative; there was no depth of focus, and little detail. I have the lab pull a couple of prints. Before long, I have convinced myself they are no good.

I don't know how long I sit there stunned, but like a teenager who has just wrecked the car, I realize it doesn't matter: sooner or later the truth will be known. With great trepidation, I call John Lennon and tell him. His reaction is immediate and, to me, overwhelmingly kind. He says to come by tomorrow. We'll shoot again.

I rush out and buy lights, flood lamps like you would see in an amateur photo magazine. I asked the salesman behind the counter how to use them. The next day I arrived at Montague Square. I've brought with me the contact sheets, and enlargements of my photos of Yoko. In the canteen there was plenty of light, and Yoko looked good. She gestured, her eyes wide. She appears thoughtful.

John loves the photographs and pins them immediately onto a wall that is already covered with Beatles memorabilia: a circular Sgt. Pepper logo, The Beatles on the cover of Time magazine. With good pictures of his girlfriend, it seemed that John couldn't care less about the ones of himself.

The Sgt. Pepper Sign. Montague Square, 1968.

I placed the lights and proceeded to shoot. This time, there was no interviewer -- just John and me. He held a quartz and crystal rock about the size of a baseball, with an eyeball set in it, a gift from Salvador Dali. I moved around him, shooting, mostly too shy to speak. I have no memory of what I said.

This is mind-blowing stuff for a boy from California who, three months earlier, was sitting in his one-room apartment trying to write, while working four days a week in a children's hospital. Heady stuff for a boy who, a few years before that, could have been seen in his madras jacket and button-down shirt singing the Kingston Trio's version of "This Land Is Your Land" in St. Mark's Square in Venice. And before the Kingston Trio, I could be caught singing "Heartbreak Hotel" along with Elvis Presley, just like a lot of other kids, probably just like John Lennon.

John Lennon with Dali's "Eye," 1968

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, "Kiss"
13. Christopher

Christopher, 1968

ST. JOHN'S WOOD, LONDON

Four days a week, I still went to the hospital in St. John's Wood and visited Christopher. But Christopher was growing older, and somewhere in the long, gray hallways of medical bureaucracy it was written that when a child turned eleven years old (Christopher was ten and a half ), he can no longer go to the Marlborough Day Hospital. Soon Christopher will have to find some other institution where he will be permanently boarded. And so, in the chill of the London winter, Christopher and I went institution-shopping.

The first place we visited was a squat gray stone house surrounded by dark trees that blocked what little light there was on an overcast day. The stooped woman who met us at the door squinted at us, and peered at Christopher (it seemed to me) like a hawk might look at a mouse, the little boy who meant money from the State. The house had stone floors, bare walls. There was no heat. The living room was empty except for one scarred wooden table that sat askew in the middle of the room, chairs scattered around it. We walked down dark hallways that led to bedrooms filled with rows of cots, gray blankets thrown over them. Every so often a child would appear and look at us, startled. Christopher was agog, staring at everything. Behind the house there was a weed-infested field. "Want to take a walk?" I asked.

Christopher walked ahead of me. Suddenly he screamed, a deep-throated yell of pain. I looked up. Christopher has discovered nettles.

I said, "It's all right, Christopher, it's all right."

But Christopher's whole life has been the stone city streets. Suddenly he was surrounded by hostile, green, "'orrible" stuff. Like some Disney forest from Fantasia the very ground on which he walked seemed alive and malevolent. Christopher held on to me, shaking. He wanted to go back to the house. With dreadful intensity, he took big, cautious steps, his knees coming to his chest, his feet placed down gingerly as if the field were mined.

To Molly I said the place is impossible, so soon Christopher and I are off to visit another prospect: a modern brick monolith. But it is much better. The rooms are warm; the beds have sheets. The vast majority of residents have Down's syndrome. As they approach us with swollen heads and what seem to me uncomprehending eyes, Christopher shrieks. But they are only curious. And they are friendly. It is Christopher's persona to retreat to never-never land when scared, but there is some rapport between them. Christopher seems to sense they mean him no harm. It is one of my last memories of Christopher, seeing him surrounded by these gentle inmates: torn between running away and enjoying the attention. I tell Molly of the day, and that I hope Christopher can go there. Molly says soon he will have to go somewhere. I tell Christopher good-bye and he acts as if he understands. Got along without me before he met me.
14. Eye of the Beholder

Jim Morrison

ENGLAND, 1968

Over time Jo, Sue, Jonathan, and I became friends. We had, after all, quite a lot in common. We were all Americans abroad, and, like all young Americans in one way or another, we were relating to, affected by, circling around The Music. Jo had been doing this for years: she worked for the early NEMS Enterprises, Brian Epstein, and The Beatles. She lived and worked in Paris in public relations with Marianne Faithfull as her client. (Marianne Faithfull was at the time one of the best-known English singers. Also, as Mick Jagger's girlfriend, she was one of the famous faces of swinging London. She would later attempt suicide while Jagger was filming Ned Kelly, and would consume hard drugs with a ferocity that became legendary.) In 1967 Jo went to Los Angeles (where she met Sue) and worked in radio until she got a call from Mick asking her to return to London to run the Rolling Stones' office.

Since everyone seemed to like the photos I took that day, when Stanley Booth (an American writer from Memphis, Tennessee) arrived to do a piece on the Rolling Stones for Eye magazine, Jo suggested that I take the pictures. Stanley brought to London a dry, Southern humor. "I want to find out what's so bad about these boys. They say they're bad, but have they ever been to Louisiana?"

Stanley and I are soon on our way to meet bad Bill Wyman, bass player for the Stones.

Much to my surprise, Bill lives in what can only be described as a comfortable suburban home with his companion Astrid Lundstrom, a Swedish woman with high cheekbones and long dark-blond hair. Bill speaks to us quietly, answering Stanley's questions. He seems as bemused by us as we are by him. The man who will stand on stage as if rooted there, who has stared out impassively as audiences throw themselves at the stage, smiles easily at our jokes. He discusses with me his interest in photography. He brings out his cameras and lenses to show me. By the end of the day, Stephen, Bill's son from a previous marriage, is snapping pictures of the three of us together.

Bill Wyman at home, 1968

Nowhere in this home is there even the remotest indication of the madness I know to be churning in the minds of hundreds of thousands of young Americans as they drift to the music of "2000 Light Years from Home."

In 1968 Charlie Watts, drummer for The Rolling Stones, lived on a farm in Sussex, surrounded by antiques: player-pianos, early gramophones, and four-poster wooden beds. Charlie lived with his wife, Shirley, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Arts, and their daughter, Serafina. A man of few words, one of Charlie's defining qualities seems to be wondering what all the fuss is about. This can be fairly disconcerting if you felt, as I did, that The Rolling Stones were important to our time.

"You guys are the greatest."

"No. We're not."

Outside Charlie's door are the gently sloping hills of Sussex. Charlie Watts leads a measured, sensible life in the quiet countryside of England, surrounded by horses, goats, and things of beauty--leaving him exposed to mockery by Jagger, who delights in accusing him of being a member of "The Village Green Preservation Society."

Charlie Watts with his daughter Serafina in Sussex, England, 1968

Keith Richards arranges to meet us at the Stones' office. In legend, Keith has been painted with the same brush as Mick: a rock and roll outlaw. And, indeed, when he walks in, Keith looks a lot more likely to be the stuff of his legend than Jagger. He walks with a swagger, subdued but unmistakable. He smokes steadily, the smoke curling around his head. He wears a ragged black cape, leather trousers, and a T-shirt. His hand does not quite close on mine when we're introduced, though he looks at me, speaking quietly, and says, "How ya doing, man?" Once again, Stanley asks his questions, and later Keith and I climb onto the roof, London spread below us, and I take photos.

I am much too timid to speak beyond the dullest pleasantries. As this leaves nothing for Keith to respond to, he remains silent. The silence in turn intimidates me. Later, we move to a flat near the office. Stanley asks questions, and Keith responds. It is clear that the one thing liable to spark a response from Keith Richards is some question related to American blues. Stanley, coming as he does from the American South, relating stories of swamps, Negroes, booze and bottlenecks, seems to do just fine.

Keith Richards, "Smokin'"1968

Then one day I found myself driving through the green hills of Sussex to visit Brian Jones in his new house. With some fanfare, Brian had just bought the country home of A. A. Milne, the creator of Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh. To me it seemed somehow perfect that this blond-haired rock and roller should have inherited the house of Pooh. For Brian, with his blond pageboy haircut, looked like a fully-grown Christopher Robin. I followed the directions down classic, winding country lanes until a sharp turn on my left led me through some trees. The house sat in a small depression, asleep in the morning sun, surrounded by grass, and then surrounded by English gardens, a picture from a hundred years ago. The house was low-ceilinged, and I stooped to get in. Inside Brian was alone. He greeted me squinting, almost as if still asleep. We talked quietly of his house, his new pride.

Up close, apart from his golden Christopher Robin hairdo, Brian looked surprisingly old. He had bags below his eyes, and his face was swollen. He said he'd been up all night, some party. Brian talked excitedly, though in a quiet voice. He started to tell me one story, about his house, but then switched to another, a little spacey. There was a charm to it, like you might have expected from Kerouac's Dean Moriarty.

Brian Jones with gun

Brian Jones kicking statue of Christopher Robin, 1968

I didn't know yet how to spot and decipher certain tell-tale signs, and so couldn't read Brian's face as a road map of various self indulgences. With Brian more than with any other rock and roller it was as if he had chosen to wear the mantle of the Crown Prince of Stonedness. And to do this he would remain constantly high. Few would have disputed his claim, even in California, where people were now setting daily records of higher and higher, just trying to catch up. Indisputably, Brian had been there first: it was his face, after all, squinting back at you from the cover of Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass); his face curled into a wicked leer peering out of the mist on the cover of Between the Buttons, just announcing by that leer that he was so high it was a miracle the camera could catch him. It was Brian who traveled to the Monterey Pop Festival, though he did not perform there, as if he were the ambassador from the English court. Pictures from the festival show him wearing a cape, its edges lined with fur, a collection of pendants and Moroccan jewelry around his neck. Here, too, he has that look on his face, smiling, as if from a long way away, the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland.

Back at Brian's house in England it's time to take pictures. At first I take pictures in the house, Brian sitting still. But he seems slightly uncomfortable just sitting there and says he'll be right back. He leaves and returns wearing a shirt made out of an American flag. Immediately he begins to act for the camera, sneering at it. He walks outside to the statue of Christopher Robin in the middle of the garden; he grabs it by the neck, strangling it. He gets a gun -- not a Clint Eastwood Dirty-Harry magnum shit-kicker -- but a pellet gun used to kill rodents. The gun he lifts in the air, butt-end aimed at the camera, threatening. Then he lies down and takes aim directly at me.

Strangling Christopher Robin

Though I was a bit confused about how the fellow who had just been speaking in such hushed and reverent tones about his house, and Milne, and Winnie the Pooh could now be seen attacking everything around him, I still thought this was great. Here was a Rolling Stone doing Rolling Stone things! The images were stoned and rebellious with a slight edge of violence. "This is the stuff!" I thought. Finally, I was taking pictures that might place me in good standing in the gallery of Rolling Stones images that came before me.

And so I took pictures for an hour or so, pleased as can be. At the end I said good-bye and told Brian how happy I was. When I got back to London I phoned Jo and told her.

"He's doing what!?" she asked. "Oh, God. Hold on a minute." And Jo phoned the Stones' press manager. Les Perrin. He was a traditional Fleet Street publicist, respected by all. His job for The Rolling Stones, in contrast to what might normally be expected by his clients, was more often than not to try and keep the Stones' names out of the papers after one scrape or another.

"You can't use those, Ethan," Jo tells me. "We have enough trouble trying to get that boy a visa."

So, all of a sudden, I was a "rock photographer." It didn't take long, after the first session with Mick for me to have enlargements made of that session, and to take those around to other offices in London, and to continue to freelance for Rolling Stone. At first, I simply attempted to find out where something was happening, and then I would show up, camera in hand. I went to receptions. I went to concerts. I became a sort of rock and roll paparazzo, although without the true grit of a real paparazzo (who wouldn't hesitate to explode a flash in the face of the most reclusive star at the precise moment that they were doing the one thing they wished the rest of the world didn't know). By my view, we were all supposed to be on the same side here. I was much too discreet, too polite to cross the line -- a product of my upbringing where children were to be seen and not heard, but taken a step further, sometimes not even seen. I stood on the edges.

Steve Winwood

Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane Visits London

Cream at the Albert Hall

Janis Joplin at the Royal Albert Hall

Granada Television arranged to film Jim Morrison of the Doors at the Roundhouse in North London. Jo Durden-Smith was the producer of World in Action, a television series that frequently dealt with politics in popular culture. Oxford educated, with degrees in the classics (Latin, Greek, and Ancient History), Jo was articulate and politically astute, with a belief, shared by many of us, that there was a symbiotic relationship between the political left and popular music. Jo had flown to California and filmed Johnny Cash's performance at San Quentin. The English music press had been full of the arrival of Morrison who seemed to be the perfect subject for the Granada show. He had a reputation as an angry young man, and some called him the "American Mick Jagger."

Morrison arrives in England

Jo went to meet them at the airport. Immediately reports drifted in that all was not as it should be. Morrison was surly. He apparently had no intention of cooperating with anyone. I heard all this from the sidelines, of course. By the time of the filming at the Roundhouse, Jo Durden-Smtih and Morrison were barely speaking to each other. As the show began, Morrison came out dressed in his normal outfit of black leather trousers and jacket and white shirt. He seemed to me somewhat puffy-faced and so appeared to be pouting. Combined with his high cheekbones and long hair, it was the high-fashion look of a photographer's model. He walked slowly (a very studied slowly it seemed to me) to the microphone. He grasped it in both hands and leaned his weight upon it, looking down. When he sang, he put his lips directly to the mic and mouthed the lyric in such a way that it seemed that if he wasn't careful he might inadvertently swallow it. He hardly moved. When he was not singing, he hung his head down, drooping. He seemed to be playing to an incredible tension that to me simply wasn't there. When in the middle of "When the Music's Over" and the song reached a crescendo, Morrison threw his head back and yelled,

"WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT [pause] NOW!"

The Doors at London's Roundhouse 1968

This was the clear, intended rallying point of the set, the moment audiences would normally cheer wildly. But London was not New York or anywhere in America, and here the audience reacted mildly. Who knows how that felt to Morrison? "It's too bright in here," he said, squinting into the lights. "I want those lights off," and he pointed out at the lights, which were, of course, necessary for the filming. The lights stayed on. The music stopped. "Turn off the lights," Morrison said again. The lights continued to burn.

"Turn 'em off, or I'm not singing." The lights stayed on.

More silence. The audience started to boo slowly. It was difficult to tell whether the audience was booing Morrison, booing the lights, or booing the whole thing in general. But, finally, Jo is forced to kill the lights as Morrison simply refused to sing. A short time later, Jo turned the lights back up and the show continued without incident.

In 1971, Jim Morrison is found dead in a bathtub in Paris. In 1983, Rolling Stone magazine features him on its cover. The headline reads, "He's Hot. He's Sexy. He's Dead," in a finely honed cynicism, a headline for the time.

Jim Morrison
15. The Beauty Parlor Is Filled With Sailors

Mick Jagger as the Ringmaster, 1968

LONDON, DECEMBER 1968

"It's a circus," Jo Bergman says. And, this once, it is the literal truth. "The Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus" is the Stones' latest project. It is to be a privately produced (by the Stones) entertainment spectacular for television. The first I hear of it is at a night meeting when Mick, Brian, and Keith meet with the director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, and I am called in to take photographs.

Michael is a baby-faced American, though a longtime resident of London, and when I meet him he is puffing slowly on the proverbial large cigar although his young face is so innocent it belies the image.

When Michael speaks, which is often and very quickly, one idea follows another, and there is a constant playful look in his eyes as if this is the best of times in the best of all possible worlds. If during the meeting Mick frowns or Keith groans, Michael can be seen to smile and then immediately abandon the idea as if he, too, had never heard anything quite so awful in his life. Michael wants Ava Gardner for ringmaster. No? Then what about Brigitte Bardot? Plans are made for Michael to meet with Bardot in Paris, but Michael won't fly. Reservations are made on the train. Phone call after phone call. Mick and Michael meet with Bardot in Paris but they cannot align schedules.

Michael is known to the Stones as one of the original directors of Ready, Steady, Go, a well-respected live pop music television show from the early sixties on which groups like the young Rolling Stones appeared. Since the Stones have gotten to be too big to do such appearances, and since they now have an international market to satisfy, Michael had also become the director of a series of promotional shorts for the Stones, the latest of which is Jumping Jack Flash.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg. My joke? It looks like Michael just told Mick what something was going to cost.

The elements of a circus unfold: there will be jugglers and knife throwers, elephants and tigers. There will be midgets and giants -- altogether a freaky music extravaganza. Music rehearsals are held on the mezzanine floor of the Londonderry Hotel, a piece of American-influenced hotel design on Park Lane. The room has bright overhead lighting and acres of designer carpet.

Taj Mahal and his band.

Taj Mahal and his band are smuggled into the country. Their presence is not to be mentioned, for they will work here without the necessary permits. As Taj enters, Keith leaps to his feet and walks with great strides across the room to embrace him. Taj's band, as they set up to rehearse, seems almost bewildered by the collection of English rock and roll heavyweights. They play a slow, loping blues: "Take a giant step outside your mind." (Never had any generation before or since been so exhorted to leave their minds behind.) Jagger stands watching, as does Pete Townshend. Mitch Mitchell is there, as well as Jimmy Miller, the producer of Beggar's Banquet, who sits watching and listening.

Rehearsing in the Londonderry Hotel

Two days later, when the appointed day rolls around, I pack my cameras, buy my film, and drive to North London. I walk on stage at eight in the morning. I see union hands standing by huge cameras. In the center of the stage is a two-story circus set, surrounded by semi-circular rows of seats.

Michael does the "tag" with John and Mick

Jo Bergman wanders around with her clipboard; Jimmy Miller is speaking with Glyn Johns, the sound engineer, who directs the placement of mics. Tony Richmond, the cameraman, oversees as the lights are trucked in and hauled up to the ceiling, pointed, spotted, and focused.

In the early afternoon, it comes time to rehearse the circus players. The floor manager speaks into his megaphone. "All right, let's see the circus."

Within ten minutes it is clear that whoever did the actual hiring, they neglected to get the A-team of the circus set. (Only years later, reading Michael Lindsay-Hogg's book Luck and Circumstance did I discover it was purposeful. But it's a tricky call. If the audience doesn't know it, as I didn't, they just look inept.) The members of the troupe traipsed tiredly through their entrance.

Without their costumes, the men in the circus wear T-shirts and suspenders. Whatever shapeliness the women once may have had is by now the victim of sausages, eggs, and chips.

A fire-eater comes out and in a desultory fashion lights and eats a flame or two while Jo and I stand on the sidelines making unbelieving eyes at each other.

The floor manager calls the knife-throwers. Someone drags out a six-by-nine-foot piece of untreated, rough plywood, raises it upright, and stands behind it, just managing to hold it steady. To me it seems as if the knife thrower and his target do not like each other very much but who can tell? The woman, not looking pleased, goes to stand in front. A group of chromed, three-foot long throwing knives is brought to the man, who then takes his position maybe twenty feet from the woman.

John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Keith, Mick, Brian, Bill, Eric Clapton, and Marianne Faithfull.

He balances each knife in his hand, swinging slowly back and forth. Accidentally, he drops a knife, which clatters to the cement floor. The woman assumes her pose, standing rigid in the center of the board, her arms held parallel to the floor. The man leans forward slightly, bends from the waist, and rocks back and forth, gaining momentum. He takes careful aim and, pulling the knife back over his shoulder, sends it forward. It spins in the air, traveling much more slowly then I imagine it should, and misses the board completely, crashing down on the concrete floor and sliding off into the recesses of the set.

"Sorry," the man calls.

Again he leans forward, takes aim and throws. The knife arcs a slow loop and this time it hits the board (though at least two feet from the woman) but sticks only lightly and then falls out, dropping loudly to the cement floor.

Another knife loops in the air and hits the board and then another, above her head and to the left. Two more knives are thrown, both hitting the board haphazardly.

"Okay," the man says, as someone brings him a glistening chrome ax the size fire men use to break through doors. He leans back and lets fly, and the ax spins, handle over head. It's so heavy that when it strikes the plywood background, still supported only by a man standing behind it, it causes the background to veer slightly, and the ax ricochets and falls to the ground.

"Okay. That's enough," calls the floor manager, in what seems to me an act of infinite mercy.

A tiger can be seen caged in a corner of the studio. A trapeze artist does a twirl or two, does not fall and die, and it comes time to think of rock and roll, as the stars are now beginning to arrive.

Everyone wears some costume -- a hat, a jacket, sometimes the whole works. Mick, in deference to the fact that it is The Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll circus, is the Ringmaster. Keith is a pirate. Bill Wyman is a clown, complete with red bulbous nose.

Brian is at one moment a sorcerer, and then simply the Androgynous Man. John and Yoko wear black cloth hats; Yoko's is pointed like a dunce's. Together they look like Halloween trick-or-treaters. The Who are dressed like their alter egos: London street kids with big shit-kicking shoes. Keith Moon giggles madly, threatening, as he always does, to suddenly spin out of control.

The doors are opened and a swarm of photographers from the English and foreign press soon fill the stage. Veterans all, they arrive with cameras and flash units hanging from their necks. It is clear that they have witnessed endless photo calls for princes and prime ministers, starlets and circuses, as they wait to take their shots.

The curtains open and the circus and cast are assembled. Bulbs flash, and questions are hurled forth. "Mick, look this way, will you?"

"Brian, over here."

"John, where's Cynthia?" This last question is soon to be the question that will take over the British press, at least when it comes to dealing with John Lennon. The British do not take kindly to this American/Japanese artist who seems to have captured John's affections. Cynthia Lennon, John's then-wife, was a classic example of the British man's dream: blond, beautiful, and waiting at home. So when John took up with Yoko, it was seen as a slap in the face to the British ideal. As if that wasn't bad enough, Yoko was older than John, and also married.

Circus camera call: Brian Jones, Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, John Lennon, Eric Clapton.

On the set the costumed rock and rollers form a wide arc, bracketed on one side by the fat man, on the other by the dwarf. The audience is admitted, the taping begins, and Jethro Tull, a fledgling act on Island Records, gets up on stage. Ian Anderson, the lead singer, wears a ragged old coat that looks like it might have been recovered from the Salvation Army. His hair sprouts from his head in shaggy misdirection. He looks like some manic goblin you might discover under a mushroom. When he performs, he attacks the microphone, plays his flute, raises one leg in the air, and spins, with one eyebrow raised, and sparkles madly. Taj Mahal is next, and he plays the same loping song he did in rehearsal. But the audience is impatient. Next come The Who.

Pete, Roger, John, and Keith have done this before and you can tell. Their filming goes quickly and efficiently. Roger twirls the mic over his head in ever-increasing circles until it is swinging in a fifteen to twenty foot arc at the end of its tether out over the camera and crew. Then he jerks it back, bringing it to his mouth just in time for the next lyric. Pete rocks back and forth from one leg to another, guitar slung at his waist, waiting for the guitar break, as he plants his legs in an inverted V and his arm sweeps into a huge circle, swiftly arcing, hitting the guitar again and again, until he grabs it and goes running across stage, leaping in the air, his knees to his chest, and spins and spins around. John Entwhistle stands perfectly still, though the fingers of both hands are picking notes to keep up with Keith Moon, truly the mad, fastest drummer in rock, who seems to wish to play six notes to every other drummer's one. Keith is not to be outdone by the antics of Pete: he throws his drumstick in the air, watching it swirl away, grabbing it as it falls, never missing a beat. As the song ends, jets of water spew from his drum kit, spattering Keith and anyone nearby. Roger prancing, Pete spinning, John standing, Keith flailing: The Who.

The Who

I was never sure how the audience was chosen. They were mostly kids. I'm not certain the audience even knew, when they arrived, what they were going to see. It must have come as something of a surprise to them when Eric Clapton, Mitch Mitchell, Keith Richards, and John Lennon assembled on stage and broke into "Yer Blues."

"The Dirty Mac-Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Mitch Mitchell & Keith Richards."

Mick Jagger is a phenomenal stage performer, who along with the rest of the Stones presents as riveting a rock and roll show as you or I might ever see. He dances, teases, and provokes. He seems constantly to move, so even if he is directly in front of you, you can still never quite catch him (a challenge photographically). You can never be quite certain of what has just passed. His performance evokes some of the fascination of watching an illusionist. Yet when John Lennon broke into "Yer Blues" he stood rooted behind the microphone as if planted there, only slightly bobbing at the knees, and singing thin-lipped. Lennon delivered a performance of such simplicity and conviction that it was breathtaking, and I felt chills race up my spine. When John sang "even hate my rock 'n' roll," the presence of the pain that made him write the line was clear in his voice.

The clock passed midnight, then one o'clock, and then two, and the Stones still had not performed. The stress of the previous few weeks of production and rehearsals started to catch up with people. Even I -- at the age of 23 with a huge enthusiasm for what was going on -- was moving more slowly. My legs ached from hours of standing on the cement floor. All of us were drooping as the Stones came on the stage.

John Lennon Mick Jagger

The Stones assumed their positions, as I readied my cameras and the first take was called. Like an aging warrior who intends to vindicate a lifetime's experience, the floor manager flew at the audience, arms flailing, exhorting them on. He didn't get much. The Who, notable troupers that they were, waded into the crowd to help. But it was an uphill battle. "Come on," the floor manager yells. I am so tired that all I register is a certain irritation at his antics. When the Stones perform, they seem good to me. They play "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Dawn arrives as the last numbers are being taped. A lot of weary people drift from the circus set in a corner of North London as the "Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus" comes to an end. It will not to be released until 1995 -- twenty-seven years later.

In the middle of filming, someone points out the American novelist and notorious acid freak, Ken Kesey, standing on the sidelines. Next to Kesey stands Rock Scully, associated with the Grateful Dead. There are a few others, all together making up a small band of notables from the Haight. They had come to England to see if it was really all it was reputed to be. From the shadows they watched the filming of the circus. The next day, while visiting Apple, Kesey (he of innumerable Acid Tests, the de facto leader of the Merry Pranksters, who proclaimed loudly and fervently, "Further! Further!") was quoted as saying about the circus, "It was all played to the ghost. The audience was a prop. It wasn't so important what was happening, but what appeared to be happening."

In a way I couldn't fully comprehend at the time I was sandwiched between the outwardly expanding ripples from the Haight--and its acid-fueled quest for the Higher Truth-- and the vastly more traditional, show business efforts of The Rolling Stones and others. The two were colliding.

Really, if I'd thought about it, if I'd been able to spot it and articulate it (neither of which I did) I would have said that my sympathies were with "Higher Truth" and with "Further," but I didn't yet see any real contradiction. Music in its vast, transcendental excitement was certainly entertaining, so what was problem? That it was more than "an entertainment" was indisputable. But the Rolling Stones were indeed producing "an entertainment" (novel as it may have been at the time), that's what Kesey spotted. The incompatibilities that separated even such natural allies as the music scenes in San Francisco and London presage the ultimate collapse of the American utopian efforts. But it was far too soon for me to have understood that at the time.

Not many days later, I got a call from John Lennon asking if I wanted to come down and take some photos. He was with Yoko at his house in Weybridge, Surrey.

John's house was then in the middle of what was referred to as "the stockbroker belt" that bordered London to the south. He referred to this house as a "mock Tudor shithouse." Within a year he moves out.

I arrived and walked to a side door that was, amazingly, unlocked. The house was completely silent and when I poked my head in there was no one about. John and Yoko were upstairs. The room I entered appeared to be a small study; there was a television against one wall, a poster announcing an international pop festival, a large cross, a photo of John and Yoko behind a wooden grid. Next to the kitchen was a small room with an upright piano at one end, various guitars, and mementos from Sgt. Pepper scattered around. That room seemed to be the most used.

Weybridge ††

In a short while Yoko came downstairs, said good morning, and offered me some tea. While we were waiting Yoko asked, "You want to see something, Ethan?"

Yoko reached over and picked up a package addressed to her, c/o John Lennon.

"You look at this. It's terrible."

She opened the package and carefully moved aside the white tissue paper. Beneath it lay a small doll, like a Smurf doll, but it was difficult to tell since it had been so mutilated. Its features were smeared with charcoal, and a black-haired wig had been glued to the head in an effort to make the doll resemble some grotesque version of Yoko. Large needles penetrated the entire body and head of the doll. A note, written in an almost illegible scrawl, read, "You leave John alone."

In the quiet of the kitchen in this empty house, Yoko seemed helpless in the face of such animosity. It went unspoken, though it was clear, that this was just a small token of the mushrooming resentment against her, and I felt sorry for her. If whoever had sent that doll was motivated enough to do that, what might others have in store?

John came down. We went outside, and I started to take pictures, though somewhat aimlessly as, really, I had been summoned and didn't know quite what to expect. John seemed to sense this, and he and Yoko disappeared and then returned shortly, wearing identical black capes. As if John (or John and Yoko) were doing my job for me, the capes created a simple, graphic look. As we now went about taking pictures, each one took on a more striking quality. Yoko seemed more preoccupied than John, John more enthusiastic than Yoko. Now John, the Beatle who had been besieged by photographers for years, seemed willing to try anything. He took a guitar and serenaded Yoko. He knelt in front of her as if she were a maiden from the time of King Arthur, and John was a knight. John was in love. This was obvious. His antics pierced through whatever preoccupation or reserve surrounded Yoko, and she was charmed. It was impossible not to be.

John serenading Yoko. ††

John and Yoko, Weybridge 1968 ††
16. Get Back

John Lennon sidles in. "How Long Will They Last?" 1969 ††

LONDON, 1968

I moved from my one room bedsit and rented the ground floor of a small house on Peel Street off Campden Hill Road. I loved my little house next to a pub ("The Windsor Castle") where in the summer people sat outside in the garden drinking pints of ale. It felt convivial and European. I was happy. It was in this small house that the phone rang, and a voice said, "Could you hold the line please? I have Neil Aspinall for you."

Neil Aspinall had been with the Beatles from the beginning; he was an accountant from Liverpool and a childhood friend of Paul McCartney's. He worked with the Beatles first as road manager. He was their oldest and perhaps most trusted associate. If ever there was such a thing as a "fifth Beatle," Neil Aspinall was undoubtedly it.

At the press conference held to announce the new company, John Lennon had explained, "[It'll be] a business concerning records, film, and electronics, and, as a sideline, whatever it's called -- manufacturing, or whatever. We want to set up a system whereby people who just want to make a film about anything don't have to go on their knees in somebody's office -- probably yours."

The change in John Lennon was striking. No longer was every encounter with the press a deft delivery of charming and witty one-liners, bubbly entertainment. Times had changed: the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, had died from an overdose of pills. Their much-publicized relationship with the Maharishi had floundered. The Beatles were now forced to fall back upon themselves.

The Beatles on the Twickenham sound stage ††

When Apple was announced, The Beatles released an ad that said, in bold type "This Man Now Owns a Rolls-Royce." The man pictured in the advertisement (it said) had submitted an idea (that other companies rejected as too bizarre, it implied) to Apple Corps, and Apple had magically turned this idea into the profit that became a Rolls-Royce. In our Age of Promise, The Beatles sang, "Baby, you're a rich man." Now The Beatles were extending us a hand, promising everyone a chance to turn their dreams into reality, into money, making everyone truly rich, as if by magic. And who were the ultimate magicians? Why, The Beatles, of course. None of this needed to be stated explicitly. At the time Apple seemed like a grand idea. It had to be. It was a Beatle idea.

In response, the lunatic fringe would come out of the woodwork and descend upon Apple and the Beatles until John would rush away screaming, "Don't give me no more brother, brother." George would be singing the "Sue me, sue you blues," and Paul, on the advice of counsel, would have no comment. But what were they to do? Brian Epstein had been their boss, to the extent that they had one. He had done the deals, had told them where to go. Now he was gone. How would they manage?

On the phone, Neil, speaking in the same Liverpudlian accent as the Beatles, invited me down to Apple.

Neil's office overlooked Savile Row known for its bespoke tailors. The floors of Neil's office was carpeted wall-to-wall with the same apple green carpet that covered all the Apple offices and was in its way as much a trademark of Apple as the Apple logo itself. I brought to Neil's office not only the photographs of John, and John and Yoko, but also the photographs of Mick from the Rolling Stone interview, and the photographs of everybody from the "Rock and Roll Circus."

"So you've been working for those guys" (meaning the Stones), said Neil, poring over the contact sheets.

It seemed like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were all aware and wanted to know what the others were up to. Mick and John would snipe at each other for years. Mick from the first Rolling Stone interview: "They [The Beatles] were really hustlers then . . . 'Hey Mick, we've got this great song.'"

John was, characteristically, a bit more blunt: "You know, I can knock The Beatles, but don't let Mick Jagger knock them. Because I would just like to list what we did and what the Stones did two months after . . . He imitates us . . . You know, Satanic Majesties is Pepper. 'We Love You,' man . . . that's 'All You Need Is Love.' I resent the implication that the Stones are revolutionaries, and that The Beatles weren't."

Neil marked some of the photographs of John, and I said I'd have them printed and get them to him. I knew that The Beatles were just beginning filming at Twickenham Studios, and I wanted to go, so I asked. "That's not possible, Ethan," Neil said. "We have people going down there all the time. David Bailey is down there today."

"Nice Cup o' Tea?" ††

"Okay, Neil, thanks," I told him. But the next day, ignoring him, I drove down to where The Beatles were filming. All the people on the film were the same people who had been at the "Rock and Roll Circus." Michael Lindsay-Hogg was directing, Tony Richmond was lighting/ cameraman, and Glyn Johns was doing the sound.

The Beatles were filming on the largest sound stage there, and it was daunting. Very gingerly I inched the door open, peeking through the crack. Inside, at what seemed a great distance away, was a raised platform on which sat Ringo's drums, surrounded by the amplifiers for John, Paul, and George. Tony had focused the lights to highlight Ringo's platform; the rest of the stage drifted into darkness, seemingly endlessly. Around the stage were the cameras, and surrounding the cameras were the crew, cleaning lenses, loading film. Cables snaked everywhere.

I slipped quietly through the door, closing it behind me, and stepped into the shadows to watch. Tony Richmond could be seen standing in center stage, his eyes cast toward the ceiling, issuing instructions to invisible men on the catwalks above. There were no sets, there was no stage design beyond the Beatles' equipment, nothing particularly cinematic. Later Tony told me that each day he planned to add a separate pool of color to the huge circular backdrop behind the stage. I told everyone to put in a good word for me if Aspinall showed up, and then I drifted off to the edges, looking at the vast space.

Then I glanced up and noticed Neil Aspinall had arrived and recognized me. He looked at me kind of strangely, but said, "By the way, we've decided to let you go down for a day."

"Not just for one day," I told him. (I will never know how that slipped out.)

"What?" asked Neil.

"I need at least three days," I said. "One day could be terrible. Everything could go wrong."

Neil looked at me. "Okay," he answered.

And so the next day I drove to Twickenham again and began to shoot.

The Beatles

There was no specific script for this movie Michael, Tony, and Glyn were making. At that moment there was no title for it. There was only, somewhat, an idea for it, and the idea was that it would be a look at The Beatles making their new record.

While in the shadows on the second day I noticed Paul arrive, wearing an overcoat and saying he took the bus (which somehow seemed unlikely). I moved slowly toward him grabbing my camera. He walked over to someone reading an article about The Beatles from an English music paper. Paul read it over his shoulder. Then John entered and Paul commenced to read the article out loud, mimicking the writer.

"Beatle John Lennon," read Paul, "said today . . ."

John upgraded his entrance to that of a Hollywood star; throwing his head back, his arm straight at his side, hand parallel to the ground, mincing across the floor. Paul read aloud; "How long will they last?"

Everyone laughed.

Paul McCartney

Then the Beatles went to work. They played endless tunes, theirs and others. Early American rock and roll was ever present; "Stand By Me," "Blue Suede Shoes," "Johnny B. Goode," "Sweet Little Sixteen," "All Shook Up," "Don't Be Cruel." "Lucille." "Good Golly Miss Molly." They consumed cup after cup of tea: until small mountains of Styrofoam cups grew at people's feet. I moved around the stage, climbing to the catwalks above and shooting down. Back on the floor I circled the set, moving in quickly to take a photograph but then retreating into the shadows.

Paul seemed to do the most talking, endlessly exhorting the rest of them to pull together. "It's like when you're growing up and then your daddy goes away at a certain point in your life, and then you stand on your own feet. . . . It's discipline we need. . . . I think we need a bit more if we're going to get on with it," cajoled Paul.

George piped up, "Well, if that's what doing it is, I don't want to do anything."

Michael Lindsay-Hogg sat in his director's chair on the edge of the Beatles set-up. As the film was currently formless, Michael was pushing for an event to film, a big concert, some spectacular moment. It also soon became apparent that whoever was responsible for the film's shooting schedule hadn't given much thought to the musicians' desires.

Over the years I have thought back upon this single fact with incredulity. At the time The Beatles were indisputably the largest band on the planet. John's remark that The Beatles were "more popular than Jesus" seemed less hyperbole than reasonable yardstick. And there they were, the four of them, on a cold sound stage in the English winter at nine in the morning. It was a level of professionalism to inspire anyone who was watching. In later years (the mid-1970s and beyond), the years of "Artist Management" on steroids, unknown managers of little known acts would have insisted that such a schedule was impossible. The infantilizing of rock performers was about to begin.

Not that the Beatles liked having to arrive at early hours. The attempt to play music in a massive, cold sound stage had everyone edgy. Still, the film cameras never stopped rolling, and, for three days, I took my pictures.

When I pick up the pictures at the lab, I'm excited. Tony's pools of color show behind Paul's head, behind Ringo and his drums. Tony's light illuminates them beautifully. One evening, I gather all my slides and take them to Apple.

"Drink, Ethan?" asks Derek, chief press officer for Apple and The Beatles. He had been hired by Brian Epstein in 1964 and was, as Neil, a trusted associate. A slender man with a mustache, Derek often spoke very quickly, and he had a professional charm that belied the fact that he also seemed to care.

I asked for a Scotch and Coke. That's what everyone seemed to drink at Apple, so that's what I had.

Derek Taylor's press office was swarming with people, as it always would be in my experience, holding their drinks in their hands, puffing hashish joints surreptitiously. Nobody would ever accuse the Apple press office of being stingy.

"Well, Ethan, you can see that there is no hope for you here," said Derek, indicating the clusters of people. "Let's go down to Peter Brown's office."

By comparison, Peter Brown's office was like a church. It was large and high-ceilinged, with subdued lighting, quiet, and empty, with a huge portrait of John and Paul dominating one wall.

Peter Brown had been with Brian Epstein, as his personal assistant, from the beginning. John Lennon would later make him famous with the line "Peter Brown called to say you can make it okay / You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain," from "The Ballad of John and Yoko." Derek went back upstairs as I unpacked the projector and all my slides, and set things up so that the projected images would fill one entire wall. I clicked through the first few. They looked good to me, so I turned off the machine and waited.

Derek opened the door and stuck his head in. "Listen, Ethan, I think John's in the building. Why don't you wait a minute?"

While I was waiting Peter Brown came in. He seemed a meticulous man, well dressed, and appeared intent upon staying above the fray.

"Hello?" he said, not sure of who I was. I introduced myself and explained what I was doing there. "Oh, good. Well, Paul will be coming in shortly. I'm sure he'd like to see them."

Ringo Starr, Twickenham Sound Stage ††

John and Paul? I hadn't expected that. Then Neil Aspinall came in, accompanied by George, who was with an American singer and piano player, Billy Preston.

"What's going on, Ethan?" asked Neil. I explained. "Great," replied Neil.

"Hi, Ethan," said George. Paul came in and entered into conversation with Peter Brown.

The door opened and Derek walked in with John and Yoko. The room was filling up.

"Well, I heard it was all happening here," remarked Ringo, who was accompanied by Mal Evans, a large, friendly man, still The Beatles' "road manager," and known to Beatle fans as the man in Help! who periodically emerges from the water and asks, "White cliffs of Dover?"

"You want to show us your pictures now, Ethan?" asked Derek.

So I began. I projected image after image of the Beatles on the sound stage at Twickenham; images where they looked tiny in the space, and images where John's (or Paul's, George's, Ringo's) face filled the wall. The show took maybe twenty minutes.

At the end, the lights are turned up, and I heard someone say "Those are nice," and someone else "We oughta do a book, and put it with the album."

"Yeah. They're nice. Good work, Ethan."

And so in that moment it is decided that I will continue to work with them and that a book from my work will be made and released with the next Beatles album.

That all four Beatles converged on that one office that evening was a coincidence I never saw repeated. In all the months that followed I never again saw John, Paul, George, and Ringo together except in front of the cameras filming Let It Be.

Life, as John Lennon later remarked, is what happens when you're making other plans.

The cold, cavernous sound stage, the early mornings, the ever-present cameras, all proved to be too much. A quarrel between Paul and George breaks into the open.

"I'll play anything he [Paul] wants. I don't give a shit," lies George.

Prior to his passing, Brian Epstein would have been the one to tell the Beatles where to go and when to show up. But after Brian's passing, who was going to take on that job? Who would have dared? I think Paul tried to become the one to exhort them. But it's one thing to be told by Brian, and another to be cajoled by Paul, like having your older brother give you his best advice. You talking to me?

Paul kept after them like a Scoutmaster, whatever his motivation. It caused George to react further. He walked out and didn't appear again for several days. The quarrel made the papers, and they played it big. Did the Beatles come to blows? Are they breaking up? Who is that Japanese woman? Can this really be the end?

Scoutmaster McCartney ††

While the Beatles go their separate ways, I go and visit my friends at the Rolling Stones' office. There people are recalling the storm that raged over the album cover for Beggar's Banquet. Tom Wilkes and Barry Feinstein produced the entire cover (titles, credits, everything) on a bathroom wall, and not the bathroom wall of your local hospital but the bathroom wall where to sit on the seat is a triumph of personal courage. The walls are dirty yellow, grubby with graffiti.

The cover is foul and humorous and without question a perfect package for The Rolling Stones. Decca, the Stones' record company, has refused to release it. It is in poor taste, they say, missing the point completely.

This is a battle the Stones are destined to lose. Whatever clout they can muster is ineffective. Decca refuses to budge. Soon the business of show asserts itself: the record must be released, which it is, in an all-white cover, which, to John Lennon's point, is awfully similar to The Beatles' White Album.

In bits and pieces word leaks out that there are problems with The Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus. In particular Mick is said not to be pleased with the Stones' performance. There is talk of a reshoot. There is also talk (whispered, furtive) that Brian's drug habits have reached a stage where they impair his ability to function. Sometimes he fails to show up. When he does, his performances can be erratic. Once the original motivator and the leader of The Rolling Stones, Brian can no longer be counted on.

This is one kind of problem when it comes to the taping of a television show; however inconvenient, it can be shot again. It is more problematic when it comes to planning a lengthy tour. And with a drug conviction hanging over Brian a visa to tour America would be impossible.

I mostly hear about this later. At the time any mention of such a problem would have been much too sensitive to have filtered down to me. Still, there would be no tour to promote Beggar's Banquet.

After the difficulties at Twickenham, the Beatles have regrouped. George returned --bringing Billy Preston along, with the express intention of lifting the contentious mood.

They decide to move the filming to the basement studio at Apple. In contrast to the Twickenham studio, with its reverberating acoustics (the province of filmmakers, not musicians), Apple is home. It is smaller, more intimate, carpeted.

Throughout the filming, Michael still has the same problem, now possibly aggravated, since it is harder to film in Apple's tight quarters. "There's lots of good footage, but there's no story yet. There's no payoff yet."

Michael wants to get the boys up to do something, deliver the grand performance in the grand locale. But the Beatles just will not move.

"It's either Tunisia or Tahiti or Tripoli," says Michael, urging them on.

Ringo: "What about Gibraltar?"

George (stonily): "You know it's just impractical to get all these people and equipment there."

In the basement studio at Apple ††

John Lennon

Ringo Starr ††

George Harrison in the basement studio at Apple ††

Then Paul said, "Okay, yes, I'm sure we could set it up. . . . I'll tell you what, I'll come in with you as long as you get a couple of boats, like the QE2, and give away the tickets here. . . . Right! We get a nice time and a bit of sun."

Then John: "I just find a good feeling about singing in the sun, you know, and singing as the sun goes down and the moon comes up. It would be like on the roof in India, but we would be fully equipped, you know, just the sun."

Michael: "If you say yes and if we get it together, then will you go?"

John: "If we say yes to that, then don't bother about it. Let's leave it in the air and just think about it. . . . We can say 'yes' now and suddenly decide 'no' tomorrow. It's not going to make any odds. Let's just think about it."

"I'll be watching telly," says Ringo.

To which George remarks, "I think the idea of the boat is completely insane. It's very expensive and insane."

"It hardly needs scenery," offers Paul. "Really, it all should be about Ringo and his drum kit. . . . You can glide down from the roof to a one-shot of Ringo's face, being careful not to miss anything . . . like Warhol's things. Even a Tunisian amphitheater can be boring. I don't dig underestimating what's here."

Personally, I'd hoped that Michael would get his way, for certainly he was correct: the camera liked to look at things.

But there was to be no sunrise over the Sahara with Arabs and camels. Perhaps in reaction to the fact that production had collapsed at Twickenham, and people feared a repeat, now it was grab-it-while-you-can. It came to pass that the farthest the Beatles would travel to do the show was upstairs to the roof of Apple.

On January 30, 1969, The Beatles performed together in public for the last time. It wasn't very public, really. They couldn't be seen from the street below, perched, as they were, on top of their own roof. People from adjoining buildings climbed onto their roofs and watched. In true British fashion, they seemed bemused. Savile Row was better known for its tailors.

The Beatles played "Get Back," "Don't Let Me Down," "One After 909," "I've Got a Feeling," and "All I Want Is You," all songs they had been rehearsing since Twickenham.

Below a crowd started to gather, their necks craned upward, as they tried to catch a glimpse.

"Fabulous," said one girl.

"Fantastic," remarked her friend.

"Bit of an imposition," fumed a merchant, "to interrupt all the businesses in the area."

An old fellow declared that is was a "Lovely crowd. Good quality. They sing well."

"Nice to have something for free in this country," opined a minister.

Someone else called the police.

I scrambled madly about the rooftop, changing angles, for if I was focused on Paul I would, of course, be missing John (and George and Ringo) and vice versa. It was a typically high-overcast, gray London day. In terms of photographic light, it was quite dull.

On the street below, the police arrived; they are filmed as they consulted with each other. Were they really supposed to arrest the Beatles? (By now, the apparent sweetheart relationship between the Beatles and the British police has worn out. John has been busted in his flat and George is soon to be.)

McCartney on the roof ††

But this time when the police got to the roof of Apple where the Beatles played overlooking the center of London, they took a wiser course: they did nothing. In a short time, Paul the Beatles finished. John, ever debunking, walked to the mike. "On behalf of the group," he said, "I hope we passed the audition."

John Lennon on the roof ††

The concert on the roof ended the filming of Let It Be. I continued to work on the book with the designer, John Kosh, who had been suggested by Lennon. The day-to-day progress was marked by the London winter, with its cold, wet days blowing just outside the door. I asked Jonathan Cott and David Dalton (yet another American living in London, who had written a piece on The Rolling Stones' Circus) to write the text. They would spend months going through the tapes, trying to decipher the unintelligibles. And then Paul McCartney would be infuriated by their efforts and excise most of it.

At one time or another, I also photographed the rest of the Apple roster. Mary Hopkin, the young discovery from Wales, was as sweet as she was reputed to be, though with a certain wariness. Probably no entertainer had been as repeatedly warned of the wicked, wicked ways of show biz as Mary had been by her parents. Her song "Those Were the Days (My Friend)," produced by Paul McCartney, had sent her to the top of the British charts and made her famous across the Atlantic as well. She was one of Apple's first successes, back when most felt that everything Apple touched would turn to gold. Around the time I was photographing Mary I was listening -- over and over -- to the strains of "Blue," by a new Canadian-American singer, Joni Mitchell. More powerful music from across the water.

To someone, everybody was a star at Apple. The receptionist would have been a star to the person who waited on the street outside. Of course there were stars and then there were stars. Truly, a Beatle was a star. And Neil Aspinall, Peter Brown, Derek Taylor, Mal Evans--they were (somewhat lesser) stars, too, having been around so long. There were (even lesser) stars: Jack Oliver and Tony Bramwell. As they shared less in the light, they could be a little uptight, nudging others aside, lest there not be enough light to go around. I was caught up in it too. It was hard not to be. It took John Lennon to bring us back to our senses, many years later, singing, "Who in the world do you think you are, a superstar? Well, right you are. / But we all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun." All of us. Remember?

My last Beatles photograph from the Apple Studio ††

The Beatles last performance, January 30, 1969
17. Nobody Even There To Bluff

Brian Jones 1942-1969

ENGLAND, 1969

On July 3, 1969 -- halfway through the last year of the decade that still promised to change the world \-- Brian Jones was found dead in the swimming pool at his home in Sussex. The coroner's report ruled it death by misadventure. That drugs were not somehow involved was inconceivable: it was just too easy to imagine the Crown Prince of Stonedness, too drunk, too pilled, too fucked up, too many times.

But it was also an image that wouldn't come into focus, Brian drifting like an embryo in the pool at the back of the house where the statue of Christopher Robin could see it all, and, if there were any justice, somehow should have protected him. Brian Jones's fans and friends and the people who worked with him cried. Brian was gone, and it was the first time in the age of nothing-you-can-do-that-can't-be done that a face from the picture was irrevocably removed, so that no matter how you turned the image to look at it, there was an empty space that could never be filled.

The law had been after Brian (as they had been after Mick and Keith). He was arrested in May 1966 for possession of drugs shortly after the first raid on Keith's country home, Redlands. In October 1967, Brian was sentenced to nine months in prison. They released him pending an appeal. In May, he was arrested again for possessing cannabis. Twice during this time he was hospitalized for strain.

That these arrests bordered on harassment was supported by a London Times editorial relating to Mick Jagger's arrest. The Times asked, "Has Mr. Jagger received the same treatment as he would have received if he were not a famous figure?" And they concluded that there was, at the very least, a "suspicion (that) Mr. Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man." Not long before his death, Brian quit The Rolling Stones. He could not have been happy to see the way things had turned out. The big problem for The Rolling Stones was, of course, that Brian could not tour because of his drug arrests. But all the people I knew who had been around The Rolling Stones since their early days said that Brian (with Ian Stewart) was the original mover, the one who motivated the group. Now Mick and Keith were emerging; it must have been uncomfortable.

It would take a long time for the fabric of hope and belief and commitment that came with music to unravel. It would be some time before the dissolution would be evident enough even to be acknowledged. Brian's death should have warned everybody, but no one I knew saw it that way. It was seen as an anomaly rather than a portent.

I got a call that the new Rolling Stone was Mick Taylor, and that they needed photographs for the press. Taylor arrived at the rented studio and stayed as long as I kept shooting. That seemed to be the extent of his intended participation. Try as I might, I could evoke no reaction, no expression, no apparent emotion from him. It made me frantic; my best thinking was to smoke a joint, loosen things up. That's when I misplaced my camera.

Mick Taylor waited patiently in front of the seamless paper, viewing all of this as if he had decided to stay at home and merely sent his likeness out to be photographed. The camera was eventually found (painfully long cannabis minutes later), having somehow slipped below the cushion of a massive, overstuffed chair. Now the long, blond wavy hair of Mick Taylor suddenly reminded me of Lady Clairol. Not much was accomplished that night. A photograph of a perfectly distant Mick Taylor was shortly released to the press.

Mick Taylor, new Rolling Stone

The Rolling Stones had replaced Brian with Mick Taylor months earlier, and after they had done so the Stones announced a free concert to be given in London's Hyde Park. Granada Television would film. "It did not start out as a memorial (to Brian); it became one," Jo Bergman would remark to me years later.

I don't know when free outdoor concerts became a signature of our generation. For me the Be-In was the first, but there had been others before it. They were emblematic. Mick Jagger had seen Eric Clapton and Cream play Hyde Park, and the Stones followed.

They asked me to do the photographs, and I arrived early on the day of the concert at the home of John Shepherd, a slim, mustached Englishman who had spent a good deal of the previous few years in Vietnam. (I could never understand why you would get near a place like Vietnam if you didn't have to, but John was one of those who seemed to like the aura attached to such assignments.) Mick Jagger met us there.

John interviewed Mick while he sat in a high-backed wicker chair. Mick seemed fairly subdued. He had some kind of bug, and laryngitis was feared. John's wife, Sonja, offered him some brownies, but he refused. Not Ethan, though; he ate two.

Mick before the concert

We left John's house and drove to the Londonderry Hotel, where the Stones had rented several suites that overlooked Hyde Park. There they changed before the concert. It was a beautiful day, and from the hotel windows you could see the crowds of people filtering into the park, the traffic swirling along Park Lane.

Inside the Stones room it was remarkably quiet, the shock of Brian's death almost palpable. Astrid Lundstrom, Bill Wyman's girlfriend, remembered years later that, "It was like we were all in a bubble; all of us were very separate from the rest of the world. It felt like something had happened to us that hadn't happened to anyone else. Everyone was shell-shocked by Brian's death, and they suddenly had to go out and do this huge concert. It was quite an effort, I think, to do that. It just felt like – closeness is not quite what I mean-- there was a certain strangeness. It was a lot of darkness really, coupled with 'the show must go on' kind of thing."

I noticed Keith lying on the couch talking with a man holding a 16 mm camera. I was told later that was Michael Cooper. He was the American who had shot the Sgt. Pepper cover and The Rolling Stones Satanic Majesties cover. In a tragedy some months later he took his own life leaving a note for his son. "Don't believe the courts when they say that I killed myself 'while the balance of my mind was disturbed.' I just live in a disturbed world that's all..I come from a... generation that made a few changes but had to experience too many other kinds of changes that they have no control over. Some of us were bound to fall by the wayside." Small solace for his son, I thought later.

When the time came to leave for Hyde Park, the Stones exited the hotel and climbed into the back of an armored van that was to deliver them to the stage. Once inside the van they would be protected and invisible. It wasn't until I noticed that the crowd parting in front of the van seemed to me like schools of fish underwater that it dawned on me that, of course, Sonja had spiked the brownies.

As the crowd grew denser and denser, people looked around and, seeing an armored van followed by a car full of reporters, started asking, "Are the Stones in there? I'll bet the Stones are in there." And the crowd started to push toward the van. But by this time, the van has found its way through the fence surrounding the backstage area and safely deposited the Stones.

At this point the noise and confusion of a rock and roll concert (my first at such close proximity to the stage) became apparent. Towers of speakers. Fences. People milling around. There was an expectant intensity in the air. I peeked around the corner of the stage. The empty vistas of Hyde Park that I knew from my early London walks were now filled with people as far as I could see. Two hundred fifty thousand had come on that beautiful summer day. I started to take pictures. As if it were a carbon copy of the San Francisco concerts, a group of Hell's Angels were parked near the stage. As I walk over to them, I realized that they were not Hell's Angels at all but very young teenagers trying to look like Hell's Angels. One of them removed a long-haired wig, revealing his crew cut underneath. I find this to be so bizarre that I asked him to repeat it for the camera, which he gladly does.

The Crowd in Hyde Park

Mick, Keith, Charlie, Bill, and Mick Taylor, came out on stage. Brian's death was on everyone's mind. Mick paused and asked for silence. He quoted Shelley: "Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep \-- He hath awakened from the dream of life." So Mick, no doubt unwittingly, added to the reluctance on all our parts to coldly recognize that Brian was now a dead person, a stiff: the one thing we couldn't really bring ourselves to admit, and did not. Not really.

Yet despite the incongruity -- who would have expected Shelley? -- the tribute was touching, and when Mick finished a swarm of white butterflies were released. They had been kept in small cardboard boxes and they seem disinclined to leave, so that they had to be shaken out by various handlers.

1,000 White Butterflies

Then, for the most part, they settled on what was nearest: the stage, the amplifiers, the curtains unhappily not living up to the picture that I, at least, imagined when first told of it: a swarm of perfect white butterflies ascending to the heavens.

I was taken to the side of the stage and hoisted up one of the towers. It is jammed with other journalists, the film crew, and assorted friends. There is no room to move at all. I cannot get a decent angle from which to take pictures, and for the most part I have to click around others who are in front of me. The constant shoving and squeezing makes me claustrophobic.

On stage Mick is dancing and singing, wearing a white costume with an almost medieval skirt. (The next day the stories about the concert read as much like a fashion report as a rock and roll review.) Toward the end of the show, the Stones break into "Sympathy for the Devil." Rocky, the percussionist, beats tall bongos as Mick yelps into the mike, "Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and taste."

From the edges of the stage dancing black men emerge, their bodies covered in paint, wearing grass shirts and carrying spears, moving their arms in motion like tarantulas taking steps. In the warm and very benign sunlight, in London's very civilized Hyde Park, the effect to me was hilarious even in -- maybe because of -- my stoned and paranoid state. They seemed like the caricatured bush Negroes of "Doctor Livingstone, I presume?" -- an Englishman's vision of what darkest Africa was like when most of it was still an English protectorate.

A black man dressed in reeds carrying a spear.

"I stuck around St. Petersburg when I saw it was a time for a change," sang Mick. "I rode a tank, held a general's rank, when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank," he continued, associating himself with the Devil, dancing across the stage. Though these songs are dark portraits, they are not autobiographies. But 1969 was the time of the singer-songwriter. Back in America, where one pill makes you larger and the other makes you small, these distinctions are entirely lost. People have come to expect that they are speaking of themselves, a cultural disconnect that will have tragic consequences.

Tom Keylock instructs "English Hell's Angels".... children
18. The Last Good-Bye

The Beatles last photo session. ††

LONDON, 1969

In early August, Neil Aspinall called to tell me The Beatles needed another photo session, and I immediately started ambitious plans for the shoot. I recalled the many sessions with The Beatles that had become famous, and how I felt about them when I first saw them; from Meet The Beatles to the Sgt. Pepper photos, to the Richard Avedon sessions. Every time you saw a new photograph of the Beatles, it would be as if a new era had been entered. I intended to do a simple studio portrait, but also I wanted to get a background of clouds painted and photograph them floating in front of it. I looked into painters, the hiring of trampolines. I worked overtime to try to select the right images and the right ideas for the session. The studio I had booked, one of the largest in London, was buzzing in anticipation when Neil called and canceled. The session would be moved to John's house.

Since the photos of John and Yoko in the black capes taken at John's "mock-Tudor shit house," John had moved. Now he and Yoko were bouncing around in "Tittenhurst Park" -- a large white house, almost empty of furniture. In one room there was just the white piano on which John would write "Imagine."

I got there before Paul, George, and Ringo, so I strolled around the grounds. In the back near the main house was a carriage house and outside that were stone statues, replicas of Sgt. Pepper and his Victorian friends. Shortly the rest of the Beatles arrived, and we started to walk around together. I am not the only person with a camera. Neil has decided that a photographer--Monty Fresco from the Daily Mirror--will accompany us, and Mal Evans is there with his camera as well. The Beatles, who don't seem much interested in this event anyway, don't have one photographer to focus on, and it is difficult to organize them for a shot.

John now looked like a cross between Fidel Castro and a Mexican bandito. He was sporting a full beard, and dressed all in black, with a flat-brimmed Spanish hat and a wide leather belt around his waist.

Walking along with John, I complimented him on his new house. "Nice move," I remarked innocuously.

"Yeah. Checkmate," replied John with a wit that could cut you in half.

All the Beatles had changed since I'd last seen them. During Let It Be Paul had a full beard. Now Paul was clean-shaven, and John, George, and Ringo are bearded.

I knew I was shortly going to leave for America, which I had started to miss, and who knew what would happen then? I whispered to Mal, maybe he would take a photograph of The Beatles and me? Mal said okay, but then I lost heart. Everybody seemed to be having such a boring time anyway.

Me shooting The Beatles. Photographer unknown.

The Beatles with statues. Their last photo session. ††

The Beatles' last session. ††

When the session was finished (the four of them in front of the carriage house ended up on their Hey Jude-- Greatest Hits album), I said good-bye to everybody.

"Have a good time in America, Ethan."

"Thanks for everything, mate."

"Yeah. See ya."

When it was announced that The Beatles were breaking up, it caused a great sadness to a great many people. As only music can (especially our age of music), The Beatles' songs had marked the times through which we had passed; they had written and performed so many songs that there was always one to remind you of something, help you out, or give you hope. Upon hearing of the breakup of The Beatles, the BBC disc jockey played "We Can Work It Out." That's what he wanted to accept. George was singing "Here Comes the Sun" on their last record, but All Things Must Pass became the title of his first solo album.

Now everyone had to get used to the idea that there were to be no more Beatles, and the responses were exactly like hearing about the impending death of a loved one: rationalization, anger, denial. As individuals they repeated over and over again that there would be no more Beatles. ("I don't believe in Beatles," sings John, "I just believe in me.") And over and over again, people refused to accept it. In 1984, four years after John Lennon was shot and killed, the rest of them (George, Paul, Ringo, and now Yoko) gathered in London to discuss the dissolution of Apple. An English reporter asked, "Are The Beatles going to get together again?"

Hey Jude cover ††

The Beatles "Weep" from the last session. ††
19. Easy Riders

Stones at the Oriole House, Los Angeles

CALIFORNIA, 1969

"We all need someone we can dream on".  \-- Jagger/Richards

The blue sky arched overhead, cloud-free as far as I could see. Below, the gray freeway -- even that seemed empty after England -- stretched out for what seemed like forever: the combination made it feel like being inside some huge empty vault. Day after day, the sky was blue: it was eerie at first. Four days after arriving back, I traveled to Big Sur. I woke up the following morning to dense fog that had rolled in off the ocean, covering the hills, obscuring everything. People put on jackets, pulling them closed against the chill. A friend arrived in a Jeep, excited, saying, "come with me." Five of us piled in, and we drove down the coast, small glimpses of the ocean appearing through the fog below us. The jeep turned off the road onto a dirt track and started to head up into the hills, through the redwoods, past cabins with gardens, clotheslines. Hand woven God's eyes hung on the porches. The jeep climbed past them, driving farther up the mountain.

As we gained elevation, the fog started to thin, the redwoods were below us, and the vegetation changed -- became California oak, madrone, poison oak, and brown, dry grass. The Jeep climbed over a ridge, out into brilliant sunshine. Below, the coastline was covered with an endless layer of fog. "Here, take this," said my friend and he handed me a piece of broken glass. He took out a candle and lit it. "Hold the glass over the flame, like this."

He tilted the candle, causing it to smoke, and the glass darkened with the smudge. "Now look at the sun."

The smoked glass became an even darker, improvised sunglass.

"There's a solar eclipse in an hour," he said, smiling.

On top of the hill, it was utterly quiet. Periodically, hawks swooped out from the trees and arced below us, drifting down toward the fog. In an hour, we were all peering through smoked glass, our necks craned, as the moon passed slowly in front of the sun. When the eclipse became total, it was suddenly darker and cooler, but it warmed again quickly after the moon passed by. California Dreaming: there really is nothing like it.

Big Sur. Photographer unknown.

In San Francisco on the radio they were playing "Honky Tonk Woman", with the distinctive cowbell beginning, the drum intro, with the guitar coming in chunk, chunk- chunk, low down and dirty, and I felt proud that I had been involved. When I first heard this I was waiting for my mother to come out of a Western Union office where she had just wired money to one of her children.

When the year began, the American troop strength in Vietnam had reached its peak: 550,000 men. Thirty thousand Americans had been killed and more than 20,000 others would be. In the previous year, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy had both been assassinated. At the Chicago Democratic National Convention there had been rioting in the streets complete with police clubbings and gassings. The turmoil helped Richard Nixon become the next President of the United States.

Music and politics, once thought to be joined in a common cause, were diverging. Politics had become confrontational: if you were committed to it, sooner or later you would find yourself on the street. And the street was getting uglier and uglier.

Music didn't require confrontation. Even if you believed in the things music was promoting, it remained possible to take it easy, stay laid back. The politicos would insist that if you were not part of the solution, you were part of the problem, but the zapped-out would suggest that was double-speak. If you were "good energy," then that, like karma, would translate itself into the common good. Besides, music was still the best time around.

Hyde Park had been the largest outdoor concert ever held but within months it was eclipsed by Woodstock. There the up-and-coming, down-and-out, long-haired, freaky, and high, all showed up and for four days camped outside and listened to the music. Except for the Big Three (Dylan, The Stones, The Beatles), everyone who was anyone in music went to Woodstock. And if Dylan was not there, he was amply represented by The Band, whose lyrics and delivery displayed the same worldly hipness as Dylan.

The Who were there, along with Crosby, Stills and Nash; Joan Baez; Jimi Hendrix; John Sebastian; Sly Stone; Country Joe and the Fish. But mostly, of course, we were there. Newly visible. "Wow, look at you," went one performer after another. "You're beautiful. We're beautiful." We were the story.

Someone then coined the phrase "Woodstock Nation," and a helicopter shot showed the "nation" at its first convention spread out over the fields, impervious to the rain and mud. Periodic announcements from the stage would deliver reports of lost children, warn people about "bad acid," the house-keeping chores of the nation. The New York Times, reacting to the mud and mire, would ask, "What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?" We called it "getting it together." We were proud.

And though I knew this only by reputation -at the time of Woodstock I was still in England - I still identified. To people who would dismiss it, we said, "Hey, it happened, didn't it? Nobody got hurt, did they?" People still believed that music was going to change the world.

Woodstock became the fifth-largest grossing music film (through 1980 the figure was $16,200,000), and it still sells, played back via DVDs in living rooms across the country: four days with the freaks on parade.

At the close of the festival, we saw a subdued Jimi Hendrix, intensely concentrating, perform a solo rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner on electric guitar, single notes arcing into feedback, howling, crackling with the noise of all that amplified electricity. The old American anthem newly played for the half a million gathered and for all the filmgoers thereafter. Jimi Hendrix, a black, psychedelic star for the Woodstock Nation, would die from a drug overdose the following year, 1970.

Drugs. With America tearing itself apart, split down the middle about everything, everybody pointing a finger at everybody else, there was no way anyone in the counterculture was about to admit that drugs were a problem. Drugs were what first turned a lot of people on. The nightmare consequences of marijuana as conjured up by such unforgettable phrases as "killer weed" and (a 1930s movie) Reefer Madness became part of our disdain for all drug-related information that had been passed down to us.

The red-eyed, zapped-out grass smoker became an affectionate member of R. Crumb's cartoon populace. (Flies buzzing around their heads, all the women with mammoth breasts and jutting buttocks, the cartoon characters all lusting after each other all the time. And Mr. Natural, white-bearded guru for the kids, on the make himself. "What's it mean, Mr. Natural?" "Don' mean shee-it.") Or a strip from London's OZ magazine: a long-hair walking down the street, a bubble emanating from his head. The bubble is full of swirls and crescent moons, lizards and stars. The longhair notices a cop across the street, and suddenly the bubble retracts into his head, like toothpaste back into a tube, until the cop passes, and then once again, his eyes popping out, the longhair's manic visions emerge as a smile creeps across his face.

Or, even later, Zonker Harris from "Doonesbury": gentle Zonker, who likes to talk to his plants and play submarine captain submerged under the surface of Walden Pond. Zonker, who is not at all ambitious, just wants some peace and quiet, and a reasonable life in the country.

Of course, there were drugs and then there were drugs. The palette of available drugs had been considerably expanded since the early days of a little marijuana and some LSD. Now there was "speed" -- methamphetamine -- which would keep you awake all night, keep you talking, talking. And there was angel dust (what a name) that turned out to be something derived from animal tranquilizers. There was heroin, too. With heroin came the syringes that could also be used to inject speed. People addicted to hard drugs started losing all their teeth. This was before crack cocaine.

A drive down Haight Street was not what it had once been. After the explosion of wide-eyed kids, a new desperate edge had crept in. Now people would watch you very closely as you walked along, looking to see if you wanted to score, or if you were a narc. And there was unquestionably the vibe, as people would say then, that whatever lay behind all this, it no longer had anyone's best interests in mind.

Mick Jagger Smoking

Mick Jagger's suitcase, shot for a possible album cover, It couldn't be used because I stuck the joint in the hat brim, insensitive to the Stones' visa problems.

Still, hard drugs were a rarity. That they were there at all was probably because no one believed (as with marijuana, as with-- not too much -- LSD) they could really hurt us. We were "sunlight," we were "golden," sang Joni Mitchell about Woodstock.

I went to see the movie Easy Rider. Two freaks on their motorcycles (Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda) decide to go to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras. Along the way they pick up Jack Nicholson. Before they go to the Mardi Gras they drop some acid, but not much happens, as I recall, except another example of how impossible it is to capture the internal psychedelic experience externally, i.e on film. At the end of the movie, Dennis Hopper is riding his motorcycle by himself when he is passed by two Southern good ol' boys (driving a pickup, shotguns on their rack) who yell out at him: "Get a haircut." Hopper gives them the finger.

A gun barrel protrudes and then there's an explosion as the shotgun blows away Hopper and his motorcycle; the sound of the explosion echoes through the theater. The pickup drives away but then turns around--and the shotgun emerges again. It blows away Fonda, too, the bits and pieces of his flaming motorcycle falling earthward and dropping on the road before they explode. As the pickup drives away, the movie ends. The culture wars had begun.

"What the fuck do they wanna do that for?" I yelled, suddenly anxious and uptight outside the theater. "Now I want to go out and blow up some motherfucker for blowing him up. What the fuck good does it do? It just makes people crazy, that's what it does. It just polarizes people. It's fucking insane." My friends looked at me strangely. But now I peered around, wondering where the next crazy bastard with a shotgun might be. Paranoid again.

In England I had learned to love waking up in the morning, walking by the local store with the aroma of freshly roasted coffee breathing into the street, without having to wonder whether someone was going to take a shot at me, or whether some friend was going to be drafted, or whether some other friend was going to O.D. . . . America, 1969: Too Goddamn Intense.

In November the Rolling Stones arrived in America. It would be their first U.S. tour since 1966. In Los Angeles, they set up camp, rehearsing during the day, retiring at night to houses high in the hills. Nobody really knew what this tour was going to be like.

A lot had changed since 1966 when the Stones were staring out at crew-cutted American boys with their Sandra Dee girlfriends. On that tour Ronnie Schneider later told me, "the lighting cue was a pink gel on 'Lady Jane.' Girls in the audience would be screaming so loud the Stones couldn't hear themselves play. The set would last twenty minutes and then the Stones would rush off. There were a lot of angry promoters." But that was when Ronnie was still working for Allen Klein, his uncle. For this tour Mick had called him from Australia to say he wanted him to "do the tour" but that he didn't want Uncle Allen. Ronnie worked it out. Mick also told him that this time they were going to pay the opening acts, stage the show, handle the business. But, as Ronnie would tell me, "It was hilarious. They didn't have any money. Nothing. We had $15,000 to put on a half-a-million dollar tour. It was a very funny moment."

I had flown home to San Francisco after the last Beatle session. While I was there I heard that the Stones were in L.A, and I drove down for a visit. I maneuvered my car up winding roads high into the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Strip. Behind a locked door and a hedge too high to peer over, amid a half-acre of lawn, sat the "Oriole House," aka the "Dupont House." I was inside talking to Jo Bergman and others when Mick emerged from a back room with Ronnie. I was exchanging a few words with him when, at the end, he asked me if I'd like to go on the tour.

The Rolling Stones in rehearsal at Steven Stills' house

So I gathered my cameras together and moved in. I stayed in the Oriole House with Charlie Watts and his wife Shirley and their daughter Serafina. Also staying there were Stanley Booth, the writer, whom I had met in London, Ronnie Schneider, David Sandison from the English press office; and Jo Bergman. We were, as Mick Taylor would remember years later, "a remarkably small group. Very small and very intimate."

For two weeks I followed them, watching preparations, attending rehearsals and business meetings, hanging out. The irony was intense: in the roiling cauldron which was politics and music in the U.S. in the late 1960s The Rolling Stones' new tour was the biggest thing happening, but in reality we were a small, basically quiet group, ensconced in a couple of houses. It was a strange disconnect, but not unenjoyable. High in the hills, we were simultaneously frenetic and relaxed, stressed and laughing.

Keith Richards

 "

"It was small and very intimate," remembered Mick Taylor.

On November 7, 1969, in true show business tradition, the Stones opened out of town in Fort Collins, Colorado.

It was a two-hour drive through the high plains of Colorado east of the Rocky Mountains to get from the Denver airport to the college town of Fort Collins. The Stones were to play in the gym. As we arrived for the sound check that afternoon, the few students who were hanging around stared at Mick and the others as if they were an alien life form. Mick was aware of the eyes upon him, and every so often he'd just do something--jiggle his ass, or smile. Something. I don't know if it was done for effect, or if he was in a personal zone, but it had an effect, as people's eyes followed him everywhere.

That night the hall was packed, the kids had waited through the opening acts, and Sam Cutler, who performed the same duty at Hyde Park, came on stage and delivered (for the first time, he later told me) the line he would use again and again for the rest of the tour: "Ladies and Gentlemen, let's welcome the GREATEST ROCK 'N' ROLL BAND IN THE WORLD!" The band raced out and launched into its first number with every intention of being exactly that. The rush was intense, and the audience was immediately on its feet, arms waving.

Fort Collins, Colorado

But as the set progressed, the audience took its seat again and listened appreciatively. This set up an interesting conflict for the Rolling Stones since they'd had no experience of an audience sitting down and listening. It was uncomfortable for some. Others liked it. For once, they could hear themselves, and, Keith later remarked, "We can play better." Bill Wyman later told me, "At first it was disconcerting." For Jagger it seemed less like a benefit and possibly a cause for concern. "We just want people to get up and shake their arses." But, for better or worse, America was not the country they had left in 1966.

On the set of They Shoot Horses Don't They?

Back in L.A., the Dupont house perched on the very top of a hill overlooking the endless panorama of streets and houses that made up the L.A. basin. The house was a pretty good example of upscale L.A. tacky. It was all view. The wall that faced the Los Angeles basin was covered in smoked-glass, gilt-veined mirrors, some interior designer's idea of Greek opulence. In the middle of this reflecting wall was a gas-jet fireplace. To add to the effect, the floors are covered, wall-to-wall, with yellow shag carpet. One night when I returned late, everyone was either out or in bed. Reflected in the gilt mirror were the sparkling lights of the L.A. basin below, and burning in the center of the fireplace were four naked gas flames, so that the spectacle of the bare gas jets and all the endlessly reflected lights of the city below seemed like a shrine to American wastefulness. The phones never, ever stopped ringing. Sam Cutler (last seen at the concert in Hyde Park) had been asked by Jo Bergman to come along. He had established himself as personal liaison for the "boys." Sam--who can have a sense of humor--recalled: "When I found I was going on the tour I was over the moon," he recalled later. "So I went and told me Mum. And she said, 'Well, it's not a real job, is it?" But he took his job seriously and was ever solicitous of "his boys."

Mick Taylor. Keith Richards, Sam Cutler

Ronnie Schneider liked to say completely gross things to everybody. "That's some old lady you have," he told me once. "She swallows." Ronnie was delighted with himself for this remark, and laughed uproariously. Ronnie was the kind of guy who carried binoculars with him when he traveled, and while you're attempting to get an answer to a piece of business will scan the windows of the hotel across the way on the look-out for women undressing.

Jo Bergman seemed to have at least one telephone to her ear at all times, yet somehow managed to be the even keel among the male megalomaniacs.

One day I answered a knock on the door. Standing just outside was a short, olive-complexioned man wearing a double-breasted pinstriped suit and a wide tie. His hair was slick and combed back above his ears, glistening jet black. In his left hand, he held a cigar; on his pinkie finger was a diamond ring. All in all, he seemed an exact replica of the gangsters I used to watch on The Untouchables.

"Hi. I'm Pete Bennett. I came by to see Mick and the boys," he told me in a slightly raspy voice that fit the image as perfectly as his suit.

"Ah, could you hold on a minute?" I asked, backing away from the door, no doubt wide-eyed. I rushed into the other room and asked anyone if they'd ever heard of a guy called Pete Bennett. But before I got a response I heard Ronnie greet him, "Pete! How ya doing?" Bennett just kept coming: he entered the room on my heels.

Everybody knew Pete Bennett, it seemed. He was one of Alien Klein's right-hand guys. When Mick and Keith arrived later, they smiled at this American specter, but it was all friendly. "How ya doin', Mick? How's it goin'? Turning to me he said, "Lissen, I'd like to get a picture, if you don't mind." Pete got them to stand still, and I took the picture. As I started to walk away Pete asked for the film and says he'll take care of it. No fool he: the pictures ended up years later on his website).

"Thanks," he told me, shaking my hand. "What's your name?"

Not only does Pete know everybody, I'm later told, he's got pictures of himself with them to prove it. The ones most often mentioned are those with President Nixon at the inauguration, and the one of him with Elvis.

That night Pete is in the limousine with Jo, Stanley, and me as we drive toward the backstage entrance to the Fabulous Forum. Between us and the entrance are lines of police barricades and helmeted rows of L.A.'s Finest, holding truncheons. Though we should have all the necessary clearances, the police are refusing to let us pass. The driver is frustrated and starts to lose his temper. A cop responds, pointing with his truncheon.

LA'S finest

Pete stepped out of the limo and asked to see the officer in charge. The cop took one look at Pete and backed off. A small circle of officers quietly conferred with one another. The barricades are moved, and we glide smoothly through, just like in the movies. "Thank you, gentlemen," says Pete.

Inside the Forum, the energy is intense. As the Stones walk in all eyes follow them. They disappeared up a long concrete corridor and back to the dressing rooms. Inside it is reasonably calm. Gram Parsons and Stanley Booth are there, as is Glyn Johns. Hovering near the Stones is a black man I don't recognize but who Stanley tells me is Bukka White, BB King's second cousin. Bukka watches closely as Keith picks his National Guitar, an uncommon guitar for a white boy to have, according to Stanley who knew these kinds of things. Watching Keith play, Bukka listens and then turns to Stanley and remarks, "Hey these boys are good. Have you ever made any records?" And everyone laughs.

But, as show time approached, we are all asked to leave. The Stones, emerging later, are surrounded by Allen Klein (what was he doing there?) and Pete Bennett. They walked down the grey corridors toward the stage.

Keith before the show.

Mick about to go onstage

Mick on stage.

The Los Angeles set starts big, but in the tradition of show business pacing, it slows to allow Keith a steel guitar spot ("No Expectations"). Mick sits next to him on a stool. Then the set kicks up again with "Midnight Rambler." It is another song from the dark side, a song of encompassing menace, describing a character somewhere between a cat burglar and an assassin.

If you ever catch the Midnight Rambler

I'll steal your mistress from under your nose.

Well, go easy with your cold fandango

I'll stick my knife right down your throat . . .

It is a good song to get the crowd going as Mick plays his evil persona. He takes off his studded belt and, whipping it over his shoulder, falls to his knees, slamming the stage. The band plays a single, percussive thump. The stage lights burn deep-red. Mick looks out at the audience. "Honey, it's no rock 'n' roll show." Thump! "I'm talking about the Midnight Rambler / The one you've never seen before."

The song starts to pick up. The band is like an old steam engine coming to life. Soon Mick is up and roaming the stage again, and the song ends in crescendo.

"Let me see you out there, L.A. You're beautiful," says Mick.

This is the cue for Chip Monck -- stage and lighting designer -- to turn up the house lights in the stadium.

Encouraged by the house lights, the kids from the back of the stadium rush to fill the aisles. The Stones launch into "Honky Tonk Woman." Then one rocker follows another. Now the crowd is roaring, surging through the security guards, who wisely let them pass, crushing against the stage, pinning me against it so that I have to raise my cameras above my head and slowly squeeze out. On the stage above, Jagger and the Stones are safe, riding the energy of the crowd and the pulsing of "Street Fighting Man." The show is a gas, the crowd is absolutely gone, and The Rolling Stones are back in America and blowing it away. Hail, hail, rock 'n' roll.

The crowd rushing the stage in Los Angeles

Shortly, we're on a plane bound for Oakland and once again walking through columns of police to get to the backstage area. Again, it's a massive auditorium (the Oakland Coliseum), and once again the Stones rush on to a tumultuous welcome. Mick plays with the crowd, dancing to the lip of the stage, tempting the hands that reach out to touch him, quickly drawing back.

Mick Jagger on stage in Oakland

Backstage tensions run high. Ronnie Schneider and Bill Graham have gone after each other with their fists and had to be separated. Since the beginning they had never gotten along. The story Ronnie told me years later is that Bill Graham came to see him at his house in Long Island. Ronnie was out walking the dog and late to the meeting, so it started badly. Graham showed Ronnie press clippings of the shows he had put together. Graham wanted the tour, but Mick didn't want Graham to have it. At the end Ronnie said about Graham's press clippings, "Those are great, Bill, but what have ever you done that's big?" Ronnie told this story at the Oriole house, cackling with delight.

Graham stormed out of Ronnie's house, went to the New York press and began bad-mouthing the Stones. By the time we got to the dressing rooms in Oakland a black and white photo of Graham has been hung directly above the mounds of fruit and cold cuts, giving the finger to the room.

Bill Graham

In 1969 San Francisco lay claim to being the center of the hip universe, second only to London, though of the many who visited London, most returned saying that San Francisco was actually second to none.

This sets up a tension, part old fashioned ego, part the unspoken etiquette of the new hip. San Francisco wishes to welcome the Stones as one of them, but it seems as if they expect the praise to be returned. The problem is that while the Stones are certainly aware of the scene, it's just not very high on their list of things to worry about.

By the time we got to Oakland, two more people had joined us. One was Michael Lydon, a freelance writer. The other was John James.

Lydon arrived wearing blue jeans and a rumpled shirt; his sandy hair hangs past his shoulders. Many years later I learned Michael was a graduate of Yale, a veteran reporter who had already covered murders during the civil rights protests in the South. But you wouldn't have known it to look at him, and I didn't. At the time of the tour Michael was living in Mendocino, a hip, earnest enclave on the coast of California, four hours north of San Francisco. His look and manner belied his experience. For this tour he was writing for The New York Times. Michael seemed to be a gentle man, one of the many affected by the sixties who tried to live a simple and honorable life, concerned about making a difference.

Lydon was everything John James was not. James was a fat man with a pallid complexion. He arrived after the show in Los Angeles, purporting to be from the Dodge Motor Company, promising free fleets of cars at every location the Stones will appear, plus general assistance whenever needed. What he was to receive in return for this was never exactly clear. That such an arrangement might interest the Stones was undeniable. Mick's concern that expenses always be kept to a minimum was well known. ("Mick said I could do whatever I wanted as long as it was cheap," Jo Bergman told me, describing her marching orders when she first arrived in London to work with him.) According to Chip Monck, James just showed up at a sound check, and Chip sent him along to Ronnie, who, always on the look out for ways to save money, thought John James and his free cars were a great idea. John James, who had nothing whatsoever to do with Dodge, went to Dodge -- and told them he worked for The Rolling Stones.

John James speaking to Vegas floor man

Michael is later to write that John James's name had been shortened from "something long and Italian." Michael was incorrect about that detail, but his instincts were right on. James' real name, I found out later, was John Ellsworth and in 1988 the Washington Post reported that the same John Ellsworth, dressed as Santa Claus, appeared at a party in Jimmy Carter's White House purporting to be the head of a charitable concern called the "International Year of the Child" and--under that guise--was soliciting Rosalyn Carter's support.

James would be with us for the duration of the tour, and, as promised, Dodge cars would be provided at every location, only to be left, keys in them, at various and sundry spots across America, abandoned by cast and crew alike. Easy come, easy go.

The Rolling Stones on stage. Auburn, Alabama, 1969.

Back in Los Angeles, on the Sunset Strip, inside Whisky à-Go-Go, Little Richard paced the stage as Mick and Keith watched from the shadows. Little Richard bulged against the confines of his gold lame suit. A cape was draped across his shoulders. The heavy pancake make-up on his face was starting to run from the sweat he was building up. His eyebrows were carefully plucked; his mustache, pencil-thin. He was working the crowd, lecturing to an all-white audience. I'd never seen him before, and I was enthralled.

"All I hear today is about The Beatles. Beatles. Beatles. Beatles. Or about The Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones. Why, shit!" yelled Richard, talking very fast. "Why, I taught them EVERYTHING THEY KNOW. SHIT!" A high-pitched yelp escaped from his lips. He was high camp. "Look at me. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?" Above his coffee-colored face his hair is pomaded and sprayed into a stiff pompadour. "Shit," he says. "Shee-it!" He sat down at the piano, a stream of words cascading from his mouth. "LUCILLE! PLEASE COME BACK WHERE YOU BELONG. LUCILLE! PLEASE COME BACK WHERE YOU BELONG . . ." He pounded the piano: pure, early American rock and roll. Little Richard comes from Main Street in Macon, Georgia. It's a long way from Macon to the Sunset Strip. "AM I BEAUTIFUL?" he yelled out to the audience, carving out a place for himself, a black rock-and-rolling Liberace. Then, later, he yells, "Okay, they tole me you was out there."

"Tonight," he told the crowd, "we have with us Mick Jagger and Keith Richards from the great Rolling Stones." Then he yells, "AN' I TAUGHT 'EM EVERYTHING THEY KNOW! GO ON NOW. ADMIT IT. SHIT!"

Heads turned, trying to find Mick and Keith, but they sat well back in the shadows. Silence.

"I know you're out there, Keith Richards! Hey, Keith! Mick!" Silence.

"HEY, C'MON BOYS. THIS HERE IS LITTLE RICHARD. TELL EM I TAUGHT YOU EVERYTHING! GO ON . . ." Pacing the stage,he again called out, "AIN'T I JUST BEAUTIFUL? SHIT!"

Keith said, "You're beautiful," loud enough for Richard to hear.

"You bet I'm beautiful. Shit!" replied Little Richard.

Now the audience had found the Stones. Heads turned and people started whispering to each other. There was the feeling that people were immediately concocting a reason, any reason, to come to the table and speak to them. It would soon no longer be Little Richard's show. As he pounded into another song, Mick and Keith got up to leave. In 1963 The Rolling Stones were the opening act for Little Richard when he toured Britain; now they were the headliners, bigger than this founding member of rock 'n' roll who would maintain his entire life that if hadn't been black he would have been bigger than Elvis.

For three weeks The Rolling Stones took their show on the American road. Each night audiences left their seats to come rushing to the lip of the stage, arms outstretched. Though this was constant, as was the line-up of songs, each show took on an individual character, colored by the times and the city the Stones are in.

The Chicago show was played near the old slaughterhouses and its mood was dark, inner-city, with an undercurrent hint of a threat of violence. A man without legs, dressed in a ragged army jacket and T-shirt with his hair hanging to his shoulders, was carried over the head of the crowd and placed on the right edge of the stage, where he stayed through the show, his eyes glued to the prancing Mick.

In Mississippi the dressing room walls were covered with framed posters of football players and cheerleaders. The audience that stared back at the Stones contained no men with long hair. The girls wore pleated skirts; their hair was stiff with hair spray, as if it were still 1966. The public address system interrupted the show to announce that the night's curfew would be extended past eleven in honor of the Stones' appearance. I spent part of that evening in the dressing room talking to the armed Mississippi guard, testing my prejudices from the early sixties and the days of protest marches against segregation. I was wondering how he felt about these long-haired foreigners whose opening act, Chuck Berry, was black. It was all the same to him, he told me, but I couldn't tell.

Once we were out in middle America we were really a small group of strangers in a strange land, more together than apart. In 1969 the Stones mostly travelled on commercial airlines. As we walk through the airports, people invariably stopped and stared, not necessarily because they recognized the Rolling Stones. It was enough that such a strange-looking group existed at all, and, of course, they were followed everywhere by their photographer, a dead giveaway that they must be somebody.

Some people didn't care who it was. I was approached by a middle-aged woman while I was standing in the lobby draped with cameras, waiting for the Stones to come down from their rooms prior to the show.

"Could I have your autograph, please?" she asked.

"You don't want my autograph," I said. "I'm just the photographer."

"Oh, no," she said. "I know. You're one of them."

"No, I'm not," I said. "Really."

She looked at me closely. Maybe it was the hair. She handed me a pad.

"It's for my little girl. She'll be so happy."

Not really, I thought, taking her pad.

Sitting out on the uneven surface of the runway was a tail-dragging twin-engine DC something-or-other, the best -- the only -- airplane that a last-minute search was able to locate when someone (who knows?) had overslept, and the normal commercial airlines couldn't manage to get the Stones to the next city on time. It was difficult at such times not to think of the fate of the Big Bopper and Buddy Holly.

It was never questioned that new transportation would be arranged, though that responsibility fell on Ronnie and Jo Bergman, with John James in the wings.

DC3

"Anything that worked in the way you expected it to work was unusual. Because with the Stones there was always a 'factor,'" Jo told me. "It might be the 'Keith factor' or the 'Bill factor,' whatever. It would mean you'd have the plan of ideally what you'd like to happen, and then the back-up plan, and then maybe another approach. Anything could happen when the Stones were involved."

This time, Jo, Ian Stewart, Stanley and others drove to the next gig, while I traveled on the plane with the Stones, Ronnie, John James, and Sam Cutler. The plane turned out to have no pressurization and no heat, so we all huddled, wrapped in blankets and woolen hats, while the engines roared outside.

On board the DC3

To me, the Stones seemed to take it all in stride. They played endless hands of cards, especially a bastardized form of poker -- "Bill Wyman's specialty" -- wherein seven cards were dealt to each player. Each player then made two three-card hands and discarded one card. The two hands were then placed face down and each hand was bet separately, with the minimum bet one dollar. In order to win, the same player had to win both hands; otherwise the pot stayed. If you did not bet a round, you were out of the game. The result was that everybody bet every round, hoping that the winning hands would split, which happened much more often than not. The pot then stayed. It could grow to be a few hundred dollars. One day Ronnie was spitting and spewing, complaining that he, somehow, should have won a hand. Keith interrupted. "Cool it, Ronnie," he said, "we're just killing time. Nobody's playing to win."

Ronnie Schneider (Mr. Money) was shamed into silence, lest a few dollars appear too important. Like hell they're not, I thought to myself, holding my cards against my chest.

Mick Jagger and Chuck Berry, 1969

Even with the diversions -- even with the incredible rush that came every evening as Sam announced to the expectant crowd, "Please welcome the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world," and the Stones came running out into the audience's wall of sound only to echo it right back to them -- even with all that, being on the road was boring. As much as the shows somehow managed to retain their own character, the travel ground everything else into a bland sameness.

At such times the individual regional qualities that I knew to exist in America disappeared. The food was uniformly frozen and tasteless: the hotel rooms were apparently identical. Every television announcer seemed to be the same person telling the same story. Down the hall from the room was the ice machine, the Coke machine. Out the window American cars filled the parking lot. Especially in the broad Midwest, the landscape--without mountains, without hills--left the eye nothing to focus on. Every other day the time zone changed. What time is it? Does it matter? All hours lead up to show time. After the rush of the show, it was back to the hotel. The locals who managed to find out where the Stones were staying make it to the lobby, huddled together, and tried to find out what room the party was in. We droned on through America, the Stones playing gymnasiums in small towns, coliseums in large ones. The movement of the tour was ever eastward, inexorably toward New York: toward Madison Square Garden, where the shows were sold out.

In New York the Rolling Stones set up headquarters at the Plaza. As with Los Angeles on the West Coast, the Stones used New York as their base and sallied forth from there.

The Lear Jet that was to take them to the Baltimore show was too small to accommodate any but the band; the rest of us boarded a bus that got stuck in New York traffic. Stanley Booth and Michael Lydon bailed out, laughing into the night. I decided to stay, not quite knowing what I was in for, and four hours later I arrived just in time to watch a smoke bomb come arcing out of the audience and explode in a wide cement trench that (happily) lay between the Stones and the audience. The show halted momentarily, but quickly continued as the smoking container was taken away.

Throughout the tour security had been effective. Once in the hall the Stones would go immediately backstage, and stay there until the show. They would be out of the auditorium before the audience. (There were no encores). Nobody got backstage except those who were wanted, and even the remotest signs of trouble were dealt with far from the Stones. Those of us who traveled with them were identified by our badges (and, by now, familiarity), and we moved easily back and forth through the several layers of security (the outermost provided by the hall or by the promoter, the innermost by the Stones). As you got to the dressing rooms, everyone knew everybody, so that the inner sanctum was generally peaceful except for the ongoing business of the tour itself. It was an arrangement that seemed to suit everyone just fine.

Sam Cutler, Ronnie, Bill Wyman, Mick,Keith and John James exiting The Plaza.

In his suite back at the Plaza, Mick invited me in. "Leonard Bernstein's coming up. Stay here, okay?"

Bernstein came rushing into the room, his black cape swirling behind him. He was effusive. Mick's English manners came to the fore. How nice to see him. He introduced me. "How nice to meet you," said Mr. Bernstein.

Jagger and Mr. Bernstein exchanged mutual compliments, the small talk of the very famous. I stood at a discreet distance. Leonard Bernstein was anxious about the crowd; about what to expect from ten thousand rock and roll fans. Mick is immediately solicitous. Ethan would be glad to escort you to your seat.

"Would he?" asked Mr. Bernstein.

The Rolling Stones "Pump It." Madison Square Garden, 1969

Jimi Hendrix with Mick Taylor, Madison Square Garden

"Of course," I responded, flattered, really. Now, Mick said, he had to change. He hoped Leonard would enjoy the show.

Walking through the crowd, my Stones' pass pinned to my shirt, I showed Leonard Bernstein to his seat. He was very grateful and gave me a big kiss.

In 1969 Madison Square Garden appeared -- at least to me -- slightly threatening, as it sat squatly in the middle of not-the-most-hospitable section of the not-always-friendliest town in the world. The crowd that couldn't get into the show swirled about on the street, ignoring police barricades. Heads peered into the limos looking for the Stones. I felt a certain relief as we were waved past and swallowed up by the maze of tunnels.

The Stones' security, so effective on the road, was pressed to its limits in New York. The pressure to get backstage was intense. New York had benefited from the publicity generated by the entire preceding tour and by the time the Stones arrived in New York, their presence seemed to be everywhere. They were written about in the papers, spoken of on television. Hour after hour, the radio stations broadcast Stones songs. The heavy rock stations had their over-amped deejays frothing at the mouth. The Rolling Stones are in town! Get down! Get down! By the time the show rolled around, The Rolling Stones fan, following all this, would have been massaged into a state of acute hyper-intensity. At the edge of the stage by the barricade where the uniformed security guards are stationed is the point where all that promotional energy that says "come and get it, you've got to have it" meets "you can't go back there." The labyrinthine tales concocted by the earnest fans, tempered by the general street rap in New York, where truth is never an obstacle, are spilled before the impassive guards.

"I'm from Mr. Jagger's doctor. I have an emergency prescription. No. I have to deliver them personally."

Mostly, the pleas fall on deaf ears. The mood could turn ugly quickly, as the two pressures collided. "All you're gonna get of the Rolling Stones, buddy, is to look at 'em on the stage. Now back to your seat or you won't get that."

"Fucking pig."

"I'm warning you."

The Rolling Stones never see this. Back in the dressing rooms, they're tuning up. These are the closing shows. Then they'll fly to Muscle Shoals to do some recording.

On stage Sam Cutler announces, speaking above the high-pitched squeals of amplifier feedback,

"Everything seems to be ready. Are you ready? We're sorry for the delay".

"Is everybody ready for the next band? Are you ready. New York? The biggest band to visit New York in a long time."

"They've done the West Coast, they've done all sorts of other places in America, now they're in New York. Be cool. Have a fantastic time . . . "Let's really hear it . . . Let's welcome the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world . . . The Rolling Stones! The Rolling Stones!"

The crowd explodes. The Stones come racing on stage. "Jumpin' Jack Flash" blasts into Madison Square Garden, and one more time the inevitable goose-flesh rush creeps up my spine. "Oh yeah!" says Mick as the song ends. "Thank you kindly. I think I bust a button on my trousers. Hope they don't fall down . . . You don't want my trousers to fall down, now, do you?" "YESSSS!" yells the crowd. The Stones run through their paces. They play early American rock 'n' roll ("Carol" by Chuck Berry). They play their arrangement of traditional blues ("Love in Vain" by Robert Johnson). But, as in other shows, they start to kick it up with "Midnight Rambler."

"'Paint It Black,' you devil," shouts a girl from the audience, requesting an old Stones tune and awarding Mick his dark-demon accolade. The band begins and Mick answers, "Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and taste . . ."

"Sympathy for the Devil" swells to fill Madison Square Garden.

"Pleased to meet you," sings Mick, "I hope you guessed my name. / But what is puzzling you is the nature of my game."

As well it might, as the lyric catalogues a list of the Devil's work (according to Jagger/Richards). Mick sings in the first person: "I was around when Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt and pain."

But mixed in with this apparently absolute identification with the Devil is "I shouted out 'Who killed the Kennedys?' / When after all it was you and me." This is nothing other than a liberal call for collective responsibility, hardly an exhortation from the Devil. It all rushes past, pregnant with meaning, but what is that meaning? Slippery and indecipherable, it is pushed and carried by the "greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world," working hard to transport the audience, the only indisputable purpose of a rock 'n' roll show, as the Stones -- Mick in particular -- would be the first to tell you.

Mick calls the house lights on, and Madison Square Garden leaps to its feet, like so many audiences before them, dancing and swaying to the music. "We're gonna do one more and then we gotta go," yells Mick as "Honky Tonk Woman" faded.

The guitars of Keith Richards and Mick Taylor start the strong chording that set up an oscillating rhythm almost like a submarine's Klaxon, and Jagger sings, "Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy / For the summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy." Bill Wyman plays strong, descending notes, while Keith and Mick kick it back up again, and Charlie hits the cymbals, bass drum, and snare, pounding to a climax. Keith is crouched, his knees bent, his right arm pumping. Mick Taylor picks single notes, twining through the solid wall of sound the band is now pouring out.

"Yeah," yells Mick. "Hey, said my name is called disturbance. I shout and scream, I'll kill the King. I'll rail at all his servants." On the chorus, Keith rushes to the mike, joining in, singing, "Well what can a poor boy do? / 'Cept to sing for a rock 'n' roll band? / 'Cause in sleepy London town there's just no place for a / street fightin' man." "No!" yells Mick. On the last note, Keith flings his arm into the air, Charlie plays the closing drum roll, and the Rolling Stones race off, jogging through security and down the concrete halls, leaping into the open, waiting doors of the limousines. They are out of the hall before most of the audience realizes they've left.

I follow closely behind the Stones, rushing for the same limousines. But when I get there, the limos are full. Unknown people ("Important New Yorkers" I snort to myself) have left the backstage early, parked themselves in the Stones' limos normally reserved for second-stringers like me, and sit there, dressed up and determined not to be moved.

People scramble for the available spaces, and the cars were waved out, doors pulled shut as the limos accelerated. This was the first backstage mix-up since the beginning of the tour, and I was standing there with my cameras hanging off me until a voice said, "here, come with us," and I climbed into the back of another limo.

"Hi, man, I'm Janis," says Janis Joplin as her car drove through the exiting crowd and turned right, which -- though I hardly knew New York -- I knew was not the direction of the hotel. As we drove downtown Janis offered about Mick, slurring slightly, "Ah, he ain't so hot,"

One of Janis's entourage introduced herself and invited me up to their hotel. But I was too uptight, not comfortable with the prospect of wandering through the streets of New York at night with several thousand dollars' worth of cameras draped around me. I took a taxi back to the Plaza.

"What the fuck's the story?" I yelled at Ronnie and John James. "I'm supposed to be working here and some clowns come along and take my place in the car, and I'm wandering the streets of New York! Can't you guys even keep it fucking organized, or what?"

They watch me quietly, waiting for my ranting to stop. Then John James got up and in a very low voice, as if delivering unto me a pronouncement of inestimable importance, said, "I'm just gonna tell you one thing. Don't ever yell at me. It doesn't matter what has happened. You just don't ever yell at me."

Though I know this was meant as a threat, my anger insulated me from it. "Well just don't fuck up again," I responded, being careful not to yell.

Ronnie came by later. "Ethan," he says. "You should take it easy. You really shouldn't talk to him like that. Okay?"

Still angry, I said nothing.

"Anyway, I've come to tell you we're all going to California to play a show in San Francisco."

"Oh, they're gonna do that?" I ask. "Yeah. Bring your old lady," says Ronnie. "She's hot."

The last show of the regularly scheduled tour is another outdoor venue, in West Palm Beach. We're late, stuck in a small rented plane on the tarmac in LaGuardia.

The Deep South had not welcomed this event. There would be no half a million unwashed hippies congregating in their back yard, a la Woodstock, not if the locals had anything to say about it. In a series of reactions indicative of the times, the promoter of the Miami show was threatened variously with a lawsuit, an injunction, and canceled insurance, legal intimidations. His other businesses in the area were boycotted. When these tactics didn't work there were threats on the lives of his wife and children. So what began as a reasonable -- if risky -- business venture escalated into the kind of confrontational politics for which the sixties were now infamous. It was dark by the time The Rolling Stones reached West Palm Beach and 4:00 a.m. before they went on stage. Huddled in front of the stage, again in mud, the audience waited. It was cold, dark, and gloomy. Occasional fires could be seen burning throughout the crowd. When the Stones finally appeared on stage, the crowd leapt to its feet, arms upraised in salute, and a great roar of appreciation erupted as the band launched into "Jumpin' Jack Flash."

It was so cold that clouds of mist came from Mick's mouth as he sang. Because of the cold the guitars refused to stay in tune. In spite of this the Stones played through the small hours of the morning, mindful of how long the crowd had waited for them. A thin pink line barely edged the horizon as the last chords from "Street Fighting Man" echoed over the crowd. Waiting apart from the stage a massive helicopter squatted, slate black against the early dawn. The band leapt into the cargo hold, and I climbed up the side of the ship into the cockpit with the pilot.

It was just barely becoming light as the big ship rose off the ground. I could see where the thousands were still assembled, starting to scatter, and then the chopper pulled away, skimming over the Florida everglades. With the sound of the chopper blades, and the glinting swamp spread out below us, the comparison is unavoidable: I think that Vietnam must be like this, half a world away.

We don't have far to go, and the helicopter drops near the hotel and its nearby beach. Slowly, everyone walks toward the rising sun. I hold back, taking pictures. A small group Stanley, Keith and others drift off. Keith says, "Soon we'll see the morning star, and when she's gone, we'll have the sun." Jagger is off by himself, leaning against a lifeguard's chair. Earlier in the tour Stanley had been talking to Mick who remarked: "Got to think about the future because obviously I can't do this forever. We've been going for eight years, and we can't go on for another eight. I mean we're so old. Bill's thirty-three!"

Mick on stage in West Palm Beach

Mick Jagger at dawn. West Palm Beach, 1969
20. The Dream Is Over

"Rape. Murder. It's just a shot away." - Jagger/Richards

ALTAMONT, DECEMBER 1969

All through America, 1969, the Stones had been leaving crowds on their feet, stomping and yelling, pumped up by the klaxon-like chording of "Street Fighting Man." As Mick and Keith seemingly encouraged everybody on to new heights of rebellion, they never appeared entirely comfortable when directly confronted with American politics themselves. Keith would say, "I don't think they understand what we're up to. Politics is what we were trying to get away from." And Mick, even more specifically, disclaims the connection. "We're primarily a band... we just want people to get up and dance."

Both the Stones and the Beatles have tried to grapple with the same dilemma. How do they speak about the calls for violence, for marching in the streets? They had seen American youth (their fans) protesting. It seems that they had --as far as you could tell--some sympathy with this American problem. "We assume you know we're with you," said Keith, but it was in response to a question about why they hadn't overtly come out against the war. Yet if the Stones' position was as clear as young Americans hoped it would be, there would have been no need to pose the question in the first place.

"You say you want a revolution / Well you know / We all wanna change the world," sang John for the Beatles, that lyric, too, impelled by the raspy power of the guitar behind it. But like the Stones, they can't quite seem to make the radical leap either: "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow." Adding, "When you talk about destruction don't you know that you can count me out?" on the single of "Revolution One" released in America. But the lyric on the album was "Count me out/in," the old yin/yang again, hello/good-bye. As sympathetic as the English might have been, it was not their war, and they were just not as conversant with the violence in the streets and what it meant to be there. Lennon would be the first to be explicit, and return his MBE (Member of the British Empire), explaining, among other things, that he was "against our support of America in Vietnam."

John Lennon ††

Melvin Belli's office in downtown San Francisco was decorated in a style reminiscent of a turn-of-the century bordello, except that where the full-length portrait of the scantily clad female would normally hang, there was a huge portrait of Belli himself, dominating everything.

The room was in a state of chaos two days before the recently announced free concert. The original site for the concert had fallen through, and a new one had not yet been found. The Maysles Brothers -- who joined the tour in New York -- were filming as Ronnie Schneider and John James watched Belli insist, in a booming, flamboyant voice, that he would shortly unravel the very complicated mess in which everyone seemed to have found themselves.

Also in this room (besides Jo Bergman, me, and an unknown host of other people) was an uncomfortable-looking man who seemed at home with neither the three-piece lawyer set nor the rock and roll crowd. His name would turn out to be Dick Carter, and he was the new owner of the Altamont Speedway. He was wearing a light blue patterned jacket and polyester trousers. His hairline was receding, and he sported a thin mustache. The story I heard many years later was that he was taking a course at Stanford about how to market his new business when he received a phone call in the middle of the night asking if he had heard that The Rolling Stones needed a place to play. Offering his Speedway as the location seemed to be a foolproof marketing idea.

Altamont was expected to be as big as, hopefully better than, Woodstock. After all, Altamont was on the West Coast, close to San Francisco, the spiritual mother of the free festival, home of innumerable freaks, and the show would star the "greatest rock 'n' roll band of all time." Everyone expected some version of Woodstock West. That it would be bigger, and better, was everyone's hope and expectation. That was one lesson of the sixties: you just did it, and whatever you were doing was going to be one step beyond what had happened before. No matter how crazy, it always worked out. It was a core belief.

At the New York press conference Jagger had been asked, "What is your opinion of the mass concerts such as Woodstock and the Isle of Wight?"

"Well, they all happened in the same year. I think next year they will be more -- huge and better organized."

"Why are you giving a free concert in San Francisco?"

"Because there's a scene there and the climate's nice . . ."

And because they just wanted to, at least in my opinion, although they were unlikely to say that. The sixties had been so incredible. The once scruffy, outcast, and marginal Rolling Stones were now mainstream heroes to an entire generation. It was not The Stones' image or inclination to say publicly that they dug what was happening, dug all these new kids being as outrageous as (or more than) they had ever been. Such reverse adulation was left for the more direct Pete Townshend to sing (in Tommy: "Looking at you I get the power. Following you, I get the beat." But it was, at least the way I read it, definitely being done as a salute to the audience from The Rolling Stones--a thank you for all the records purchased, all the concert tickets bought, a celebration of the community that music had created. Jumpin' Jack Flash, you're a gas, gas, gas.

Melvin Belli

Announcing Altamont. November 26, 1969

The day of the concert I was on the second helicopter flight out with Bill Wyman and Astrid. Earlier I had watched Jagger, Ronnie Schneider (counting money as the helicopter took off), and Charlie Watts board the first flight. This after Mick, while waiting to leave, had walked up to a girl who was standing motionless in the middle of the pier. She was wearing sunglasses and a miniskirt, and clutching a purse. Mick walked up to her side and, pursing his lips, placed a princely kiss against her right cheek. The girl reacted not at all, standing frozen in place, eyes straight ahead. All the while the cameras kept filming until the chopper landed and took Mick away. It was back shortly.

The bay dropped away below as the helicopter headed toward Berkeley and then passed over the hills, brown and dry after the California summer. As we approached the site, an endless line of cars could be seen strung out below, pulled to the side of the road and left abandoned. Then I made out the outline of the raceway and a small speck of a stage, with the speaker towers and scaffolding for the lights jutting out of the crowd, which was huge: it filled the small valley formed by the hills. People had been arriving from the moment the site was formally announced: bringing sleeping bags, lighting fires, camping out, waiting.

When I stepped out of the helicopter, though, the first words spoken were:

"Did you hear what happened to Mick?"

"No, what?"

"Some kid came rushing up to him. Punched him in the face."

"What? Why?"

"No one knows. He was shouting, 'I hate you, I hate you'. . . something like that."

I stepped off the speedway and out into the dry grass. I was looking for the new families, somebody giving birth, some re-enactment of the events of the Woodstock Nation that I had experienced only through the media. The numbers were certainly present. As I walked around, people would occasionally smile at me, a red-eyed half-squint, and raise their hands in a "V" sign. Here and there through the crowd tie-dyed banners could be seen waving in the chill wind. Isolated figures swayed to the music of the opening acts, their eyes closed, their arms moving through the air as if they were swimming. The peace symbol -- the airplane shape enclosed in a circle -- stood planted on top of a pole stuck in the earth like the insignia of a Roman legion. Thousands of longhairs had brought their children, now three and four and five years old.

There was no real separation between the crowd and the backstage. There was only a small trailer where Mick had retreated after he had been hit, and a canvas tent maybe 20 yards from the back of the stage where the Stones now waited. There were a lot of Hell's Angels.

It was almost instantly apparent that the location was unfortunate. The entire geography was alien to me. I had grown up in San Francisco, only fifty miles away. I'd never heard of Altamont. Everything San Francisco was known to be, this was not: Golden Gate Park was lush, landscaped, extraordinary. It was a jewel in a beautiful, cosmopolitan, sophisticated city. Altamont was treeless, barren and brittle and in the middle of nowhere.

Altamont from the air

But if Altamont appeared somewhat inhospitable, what the hell: after all, at Woodstock they sat in the rain for days.

I watched Frisbees spinning through the air. At the edge of the crowd stood a long line of green outhouses. Beyond them I could see numerous automobile wrecks, carcasses from demolition derbies that had been held there, icons of another generation's idea of a good time. I didn't see any babies being born, and I didn't feel any particular sense of community. People were just passing time, getting high, waiting for The Rolling Stones.

Altamont

Altamont

But behind the stage the mood seemed grim. Mick came out of the trailer wearing the red-and-black cape with its El Greco folds that he had worn at the outdoor concert in Miami. He and Charlie went down to the improvised tent where, amid Hell's Angels, they drank a beer and seemed to try to relax.

Reports came into the tent of trouble earlier in the day. A Hell's Angel had knocked out Marty Balin, the lead singer of the Jefferson Airplane. Sam Cutler -- who'd been awake all night trying to bring this thing off -- made the point to the Hell's Angel that there wasn't going to be a concert if they kept knocking out the singers. The Hell's Angel replied, "He fucking insulted my people."

With the night fallen, the Stones went on. As I had done every night for the previous month, I prepared to go out with them. With Mick and Keith directly in front of me, we were sandwiched between Hells Angels as we moved through the crush of people still behind the stage. People were stacked everywhere: in front, behind, to the sides, even above on the tops of trucks parked next to the stage. As I arrived at the back of the stage, two more Hells Angels wanted to know if I was okay. Told that I was, they moved aside. I stepped onto the stage.

Following Mick and Keith onto the stage

I looked across and saw Stu; Ian Stewart had been a founding member of The Rolling Stones. He was, Keith Richards would later say, "the Granddaddy of us all." Stu, for his part, called The Rolling Stones his "little three chord wonders." Even after Stu was eased out by Brian and Andrew Loog Oldham, he stayed with them. He had seen them through the frenzied female riots in Germany, through the drunken Scots' brawls in the slums of Glasgow. By 1969 Stu was both their road manager supreme and a fellow player, on stage every night at the piano to perform "Honky Tonk Woman" and "Little Queenie." Stu had seen and been through it all with them, but without the cloak of personal stardom, since he was never an identifiable Rolling Stone. Nothing ever seemed to faze Stu, whose imperturbability was as developed as his cynicism. But here on the stage at Altamont, Stu looked worried. The stage actually sagged under the weight of the crowd, and when, combined with the weight of the Stones and their equipment, it swayed when the crowd shifted. It felt as if it might collapse, taking everybody with it. Stu moved about grimly, trying to clear people away as they pushed to the very edge of the performing area itself, their eyes riveted on Jagger.

If it was dense on stage, it was much worse for the crowd in front. The Stones fans who arrived earliest had planted themselves at the lip of the stage and rooted there, not wanting to move lest their places be lost, as the crowd behind them swelled. In the natural course of things the crowd grew, and the pressure toward the stage increased. By the time the Stones came on, the crush of several hundred thousand people behind them jammed those who are in front against each other and against the stage. There was no room between them for anything to pass, anything at all.

For a very short time, I was on stage, but quickly I realized that I didn't want to be there--that I was just another person adding to the confusion and to the weight. Another person to make Stu crazy. So when Sam made an appeal for anyone that didn't absolutely have to be there to leave the stage, I was glad to oblige. I walked to the back of the stage, escorted by a Hell's Angel, and was hoisted to the top of a van that was parked behind the stage. Once on top, I looked up to see Al Maysles filming.

I still didn't get it. It just seemed that the idea for the free concert wasn't going as well as I had expected. I kept thinking it's just the last gig, it'll be over soon. I had a difficult time processing what was in front of me, as if my brain didn't want to accept reality.

Mick Jagger on stage at Altamont

Meredith Hunter

From where I was, the lights that created back light for The Rolling Stones shone onto the upraised faces of the people closest to the stage. As the light fell off, the faces disappeared into the darkness. They became indecipherable, part of the compressed mass of blackness that was stretching out endlessly in front. Suddenly, in the midst of that mass where there was no space, absolutely no space at all, I watched a circle of bodies open, crazily, like a sea urchin's mouth, quickly widening until there was an empty circle maybe thirty feet in diameter, and I stared aghast, knowing that the only way for that space to have opened would have been if people had swarmed back over and on top of themselves and those around them, manhandling each other out of the way. I felt as if I were witnessing a physical impossibility. Then, in the center of that circle, I saw hulking, vague forms: the backs of Hell's Angels with their arms holding pool cues, pumping up and down, beating on people.

The music stopped. It was hard to tell what was happening, and when it subsided the music began again. The empty hole once again filled with people, and became once more a solid ocean of humanity stretching into the blackness.

Shortly, there was more violence and another crazy hole opened. People scrambled, and arms pumped. Occasionally people screamed at the Angels until the Angels swarmed over them, beating them to the ground. The music hesitated but kept going as the Stones tried to just get by it. After all at any Rolling Stones concert there was always some business going down in the front rows, and always the Stones played through it. They played to the house, to all the other tens of thousands that couldn't see or didn't care about what was going on in the front row. But then at all of those other venues there had been people whose job it was to make sure things didn't get out of control. This time it was different. It was as if, at Altamont, the only law that held any sway was the show business law: the show must go on.

So the Stones kicked it up again, but soon another fight broke out. Sawed-off pool cues were visible, their butt ends brought crashing down on collapsed forms. The Angels, for whatever reason, were trashing the crowd, and I began to think, "Why the fuck doesn't Mick do something? Just stop it."

Mick went to the microphone, and I thought, "Good. Now this will all stop." Mick said, "Hey, hey, people. Sisters -- brothers and sisters -- brothers and sisters -- come on now . . . Let's just give ourselves -- we'll give ourselves another half minute before we get our breath back ."

Then it was as if everyone held their breath, and things seemed to calm a little. Slowly the music started again. But immediately the fighting erupted once more, the Angels wading into the crowd and flailing away. Again the music stopped and Mick asked, "I mean, like people, who's fighting and what for? . . . Why are we fighting?"

Mick was not calling anybody out. Instead he seemed to be attempting to reason with the mindless violence -- maybe murky but unmistakable -- that was going on right in front of him. His reaction seemed so timid to me, as though he was talking to (as I came expecting to photograph) some idea of a peaceful community he had heard so much about, not to these bedraggled, wasted kids in front of him.

Mick said, "I can't see what's going on, who is doing what. It's just a scuffle. All I can ask you, San Francisco, is like the whole thing -- this could be the most beautiful evening we've had this winter. We really, y'know, why, why -- don't let's fuck it up. "

I stood on top of the truck at the back of the stage, hardly taking photographs, feeling blown out and numb, just wanting it to stop. I wanted Mick to actually do something, though I don't know what, and then Keith walked to the microphone, direct Keith, and said "Either those cats cool it, or we don't play." And I thought, "Right! Right, now it'll have to stop."

Keith pointed to a someone in the crowd and said, "That guy there . . . If he doesn't stop it . . ." But where Keith pointed was where a stabbing had just taken place. A Hells Angel walked up to Keith and whispered into his ear, "There's a guy with a gun and he's shooting at the stage."

Meredith Hunter, a 19-year-old black man, had driven to Altamont with his girlfriend. In the afternoon he told her he was uncomfortable and went to his car and got a gun. He had worked his way to the lip of the stage and, at the time of his stabbing, could be seen in the Maysles brothers' footage waving it around. He was stumbling. Already a man was moving toward him with a knife. Some say Hunter was pointing his gun at the stage, and that the Hell's Angel saved Mick Jagger's life. It is not indisputably clear, but this is possible. None of this could anyone have told you at the time. You couldn't see from the stage: it was just another of the unholy human holes in the crowd opening up, and closing.

Mick spoke from the stage, trying to keep it together, while the idea was being slaughtered in front of him, "If we are all one, let's fucking well show we're all one. Now there's one thing we need -- Sam, we need an ambulance -- we need a doctor by that scaffold there . . ."

The unceasing and apparently unstoppable violence caused a sense of unreality to take hold. Time slowed down, crawled to a halt, just as when on drugs, and I pitied the poor bastards on LSD. Still, somehow, and I had no idea how, the show lurched toward its finish. I heard the Stones start to kick the music back up signaling, as it had the entire tour, that the show was coming to an end. I climbed down from the top of the van, and started walking back to where I thought the helicopter should be. I walked from the stage into complete blackness: there were no lights strung on this desolate hillside. I wanted nothing more than to get out of there. Then I bumped against a chain-link fence in the dark and realized the fence was between me and the chopper. I walked along it. I wondered if I would be stopped but I saw no one. I wonder if there was someone, whether they would let me pass, honor the usually sacrosanct passes I carried. I came to a gate but it was locked. I took off all my cameras and pushed them under the fence, got down on my back, and slithered under but a strap from a case got hooked and I was stuck. My heart pounded in my chest. But I managed to unhook it and free myself. I saw a few lights in the distance in front of me and I ran toward the chopper.

The music had stopped and that meant the Stones would be rushing to get onto the helicopter as well. By the time I got there, others were already jammed in. But someone recognized me and pulled me on board. I crawled onto the floor, and lay down across someone's legs.

The helicopter tried to take off in the normal manner, straight up, but it couldn't. It lifted a few feet into the air and then dropped back down. There were too many of us and the helicopter was overloaded. It started to move horizontally, as it sort of taxied down the runway, gathering speed until it finally lifted, with agonizing slowness, off into the night sky. Nobody spoke as the helicopter passed over the darkened hills. It landed with a bump, overloaded, coming to a stop.

I didn't know what had happened; I didn't know then that someone had been stabbed to death. I just knew the situation had been out of control and very ugly, and I that was glad to be out of there, glad that it was over. I went back to the conservative hotel on the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco, climbed into bed between clean sheets, and went to sleep.

The next day I talked to Mick and I can't remember what question I asked, but I remember his answer. "It could have been me." I first thought how amazing it was that he could have thought about himself when there was such mayhem and violence all around him, and then I remembered that this was a man who for years had been playing riotous crowds, who had been dragged offstage before, who knew that he could be hurt when he was up there. Quite a while later, I saw the Maysles' film of Altamont, Gimme Shelter, and in it I saw a wannabe Hell's Angel whose eyes were quite literally bulging out of his head, whose hands clenched and unclenched themselves as his face grimaced, who pulled at his hair, and who was clearly stoned, violent, and precipitately murderous, standing not eight feet from Mick Jagger -- a cosmopolitan, rather slight Englishman and rock singer. Though they both paid homage to the Devil, only one of them was in show business.

A slow howl, like the dying gasp of some dumb animal, erupted over the next few days and months, arising from people who were writing and talking about Altamont. All of those who considered music and its revolution to be worthwhile reacted as if they had been assaulted, as, of course, they had been. Recriminations flew. People railed at Jagger, calling him Satan and Lucifer, assailing his image.

The Stones were called callous and capitalist. Ralph Gleason -- an editor for Rolling Stone Magazine whose reputation had swelled with the music of the sixties, in no small part because of the influence of The Rolling Stones -- termed Jagger "lofty, elitist, and absolutely amoral." A woman who called herself "Detroit Annie" delivered a judgment from the hip street: "Mick and the boys, you see, have signed this pact with the Devil. First of all they get the Power -- just enough to pull off a few pranks and fantasies -- have some fun, you understand. But don't waste your sympathy on the devil. He ain't trustworthy."

The more political recalled the Chicago Democratic National Convention and the confrontation at People's Park (for Berkeley was just across the Bay), and they tallied the cost of Revolution. In this context the Hell's Angels were the "People's Pig." As for the Hell's Angels, Sonny Barger said in a radio interview the next day, "There were ... people in there that. . . kicked a couple of bikes over and, uh, you know, broke a couple of mirrors. I don't know if you think we pay fifty bucks for them things or steal 'em or pay a lot for them or what? But most people that's got a good Harley chopper got a few grand invested in it."

Radio interviewer: "I can dig it."

Barger: "Ain't nobody gonna kick my motorcycle."

Radio interviewer: "Right."

Others still, from the early Haight-Ashbury days, who had hoped to somehow make credible in the twentieth century the old Indian respect for the land and the spirit that lived there, wrote: "It may be that some of the difficulties at the Altamont Rock Festival transpired because the organizers didn't take time to make the proper preparations. Such would be: Formally asking the local Earth-Spirit for permission to use his space; requesting indulgence of the grass, insect, and bird beings whose homes and bodies would be trampled on. . . . Such was done at all the Gatherings of the Tribes -- the first Be-In in Golden Gate Park."

Certainly Altamont was at the very least the beginning of the end, stripping away all the conceits of togetherness that had been heralded only four months earlier at Woodstock. The frightening thing at Altamont -- and everyone noticed it -- was how so much of the audience wasn't just high, they were gone. Their eyes were not entranced but vacant. There were reports of kids writhing in the mud, kids burning each other's faces with cigarette ends, burnt out for real.

"Us" at Altamont.
21. Woodstock in a Freezer

Banstead, Surrey

ENGLISH SUBURB, 1971

On a slate gray winter day I went to see the movie Woodstock in a cold English cinema in a London suburb. I sat and watched happily, delighted by the split screen images of the musicians, moved by Jimi Hendrix's performance of the "Star Spangled Banner." I easily understood what I was looking at: everything was a big, almost predictable, extension of the Human Be-In. Bigger. Better. Further. But as the movie faded and I exited the theater, I was surrounded by a world infinitely far away from Yasgur's farm: gray sky, gray streets, and rusty brick walls. At moments like these, you'd think I would have stopped to wonder how we could have any impact on a world so fundamentally different. But I didn't. After all, Woodstock was in the theater, wasn't it?
22. Going Mobile

Who's Next

ENGLAND, 1971

With Pete Townshend at the wheel, the six-liter Mercedes was traveling up the Ml north of London at speeds approaching 130 miles per hour and never, it seemed to me, below 110. I watched from the rear seat as we overtook cars driving on the motorway as if they were parked.

Townshend was talking animatedly to John Wolff, the bald road manager for The Who, known familiarly as "Wiggy." "Not a hair on me anywhere, mate," he would explain. Pete, Wiggy, and I were headed north to Leeds to join the rest of The Who for a performance that night. Wiggy and I had met a couple of weeks earlier after Glyn Johns (who was producing Who's Next, their first studio album since Tommy, had called to say that the album was almost finished and, although there were several companies developing ideas, The Who still did not have an album cover. So I met with Pete at his home in Eel Pie, and he told me the story of Lifehouse (from which Who's Next was derived) and one of the tunes mentioned getting away from it all. Glyn suggested maybe something could be done with that, you know.

So the Land Rover was borrowed, and Wiggy, and I, and occasionally Sy (another member of The Who's entourage. "Sy" was short for "Cyrano," and he looked it; a long nose bulbed at the end and hair that grew to his shoulders), would go driving around the English countryside. They would tell stories of being on the road with The Who, stories of madness and destruction and a lot of booze.

I got it into my head that the photograph should be set in something resembling a dry lake bed. It was a look common in American advertising of automobiles. As a dry lake bed was out of the question in England, we looked for an unobstructed, treeless hillside. It is a peculiarity of photographers to care about these things, opaque to others, and for days we searched, until it became a running joke when Wiggy saw me: the American who liked English beer who needed to find "an unobstructed hillside without any trees."

But we got the photographs. When Pete saw them he justifiably wondered what a Land Rover perched on a quite unobstructed hillside in the English sunset with its head lamps gleaming had to do with The Who's latest record. The Who's only alternative, however, was a cover delivered the day before to the recording studio: a 24-by-12 inch montage of extremely fat, naked women. It was rejected because Jimi Hendrix had done something almost identical on one of his albums, although the women in that instance were not fat. It was decided I would travel with The Who to a weekend gig in the Midlands, and out of this, it was hoped, a cover would emerge.

As the Mercedes raced north, one of the cars in the slow lane would occasionally decide to use the passing lane and pull out, so that now it was as if we were catapulting toward a parked car at 70 mph from the rear. Pete would look up from his conversation with Wiggy and apply the brakes. I watched the speedometer drop from 130 to below 100 to 60, so that it felt as if we had come to a complete stop. The big Mercedes accomplished this so smoothly that I was repeatedly impressed, but in a captive fashion -- like some prisoner grudgingly forced to admire the solid construction of his cell.

As soon as the other car pulled back into the slow lane, Pete would once again accelerate up to 130. This happened repeatedly until, truly unable to stand it, I slumped down in the back seat and closed my eyes, leaving my fate entirely in the hands of Peter Townshend, whose reputation was built, at least in part, on the total destruction of his equipment when he performed.

This sudden whirlwind of destruction grew to be a trademark of The Who both on stage and off. As Townshend would destroy his guitars, raising them over his head and smashing them against the floor, into the amplifiers, the feedback howling, smoke rising for effect, so Keith Moon would destroy his drum kit, kicking it away from him, taking the kettledrum and raising it over his head, throwing it at the audience.

That afternoon they entered the dining room of a middle-class hotel in Leeds like some outlaw gang in a Western; the bald Wiggy, the curly-haired Daltrey, and the ever-manic Moon. The customers turned to stare, pausing from their shrimp cocktails with thin pieces of buttered brown bread to watch as the normally nondescript process of ordering lunch was turned into an encounter laced with threats of personal violence.

Wiggy to the waiter; "And if it's not just how I ordered it, then, hear me out now, I shall rip off your arm and beat you to death with it."

Upstairs, in Keith Moon's room, bottles of brandy were opened and consumed, the first stirrings of a rush to manic abandonment that seemed the daily fare of The Who's drummer. Moon was so legendarily crazy that I always felt it best to keep my distance. Still, he was ever the gentleman, smiling and bowing -- "weaving" might be another word.

"Ethan, my good man, a spot of brandy, then?"

That night, after the gig, we still had no idea for a cover, but The Who flaunted destruction, so destroying a dressing room for a possible album cover seemed natural.

I borrowed lights from the stage, remounted and used them to light the dressing room. The hall had reluctantly agreed (there's really not much you can do to six cement surfaces). But it was as if, permission granted, the idea lost its appeal, and it was a desultory destruction that resulted in a few chairs being broken up and the spectacle of Moonie bashing his fist through some bottles.

The Who in their dressing room

The next morning we were off again: a caravan of Mercedes, Jaguars, and Rolls-Royces. The cars pulled on to the motorway and headed back toward London. It was a typical English day; the sky would be clear, and then suddenly clouds would blow in, the sky would darken, and sheets of rain would lash the landscape.

Following the lead car (in which I sat), the caravan traveled at Pete's speed -- that is to say, at 100 miles per hour and above. When the car would run into a squall it was as if it had suddenly been thrown into a lake, so dense was the water when encountered at that speed. Visibility would drop to nothing, for even German engineering cannot create a windshield wiper to deal with that stress. Pete would slow down to 60 or so and wait for the squall to pass.

It was quiet in the car, the morning after the gig of the night before. I was still wondering what we were going to do about a cover, and, as with the journey north, a good deal of my attention was consumed in wondering if I'd survive, when I look out the window and saw some huge cement blocks thrusting randomly out of acres of mottled gray sludge. A totally surreal sight, it reminded me of the monolith -- the slab -- from Stanley Kubrick's 2001:A Space Odyssey. But we were traveling so fast that the shapes vanished almost immediately. I turned my head quickly to catch a last glimpse.

At the next roundabout, Pete asked, "well, do you have any ideas?" And I replied, "Well, there were these shapes back a few miles." Townshend spun the wheel of the Mercedes, and the entire caravan followed us, and we careened back toward these shapes, screeching to a halt. The Who and its entourage stepped out of their cars. (We are looking -- I am later to discover -- at a slag heap, a collection of almost solid industrial waste into which concrete pillars are thrust to keep the waste from shifting.)

I picked up my cameras and we all walked out onto the dark reef of the slag. The sky was still gray and occasional drops of rain fell. At first I directed them to react to the slab as Kubrick's apes and astronauts react in 2001: approaching cautiously, arms upraised, almost touching it.

The Who as Kubrick's apes.

But this was too much a re-creation, and Pete walked up to the slab and started to piss on it. The others follow suit. Those unable to urinate on cue are aided by little 35mm film cans filled with water.

In the early 1970s anyone familiar with The Who is also going to have seen Kubrick's slab, unclear in its meaning but mythic in proportion, somehow mystically related to death and rebirth. For their next cover, The Who pissed on it. Such was the nature of album cover art at the beginning of the seventies. The gray sky is a little dull so it is replaced with the sunset from the Land Rover photograph.

Shooting Who's Next

Who's Next out-take

Who's Next

Album covers. The Rolling Stones' Through the Past Darkly had been my first (the five of them, before Brian's death, with their faces pressed against a sheet of glass). I had suggested the idea to Al Steckler, from Allen Klein's office, who in turn suggested it to Mick. Much to my surprise, Mick agreed. Mick suggested we destroy the glass for the back cover. The assistants in George Nichols's studio -- probably the most elegant still studio in London at the time -- stood shocked as twenty sheets of eight-by-ten-foot glass were shattered in a flurry of bricks. The early images of The Stones, The Beatles, and Dylan had made photography paramount, the Stones most outrageously (dressing up as WACs with Wyman in a wheelchair ). The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the first gatefold (double sleeve). But hard on its heels, the Stones' released Their Satanic Majesties Request, also a gatefold. Thereafter any group with any clout would demand the same treatment, a practice that was to last into the late seventies, when the recession hit the record business.

What a canvas it was to work with, one of those strange serendipities: 144 square inches on the front, again on the back, and -- if a gatefold -- an additional 288 for a total of 576 square inches. In the early eighties the music business would migrate to CDs, a mere 25 square inches until even that minimal space would all but disappear with the advent of iTunes.

An album cover not only showed a group in its latest incarnation (and that's the word, they were changing so often), the cover became an entertainment in itself, something to spend time with. The lyrics, with renewed importance, would generally be printed on the liner or the album sleeve (with the notable exception of the Stones'). The players would be given credit, sometimes on a song-by-song basis. The list of credits -- including design and photography -- expanded until a record jacket seemed to contain as many credits as a film. (Management by . . . Manager's assistant . . . Album coordinator . . . Spiritual advisor . . . Rib joint . . . and on. . . and on.

Album covers became part of the mythology that rock music created. People who remember the heyday of album art -- up to and including the mid 1980s when CDs really started to replace the 12" LP -- almost always remark on the loss of that experience: opening and closing the sleeve, reading the liner notes, staring at the photos.

So when the latest "Word" in record form arrived -- especially when I was younger -- I'd put the record on and then sit and listen, turning the cover over in my hand, examining it. The same obsessive attention that music was receiving would be shared with a cover, for there were the visual clues. And the same focus that would lead someone to insist that the very last groove of a Beatle record, played backward, would revealed that "Paul is dead," would find mysterious figures encrypted in the bark of a tree on the cover of Dylan's John Wesley Harding, significance where none was intended. So it seemed to me at the time that the album cover was the summit of musical photography. There the photograph became more than just a photograph -- it became an icon, incorporated into the community, something that allied itself with (maybe even became an amplification of) the music. More and more, I spent time looking at things, going to museums, leafing through magazines, studying other photographers' work, trying to decipher how a photograph had been taken. A lot of the craft of photography was still a mystery to me.

Through the Past Darkly (cover)

Through the Past Darkly (inside)

Through the Past Darkly (back cover)

I asked Tony Richmond -- the lighting/cameraman on the Stones' Rock and Roll Circus and Let It Be how to light. "By looking," he said, a statement both simple and irritating to me, since looking is the essential action, but there's a great deal of craft in interpreting what you see. It was emphatically not the response I wanted, which would have been completely specific, such as: you take the lamp and place it at a 45-degree angle to, and six feet from, the subject's left. I wanted answers.

There was new equipment to learn, from the many available lenses of 35mm photography to the larger formats of two and a quarter inches (Hasselblad), four by five inches, eight by ten, half-plate, and whole-plate. These were cameras that had to be on a tripod, that forced the photographer to disappear under a dark cloth and view the image on a ground glass, upside-down and backward.

Keith Richards (shot with Hasselblad)

Still, as cameras and their operation became less of a mystery to me, light became increasingly intriguing. Natural light. Artificial light. Soft light. Hard light. The color of light. The physics of light.

I was learning the trade of what I had, quite by chance, become: a photographer, or more precisely, a "music photographer," a very small cog in the large wheel of the business of show.

There were few of us to begin with: Baron Wolman who -- in San Francisco -- did candid portraiture for Rolling Stone. In London Gered Mankowitz shot many of the early Rolling Stones' covers. Also from San Francisco was Jim Marshall--hook-nosed, very intense. Jim was a complex man, sometimes exceedingly generous, but also potentially violent. Jim cared deeply about his photography, but his anger and paranoia often seemed to get in his way.

Bob Seidemann created images that haunted. He photographed the Grateful Dead standing amid the endlessly identical houses of South San Francisco, the whole image underexposed except for their faces, so they appeared like apocalyptic figures, arrived to wreak havoc. Bob did the montage of the topless adolescent girl holding a silver airplane for Blind Faith, and the Magritte-inspired (or so it seemed to me) photograph of Jackson Browne on the cover of Late for the Sky.

In Los Angeles, Barry Feinstein produced notable album covers with Tom Wilkes. Later there would be Norman Seeff, from South Africa, once a doctor by trade. Norman's work, almost always black and white, consisted of slightly diffuse portraits of singers or groups, often in varying degrees of ecstatic abandon, as Carly Simon in Playing Possum on her knees in boots and tiny black negligee in front of the photographer's seamless paper.

In 1970, Annie Leibovitz became the staff photographer for Rolling Stone. Trained at the San Francisco Art Institute, Annie brought a highly scattered energy to her work. Always threatening to trip over her equipment and destroy it, Annie completely disarmed her subjects. She would give them a direction, at first tentative, and then laugh, and go, "Great. Great!" Annie's early work, despite her disclaimers, indicated a talent that would carry her to the height: she eventually became more famous than most of her subjects.

In 1973 Rolling Stone published Shooting Stars, a collection, edited by Annie, of photographs taken by those who worked entirely in music. Even as rock photography drew some attention to itself, it remained a very obscure profession, difficult to explain to the average person.

Still, there was a growing group of us who were making our living by photographing, designing, and packaging rock 'n' roll.

LOS ANGELES, 1971.

Peter Asher, once head of Apple Records' Talent Division, where he signed James Taylor (and, prior to that, as "Peter" of Peter and Gordon "[World Without Love"]) had moved to Los Angeles taking James Taylor with him. Peter, who at first appeared so shy that he might hesitate to ask you for the time, somehow successfully managed to ask various record companies for the millions of dollars that were to become due to the artists he managed and produced (James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt). Also with Peter had gone Chris O'Dell, of "Pisces Apple Lady" fame (Leon Russell), from Tucson, Arizona (and The Beatles, "Get Back"). Chris was friends with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, a sweet and soft-spoken American lady Chris was immensely solicitous of everyone's well-being except, of course, her own. Chris' weight dropped to under a hundred pounds before she put the brakes on.

James Taylor has prospered on his return to America in part because Time magazine placed him on its cover, as the most visible exponent of what Time called "The New Rock; Bittersweet and Low." Sweet Baby James, the album immediately preceding his new one, for which I am to do the cover, sold a bittersweet 1.6 million copies (which gave Taylor the experience to later write, "I need a strong hit / from that money machine").

James Taylor

Chris called me, and I called Peter: a session was arranged. Taylor showed up at the small rented studio in Hollywood. He was tall, with a deceptively commanding presence. He wore a wrinkled blue shirt and old herringbone trousers held up by suspenders stitched with images of half-moons and cats.

It was a no-frills session. There were no art directors, and no assistants -- just the two of us. I took a Polaroid, and showed it to him. This was my way of involving someone in the photo session (as the Polaroid, attached to the camera and lens that will expose the actual film, is an almost exact approximation of the image). This way, the sitter doesn't feel quite as removed from the process. Taylor looked and nodded, but he didn't react. I offered a few pleasantries, took another Polaroid, showed it to him: nothing beyond what appeared to be a completely benign indifference.

I believe that somewhere in the course of a reasonably successful photography session, the photographer is obligated to draw something from the sitter, to overcome the sitter's reticence or paranoia about how they look, the personal baggage everyone carries about their appearance. In later years there would be the added concern that the image be striking enough to coax the viewer into buying the record. The photography of the artist became a kind of "product photography," approached in the same way you might consider shooting, say, an automobile or a can of tomatoes. At a deeper level the artist being photographed may harbor a reluctance to be exposed. Still, this is generally a mutual effort, approached obliquely, with the tacit assumption that, in the end, nobody really wants to look bad.

But with James Taylor whatever I said met with no response. Roll after roll of film passed through the camera, but his expression was unvarying, a look that would be bored if it could rise above indifference. Since this portends certain failure for the session if it keeps up, I finally asked, in desperation, "can you do anything? How about a smile?"

For me to explicitly ask for a smile is to admit failure. But then, much to my surprise, a purely beatific smile spread across James Taylor's face. "Could you do that again?" I asked. The smile returned, as if he kept it in a pocket behind the half-moons and cats. And he delivered unto me a wonderful portrait.

SAN FRANCISCO, 1972

In San Francisco, I photographed Boz Scaggs.

I had met Boz in London, where Glyn Johns was producing Boz's second album. I remembered Boz tearing at his hair, a man almost finished recording his record, most of the tracks completed, without a single lyric written.

I remember Boz, a great cook, standing over a stove in Pacific Heights, San Francisco, pouring wine into lobster sauce, stirring, tasting. He would soon become the very elegant Boz.

For Boz's album My Time I attempted to recreate a quality of portraiture common in the 15th century. The portraits I was thinking of -- I had an example from the Tate Gallery in London -- were usually just head and shoulders, in a room with a single window. Out the window would be a pastoral, almost medieval scene. In the paintings that inspired me, the spatial relationships were never quite right, as if the landscape was infinitely far away and somehow had been cut and pasted into the window (a technique that Photoshop would later make trivial). I tried to recreate this, building a two-wall set and commissioning a painting of a moonlit landscape hung and lit outside the window, an appeal to the romantic.

Boz and I sat getting drunk in a bar. Boz talked about the pros and cons of being very famous, which Boz is not, yet. Boz is for it.

Moshe Brakha and Ron Coro would create the image that would do best for Boz Scaggs -- a perfectly tailored elegance, like a forties movie transformed into color. Two albums in a row would sell platinum (one million units). Boz would be managed by the notorious Irving Azoff, and achieve the fame to which he aspired. But, as with so many others, it would take its toll. Boz rode that manic wave, carrying a Dristan container to clear his nose in public places. Shortly he disappeared, reemerging some years later to tell San Francisco magazine that his sons were what mattered, and that the road show business sends you down is a dangerous one indeed.

Boz Scaggs "My Time"

RITA COOLIDGE.

For years a backup singer (for Delaney & Bonnie, Joe Cocker, Eric Clapton, and Leon Russell), Rita was making her first record, produced by the distinguished David Anderle at A&M Records. Anderle was of the few for whom Los Angeles really was home; he had been born there. He therefore didn't always appear to be lost at sea, as so many others were. Rita's folks were southern and Christian. Her sister, also a singer, married Booker T of "Green Onions" fame, who would later give the world Willie Nelson singing "Stardust." They had a ranch in Malibu.

We went to that ranch to shoot; Rita wore a black cape and rode horses and walked around as I took pictures. As it seemed to almost every year, Malibu had just had a brush fire. As Rita walked through the blackened branches, she looked like an Indian princess.

Rita Coolidge

SANTANA, 1971

In 1971 I went on the road briefly with Carlos Santana and his band. It was an almost schizophrenic experience.

For one, the thing that most often connected me directly to the music -- the lyric output of a singer-songwriter -- was not as much of a factor. Santana--the group-- were more overtly just about the music: the swing of Latin rhythm, a driving guitar, and a break-out percussion section, and not really at all the lyrics, or so it seemed to me.

But the thing I noticed most was the behavioral disconnect. Carlos Santana was quiet, and somewhat aloof. His band, on the other hand were -- for the most part -- like kids on summer vacation, or in Animal House. It was, it seemed, a marriage of the sacred and the profane.

"Profane"

"Sacred": Carlos Santana with shrine in hotel room

Carlos Santana on drums
23. It's Only Rock n Roll

Keith Richards & tongue

LOS ANGELES, 1972

By 1972 The Rolling Stones had their own corporate logo (a lapping tongue protruding between unmistakable bright-red lips) that spun around in circles in the center of their records, was emblazoned on T-shirts and jackets, was made into little gold pins for the Inner Circle, and now drooped happily painted on the fuselage of the Electra jet chartered for their first American tour since 1969.

They had a new record out: Exile on Main Street, a great title for the new Rolling Stones: the once-ragged band from London's cold-water flats were now English tax refugees living on France's Côte d'Azur. Stories of Bill Wyman lunching with Marc Chagall appeared in the press. The gaunt outlaw of rock 'n' roll, Keith Richards, lived in high-ceilinged splendor at Villa Nellcote, once commandeered by the Nazis during the Second World War. There, the drug-taking reached prodigious proportions, threatening everything. But I was removed from these stories: Dominique Tarle is the French photographer who photographed them (magnificently) during this time. It was when they arrived in America to begin the tour to promote the record that I once again joined them in Los Angeles.

Keith Richards/Mick Jagger Villa Nellcote Photograph by Dominique Tarle

Mick and Keith were again domiciled high in the Hollywood Hills, way at the top of Sunset Plaza Drive, in a house belonging to Michael Butler, the producer of Hair. Like a lot of L.A. houses, it was an imitation French château. The workers for the 1972 tour -- of which I would be one -- are stashed at the Beverly Rodeo Hotel on Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills.

Plane and limos

Except for its address, the Beverly Rodeo could have been any of America's faceless hotels; it was an unimposing four-story structure sandwiched between shops. The lounge was done in deep-red leather, and lit almost entirely with tiny-flamed candles in red jars. Entering from the bright L.A. sunshine, your eyes need several minutes to adjust. The Rolling Stones tour party (dubbed "S.T.P," some said for "Stones Tour Party," and others, for the hallucinogen of the same initials -- the usual ambiguity) took up most of one floor. By the time I arrived, called down from Northern California, most of the crew had been there for a week.

The old hands (Chip Monck, Jo Bergman, Glyn Johns, Ian Stewart) were rapidly bringing themselves up to speed. The big change was the absence of Ronnie Schneider -- or anyone from the Allen Klein organization. Ronnie had been replaced by Peter Rudge, whose suite at the Beverly Rodeo was the hub of all activity: the phones were constantly ringing, and the doors slammed shut in people's faces as Peter entered into any of myriad negotiations prior to the start of the tour.

Rudge, twenty-six, was an Oxford-educated Englishman whose entry into rock and roll was as manager for The Who on their American tours. Dealing with Who madness was deemed to be education enough for Rolling Stone madness, and now Peter was submerged in the details of the new Stones tour. His hair hung over his collar, and he wore an open-necked button-down shirt, a blue blazer, blue jeans, and loafers -- the soon-to-be-common look of the rock manager. Peter was maniacally intense, having undertaken, for unknown compensation, to oversee the innumerable details of the largest Rolling Stones tour to date. Peter smoked incessantly, bringing the cigarette to his lips and taking quick, staccato puffs, then crunching the cigarette out. He was able, in the unimprovable phrase of Robert Greenfield, to say "completely offensive things to people that make them smile." It was a quality Peter employed a lot.

I waited in the hallway outside Peter's room for my salary negotiation to take place. My request would be small. I want only what I received on the 1969 tour, reasonably adjusted to take into account the effect of inflation -- a cost-of-living increase, as it were.

The door opened and Jim Price, the accomplished trumpet and trombone player, who will -- with the tempestuous Bobby Keyes -- constitute the horn section for this tour, walked out, shaking his head dejectedly. I have similar luck, and when I leave I am glad to have hung on to what I earned in 1969.

Whatever was wrong with the 1969 tour--which ended, after all, in Altamont--Peter was determined would never happen again. Charges leveled at the Stones regarding high ticket prices and unprofessional behavior were to be addressed. This tour was bigger, better, and more prepared. The Rolling Stones now traveled with their own doctor, film crew, make-up man, bookkeeper, baggage handler, and several layers of security. Already the tour was garnering more media attention than the 1969 tour had. This may have been in part due to the efforts of Bob Gibson and Gary Stromberg, whose public relations firm (Gibson & Stromberg) was to David Horowitz's (of the 1969 tour) what Perrier and a little toot in the back room was to a two-martini lunch.

Jagger films himself being photographed

Gibson and Stromberg had offices in a small building in the middle of Sunset Strip. The doors were always open, and there was a sign above the entrance that said, "Two Press Officers -- No Waiting." Young, beautiful girls wandered in and out while Gibson and Stromberg were on the phone to Time, Life, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Saturday Review, all of which were planning major stories on the tour.

The Stones were now a bigger story than ever. "They are the last of the sixties," said Time magazine, which also noted that they "need publicity about as much as the Second World War." But something had happened since 1969, something to excite this much attention on the media's side, and no doubt that something had been Altamont. For at Altamont -- it was clear to see from the Maysles Brothers' film -- it could have been Mick who was attacked, or even killed.

Leroy

Patience Please 1972

"Lips"

This very real fact had given rise to massively stepped- up security. Guns -- not seen at all at the beginning of the 1969 tour and only surreptitiously (courtesy of John James) at the end -- were now everywhere. Astrid Lundstrom remembers asking the security man sitting in their hotel room if he would like a cup of tea, which he accepted. When she returned she found him screwing a silencer onto his gun in front of their wide-eyed 10-year-old son, Stephen. When I arrived at Mick and Keith's house in the hills I am eyed suspiciously by Leroy, whose waistband bulged mysteriously.

But Peter Rudge, harried and intent, was determined that any violence, never overtly mentioned, would never materialize. (And it never did, though threats of violence were common and, much later in the tour, there was even a bombing. Still, none of this ever intruded upon the Stones. Peter even met with the Hell's Angels to try to soothe their still-angry feelings.) Wherever the Stones went, security was double- and triple-checked. Every member of the cast and crew was issued a red laminated-plastic identification badge with his or her photograph on it, the letters "S.T.P" above, and Peter Rudge's signature below. Even the Stones wear these, posing patiently for Polaroids I take of them.

S.T.P The "Stones Touring Party" (Backstage badges for tour)

But despite the months of planning, on the day of the first show in Vancouver, The Rolling Stones' tongue-emblazoned plane was stuck on the ground, because the necessary flight plan has apparently not been filed. Everyone is in a panic. Alan Dunn, who oversaw these things, was talking with the pilot, trying to find a solution. The excitable Marshall Chess, president of the new Rolling Stone Records, was totally engulfed by the momentum of the tour-about-to-happen, and began shouting, "Where's a telephone? Get me Trudeau on the phone. Immediately." With an unquestioning belief in the sanctity of our rock 'n' roll mission, Marshall attempted to track down the Prime Minister of Canada to get special clearance for The Rolling Stones to enter Canadian airspace.

Marshall failed, and instead the jet landed at an airport near the Canadian border. A string of limousines drove out onto the tarmac to greet us. Shortly, The Rolling Stones' Tour Party was racing along empty Canadian freeways on its way to the opening show.

By 1972 there were a lot more photographers. Annie Leibovitz was covering for Rolling Stone, and Jim Marshall was taking pictures for Life. Ken Regan of Camera 5 was there on behalf of Newsweek and the wire services. I was covering for the Stones, but as an economy measure would be switched to the payroll of Saturday Review when Terry Southern showed up to write the article.

Annie Leibovitz.

Robert Frank boarding the "starship"

Terry Southern (of Candy fame) replaced William Burroughs (who, of course, had written Naked Lunch) and who had been originally scheduled to write the piece. Truman Capote came to replace Robert Greenfield for Rolling Stone. Robert, whose work seemed to me the best of the tour, had left, leveling charges of "Starfucker!" at Jann Wenner.

When Truman Capote arrived accompanied by Lee ("Princess") Radziwill (of Jackie Onassis' younger sister fame) and Peter Beard, as his photographer (later of his own and Cheryl Tiegs fame).

In addition, the tour travels with its own film crew, Robert Frank and Danny Seymour. Robert is also a photographer, whose book The Americans is based on his work crisscrossing the United States in 1955-1956, which was paid for by a Guggenheim Foundation grant. His work is phenomenal, and would have intimidated me immensely if I hadn't been so woefully ignorant. His photographs, in montage, had made up the album cover for Exile on Main Street. Robert is now also making movies.

Danny is his sound-man/assistant, and looks the quintessential Greenwich Village-dwelling filmmaker: gaunt, with long black hair sticking out from under a beret. There seemed to be universal liking and respect for Robert, who had more access to The Rolling Stones (for a cameraman) than I had ever seen before.

Drink

Lee Radziwill and Mick Truman Capote

Keith Richards and Terry Southern bagging.

The number of cameras, recorders, and writers surrounding the Stones lent an almost campaign-like quality to the tour. In fact, the Stones were crisscrossing the United States during the U.S. 1972 Presidential campaign. While Nixon sat in the White House giving interviews and acting Presidential, George McGovern was hopping all over the country. Ken Regan, who supplied Time and Newsweek, among others, with a lot of their photography, jumped back and forth -- spending one week with McGovern campaign, and the next one with the Stones. The parallel did not go unremarked, but it is Robert Frank, with his journalist's flair for seeing what is around him, who notes the essential difference. He says, perplexed, "I have never seen anything like this. Everything is always pointed inward here. They travel everywhere, but they never look outside."

It's true. Traveling with the Stones, the expectation was that everything would come to you. In the morning, the doctor arrived with the day's supply of vitamins. Transportation was always provided. Every person in the tour had been assigned numbers for their baggage, which would then be waiting in their assigned hotel rooms. With the access-providing S.T.P. badges, tour members roamed through hallways that were closed to the public. While George McGovern was trying to establish "name recognition," The Rolling Stones were already -- remember Time magazine's description -- "as famous as the Second World War."

As for the showmanship of it all, the Stones were as great as ever, strutting out in front of one sold-out amphitheater after another, bringing the crowds to their feet, leaving them yelling and dancing, living up to -- in city after city -- their opening accolade, "the greatest rock and roll band in the world."

And it is always a gas, even as the backstage started to resemble a snippet from the "People" section of the newsweeklies to leave the backstage and go out in front. There, you'd hear the huge audiences buzzing in anticipation, hear the roar that greeted the Stones as they come running forth -- Jagger parading, the familiar tunes blasting from their amplifiers. Chip Monck's lights reflected from a huge mirror that got transported from city to city, illuminating the band simultaneously from front and back, so that it was as if searchlights were beamed into the sky and reflected back to find the Stones, somehow reminiscent of the Nuremberg rallies.

As in 1969, the crowds left their seats and were jamming the aisles, their eyes fixed on Jagger and the Stones, all of them wanting to be blown away, wanting the band to take hold of their minds and bodies and deliver rock and roll oblivion, that essential experience from the sixties: The Rolling Stones.

They delivered. That's what they got paid for.

When Terry Southern joined the tour, he strode backstage, the very figure of debauchery, with his hair shaggy, his eyes red, his stomach protruding, and his arms outstretched. "Keith," he yelled, grinning. Keith leapt up and, with that special affection he seems to hold for some, strode forward; the two embraced.

"How ya doing, baby?" asked Terry.

In New Orleans, the rock and roll blowout that Terry came to see (not so much to see as to be, really) caught up with him. A little too loose, while edging by one of Louisiana's Finest on his way onto the stage, Terry stumbled -- and an assortment of rolling papers, pills, and poppers poured out of his shirt pocket. Terry scrambled to pick them up and jam them into his pocket. This was deemed to be too much by the powers that be at S.T.P., who had plenty of problems without Terry's, and did not wish to deal with any drug arrests in the American South. Terry was told he was off the tour, and as I was working for Saturday Review, I was told that I would go as well.

The next morning in the humid sun of New Orleans, Terry Southern and novelist Richard Elman sat on the roof of the white-pillared hotel and, the real world intruding, discussed alimony payments. Terry was subdued, with his imminent exile from the tour impending. But he was to be forgiven; it is hard to bust a friend of Keith's for loose behavior. Still, the message was heard: get down to business, or be gone.

When Truman Capote and his entourage showed up in Dallas (the town that sells postcards of the Texas School Book Depository with little x's marking "The Window," "First Shot," and "Second Shot"), his arrival was awaited with some apprehension. What did Capote have to do with rock and roll? What did Princess Lee Radziwill have to do with rock and roll? What did Peter Beard, who was preparing a book depicting the slaughtering of alligators in Africa, have to do with rock and roll? Capote had a notoriously wicked sense of humor. Could he be trusted? What was Capote doing writing for Rolling Stone? What did all this have to do with rock and roll?

The Washington, D.C. concert took place at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium.

The preoccupation with security, with protecting the "principals," especially in the huge coliseums, was still very much on everyone's mind. This stage was built exceptionally high, creating a problem that would soon be common in festival events: The fans down in front -- those who had waited the longest and cared the most, got pressured by those who were behind them, until they were forced against the front of the stage, which is higher than their sight-lines. From there, they could see nothing. Crushed and overwhelmed, some faint -- and their bodies are passed overhead, to be carried out by security. In Washington, occasional smoke bombs come hurtling from the rafters; these are quickly doused by watchful stagehands.

"Honey, it's no rock 'n' roll show," sang Mick, prancing across the image of a Chinese dragon breathing fire that was painted on the stage floor.

Washington, D.C. was the last show I would see in the '72 tour. After Terry Southern departed, I left as well. Returning to California, I would read about Keith taking a swing at a photographer who refused to stop taking pictures; how the Stones would be jailed; and how the mayor of Boston would effect their release so they could play the sold-out show at the Boston Garden. "I don't want to be responsible for any riots," the mayor announced.

Mick Jagger would celebrate his twenty-ninth birthday at Madison Square Garden, in front of twenty-thousand people. Later, on the roof of the St. Regis, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street, a celebratory party was thrown, the guest list for which read like the "Best of People": Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Count Basie, Dick Cavett, George Plimpton, Muddy Waters, Lee Radziwill, Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. The party marked the departure of Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones from the annals of pop stardom into the peculiar realm of the international celebrity, like Liz and Dick (like Mick and Bianca). What did all this have to do with rock and roll?

Terry Southern published his article, which was a rambling attempt to marvel at the faroutness of it all. Robert Greenfield went home to write his book with care and concern. Truman Capote, who had everyone so worried, did not deign to write anything. "There was nothing to write about," said Truman, catty little fellow. "It was boring."

In the aftermath of the '72 tour and the blowout in Madison Square Garden, Jo Bergman, who had stood by The Rolling Stones since the days of the attic office in London, left. She feared she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Jo Bergman, Peter Rudge, "Stress" 1972

Keith Richards with Jack and Coors, 1972

"In 1969 it was just us," she said. "Who was there? Mick, Keith, Bill, and Charlie. Mick Taylor. Astrid. You, me, and Stanley. Sam Cutler. Stu. Ronnie Schneider. Chip. Just thirteen people. By 1972, Keith was packing a gun, and the drug dealers were following us from town to town." Jo retreated to the Isle of Man. She was reacting to what she had seen around her, and was fearful that rock and roll might kill her, too. Show Business.

In 1972, The Rolling Stones were big business, and getting bigger. Even as early as 1984, a Rolling Stones tour was a sponsored, packaged event that would include merchandising rights, sales of programs, a major theatrical motion picture release, a home-cassette sale, box-office receipts, and -- just like in the good old days -- it would promote the latest record. The Rolling Stones ("the last of the sixties") would earn a reported $1,397,000 for each show. In 2007, the Bigger Bang tour ("over 4,500,000 tickets sold, for 147 concerts, in 118 cities and 32 countries, over a period of 735 days") grossed over $558 million. In 2009, the Stones play a free concert in Rio in front of a reported 2,000,000 people, the Devils.

Starship

"I know. It's only rock 'n' roll," sings Mick. "But I like it."

Mick Jagger 1972
24. True Believer

John Lennon

NEW YORK CITY, 1972

While Mick and the Stones are blowing them away in Madison Square Garden, John Lennon was living in the West Village, preoccupied by the considerable difficulties he was having with U.S. immigration. Though all the official objections to his staying in the United States center on his arrest for possession of cannabis in London in 1968, there were those of us who suspected the true reasons might be different. John's trouble with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service seemed to start about the same time John decided that his life as a human being might encompass both the political and the entertainment worlds.

"Her (Yoko's) reason was peace. I'd been singing about

love, which I guess was another word for peace."

\-- John Lennon

LONDON, JULY 1969

The party thrown to celebrate the release of "Give Peace a Chance" was held in the Chelsea Town Hall on King's Road. The event was an Apple promotion to introduce John and Yoko's new song to the press. Flowers filled the room; posters proclaiming "Peace" and "Love" hung on the walls. On the stage in front of the room was the "Plastic Ono Band," which was quite literally made of plastic: standing cylinders and cubes. The centerpiece of this sculpture was a collage of black and white photos of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe, and many others.

Ringo was there, and Derek Taylor was there. Paul didn't make it, nor did John and Yoko, since they'd been in a car accident in Scotland the week before. Despite the obvious plea made by both the song and the posters, the party was not dissimilar, on the surface, from the one that had been held atop London's Post Office Tower to kick off Mary Hopkin's single "Those Were the Days." Both had open bars.

Over and over, the words "All we are saying is give peace a chance " echoed through the room. People stood randomly scattered, drinks in hand, as if at a giant cocktail party. To me, with my American fervor, there was something depressing about a message of hope received in this manner, and so, after drinking too much myself, I walked through the hall, encouraging people to form themselves into a line (like the snake at an American high school dance). Before long, we were wandering through the hall singing along with the record. Richard DiLello would write about the snake, "it coiled . . . back and forth, mindless and dazed by its own locomotion... Mercifully the event called itself off by eight o'clock." So much for my efforts.

Indeed, the event seemed indigestible to most of the crowd, which consisted mostly of the English press, a cynical group, and the staff at Apple, who were loyal employees. Wasn't war and peace an American problem, over the sea and a long way away? What did The Beatles have to do with it (for they were still together then)? And John Lennon was a Beatle -- some said, the leader of the group. Wouldn't it be better if The Beatles just stayed out of the whole thing?

"Listen," said John, "when they ask next time, we're gonna say we don't like that war (Vietnam), and we think they should get right out."

Give Peace a Chance

"The continual awareness of what was going on made me feel ashamed. I burst out because . . . it was just too much for me," he told Rolling Stone. "I thought it was about time we just fucking spoke about it [revolution], just like I thought it was about time we stopped not answering about the Vietnamese war."

John and Yoko started a media blitz to promote peace. For John, it was simply doing what had worked so well for The Beatles. They held the Bed-In at the Amsterdam Hilton and invited the press in to interview them. Film taken at the time showed them leaning back against a wall in their pajamas, speaking quietly to each other -- while the room was filled with inquiring journalists. "Christ!" Lennon would later sing, "You know it ain't easy."

For their Christmas message, they released a poster, "War Is Over (If You Want It)." These posters were plastered all around the world. They rented billboards on the Champs Elysées in Paris, on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, in Times Square in New York, in Piccadilly Circus, London, and the center of Tokyo, Japan. The poster was carried as far as the border between Hong Kong and Red China.

The world press, although entirely cynical, nevertheless ran the stories and interviews. Like The Beatles before them, John and Yoko prepared to invade America, to carry their message to the heart of the U.S. It was then that John Lennon's visa was denied. The Ono / Lennons kept at it, and they flew to Canada and visited Prime Minister Trudeau instead.

But John Lennon came to love New York and America; in 1971, he and Yoko decided to move there. The war in Vietnam still raged. Richard Nixon, who had been elected on a promise to get the United States out of Vietnam, bombed Cambodia instead. In reaction, demonstrators gathered outside the White House. The song they sang was "Give Peace a Chance." Richard Nixon personally ordered government officials to "harass [Lennon| and 'kick him out of America.'"7 In the kind of language that would later become all too familiar to Americans, the Internal Security Subcommittee released a memo headed "John Lennon." It declared, "If Lennon's visa was terminated it would be a strategy counter-measure." John Lennon, lacking his own government bureaucracy, struck back through song: "No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky Dick's gonna mother-hubbard soft-soap me . . ." Senator Thurmond wrote to Attorney General John Mitchell, "this appears to me to be an important matter, and I think it would be well for it to be considered at the highest level as I can see many headaches might be avoided if the appropriate action were taken in time."

John Lennon sang, "I'm sick and tired of hearing things from up-tight, shortsighted, narrow-minded hypocritics. All I want is some truth. Just gimme some truth." In February of 1973, the Vietnam War \-- the longest war in American history up to that point -- was drawing to an end. More than any war before it (except the Civil War), it confused and divided the American people; it forced many to disavow their government and become cynical about its intentions. It led to the beatings in Chicago, and the killings at Kent State. The war's end was accelerated by the concerted effort of a broad coalition of Americans. Discounting this, Richard Nixon attempted to take full credit: "We finally achieved a peace with honor," he said. "I know it gags some of you to write that phrase." From the podium Nixon initiated an attack against any and every American who had opposed the war, revealing once again his almost pathological insecurity about the "so-called better people in the media and in the intellectual circles." They were the problem, complained Nixon. Most Americans supported the war, "despite the fact that they were hammered night after night, day after day, with the fact that this was an immoral war."

"What really aroused his ire," reported Time (February 12, 1973), "was a question on whether recent calls for a healing of the nation's wounds might lead to an amnesty for draft resisters. Nixon glowered, gripped both sides of the lectern and hunched low over the microphone. 'Well,' he says, 'it takes two to heal wounds.'" Nixon, apparently, is not going to be one of them. 'It is a rule of life, we all have to pay for our mistakes. Those who served paid their price. Those who deserted must pay their price, and the price is not a junket in the Peace Corps or something like that.'"

The same issue of Time that reported this recounted Nixon's electoral triumph, and speculated on the nature of Nixon's second term, also carried an article on the Watergate break-in--which had taken place the previous June. In it, Judge John Sirica was quoted remarking, "I hope the Senate gets to the bottom of this case."

In an interview at the White House, Nixon, with his usual forthright honesty, announced, "My political enemies don't get under my skin at all. You can't be in this business if you have thin skin."

John Lennon sang:

"Instant karma's gonna get you. Gonna look you right in the face. Better get yourself together, darling, Join the human race."

John

7 John Lennon: One Day at a Time, by Anthony Fawcett. New York: Grove Press, 1976
25. Love Reign O'er Me

Quadrophenia: Battersea Power Station

LOS ANGELES, 1973

The billboard over the Sunset Strip near Doheny showed Tom Wilkes and his new partner, Craig Braun -- arms interlinked, eyes bulging, both wearing T-shirts on which was an illustration of a bulldog with a cartoon bubble emanating from its head, a light bulb in its center glowing. There were no words on this billboard, nothing to explain to the general public what they were meant to glean from this ad.

Such was the hip, low-key approach to the record-packaging business in the early 1970s. It wasn't an ad for a record, it was an ad for record packagers. Wilkes and Braun, the company name, was to combine the talents of Tom Wilkes, who for many years had been the art director for A&M Records, with the business acumen of Craig Braun, who came out of New York. Packaging was part of rock and roll now, and Tom and Craig meant to enter their business at the top. Hence the billboard. I had met Tom when he was at A&M, and he called me in after his new company launched. We'd often spoken of working together, and this was one of our first opportunities. In the type of hushed tone that might accompany the signing of a major star to a new movie, Tom intimated that Wilkes and Braun were on to something big, very big -- in fact, a bigger and better package than had ever been done before. He wanted me to be involved, but he couldn't tell me anything about it yet.

Tom was a big, blond fellow who might easily have been mistaken for Grizzly Adams. His slap on the back could send you reeling. It was strange to see this robust guy bent over a watercolor pad, struggling with the intractability of his paint, helplessly swearing as the delicate colors refused to stay put.

The "big package," it turned out, was the Ode Records production of Tommy. Indeed, as a product it was a bit like the rock equivalent of Ben Hur, with an all-star cast. The original Tommy, a brainchild of Pete Townshend and The Who, was the first self-proclaimed rock opera. It was the Who's first million-seller in America, and they successfully toured the country with Tommy. The most prominent performance was at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, which netted them a vast amount of media coverage. In rock terms Tommy was almost as acclaimed as Sgt. Pepper.

The combination of Lou Adler (of Carole King and Ode Records fame) and Lou Reizner, producer, resulted in the decision to re-record Tommy with the London Symphony Orchestra and an all-star cast. "Starring" were, among others, Ringo Starr, Rod Stewart, Richie Havens, Stevie Winwood, Richard Harris, and, of course, Pete Townshend and The Who.

"Don't tell anybody, Ethan," said Tom. "Here's the idea: Craig is going to line up a selection of the very best illustrators in New York. They're going to produce these fantastic drawings of pinball machines in a variety of bizarre settings. You and I will go to England -- you know studios there, right?-- and we'll photograph Ringo and Rod Stewart and everybody, and then we'll strip their faces into the drawings."

Tom was excited. I was excited. But somebody -- Lou Adler, one presumes -- didn't have any intention of flying Tom and me and who knows who else to London to sit and wait for Rod Stewart to show up.

Big Bear Lake, California

In a feat of nimble creativity, Tom flipped the entire concept: the illustrators in New York would deal with the celebrities. ""We'll get the pinball machine here, take it around California. If it made somewhat less sense, what did it matter?

So the search began for the most absolutely cherry pinball machine; it had to have wooden legs. It was finally discovered in a remote corner of the San Fernando Valley.

An alleyway in downtown San Francisco

We proceeded to drive the length of California -- unloading the machine, bolting its legs back on, and dragging it into redwoods, out onto beaches, and into urban alleys.

It was a somewhat surreal undertaking, as we raced through Tom's locations in Southern California, wiring stuffed buzzards on weathered tree trunks at Big Bear Lake, tossing stuffed alligators into fire-ravaged canyons in Ojai, until finally, crisscrossing Southern California, we arrived at a turkey farm out in the middle of some God-forsaken spot and unloaded our star pinball machine. We placed it in front of a field full of turkeys, and then leapt on the back of the pickup, my hand clutching the shutter release as Tom and I shouted "Higher! Higher!" in imitation of Sly Stone singing before the five hundred thousand at Woodstock while all the turkeys answered us, "Gobble-gobble-gobble" -- their heads erect, paying strict attention.

Temecula, California "Higher"

The finished package drew a lot of attention. Tom and Craig submitted it to every design and art director's show, and it won a lot of awards, including the Grammy for best album package that year. "You did that?" asked Pete Townshend when I met with him in England. "Do you know what it costs just to produce the package? Nineteen and six, each one" (roughly two dollars and forty cents in those days). Townshend tossed his head in disgust. Used to be able to produce the whole record for a unit cost less than that, he implied. What had it all come to?

Pete told me this when I was in England to work with him on a cover for Quadrophenia, The Who's latest work, and the result of more than two years of Townshend's efforts. Townshend had called me in L.A. where I was living in one of those small canyon homes -- sampling Southern California, trying to make sense of it.

Quadrophenia, Townshend explained, was another rock opera. It told the story of Jimmy, an adolescent who suffered the severe effects of having four conflicting personalities ("twice schizophrenic," hence "quadrophenia"). Pete had conceived that each member of The Who -- a quartet -- would stand for one-quarter of Jimmy's personality.

Quadrophenia

Each aspect of the personality was represented by a different musical signature, which was introduced and kept separate until the climax of the opera where, as Jimmy was symbolically drowned and reborn, the four musical signatures were revived and woven into one. It was an ambitious and impressive work. Extensive thought and anticipation had gone into the marketing of Quadrophenia, which also played off the word "quadraphonic" (four-channel) as it related to sound, and was being touted to replace stereo as the audio system of choice. In fact, Quadrophenia would be the first major pop record to be released in quadraphonic sound.

The record needed a cover, and maybe something more. There was urgency attached to the project for, as ever, the record had been expected for some time. Townshend was still mixing, and MCA Records, in America, wanted an album in hand in time for a Christmas release.

So once again I jumped into the cycle that was the progression of the record biz; first, the artists wrote and recorded the music, then they mixed it, then they looked for a cover, then they toured.

It was not a strange idea to also produce a book. Double-record sets, as Quadrophenia was to be, often included something additional, if only an expanded lyric sheet. The original Tommy had included one, and the re-recording of Tommy also had an insert. An opera, even a rock opera, seemed to require a libretto.

As much as Quadrophenia was about the tangled psyche of its main character, it was also about "mods" and "rockers" and a dimly understood (by Americans) era in England, from whose roots grew a lot of English identity. That, in turn, had been exported to the United States as part of the British Invasion. (As I was to learn, what Americans thought of as "mod" -- Brian Jones and Edwardian jackets -- was not correct at all.) "Mods" were peculiarly English, whereas "rockers" were English copies of American juvenile delinquents from the 1950s -- leather-jacketed, with jellyroll hairdos and a lot of attitude (the young John Lennon was one example). Rockers were hybrids of Elvis Presley and James Dean, copied and reproduced as only the English can when they become enthusiasts.

But, as when my sister and I walked through Piccadilly Circus looking for the psychedelic explosion -- only to find the procession of pubs and theaters -- I discovered that nothing much subtler than the Industrial Revolution really changes the face of England, and mod was something that lived and thrived in the same back streets of row houses and cafes (rhymes with "laughs") to be found in Battersea in 1973 . . . which is when Quadrophenia was shot.

English breakfast

In 1973 The Who were building a studio in Battersea, over the bridge from Chelsea and the King's Road (one mecca of "Swinging London"). Battersea was a short distance from London's East End, near the docks, bombed into rubble during the war, and home of the dropped "h" -- "'Ere's to 'im, mates."

Very quickly, I became submerged in stylistic details -- some directly mod, others just representative of the England of the period, everything that I hadn't photographed earlier when it was all The Beatles and pictures of Mick Jagger -- plates of chips, and chips and eggs, and chips and beans, and Spam and chips. I recalled my early travels in the Midlands and being startled to see a man stuffing huge French fries (chips) between slices of white bread. They called it a "putty sandwich."

Educated and assisted by Richard Barnes -- who had been brought into the project by Pete -- I began the process of finding and restoring the correct scooter, assembling an accurate period wardrobe, casting the kids who were to play the characters. They were all locals from the East End (with the exception of Townshend's younger brother, who had to have his shoulder-length hair shorn; and a professional female model who bore a marked resemblance to Queen Elizabeth, whom I cast as Jimmy's mum).

Jimmy with his Mum and Dad

Chad, who played Jimmy, was our star. In reality, he appeared to be the essential East End tough. By age twenty, his wife had already left him, and he was living in his parents' council flat. He had the word "LOVE" tattooed across the fingers of one hand and "HATE" across the other. Chad didn't tell me he was in trouble with the law until one day at the end of a month of shooting, when exhaustion had me in its grip, and the details and production problems associated with creating a forty-page book were at their peak. ("I thought you said it would be eighteen pages, Ethan?" remarked Pete later. It just grew. Who knew?)

I was standing on top of a ladder at six in the morning, taking the only photograph that included The Who in the entire book, when one of group's managers arrived and handed me a piece of paper. "That okay?" he asked. "For what?" I responded.

"It's the paper for the book."

"Yeah, seems all right."

"Good, I just ordered six trainloads of it."

As the deadline pressed ever tighter, I worried that the production problems regarding the book would slow the release of the long-awaited record. Then Chad came up to me and announced that he couldn't shoot the next day because he had to go to court.

"Court? Why?" I asked.

"I stole a bus," explained Chad.

"You did what?"

"Stole a bus."

Chad had seen a London double-decker just sitting there one day, so he thought he'd take it for a spin. He was caught and arrested. "Could they put you in jail for this, Chad?"

"S'pose so," replied Chad.

Chad was the star of our book, only half of which had been shot by then. Chad in jail would have been the end of the project.

Chad with Scooter

I accompanied him to court, and sat there nervously, listening to the judge sentence a man to two weeks in jail for striking a ticket salesman. When called, Chad did not challenge the facts. He just asked that he be given a second chance.

"What do you do now?" asked the judge.

"I'm a male model," replied Chad.

"Excuse me?" exclaimed the judge.

"I work for the pop group the 'Oo," (rhymes with "moo") proclaimed Chad in a proud voice, appearing to feel for--perhaps for the first time in his life-- some sense of impunity, as if the reputation of The Who was likely to protect him.

"Is this true?" the judge asked me, and I affirmed that it was.

Jimmy wrecks his scooter.

Chad and his dream of naked ladies. Inspired by Pete.

I explained that Chad was essential. So Chad was released, and we left for Cornwall to shoot the final sections of the book, wherein Chad had to jump, fully clothed, off the side of a boat into the ocean for the drowning sequence. This he did, in a blue suit and parka, the motor-driven Nikon firing four frames a second. I went to fish out a Chad who was shivering and adamantly refusing to go back in the water so I could get a shot of him fully submerged. Only later, when we went to do the shot in two feet of water in the small river running by Townshend's country home – and Chad once again demonstrated the same reluctance -- did he reveal that he could not swim at all.

Drowning Chad.

Resurrection.

In the end, the book was finished. I lost twenty pounds, from day after day of waking up at four in the morning to get an early start, producing and shooting all day arriving at the printer's at night, working on prints until midnight, and then going back and doing it all over again. Quite by chance, as I was boarding the plane to return to L.A., I saw Pete, who was carrying with him boxes of tape -- the prized masters for Quadrophenia. I was too tired to say much of anything, but upgraded my ticket to first-class so we could talk. I slept most of the way to Los Angeles.

At customs, the people from MCA Records met Pete. The customs man reached for the tapes under Pete's arm; Townshend jerked them back, and started stamping his boots at the official's feet.

"Not leaving my hands, mate. Not for a second." Nice, what you can get away with if you're famous.

"Ethan!" I heard a voice, and turned. It was Anthony Fawcett, who had been John and Yoko's assistant at Apple when I was there, and had stayed with them through their Peace Initiative, and their move to New York -- almost, in fact, until John suddenly left for Los Angeles in 1973.

Anthony seemed intrigued, and wanted to know what I had been doing. I was still just outside Customs, waiting for my connecting flight to San Francisco, sitting at a bar and staring into a beer, where the bubbles were taking on an unnatural sharpness. The time change and my exhaustion were closing in on me.

"Stay out of show business," I told Anthony, who had not asked. "Just don't get near it. It'll chew you up."

I got back to San Francisco early that evening, and my father told me, "You look good." I knew it was far from true.

Soon I took a plane into the heartland of the United States, joining friends who were crossing America in a battered 1962 Buick -- their possessions filling every spare nook, the dog's nose hanging out the open window. We drove through blizzards in a deserted Yellowstone, fished for trout by yellowing aspens in the Wyoming Rockies, and watched farmers paint the word "cow" in red on the sides of their cattle as the deer season opened. The sounds of rifle shots echoed through the hills, as the newspapers ran stories about meat shortages.

Elk crossing in a snowstorm. Yellowstone empty. Photo by Gerard.

We swooped over the Continental Divide with Beethoven on the tape deck, down into the old cow towns. Bob Dylan's voice bounced off the stratosphere, late at night, way out in the Midwest: Knocking on Heaven's Door. We stopped in Fargo, North Dakota, to visit four generations of Gerard's family who were all still living in the same town, where the kids still got married at twenty and had kids of their own. (It seemed like a very far-away world to me, and I was sad about that.) Then it was up into Canada -- east, and then south toward New York. And smack into the height of the autumn's New England blaze, with the rigors of rock and roll diminishing day the day.

America. Photo by Gerard.
26. Don't Get Fooled Again

The Berkshires

We don't get fooled again. \-- Pete Townshend

In a huge valley in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, the changing leaves crept over one ridge line to slowly transform the entire valley. On television, Richard Nixon continually affirmed his innocence while we sat around and guffawed. It was the age of Watergate and Richard Nixon -- puzzling, arrogant, insecure -- was becoming increasingly implicated in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in.

With the malicious glee of an Ebenezer Scrooge, I watched the unraveling of the Nixon Presidency, noticing very early on Nixon's incredible mistake of pitting his word and his Presidency against the entire American political system, legislative and judicial -- thinking to myself, now he's done it: it's the system or him. On television a series of witnesses were brought before the Senate Committee headed by Sam Ervin, each of them unique studies in the psychology of Washington and the Nixon White House: Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Dean. . . the list went on. For all its excitement, it was a complicated game of "he said, she said" between the Executive and the Legislative branches, and there was little hope of real resolution until a White House aide -Alexander Butterfield -revealed that Richard Nixon recorded all the conversations in the Oval Office.

Nixon

There was no better place to be that year than the East Coast, following the day-by-day revelations reported in depth by The New York Times, which dutifully carried transcripts of entire press conferences. Along with my friends, I sent off an angry telegram upon the firing of Archibald Cox, awaited with anticipation the formation of the Senate Special Investigating Committee headed by Sam Ervin, and sat glued to the television throughout the proceedings: this was a drama the likes of which the modern nation had never witnessed.

This was not political machinations in a distant, academic sense. The Vietnam war still raged and Americans were still dying. It was part of Nixon's dilemma, part of America's ongoing dilemma, part of every citizen's dilemma and it was tearing America apart. What to do with this war where over 50,000 Americans would be killed?

One can debate when the culture wars began (and we will). Some people point to Reagan and the Free Speech Movement, but Nixon's silent majority speech on November 3rd, 1969 was unquestionably one pivotal moment. The American government, which got us into the war, could not get us out. They chose to blame the people in the United States who were against the war for that problem, which was a problem of the government's making, not of the people. "I ask for your support," Richard Nixon said to the television audience. Against whom? Against Americans who disagreed with him.

Richard Nixon, who never even had a remote inclination to pardon those who had protested the war, was now pinned and wriggling on the Watergate break-in. It was a triumph for America, I felt, though it was opaque to the rest of the world.

Me, 1973

That year in the East, traveling back and forth from the Catskills and the Berkshires to Manhattan, I had written, with another filmmaker, a treatment for a television special of Quadrophenia, employing a performance by The Who and a narrative that would have told the story of Jimmy. I flew to England to pitch the project to Pete Townshend.

A car drove me to Townshend's house overlooking the Thames near Eel Pie Island. Pete and his wife, Karen, sat quietly as I started my pitch. The house was old, and the ceilings were low. From the middle of the ceiling in the small front room hung a metal chandelier. I was wound up, walking and talking, when I ran into the chandelier. Bam! I kept moving. Talking, selling. Bam! I hit the chandelier again, and then again. Finally I knocked it completely out of the ceiling, and it crashed to the floor. "That's okay," said Pete, very kindly. "We've been meaning to have that removed."

To my knowledge the television presentation of Quadrophenia would have been the first attempt to bring a cinematic use of rock music to television, and it was hopelessly ahead of its time. Though Townshend gave us the rights to Quadrophenia, they were contingent upon our ability to line up a prime-time broadcast, something that ultimately proved impossible despite a sustained interest by ABC. I had no idea the difficulty of what we were being asked to accomplish. At the time it felt like a great success even to be given a chance.

When it fell through, I returned to San Francisco, and I sat on the edge of the bed with my father; we watched as Nixon resigned. I felt terrible for my dad since he -- like so many others -- had stood by Nixon, defending him throughout his endless series of lies. My father had voted for him, supported him, and railed against all who would speak against him, citing "hard political realities" and explaining that Kennedy, Johnson, and even Roosevelt had been as bad -- or worse.

But I judged Nixon. As I saw it, his paranoia and arrogance had dragged the country my father loved through the mud -- until the once-unquestionable virtue of loyalty to the President became meaningless since this President seemed to place his personal, political survival above the law. What a thing it must have been for my father to accept. All his life, he had believed in America; he had kept the faith. I don't think Richard Nixon's name ever came up again.

Not that rock and roll really had anything to do with this anymore -- except that earlier, back when people were on the streets, they seemed to get the idea that they could actually do something if they set their minds to it. At least in this one moment, when it was crucially important, they had not forgotten that. The people's government had held.
27. Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It?

Dave Mason

HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA, 1975

Welcome to the Hotel California. Such a lovely place.

\-- Don Henley, Glenn Frey, and Don Felder

In the corners of the large all-white room ferns cascaded from pots on pedestals. Sandblasted wood provided background for gleaming photographs of Japanese trucks. I was in an advertising studio in the center of Los Angeles's film district. Tom Snow -- a graduate of Princeton University -- repeatedly climbed four rungs up a ladder and then jumped the few feet to the studio floor. Behind him hung a sixteen by twenty foot painted backdrop of an urban skyline, upside down, so that, when the actual photo was itself turned upside down, Tom appeared to be falling earthward from a great height, head first. The occasion for this apparent suicide attempt was the album cover session for Tom's first record, titled Taking It All in Stride.

Tom Snow

Tom Snow, the art director, Tom's career manager, the personal assistants --- all gathered around the Polaroid of Snow's cover and reveled in the effect, talking about how the cover would stop customers in the aisles, leap off the rack at them. The emphasis was on startling, and people got pepped up and snapped their fingers and talked about -- wow -- impact. The once-passionate certainties ("All you need is love"), the cries for "further," the huge spiritual and political ambitions, had faded, replaced by variously guised concerns about how and why we had all gone wrong. About "us," Jackson Browne sang: "Some of them were dreamers and some of them were fools. . . And for some of them it was only the moment that mattered." We were being busted for hedonism, an accusatory finger difficult to dismiss.

In 1972, Don Henley and Glenn Frey of the Eagles recorded their first album, Desperado, a portrait of the American Wild West -- of gunfights and broken love, of youthful dreams and disillusionment, with the clear implication that we had inherited the same spirit as these romantic outlaws. Then, just one album before they, too, broke up, the Eagles wrote Hotel California, which was about those of us in the new Wild West, circa 1975.

With an uncanny facility to tantalize and moralize at the same time, Frey and Henley described the insatiable appetites that drew so many of us into one kind of trouble or another. "What kind of love have you got?" they asked of a favorite character of theirs, a young woman just starting to worry about her age. "A room full of noise and dangerous boys still make you thirsty and hot." Theirs was a world filled with Mercedes-Benzes and lithe, tanned California bodies wired to the gills on cocaine. "Life in the fast lane," they sang, "surely make you lose your mind." And they stated a concern that was beginning to be troublesome: "You're afraid it's all been wasted time."

The Eagles

If the legacy of the sixties and its psychedelics looked to be that Timothy Leary's "tune in, turn on, drop out" had turned into "freak out, fuck up, crawl back," now people seemed to be determined not to be caught out again. There was a new drug in town to keep everybody tight, wired, and alert. The drug reflected a new attitude: everyone was going to take care of business -- and taking care of business, which was a phrase sometimes used to mean taking care of what mattered, had reverted to its narrower definition, which was making money. Cocaine was expensive.

By 1975 it seemed that there were as many Englishmen in Los Angeles as there had once been Americans in London. Even John Lennon had spent time in Los Angeles, though he was to wither on the vine there. Tales were reported of drunken nights with Harry Nilsson. Recording sessions with Phil Spector disintegrated into drunken stupors, with Spector running off to his house in the hills, guarded behind locked gates, rivaling Howard Hughes in his insanity.

Like many foreigners, these Englishmen often seemed fascinated by L.A. without, apparently, being troubled by its inexplicable taste (as Americans often are). John Kosh -- a friend and designer I had worked closely with in London, who had designed Let It Be and War Is Over and who was now an Art Director at a Los Angeles design firm specializing in "record packaging" -- was not only untroubled, but to the contrary was having a great time, having embarked upon a personal celebratory resurgence of the American fifties. It was apparent in his designs and in the 1950s cars he was buying. "Look at that," he would say, smiling and slapping the side of his '56 Buick. "Steel. Pure, solid steel." And you had to admire his enthusiasm. I tried to attach myself to it, but it was difficult for me to forget the images that the fifties spawned: Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe and, ultimately, Vietnam. It was a time when gasoline cost less than a quarter a gallon, and there was enough to power the several thousand pounds of metal that was every American's birthright. And gas would always be cheap and plentiful -- because, hey, who was gonna stop us? But if it was the mid-seventies and people were burnt out on the sixties, well that was one thing . . . yet what were we going to replace them with? The fifties? Really? It was difficult for me. Los Angeles didn't care. The palm trees -- some thick and hunkered down with dinosaur-like skin, some incredibly long and thin, with just a few fronds at the top -- stood sentinel. In Mexican restaurants I ate enchiladas rancheras washed down with pitchers of margaritas, and built up a little steam; I prepared to crank out photographs. For, as Rod Stewart might have sung, "Every record needs a cover, don't it?"

I leased a studio on Sunset Boulevard. It was a grand old building, with forty-foot ceilings and massive double doors. It had once been the garage for trolley cars, back when trolley cars had traveled up and down Sunset.

My assistant, Jim Shea (a refugee from Eastern winters), and I bought gallons of white paint, and rollers with eighteen-foot extension handles -- and set to work refurbishing. Then Jim and I opened the doors and waited to see what L.A. had to offer.

Prepping the L.A. Studio

She was naked. She was fat. Out in the middle of the desert dry lake she sat atop one of those high-handlebarred motorcycle hogs and scowled at camera. Tom Wilkes, the Art Director, and I spit and cackled. CBS had commissioned Tom to produce a cover for a group called Sweathog, and Tom had hardly had to pause before this image spilled into his brain. The rest was just production, so that in a short time we found ourselves confronted with I-can't-rememberwhat-her-name-was. She was not the least bit flustered by our cackling, nor put off by the exaggerated deference Tom used when speaking to her, before turning toward me and rolling his eyes back into his head. She came up to me, slurping fries and a Coke, and proclaimed, "Fat women are the best, Mr. Photographer. You should try me."

Sweathog

With John Kosh, on the very same lake bed, at a later date, I found myself faced with the much lither figure of Pamela: stripped to the waist, her hair piled on top of her head in a 50s 'do, wing-tipped sunglasses shading her eyes. Pamela modeled for us in a series of cheesecake poses, standing between a bright-red El Dorado and the Kosh's green-and-white '56 Buick. A single cloud floated in the desert sky.

Pamela

When Kosh arrived in Los Angeles, the company he worked hired a red London double-decker bus and invited representatives from all the record company art departments to attend. They toured the Los Angeles area, drinking beer and wine: young people now playing a traditional game. Packagers, they were in the supply chain of the record business. Record companies housed art departments by this time, some with their own photo departments. Theirs was a world of purchase orders, requisition forms, and accountability to heads of other departments. Throughout Los Angeles other freelance art directors and photographers had set up their own studios. Ours was a world of high overhead, uncertain futures, and a need for self-promotion. We were all in competition with each other, the old-fashioned way. I was inevitably part of the same chain. I was caught up in it, how could I not be? It was more difficult for me than I at first realized.

Still, every record needs a cover, don't it? Set up the camera, point, focus,

\--CLICK--

To the guard at the gate, I gave my name, and then I drove into the Malibu Colony and found Linda Ronstadt's white-shingled, green-shuttered new home. The windows facing the ocean were open, and the breeze blew through. Linda kept giggling in an embarrassed way, excited by her purchase. "It cost so much," she'd say. Then it was as if she'd realize where she was now living -- the girl who once posed with a pig, once sang with wonderful conviction, "If you give me weed, whites, and wine, then show me a sign, yeah, I'll be willing," and she'd giggle once more, a bit anxiously. Finally, seriously, she told me, "it's just not safe for me any more to get a house by myself alone, out on some hillside." She couldn't have been nicer, this daughter of a hardware store owner. Her new album, produced by Peter Asher, was called Prisoner in Disguise. She wanted to shoot as soon as possible, she told me, since her weight tended to balloon up and down. Now she was thin.

Prisoner in Disguise Back Cover

I listened to the record. The title song was slow, anguished. I thought about the title and about Linda. I thought about Linda as "America's Sweetheart." This brought to mind the image of a dozen long-stem American Beauty roses. Then I thought how, as this was show business, we might get the roses made out of neon. It seemed to evoke a lot of qualities; like the flashing sign at some Arizona roadside diner -- but a little empty, too, like a prisoner in disguise, since these weren't real roses, after all. ("You just keep thinking, Butch. That's what you're good at," said Sundance.)

So the session was postponed until I was able to find someone who could actually make the roses. This was L.A. however, and these sorts of request were legion. Somewhere in the San Fernando Valley such a person was found -- but, as with so many of these things, there was a snag (other than time; there is never enough time). You could bend the one-eighth inch tubing to represent the roses, but the amount of voltage necessary to energize the neon gas would be massive, dangerous to life and limb.

Undaunted, I proceeded, praying silently not to be the man who electrocuted Linda Ronstadt. Two weeks later, the roses were completed. They arrived at the studio, accompanied by their handlers; six rosebuds (we had trimmed the number from twelve), whose stems blossomed into a tangle of wires and transformers. These were surrounded by a glass cylinder to insulate Linda. And yet the handlers looked worried; Linda arrived. The handlers' anxiety must have transmitted itself to Linda, for when she was handed the roses, she stood there uncomfortably. To make matters worse, all the electricity needed to activate the neon gas crackled, reminiscent of scenes in old black-and-white sci-fi movies. The whole contraption started to take on the air of a sinister alien. In the end, it didn't work. The glass cylinder was too ungainly for Linda to hold comfortably, despite her best efforts. So I went on to shoot her without them -- in wide-shot and close-up.

Linda Ronstadt Prisoner In Disguise Cover

When I delivered the photographs, the record company judged that the session had been a failure, for there was no "pop" and no "zap. " The image would not demand attention in a crowded field. But to me they were low-key and subdued, as I had always intended. The company promised a reshoot, talked of "saving the cover." There was much moaning over the mess I had gotten them into until Linda and Peter saw the photographs, liked them, and the project went forward.

Still, the politics -- the surreptitious phone calls, the posturing, and particularly the lies -- were a new element that had suddenly arisen in the music business, at least for me, as competition replaced the idea that we were all in this together. I tried to shake it off. Point. Focus.

\-- CLICK --

Andy Caulfield (another refugee from Eastern winters) and I were off-loading boxes of equipment onto the hot L.A. sidewalk. It was Sunday, and Los Angeles was blanketed in orange smog. I'd gotten a last-minute call that Jerry Lee Lewis was in town and told to get to the recording studio: Jerry Lee was too crazy or too disorganized to make it to a photo session.

I arrived around noon at a small, nondescript box-like studio near Hollywood Blvd. It was hot and uncomfortable already in the L.A. smog. Inside, the producer waited with the assembled studio musicians; I could see them through the control-room window, twirling drumsticks, tuning guitars. Professionals, paid union wages by the hour, they were all on-time. But there was no Jerry Lee.

I spoke briefly with the producer. He seemed unhappy. Lewis is uncontrollable, he told me. Everyone waited.

"KILLER!" yelled a voice. "THE KILLER IS HERE!" and in strolled Jerry Lee, announcing himself.

He was wearing a light blue striped business suit with white checks, complete with tie, and looked every inch the prosperous Louisiana businessman. I thought this was terribly hip -- beyond hip, as if he'd gotten dressed up for his Mom, to show her how well he was doing. While Jerry and the producer said "good morning" to each other -- rather guardedly, it seemed to me -- I looked around. There are not a lot of interesting photographic choices in a recording studio. While we were trying to figure out what to do, Jerry left the producer and walked into the studio, puffing on a cigar, saying, repeatedly, "The Killer is back!"

He sat at the piano, riffling through some boogie and four bars of "Chantilly Lace." Then suddenly he slammed the piano lid shut, threatening to disintegrate his knuckles, and yelled "SHIT! THE KILLER!"

Jerry Lee Lewis

"How about a little eye opener?" he asked. And a dark cloud crossed the producer's face.

Jerry Lee's manager said "There's none here, Jerry. Take it easy."

"Ah, shit!" said the Killer.

Meanwhile, Andy and I had decided to take advantage of the only distinctive quality the studio seemed to have, which was that it looked a bit like a piano lounge. We drew the red velour curtain closed and stood Jerry Lee in front of it, placing a stand-up ashtray next to him. The Killer obliged by puffing away on his cigar, P.T. Barnum-style. He seemed pleased to pose, with not a glimpse of the troublemaker everyone feared. We finished taking the pictures and left. On our way out we overheard the Killer ordering his manager to go and get a bottle of bourbon. Word got back to me that he went out that night to a bar in Topanga Canyon and closed the joint down. In 1984, the Killer announced that he had found Jesus.

Album covers. Point. Focus.

\-- CLICK --

From Ron Coro (then the art director at CBS) came the phone call. Roger McGuinn needed a cover; would I be interested? Though not as radically as, let's say, Lew Alcindor or Cassius Clay, Roger McGuinn had changed his name (God knows why) from Jim. Jim McGuinn had been the lead guitar player for the Byrds, whose break in the middle of "The Bells of Rhymney" used to take me traveling every time I listened to it. He was also the inspiration for the line "McGuinn and McGuire just kept a-getting higher / in L.A., you know where that's at" from The Mamas and the Papas.

McGuinn arrived, parked his Mercedes convertible at the door, and walked into the studio with a wicked grin on his face, prepared to have fun. He carried a briefcase, which contained a telephone and a radio. The latter provided a continuous scan of all police and fire short-wave broadcasts. The initial part of the session was taken up posing Roger by an empty picture frame, water with glycerine sprayed on his face, and a slight bit of wind blown through his hair. Ron would later physically composite – "strip" -- an eighteenth-century illustration of a sailing schooner into the frame. (It was a typical Ron Coro idea. His tastes were broad, eclectic, and usually highly and subtly -- not a contradiction -- visual.) McGuinn stood patiently, guzzling anything that was put near him. I had him teach me "Eight Miles High" on the guitar.

"Can't teach you the lead break, though, Ethan. Took me six hours to do that."

"That's okay," I told him.

Many bottles of beer later, Roger McGuinn staggered out to his Mercedes. "Shokay, Ethan," he replied when I offered to give him a lift (although why I thought I was in any better shape, I don't know). He swung the car around and headed up Sunset Boulevard, spinning back toward "the Mali-boo" (as Henley had styled it). I stood and watched worriedly as the taillights diminished: my psychedelic hero boozed out. The next day I was afraid of opening a newspaper, scared to encounter a headline about a car wreck. Point, focus,

Roger "Jim" Mcguinn

\-- CLICK --

It didn't seem to matter whom I was speaking to. When I mentioned that I was going to photograph Debby Boone, the reaction was identical: a cynical laugh.

In person, Debby Boone could not have been nicer. That she was sincere and conscientious was apparent. That she was a hard-working Debby Boone professional with reasonable concerns about her career was equally evident. Working with her was not dissimilar to working with many other entertainers: there were worries over make-up, over which clothes to wear, over the fact that her previous covers had made her look like plastic-covered furniture.

Her sin seemed to be her sincerity: Perhaps she had never taken drugs, and might be expected to believe in Jesus. Or maybe it was simply that she wasn't hip. Well, there was certainly no question about that; in terms of hipness, Debby Boone just wasn't it. Too bad.

Debby Boone

\-- CLICK --

Since childhood, I had been fascinated by the newspaper game "What's Wrong with This Picture?" For a long time I carried the idea around with me, hoping one day to recreate it. It finally became an album cover for Andrew Gold. "Best cover you've ever done," someone told me, employing the Los Angeles mannerism, speaking entirely in superlatives -- either best or worst. "Why'd you waste it on someone like Andrew?"

"Andrew was the only person I found who would call his album What's Wrong With This Picture?"

"Oh."

Andrew Gold "What's Wrong With This Picture?"

Los Angeles: sprawling and elusive. In 1975 New Yorkers arrived at the Beverly Hills Hotel telling Woody Allen jokes. Uncomfortable in the palm frond hallways, they tried to subdue L.A.'s Slick and Cool with New York Nasty Mouth. L.A. is a mysterious town, hard to pin down -- not surprisingly, when the same block in Beverly Hills has an English Tudor mansion next to a French château, next to a Cape Cod summer home, next to an Arabian Refurb next to . . . a Fifties Indescribable. Where everywhere -- in canyons, in beach houses, in North Hollywood, in Orange County -- dwell celebrities . . . and also out-of-work actors and would-be rock 'n' rollers. When I lived there Los Angeles was home to people as diverse as George Putnam, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Cary Grant, Monty Hall, and even Tom Waits -- hiding in the Silverlake, keeping alive the time of Kerouac and the Beats, committing suicide by Viceroy.

Scattered throughout the same valleys and canyons lived all the makeup-wardrobe-lighting-camera-people, including photographers, whose job it was to present the famous and would-be-famous to the world.

Back to work. Album covers. Point. Focus.

\-- CLICK --

Buffy Sainte-Marie walked into the studio. I had been studying Edward Curtis' portraits of American Indians taken in the late 1800s and early 1900s. As with many photographs of the time, there was a peculiar quality, a kind of fixedness, attached to them. It seemed to me to be a combination of the fact that photographs were so new and unusual at the time that the sitters didn't have an easy familiarity with the process ("Who's that?" you ask a two-year-old today, pointing to a snapshot. "Me!" he/she responds). Additionally, due to the photographic constraints of the time, an exposure could take several minutes, and the sitters had to hold rigorously still, their heads sometimes supported by mechanical braces. I elected to shoot long exposures, ranging from eight to thirty seconds. Buffy Sainte-Marie's apparent interest in this was zero. It wasn't until later, when she put on her red dress (baby) and was dancing in front of the background paper that she seemed to feel we had gotten down to business.

But the Curtis-style photograph was the one we used.

Buffy Sainte Marie

\-- CLICK --

A pickup truck, its bed filled with sand, backed through the double doors of the studio. In one corner a harried, overworked painter was creating a Tahitian beach scene on the white background the carpenters had constructed overnight. The sand was unloaded and spread out as the painter cursed. I examined a large rubber mask specially commissioned to look like a huge coconut. It had no opening for either eyes or nose -- but instead a huge crack where the meat of the coconut was visible, its milk dripping down its sides, around the strands of imitation coconut hair.

All of this was conceived by Ron Coro for Dave Mason's new record, Split Coconut. We all awaited Dave Mason (once of Traffic; he had performed on "Dear Mr. Fantasy"). Yet another Englishman living in L.A., Mason soon walked through the door, breaking into peals of laughter when presented with his mask. He placed it over his head and sat atop the artificial sand dune, guitar in hand -- a rough approximation of the headless horseman, if the horseman had had a coconut in place of his void. I took pictures while the rest of the band lobbed coconuts, camera left to camera right.

The cover was immediately rejected by the powers-that-be at CBS, even though their own art department had come up with the idea. Mason's face had to appear on the record cover. This was not an insignificant decision, since CBS had to re-employ everyone for the re-shoot. Other covers had suffered a similar fate. (With Tom Snow, the visual joke was shunted to the back cover, and replaced by a portrait I'd taken at the same session. As for poor Ms. Sweathog, she was never even considered.) Though produced in the spirit of fun and outrageousness that, it would appear obvious to anyone who paused to think, had been the lifeblood of rock and roll, these images were rejected for being too outrageous and not satisfying the product need for "artist identification." The heart of Southern California -- if it could be said to have one -- had taken hold, and the nature of the work I was doing was gradually made clear to me. My images were, to a record, what Reggie Jackson was to Wheaties. It was a thought that, at first, I didn't want to linger over.

Album Covers

For two years I continued. I photographed Deniece Williams. I photographed the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Every picture had its story, didn't it? For Earth, Wind & Fire truckloads of sand were spread across a sound stage floor. Forty thousand watts of light were used, arcing and firing mysteriously. I pretended I was Field Marshal Rommel. I photographed Phil Everly in about fifteen minutes. (It was a wonderful moment for me, to meet such a legend, but he had a completely work-a-day air to him, which seemed pretty easy to understand, his moment having passed years before). I had a manager in Nashville tell me to be sure to include a country singer's crotch in the photograph. "The women go crazy," the manager said. Linda Ronstadt warned me, "Don't shoot. You'll scare the horse," seconds before I exposed the cover frame of Hasten Down the Wind.

But the time between the sessions was often difficult for me. It was as if there was no reason for me to be in Los Angeles except to do this work, and although I could not have told you what the problem was I knew that unless I was working I wasn't happy. Years later I would identify that I had gone into music because of the excitement, ideas and idealism, like I'd drifted into a dream and when I woke up, I was in show business.

I was living with a woman from Long Island, a beautiful girl, whose main desire seemed to be to get away from Long Island. She had worked for Tom Wilkes, the Art Director, which is how we had met. After I arrived home from a session, slightly drunk, she said to me the difference between Norman [Seeff] and me was, "he gets his subjects drunk and you get yourself drunk." I would owe her, but didn't know it. In London, before I returned to America, I had begun to read and follow the work of Carl Jung. I participated in Jungian therapy. I wrote down my dreams. I read Memories, Dreams & Reflections . I came to believe that dreams could help you understand what mattered.

Phil Everly

Linda Ronstadt, Hasten Down the Wind

One day, some time later, when I was living on my father's farm, Bill -- a horseman who worked for us -- called me up and told me to come down: one of the mares was foaling. Though I had been around horses all my life, I had never seen one foal, so I grabbed my camera. In the dim light I photographed the fetus slowly emerging. Standing as quietly as I could, I saw the foal born, and the mother licking and smelling it. Finally, within that incredibly short space of time, the little fellow raised its legs, looking every bit like a daddy longlegs spider, and hobbled slowly to his feet. He fell, and then got up again. Like any true-life experience, it was heart-rending. But I had a secondary, strange reaction. I felt that by having taken photographs I had somehow missed the central spirit of the event. More and more, photography seemed to get in the way.

I had a dream. I was out in the ocean, off Carmel. In front of me were kelp beds. I had to make my way through them to get to shore, which I did. Once ashore, I looked up the hillside, and saw a chapel-like building, like the Carmel Monastery. I walked there. When I peered inside I saw an apparent replica of The Last Supper. Except seated at this table instead of Christ and the disciples were the four Beatles, Stevie Wonder, several nuns, and a chimpanzee. There were lilies all around. The scene was vibrant and full of energy. I thought to myself, "This is important. The Beatles are reunited, and I must get a photograph," so I went running off to find a camera. All I could find was my old Nikkormat. It was dinged and beaten up by many hard years of hard use. The lens on it was an equally old 35mm, my least favorite lens with which to work. When I rushed back to the scene, all four Beatles were gone. The scene had shifted to black and white. All of the energy had dissipated.

I took this dream to mean (among other things) that I should give up rock and roll photography. So I did.

I lived in Carmel Valley, renewing old friendships. I seriously considered opening a restaurant, and it felt wonderful to be around people for whom show business was not the entire universe. I drank a lot of wine, and spent a lot of time down the Coast. Carmel Valley has endless, forgiving days of sunshine.

Foaling mare

Carmel Valley
28. Silent Movies

Music videos, 1978

LOS ANGELES, 1978

During my year in New York as I worked to turn Quadrophenia into a movie, I was driven by the same creative inspiration that had influenced me for years: the work of the singer songwriter. Peter Townshend's Quadrophenia was, of course, perfect since it was already crafted as a narrative.

In the early seventies, I observed that the work of the singer songwriter wasn't represented on what was becoming (if it hadn't already) the most powerful and pervasive medium in our country: television. What you did see was a program like Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, but to me it was more boring than not. I thought there was a great deal more to do.

In 1978 Jo Bergman -- who knew of my efforts with Quadrophenia and slowly seen the scale of the work I was doing grow to large productions (Civil Wall battles and ballroom dances) -- called and talked to me about a film with Leon Redbone. They were called "industrials" then, so work-a-day they were considered to be. And so I got to try out a lot of the ideas developed for Quadrophenia: there would be a musical performance by Leon intercut with a short narrative, with Leon playing the lead.

I did the usual, drove around Los Angeles looking for locations, always a time-consuming and essential task. In the end we found one in Pasadena and for two days we shot 16 mm film in a smoke filled room.

Warner Brothers loved it (and I loved being a director and working with a team of amazingly talented people) but the real proof of concept came next with Rickie Lee Jones based on three songs from her first album.

Rickie Lee -- still unknown, with her first album about to be released on Warner Bros -- would prove to be perfect for what I was up to. She not only wrote and performed beautiful, atmospheric songs but she already fully imagined herself as a character, so she created and inhabited her own role intuitively. The film "Coolsville" was three songs but played as one ten minute piece and received a huge amount of attention. As a result, I got a deal with Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer at Paramount Pictures based on it and Rickie got an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Rickie's work propelled her to a Grammy for Best New Artist. Our film came out two years before MTV even existed.

It gave me new hope for the world of music. These new films were clearly appealing and communicative. They had "good bones," I thought to myself -- like early silent movies, where the action on the screen rode atop the music.

As important as the music was, the power of the visual would trump. Charlie Chaplin said, "Film music... may convey more to the beholder-listener than the camera conveys at a given moment, still it must never be more than the voice of that camera."

The work got a lot of attention and I was excited by it. I thought I was really onto something here, for nothing at the time was more compelling to me than the marriage of music and image and story. Since it was Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time going to lunch with agents. But my father called and soon the family was off to Greece.

I was definitely going, regardless of what was happening in my work. Years earlier, when living in London, my father asked me to go on a trip (to which this one was the successor). I had demurred. I had a job. My family came through London on their way to Greece. By the time they returned they were like a different family: bronzed, relaxed, laughing. As for me, the job I had stayed to do? It had been cancelled. No way I was missing it again.

Greece

Greece
29. Starting Over

(Photographer unknown)

HOLLYWOOD HILLS, OCTOBER 1980

In show business, it does always seems to start with a phone call. "Congratulations, and don't say I never do anything for you," offered Jo Bergman calling from Warner Bros Records. "John and Yoko have chosen you for their new film."

From my house on the hillside I gazed through a break in the trees. Below I could see the flatlands of Hollywood stretching off into the smog. My latest career had involved the production and direction of short musical films, soon to become known as "music videos." A reel of these films had been sent to John and Yoko, and they selected me as producer/director for the video they intended to make for their new album Double Fantasy. I am told to call Yoko on the thirteenth of November at 1:45 p.m., not before. The reason, I am later told, is that Yoko had a chart done to determine the most astrologically opportune time to commence the filming and that turned out to be a date still about two weeks hence. In the interim, I am instructed to go to the record company and listen to the single.

Chateau-like offices, Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles.

Sunset Strip in the 9000s is a very good address in show business. Tucked away in little chateau-like offices are major deal makers. Contracts worth millions of dollars are negotiated and enforced by people who sometimes look like they have a lot of trouble getting out of bed in the morning.

Double Fantasy was John's first record in more than four years. Intermittently I had heard of his "lost weekend" in Los Angeles, his return to Yoko, his stint as a "house husband."

The secretary ushers me into the office where the operating head of the company sits behind his desk. He wears a beard, and appears intense and very preoccupied.

"Here's the single," he says, and punches the start button of the cassette player. Over the speakers comes the sound of three chimes, followed by a slow introduction, John sings: "Our life together / Is so precious together" and then the tempo shifts and breaks into the loping cadence of "(Just Like) Starting Over." John is singing in true rock idiom, sounding like the stuttering Elvis in Heartbreak Hotel sounding like John Lennon. As I listened, I noticed the record company executive seemed agitated, as if somehow this meeting was taking place against his will. When the song was over he ejected the cassette and handed it to me. The album is not due for release for another two weeks. The record executive fixes his stare on me and says, "You know, if somehow one of those were to make it onto the radio before the release of this album, kill would not be too strong a word for what I would do to that person."

I left his office. Out on the Strip the sun was bright and hot in that insistent L.A. way. Walking to my car, the cassette in my pocket, I once again paused to reflect upon the amazing behavior of people in this business. In the absolutely normal course of business, at the request of the artist, I went into a record company to pick up a cassette so I could listen to the music and prepare for a production. In that process, the executive, who has never met me, assumed that I have the morals of a pirate and threatened my life. There really is no business like show business.
30. God Takes Those He Wants To Keep Close

John and Yoko "Woman"

NEW YORK CITY, NOVEMBER 26, 1980

"Its been like a reunion for us these last few weeks. We've seen Ethan Russell, who's doing a videotape of a couple of the new songs."

\-- John Lennon to Jonathan Cott, December 1980

John and Yoko walked along the curving path through Central Park, followed by Don Lenzer, the cameraman, and his assistant. The sound man, Harry Lapham, hovered close to them. I walked with Jayme Lubarr, the production manager. All together we made up a small crowd, noticeable even in New York's Central Park. As we rounded a corner, I noticed several construction workers sitting down to eat their lunch; the site on which they were working was surrounded by a chain-link fence. One of the workers was young, maybe in his late twenties, with long, curly hair, wearing overalls. As we approached, he looked up. "Look," he said, pointing. "There's TV cameras." And then, "Hey, would you look at that. That's John Lennon . . . It's John . . . John Lennon! I DON'T FUCKING BELIEVE IT'S JOHN LENNON," his New Jersey voice rising, as he stood up and started to walk toward us, dropping his sandwich.

"I FUCKING SEE . . . I DON 'T FUCKING BELIEVE . . . IT'S JOHN LEN -- I DON'T FUCKING BELIEVE IT'S JOHN LENNON."

By now the guy had reached the fence and thrown himself against it, still yelling at the top of his lungs. He stuck his fingers through the holes in the chain link, straining to touch John.

We stopped. The guy just stood there, riveted, while his voice maintained its screaming, as if it disembodied. "JOHN FUCKING LENNON. THEY'RE NEVER GONNA BELIEVE THIS. JESUS! JOHN LENNON!" He was now not three feet from John.

"How you doin', man?" said John in a soft voice. As the guy continued his attempt to touch him, John raised a hand in greeting, and we all moved on. The camera rolled, gathering indiscriminate footage for use in the promotional film for "Woman, the second single from John and Yoko's new record, "(Just Like) Starting Over."

John and Yoko in Central Park "Woman"

It had not been easy, getting everyone together in the park. I had been in New York for two weeks, and had booked crews several times in anticipation of filming, but every time Yoko had cancelled at the last minute, never giving very specific reasons, saying with her clipped Japanese accent, "Okay, Ethan. We'll do it tomorrow. Bye."

I hadn't spoken to John until this day of the shoot. I had asked to, since Yoko kept changing her mind, and it was difficult to produce without some direction -- but according to Yoko, John was always unavailable. When outlining a shooting schedule, I mentioned to Yoko that we would meet them at the Dakota, where they lived. We would then walk around the park and pick up some footage there, and later drive downtown where Virginia Field, the art director, was overseeing the construction of an all-white-walled bedroom in the Castelli Galleries in SoHo. There John and Yoko would climb into bed, naked, for the camera.

When I had mentioned to Yoko that after the shoot in the park we would drive downtown for the balance of the filming, she had seemed worried. "He's not like he used to be, Ethan, you know."

It was not a particularly demanding schedule, so I asked her what she meant, but she didn't elaborate.

It wasn't until the day of the shoot that I'd seen John, sitting quietly in a coffee shop with Yoko and a photographer. "How are you?" said John, immediately friendly.

"Okay," I told him, but really I was immensely uptight. Dealing with Yoko and all the cancellations had long since taken any easygoing spirit out of the production for me.

From the day I arrived in New York, when projected plans for shooting -- then only a few days hence -- had ranged from the simple (as the walk in the park), to complex productions of three to five songs, it had become obvious that additional personnel might be necessary. As a result, another producer and his assistant were on their way to the Los Angeles airport. I told Yoko.

"Stop them," said Yoko. Emergency calls went out. They were stopped at the gate.

When I asked Yoko to sign a standard form used by Warner Brothers to indemnify the company against the possibility of cancellations, Yoko refused. "You probably don't know this, Ethan, but if we sign that, then it's as if we are working for them." (She was right, it turns out.) Then she called the record company to sort out ownership of the film.

Crews were again cancelled, again without notice.

One day I was summoned to the Dakota, and Yoko took me through endless rooms and upstairs through the back corridors, and finally into a kitchen. On the walls were various memorabilia from John and Yoko's past.

"Tomorrow, this is where I want to shoot. You see. John will be making breakfast and looking after Sean, and I will be dressed up as if I am going to the office. Okay."

I looked around, figuring angles. Whatever Yoko wanted. Then she said, "Don't tell John. Okay? I'll see you tomorrow."

The prospect of somehow surprising John into performing his house-husband role, as Yoko portrayed the breadwinner, made me uncomfortable. It was, I would learn later, a conscious separation of function that they both understood, but I didn't know that at the time. Still, it was Yoko's gig. I booked a crew. The next day Yoko called and cancelled.

But finally, a shoot wasn't cancelled. The crew was waiting outside, along with two New York policemen assigned by the city to keep watch. In the coffee shop Yoko sat frozen in a corner. She appeared to be easily as uptight as I was.

John must have sensed this, so he stood up and we all followed him out onto Seventy-first Street and then into the park.

There was no script. The park walk had arisen when I asked Yoko what she wanted to do. "Well, I don't know. We could walk in the park, you know." (Yoko always said "you know.")

It was, thankfully, a beautiful day, late in the fall -- and the early afternoon sun came shining through the leaves. Don Lenzer set the camera, and I spoke briefly to John and Yoko, suggesting a path for them to walk along.

John told me how glad he was to be back. Glad to have made a record, glad to be filming again.

"It's just like Rubber Soul," he said, "only me face has dropped." In truth, John looked frailer, almost translucent, as if to prove that the stories about the ravages of the lost weekend had been true.

In the park, the shooting took about an hour. John and Yoko would walk up a slight hill, appearing over the crest. Passers-by, noticing the camera, would turn and look, always recognizing John. When we had covered them from several angles, the crew packed up and left to go downtown. I stayed with John and Yoko.

We climbed into their limousine.

With Thanksgiving weekend upon us, the traffic crawled, threatening to seize up at any moment into impenetrable New York gridlock. The driver headed to the West Side Highway, trying to find an opening, but it was jammed; we crawled downtown.

John and I talked. He spoke about films, and about how he'd seen a certain shot that he'd liked. "It was like it opened as an aerial shot and then closed in on this train, until, at the end, it was right close up on the headlight on the front of the train."

"Those are great. They take a long time to do, though," I said, rather defensively. As John spoke, he grew more animated. Yoko sat huddled in a corner, looking out the window. As John grew more excited, Yoko seemed to grow subtly concerned, or so it appeared to me.

I spoke to John about his possibly singing some portion of "Woman," even if it had to be a lip-synch. It was something I had mentioned to Yoko on the very first phone call from Los Angeles, trying to persuade her that John singing was interesting. I would have preferred to see John performing, versus just walking in the park, or getting in and out of bed. Or -- rather -- I was glad to see John walking in the park or getting in and out of bed, but I wanted to see him perform, as well. But the idea never seemed to get picked up.

"I dunno," he told me. "I like Yoko's idea. I don't want to be like Mick, you know, prancing about at forty." And it wasn't to be. I couldn't seem to convince either of them that John singing was interesting, and it was dropped.

The limo entered downtown and started through the lower Village. John was gazing out the window. "Look, Honey," he said excitedly. "There's that building we used to live in."

At the gallery, the small crowd had grown somewhat. The lighting crew, make-up people, and camera crew were already there. They were joined by gallery employees who gathered to watch as John and Yoko walked through. In one corner of the gallery the floor had been overlaid with white, and any other object that had at one time been some color other than white was now white. In the center of the room was a white bed, resting on top of a white platform. There were scattered other objects, a set of white stairs leading nowhere, white pedestals, a white apple, white Beatle boots. I had asked Yoko beforehand what else she might like in the room. She seemed mostly noncommittal, and told me I should use my imagination.

Yoko looked around. "What is that?" she asked, pointing to the white apple.

"It's a prop," I answered.

"I don't like it," she said in a voice that showed she really didn't like it. Somehow, I remembered it as her idea.

"Fine," I said, and ordered it removed. "This is just for you to do whatever you want with." Screens were erected, and all nonessential people were asked to leave as John and Yoko disrobed, and then put on hand-painted Japanese gowns. The lighting crew scrimmed, and focused lamps on the spot where John and Yoko would be lying on the bed, creating a three-quarter back light. Yoko explained what she wanted: very close-up shots of John and her; close-ups of lips, and hands touching backs, close-ups of eyes.

They took off their gowns and stood, naked, backs to the camera, next to the bed. When I called "Action," John reached over and kissed Yoko and, together, they leaned back onto the bed.

Don filmed the descent into the bed and then switched to shoot in extreme close-up, as John and Yoko lay there. The camera ran for many minutes, following her hand on his back, his face as he kissed her. Behind us the crew waited.

On a cut, John would look up and smile. He seemed to be having a good time, and his love for Yoko was still very much evident.

When we broke for a meal (which, I explained to Yoko, was required for the crew), John sat surrounded, the film crew gathered at his feet. John told stories. He seemed so much calmer than the rest of us. Maybe so much had passed through the mind and body of the man that it had just left him spent. Maybe after too many encounters like the one in the park that afternoon, he knew it was just better to lie back and let it be. His calmness seemed to be made more dramatic by the obvious awe in which he was held. In the end we filmed until almost eleven-thirty that evening -- until Don was satisfied that we had done all that could be done in that environment. Then we broke as the crew started to dismantle the lights. John and Yoko went to the back room to get dressed, emerging shortly.

"When's the film gonna be ready?" asked John. "Should be the day after tomorrow," I answered. "Well, see you then," replied John. "No, no," said Yoko. "Ethan's going to Los Angeles."

Yoko was right. I had another job, and had to get back.

John looked surprised. "Okay. Bye then," he told me, and they walked downstairs and were driven away.

I sat down, glad finally to have shot something, and noticed that it was midnight and my 35th birthday was over and it was Thanksgiving Day.

It was nighttime when I arrived back in Los Angeles. Driving home, I could see a thirty-foot can of spinach being tugged down Hollywood Boulevard -- spot-lit, surrounded by limousines. There really is no place like it.

In the early evening almost two weeks later, I was walking around my front room, listening to Bruce Springsteen's Point Blank, when the phone rang. It was Holly Wertheimer, the film editor, calling from New York. She was crying. "Have you heard?" asked Holly.

"Heard what?" I thought something had gone wrong with the production. People get tired and emotional during such projects.

"They've shot John."

"What?"

"They shot John."

"Is he all right?"

"I don't know, I don't know." There was silence. Over the phone line I could hear the radio, and out the window the never-ending sound of New York horns blaring, and ambulances.

"It's on the radio . . . They're saying something. Oh, no! Oh, God! He's dead."

Holly was still crying on the phone.

"These things happen all the time," I said. I don't know what I meant. So many dead people. I said good-bye to Holly, told her I'd call her back.

It didn't sink in. It didn't mean anything. All I could think of was the film. We had the last film of John and Yoko, and now it was precious and had to be protected. The negative was with the lab in New York. Yoko had to have it.

I called Jayme Lubarr, who was now handling the production. The negative had to be released, and then placed in a safe-deposit box until it could be transferred to Yoko. Lawyers were called, flown to New York. Releases were obtained, and the negative taken from the laboratory and finally placed into Yoko's hands. It seemed to be all I could do.

The next few days were grim; even Hollywood seemed subdued. In the newspapers there appeared that awful picture of Yoko, grimacing, the flash bulbs freezing her and David Geffen as they left John's body. This was more pain than any person should be asked to bear.

I walked into the hills of Carmel Valley six days later, and sat silent for the ten minutes that Yoko had requested -- as did many of my friends, each separately and alone, part of the hundred thousand in Central Park and who knows how many millions around the world. Mark David Chapman had come all the way from Hawaii and taken it upon himself to shoot John Lennon, standing and watching as John had taken the time to autograph a record for a fan earlier in the day.

Imagine.

I couldn't. The reality of John's death took over a year to sink in.

Unbelievably, Yoko finished the film "Woman." She used stills from their past. She superimposed John's face from the Imagine album cover over the (equally unbelievable) photo that a photographer had somehow managed to steal of John lying in the morgue. She used the film of them walking in Central Park. Shortly thereafter, she would have herself filmed, alone, in Central Park in the winter. She used that, cut with the film of the two of them in bed, for her song "Walking on Thin Ice." At the end of the filming in the gallery in SoHo, I had told John that I would like to get a picture with him, and that I always regretted I didn't get one with The Beatles. He said, "Sure. You should hang on to your memories; they're all you've got."

In the Gallery. November 26, 1980. Photo by Gerard
31. There Is a Season

Dad

CARMEL VALLEY, 1981

To Everything There Is a Season \-- Ecclesiastes

As I was observing my ten minutes of silence for John Lennon -- standing in the hills beneath an oak tree -- my father was upstairs in the house slowly dying of leukemia.

The children did not hear immediately about my Dad's illness, which he discovered in New York City on our way to Greece. He was suddenly taken to a hospital, but my parents didn't speak to us about it, and the unexpected trip to the hospital was soon forgotten.

While they found out then, they didn't tell us until months later after we were back in the U.S.A. As my father began to grow weaker, I moved home.

When he was in the midst of transfusions, he told me that he was going to "beat it," and until the end he acted like he thought he might. But I don't know how you beat leukemia.

It was a John Wayne thing my father had, strong and silent. It was almost incongruous in a man as well-mannered, well dressed, and even gentle in many ways, as he was, but it was in him nevertheless. I wonder if he believed it. To me it seemed almost bizarre. John Wayne himself couldn't "beat it." My father never did admit to me he knew was going to die and as far as I know he held onto it until he slipped away.

It was a characteristic of his -- the greatest -- generation, that had done so much for our country. He didn't express his views often; his feelings, less. I think all the change he saw in America was disappointing and alienating for him. . . .so many of the changes driven by my generation.

I can certainly understand how he could have been disappointed; how he could easily have wished it was different. But he didn't talk about it.

My last memory of my father was to see him through the crack of his hospital door, as Father Brock -- our local Episcopal minister -- knelt by his bedside, praying. My father had been in and out of a coma for days. He passed on May 13, 1981. He was only sixty.
32. Where Did You Go My Blue-Eyed Son?

New York

NEW YORK CITY, 1984

Somebody spoke, and I went into a dream \-- Lennon/McCartney

After my father's death, I spent two years with my family preparing to sell the "Ranch," and after that helping my mother move back to San Francisco. Then I drove -- again -- across America, this time by myself. I was going to be with my new girlfriend -- a New Yorker -- and to start a life away from show business.

There was much that attracted me about New York, the city of my early childhood, and where I had travelled back and forth from Los Angeles in the 1970s. It was a town of literacy, where books mattered. Like my father I had been bi-coastal since my youth. Part of me really liked the granite urban grayness and the sophistication of its people. I thought of it as a grown-up town, where people wore coats and ties and went to elegant bars to drink. If I hadn't given up smoking, it would have completed the image. For the following year I worked on my first book, Dear Mr. Fantasy, typing away on one of the first portable computers (the Osborne 1). I was getting my chance to be a writer, like my college aspiration.

In my small Upper East Side apartment a small silver tray held bottles of liquor on a ledge by the window. I wrote daily, struggling to finish. In the mornings, hung over, I would look at the tray and swear that the next morning it would be different. It never was.

In the winter I walked down Park Avenue wearing three layers of clothing, including long underwear, with the freezing wind penetrating all three layers. It was so cold I felt naked. In the West Village freezing rain glistened on the deserted nighttime streets. New York, which had seduced me on a sunny and crystalline autumn day, was proving difficult.

I went back to California.

In Carmel Valley, in a bat-and-board wood summer house by the river's edge, I still froze in the early mornings, though it was balmy by lunch. I typed the end of the manuscript in gloves with the fingertips cut off, with a huge fire burning in the fireplace. The bottles of liquor followed me from New York.

One evening, distraught, I went to a meeting in the basement of a church. On the walls of the room were signs which read: "One Day at a Time," "Easy Does It," and "Let Go and Let God." They seemed comforting to me in a sixties kind of a way: "Be Here Now." The relationship with my girlfriend in New York had ended, and I was a mess.

Walking into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous is never on anyone's list of shiny plans for their future; it certainly wasn't on mine. The "Twelves Steps and Twelve Traditions" must have been read that first night -- they always are -- so I must have heard "we turn our wills and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God," although I don't remember. Still, the signs on the wall seemed to recall a time I remembered from the sixties, when the spirit of things was a reality you paid attention to, and if you did, change followed. Not long afterward, I had my last drink.
33. There's a Tear In My Beer

"Tear In My Beer" 1989

LOS ANGELES, 1985

When my first book was finished and off to the printer, I moved back to Los Angeles. I was nervous about returning to the Land of Show Business, but that is where the work was. There were a few cultural adjustments as well: in New York when I told people I was writing a book, they would sit up with interest; in Los Angeles people asked whether it was going to be a movie.

I lived in Pasadena, where the old houses and gardens reminded me of Northern California. In the winter it was beautiful, like living in the image on the sides of orange crates that I remembered from my youth: a perfect blue sky and thin-trunked palm trees, with snow-topped mountains arrayed in the distance. I began the long job of learning to live sober.

Once, years earlier, someone had asked me the "twenty questions" which were designed to help diagnose whether you were an alcoholic. I answered yes to only a few, confident I was no such thing. Yet according to the test, a few was enough.

"That's ridiculous," I protested. "If that's true everyone in my family is an alcoholic!" (sound of the other shoe dropping).

I wasn't even the heavy drinker in my family. That I was a cigarette addict had been plain to me and when (with the aid of hypnosis and all the willpower I could muster) I managed to quit smoking, it gave me confidence that quitting drinking would be a lark. I knew I wasn't addicted, and I wasn't. But alcohol is a slippery foe, and I had used it, along with its companion marijuana, to manage how I felt in the world, day after day, for many years.

Learning to live sober became my top priority, as it needs to. It was subtly much more challenging than I would ever have guessed. I had an entirely stereotypical idea of what an alcoholic was. That I didn't fit the stereotype and that, equally, I was an alcoholic was only part of the challenge.

The process wasn't simply about ideas and knowledge, although they were a door to understanding. It wasn't even really about alcohol (or marijuana). Learning to live sober was about learning to live comfortably in your own skin, something I had never been able to do. Everything added up to a need for me to hunker down and regroup. My father's passing was still unsettling, and would remain so for years.

John Lennon's death -- and somehow just the simple fact that he was no longer in this world -- also rattled me. The forces that drew me into music had been so powerful that I never even questioned how pervasive they were for me. In 1985 music was still arguably ascendant, so it was still where I looked to hang my hat. Yet so much had changed and so much was changing. Where it all might end up I had no idea. "Life is what happens when you're making other plans," was one of John Lennon's quips with which I entirely identified. I put one foot in front of the other, and I kept going.

The irony for me was: wanting to be a writer, I became an image-maker. I used my talents to the best of my ability in the service of words and music. I studied image, from Renaissance paintings to the Magnum photographers. My motivation had always been music and the power of the singer-songwriters. I became a director because I wanted to bring them there. And music videos -- as they were now called -- were garnering an immense amount of attention.

In fact, by 1985 -- there was no doubt about it -- music video had become the New Big Thing. Its official birth, one would have to say, was MTV's premiere on August 1st, 1981. Then they broadcast the Buggles singing -- in a wry McLuhanesque ditty -- "Video killed the Radio Star."

If "my" music (or singer-songwriter-driven music) was somehow drooping in its influence, I still had a (barely conscious) yet passionate hope that combining the two mediums might reinvigorate its primacy. As a form music video was already demonstrating it had remarkable power. My hope, you could argue, was not an impossibility. (It was not, it would turn out, what the record business had in mind for them.)

Now record companies had music video departments. I would travel quite frequently to Nashville, which felt good to me. (It was country music after all that was on my little monaural radio before there was even Elvis.) I worked with Randy Travis, Rosanne Cash, and Hank Williams, Jr., among others.

I got the call for the Hank Williams, Jr. video from Warner Bros. Hank, I was told, had discovered a never-released track by his father, taken it into the studio, and added backing by his band and his own vocal to transform it into a duet with his long-dead father.

I wrote the concept on the plane to Nashville. (This was always done under earphones, the song played repeatedly.) In the script Hank Williams, Jr. is in a recording studio during a major electrical storm. While he's singing there is an immense clap of thunder, a bolt of lightning, and suddenly the voice of his father is heard singing from another room. Hank, Jr., astounded at first, gets up to investigate. He opens the door to see his father performing. In a triumphant moment for him, he walks into the "past" and joins his father to finish the song.

There was a significant problem, however: Hank, Sr.. had never been filmed singing "Tear in My Beer." So, I researched old footage and chose a take of him performing another song: "Hey Good Looking." This performance was slowed down so that Hank Sr appeared to strum his guitar in the tempo of "There's a Tear. . .." I then hired a local actor and video-taped him lip-synching "There's a Tear in My Beer." This one inch tape was then taken digitized in Los Angeles, and the actor's lips were pasted, frame by frame over Hank William, Sr.'s performance of "Hey Good Looking."

To help complete the illusion we built a replica of the set Hank Williams Sr had performed in, cast a band and ward-robed them in period costume, had a suit matching Hank, Sr..'s made for the actor, and shot reverse angles looking back at Hank, Jr. These were then cut into the Hank, Sr.'s performance footage.

Tear In My Beer

Music video was arguably the most influential pop culture movement of the decade and for the next ten years it mined a deep, creative vein. It could be riveting and sometimes breathtakingly inventive. In fact, the sheer creativity of it could make it feel like we really had another revolution on our hands. Yet there was a big, big difference about this invention. Music videos were ads, and their reason for existence was to sell records.

I was as guilty as the next guy. We were all engaged in, as Joni Mitchell had once sung, "The star maker machinery behind the popular song." We were making ads, and ads were, of course, about doing what you needed to do to sell product. It was not an accident that the production company responsible for a large portion of these music videos was called "Propaganda" and that the internal term for new releases in the music companies was "product."

Music had settled back into the music business; its core function once again the peddling of tunes, as it had traditionally been prior to the explosion of the sixties, when along with all the many other traditions that were gleefully shunted aside was the three-minute single: musicians were making 8,10,11 minute songs. It was not Tin Pan Alley.

Executives -- many of them refugees from the sixties -- disappeared into burgeoning media corporations. Records -- which were about to be displaced by CDs -- sold more than they ever had before. Music companies were launching into their most profitable decades in history.

None of which is to suggest it wasn't exciting. It was. But what, really, were we all up to? And what was going on in the world outside?
34. Morning in America

Sunrise, Pt. Reyes, California

1986

I learned to fly and bought a share in a Cessna 182, a high-wing, single-engine plane. I would drive to the Burbank airport, walk onto the tarmac, prep the plane and fly the one and a half hours to Monterey, California's Central Valley passing beneath my wing. If I was still trying to make a living in the music business I was equally loathe to let go of the life I had liked so much after I last left Los Angeles in 1980. Then, leaving show business behind had been a relief. I connected with things that had mattered to me since childhood: my friends, hikes in the California hills, into the redwoods and along the rivers of Big Sur. I still had a yearning for a simple life in the country, like Zonker Harris of Doonesbury fame.

Big Creek, Big Sur

Certainly the tumult of the sixties seemed long gone. Reagan's "Morning in America" was the theme, wafting over the land. His single-minded determination to confront the Soviet Union would culminate in the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a triumphant moment. And the rise of "market democracies" marked the apparent triumph of America. The Cold War, as I had known it all my life, appeared to have ended.

As an image professional, though, it was easy for me to be cynical about the "Morning in America" that Reagan's ad was trumpeting, for the ad itself was virtually identical to Hal Riney's other ads for wines and banks, all soothing soft images and feel-good paeans to the future.

Reagan's explicit intention appeared to be making America feel good about itself. And when he spoke in his modulated voice, he was remarkably reassuring. (Unless you were identified by him as something that prevented America from feeling good about itself. Then you had a target on you.)

My father -- who had worked with Reagan when he was Governor of California -- once told me he would never vote for him for President. He didn't explain why, and I wish I'd asked, but I didn't. I don't think he ever did. He was too ill by then. But I think he would have. Ronald Reagan was remarkably persuasive and reassuring. It was clear he cared passionately about the things he believed in. But he also famously said, "Politics is just like show business," and with his easy presence, his ability to make an entrance with his confident and engaging smile, he performed beautifully. I don't think there had ever been before (nor has there been since) a politician more comfortable in front of the camera.

More than ever, the images on television were how we saw the world and the platform for our politics. But so what?

Big Sur

Introduction to Part II

We had the experience, but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.

\-- T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

In writing American Story I was faced with a creative dilemma. On the one hand I had pictures and stories of legends--full of color, sound, and fury--the kind of people Steve Jobs would pay to be on his billboards. These people changed my life, and it was easy enough to imagine how to keep the reader involved with that. On the other hand, sometimes the thing that began to change your life was just a book, whose ideas unfolded over time. Would the reader stay with you? What do you do?

All of my books have been explorations, American Story more than any other. In fact, American Story began with the express intention of looking back at the America of my youth and at what I believed had become a skewed narrative of my generation. I wanted to answer the question: how did we get here from there?

It has always been my nature to try and understand the world around me, but it has never been my job, which is to say, I didn't wake up on an average morning planning to arrive at some analysis of the day, political or social. What I learned came through the flow of my life, and not always easily or quickly.

And so it was my experience that the answers to the questions I was asking would come over time. In the story so far, I am in my late-thirties--still a person in show business although it was an uneasy fit. Years later I would be able to encapsulate my experience and describe it as being swept into music when "music" was the all-encompassing metaphor for exciting ideas, and change, as a friend of mine brilliantly expressed (and he is a graduate of Yale).

What I remember most distinctly about that period were the number of ideas moving around rapidly and brilliantly in an emerging, truly international, conversation about life, and art, and music, and politics, and being inspired by really brilliant statements of all kinds. Jerry Garcia was as smart as anybody, as smart as a guy from Yale who was a clerk for a Supreme Court judge. No, Garcia was smarter, more happening."8

And then--with all that promise drawing me in--I woke up in show business. But I couldn't articulate it then. Like I say, sometimes it takes a while to figure it out.

So, back to my creative dilemma: what could I do? Since my answers would only reveal themselves through time, the answer to my creative dilemma seemed to be: go where the story takes you, and tell it through time. As we return, I am on a dusty building site directing a video. .....

8 Michael Lydon from LET IT BLEED by Ethan Russell. Deluxe Rhino Edition 2005 also LET IT BLEED: Altamont and the End of the Sixties Trade. Springboard Press.
35. Books Change Your Life

Full moon & fire from music video: "Shelter" Lone Justice

LOS ANGELES, 1986

I had been up all-night directing a video for Maria McKee and Lone Justice: "Shelter." The trials and tribulations that preceded finally getting to this all-night shoot were becoming typical -- at least in the Los Angeles music-video landscape-- an arduous struggle to get an agreement from the record label and the artist. I think in retrospect Maria McKee wanted nothing to do with it, desiring only to be a singer. In pre-production meetings she seemed entirely withdrawn, virtually avoiding eye contact, as if whatever struggle had been required to get her to this point in her career was already too much. Whatever the truth was, and I certainly didn't know it, I was that morning after the all-night shoot driving East into the rising sun, my eyelids drooping from exhaustion.

What was finally both non-objectionable and do-able to the record company, the management, and the artist was to build a huge bonfire. The original location -- slated to have been the wide-open Mojave with the sweep of the desert and sky -- had been nixed, and we ended up shooting on bulldozed acreage that was pending construction still in Los Angeles County. My eyes drooped shut, and I had to bring myself up sharply, realizing that I'd almost fallen asleep while driving along the freeway

The next day, waiting for the film to come back from the lab, I went to the Pasadena Public Library. It was quiet and peaceful there. It occurred to me that it was a bit strange for a music video director to prefer this room to some other more flashy media environment, but it felt comfortable to me. In fact, one of the great things for me about Pasadena was its closeness to the Huntington Library, a remarkable place with 120 acres of gardens, and one of the world's great collections of original books and manuscripts: Shakespeare folios, a Gutenberg Bible, Faulkner manuscripts,Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and so on. . . .Books. . . .

Section of the gardens at The Huntington Library

Then one day I was wandering the aisles of Barnes & Noble in Santa Monica when a title jumped out at me. It read Amusing Ourselves to Death with the sub-tile: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Written by a professor of communications at New York University -- Neil Postman -- it was a book that was as game-changing for me as music had been. I can't remember if I glanced at the Foreword, read it at the time, or simply just took it home. But here's what Postman wrote:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another--slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing....In 1984 people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.9

Hello?

As a young man in college I read some of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media. I took away from it an essential point: we fall in love with our reflections, not knowing they're us. McLuhan wrote about Narcissus: when he fell in love with the image in the reflecting pond he thought it was another being. So, said McLuhan, are we with our media. I knew a few of McLuhan's other concepts, too; simple ideas like the global village. But the distinction between hot and cold media always left me a little confused, and I hadn't thought about McLuhan for years. Postman seemed more direct, his analysis relentless, what he had to say profound and inescapable. "Consider." he writes, "the primitive technology of smoke signals."

While I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians, I can safely guess it did not include philosophical argument. Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.10

His book is about the effects of media -- but it is overwhelmingly about the effect of television and particularly about American commercial television. The title really says it: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Political Discourse in the Age of Television.

Postman painstakingly traces the collapse of centuries of print culture under the onslaught of imagery. While it is clear this makes him unhappy, his obituary is delivered with an air of inevitability since his central premise is immutable: the technology of a culture defines the kind of conversations it can have. His sense of loss is often palpable, recalling the debates of Lincoln-Douglas which lasted up to six hours and were standing-room-only, or the importance of literacy in Colonial America:

"It may be true...that the primary motivation of the writers of the United States Constitution was the protection of their economic interests. But it is also true that they assumed that participation in public life required the capacity to negotiate the printed word....To them, mature citizenship was not conceivable without sophisticated literacy...the voting restrictions against those who owned no property were frequently overlooked, but not one's inability to read." 11

As Postman describes himself, he is "no relativist." He clearly believes the culture of the printed word is superior to that of television, but he is not an absolutist either. He concedes there are downsides to print as there are to television. But he believes passionately -- it simply infuses every page of his book -- that the age of print that supported Colonial America, and which was the dominant medium of our democracy up until the middle of the twentieth century, was in large measure the bedrock on which our political institutions rested. And then "image" -- starting with the photograph -- overwhelmed print and in so doing has effectively destroyed context. What, after all, is the purpose of a word if it doesn't contain meaning? And what is a word's meaning without its context?

An image doesn't have the same demands. We may readily question what someone tells us, but if shown a photograph the question seems laid to rest (at least before Photoshop), as Susan Sontag pointed out.

In example after example, Postman shows how television eviscerates context, and with it the logical narrative necessary to deal with complexity.

While print requires time to create and absorb, a photograph can be realized in a millisecond and convincingly present itself as a complete world. Television, with its more powerful media capabilities (sound, motion, editing), is vastly more aggressive in its claim that it represents reality.

The result, Postman asserts, is a "peek-a-boo world." Like the child's game, it is perhaps fun and attention-grabbing, but ultimately incoherent.

By 1986, as I stood in the bookstore reading, you certainly couldn't argue: television had become the dominant medium in our culture.

9 Postman, Neil; Postman, Andrew (2005-12-27). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Foreword) Penguin.

10 Ibid. p. 6.

11 Ibid p. 62.
36. It's Howdy Doody Time

1950s TV set

SANTA MONICA, 1986

"Fasten your seat belt. It's going to be a bumpy night." \-- Bette Davis

In a seaside hotel I sat in a small conference room with four other people. We were judges, there to select the nominations for the Grammys' "Best Music Video." Stacked in one corner of the room were hundreds of 3/4-inch videotapes, the professional playback format at the time. A hapless assistant inserted them one by one into a Sony Umatic while the five of us watched. As a group we had decided to allow only ten seconds for any entry to get our attention, or we rejected it. That, we reasoned, was as long as anyone else's attention span could possibly be.

Inevitably in the stack of videos there would be one that would assault the senses with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of images – all cut quickly together, and representing the cacophony of our media environment. I'd seen this same technique employed outside of music videos as well, and I tended to dislike it. If anything, the fast-cutting felt to me like a lazy approach, something produced mostly for effect with a pretense to commentary -- but which was simply an easily produced reflection.

Yet I missed the deeper implications of this fast-cutting: what it meant, and how it had evolved. I missed the radical importance of the transformation that had been happening since I had watched the black and white screen in my parents' New York City apartment in the late 1940s, my mind filling up with foreign, far-flung images. (These images were "foreign" in the way that traditional medicine uses the word: they were something that invades the host.)

In 1949, when I was four, the amount of time the television was on was, say, a half an hour per day. Let's assume that in those early shows the number of new images per minute (meaning cutaways or scene changes) was three, impossibly slow by today's standards. That would be 90 new images introduced per day, or 630 new images per week. The number would grow.

By the 1950s programming changed, especially for children. I watched Gunsmoke, Davy Crockett, and Have Gun, Will Travel. Let's say that by this time television viewing had increased to an hour per day, seven hours per week, and the number of cuts per minute to six. That was 360 new non-related images per day, or 2,520 per week. By the 1970s, the average American household was watching between four and eight hours of television per day. This number steadily grew, but that wide range was encompassing. If the number of cuts per minute increased again to an average of one every six seconds, as editing speeds increased then, when watching television four hours per day, you absorbed 2,400 non-related images into your consciousness each day. That amounted to 16,800 per week, and 873,600 each year. If we use the statistic now reported of an average of seven hours of television viewing per day, the results are 29,400 new images per week, or 1,528,800 per year.

In a span of 40 years, the number of new non-related images insinuated into your consciousness was something like 61,152,000. You get the idea. Here was our new culture, the one that Neal Postman talked about in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death; we were immersed in it. Writes Postman,

The decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television...has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse. As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television. I have remained steadfast to (McLuhan's) teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.12

TV set in Los Angeles circa 1974

Prior to the late 1940s, this experience of having an entirely foreign scene mapped directly into your consciousness was impossible -- since the technology that was to enable it didn't yet exist. And yet, a few decades later, entire galaxies of imagery, created by people unknown to you, are suddenly inside your brain, and part of your personal memory. At any prior point in history, none of these images would ever have had the occasion to even enter your home. Television would change everything.

Postman expands his point: "Every medium of communication. . . like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility...our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like."13(my emphasis).

The world I knew as a young child wasn't affected by television in the way the world would be for people born only a few years after me. And of course this would have been true for Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and John Lennon -- all of whom were born even earlier than I. Three of them were young Englishmen in a country where food was still being rationed. People weren't buying televisions or any other "entertainment appliances." George Harrison, when asked if his family had a record player as a child replied, "We didn't have sugar."

The world would change radically, but for my generation the first popular medium to really change it would be recorded music, not television. And recorded music, in the age of the "LP," was a medium of linearity, and, in the hands of the singer song-writer, a medium of artistic coherence.

We are in the evolution of media so far away from when the long playing record ("LP") held sway that perhaps there's a need to define what an "album" was: a collection of (usually) 12 songs on a doubled sided "LP." Made of vinyl they were the precursors to both cassette tapes and then the compact disc. The letters stood for "Long Playing" to differentiate these albums from the earlier "45s" -- two songs on opposite sides of a single disc. (Those 45s were the MP3s of my generation. An early photograph of mine shows John Lennon in 1968; he is sitting amidst a collection of these 45s scattered about the floor of his apartment).

John Lennon with "45s"

The LP was the physical form that supported a particular creative expression, and the output of that expression was more than music, and much more than "entertainment." Songwriters could (and did) write songs for albums that when played linearly (i.e. track one followed by two, etc) delivered an experience akin to other forms of narrative. That is, they contained a beginning, a middle and an end, in the manner of a book, play, or movie.

The album wasn't narrative in the narrow sense of the word. Albums were more often thematic than plot-driven, more poetry than prose, but almost always there was a conceptualization, a way of making the entire work more than simply twelve separate songs. There was often a dramatic theme that wove through them, and the characters, setting, and sequencing were carefully authored.

This seemingly trivial fact appears in retrospect to be profound, especially when viewed against the disjointed television landscape that followed. In the manner of all the narrative arts, listening to those albums delivered a consistent, repeatable experience. With the power of the music, and the talent of the writers, they spoke to us. The importance of this ability for an album to deliver a crafted, dramatic experience cannot be overemphasized.

Not just in the sixties but going forward from that time, the world I saw on television was not the one I saw around me. And yet it purported to be "our world" -- the real world -- that television was said to represent. More and more, TV became our cultural measure of what was important. If it was on television, it was. If not, it wasn't.

Television would champion and extend The Age of Celebrity, which I dated from the publication of People magazine and noticed at first on the Rolling Stones' 1972 tour. Celebrities perfectly fit Postman's definition of the kind of "information" television likes. They were all look. They defined themselves. They travelled, packages without context. As we all know, the requirement to be designated as a celebrity morphed from having achieved at least something notable (sports, science, social leadership) to simply being perceived as "famous."

The consequences and effects of television, needless to say, could fill (and do) myriad books. The unique focus of Postman's book, however, is how our media determine what we are able to say, and how we perceive meaning, because now we are "talking" not with the written word, but with decontextualized images. A focus for this book -- American Story -- is how those images have been used to tell our history.

12 Postman, Neil; Postman, Andrew (2005-12-27). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business P8 Penguin.

13 Ibid p. 10.
37. I Saw the News Today. O Boy.

"Fuck the Man." Photographer unknown.

The methodology used to create television news is now so uniform and pervasive that we hardly notice it.14 But the style and method of its application first became commonplace in the early sixties. "Despite being extensively documented in historical scholarship.... much of what passes for history and conventional thinking is actually the public memory preserved for us by the mass media" writes Edward P. Morgan in What Really Happened to the 1960s. "(And they (mass media) were drawn to more dramatic and imagistic features that made protest newsworthy (so that) the protestors became the story, not the issues."15

But, arguably, these "imagistic features" weren't really telling a story as much as they were provoking opinions. Maybe they weren't even opinions in the traditional sense of the word. Neil Postman argues that these "opinions" were "of a quite different order from eighteenth-or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions (my emphasis), which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us." He continues,

"What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information -- misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information -- information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing...I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.16

In the context of the sixties, then, once the visuals of the protest are separated from the reasons for the protest (once an image is separated from context, something that television intrinsically does, Postman would argue) what is considered to be reporting and referred to as a "story" becomes instead a trigger for an emotion. As Postman notes, this is what happens naturally as an unintended consequence of commercial television. There is no need to have a conspiratorial bent.

But over time, and more and more, this was what happened: images of protests, of lifestyle, of violence drove diffuse, emotional responses. Since the images were, in effect, detached, a "new narrative" could easily be built out of the emotional, imagistic goulash. In fact one was building, and it had a powerfully communicative spokesman (one who was intent that America feel good about itself).

Edward P. Morgan writes that "the folksy, avuncular Reagan persona became a kind of nostalgic commercial for traditional verities and 'family values' that allegedly flourished in a visually mythologized past before the era of 'riots, assassinations, and domestic strife over the Vietnam War' as Reagan described the 1960s. . . . All things 'liberal' \-- permissive parenting, indulgent campus authorities, domestic government programs and the media -- were blamed for the generational unrest."17 It was during Reagan's campaign for governor of California in 1966 that he first started to marshall support for himself with a strategy that mined the revulsion people felt over the scenes Reagan chose to highlight at Berkeley, about unruly students, and over the reports of pot parties. While Reagan's opponent, Pat Brown, recited a long list of his accomplishments as governor, Ronald Reagan spoke to his supporters of "LSD parties" and conjured up images of their children engaging in orgiastic abandon.

Video: Ronald Reagan vs. The Hippies

Even though in fact Pat Brown's response to the sit-ins at Berkeley's Sproul Hall was to order the largest arrest ever of demonstrators, Reagan acted as if Brown had somehow caused the demonstrations. And Reagan's air of parental disapproval -- followed by footage of the student demonstrators -- was what remained in the public mind.

Still, at the time other professional politicians didn't take Reagan seriously. When confronted with the possibility of a Reagan candidacy, Pat Brown dismissed Ronald Reagan as a lightweight; a sizable portion of the press did the same thing. In a world of logic, they had good reason. Pat Brown's 1959 legislative session had been, as Rick Persltein writes in Nixonland, "the most productive in California history: bold new agencies for economic development . . . new funding for hospitals . . . a ban on racial discrimination in hiring; massive new funding for schools . . . the greatest college construction boom in human history . . . Let the actor have at him: the middle class knew better than to fall for that. (Pat Brown) had built the ladder upon which they had climbed."18 In defeat, Pat Brown would declare, as many capable and qualified politicians around America would also remark after their respective defeats by the likes of Lester Maddox or George Wallace, "it didn't make sense."

But to Robert Kennedy's advisor, it made at least some sense: "Pat Brown had the grays. Reagan had the black and whites." Why was it that as a nation we were now so easily persuaded by the "black and whites," and having such difficulty absorbing shades of gray? Because television chokes on complexity, and loves images (even if they're images you love to hate). And television media -- just starting to invent and refine its methods -- naturally gravitated to what was most visually compelling, even disturbing. That -- much more than getting the "story" -- was the imperative. The pictures were the story.

"Hippies" Photographer unknown

In an image-driven narrative \-- in the manner our history was now being portrayed -- time is easily condensed, like flash-forwards and flashbacks in a movie. Accuracy relies on the writer and the editor to construct the images in a way that truthfully represents the story. But writing and editing take time (sometimes years), talent, and integrity -- all three of which are often in short supply . . . even in the slower, better-financed world of film. To arrive at a real understanding of events, you need to identify and track them in the cacophony of images, which would include all of the media flood in which they flow – while most of flood is designed not to inform but to distract, sell, entertain or frighten. To truly understand, you would need the context of the events, which would not, as noted, be attached. And after awhile the viewers don't even necessarily know to demand (or even miss) the context: after all, they are seeing it with their own eyes, and this assures them that they have been informed. "Film footage justifies itself, as every television producer well knows." (Postman. My emphasis.)

The reality is that it is nearly impossible to simply track the events themselves, or even the most rudimentary information about them.

As the images multiplied, and became incessant, America polarized. Public response snowballed into a behemoth of judgment, a fear that all that mattered to Americans was under assault. That this would be the effect of television coverage was unanticipated. At the Democratic National Convention in 1968 in Chicago, Edward Morgan writes, "the protestors were confident that television coverage of police brutality would turn viewers against the police. In fact, the majority of American public responded by siding with the police." Our history (as all "history" since) was first communicated as the output of these television newsrooms.

Over time the images were taken apart and reassembled, generally driven by the imperatives of television news: what is striking visually, conflict-driven, emotion-producing?

Edited together, the images become inseparable, distasteful, threatening. All that remains is the ominous sense of disruptive outsiders.

The images being presented would -- over time -- "brand" the sixties. "Brand" is a word that would rise to much prominence in the corporate nineties--for to brand something well was virtually synonymous with success.

To have "branded" something successfully meant you have told the consumer both how to think of it and what to do with it. They literally "buy-in" without further judgement.

If it's food, say McDonalds, you know it is inexpensive and fast. If it's Apple Computers, you feel assured of a well-built product and good user experience. If it's the sixties it's a failed, chaotic decade. The images defined the brand: tear gas, dogs and beatings in the American South, King's March on Montgomery, angry whites cursing blacks in Chicago, Watts burning, students protestors incinerating draft cards, self-immolating monks, hippies in psychedelic clothing, a nodding-out addict, the stabbing at Altamont. The feeling of national revulsion was intense, rising like a wave of nausea. The revulsion became the emotional glue. and was used quite consciously (as it would be for the next 40 years19) to influence the political cycles.

If I thought about it, it seemed clear that elements of my generation had always been singled out for disapproval, going back to the birth of rock and roll and the invention of the teenager. The first wave of disapproval had been at "juvenile delinquents" -- who kind of scared me. Not that I actually saw any; most of them were on television or in movie trailers (so already it was the pictures). There was a lot of brouhaha over gangs and violence. Predictably, a plethora of films emerged about sexually loose, scantily clad girl-gangs,which, in the fifties, might mean occasionally exposing a bra). Yet the objects of the first wave of disapproval have become so assimilated into our culture that the once-fearsome juvenile delinquent was eventually reinvented as the adorable Fonzie in Happy Days.

The Fonz

But it was the reaction against the second wave, dating from 1964 onward (which, just like the first, was propelled by rock and roll) that was more severe; it lasted longer, too.

In college people threw things at me for having long hair and every day brought interactions -- sometimes whispered ("Is it a boy or a girl?"), sometimes confrontational. I was not alone; it was a national phenomenon. People with long hair were refused food and service. They were not infrequently assaulted. Some examples seem quite insane today: in New Orleans a woman was arrested and put in jail for wearing jeans, a charge formalized as "wearing the clothes of the opposite sex."20 For me it was the disaster at Altamont, for others it was the increasingly violent confrontations that over time gave rise to a distancing from all things political. But while we may have abandoned politics, politics did not abandon us.

My generation (or at least my slice of my generation) and our lifestyle would become a convenient target for political attack. Modeled on Reagan's strategy when running for Governor of California, it became the cornerstone of Nixon's "silent majority" strategy. (What a clever phrase and strategy that was, making a sweeping assumption about a broad class of people and then appropriating them as a political base when -- by description -- they were silent.) The key to understanding the strategy is to appreciate its efficiency. Television triggers emotions (even more than opinions) and emotions (more than opinions) motivate action. The revulsion at lifestyle, the disapproval of behaviors, and general resistance to change was successful in allowing an entirely new political alignment. It moved, for example, many blue collar workers, for years in the fold of Franklin Roosevelt's Democrats, into Reagan's patriotic America. It was a new, amazingly powerful weapon. And so the "culture wars" became a central strategy in our national political landscape.

By the time the "branding" was complete, an entire visual mythology had been constructed. To me it looked like this: a bedraggled long-haired youth, holes in his clothes, a bandana around his head, red-eyed, stands next to a classic WWII army soldier (and, by extension, all those who served, before and after) in rumpled green fatigues, helmet under his arm, his eyes sorrowful from the horror he has seen, the weight of the battle emanating from him, his courage palpable, his sacrifice implied, his honor immense. In this comparison our hippie is an insult. And such was the intended effect.

But it was not clear at the time that this would be the outcome. In 1972 when I was touring with The Rolling Stones, standing on stage in auditoriums filled with 20,000 ecstatic longhairs, it was pretty easy to feel that the polarization over lifestyle had been laid to rest, and that we had "won." I remember seeing the changes in small things.

Returning from England while watching an American football game on television, I noticed with astonishment and some pleasure that the quarterback's long hair was emerging from underneath his helmet. To a boy who had grown up in the fifties, when the male teen ideal was the close-cropped, muscular jock, this augured something . . . perhaps a softening of the rigid archetypes of the fifties. Politically, in 1973, Nixon was forced to resign over Watergate. Earlier in his administration his Vice-President, Spirow Agnew (he of the atrocious alliterations... written by Pat Buchanan...) had become the first Vice-President in American history who had to resign for criminal charges that were brought while he was in office. Surely the cynicism and hypocrisy was obvious, even to the "moral majority" the Administration purported to represent? With the Vietnam War receding and Nixon out of office, it seemed that after a long, hard road, some balance might be coming back to the country. But it was too late. The cacophonous, polarized, politicized narrative of the 60s as portrayed on television had already taken root.

14 Postman, Neil; Postman, Andrew (2005-12-27). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (p. 1070 Penguin.

15 What Really Happened to the 1960s? by Edward P. Morgan 2010, University Press of Kansas p.4

16 Postman, Neil; Postman, Andrew (2005-12-27). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (p. 1070 Penguin.

17 What Really Happened to the 1960s? by Edward P. Morgan 2010, University Press of Kansas p.4

18 Nixonland by Rick Perlstein p.72 Simon & Schuster, Inc. 2008

19 Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George

W. Bush, by Bernard von Bothmer, 2010 University of Massachusetts Press

20 Terry H. Anderson. The Movement and The Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (Kindle Locations 4534-4536). Kindle Edition.Terry H. Anderson. The Movement and The Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (Kindle Locations 4534-4536). Kindle Edition.
38. The Drug Generation

Photographer and subject unknown. [†]

Everybody must get stoned (redux)

It might be convenient to state simply we were misrepresented (intentionally or not; the truth is certainly both) and retire. But this would be an inadequate response. Especially in terms of excess, we provided plenty of material.

I know of no reason why my generation struggled so forlornly and at such cost with alcohol and drugs any more than I know why I was so unconsciously attracted by the look of the long-haired man in Big Sur in 1962 who reminded me of Wild Bill Hickok and so seemed to be the keeper of some important heritage. This long-haired stranger seemed to me to signal a lost time in America that shouldn't be allowed to be lost.

Yet drugs were unavoidably central to the story of my generation. Our history is littered with the damage that resulted from drug and alcohol abuse. Both my brothers struggled with addiction most of their lives. (My elder brother got sober for the last 19 years of his life, but my younger one never could, at least for any length of time. He died at 56.)

The list of casualties seemed endless enough . . . knowing just my family, and searching only my own memory. The ones that came to mind, most of whom I knew or had at least worked with, included Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, John Entwhistle, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. But when I researched it, the weight of the names felt crushing. And these are the ones who were well known enough to make it onto the list: Lester Bangs 1948-1982

Mike Bloomfield 1943-1981

Tommy Bolin 1951-1976

John Bonham 1948-1980

Lenny Bruce 1925-1966

Tim Buckley 1947-1975

Paul Butterfield 1942-1987

Truman Capote 1924-1984

Kurt Cobain 1967-1994

Michael Cooper 1941-1973

John Entwhistle 1944-2002

Brian Epstein 1934-1967

Ranier Fassbinder 1945-1982

Lowell George 1945-1979

Tim Hardin 1941-1980

Abbie Hoffman 1936-1989

Michael Jackson 1958-2009

Jack Keruoac 1922-1969

Joseph McCarthy 1908-1957

Keith Moon 1946-1978

Jim Morrison 1943-1971

Gram Parsons 1946-1973

Elvis Presley 1933-1977

Sid Vicious (John Simon Ritchie) 1957-1979

Don Simpson 1943-1996

Ike Turner 1931-2007

Keith Whitley 1954-1989

It is difficult in light of the litany above not to feel desolate; if I had to select one thing that is most regrettable and wasteful about our history, it would be the toll that drugs and alcohol took on us. It is not merely about those individual losses -- "the casualties," as people would refer to them in a kind of short-hand -- using the metaphor of an accident, or a war, though neither truly applied: both lack the element of personal accountability that must necessarily attach to drug use. As awful as the "casualties" were, they didn't encompass the entire cost, which must also include all that wasn't accomplished that needed to be accomplished.

But it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that when marijuana and LSD first appeared on the scene they did so in an explosion of mostly joyous fun and revelation. Drugs were in the air at the "Human Be-In" in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967, and (perhaps fatally) became forever associated with all the exciting change that was happening and predicted to keep happening. That the marijuana of the time was closer in effect to a wine spritzer than a 120 proof martini it would morph into by the 1980s, and that LSD would become a minor player among a menu of addictive drugs, we didn't know then that was even possible.

But things went downhill very quickly. At Altamont, less than two years after marijuana and LSD were being trumpeted as mind-altering sacraments, the debilitating effects of drug abuse were visible for all to see: people's eyes were vacant, not entranced. People seemed mindless, disoriented and, often, stupid. It is easy to feel from this a sense of generational failure.
39. Vogue

Madonna. Photographer unknown. [†]

"Strike the pose." -- Madonna

The Eighties wore on. Madonna adroitly used wardrobe for personal reinvention (rather than use personal reinvention for personal reinvention, as I felt my musical heroes had). The number of seismic social and cultural shifts that Madonna somehow embodied reads like an inventory of the rift in the generations: from the sixties' spiritual quest for "Further" and "All You Need Is Love" to the Eighties "Material Girl" and "Greed Is Good." But there was an apparent sub-text: these changes seemed to want to reinforce themselves by including a cynical dismissal of all the things the sixties had purportedly stood for, as if not satisfied simply to exist on their own. As money became once again the measure of merit, and as social concerns seemed to disappear from discourse--the changes were unsettling to me. But, hey, things change. That was our mantra. What was I to worry about?

It wasn't as if we were entirely unaware of our shortcomings and needed reminding. As early as 1974 John Lennon was asking "Was it just a dream?" And in 1975 the Eagles were singing: "you're afraid it's all been wasted time." I felt it. I had first tried to come to grips with this sense of failure that was starting to appear when I wrote my first book Dear Mr. Fantasy, which focused on music and ended with John Lennon's passing. But John's death alone did not seem adequate to explain the burgeoning sense of generational collapse that seemed to be forming. It was almost as if there was something external driving it... something that never made it into the pages of Dear Mr. Fantasy. How was this happening?

Like I say, it wasn't on the top of my list of things to worry about. But I felt it.
40. Losing My Religion

"Consider this...." R.E.M

The 1990s

Rock and roll splintered. Mainstream metal took on the flavor of professional wrestling; it became a theater of excess. Years earlier, punk reacted against bloated rock 'n' roll --with the Sex Pistols' wonderfully-titled Never Mind the Bollocks. But they, too, became a splinter. Rap and Hip Hop emerged. The Wall Street Journal wrote a cover story about how rock's audience had fragmented into different demographics. MC Hammer's floppy pants danced across television, while Britney Spears dressed in a skimpy dress like a cheerleader, moaned Baby One More Time, and Michael Jackson danced with black men who pretended to be in Africa. . . .carrying spears. His performance was riveting. The images were big -- and fragmented beyond sense. Everyone was choreographed and extraordinary. Media everywhere was splintering: the three networks were challenged by cable. The image onslaught accelerated faster and further.

My business remained a satellite of the music business: I directed music videos -- Paul Simon "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes"' kd lang in Canada "Trail of Broken Hearts", Vonda Shepherd (about to be a mainstay on Ally McBeal), even a heavy metal all star supergroup......and took the occasional photograph.

It was my job.

"Diamonds"

Soft rainsqualls on the swells

south of the Bonins, late at night. Light

from the empty mess-hall

throws back bulky shadows

of winch and fairlead

over the slanting fantail

where I stand....

....the ship burns with a furnace heart

steam veins and copper nerves

quivers and slightly twists and always goes -

easy roll of the hull and deep

vibration of the turbines underfoot.

bearing what all these

crazed, hooked nations need:

steel plates and long injections of pure oil.

\-- Gary Snyder "Oil" 1958

In 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and President George H.W. Bush went on television to announce this will not stand. Requested by the Kuwaitis, sanctioned by the United Nations, George Bush organized a coalition, like a man of his generation. Unlike some of my peers, I was more sanguine about this war. Of course it was about oil, but oil drove economies, and the new "market democracies" seemed like a good thing. But it was the fact of a real alliance--as opposed to the unilateral nature of the war in Vietnam--that softened my response. When the French allowed us to fly over their country, I knew that alliance was real. The French, like Mikey, don't like anything (American).

When the U.S. responded in January of 1991, cable news was all over it. Soon we started to see the footage of laser guided smart bombs and cruise missiles fired from destroyers. There were concerns about Iraqi use of chemical weapons, and the scorching summer temperatures. A little over five weeks later, the war was over.

For years people complained that Bush stopped short of going into Baghdad, but to me it was obvious why. We would never have gotten that agreement from the alliance before the war. Bush was acting in concert with the alliance and the U.N. Charter. That seemed a good thing to me, unlike Vietnam.

George H.W. Bush emerged from the Gulf War with a popularity rating of over 90% but it dropped to under 40% by March. By 1992 the U.S. had entered a slight recession, which is never a good thing for an incumbent--and Bush the elder was too centrist for the conservative base that was beginning to dominate his party. That he raised taxes-- despite a campaign pledge not to do so -- "read my lips" -- was probably his political death knell.

In 1992 George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton; it was a cold blow, really. I had no particular affinity for Bill Clinton. The first time I saw him I turned off the television, repelled by his cute little Kennedy haircut and what seemed like a disingenuous smile. (Ross Perot's candidacy emerged to become a blip, historically, although he was attention-grabbing at the outset. In the end, almost 20,000,000 Americans voted for him' a lot of people.)

But Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate, and I was predisposed to like Gore: I had met him in a small gathering of environmentalists in the 1980s. You would never recognize that Al Gore, though, as the man who later ran for President. His talk was emotional, powerful--almost like I imagine a Southern Baptist preacher might be from the pulpit.

Clinton-Gore won the election and turned the Republican landslides of the previous 12 years into a significant realignment of the electoral map. Except for Jimmy Carter, there had not been a Democrat in the White House since 1969.

In January of 1992, I watched the Clinton Inauguration on television. There was a little bit of celebratory rock and roll: Fleetwood Mac singing "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." Still, one image persisted: a telephoto shot of lines of limousines, stretching forever down a Washington avenue. As opposed to Kennedy's open car in Dallas, the limousines were now heavily armored, with the windows smoked and closed. They looked, in this compressed view, like hulking rhinoceroses. Flags by the avenue unfurled lifelessly on their standards: The overall feeling seemed not that of a great democracy, but instead eerily like that of the Roman Empire at its height.
41. Sisyphus

Photographer unknown

"Here I sit so patiently / Trying to figure out what price I have to pay to get out of / Going through all these things twice?"

\-- Bob Dylan, "Memphis Blues Again"

For me, politics had settled into the background. Even the Gulf War hadn't made that much of an impact, and it seemed there was little cause to engage except for the Rodney King beatings in 1991. Watching the grainy tape, I felt I was witnessing a police state, or a replay of the American South in 1962. But despite the horror of the beatings, and the huge riots that followed, they didn't seem to drive a political response. Instead, people looted.

"I call them 'The Home Shopping riots,'" said my friend Georgia Bergman. She had a point.

I typed an angry letter to the Los Angeles Times \- on paper, mailed with a stamp. E-mail was still waiting in the wings.

The political volume may have diminished to a background noise, but it was a background noise that kept getting louder. Still, it wasn't until the attacks on Bill Clinton in his second term took on the aspect of a religious crusade that I started to pay attention. The attacks had begun in his first term over Whitewater, but post Nixon Watergate, and post Reagan Iran-Contra the expectation of partisan attack was well established. But to me there was a disturbing difference. These really weren't political issues. Unable to get traction on Whitewater, the attacks moved to personal matters of marital infidelity. And so I started to become engaged for the same reasons I had in my youth: what I was witnessing seemed wrong on some fundamental level.

At first, the depth of the rancor Bill Clinton inspired was hard for me to comprehend, but I discovered that it ran as deep as the wounds from the Civil War -- made even worse for those affronted (if that were possible) by all the resentments from the sixties stereotypes, by civil rights marches, the war protests, and by the "lifestyle" issues of sexual orientation.

A former judge on the Arkansas Supreme Court, a diehard "states' rights" Democrat, told Ken Gormley in his book "The Death of American Virtue," that it was people like him who had "recaptured the South" after the Civil War and worked to restore whatever "dignity was left." Clinton undermined this by putting together "coalitions of the blacks, leftists, labor and other special interests" and then tacked on "the gays and schoolteachers" which "really stole our home base." They hated Clinton for it, but they didn't attack his policies or his coalitions. They attacked his sexual behavior.

But Clinton's acts -- under any semblance of rationality I could muster -- were transparently never those of high crimes or misdemeanors. And the attempt to make them so, by having him testify under oath, where he lied about his sexual transgressions, and then using those lies to go after him for perjury, and so remove him from the Presidency, was a witch hunt. To suggest if Bill Clinton had simply "owned up" it would have gone away is sophistry. Even at the time it seemed absurd. A sex charge superheated into an impeachment trial.

The pursuit of Clinton was accelerated and sustained by the emergence of "political talk radio," which was made uniquely possible by the repeal in 1987 (under Reagan) of the "Fairness Doctrine."

The Fairness Doctrine had been established in 1949 and so had affected political debate in America through my entire lifetime. It had two basic elements: "It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters...[Even so] the doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views." 21

The reason for repeal argued that the original conditions requiring the Fairness Doctrine (lack of access to an opposing point of view) no longer applied in an expanding media landscape. I can almost hear the lawyers as they lay out their immutable logic. Cable meant more bandwidth. Bandwidth meant more choices. Opposing views could now proliferate, if anything. There would not be less diversity, but more.

But there would be consequences: in the explosion of media that would result in not one, not two, but three twenty-four hour news channels (not to mention all the other media outlets), there was no realistic way people had the time to track the opposing points of view. So, as Americans, the trend became to listen to your personal predisposition and never change the channel. Into this volatile political and regulatory mix Fox News launched.

Sitting in my home in Pasadena, I watched it unfold. In my mind, we now had what amounted to a virtual national disaster in the polarized and destructive national political debate. It excited emotions, of course, (and emotions energized supporters), as it had since the sixties. The culture wars were in full flood.

So I became involved again. I sent money, signed petitions, and sent emails (the new technology in town). I had never, since the Vietnam War, seen the country so polarized. By 1998 it was as if the U.S. dialogue was almost exclusively about Bill Clinton's blow job. It was Amusing Ourselves to Death writ large: what as a nation we now seemed prepared to accept as public discourse in the age of show business.

21 Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine
42. Teach Your Children Well

Seeds Elementary School

LOS ANGELES, 1990s

While the culture wars gathered steam, I read an article in the Los Angeles Times about Robert Abel and Synapse Technologies, which had set up shop in the by-then-abandoned Ambassador Hotel--where Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. I'd met Abel several times through the years. He had a shop on Highland Boulevard with Emmys displayed on the walls that recognized his early work in computer animation. It had been an up-and-down ride for him, however, and he had moved on to a new endeavor -- a joint venture with IBM to develop an "interactive, multimedia" educational product, based on Columbus' discovery of the New World, which was short-handed by the creatives as "Columbus" but became "Columbus: Voyage, Encounter, & Beyond."

I was already a computer geek. I had bought my first computer, an Osborne 1, in 1981, and my first book had been written on its little four-inch screen. Looking at the Osborne today, it was impossible not to be reminded of early televisions. It was about the size of a portable sewing machine, and that was its appeal to me: its portability. I was swept immediately into the project. Synapse was like being in the Army during wartime, the need for conscripts was great.

"Columbus" was one of the first and biggest "interactive, multimedia" projects in a rapidly developing technological world. It ran on Windows 3.1, with audio assets on an external hard drive and video stored on an analog laser disc; the entire contraption, with speakers, occupied several square feet. In retrospect it feels like we constructed a space ship out of locomotive parts.

The first browser (Netscape Navigator) had yet to appear, and while the internet existed it was still practically invisible, and there was not yet a graphics-intensive World Wide Web. But the ideas were there: a menu-ed and searchable database; articles in text, audio, and video. In education, it seemed that everyone decried the influence of television and the insularity of the classroom, which felt increasingly out of touch and irrelevant. I had already read Amusing Ourselves to Death by then, and I was interested in how one might one day bring to education a viable new media syntax. Anyway, every time I had a chance to get out of show business I usually jumped, and this was another opportunity, although I continued to do the occasional job for the music business.

I flew to Franklin, Tennessee (home of an 1864 Civil War battle) to photograph John Hiatt. His opening remark, memorable, was "I'd rather be locked in a phone booth with a mountain lion than have my photograph taken," an auspicious beginning. We shot for two days. After Columbus was delivered I spent a further year working with UCLA and the Seeds University Elementary School, part of their graduate school of education. I drove daily from Pasadena to the school, working with the teachers, filming in the classroom, absorbing the values of child-centric learning, and talking with the children. These were exciting times. I was glad to be near children again. The potential for change promised by "new media" appeared immense, as it would turn out to be (but not, of course, only benign).

Seeds U.E.S.

John Hiatt eyeing an approaching storm

The Seeds Elementary School was my own project. I shot film of the teachers explaining their methods of instruction, and the reasons behind them. I shot the children as they played in the classroom, and built an interface that made it possible to "click through" and hear the teachers explain the methodology that was at work. Always, in the back of my mind, were the challenges that Postman had surfaced and I was trying to discover mini-steps to try and address them. There was a popular saying that people would throw about during these years that may have been over-stated, but which was certainly more true than not--and it was terrifying: "Ninety-percent of the people get one hundred percent of their information from television."
43. The Beat Goes On

Photographer unknown

"Television provides a new...definition of truth: The credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition."

\-- Neil Postman

George W. Bush was all things television loved: personable and friendly. Postman writes,

"Credibility" here does not refer to the past record of the teller for making statements that have survived the rigors of reality-testing. It refers only to the impression of sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability or attractiveness (choose one or more)... This is a matter of considerable importance, for it goes beyond the question of how truth is perceived...If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude.22

What Postman omits in his commentary is how "television credibility" is inextricably linked to credulity, which amplifies the effect. The "impression of sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability or attractiveness" is reinforced when, additionally, there is a willingness to believe. The greater the credulity, the more forcefully it powers belief. It is not much of a stretch, then, to see how the resulting beliefs can end up as Political Articles of Faith, which in turn take on many aspects of religious faith. While Reagan ("politics is just like show business") was arguably the master, John Kennedy and Bill Clinton both benefitted.

Despite a spotty track record of success 23] at his early endeavors, Bush had the makings of a Presidential candidate, at least as far as Karl Rove was concerned. When the two first met, Rove described Bush as having "huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma -- you know, wow!" On the radio I once heard Rove declare Bush had "more charm than any human being should be allowed to have." In the [2000 Republican primary, Bush carried 43 states to John McCain's 7 -- and Alan Keyes's 0.

Bush's opponent in the general election was Vice President Al Gore. Their debates were interestingly reminiscent of the Kennedy-Nixon debates wherein, famously, the people who listened on radio thought that Nixon had won, while those who watched on TV felt that Kennedy had carried the day. The "telegenic" candidate won.

Kennedy Nixon debates

The similarities extend further: Nixon had vastly more experience than Kennedy, as did Al Gore had when compared to George W. Bush. Gore, like Nixon, had been Vice President for eight years, and had served sixteen years in Congress (eight in the House, eight in the Senate). But, as Postman predicted, such a lengthy record of experience is not what television is interested in. It is interested in the impression of sincerity.

This is not really a partisan issue: after all, George W. Bush's father -- whose experience when he ran for President (after Reagan) constituted the "longest resume in Washington" -- once pointed out that he did not like the debating process. It was, he told PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer, "ugly. Some of it's contrived. Show business...You got Bernie Shaw on the panel, and here's what he's probably gonna ask you. You got Leslie Stahl over here, and she's known to go for this and that. There's a certain artificiality to it." 24 The Elder President Bush would be hammered over and over for "the vision thing," and you could tell its persistence irritated, even confused, him. But his lack of "the vision thing" might really have been the absence of what his predecessor had been so astonishingly good at: the ability to look into the camera, be personable, and gaze into the distance. If George H. W. Bush could have done that, I posit, he would been declared to have "vision." Bill Clinton – who was less stiff, more personable, and quite good at squinting his eyes and looking into the future -- won. "Vision."

Of course by the time of the younger George Bush-Al Gore debates both the candidates and their campaigns were acutely aware of the power of television, and they approached the debates defensively. Gore rated himself: "In the first debate I was too hot, in the second I was too cold, and in the third I was just right,25" he says, recalling both Goldilocks and Marshall McLuhan's definition of hot and cold from Understanding Media.

It was more than just Bush's demeanor, however. As a candidate, he said some measured and reasonable things -- for example, about foreign affairs, "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us. I would take the use of force very seriously. I would be guarded in my approach . . . [Al Gore] believes in nation-building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders."

After the Florida recount and the Supreme Court decision that confirmed him as President, Bush was eloquent in his call for bi-partisanship. "We must put politics behind us, and make the promise of America available for every one of her citizens...I hope [we can] heighten a desire to move beyond the partisanship . . . Our nation must rise above a house divided."

It did come down to an impression of sincerity. I am still tempted to believe that Bush meant what he said . . . but did he? Postman would argue that such a critical question is no longer possible to answer, since on television the answer can't really be determined.

There is some evidence that Bush was genuine, but that his personal and Presidential style made him easily managed by his much more sophisticated, detail-oriented, and hardworking Vice-President.

Cheney, in turn, seemed to have insulated himself from his own acts by defining himself as a selfless supporter of Bush's presidential prerogatives, which Cheney defined in large measure as synonymous with his own priorities -- among which was the vast expansion (or reclamation, depending on your point of view) of executive power. Cheney's Vice Presidency was, in effect, a shadow Presidency \-- one I had not seen before, and for which I was entirely unprepared. It appears, however, that Cheney knew what he was doing. In Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency, Barton Gellman recounts former Vice-President Dan Quayle's visit to Cheney before the Inauguration. Quayle offers Cheney some advice,

"You know, you're going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you're going to be doing all this political fund-raising.... I mean, this is what vice presidents do. We've all done it. You go back and look at what I did, or what Gore did."

Quayle continues, "Cheney (then) did that thing he does with one raised eyebrow, a smile on just the left side of his face. 'I have a different understanding with the president.'"

"Well, did you get that directly from Bush?" Quayle asks.

"Yes."26

As much as I was inclined to give George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt, I did notice that the people he surrounded himself with looked a lot like his father's War Cabinet. Maybe Dick Cheney--who had headed the team charged with selecting the Vice-President only to end up with the job himself--had a hand there as well.

22 Postman, Neil; Postman, Andrew . Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (p.101) Penguin.

23 Byrd, Robert C. (Senator), Losing America: Confronting A Reckless and Arrogant Presidency,W.W. Norton & Co 2004

24 Lehrer, Jim (2011-09-13). Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates, from Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain (p. 6). Random House. Kindle Edition.

25 Ibid p. 110.

26 Gellman, Barton Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (p. 58). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.
44. Nine One One

Home

SAN FRANCISCO

In early 2000 I finally left Los Angeles to return to San Francisco. My mother had turned 70, and I wanted to be with her in the last years of her life, however many she had. I made my last movie, another homage to the singer songwriter, based on the work of Rickie Lee Jones, ("Naked Songs") and then I devoted myself entirely to interactive media.

I judged San Francisco to better understand what was variously called "interactive multimedia" a.k.a "new media." I worked with a startup that made five hour interactive movies and delivered them, networked, to the desktop as part of another rich, multimedia database. The product was targeted at Fortune 500 companies for training -- not my usual field of endeavor -- but I still had an abiding interest in seeing if there was a way to build a new semantic that might help counteract the dismemberment of print, and this was a real-world way to do that.

Music spoke less and less to me. On the charts Britney Spears sang "I Am a Slave 4 U" -- released September 24th -- and in the video appeared tousled and sweaty, walking down a hallway surrounded by dancers, like a more experienced, world-weary version of her first video. In technology we were in the middle of the "browser wars" as they began to take over the desktop.

In early September of 2001, I was at home in San Francisco when my mother called.

"Are you watching TV?" she asked.

"No," I replied, switching it on, imagining that whatever she was calling about would be no big deal; she was elderly. And yet the first thing I saw was not a talking head, but the event itself: slow motion footage of a plane as it smashed into the World Trade Center and then exploded in a huge fireball. I sat glued to the set, like everyone, for hours, watching the towers crumble.

First tower hit. September 11,2001

The next day I went to the Civic Center to donate blood, and saw a line that stretched around the block. I vowed to go back. I was glad -- and a little surprised -- when Bush, in his televised response, had a Muslim standing next to him. There was no question: there had to be a response.

Lower Manhattan, September 11,2001

Robert Byrd later wrote that this moment focused a floundering Presidency27 and, for some time, the world rallied around us. It was heartening to see that, after the anti-Americanism that still lingered from the Vietnam war, and from America's other unilateral adventures into foreign affairs. Yet as the Bush administration orchestrated a response, the focus inexplicably began to shift from Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan to Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

In 2001 and 2002, as America readied its military to invade Iraq, I protested the invasion, along with literally millions of others worldwide. I was particularly struck at the time by the ineffectual nature of our protests. They did not draw the kind of violent police response as the protests of the sixties had, and it was as if on some level there was no longer any need to be responsive to the citizenry.

In fact, the protests seemed not to matter not at all. One wonders if it was in part because we no longer had Armed Forces that were drawn broadly from our population? This was a bittersweet pill, because I had been overjoyed when the draft was stopped. But as a result, there was no "Hell, no. We won't go."

It could have been, as Postman suggests, that Americans were not informed, or: they were informed, but misinformed. Ten years after the war, the Brookings Institute reported 46% of Americans still believe Iraq was supporting Al-Qaeda and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.28

Whatever the reasons, the invasion of Iraq moved inexorably forward. I was working in San Francisco when Saddam's deadline passed and CNN broadcast images from Baghdad, the anti-aircraft tracers arcing green in the night sky. Whether this outcome was largely a result of Cheney's machinations, it occurred during Bush's Presidency, and it appears unlikely that the "centrist, compassionate" positions he articulated as a candidate, discussing a "humble" America in foreign affairs, will turn out to be the legacy of his Presidency. Instead, it will almost certainly be the misdirection from Afghanistan to Iraq, the use of torture in Guantanamo, the images from Abu Ghraib, and (as would become painfully clear) an explosion of national debt . . . all to be accompanied by a partisan rancor unequalled until, unhappily, the years that would follow.

I wrote in the Introduction that I was unable to recognize in present-day America the country of John Adams, or even Eisenhower's America of my youth. The question I asked in the Introduction was, and it is one I want to try and answer: "How did we get here from there?"

"History is a better guide than good intentions," as Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Reagan's foreign policy advisor once put it. Let's use that.

27 Byrd, Robert C. (Senator), Losing America: Confronting A Reckless and Arrogant Presidency,W.W. Norton & Co 2004

28 Brookings Intitute Poll. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/09/911-and-the-war-on-terror-polls-show-what-people-really-believe-10-years-later.html
45. The Long Road Home

Marin, California, 2008

"Each generation of Americans rightfully demands a new engagement with the past." -- Ronald C White, Jr. Lincoln: A Biography

I suppose I could have discovered that the America of John Adams and Dwight Eisenhower was still dominant in ways I hadn't understood, but that is not what I found. It may even be fair to say that I would have been unable to find that America when I was in my late teens, and that was perhaps part of the problem for everyone: we were already looking, and it was already gone.

So – as Ronald White suggests above – I wanted a new engagement. Almost no one I spoke with as I wrote this book felt that our history had been presented in a way that did it justice. But few had spent the time -- or seemed willing -- to look back at it. It was as if there was an open wound there, caused by the after-effects of violence and stemming from the assassinations of the 1960s or the Vietnam War. Or, perhaps the wound was really self-inflicted as with drugs, or perhaps just the result of simple disillusionment. "My sentimental idealism became as unfashionable as bell-bottom pants," wrote Jonathan Taplin in his book Outlaw Blues. He goes on to say, "I might have foreseen that] the air of passionless detachment that the age of irony ([Seinfeld, Letterman, SNL) was about to bring upon us would render most of my generation, and the one to follow, politically impotent. . .Most of us retreated into work, or eventually family."29

Generally, the responses I encountered seemed to fall into a couple of broad categories: a feeling of loss, as mentioned, coupled with a vague sense that somehow the story had not been told properly -- or, quite often, a dismissal of the entire period, as if any identification with it would destroy one's credibility.

And yet I have been uncomfortable leaving it there. Any listing of the ills of my generation -- the things that caused the collapse of our political engagement -- point to certain facts: the personal and visual excesses, as protests became more theatrical; and the exhaustion of everyone involved with the conflicts. But no one wants to examine the consequences; they disregard concerns about what happens to a democracy once you drop out of the process. All these assessments of our history seemed crippled and ultimately inadequate; I kept looking. If you understand why it was possible for us to make the decisions we did, and how (at least in my mind) they were consistent with the America that came before -- and then watch how they were discredited -- you will have come a long way in understanding my view of how we got here from there.

To do this we have to widen the lens beyond the traditional range of dates that normally bracket the "Baby Boomers": 1946 through 1964. In my personal life I had discovered that by expanding the number of generations I looked at, I was able to bring some sense to a subject that was otherwise impenetrable to me. During my teen years, for instance, I could never understand my family as my mother was explaining it to me. Despite her passion for what she was trying to communicate, her explanations never lined up with the experience I was having. She would say, for example, that family was the most important thing. But I never felt -- nor, particularly, did my siblings appear to feel -- that we were the most important thing. It wasn't until years later, when I learned about my mother's mother (a five-time divorcee, drug addict, and suicide victim), her brother (killed in the Second World War), and her father (sent to live a continent away when she was a child) that I realized how her life experience so intimately affected mine. She had to believe that family was the "most important thing": she had suffered her whole life from its dissolution. Once I understood this, what went on in my family made sense. The inclusion of several generations was needed.

"History," as Therdore Roszak wrote, "is not comfortably measured out in decades." And so, looking at our history, we must go back.

Anerica 1946

Seven months after Germany surrendered to the Allies, Winston Churchill delivered his "Iron Curtain" Speech to students of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. He told his audience, "ladies and gentlemen, the United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American democracy." He was right, of course: America had never in its entire history been in the position it found itself in after the Second World War. After previous wars, the policy of the United States had been to reduce its forces. After World War I, they were shrunk to around 125,000 men. The result was, as someone remarked, the U.S. was left with "the smallest force of all the Great Powers." The First World War had been "the war to end all wars," and the U.S., like Britain, retreated into itself. The two nations licked their wounds and became aggressively isolationist. Who would be crazy enough to repeat such carnage?

It is hard to imagine today the modest status of the American military at the beginning of World War II. It wasn't until 1932 that tanks were even introduced into the Armed Forces, and then it was into the calvary, next to the horses. Even that introduction moved at a glacial pace. When in 1939, Germany invaded Poland in a mechanized blitzkrieg, there were only 464 tanks in the entire USA.30 In June of 1940 Germany invaded France, and in the United States peacetime conscription was introduced.

London bombed.

Then in June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia, at which point Russia became our ally. Six months later, on December 7, 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Four days after that Hitler declared war on the United States. By then the U.S. Army had grown to 1,640,000 men.

We were in the war, but our prospects were definitely not good, as William Manchester writes in his book, Goodbye Darkness:

In the spring of 1942, when Corregidor fell, and I joined the Marines, a glance at a global map would have convinced an impartial observer, were there any left, that our side was losing the war. Indeed, one could have argued persuasively that the Allies had already lost it. Hitler was master of Europe. He ruled an empire larger than the United States, with conquests stretching from the Arctic waters in the north to the Libyan Desert in the south, from the English Channel in the west to within a day's march of the Caspian Sea in the east. It seemed that nothing could stop Erwin Rommel from seizing Cairo and the Suez Canal. Certainly the Americans couldn't. Thus far they had been a ineffectual ally... U.S merchantmen were being torpedoed nightly in the Atalantic -- 1,160 that year -- often within view of their Atlantic seaboard. To few were reaching Murmansk or English ports with tanks or munitions to tip the scales. An imminent linkup between German and Japanese armies...appeared to be inevitable.31

We know who won. But the point for me--the reason this matters for this book-- is to understand what America faced in the war, how aware we were of its consequences, and with what concern we would view the possibility of another.

Tanker sunk by a Japanese submarine

On August 6, 1945, the Unites States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, immediately obliterating 70% of the city and killing 80,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki -- killing 73,884, and injuring 74,909, with another several hundred thousand diseased and dying, due to illnesses caused by radiation. The effects of nuclear war, at that point, became horrifyingly real.

Nagasaki

The death toll of World War II was staggering. Between 62 and 78 million people died; Russia lost over 23 million people (14% of its population). Germany and Austria lost between 6,750,000 and 8,800,000, or 8.0% to 10.5% of the countries' populations. Great Britain lost .94% of its population, and the U.S. .32%.32

The global devastation was shattering. The U.S. emerged as the indisputable economic and military beneficiary of the war; its mainland was unscathed, and its economy and industrial capacity were expanded enormously.

deGaulle in Europe

Kiev in Ruins

Such was the state of the world as, in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill continued with his warning.

"....with this primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. As you look around you, you must feel not only the sense of duty done, but also you must feel anxiety lest you fall below the level of achievement (my emphasis)....It is my duty, however, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow." 33

He laments: "Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her, and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind.... It could have been prevented in my belief..."

And so, Churchill describes a vision of post World War II that echoes the warnings that he had made to his own government about the rise of Hitler -- warnings had gone unheeded, and were by now seen as prescient. The consequences of ignoring Churchill's concerns were catastrophic: over 62 million people killed, before the nuclear weapons were even deployed. Churchill's warning was impossible to ignore. Harry Truman picked up the gauntlet.

One week after Churchill's speech, the American President announced the "Truman Doctrine," which declared that the U.S. would support Greece and Turkey with economic and military aid, to prevent their falling into the Soviet sphere. It would be, he said, "the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Truman's policy won the support of the Republicans who controlled Congress at that time, and involved sending $400 million in American money (but no military forces) to the region. The effect was to end the Communist threat to Turkey and Greece, and in 1952 both countries joined NATO, which. despite all its difficulties, was successful in its efforts to contain Soviet expansionism. Although it is a struggle that arguably went on until the collapse of the Soviet Union -- some say to the present day -- the Truman Doctrine could be judged to be a success, at least in the beginning, as it confronted the external Communist threat. Yet within the United States, the same goals would bring about an entirely different legacy.

Executive Order 9835

On March 21, 1947, Truman issued "Executive Order 9835." Sometimes known as the "Loyalty Order," it established the first general loyalty program in the United States, designed to root out communist influence in the U.S. Federal government.

It seems clear in retrospect that Truman's policy was motivated at least as much by politics as by real concern for the country. In fact, he wrote to Pennsylvania Governor George Earle that "people are very much wrought up about the Communist 'bugaboo,' but I am of the opinion that the country is perfectly safe so far as Communism is concerned. We have too many sane people." But Truman's judgement was cavalier, seriously underestimating, as it did, the American capacity for intolerance. The Executive Order unleashed within this country a series of witch hunts that lasted for a decade. Fear of the "communist threat," the "red scare," the "communist conspiracy" – all these frights, in some real measure, overwhelmed the sanity Truman had taken for granted. The House of Un-American Activities (HUAC) was the official investigative body for the "communist threat," and its trials became infamous. In 1947, the HUAC began its probe into Hollywood \-- a probe made possible by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

Hoover was more than willing to assist with the committee's investigations, which was fortunate, since no congressional committee had the resources available to the FBI... The committee investigated the film industry three times, in 1947, 1951–52, and 1953–55. The first hearing produced the so-called Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and professionals. Despite invoking their First Amendment right to Freedom of Speech (belonging to the Communist Party in America was legal until 1954), they were subsequently charged with contempt of Congress, tried, convicted, and jailed .

The furor over the Communist menace spread way beyond the HUAC, permeating state governments, schools, and businesses. Terry Anderson writes,

Almost all states introduced loyalty pledges for employees, especially for teachers. Most states also passed anti-subversive or sedition laws. A party member in Pennsylvania violated that state's sedition act and received a twenty-five-year sentence. The penalty for speaking or writing subversive words in Michigan could be life in prison; in Tennessee it could be death. In Indiana the official aim of the state was to "exterminate communists. . . Newspaper editors competed with television and radio as they eagerly published headlines such as 'How Russians Spy on Their Allies'; "The Reds Are After Your Child"; "How Commies Take Over"; "Trained to Raise Hell in America: The International Lenin School in Moscow"; and even "Communists Penetrate Wall Street." Even the Cincinnati Reds baseball team changed the name of their team to the "Redlegs" to avoid the money-losing and career-ruining connotations inherent in being ball-playing "Reds." " 34

(They changed it back in 1961.)

Anderson continues, "By 1952 at the University of Michigan nine out of ten students were afraid to sign a document; it was the Declaration of Independence without the first sentence."

In the end, during the late 1940s into the 1950s "6.5 million Americans were checked for loyalty." 35 How effective was all of this? From those investigations 308 people were removed from office. For those who would like to know what percentage that is I have calculated it for you: 0.0000473846%.

The reign of the red scare lasted for seven years. It passed, but only because of the considerable courage many Americans showed in confronting it. These were brave people with a sense of history. In the Army Hearings called by Senator Joe McCarthy, for instance, McCarthy was confronted by Army Counsel Joseph Welch, who famously asked, "Have you no sense of decency?"

It was Edward R. Murrow, an American reporter initially famous for his radio reports from London in World War II, who later became a television journalist for CBS, who may have been most courageous and explicit in his denunciations of McCarthyism, reminding the audience:

"We are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. It is necessary to investigate before legislating. But the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the Junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been confusing the public mind as between the internal and the external threats of communism. . .."36

Edward R Murrow

1964

Even though a cloud's white curtain in a far-off corner flashed And the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting...

\-- "Chimes of Freedom," Bob Dylan

By the time I was a freshman in college, we made jokes about loyalty oaths, and commies under the bed. The entire accusatory era had been reduced to hyperbole, and my friends and I dismissed it all with a sense of moral superiority. Besides, the worst of the Red Scare was over, and thus simple to brush off: we made fun of it while Bob Dylan sang in the background:

Civil Rights Confrontation

"Well, I wus lookin' everywhere for them gol-darned Reds I got up in the mornin' 'n' looked under my bed Looked in the sink, behind the door Looked in the glove compartment of my car Couldn't find 'em . . ." "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" \-- Bob Dylan

As unacceptable as the excesses of the McCarthy era now seem, and as confident as we may feel that those days are behind us, it was during that era Americans began to look at each other as potential enemies because of what the other might believe: pointing fingers, branding each other as communists and traitors. Spying on your neighbors could now be defined as a good, patriotic duty--if they were possible "communists." Once we got into the habit, it would continue to happen again and again in America. The accusations may change, but not the behavior. Today, after all, it is popular to accuse our Presidents of being Hitler.

I was sixteen months old when Truman signed the Loyalty Order, and I was nine by the time Joe McCarthy's reign of innuendo was brought to an end. When we made jokes about it in college, it was easy to do: we were young and on the right side.

You couldn't as readily dismiss the stories and images coming from the American South.

"William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger..."

\-- Bob Dylan, "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" 1963

My family moved to San Francisco in 1952. I grew up on a flat block on the top of a steep hill, awakened many times in the middle of the night by the sound of truck engines straining to get up that hill. I used to walk to the local public school two blocks away; it's since been demolished. My great-grandmother came to visit. She was born five years after the Civil War, and, when she was a child, she remembered eavesdropping on her grandfather's visitor -- as he described witnessing the attack on Fort McHenry, the inspiration for the "Star Spangled Banner." The continuum of history spreads across generations. I remember her, at 87 years of age, walking up two of San Francisco's steepest hills. It was 1956.

In Grant School, I had two friends: Peter Swain, my closest, and Billy Marks. Billy was black. San Francisco was not overtly racist -- as American cities went -- so I was largely ignorant of racism.

In 1945, black soldiers returning from World War II arrived in an America where (in the South) they could not vote, could not sit at a lunch counter, could not educate their children in the same schools as whites. They came home and were called "nigger" by men who hadn't fought. It happened in the North and in the South.

Colored waiting room in the south circa 1942

As a young boy, what I knew about America was its heroic narrative, which is what I had been taught, like any young American of the time. As heroic as it was, it was also, as we would discover, remarkably incomplete. This was just the way it was in the fifties. The attempt to broaden -- some say correct -- our history was one of the bruising battles of the sixties. It still goes on. Sometimes it seems worse than ever. "Ignorance," writes Rodney Crowell, singer-songwriter, "is the enemy."

In the beginning of 1957, when I was 11 years old, and still trying to smile like Elvis, nine black students (the Little Rock Nine) had to be escorted by the 101st Airborne of the U.S. Army to gain entrance to a public school. After Brown vs Board of Education, Eisenhower announced that it was impermissible for a state to defy the orders of the U.S Supreme Court. I was 15 when, in 1960--95 years after the Civil War, but still 5 years before the Voting Rights Act--Ruby Bridges, a 6 year old black child, was escorted by Federal Marshals into the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. This little girl thought, on her first day, that the hostile crowds surrounding her school had something to do with Mardi Gras, and when she entered the school, through the threats and the taunts, the white parents took all of their children out.

For the entire year, Ruby was in a classroom by herself.

I knew none of this, of course; it was all happening thousands of miles away.

But by the time I got to college in 1963, the news of civil rights protests was starting to become more generally known, made more visible by the music from Bob Dylan, the covers of Joan Baez, and the performances of Peter Paul & Mary. The civil rights movement -- along with memories of the Red Scare -- was in the air.

By the summer of 1963, between my freshman and sophomore years, I was absorbed reading the life of Gandhi. As I was reading there was nothing about me that was radical. In another era I might simply have read it and internally catalogued it as history -- like Tippecanoe and Tyler too -- and put it aside. But as I began to hear the stories, and see the images, of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, lunch counters, and the violence, segregation, and more, they demanded my attention.

By the winter of 1965, the pictures from the first Selma march showed the rest of the country the beatings, clubbings, and gassings that went on while blacks were trying to register to vote. Six hundred civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police -- with billy clubs and tear gas. The marchers were engaged in a nonviolent protest; they did not strike back.

"The next Selma procession, on March 21" writes Rick Perlstein in Nixonland: "was celebratory--thousands of singing marchers, ranks of glamorous celebrities in the fore, marching all the way through to Montgomery." 37

That night one of the white marchers, a Detroit mother of five named Viola Liuzzo, was shot to death. As they were driving along Route 80, a car tried to force them off the road. With four Klan members inside, they pulled up alongside Liuzzo's car and shot directly at her, hitting her twice in the head, killing her instantly.... "The martyr only seemed to intensify the nation's moral resolve," writes Persltein.38 Lyndon Johnson asked, "Should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation." He signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6, under the Capitol dome. People cried. The Negro's cause was America's cause. "Who could argue with that?"

Five nights later, on August 11th, rioting began in Watts – a largely black suburb of Los Angeles. My older brother Jeremy, a member of the National Guard, was mobilized and sent. He never talked to me about it, for the rest of our lives.

By 1964 college students, I among them, had begun to question America's presence in Vietnam. On the same quad that I first heard "I Want to Hold Your Hand" drifting across the lawn, I listened to a professor explain that our country was supporting a puppet leader in South Vietnam (Diem), who refused to hold the free elections mandated by the Geneva accords. Even Eisenhower admitted in 1954 that if elections had been held, "80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh" over (Diem's predecessor) Emperor Bao Dai.

These facts were disturbing to draft-age students. Over time, as the ambiguities and difficult moral choices that fighting a foreign war against an arbitrarily divided nation came to light, and when we were confronted with images of the self-immolating Buddhist monks and the revelations of the massacre at My Lai \-- the awareness rose that we were being consistently lied to, and then the protests swelled beyond the campuses, and into mainstream America. By 1969, between 250,000 and 500,000 participated in the Moratorium \-- still the largest single protest movement in U.S history, with millions of additional people protesting all around the world.

By 1965, this was our context. It was mine, anyway: I was a young American, who along with my peers had inherited our country's racist past (and was now watching a battle with those that wanted to extend it) who had learned of the witch hunts that went along with the red scare. Now we were confronted with the moral complexities of a political war of containment, and the horrific revelations that emerged therefrom. Still, the fledgling global superpower tried to navigate its course, confronting issues that had never been relevant to an isolated democratic nation before the Second World War.

For me, it wasn't so much about the day-to-day context of my personal life -- the landscape of a privileged white child in an agrarian university, and (on the inside) a young boy trying to make sense of it all. Rather, it had to do with the broader context of the America I was coming of age in. I thought then – and I think today -- that the things we saw deserved the protests we participated in. Things needed to change.

I never seriously questioned the actions I was part of. I didn't wonder whether they were somehow inappropriate. It's true we were entering an era where the phrase "America: love it or leave it" was becoming part of the push back, branding dissent as traitorous. But to me this was absurd.

When I think of this question of changing morality, I think especially of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower -- the men who led us after Franklin Roosevelt's era was over. Both men were products of small towns in an America that would have borne much more resemblance to towns of the Civil War than to the 1940s and 1950s America that they would govern: Truman was born in 1884, only 19 years after the Civil War -- but 66 years before 1950. Eisenhower joined the world in 1890, 25 years after the Civil War but 60 years before the 1950s were to begin.

Eisenhower and Truman both grew up in times of westward expansion, before the U.S. was even fully formed. Still to become states were North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii. The town Eisenhower grew up in -- Abilene, Kansas -- had a population of less than 4,000, and no police force. As a child, Harry Truman lived on his grandparents' 600-acre farm before moving to Independence, Missouri (population 6,381) when he was six years old. American roads weren't paved, and it would be thirty years before the Model-T would appear on America's landscape.

America was a different country entirely.

It was this pre-World War II America, I feel certain, that Eisenhower held in his psyche when he delivered his farewell Presidential address in 1961. He cautioned:

"We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." 39

I wonder if it is possible for us, so many years later, to really appreciate what Eisenhower meant when he said we should guard against the endangerment "of our liberties or our democratic process?" To do so, you have to be familiar with -- as Eisenhower was -- an America not consumed by the military-industrial complex he warned us about. One would need to have a memory of an America absent of constant intervention in foreign affairs. This may be hard to imagine, as America has been involved in foreign intervention my entire lifetime.

Yet if the civil rights protests, followed by the protests against the war in Vietnam, weren't difficult enough for the American body politic, the stakes were about to be raised even more when the "hippies" entered the picture in 1967.

It was not until this time (so driven by music, marijuana and LSD) that the protests came to be what Theodore Roszak described:

"Never before had protest raised issues that went so philosophically deep delving into the very meaning of reality, sanity, and human purpose. Out of that dissent grew the most ambitious agenda for the reappraisal of cultural values that any society has ever produced."

As if to guard against the dismissal of a claim so impossibly large, Roszak defines his proposition:

"Even before our world view guides us to discriminate between good and evil, it disposes us to discriminate between real and unreal, true and false, meaningful and meaningless. Before we act in the world, we most conceive of a world; it must be there before us, a sensible pattern to which we adapt our conduct." 40

And he was certainly in some measure right. For it was in agreeing to a common reality that the wheels can start to come off the car. Certainly, the truths of the fifties were going to have a little difficulty -- containing, as they did, rigorous prejudices and peculiar new consumer trends: whites only, heterosexuals only, Tupperware, the perfect nuclear family, the hula hoop, wear my pin, an aggressive insistence on innocence, consumerism in its first invasive explosions, white bread, more Tupperware, and stereotypes of every conceivable kind.

But reality testing wasn't going to stop there; LSD was too powerful. The "new" reality would discard -- or at a minimum substantially refocus -- a lot of the perceived superficiality of the fifties and insist on a world vision of a higher order.

In spite of the hedonism and excess that would become attached to it and arguably destroy it, the movement of the hippie/transcendentalist was a profound revolution that introduced a spiritual plane to what had been purely material, political and social.

To be clear, the transcendental wasn't without its inherent political component. In a consumer economy, "back to the land" movements are inherently political. And "dropping out" -- part of Leary's unfortunate trilogy of "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" -- was understood to be a political act.

Lifting the movement onto a spiritual plane raised the stakes in an interesting way. Now everything was on the table. This, arguably, was the Big Promise, and the most vocal championing of it came through The Music. All You Need Is Love, indeed. Wasn't that awfully like what Jesus said?

But now the roiling image-cauldron could begin in earnest, for the carrying on of the hippies, their lifestyle, became like the final set of pictures to be included with the rest of the images accrued over the previous twenty years: in the distant background (yet still in the picture), you could see the protests at House of UnAmerican Activities Committee in San Francisco; in Berkeley the Free Speech Movement with Mario Savio yelling from the Sproul Hall steps; in the South we could see beatings and marches; in Los Angeles: riots. On the campuses: protests. In Haight Ashbury, psychedelic swirling and Kesey's bus. In Washington D.C. 500,000 in the National Mall. In Chicago police clubbing American protestors carrying Vietcong flags. Whatever it was in reality it was, as an image stew, threatening and intolerable.

But if one is going to question the "very meaning of reality" -- especially in a loud, celebratory way -- some folks are going to feel threatened.

"Hail, hail rock 'n' roll Deliver me from the days of old; Long live rock 'n' roll, The beat of the drum is loud and bold."

\-- "School Day" Chuck Berry (1957)

Concurrent with the issuing of Truman's Loyalty Order -- unbeknownst and therefore uncommented-on by almost everyone at the time -- rock and roll was being born. In 1947 - when I was two years old - blues artist Roy Brown sang "Good Rocking Tonight." When I was 12 Elvis Presley covered it. I was 33 in 1978 when Bob Seeger sang, "Just give me some old time rock an roll." Music was our glue.

Culture can be an insistent worm. The Berlin Wall, some argue, came down not because of Ronald Reagan but because of the influence of Western culture, which was broadcast into Eastern Europe and looked like a lot more fun. The Rolling Stones in Leningrad? There's something in that.

The thing about history is that it is linear; we cannot escape it. I am -- all Americans are -- a direct beneficiary of the first experiment in government of the people, by the people, for the people. The line that runs from then until now, from there to here, is continuous and continues.

29 Jonathan Taplin Outlaw Blues: Adventures in the Counter-Culture Wars, Annenberg Press, Innovation Lab Series © 2011 by Jonathan Taplin.

30 http://users.swing.be/tanks/edito/usa.htm "US Tanks In World War II."

31 Manchester, William (2008-12-02). Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (Kindle Locations 1144-1152). Hachette Book Group. Kindle Edition.

32 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

33 Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ Sinews_of_Peace

34 Terry H. Anderson. The Movement and The Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (Kindle Locations 347-349). Kindle Edition.

35 Ibid.

36 Murrow Speech -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUMEq24tqtU

37 Perlstein, Rick (2008-05-13). Nixonland (p. 9). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

38 Ibid, p. 9.

39 Eisenhower's Farewell Address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower %27s_farewell_address

40 The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition by Theordore Roszak 1968 University of California Press
46. Phoenix

"Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present Generation to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make good use of it.."

\-- John Adams

"It ain't over til the fat-lady sings." Popular saying.

MAY 2011

"Joan Mulholland was watching television when something flashed across the screen that gave her chills. Unarmed young men and women blocked rows of tanks. Giddy demonstrators placed flowers in soldier's bayonets. Protesters sang 'We Shall Overcome' -- with an Arabic accent. The images hurled the retired schoolteacher back to another moment in spring when she was a teenager risking her life for change. (Fifty years earlier) in May 1961, Mulholland joined the "Freedom Rides." She was part of an interracial group of college students who were attacked by mobs and imprisoned simply because they decided to ride passenger buses together through (America's) Deep South.

"So much of what has happened in Egypt is like déjà vu," says Mulholland, "The pictures that have been in the news have been almost interchangeable with the civil rights movement here years ago."

– A Report from CNN

"Arab Spring" (Photographer unknown)

A book that proposes to look at history and then ends in the present day is asking for trouble. The effect of events from seventy years ago might be settled enough to safely draw some conclusions, but moving toward the present the process becomes trickier: events and trends that seem hopeful or disturbing may be ephemeral and their final effects unintended.

Still, as I read the CNN report, I felt like Joan Mulholland. It seemed to me we were seeing our better selves remembered and exported. It was everything I would have liked to believe. But then in the same month, mobs attacked and burned down two Christian churches killing twelve.

It is frequently offered that of all the ambitious change that my generation called for, the changes that actually occurred were principally cultural, and that may be. As I write in 2011, our President is a black man, and anyone with any sense of history about the nation of Lincoln must see this as profound.

And if one compares America today to the America of the 1950s there is, in truth, vastly more diversity; more room for people to be themselves, whether they are women in the workplace, in government, in the Olympics; gays; or even just the skinny kid in the classroom. For those that had their essential humanity dismissed in the 1950s because of their skin color, or sexual orientation, or simple differentness, this, too, is a profound achievement.

Some of our pressing concerns were enacted into law: voter enfranchisement and better environmental protections which, despite fierce, ongoing efforts to repeal them, have managed to slow some of the most disastrous effects. In Los Angeles, despite a rapidly growing population the air quality in 2011 is actually better than it was in the 1950s.

But what I see (early 2012) concerns me tremendously: Supreme Court decisions that have given corporations expanded protections while police pepper-spray people gathered in peaceful assembly; income inequality of Third World proportions, endemic white collar crime, an inexorable slide in our global educational rank, and some in our population who cheer when the question is, "Should we just let them die?" It seems to me we are confronted with a challenge of conscience and compassion.

But in examining our current dilemma we do well not to be too hasty in our judgment; in fact we do well to be cautious. But that does not remove the need for judgment.

Case in point: It was not my generation, the Baby Boomers, who were required to confront the first challenges of global nuclear war. I was in grade school hiding under my desk as I was told.

America, untested as a superpower, faced problems on a scale that were previously unimaginable except in the annals of apocalyptic doom. Now, the possibility of nuclear Armageddon was real, the first problem the scale of which could propel mankind to extinction.

The fear of nuclear annihilation blanketed the land like a winter storm. William Faulkner accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 noted the effect: "Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear... There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?"

How would we respond? On the heels of a war where over 62 million people had been killed?

But unless the U.S had chosen to ignore Churchill's gauntlet and left the stage, with unknown consequences, the U.S was forced to act. There was no other country with the resources. We were on our own.

As America was confronted with the terror and anxieties of the nuclear age, people asked the question: could the United States remain the country it had always been? Could the values we professed be maintained? Could democracy even exist – let alone prevail -- in a nuclear age?

Our predicament was classic: in fighting our enemy, do we adopt his tactics? Do we, in short, become what we propose to destroy?

We were challenged. Over the years our responses have been uneven: from the witch hunts of the McCarthy era, to our involvement in Vietnam.

In 2011 a Senate debate on water-boarding revolved around a hypothetical dilemma offered to the witness: somewhere in a U.S. city a terrorist has a nuclear weapon and the only way to get the information to stop it is through the use of torture.

Although a measured response to the leading inquiry would question the efficacy of torture to obtain accurate information, the emotional point is made. The magnitude of the problem is overwhelming, almost numbing, just as Faulkner noted, and the moral dilemma the same, as communism (for the most part) has been replaced by terrorism.

Are we the country of the Marshall Plan, or the country of Abu Ghraib? We have been both.

As told through mass media the history of my generation -- "our history" -- is a disjointed mess, suffering all the ills predicted by Postman and then some, but its most damaging effect is how television purports to inform while (inevitably) it misleads. As if to confirm this, when read in print our history unfolds chronologically (hence more coherently) and with context.

Among the books I read while writing American Story, three had chosen as their particular challenge the reconstruction of our history. All of them called out the immense, negative effects mass media had on the protests, on debate, and they noted how we became polarized because of it. (The books were: What Really Happened to the 1960s? by Edward P Morgan, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee by Terry H Anderson, and The Framing of the Sixties by Bernard von Bothmer). Again and again, the authors noted how media coverage so skewed the reporting of events as to be entirely misleading. Writes Morgan,

"Despite the activist's sense that they were part of a social movement that was making history, bringing America to a full reckoning with its tragic racial past and forging a future more compatible with the nation's democratic ideals. . . the media culture conveyed the clear impression that the nation was coming apart. . . Media consumers had been buffeted by a long sequence of violent shocks: political assassinations, racial insurrection, police brutality, a nightmarish war, militant protest, and alienated youthful counterculture, and a political discourse charged with the strident rhetoric of backlash. In contrast to social movement's sense of making history (many felt) "helpless in the history of our times."

Morgan goes on to describe the pact that ensued between the media and the protestors:

"The media's tendency to be visually inclusive sent protesting outsiders the message that they should adapt themselves to media imperatives if they sought to express their voice to the wider society. The contradictory dynamic of visual inclusion and substantive exclusion substituted being seen for being heard as a vehicle of empowerment. Protestors and the media thereby engaged in a kind of dance wherein each provided something for the other. Yet the media were the dance partners that determined the tune, or the acceptable meanings of the protest." (my emphasis)

The process led to a downwardly-spiraling media circus. By the end of the 1960s the protestors and those watching were like two exhausted prize fighters, leaden-legged, bloodied, leaning on each other, until each like Roberto Duran threw up their hands "No Mas!"

"Despite," writes Morgan, "the awakenings of important new social movements focusing on the liberation of women, gay and lesbian rights, ecology, and neighborhood preservation, the (mood at the) end of the decade stood in stark contrast to the idealistic and hopeful zeitgeist of the early 1960s."

"Who won?" asked Morgan, who then answers himself. "It depended on who was in front of the television."

"NO MAS!" was the sentiment and by the early 1970s (after Kent State and the election of Nixon) it was as if the protestors abrogated the field. Their continued protest became personal; their shifting life-styles changed the culture. The effect is not to be belittled; it had massive impact. But "traditional" politics seemed ceded to the politics of divisiveness.

The better question might not be "who won?" but rather "who lost?"

As a generation we didn't do as well as we hoped, but we deserve better than the popular cliches.

If there is one point I wish to leave the reader with, it is the truth about our protests, political and social. I wish to dispute the view which would isolate the protests of the sixties as outside the mainstream of American history. They were, to the contrary, the exact opposite.

The inescapable truth is all Americans were born of revolution, and the American story is the history of struggle for rights and freedoms. It is a history of which we are justly proud, and for which we praise ourselves. And yet equally true is that movement for change is resisted, and often violently.

But what happens when the struggle is over and the changes are (slowly) incorporated? We hold our diversity as an example of our national virtue, and further proof of the exceptionalism of our "city on a hill."

If you had to choose a heroic symbol for America and two modern American Presidents, one from each party-- both of whom invoked it--who better than John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, and what better symbol than John Winthrop's "City On a Hill" (as first put forth in his speech to the Pilgrims of the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the ship Arbella as they crossed the Atlantic in 1630)?

Winthrop exhorts his fellow Puritans to pay heed to their charter and covenant. A few days earlier the same Pilgrims had been encouraged by the Reverend John Cotton (whose great- great-grandson would teach John Adams at Harvard) to see themselves as messengers in "God's Promise to His Plantation."

By the time Ronald Reagan paid homage to Winthrop's City it had become "shining," so that now it was anointed as the icon for what is called "American Exceptionalism" (which is used, essentially, to differentiate us from all other nations, often with the corollary that rules that apply to others don't apply to us).

The narrative of American exceptionalism continues today (and it has become "non-partisan," akin to the obligatory American lapel flag pin that all politicians now wear). Examples abound from Newt Gingrich's latest book A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters to Barack Obama's statement to the French in 200941. (Obama also chose America's military strength as a principle attribute.)

But it appears upon examination that Winthrop in his address to the pilgrims had a very different focus in mind: he offered no suggestion that the New England plantation would be an envy-inspiring "City Upon a Hill" for others to admire. (We might even imagine that in a devout Puritan's eyes such self-inflation would have bordered on the deadly sin of Pride.) Instead, Winthrop's speech was cautionary. He wished more than anything to "avoid the shipwreck" that their experiment might become if they did not heed God's covenant and were instead selfishly driven, for example, "seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity." That would be a shipwreck. He then offered the "only way" to avoid it:

"We must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body." 42(My emphasis)

As we arrive at the end of my generation's passage through our nation's history, what are we left with? Is it the emotionally unsatisfying fact of having accomplished some things while leaving others undone? This seems inadequate since it is an inevitability.

Yet it is true that what I sometimes feel with a sinking sensation is the weight of things left incomplete: casualties of our country's polarization; victims of rancor and divisiveness now extending over 30, 40, even 50 years: the many needed changes that have been marginalized or shelved while the culture wars rage. What concerns me is we may no longer have the time for this. The problems facing us are now more and more often of a magnitude that they affect all of Man and the planet we live on. I fear that these problems must cast a pall over our youth like our own numbing fear of nuclear Armageddon cast over us.

Case in point: John Adams, quoted at the beginning of this book, described the momentous impact of what they were trying to accomplish to his wife Abigail: "How few of the human race have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children? How few have ever had anything more of choice in government than in climate?"

Adam's choice to illustrate an ultimate impossibility? That mankind could affect the climate. Yet, in a short 200+ years we must now make a choice in climate. It may be necessary that we come to understand, as Theodore Roszak noted, that it is no longer so much "the sky's the limit," as "the Earth is."

Of the challenges in front of us, those which we can survive, or not, is beyond my capacity to tell, of course. But I would offer that we will be unable to do anything unless we somehow turn ourselves around, stop vilifying each other, fix our debate, and pull together. That seems the essential act for our country, the only thing worthy of the ride John Adams took.

Adams knew this. He said: "Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present Generation to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it."

From Adams to now, from Eisenhower to today, it is probably fair to say much has been lost, hence the sense of loss. But the price is not only the loss of our political debate, which may cost us our democracy if we are not careful, but a related issue as well: I miss what Roszak also remarked, "Where (today) do we find a similar generosity of spirit?"

When Dylan sang "Chimes of Freedom" (covered by The Byrds) they tolled -- it seemed to me -- for everyone:

Tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed.

For the countless confused, accused, misused strung-out ones, and

worse.

And for every hung up person in the whole wide universe....

Words from my generation that seem to me remarkably like Winthrop's exhortations, a cautionary recipe for success.

41 See "Endnotes"

42 http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/charity.html
Epilogue: Here & Now

The Who's Next Monolith 2011. Photograph: John Hirst

"History is not was. It is." -- William Faulkner

It is an interesting experiment to write a book which: a) revisits modern history, while b) simultaneously engaging with current events, and c) also intends to be updatable (and so behaves more like software than a book). Finally, it e) encourages others to help write it, via its companion presence allamericanstories.com. That's a lot of variables.

Already, when speaking to some readers (especially of generations other than my own) I have been made aware (of course) that my touch-points may not be theirs. For these readers, when wondering how they may have gotten from there to here, their "here" was different than mine. Or, put another way, "Where's Occupy Wall Street?" or the Gay liberation movement?"

The good news -- for me at least -- was their desire to broaden those touch-points and to engage, which was part of the reason to create the book/blog. Many of the things that stirred me in my youth were in a long American tradition of reform, and how we deal with change will be critical going forward, as it was then.

When dealing with change, we--which in this sentence will include all of my contemporaries, both those for and against the changes of the sixties--didn't do well. I believe that is partly the "moral" of this book: that in reaction to the (overplayed) convulsive times of the sixties there was an equally convulsive counter-reaction to demonize that era to prevent the changes it was seeking. The second reaction has lasted a lot longer. Call it culture wars, call it whatever, it was the death of dialogue, and it persists.

As for today, it is arguably worse as the congressional "here and now" of 2012 appears to be a variant of the child's strategy of holding your breath until you get what you want.

We--my generation--may have sidelined ourselves (meas culpas), but I am unable see how that might be, going forward, a path another generation seeking change might wish to follow. I believe we erred there as well.

As for those who would generically vilify government--they should be ashamed of themselves. Wouldn't another approach be to define, and then insist upon, effective government? Am I alone in noticing the complete absence of this debate--at least on the front "pages" of any of our media, from any quarter?

But the meta-question raised by the reader, above, was how "today" (a.k.a. "here" in American Story) would be defined in an ongoing narrative.

"There" was easy enough to set forth: it was John Adams' passion for government in Colonial America as represented in David McCullough's John Adams, and my sense of "Eisenhower's America." This was a definition that could be fixed at the outset.

For me "here" was defined by the time I started my exploration, which dated from the reading of John Adams in 2002, but became ever more pressing as the U.S moved toward the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003. The events involved (shifting our focus from Afghanistan to Iraq, the propagandistic rationale for the war, the secrecy, and the lies) were for me--and I believe a lot of other Americans--a crisis point. Robert Byrd's title Losing America did not seem hyperbolic. That was my "here," if frozen in time. That was the "from there to here" I was looking at.

For the reader that wonders about "Occupy Wall Street" or the Gay liberation movement or any of the other movements for change, than my response would be please bring them. Since this is An American Story, isn't the "here" always going to be the America the reader is living in, and the story they need to tell?
Coda

My great grandmother Florence "Daisy" Harriman at the head of a suffragettes' parade, 191243

"Five to one, baby

One in five.

No one here gets out alive."

\-- Jim Morrison

"Que sera, sera," as Doris Day sang in my fifties youth. But then, as I once heard attributed to a dying Tennessee Williams, "All I remember are the little kindnesses," which might be also be called acts of conscience and compassion. It's your history. Help write it.

43 [1] Harriman, Florence From Pinafores to Politics. Photo identified as "The Last Suffrage Parade 1917"
Thanks and Acknowledgements

I need to single out and thank my friend and lawyer Stephen Hibbard whose steadfastness and generosity finally ended a lengthy negotiation with Apple Corps, The Beatles, and Yoko Ono, which in turn allowed this book to be inclusive of my work with them. For those readers who particularly appreciate this aspect of the book, Stephen deserves individual thanks.

As I have done with every one of my books, I need to thank my old friends Gerard VanderLeun and Georgia Bergman. Gerard once again played a yeoman's role as consulting editor (through some difficult times for him). I have known Gerard since our sophomore year in college--49 years. He was the man who in 1968 introduced me to Jonathan Cott, who in turn asked me if I might be interested in photographing Mick Jagger, so Gerard's role in this story, while not always on the page, is singularly important. As for Georgia Bergman I have known her almost as long. We met when she ran The Rolling Stones' office in 1968. She remains a steadfast friend, and one of Lucas' two godmothers. Both belong in the group below: friends that are family, but I wanted to single them out here as well.

Those that stand by you through the inevitable highs and lows of life always deserve special thanks. To list above, I will add Tom McGuire, Josephine Powe, Rosanne Cash, Glyn Johns, and the Osbornes (all of 'em--they know who they are): all old, dear friends who are, indeed, family in all except the genes. To this list, I need to add Peter Friedman, whose support and special relationship with me extend back over 25 years.

The book was a long labor, as they always are. Many people helped along the way. Dolores Lusitana designed the cover and worked with me on allamericanstories.com during the time I was writing the text. These were the slog months and Dolores helped both in responding to the evolving text and developing the look and feel for the new website. Andy Caulfield consulted and was always there as my producer and friend. (I call Andy "the real photographer.") Lastly, I want to thank Ken Hertz for his help when the book was first getting underway.

As it was drawing to a conclusion, Joy McCann threw her shoulder to the wheel, copy-editing a manuscript that had been through so many iterations and really--to make matters worse--often in HTML. I think it's fair to say it was an onerous task. Bob Roden and Robin Harper both deserve thanks for their contributions and support through what truly did resemble the doldrums: when all the effort seemed to move the manuscript not an inch and even minor encouragement was a welcome relief.

I was shameless in seeking the support of a few select people to read and respond. Among those was Rick Trank, a powerful, documentary filmmaker, and my old friend Scott Ross. I thank both of them.

Finally, on the hands-on list I want to thank my nephew, Brice Matson, who has been helpful as a reader, assistant, videographer and photographer. It is the blessing-curse of desktop computers and digital technology that one person performs all these functions, but it is very much the world of the present. Brice leapt in and provided that support plus the support of family, and I thank him for it.

At the end of 2011 I went to New York City to show the early manuscript/prototype to a few people I knew and respected. At the top of that list was Rosanne Cash who read the book and afterward agreed to write the Foreword. I would have been delighted with anything Rosanne wrote, but what she did write was both generous and remarkable. She understood the work in a way I couldn't have said with certainty--at the time-- was there to be seen, and for a while thereafter I felt like I was writing to live up to her understanding. This certainly speaks to Rosanne's abilities as an artist, and I will be forever grateful to her for it.

Also on that trip I showed the book in its then-state to Sandi Mendelson (of Hilsinger-Mendelson) and Merrilee Heiffetz (of The Writer's House). They both took time out of their busy schedules to read and be forthrightly encouraging. It meant a lot--even made me think I was near the end. Not. I am further delighted to be working with Sandi on the book's release.

From INscribe--the company I chose to work with to help place the book with the various retailers--there are two people in particular I need to thank. The first, John Orifino, was instrumental in the early days with his hard work and enthusiasm for the project, and in keeping me on board. Kelly Peterson, who arrived on the scene somewhat later, has done and continues to do a remarkable and thorough job. To have arrived at this point--with a rich and complex product that requires some thought to fully assimilate--and to have it given the time and professional treatment that Kelly has, is to be a lucky author indeed.

There are other photographers whose work appears in this book, but I wish to thank particularly Robert Altman, Annie Leibovitz, Bob Seidemann, Gered Mankowitz, and Dominique Tarle for their kind permission to feature their work.

It may seem facile to thank Bob Dylan, or The Beatles, or The Rolling Stones but, really, without them what is our history? As I have said repeatedly, it was the singer-songwriters that meant so much, and I thank all of them for their work.

Finally, I need to thank my family for being there--always the sine qua non. Both my wife, Shannon, and my college-bound stepson Gabriel specifically helped by challenging the book's structure. This was instrumental in motivating that change, and the book became better as a result. As for my son, Lucas, this book was always for him, as it will always be.

My family November 2005 as I was about to begin work on American Story.
l to r: Gabriel, Shannon, me, Lucas.
Endnotes

* At the time I was reading John Adams and before I began work on American Story I was unfamiliar with any book that seemed to me to accurately represent the experiences I wanted to relate. My early efforts found only two books: The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition by Theordore Roszak 1968 University of California Press, and Terry H. Anderson. The Movement and The sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee 1995 Oxford University Press. (There may have been others, of course, but that was my experience).

By the time I got to the end of American Story, three more books had been published (that I'm aware of). I came across Nixonland by Rick Perlstein (Simon & Schuster, Inc. 2008), and still later What Really Happened to the 1960s? by Edward P. Morgan 2010, University Press of Kansas and Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, by Bernard von Bothmer, 2010 University of Massachusetts Press. It is notable that the large majority of these titles are published by university presses. Perhaps the inquiry into what really happened in the sixties--to borrow Edward P. Morgan's title-- is finally underway. Morgan and Bothmer were both particularly focussed on things that I had equally been finding to be true, and they brought a depth of research and scholarship that was somewhat beyond the scope of my title. I was delighted to uncover people working in a parallel vein, and I recommend all of these books.

** The Economist The Big Lie November 9, 2009

"I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. I'm enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don't think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that. And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional." -- Barack Obama
Photo Credits

All photographs are © by Ethan Russell unless otherwise noted. All photographs of the Beatles are © Apple Corps and used by permissions as noted on the Copyright page. All photographs of the John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and/or John and Yoko from 1968-1969 are copyright © Yoko Ono as noted the Copyright page. Photographs of John Lennon, John and Yoko, and/ or Yoko Ono taken at The Rolling Stones Rock n Roll Circus are copyright © Ethan Russell. All photographers have been credited, if known. If known I have placed the credit next to the photograph. If unknown, I have attempted to indicate the source--almost always from the Web. Please notify me at ethanrussell@allamericanstories.com with questions.Chapter 39 Madonna source: http://freshafterdeathstill.blogspot.com/2010/05/ madonna-in-vogue.html,

Ethan Russell Photographs are available in signed, limited editions. Visit: www.ethanrussell.com.

Contents

ETHAN RUSSELL

Copyright

Preamble

Foreword by Rosanne Cash

Introduction

1. Applesauce

2. This Land Is Your Land

3. Cannery Row

4. Cow College

5. Masters of War

6. The Rush

7. Acceleration

8. The Best of Times. The Worst of Times.

9. Endless Love

10. Sunny South Kensington

11. Nothing You Can Do That Can't Be Done

12. John Lennon Calling

13. Christopher

14. Eye of the Beholder

15. The Beauty Parlor Is Filled With Sailors

16. Get Back

17. Nobody Even There To Bluff

18. The Last Good-Bye

19. Easy Riders

20. The Dream Is Over

21. Woodstock in a Freezer

22. Going Mobile

23. It's Only Rock n Roll

24. True Believer

25. Love Reign O'er Me

26. Don't Get Fooled Again

27. Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It?

28. Silent Movies

29. Starting Over

30. God Takes Those He Wants To Keep Close

31. There Is a Season

32. Where Did You Go My Blue-Eyed Son?

33. There's a Tear In My Beer

34. Morning in America

Introduction to Part II

35. Books Change Your Life

36. It's Howdy Doody Time

37. I Saw the News Today. O Boy.

38. The Drug Generation

39. Vogue

40. Losing My Religion

41. Sisyphus

42. Teach Your Children Well

43. The Beat Goes On

44. Nine One One

45. The Long Road Home

46. Phoenix

Epilogue: Here & Now

Coda

Thanks and Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Photo Credits

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook