Excerpt from The Human Be-In (Basic Books, 1970) by the brilliant Helen Swick Perry. Perry was 55 in 1966-7 and was employed at the Haight-adjacent Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, working on a community mental health project, when she began to explore (and participate in) the goings-on of the “flower children.”
…There was another tool for effecting the psychedelic revolution in the Haight-Ashbury, and this seemed the most effective, the most lasting. For want of a better term, I will call it instant theater; it emerged in the Haight-Ashbury primarily in the phenomenon of the Diggers. In my estimation, much of what the Diggers stood for in the Haight-Ashbury will survive—by word of mouth, by a picture in people’s minds of what they did, by their example of simple kindliness and humanity, by their reaffirmation of the importance of every person and of everyone having his “thing,” and by their emphasis on the destructiveness of property values in a society moving toward technological affluence.
…[T]he living theater of the Diggers as it combined eventually with the wisdom of the black man in the slum represents the significant survival potential of the Haight-Ashbury. Audience participation in theater has, of course, a long and intricate history; and the young people who began the Diggers movement had knowledge of this, as evidenced by their publications and actions. But the instant theater that was developed by the Diggers was more spontaneous and politically sophisticated. This kind of living theater had an immediacy and a communication potential that bypassed the failure of the establishment to listen to the words of the songs sung by the young—even the civil rights songs. All the skill of the medicine man, as the young had witnessed it in the TV ads in their growing-up years, was brought to bear on the audience. The Diggers knew how to make a point without words. They also recognized that a commercial ad would do no good; there must be conviction and dedication, which also had some element of being quite willing to suffer for their beliefs, if that became necessary.
…The Diggers’ drama was a group effort, and it evolved out of the sensitivity of several young artists to a particularly tragic incident in the city; most of these artists were part of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. In the early fall of 1966, San Francisco had experienced a so-called race riot, and the city was upset and puzzled that it could have happened at all. On the afternoon of September 27, three young Negro boys were stopped by a policeman in one of San Francisco’s slums, on the chance that the car they were driving had been stolen; the policeman was correct in his surmise, although his hunch was not based on any report of a stolen car—the owner had not even missed the car by then. The policeman was white, and the boys were understandably scared; they fled, and continued to run after the policeman ordered them to stop. One of the boys, sixteen years old, with the same last name as the policeman but a different shade of skin color, was shot in the back and died almost instantly. Thus began the San Francisco riots of 1966, with three days of “racial turbulence,” as it was described in the Chronicle, and six days of curfew in certain disturbed areas of the city, including the Haight-Ashbury. In the slums of the city—and in this instance this included the Haight-Ashbury, which was not primarily a slum area at all—many people were caught without food because of the curfew and the rioting. Some members of the Mime Troupe, calling themselves Diggers, began to prepare food and serve it free to all comers. There was no formal organization; it was more a state of mind.
The name “Diggers” was somewhat obscurely derived, and different people had different theories about its meaning. Some of the members of the movement clearly connected the name with the Diggers in Cromwell’s England who began to dig and plant the commons in towns throughout the country, distributing free the food produced, as a protest against a government insensitive to the hunger of some of its people. These early Diggers were a branch of the group in England known as the Levellers, who, like the Quaker movement begun in the same general period, had as one of their main tenets the idea of leveling all differences of position or rank among people. At the same time, the word Diggers in the Haight-Ashbury had other connotations, some of them continuous with the Negro culture, for instance, where the term “hip” had long implied that one really “dug” what was happening; and I heard various sympathetic puns on this usage in the Haight-Ashbury coffee houses. There was a free frame of reference for words on Haight Street, as there had been for James Joyce, and it would be restrictive to think that the word Digger meant only one thing in that rapidly changing culture. The use of the word was undoubtedly enhanced by the fact that a North American Indian tribe had once been known as Diggers because they lived chiefly on roots, and Ruth Benedict‘s book Patterns of Culture (1959), which was well read by the young, had as its epigraph a “Proverb of Digger Indians”: “In the beginning God gave to every people a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life.” The seekers had an affinity for odd pieces of information floating around which coalesced in remarkable ways from time to time, and they were considerably influenced by the romance and lore of the American Indian. For some of the young people, the name Diggers was connected with grave-digging—a macabre association in light of the young boy’s death. They pointed out that the original Diggers in England had been Levellers, that they had acquired the name Diggers when they had to dig the graves for their own dead on the commons in the morning, after a night’s encounter with the local officials; altruism has always been a peculiarly red flag for the establishment of whatever century or country. At any rate, the word “Diggers” captured the imagination of many people throughout the Bay area, and the concept eventually stirred up as much anxiety in the San Francisco establishment as it did in Cromwell’s England…
In 2010, I drove to northern California from my home in Joshua Tree to interview as many living Diggers as would talk to me. Each conversation over those few days felt like a breakthrough—a motherlode of historical detail and insight beyond what I had gleaned from book research. And each Digger I interviewed was excited to learn that I was headed to Humboldt County to interview Jane Lapiner and David Simpson at their forest home. This couple, together since April, 1967, was beloved by other Diggers. If I was interviewing them, it meant that I was really doing my work. Instant Diggers cred.
In 2022, the Diggers are little-known. But in 1966-8, such was the Diggers’ presence and notoriety that seemingly every reporter filing a story on the Haight included the Diggers in their account. “A band of hippie do-gooders,” said Time magazine. “A true peace corps,” wrote local daily newspaper columnist (and future Rolling Stone editor) Ralph J. Gleason. The Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor would later write, “[The Diggers] were in my opinion the core of the whole underground counterculture because they were our conscience.”
Jane Lapiner and David Simpson were in their mid-20s during the Diggers period. Jane was a single mother from New York City with a background in leftist, avant garde dance; David was a Chicago-bred lefty dropout from the University of Wisconsin, who’d been a competitiveboxer in high school, shared a house with pre-stardom Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs, served in the Coast Guard and was trimming trees in the East Bay when… But hold on, I’m telling their stories, instead of letting these award-winning storytellers tell it themselves.
What follows is a consolidation of conversations the three of us had one night and the next morning inside their farmhouse home, warmed by a wood stove and good food. I am grateful for their hospitality, and the life-example they continue to set (for example, see: “Judge Dismisses Case Against Four Septuagenarian Rainbow Ridge Activists,“ North Coast Journal, Dec. 15, 2020). There are some ‘60s people who went back to the land and didn’t fail. Jane and David are those people.
Please note that this conversation has not been edited down for a general audience. Many incidents and personages are spoken of without context, or only in passing. My advice to the casual-but-curious reader is to simply let any unfamiliar/unexplained bits pass. Keep reading, you’ll like the next part. You’ll see why these two are so beloved.
This is the ninth interview in my series of Diggers’ oral histories; the others are accessible here. For more information on the Diggers, consult Eric Noble’s vast archive at diggers.org
I have incurred not insignificant expenses in my Diggers research through the years. If you would like to support my work, please drop a nickel or more in my TipJar. All donations, regardless of size, are greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Judy Goldhaft at work. Photo courtesy Chuck Gould.
The San Francisco Diggers were an audacious, anonymous group of street anarchists and visionary pragmatists who helped kickstart-midwife what would become the American counterculture of the 1960s. In 2021, they are little-known. But in 1966-8, such was the Diggers’ presence and notoriety that seemingly every journalist filing a story on the Haight-Ashbury district scene—even, memorably, a typically dyspeptic Joan Didion, for the Saturday Evening Post—included the Diggers in their account. “A band of hippie do-gooders,” said Time magazine. “A true peace corps,” wrote local daily newspaper columnist (and future Rolling Stone editor) Ralph J. Gleason. Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman adored them. The Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor would later write, “[The Diggers] were in my opinion the core of the whole underground counterculture because they were our conscience.”
As the years passed, some formerly anonymous members of the Diggers have given accounts of what they were up to during this period. Actor Peter Coyote and the late Emmett Grogan published memoirs chronicling their participation in that era; Grogan’s Ringolevio is particularly notorious. These are fascinating, essential books, but there are so many other Diggers whose testimony has never been told, at significant length, in a public forum.
With that in mind, it is my good fortune to share the following conversation David Hollander and I conducted with Judy Goldhaft at her San Francisco home in November 2006 for a documentary film. Judy, a brilliant and committed avant garde dancer-choreographer-artist-activist, talks directly about who she is, who the Diggers were, and how and why they did what they did.
There has been some extremely minor editing for clarity in the transcript below, but for the most part this is how the conversation went; it has not been edited down for a general audience, and many incidents and personages are spoken of without context, or only in passing. My advice to the casual-but-curious reader is to simply let these unfamiliar/unexplained bits pass. Keep reading, you’ll like the next part.
This is the seventh interview in my series of Diggers’ oral histories; the others are accessible here. For more information on the Diggers, consult Eric Noble’s vast archive at diggers.org Planet Drum, the San Francisco-based bioregionalist non-profit foundation Judy started with her late husband (and fellow Digger) Peter Berg in 1973, continues to the present. Read more about Planet Drum here.
I have incurred not insignificant expenses in my Diggers research through the years. If you would like to support my work, please donate via PayPal. All donations, regardless of size, are greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Jay Babcock: Where did you grow up, and how did you end up in San Francisco?
Judy Goldhaft: I grew up on the East Coast in the southern part of New Jersey. I went to college [Goldhaft graduated from Cornell with a B.A.] and then I got married. My husband Karl [Rosenberg] was a painter and he wanted to go to the San Francisco Art Institute for graduate work, so we came out here. Being a dancer, I went to Mills College and got a degree in dance.
Bob Hudson and Bill Wylie, who were part of the graduate class with Karl, were working with design with what became the San Francisco Mime Troupe. R.G. (“Ronnie”) Davis at that time was doing something called Midnight Mime Shows, and they worked with him on the props and costumes and setting up. This was like an event/performance art situation. Because these were people in Karl’s class, he was assigned to go and see it. So we went to the show and it was exactly the kind of theater that I wanted to be involved with: it was very physical theater. At that time, there was not a whole lot of physical theater besides Marcel Marceau-style mime. So I took some classes with Ronnie and got involved with being part of what eventually became the Mime Troupe.
The Mime Troupe was really a nexus for artists and poets and designers and theater people. All kinds of amazing people were involved it.
Right. Actually Steve was going to Mills when I was going to Mills. And Pauline Oliveros and Ramon Sender started the Tape Music Center, which is where Ronnie did another event/performance piece that I was part of.
With the Mime Troupe, I did all kinds of things: I did performing, I gave dance classes and movement classes, I made and designed costumes. And I also created and directed pieces. I did The Girlie Show, which starred three women: myself, Sandy Archer and Jane Lapiner. I don’t think it had much speaking in it. It was kind of a parody of all of the advertising identities of women. At that time the clothing was pretty outrageous, so we took the clothing and it made it more outrageous. The piece was basically women coercing other women to do things the way that fashion dictated them. We had a section about hair, we had a section about makeup, and we had several costume changes. In one section, we started with slides of the three of us naked, jumping, and then at the very end of it, the last costumes that we had on, were flesh-colored leotards underneath plastic clothing. We ripped the clothing off but since the clothing was clear plastic anyway, it didn’t make a whole lot of difference whether it was on or whether it was off. We had pasties over our nipples. Someone said we looked like live Barbie dolls at the very end. [smiles] It was an early encouragement to women to get control of their lives, to not be manipulated by ads and media and fashion.
The Mime Troupe at that time was in a loft on Howard Street. We performed The Girlie Show there, and we also performed it in Berkeley. I think we also performed it with [Peter Berg’s play] Center Man as part of the Traps Festival—which was about the traps that people could get into, traps that were hard to get out of. The Girlie Show was also performed some place in the East Bay at a Women’s Club. They were pretty horrified. [laughter] They had no idea what they were seeing.
I directed another piece that was about money. I don’t remember what it was called, or even if we did very many performances. It involved a grid on the floor and people walking, having to stay within the restrictions of the grid. It was about various roles that women have, like a waitress, which is a subservient and a very giving role. And there were three or four different people in that. It was mostly movement. I think it maybe had some talking in it.
An all-women cast?
Yeah. Jane must have been in it. And then I performed in a number of pieces that Jane choreographed. Jane was a dancer who we’d met that I brought over to the Mime Troupe. She did a number of dance pieces that I was a part of.
Jane was from New York. She had taken dance since she was a little girl, and had performed with some of the modern dance troupes. And she’d done the same thing I did, she got married and her husband was gonna teach at Berkeley, so she came out here. When I ran into her, she was dancing with Jenny Hunter, who was a modern dancer at the time. I went over to take some classes at Jenny’s and I met Jane and we realized that despite the fact that we had separate parents we were actually sisters. We became very close.
Sisters from different parents: Jane Lapiner and Judy Goldhaft at free Haight dance class, probably 1967. Photo courtesy Chuck Gould.
Do you remember anything about Billy [Murcott] and Emmett [Grogan]’s initial Diggers broadside?
They posted this sign at the Mime Troupe. It was a manifesto that said Fuck everything, including everything that you might not want to fuck, like ‘Fuck the Black Panthers, fuck the Mime Troupe’… It was signed ‘the Diggers,’ but we knew who it was.
Not long after that, a segment of the Mime Troupe decided to do street theater [as Diggers], and I was part of that group.
Were you involved with doing the free food?
My house had a very tiny stove so I cooked the food maybe once and it was horrible because it had only two burners in it. But there was an apartment that had a bunch of women who were from Antioch College in Yellow Springs. Antioch was one of the few universities at that time where you went to school for a semester and then you had a work semester. And so these four or five women had come out here and this was their work semester and they got waylaid and joined the Diggers, and became part of the Diggers. They did a lot of the cooking. Other people did cooking as well. I did some of the cooking but not a lot. Once Emmett had kind of set it up, Nina Blasenheim and I and maybe somebody else would go down to the wholesale produce market with the truck. Maybe one of the guys would be driving the truck, or maybe I would be driving the truck, and we would go to the produce purveyors and ask them if they had anything they could give us to feed people in the park. We did that twice a week. We developed really wonderful relationships with the guys at the produce markets. Sometimes there were other women who came with us. There was a whole group of people who went.
Did the produce guys prefer dealing with the women?
It’s not that they wouldn’t give food to the men. But, they enjoyed our coming. They liked us. And it was fun for us, it was interesting for us. I really liked them. So we did it. And there were some other women who went to the wholesale fish markets down in Fisherman’s Wharf.
We also did gleaning in the fields — that was quite fun. It’s a very old, traditional way of getting food. Gleaning is when they have mechanical pickers in a field, they pick certain size of whatever it is, zucchini or onions, something like that, and they drop out a bunch of them, the ones that are too small or the ones that are too big. And then if you go to the fields afterward, you can pick up the leftovers.
The free food was part of what drew mainstream press coverage of the Haight, which in turn caused a massive influx of people to the neighborhood. You guys anticipated that was going to happen.
Yeah, it was kind of a media hype. In January [1967], the media said, [breathless] ‘Oh my god, San Francisco is the place to be. Come to San Francisco, wear flowers in your hair.’ So we had a meeting of the people in the Haight-Ashbury about how we were going to deal with so many people coming. The Diggers decided to kind of make it a university of the streets, an alternative anarchist culture.
We knew that all these people were coming to San Francisco, and we knew they weren’t going to stay. And we thought, well, the best thing we could do would be to kind of educate them about the kinds of things that are possible in society, and then let them go back to where they’re from, and they would carry these ideas. And that is what happened. We were quite successful in that.
A spring 1967 public proclamation by the Council for a Summer of Love in the City of San Francisco. Many of the co-signers were Diggers.
Prior to that, you were doing things for yourselves and the neighborhood.
It was the same thing, really. We were trying to make a new society. We decided what we would do is provide the basics: food, and housing, and health care. The free health clinic started in the free store. And we thought if we could provide basic subsistence living—clothes from the free store, apartments because we had some apartments that people could stay in, and food because we were able to get food, and health care—that then, that would free people up. The ‘50s were the grey flannel suit and you have to have a job and you have to have money. Our effort was to disconnect people from that society, and open them up. Our idea was: If you were supported, what’s the most creative, beautiful life you could lead? That’s what we were doing.
We were not exclusive. [smiles] We said, If you say you’re a Digger, you’re a Digger. That did create some problems, but on the other hand, it opened up a lot of possibility. There were a lot of people who said they were Diggers who I’ve never met, I’m sure. And there are people who have written books about their life as a Digger and I never met them, I don’t know who they are. But that’s okay. I don’t mind, I think that’s more open.
We were very anonymous, and we were not self-promoting. People didn’t really take credit. None of the broadsheets handed out on the streets are signed, I don’t think. The Digger Papers are not signed. So who wrote what is kind of up for grabs. That eliminated, to some extent, the kind of hero worship that the media tends to make happen. Emmett had a little difficulty with this because Ramparts actually named him as some kind of Digger leader — he had a lot of difficulty dealing with the fact that he had become a “personality.” He was a very charismatic person and very energetic and he had great ideas, but he had a lot of difficulty dealing with the persona of “Emmett Grogan.” That’s why Suzanne said she was “Emma Grogan” at the Alan Burke Show, to say that the actual person wasn’t really a man, it was a woman, to play with the media a little bit.
This is why [Diggers film] Nowsrealhad no narrative in it—because we thought that if you put a frame around what you’re doing and explain it to people, then they’ll only see what you explain. If you don’t explain it, then they’ll see what they see and either be confused by it or puzzled by it or turned on by it. They’ll pick whatever meaning they want from it.
What was your experience with Digger housing and apartment live?
I never lived in one of them so I’m not the person to tell you about them. I lived in a little house that was over the hill from the Haight-Ashbury. The summer when there were so many people there, 1967, every day as it got towards sunset, Peter and I would go out on the street and find somebody that needed a place to stay and take them back with us. Sometimes it was more than one person. But often it was one or two people. That was what we did. There were bigger [Digger] houses that were rented, there were flats that were rented, there were some flats that were just free available space, and each of these lasted for varying amounts of time. [Smiles] Sometimes the landlords stopped renting to us after a while.
How did the free health care clinic concept work?
There were these three doctors that said they wanted to provide health care in the Haight-Ashbury. We said, Okay we’ll set up a free medical clinic. I believe the first one was in the free store that was at Cole and Carl Street, which was called Trip Without a Ticket. One or two evenings a week, they would see people. Eventually it moved out of the free store and then into its own space. We actually would go by occasionally and check it out and see if it was still free and that they weren’t keeping records of people. Keeping records of people, although it seems like something you’d want to do in a health care situation, it was very coercive at that time. You could be pulled in, especially if you were underage—you could be found that way. So people sometimes gave alternative names. We used to check it out and make sure that they were still providing the services for free and still providing them without any coercion of any kind.
David Smith [who later ran the San Francisco Free Clinic] was not one of the original three doctors. I think maybe they were from UC Berkeley. They were pretty hip. You had to be. You dealt with bad acid trips.
Being free at the Diggers’ Free Store. Photo courtesy Chuck Gould.
David Hollander: The Diggers had support from religious organizations…?
Some. And sometimes. [smiles] And sometimes they had an interaction with us and they asked us to never come again. [laughs] We used to bake bread in the All Saints Church. They had a professional oven, and I remember cooking fish there to take to the park. I think it became the place where we cooked food.
And we did the initial tie-dying of white shirts at All Saints. That’s one of the other through-lines of what we were doing, an interest in personal creativity. Conventional fashion was about everybody wearing the same thing,everybody looking the same. Making tie-dyed shirts out of white shirts, you were guaranteed not to wear the same thing that anybody else wore. It was your creation. Quite frankly unless you’re fairly clever, you can’t really tell what your tie-dye is gonna come out looking like, you can’t make it identical to someone else’s. You may have an idea of how it’s going to come out, but it’s always a surprise, a wonderful surprise.
A woman named Jody Robbins — she changed her name to Luna Moth, and then to Luna Moth Robbins, and she was also known as Jody Paladino —she used a bunch of different names — she was a fabric artist that Karl knew, and Karl brought her down to the free store. When she saw all the white shirts, she said Oh I know what to do with those. She’d already done a lot of batiking and a lot of tie-dying. She showed us how to do it, and once she showed us how to do it, we ran with it. We did a lot of dyeing together, all the Diggers.
She and I gave a lot of classes together. She was really a wonderful artist. And later on, a friend of hers named Annie Tiedye started doing tie-dyes in the Los Angeles area.
When you talk about giving classes, where were the classes given?
At the free store. The free store on Cole and Carl Street had two rooms, and in one of the rooms was kind of a craft laboratory, where you could make things. The other room was Free Store, where you could get things.
But we also did tie-dying at events in the park. So we would, as part of an event, or giving away food, we would also have everybody making tie-dyes. I can’t quite remember but we must’ve brought some kind of heating elements, propane stoves or something, and set up pots of dye. The dye has to be hot to adhere to the material.
We made enormous banners too. When Malcolm X died [in 1965, before the Diggers existed], I was part of an event at Hunter’s Point. We brought big banners and set up tents outside, and silk-screened faces of Malcolm X that we gave people.
Those kinds of interactions continued during the Diggers…
We worked with the Black Panthers. We actually introduced the Black Panthers to giving food away, and they began their school programs of feeding kids as a result of interactions, maybe with Emmett? I’m not sure, Emmett or Peter [Berg]. I took food over to Kathleen Cleaver. We did things together sometimes. I mean, we didn’t do things together very much, but we sometimes took food to them, to their apartment.
For another event, one of the things I did with another woman was to silk-screen little placards that said “NOW,” that we handed out. The concept was we didn’t want to be part of the past and we didn’t want to be part of the future, we wanted people to focus on the existential NOW. Phyllis [Willner], who was riding standing up on the back of [Hells Angel member] Hairy Henry’s motorcycle was holding one of these. They busted Henry because she was riding standing up on his motorcycle. So at the end of that event, everybody marched over to the police station at the end of Haight Street, and we raised the money to get him out.
The Diggers often acted as the conscience of the Haight — the ones who encouraged people to do the right thing, and pointed fingers when necessary. [Looking at flyer signed by the Diggers] Here’s one protesting high prices for a dance concert: “You shouldn’t have to pay for love.”
That was the Bananarantra. [smiles; chants] “Banana nabana.” The price of tickets to see a music show was usually fairly inexpensive. A group of people decided to do a concert at Winterland and they charged a lot more for it, maybe twice as much. And so we protested it, a whole bunch of people protested it. That was at the same time that people were saying that banana skins would make you high if you dried them, so we had a Bananarantra, a bananarantra mantra, that we did in front of there. I think we put out things saying “$3 is a cheap trick,” whatever the ticket cost, maybe the tickets had been $2.50 and now they were five. But it was culture being sold back to the people who made it, and we thought that was a rip-off. [emphatically] It was a rip-off.
There were a lot of people in the Haight-Ashbury who really had no idea why they were there, or what they were doing. They were the “hippies.” [smiles] We were not the hippies. We were a little bit more intense, and a little bit more clear on social activism and manipulation, and so when things happened that we thought were manipulations, we pointed them out to people.
Judy Goldhaft and her partner Peter Berg, date/location unknown. Photo courtesy Chuck Gould.
He worked with the Diggers for a while. We produced a book of his poems that included seed packets, Please Plant This Book. I think it was designed by Freewheelin Frank, maybe. And inside there were seed packets of four or five or six different kinds of seeds, with Richard’s poems on them. And we gave them away. A group of us women took them to the fire stations. We liked the firemen. You know, we were pretty hip to San Francisco history. There was a woman named Lillie Coit — there’s a Coit Tower in North Beach — and she was involved with the firemen. So we would go and do things at various fire stations as the Lillie Coit Memorial Brigade. Sometimes we would bring them flowers, sometimes we brought them cookies. We brought them these books. I don’t know what they made of them. I liked the guys, they were really nice.
How about the police?
The police were not nice but, you know, initially, the police had no idea what we were doing. It took them about a year to figure out that whatever we were doing, they shouldn’t allow it. But at first they couldn’t figure out what it was that we were doing. One time, we had these long marbleized sheets of paper. Karl was into marbleizing things and he had made the paper, and someone else did calligraphy of Lenore [Kandel]’s poem on these sheets. And then four of us went up on a rooftop on Haight Street and held the poem up, and as we’d turn the sheets over, people down on the sidewalk would read the poem aloud. The police saw that, and they thought, There’s something wrong about that. So we have to tell them to stop. [laughs]
Whose idea was it do that?
The way that the Diggers functioned, really, was if somebody had an idea, they would talk to other people about it, and if people liked it, we all did it together. Sometimes Jane made up things, sometimes I made up things, often the guys made up events that we were gonna do, but once somebody settled on an event, then that would kind of click on other people’s creativity, and they’d say, Oh if we did that, then I’ll bring blah blah blah. “I can get ice.” “Oh, I can get scaffolding. Let’s make a snowball ice mound.” It ended up being very non-hierarchical, actually.
Can you remember anything about the “The End of the War” event?
There were so many events! I can talk about some of the things that I think happened at The End of the War, but they may have been part of another event, I’m just not sure. It was definitely in the Straight Theater. Bruce Conner was running for mayor at that time and he was there, giving his mayoral ‘vote for me’ speech, and he listed all the things he was for: apple pie, lemon meringue pie, lots of very American foods and pies and things like that. It was very funny. I think that’s the event where Peter put together loops of disaster tapes, natural disaster tapes. Volcanoes erupting, hurricanes… We made black-and-white film loops of them and showed them on the screen.
We gave out our free money at that event. A ceramic artist made little coins that said ‘free money’ and they had winged penises on them. A number of the women had perfumed oils in bowls, warmed up, that we would put on people. [motions] Make them smell good. [smiles] A sensuous thing. We also had branches of trees that we handed out so that the audience ended up looking like a little forest. It was pretty amazing. People who were in the Army came to the event. Steve Miller played ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home,’ and they played it a number of different ways. That was very nice. I’m not sure—I think I might be mixing up two events—but at one event at the Straight Theater, we had cargo nets that we hung from the balcony, and let people climb up on them.
Cargo nets! Where did those come from?
Who knows. Somebody got cargo nets, and we hung them from the balcony. A lot of the things we did [in those days] were actually quite dangerous [smiles] and quite on the edge. You could get hurt. But nobody ever did. We must have had the right vibes. [chuckles] Or something.
At one event, we did Jane’s other dance, which was called Waiting. There were a lot of lifts in it — people were lifted up by other people — so we made signs of various things being supported, like signs at a protest rally or political convention. I’m just not sure if this was the same event.
The Diggers had an interest in bellydancing—where did that come from?
I did that. Why bellydancing? Because we were living in a society that was very Puritanical, and there was very little, I know it’s hard to think of it now, but at that time, we’re coming out of the ‘50s, and the ‘50s was really very repressive and very restrictive. We were involved in sensuality and things being beautiful and sensuous, and bellydancing seemed to me to be beautiful and sensuous, and it was a celebration of bodies and sensuality.
Lenore had done some bellydancing. She had been a folksinger and she sang in some clubs and in one of the clubs, in New York I think this was, the Greek owner had taught her to bellydance. So she taught me the basics of bellydancing and I taught a bunch of people. We began doing bellydancing, at a lot of events. One of the things I wanted to do at the “Invisible Circus” was to have this group of bellydancers break out from behind a wall.
In Nowsreal, there’s a group of bellydancers on that flatbed truck. Are you on there?
Yeah. I think I’m [the one] wearing a polka-dotted raincoat. That was the summer solstice of 1968. At that point, the Diggers had kind of evolved into Free City. There were political conventions going then, so we did a Free City Convention. By that point, we had moved beyond the Haight-Ashbury. Haight street had been made one-way, so that meant the police really were in control of the street. They could just stop traffic at both ends. So we thought the only way to continue with our desire to make a new society, a changed society, was to move out of the Haight-Ashbury. That’s why we did poetry readings on City Hall steps for three or four months.
Judy reads poetry at the San Francisco City Hall steps as part of an ongoing Diggers action, 1968. (Still from Nowsreal film.)
After the Invisible Circus, we had a meeting, about 8 or 9 of us, about what we should do next. [shakes head] That had been so much fun. We had to do something—what shall we do next? Lenore Kandel said we should consider a planetary holiday, and noted that the summer solstice was coming up. Although of course it wasn’t coming up for six months or so. And so we decided to do all kinds of things for the summer solstice.
Marquee at the Straight Theater for a summer solstice celebration put on by the Diggers. (Still from Nowsreal film.)
Previous to that, the solstice and equinox events had mostly been in Speedway Meadow or the Panhandle. But now, we were trying to move the effort out into other neighborhoods. We made coalitions with people in the Mission district, people in Chinatown, the activist kind of gangs [smiles], the Hua Ching in Chinatown and the Mission Rebel. And that’s why, as you can see in Nowsreal, we were on a truck. The bellydancers and the music were going from park to park, from neighborhood to neighborhood, across the city: the Panhandle in the Mission District, Delores Park in North Beach, Washington Square. And there are shots of us driving through the Financial District. Driving through the Financial District, encouraging people to go to the Park, telling them that it was a holiday.
That’s Judy in polkadot. (Still from Nowsreal film.)
At that time, nobody had any awareness of planetary holidays. Now even on the weather report they tell you, Well tomorrow is the equinox, the first day of fall, or spring, but at the time nobody had much awareness of it. When we were going through the Financial District, the film makes very clear the repression that was going on: the guys looking at the girls, kind of drooling, licking their lips. They didn’t get this in their usual day-to-day life, they didn’t get to see a lot of flesh, [laughing] especially in the Financial District. We were yelling to them, Go to the park! It’s a holiday! It’s a planetary holiday. Today is the solstice. Go to the park, enjoy yourselves!
You guys were into planetary holidays.
We did that on purpose. There were a lot of lines in the Sixties and one of the lines was to lead a more natural life, to be in tune with the planet, in harmony with the planet. So we celebrated all the planetary holidays. We did things on Haight Street, we did things at the beach. We often watched the sunrise and the sunset. One of the sunset events we decided to do was at Land’s End, which is on the coast, and it’s very rocky. We went there with some people, and they were all very disappointed: Where are the people? You said this was going to be an event and there’s nobody here! So we said Well, listen, we’re gonna do this thing. We had handed out little sticks that were sparklers, and as the sun went down, all over that cliff, there were sparklers lit. So you couldn’t see the people—but obviously there were lots and lots of people there. It was a wonderful event.
One sunrise, we went up to the top of Strawberry Lake in Golden Gate Park. Somebody had made bags with candles in them, lighting the way up to the top of Strawberry Hill and Golden Gate Park and we all met up there and watched the sunrise, and played musical instruments, blew a conch shell, generally made a lot of racket.
Some of the events were pretty outrageous. One of the summer solstice events we did in Speedway Meadow and we took a lot of props. Lenore was very good at getting things given to her, and she had gotten a lot of windchimes. She hung them from the trees, just randomly. And she was big on pennywhistles, somebody had provided her with pennywhistles. And a bunch of us made reams of tie-dyed material, which we just plopped down somewhere for anyone to do what they wanted with. During the day, I went back to the place— this is to give you an example of how things were at one of these events, so much was going on that you couldn’t possibly know what was going on all the time—I went back to where we’d left tie-dyed sheets that we’d sewed together, and people had made it into a teepee. And another time they had made it into a garden. Then they had made a fence out of it. And it just kept evolving. People changed it, people came and did something with it and then left. I have no idea what happened with the material. I hope somebody just took it and enjoyed it. [smiles]
At the end of the day, after an event like this, we’d all get together and say, Well what did you do? And people would rap about what they had done. And what they had done was more than you can imagine now, looking back, and sometimes less than you can imagine. [chuckles] In Nowsreal, at the beginning of the part about the Solstice, there’s a long shot of the skyline of San Francisco. The reason that that shot is there is because someone had gotten flares, and 12 people had gone to the top of buildings and they were going to shoot the flares off. [laughs] This sounds reasonable. So someone had gone to film, or shoot, these flares coming off the top of these tall downtown buildings in the morning. Right? Well, but there was nothing in the photograph. There’s no flares. What happened? Well, when we got together later, somebody said, God! It was so exciting. I had to get to the top of this building. I managed to do it, I got myself on to the roof, I got there, I had the flare and I struck it, and I held it up…and it was one of those highway flares. It made a little red flare. But it didn’t make a big FLARE, which is what we had hoped it would. So, you know, things sometimes didn’t work out. [smiles] It was funny.
Can you talk about some of the other daily ‘free’ stuff you were involved in? You were talking about teaching bellydancing…
Mostly I did it for particular events. We did have dance classes, though, everyday. Jane gave dance classes everyday, and sometimes I gave mime classes. And we all did bellydancing, but it was not a regular thing, it was more for a particular event, we would teach a bunch of people how to bellydance. And it was wonderful because they were all shapes and sizes of women. We were really excited to have a lot of different sizes and shapes.
Were you guys teaching yoga? There’s that scene in Nowsreal…
We’re doing modern dance. But people were involved in yoga too, yeah.
Okay. Going back to some people who were involved with the Diggers, who aren’t alive now. Richard Brautigan…
He helped design events. We worked with a bunch of artists and poets. Lew Welch, he was one of the Beat poets, he was around. He was married to Lenore for a while. I really liked him a lot, but I didn’t know him very well.
Kirby was a marvelous poet, and a crazy person. He wrote some poems, one about John Garfield, that we read at the “CandleOpera.” He actually lived with the Diggers, he was one of the Diggers for a long time. He was a very intense person, and he was very creative. He had a girl child with one of the other Digger women whose name was Tracy and they named her America. That’s an intense name.
What do you remember about the CandleOpera event?
It was wonderful. [smiles] I don’t think I can describe it properly. It was an evening event in the Panhandle. People read poems. [looking at the flyer] I guess there was music, it says there was music. There were no lights in the Panhandle, so we put candles around in the trees and things so there was a certain amount of light. And there was a stage, and that had lights. Or some lights? I can’t be certain. There was incense and there was dope. It was one of those events that could easily have turned into something terrible. But it didn’t, so it was wonderful. In our life today, we’re rarely in places where it’s very dark, and it was very dark at the CandleOpera. I remember that. The night is very dark in the Panhandle. And you know, the Panhandle was not a nice place at night. People got raped there, so people didn’t go there at night. And for the Candle Opera to be there was to open it as a useable space. It was wonderful. It was scary and it was exciting. It got your adrenaline running.
That’s almost a metaphor for what you guys were doing.
David Hollander: The Invisible Circus was almost like that—
Yeah, it was scary. It was a miracle that nobody got hurt. [smiles] The amount of people. That elevator was stifling, that elevator with all the plastic strips in it. I don’t know why nobody got trampled in it.
Y’know, also, in the sanctuary at the Invisible Circus, we showed Night and Fog.
What was the thinking behind that?
[shrugs] Why not? It’s the intensity of life, the things you have to deal with in life. People also made love on the altar there too. You can see why we didn’t last more than 24 hours there.
Another aspect of the events is that they were very sensualist. You were engaging all the senses — sight, scent, sound…
I think everybody was a sensualist at that time. [contemplates] Everybody was dancing. Before that, when I was giving dance classes at the Mime Troupe, not too many people knew how to move their hips. And their arms—nobody used their arms, either. You’d see a group of people dancing and you’d see maybe one person moving their arm up. Up ‘til then, there had been swing dancing, there was jitterbugging. But as part of the ‘60s, people began exploring their own movement, what it felt like to move their bodies.
You guys were unlocking spaces, opening up minds and bodies—
You want to get people to open up and do whatever they wanted to do. I loved watching the dancing then because people really were doing creative exploration. A lot of interesting dance happened there—people feeling the music.
And, a lot of alternative health things developed out of the Sixties. People were trying to do things in a more natural way. Chinese herbal medicine—herbal medicine per se—was being explored. And that was very hard to do. People really didn’t accept things like that. It was hard to do. And babies began being born not in hospitals but at home.
In some ways it was very progressive but in others it was a revival of ways things had been done—
Before the Industrial Revolution. We were very into exploring the long-term ways that people who were able to survive did, and the things that they did, we revived them. We did canning, for example. We got a lot of tomatoes, and we canned them all. And when people moved out of the city and back to the land, canning became a big way to preserve food.
Digger Bread is whole-grain. There was a natural foods movement at that time but it was really very small, and people wanted to do things in a more healthy way and without preservatives. We made Digger bread two or three times a week, or at least once a week. We were given a bakery to use. The recipe for the bread was a whole wheat bread, a healthy bread. At that time you would’ve been lucky to find rye bread, let alone… It was little balloon white bread was what was around. A lot of people learned a lot about food in the Sixties.
And you communicated using an old method—the broadside.
He had a job working with the American Friends Service Committee, but he liked what we were doing as Diggers, and he got involved. He provided a lot from the access he had.. And he also was an artist, so he had a nice sensibility. He did a lot of things. He ran one of the free stores, I think. I believe that he got a Gestetner. I wouldn’t swear to it. It was either he or Don Cochran. But I think it was Arthur.
We took our Gestetner down to some of the schools, and had the kids write instant poems and things at lunchtime. We put out this newspaper for three months. We made little “Free News” boxes, there was one up at City Lights, there were other ones in the Mission District and on Haight Streets. So you would Gestetner up these different pages and then staple them together, they’re kind of like the Digger Papers that the Realist put together, and then go distribute them.
A typically gorgeous “Free News” sheet.
We actually took those sheets to the Gestetner company. They had no idea that their machines were capable of doing what we did. Like we put a peacock feather on the Gestetner and put the top down and Xeroxed it in color. And they were amazed. They were very beautiful sheets. We asked the Gestetner company to let us keep their machine, which hadn’t been paid for in full, and they said, No.
Emmett Grogan claims in Ringolevio that he gave a speech at the at the infamous Dialectics of Liberation conference that went over very well with the lefty intellectual/counterculture audience — and then reveals that the speech was actually a verbatim recital of an Adolf Hitler speech. Okay, Grogan makes his point about the dangers of charisma, gullibility, hierarchy, etc.
That may well have happened, but we don’t have any evidence for it outside of Grogan’s own account in Ringolevio, and Grogan is a known fabricator of poetic truths.
However, as Grogan also writes in Ringolevio, he had already made one other appearance at the conference on the previous day, in a panel discussion with Allen Ginsberg and Stokely Carmichael. What follows is a partial transcript of what one presumes was Grogan’s opening statement for that conversation. This transcript was supplied to me in 2010 by documentarian Peter Davis, who filmed the event for a BBC film. Unfortunately there is only a bit of footage for some Grogan’s statement, starting here at the 16:17 mark:
(Further footage of Grogan is available at the opening of this 13-minute video compilation of excerpts from the event. These remarks aren’t reflected in the transcript.)
Here’s the transcript text that Peter Davis sent to me.
Note the closing line.
Emmett Grogan – Dialectics of Liberation 22 July 1967
Black people all over the world are discovering their humanity through their blackness. Children all over the world who are not black skinned are discovering their humanity through their madness. The white world as it is structured, systemized and stands is an unnatural myth. The black people are revolting within themselves against this myth. The children who are not making themselves available for employment or degrees or publishers are also revolting against this myth. And each of these peoples is discovering a power—that power is autonomy. To stand on a street corner and wait for no one is powerful.
These children are evolving from every single suburb: liberal and fascist and Bircher and conservative and radical homes—and are leaving. The language in these homes has always been, will always be too functional, They cannot understand anything, nothing means anything. If the change we are all talking about in the dialectics were to come about most of the people in this room right now would not understand that change and would die. Concepts that have evolved with the evolution of this mad race of young people have been interpreted on every level imaginable—political. philosophical, psychological. There’s only one level, there’s no higher or lower level, there’s only one level, and that’s the level of each man’s natural humanity. A man is one to one with himself or he’s not one to one with anything else. And the black people are lucky because they’re black. They can recognize their brothers in the streets—a black man sees a black man, he’s a black man. A child cannot recognize another child because there’s no age limit on this thing. So they formed all these different appearances—long hair, colored clothes—but they treat them as they should be treated, as fads. They come and go, different styles every week. But the new reason and the new sense of brotherhood is coming closer to being understandable.
In America these children, for the first time in their lives, come out of these wounded homes and go out on the street. On the street they meet the people. Who lives on the street? Marxists and radical politicians call the street people the proletariat. On the street, like Stokely Carmichael calls them, black people. On the street, gypsies call them gypsies. On the street, hell’s angels call them hell’s angels. They’re all people. They’re all strange people, because they have nothing to do with whatever anybody says about them, except now. Now the black people are doing It. Now the children of the western world are doing It. And everybody’s trying to interpret It. It can’t be done. Only the people will do It and they will never tell anyone what it means.
Spontaneity, autonomy, seem to be a new type of humanity that’s or coming about, and today is the first day in the rest of your lives.
I interviewed the late Peter Berg at his San Francisco home in November 2006 with David Hollander for a documentary film project.
Berg was reluctant to speak yet again about the Diggers — he had given many interviews through the years, and dreaded what he called “the 7s” — years ending in “7,” which always marked a numerically significant (10th, 20th, 30th, on and on) anniversary of the 1967 Summer of Love and for him meant yet another round of fielding media asks for interviews about the Diggers’ role in the Haight-Ashbury scene.
In 2020, the Diggers are little-known. But in 1966-8, such was the Diggers’ presence and notoriety that seemingly every reporter filing a story on the Haight — even, memorably, a typically dyspeptic Joan Didion, for the Saturday Evening Post—included the Diggers in their account. “A band of hippie do-gooders,” said Time magazine. “A true peace corps,” wrote local daily newspaper columnist (and future Rolling Stone editor) Ralph J. Gleason. “A cross between the Mad Bomber and Johnny Appleseed,” said future Yippie Paul Krassner in The Realist, “a combination of Lenny Bruce and Malcolm X, the illegitimate offspring resulting from the seduction of Mary Worth by an acidic anarchist.” The Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor would write, “[The Diggers] were in my opinion the core of the whole underground counterculture because they were our conscience.”
In the decades afterward, everyone wanted to interview Peter Berg because he had been there, he had done things, and most of all, because he had remained brilliant and charismatic, post-Diggers. Berg was a playwright-dramaturge and anarchist tactician who had a street sense, a sense of history and a sense of humor; a short, sometimes brusque guy with a big, creative, poetic mind who gave tremendous quotes.
Born in 1937 (another “7”), Berg was in his late 20s as the Haight-Ashbury “uprising,” as he called it, rolled into being in 1966. He was somewhat older than the drop-out “flower children” and teenage runaways of the time. He was also somewhat younger than the Haight-curious North Beach bohemian poets, painters and beatniks, most of whom were in their 30s and 40s. Having coined the term “guerrilla theater” during his productive time in the radical San Francisco Mime Troupe, Berg found his role in the Diggers, manifesting maximum social joy and welfare through a set of deceptively simple ideas whose range of application seemed boundless.
In 2006, after many phone calls, emails, postcards and a shipment of Arthur No. 13, David and I scored an audition with Berg to conduct an interview. We passed, and, not long afterwards, on camera in his kitchen, Berg gave us — performed for us — one of the best, most comprehensive interviews regarding the Diggers that he ever did. He was on for two hours, and he knew it. I hope the following text, basically a transcript with extremely light editing for clarity, gets that across.
Berg died in 2011. Planet Drum, the San Francisco-based bioregionalist non-profit foundation he started with his wife (and fellow Digger) Judy Goldhaft in 1973, continues to the present. Berg’s contributions to bioregionalism were foundational and visionary; his work persisted across decades, and was a natural continuation of his Diggers work. Read more about Planet Drum here. For more information on the Diggers, consult Eric Noble’s vast archive at diggers.org
I have incurred not insignificant expenses in my Diggers research through the years. If you would like to support my work, please donate via PayPal. All donations, regardless of size, are greatly appreciated. Thank you!
“It ain’t Eisenhower’s America anymore”: Peter Berg runs it down for a CBC TV crew, 1967. Screengrab from “The Way it Was: San Francisco Summer of 1967,” directed by Don Shebib.
Peter Berg makes a point at the San Francisco City Hall steps, 1968. Photo courtesy Chuck Gould
Jay Babcock: What kind of family did you grow up in?
Peter Berg: My mother used to call herself a ‘parlor pink,’ which was a variety of Red. My father was known for being able to recite whole pages from H.G. Wells’ Outline of History. At that time that sort of indicated that he might have been a leftist, but I’ve called him a barroom socialist because my father was also an incredible drunk. My own feeling is that they were immigrant folk socialists. My brothers enlisted in World War II as Navy fighter pilots. They called it the “War Against Fascism.” [That kind of language] was in the air at the time. It wasn’t theological. Sort of FDR/Socialist “New Deal,” that kind of thing. That’s the kind of politics that were around.
You went to University of Florida to study psychology…
I didn’t go there to study psychology, I went there to be a college person. I think I was 16 at the time. 15 or 16, because I’d been skipped ahead at school. I had to choose a major, and by sophomore year I’d decided that one of the least venal things to choose was psychology.
It was a fairly large university, 10,000 or so, but the group of people who were ‘alternative’ was so small they all knew each other. It wasn’t more than a couple dozen. There were a group of us who wanted to provoke, to insinuate, that integration was overdue at the University of Florida—it was 1957, three years after the Civil Rights Act— so we pasted up posters with the slogan ‘Integrate in ’58.’ We pasted those up at night. We didn’t want to be seen. It was not public.
You put them at night because you had to, or to …?
To avoid being censured. To avoid being beaten up by fratboy football fan types. In fact, the editor of the school newspaper made his reputation by posing as queerbait, getting propositioned by homosexual professors, developing a list of them, and then outing them and getting them all fired.
How did you get to San Francisco?
The main thing I did academically in college was to read novels. I read all the authors straight through. One of the things I picked up was there was an American ethos, and I wanted to go search it out. So I made hitchhiking forays to different parts of the country. One of them was to the Midwest, to see the “real” America. I worked in a factory that made flexible metal tubing. I hitchhiked to San Francisco. San Francisco was a destination for me because I had read ‘Howl’ in college, shortly after it came out. In fact, I read Howl the night that Fidel took Havana. I know because we were in a bar to read Howl together, my friends and I, and somebody came in with a shortwave radio and threw the aerial up in the air and in Spanish it said, Fidel Castro has taken Havana.
So, I made hitchhiking forays. I went to the Pacific Northwest, I was on Whidbey Island in Washington. I jumped a lumber freight and came down to the Albany trainyard, in Berkeley. I met some people, took some LSD, decided to go to Mexico. Spent a month in Mexico, broke. Came back to San Francisco, pretty shredded mentally. A lot of reverse culture shock, coming back to this very materialistic California culture from Guadalajara in 1963, maybe 1964. I got a job with the City of San Francisco, and while I was working for them I heard about the San Francisco Mime Troupe from someone, I forget who, and just walked in and told them I was a writer, director and an actor. And the very adventurous director Ronnie Davis—R.G. Davis—handed me a book that was a translation of Giordano Bruno’s late Renaissance play Il Candelaio [The Torchbearer, 1582], which was really a philosophical treatise in the form of a play—a very old way of writing. It’s Greek dialogues, a five-act play of dialogues. Absolutely unplayable. It was not theater. But he asked me to make a three-act, free Commedia dell’arte from it—it’s the form of theatre Ronnie had pioneered in this country. It’s a Renaissance, Italian form of acting where there are stock characters: the doctor, the clown, etc. And I did. And we rehearsed it; one of the lead actors was Luis Valdez, who went on to form the Farmworkers Theatre (El Teatro Campesino) for the grape strike in Delano in 1965.
Berg explains his approach to Il Candelaio in a column for the Aug. 15, 1965 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle
Well, while we had been rehearsing it, a dispute had occurred between the city and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. The dispute was whether or not we would receive our share of the San Francisco hotel tax, which is a form of promoting the arts. The city decided not to give us the hotel tax money that we’d gotten the previous year. So, the director’s response was to not apply for a permit to do a free play in the park. And we knew we would get busted. I mean, by the time we were all in the truck, headed for the park, we more or less highly suspected that the police would be there. And somebody, or several people, invited most of the people who were later to be called the New Left in the Bay Area to come and be an audience for the play, and react if the police attempted to stop it, if there was a dispute about attempting to perform without a permit. We arrived, and of course I’m all involved in the idea that I wrote this thing and it’s going to be performed, and frankly I’d never written a play before in my life, and I was very excited, very ego-identified with it as the playwright, and we show up and there are black mariahs—paddywagons—all over the place.
The director, who did not possess a tremendous amount of physical courage, but was kind of playing to his troupe and to this New Left audience, said, Give me the costume for the lead actor, I’m going to be the one who jumps on the stage and announces the play. So we set up the stage. Still nothing from the police. Got into costumes. Still nothing from the police. The audience gather around, anticipating that this is going to provoke a riot or something, an arrest. And the director jumped on the stage and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the San Francisco Mime Troupe presents—a bust!” And the police, on cue, came forward and arrested everybody. Or, arrested him, dragged him off. There’s a great photo of all of us looking kind of stunned. Me, looking like, What happened to my play? Or at least that’s the way I see it.
The New Left people were just galvanized. It was a polarizing event that made a unity out of this group of people who were old Communists, Beats, gays, proto hippies, musicians, the underground newspaper the Berkeley Barb, all these people were suddenly made the same people, by that event. And all yelling, Stop, stop, you shouldn’t do this. And also all knowing that it was staged. You hear that word “staged”? That’s kind of key to what happened with the Mime Troupe next.
That event led to benefits for the Mime Troupe, who had no money. And our business manager was Bill Graham who at that time was called William Grajonca, he had his Polish name still. He wanted to be Sol Hurock when he grew up, Sol Hurock was a big promoter in New York. And he had this idea of having the benefit. It had an incredible array of performers: Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention—I requested that they be there. Lew Welch, the great San Francisco poet, was there. Timothy Leary. Some of the San Francisco Sound people, I think Big Brother was one of the groups. And others. And people lined up. Thousands of people lined up for a dinky studio on Howard Street that only held 200 or 300 people maximum. This was incredible. And suddenly this event was not only the creation of the New Left, but it was a statement of the counterculture. Bill Graham saw it, and he had a revelation: Whooooo, herein my future fortune lies. And we looked at it and thought, we’re really doing what we’re supposed to do as a radical theater company: we provoked an arrest, it annealed the New Left, and it created a focus for the new culture, which some of us who lived in the Haight-Ashbury had seen developing around us. We were pot smokers and acid rock-oriented. We listened to Sandy Bull, and Billy Higgins, Ravi Shankar, getting all those Eastern half-notes and quarter tones, all of that. Janis Joplin was walking around on the street of the Haight-Ashbury at the time. I was in a commune at one point with Chet Helms, who founded the Family Dog. He was a dumpster-diver who lived in the Haight-Ashbury.
Anyway, we knew this new culture was there, we knew this phenomenon was occurring, centered in the Haight-Ashbury, so after this event, we dramaturges sat together and tried to think it out. What is this, in terms of breaking down the fourth wall? How is this a historical follow-through for Antonin Artaud on one hand and Bertrolt Brecht on the other? How did these two come together in this? What do you call this, when you provoke riots and use the audience as members of the cast? When you can stage events that brings the audience on the stage—but there is no formal stage? But it’s a theatricalized event…? It’s all new. So I called it ‘guerrilla theater.’ And Ronnie heard that phrase, and wrote an essay about doing Left provocative theater. That wasn’t what I saw. I saw it as being deeper than that. And I began writing plays that now were for sure plays except that a lot of the dialogue was spontaneously derived from the performers—we had some really great performers at the Mime Troupe at the time, I’d say there were at least a dozen good performers, and a couple who were really brilliant. Anyways, put these people together, I gave them a context, and we began improvising dialogue.
Che tells us what to do about theater in America: the opening page R.G. “Ronnie” Davis’s essay on “Guerrilla Theatre” in the Tulane Drama Review (Summer 1966: Vol. 10, Number 4 [T32]). Note mention of Berg in Footnote 1.
At the same time I had in mind a couple of ideas. One of them was based on a short story by a former German prisoner of war who was a literary hero of the postwar era in Germany, Wolfgang Borchert, he wrote a number of short stories, one was titled The Dandelion, based on his experience in a Russian prison camp. It was about military prisoners who craved so much to have some sort of human contact that they will take extraordinary risks, and one of them risks getting out of line to run over to where a dandelion is blooming, to look at the flower. And is beaten to death. It must have actually happened. So I wrote a play titled ‘Center Man’ about a military prisoner of war, a German prisoner of war who’s in an American prisoner of war camp, and I thought people will look at this as being exotic but it’s actually what’s happening in Vietnam. So it was a way of talking about Vietnam without directly talking about Vietnam. The guard has the prisoners do exercises. One of them reaches out to grab the flower, and the guard beats him to death. And a friend of mine designed a set that was made out of exhaust pipes, the whole exhaust assembly, rusted out, as the background. And as I was rehearsing this play—this was more scripted than the ones that followed—as I was rehearsing it, Ronnie, who had this directorial brilliance, looked at it and said, ‘These guys are just talking to each other, we’ve gotta have them doing something.’ I had them running around in a circle. He said, Put shower shoes—clogs—on them. Make it really loud. So now they’re going [claps stridently] [yelling] “Run around!” and they had “P. O.W.” written on the back of their fatigues, and the guy’s got a white helmet and MP [Military Police] on his arm, he’s smacking them while they’re running. Well, by the time he hits this prisoner and kills him, it was a pretty profound, emotional thing. A lot of it derived from the sound of these shower clogs banging on the stage.
So where do we bring this, as guerrilla theater? The Free Speech Movement (FSM) is in full bloom at UC Berkeley. Free Speech Movement: students have a right to say whatever they want to say. You can’t control speech. Students aren’t going to school. Nobody’s going to class—there are no classes. Even the professors have walked out. There’s a huge stage set up in Sproul Plaza and all kinds of FSM people are giving speeches— Communist Party people, civil rights leaders, anti-war, student freedom, Mario Savio. That day when we finally get over there is at least a couple of thousand students around the stage.
So we show up in a VW van. No idea what we’re gonna do. None at all. We’d just heard that the FSM thing was going on. None of us had been there. I go out and I suss it out, and I see that there’s a big stage with people on it and a lot of people in front of it and a big plaza. So I come back and tell the actor playing the guard, ‘March the guys out into the middle of that crowd. Clear the crowd—push the people out of the way—and start doing the play, without any announcement. Just start smacking these guys around and having them clog in a circle, and then kill that guy at the end.’ The actor asked, ‘And then what do we do?’ ‘Well, then we leave. We’ll just get back in the van and drive away.’ ‘Well, who’s going to know it’s a play?’ ‘Nobody’s going to know it’s a play, or if they do, they’ve never seen any kind of play like this before. It’ll be an experience. They’ll participate in the cruelty of the guard. They’ll observe it, not knowing if it’s true or not, they will observe the murder of a prisoner, not knowing if it’s true or not, and we’ll see what happens. This is guerrilla theater.’ [chuckles] We hadn’t ever done it before, but we’re pretty highly trained spontaneous performers.
So the guard on the way out, he has them pick up cigarette butts. He’s shoving people out of the way, saying, Get out of the way, get out of the way of my man here. Pick that butt up now! You know what’s gonna happen if you don’t. So people start clearing this path. And they clear the path until the four actors—the guard and three prisoners—[actors with] no set—go into the middle of the plaza. The guard had the authority to begin the play whenever he wanted. So he begins the play. And people start backing away from the circle, physically getting away from this behavior and saying to each other, What’s going on? They can’t allow this, can they? Is this like ROTC? What’s happening here? Does anybody know…? Is anybody in charge of this? Uh, who let them here? That’s American military isn’t it? Uh, who are those guys? W-what are they doing? I was there in the crowd, I heard these comments. I couldn’t believe it! I was delighted. My ears were about to spout blood. It was extraordinary. And then they killed the guy. And people start yelling: You can’t do that! Does anybody see what’s going on here? And there was sound with it. You know, when he kills him, he hit his club on the ground so it goes POW. And then there’s this sucking in of breath, screaming, girls are crying, students… the people on stage have stopped talking. This is like prohibited criminal behavior going on in their ivory tower, and they’re witnessing it. And they don’t know how to respond. What do I do when I see a military man murdering somebody? So then the guard orders the other guys to pick up the body. He walks them off and back to the van. And we drove out of there.
We get in the van and we’re saying to each other, WOW. [laughs] It was like throwing a stick of dynamite into something. This isn’t show business man, what are we doing? We gonna get away with this? That’s what we’re saying on the way back to the place. So then we tell the people at the Mime Troupe about what we did. Mouths dropped open. It was like, You didn’t tell them it was a play? You didn’t tell them it was the Mime Troupe? No.
So now this is more than free theater in the park, this is this guerrilla thing. We’re gonna be doing this guerrilla theater thing. And Ronnie at the time, to his credit, allowed me to do whatever I wanted. He gave me a position there. After that we did a guerrilla theater piece… Well, one of them was to take a scene out of a Jean Genet play titled The Screens, and do it in the bus station, without telling anyone it was happening. It’s full of criminals of various kinds, and we just had it done, and a cop saw it going on, and just from the behavior of the play, said, Y’know you gotta stop doing that, you can’t do that in a bus station. You can’t shoot drugs sitting in a seat waiting here for a bus. [chuckles] That’s the way he treated it. But that one wasn’t really so sensational.
One other play we did was called ‘Search and Seizure,’ at a rock club called the Matrix, on the same bill as Country Joe and the Fish. The guys in that band did not know what else had been booked, so the first night we did it, they watched along with the audience in the club. It was largely improvised dialogue—improvised in the studio, and then written down so people had their speeches. Some notable things about it: the characters were a doctor strung out on heroin, a hippie who had dropped a tab of acid, somebody with some marijuana and somebody on speed. They’re pulled out of the club group and put on stage by two people who purport to be narcotics detectives. So they’re pulled away from the tables they’re sitting at, put on stage, and face the audience, where this interrogation begins. If you did this one quickly, nobody thought different: it was real. If you had any pauses or laughed, you blew it, but if the actors acted like, what’s going on, where’s Country Joe, if they were like that, the detectives were hard cop/soft cop, and you got into the rhythm of it, people watching, they thought they were watching the real thing. Or if they weren’t watching the real thing, this was the realest thing they’d ever seen! Country Joe told me it made him paranoid, he was never going to watch it again. I mean, that’s how effective it was. [laughs] Emmett Grogan was one of these people. I think he was the speed freak. Anyway, they all get busted, they tell their stories of why they’re there: what are you on, what does it make you feel like, why are you doing this? The cops insult them, they call them enemies of society, etc. And then they lead them off at the end, they lead them to the back and out the door. Nobody says anything to the audience—nobody says, You just watched a play, or, Now it’s over and now we present Act 2. That was really good, that one. Like 15 or 20 minutes. The actors would improvise on their own improvisations, they would improvise on their own lines. Some of them got very involved with their lines—it was their chance to be a playwright.
You mentioned Emmett Grogan. Who was Emmett Grogan?
Emmett Grogan was one of the people that walked into the Mime Group the same way I did. He came in and purported to be an actor. He claimed to have been to a film school in Italy, which I doubted, because he didn’t pronounce “Cinecittà” correctly, so I thought he had not actually been there. I would learn later that almost everything that came out of Emmett’s mouth was at least an exaggeration if not an outright fabrication. But that was somewhat forgivable, considering his charisma; his charisma was substantial. More than substantial—he was probably the most charismatic person that I had ever met. And he was enamored of that ability. He was not a good actor, onstage. He was an extraordinary life actor. I created the term ‘life actor’ to describe him. It’s part of that thing about lying, or misrepresentation or whatever. He would bring things off to see them happen. What if somebody moved like this? What if somebody said this as an answer? That’s the way he operated. And he was, I don’t think he was fearless, but he was stronger than most of the people he ran into in San Francisco. He was from Brooklyn or Hell’s Kitchen, New York, I’m not sure which. Had a New York attitude. Tough, New York, gang…? I did meet some young mafiosa that were his acquaintances, so he had dipped into that life to some extent.
Emmett Grogan, New York City, date unknown. Photo courtesy Max Grogan.
I cast Emmett in ‘Search and Seizure’ and in something I did only one time in a Berkeley coffeehouse that was about the impact of cybernetic culture. This was sort of prescient to do this because almost nobody was even writing about computers in 1967, and the best things I got a hold of [on the subject] were by philosophers. There was an essay titled A Prolegomena to Androidology [Michael Scriven, 1960] that had a dozen tests for whether or not something could only be done by humans or could also be done by machines. The conclusion was that machines could do anything that humans did. So I wrote a guerrilla theater piece called “Output You” and in it there were a woman programmer and a man who worked together in an office around computers, and they each had doubles—they had dopplegangers, dressed in black who were beside them all the time, or laying down or whatever, and while they conversed with each other about [robotically, flatly] ‘Do you have the program Catherine?’ ‘Yes I do but there are some bugs in it still that have to be worked out.’ ‘Well could you get that to me as soon as possible so that we can set it up and process some data?’ While they were talking like this, their doubles were doing all kinds of things—taking their clothes off, they were attempting to have sex with each other, they were rolling around, they were pulling out bottles, they were the sublimated computer programmers. And at the end of that one, the real people and their doubles become enmeshed together in an unresolved mass. People watching it thought at the beginning that it was about two people in a computer room. They didn’t know that there would be doubles and that the doubles would upset the reality of the ‘real’ people. Well, Emmett and Billy Murcott were both in that play. Neither one of them were very good performers—onstage.
Who was Billy Murcott?
Billy Murcott was a Greek American from New York who had run into or come west with Emmett Grogan. He had very curly black hair. He was new to drugs but he was very enthusiastic about taking drugs, believed drugs would change human identity, that he was in the forefront of that. Marijuana, LSD. Billy when I first met him was pretty interesting. Very verbal, vocal, so forth. For some reason over time he became less so. I’m not sure why. And his contribution was enormous. He wrote the essay “Mutants Commune” that was published in the Berkeley Barb. That’s Billy. And he named the Diggers. He was taking LSD and smoking pot, living in the Haight Ashbury, and began idealizing a future society. So he read a book on anarchism. And in it, the Winstanley group in England [the original Diggers group in the 17th century] was described. And he just thought the name was terrific for “I dig you” and “dig up the park”… y’know, the Haight Ashbury is right near the Panhandle of the Golden Gate Park. So we had the Park as our commons—the Diggers in England had a commons—and we had this idea of being free that is brought about through LSD. Free of precepts, prior understandings, etc. So Billy thought it was a terrific name for a group that would be, in the New York language and perspective that he and Emmett had together, they wanted the white equivalent of the black rebellion. Y’know, Why shouldn’t white people be able to have this too, whatever black people were doing. So they formulated an idea of starting a group called the Diggers, although they didn’t know what it would be like, on a roof watching the Fillmore burn during the Fillmore riots—the Fillmore was the African-American part of San Francisco—in 1966. They wrote together something that was like Martin Luther’s 99 Theses. They asked me what to do with it and I said, Tack it to the wall of the Mime Troupe office. I had just barely glanced at it. I was working for the Mime Troupe at the time. And so everybody came in one morning to the office and there’s this sheet that says [chuckles], this list of things: Fuck the country, fuck capitalism, fuck the civil rights movement, fuck the Black Panthers, fuck this, that, fuck pop music, et cetera, and the last one was: Fuck the Mime Troupe. It was signed “The Diggers.”
And I saw that and thought, Now these are two guys that have been through my guerrilla theater thing, where I’m trying to move theater from being on the stage to being in the audience. They are moving things into the street of the Haight-Ashbury. We could have a street theater where the street is the theater—where the street is the stage. And we can cause things to happen, because I’ve seen this, I’ve witnessed this. And we can do it on a large scale with all those people pouring into the Haight-Ashbury. (I lived in the Haight Ashbury at the time.) So I left the Mime Troupe, without very much commentary.
During that period, I had been down to Delano to see the way the Grape Strike Theater was operating. The Tulane Drama Review mistakenly advanced me some money to go down and write an article about the Teatro Campesino. I went and I saw that they had made a village. The strike was a description of the society that the union hoped to create. It had a free clinic, food, education, etc, housing. They were taking care of people’s needs. The union movement was always that—a strike was always supposed to be the theater of the achieved society that the union would bring. The strike is a struggle between the working class and the ownership class. It describes that struggle. It takes form in the strike, and then strike assistance to workers is the forecast of the future society that the union movement can bring about. Well, I was aware of that, and I saw it there. There was a theater, of course—the Teatro Campesino. But the strike itself was extraordinary theater. So Luis Valdez was busy promoting himself to me and to other people as a wunderkind of theater, and in a way he was, but the grape strike itself—la huelga—was the theater. [chuckles]
So I opened a free store in the Haight Ashbury. It was named “Trip Without a Ticket.” It was a store to exemplify the Digger credo, which was: “Everything is free. Do your own thing.” And we’re pulling now off of Anarchist history. We are being the Anarchist movement of contemporary American society. We’re exemplifying what anarchy could be in American society.
So, the free store is named Trip Without a Ticket, and I wrote an essay about it titled “Trip Without a Ticket,” which was one of the Digger Papers, which was later reprinted in The Realist. I sent it to the Tulane Drama Review, and said, I don’t know what happened to your money, but I know what happened to the article: this is it. Print this, and don’t be surprised. Well, they didn’t print it. [chuckles] They didn’t know what they had in their hands. And they resented me too for failing to fulfill my contractual obligation to be a journalist, which I wasn’t.
“Trip Without a Ticket,” as reprinted in the “Digger Papers” issue of The Realist. Scans courtesy The Realist Archive Project.
So now the Diggers are underway, and the approach is put “free” in front of anything you can think of and that would make it ‘Diggerly.’ How do you be a Digger? Well, think of something and put ‘free’ in front of it. For example, food. Put ‘free’ in front of food. Or, housing. Put ‘free’ in front of housing. Or energy. Or art.
For example: the tie-dye craze of the hippie generation. I know where it started. It started in that Free Store. It started with a woman who had been studying Indian fabric techniques. We were starting to get a lot of white shirts. People were dropping out and they were leaving their formal clothes at the door of the free store. So we would walk in in the morning and wade through these piles of white shirts. We had a super-abundance of them. This woman, whose name was Luna, said, We can make tie-dyes out of these. We said, What is tie dye. And so she showed people what they were. The Digger women looked at them and said, These are fantastic. We can make them ourselves, we can do it to all these shirts. So we began showing people how to do it. That became a standard activity at any Digger event after that, off in a corner somewhere someone would have boiling pots of dye and people, men and women, would be tying up shirts and tie dying them. And then this miracle would happen, you’d undo the cords and BOOM, these cosmic and amoebic bursts would occur. That was free art. Take the white shirt: it’s free. Do this technique with it: you can learn it, and it is art when you’re finished.
March 23, 1967 Berkeley Barb
From the March 31, 1967 LA Free Press, courtesy diggers.org
For me, the highest form of our free art were the street events that we did. We did events that were pageant-oriented events, but the audience didn’t know it was a pageant. They didn’t know they were in it. It was just happening all of a sudden, and the material to do it would show up, or the characters of it would move through the crowd.
Can you talk about doing free food in the park?
If you ask people who were there during the middle ‘60s in the Haight–Ashbury, during the advent of the Diggers, what they were doing, you will get different stories, depending on what their perspective is. Some men were there to hit on girls. That’s all they can think of from that period. Some people were there to be politically idealistic, and everything they’ll talk about will be framed in political idealism. I saw everything as theater. So from my point of view, giving food to people in the park was not just feeding the waves of liberated people coming to the Haight-Ashbury to identify themselves with the psychedelic revolution that was underway. It wasn’t just that. It was also a demonstration of an attitude—that food should be free. All food in the society should be free. It was a guiding ideal. From my point of view, the left didn’t have a guiding ideal—there wasn’t a place it wanted to go. We wanted to give it a destination. So we would give it a destination by enacting the destination. So everything we did, from my perspective, was a demonstration of this future world—in the present. It was like, Walk through it. Feel it out. How does it fit? What’s wrong with it? What’s good about it? The food should taste better. Yeah, right, okay, it should taste better. It should be fresher. Right. It should be organic. Those kinds of things. It should be homemade. Digger bread…should be made in a recycled coffee can. You should make it yourself. That would be part of the coming world, the new vision. The guiding vision.
So it wasn’t just enough to have food in the park. [smiles] The food in the park should be served inside a 12-foot square frame…that is, a picture frame, one that is so large that the human activity inside it will always fit. It will always seem to be part of a deliberate painting. And this frame should be aimed at the cars that are coming to work in the morning, so the commuters coming down Oak Street would see people getting free breakfast out of a milkcan within a 12-foot orange frame that we would call the “Free Frame of Reference.” Right? We really wanted to lard on the language and the symbolism and the theater of it. [laughs]
Everything we did was like that. We would set up situations at the Free Store where one magazine writer is interviewing the other one, and they’ve both been told that the other one is the manager of the Free Store. And they actually are going at this for five minutes, undoing this confusion for our benefit—they were performing for us. [laughs] Or people would walk in and say, Who runs this free store? And we’d say Well as a matter of fact—you do. Someone was running it, but now that you’re here, we’re leaving. [laughs] And we’d walk out. Wha—couldn’t I just take anything I wanted??? Yes, you could. Well, what if somebody wants to pay for it? Take the money. What should I do with it? Keep it. [laughs] The idea was not just to give away things free, but to create a theater where people could explore this notion of a free store. What would it be like if things didn’t cost money? How do you relate to them? How do you get them? How do you decide about them? Do you share them? How do you use it? Quite amazing to me, there were African-American women on welfare that would just sit there and wait for people to bring donations and quickly go through the donations as fast as they could to get the best stuff out of it and pack it in their own bag to take later and sell. And they were like, Do you people know you’re just giving me everything I need here? And we’d say, Great! Or, I actually saw this: we had a changing room that was really a place for sex. It was done in velvet and mirrors—it had a couch, it was really [chuckling] a very decadent changing room. Somebody came in, in uniform, regular Army, pulled men’s clothes off various racks, went into the changing room, came out, walked out of the place. I went over, opened up the changing room. His uniform was there. He’d deserted the Army, on the spot, and got the clothes for it: that’s how he used the Free Store. To me, that wasn’t a political act, it was a theater thing. He came in a solider and he went out as a civilian. [laughs]
I tended to see most things in terms of theater. I think most people, if they’re exposed to that perspective, can see this acting out as theater, without thinking it’s fraud, without thinking it’s fake. Nothing I ever did was fake, none of it was phony, but the name I gave to it was “life acting.” It was creating the condition you describe, which is a phrase that I read in a book titled Thespis [Ritual, myth, and drama in the ancient Near East by Theodor Gaster], about the annual journey the pharaoh of Egypt took up and down the Nile as a way of uniting the two Egypts, the upper and lower. He had a barge, and it would go up the river, and incidentally collect taxes. But people would bring symbolic things onto the boat that represented the area that he was in, or the nationality of the people, because you know the Nile is like 3,000 kilometers long, it’s really an enormous body of water. So people would act out who they were getting on the barge, and the pharaoh would act out the creation of Egypt as a unified kingdom by his presence. And they would give symbolic things while the tax collectors were actually picking up the bags of grain, they would bring a handful of grain to the pharaoh. So it’s all very symbolic, and the writer of this book said, and by so doing, the pharaoh would create the condition that was described: he would make a unified Egypt by unifying it through this trip, this ritual pageant.
Well, that became my ideal, to create the condition we described. And for me, the street events, and sometimes we did them inside, in buildings, but the ones I really liked best were street events. One of them was called “The Birth of Haight and the Death of Money.” And that one in particular had elements that were just unbelievable. It was unbelievable to see it happen on Haight Street. The entire street would be thronged with people who knew they were participating in some event, were not exactly sure what it was, but would see various elements of it pass along the street or the sidewalk. For example, a coffin, painted black, with oversized gold and silver coins, carried by black shrouded, animal-headed people. The animals are bringing a coffin full of money down the street, singing ‘Get out my life, why don’t you babe’ and people just cracked up. It was so funny, it was so them, they identified with it so much. They all got it. Think about the elements: they’re a little to the side of normal behavior or imagery. Black shrouded characters wearing enormous animal heads carrying an oversized coffin full of oversized money singing Chopin’s Death March, with pop lyrics, walking down the sidewalk, and everybody bowing in front of it, people spontaneously doing that. While people on top of rooftops are flashing the sun with rear-view mirrors that we got at a junkyard and passed out to people and pointed them to the tops of buildings, blowing penny whistles that we passed out to the crowd. And these things would come in waves. Suddenly the people would appear with the bags of pennywhistles and pass those out, and then you would start hearing pennywhistle music, where before you didn’t hear it. Or the rear-view mirrors would get passed out and suddenly light is bouncing around the street. And this is ten blocks of Haight Street [laughs] where this is going on. Thousands of people are involved in it.
The Birth of Haight and the Death of Money. Photo by Gene Anthony
One time people were in the park, and we urged people, Leave the Panhandle, go to Haight Street, we’re going to be doing this event. I printed up something that said Carte de Venue [“your card to go someplace”] and Street Menu, and it was what was going to happen when you got to Haight Street, what was the course of events. In order to get to Haight Street from the Panhandle, people had to run through, and destroy, newsprint-sized, three-feet-wide paper…not banners, just newsprint. Bands of paper that were beautifully decorated with Paisley-style paint drippings. You had to break these—you had to destroy them—to get onto Haight Street. It was like that was the entrance fee, that you had to break your conception of what was a good or beautiful thing to get onto the street to do this new kind of theater. And nobody was told that. They just assumed I was right about that. They broke these things… [laughs]
One time at one of these events, women were on top of the buildings with a poem of Lenore Kandel’s, holding it up — this is above the street, three storeys up, very large, the same three-feet-high newsprint—we got this newsprint free, it was the end of a roll, when they make a newspaper they have hundreds of feet of this stuff left over, anybody can go to any print place and say can I have the endrolls, and get it for free—and the women are wearing incredibly gorgeous avant garde outfits. Avant garde: we knew they were avant garde because they were one-of-a-kind outfits that Levi Strauss had been trying out. They were like silver lame Levis, that kind of thing. And they’re reciting this poem of Lenore Kandel’s from the rooftops, holding it up so the people down below could see it and read along with them. [chuckling] Now that’s literature. Is that literature or what?
Street scene, as reprinted in March 31, 1967 Los Angeles Free Press.
There was a certain point in time where the focus of creative energy that used to be in North Beach was no longer in North Beach—it re-emerged and it was in the Haight-Ashbury. There were so-called Beat poets, the San Francisco poetry scene, who retained all of their integrity, all of their critical viewpoint, and suddenly saw this psychedelic rebellion and quote hippie—that’s a phrase I do not like, ‘hippie’—emergence as being the children of their desires. It was what they wanted instead of the negative society that they had criticized. So we became the pro-active manifestation of the protest of the Beats. And it was very attractive to Lenore and Richard Brautigan and Mike McClure, Gary Snyder, they saw a lot of hope in it. Allen Ginsberg saw it as the manifestation of their idealism. You know, Americans have a continuum that goes from idealism to disillusionment. We all know what this is. We all have had both of them. And we all keep both of them to various degrees. And the Beats were already disillusioned, and were more disillusioned by Vietnam, the horrors of the civil rights scene. And all of a sudden, there’s this group of people saying everything is free, do your own thing, who have their own music, have their own art, have their own dress, and they saw them as being the people they created. So, they were very participative.
Kirby Doyle wrote a magnificent essay, titled The Birth of Digger Batman. Billy Batman [real name: William Jahrmarkt] was the person who owned the Six Gallery, which is where the reading of Ginsberg’s “Howl” first occurred. [Berg is in error here: Batman did indeed own a gallery, but it was called the Batman Gallery, it was located at 2222 Fillmore, and it did not open until 1960; its first exhibition was Bruce Conner.] That was Billy Batman’s gallery! And he and his wife had a child during the middle Sixties that they named Digger! You see, the connection is very, very clear. The Beats saw their children as the Diggers.
And there was Ken Kesey with the bus Furthur, parked along the Panhandle. That sort of manifestation.
How important was LSD for what was going on?
I don’t think the psychedelic rebellion would have happened without LSD. I don’t think the proactive manifestation would have had the courage to occur. The Beats would have done it, if they could’ve. The hippies did it, because they had LSD. LSD was so undeniably a consciousness-changing agent, and to go on that consciousness change, to undergo it, and to come out on the other side, and not be ravingly insane, meant that you could turn reality upside down. Reality could be turned upside down, and good things could come of it. It could be done. The Beat ethos lacked a magical ingredient. It would’ve taken an act of magic to change society. That’s why so many Beats were enormously depressed. By the Civil Rights phenomena — not the civil rights, but the repression. And the war in Vietnam. It was like, How could this happen? How could you have a Democratic president and be crushing black people on a daily basis, and bombing, and poisoning a whole nation? How can you change that? It would take an alchemical act, or substance, or magic wand, to change that. [gestures, here’s the answer:] LSD.
I never will discredit LSD. I won’t join the legions of people who feel that for some reason having lasted through the Sixties they can now join the mainstream and repudiate LSD. I will never do it. It was a magic wand. I thought the Diggers were social LSD. I called the Diggers “social acid.” Everything is free/Do Your own thing — everything can be turned upside down AND BE BEAUTIFUL. In our society, everything costs money, there’s no free lunch, and you’re not supposed to be a total individual—you’re supposed to cooperate with society and be productive, in corporate terms. To say ‘everything is free’ repudiates that. [To say] ‘Do your own thing’ gives you the authority to be an artist—[to realize] that everybody is an artist, which, you know, we all believe. At least, I believe. What is it, in Bali, someone asked the Balinese ‘what is your art?’ They said ‘we have no art, we just do everything as well as we can.’ So LSD gave people that authority, it authenticated that positive possibility. And everybody that was involved with that thought — that, there, was a revolution of consciousness afoot.
“Civilization is up for grabs”: Berg gives a brief, explosive exposition of the situation in Summer 1967, starting at 33:16, with a second one starting at 41:58. (From CBC documentary series, “The Way It Was,” directed by Don Shebib)
Were the Diggers missionaries for LSD?
The role of the Diggers at the Human Be-In was to pass out 3,000 tabs of LSD. They were given to the Diggers by Owsley. Not personally. Owsley wasn’t a person you saw. He knew that everything he was doing was at great jeopardy. As a matter of fact it was two very large African-American men who came over to the Free Store with the 3,000 tabs of acid, like a pie box full of it, and said, [in deep voice] This is from Owsley. [chuckles]
The Diggers communicated via broadsheets put out by the Communications Company (Comm/Co). One of the guys involved with that was Chester Anderson. Who was he?
Chester Anderson was a Beat consciousness type who was in total rebellion against his Navy/military family. I believe his father was high-ranking, maybe an admiral. He had dropped out, and he was older than many of the other people who were involved with the scene. I would imagine the age range of the Haight-Ashbury was about 20 to 30. I was a little older, he was at least ten years older than I was. And he was a Sexual Freedom person. He had his own sexual preference issue. And he had acquired a Gestetner machine; Gestetner was an early Xerox-type printing machine, very well made by the way, that used color. At that time, Xerox was not in color, but Gestetner was. [smiles] I think he had obtained it under a false pretext. Anyway, he and someone who worked at Ramparts magazine, Claude Hayward, began something they called the Communications Company. They were struck by the Digger ethos, and they were going to be the ‘free’ printers. The form that they used was to produce daily or occasional 8.5 by 11 or 8.5 by 14 sheets of paper with various messages on them, some of them very helpful to people, like numbers to call if you had an overdose, or numbers to call for social assistance. But a lot of them were ones composed for example, for street events, or composed for expression, or had poems. When Martin Luther King was killed, David Simpson made one that had a splash of red, as blood, and the words, “Goodbye, brother Martin. Today is the first day in the rest of your life.” And we passed that out in the street. A lot of Brautigan’s poems first appeared that way. A poem that was rejected by the Oracle newspaper for its overt political content, written by Gary Snyder, was titled “A Curse on the Men in Washington, a curse against the Vietnam War.” A curse on the men and their children, by the way—that’s why the Oracle thought it was too far out. Anyway, we first published it as a street sheet—I know, because I got that one published. I imagine they did several hundred.
What was the relationship with the Grateful Dead?
Some of the Diggers, including myself, went to their house. They had a house on Ashbury Street, everybody knew where they lived, and we invited them to come to a free event that we were gonna do in the park. We’d begun doing free events, along with free food. We took over the park! We acted as though it was our park. The Panhandle was our commons. So we told them we had events there and that we were going to have one on the weekend, and that if they would come, we would do everything we could to accommodate them. We’d get a truck for them. If they wanted a sound system, we’d find a sound system so that they could play. But they did not want to play. The members of the group that I heard conversing about it were saying, Why should we do this? Why go out there in the middle of the day? I don’t get it. What is this all about? Won’t we get busted? That kind of talk. As I recall it was Danny Rifkin, who was one of their road managers and started their fan club, who said, This is it. This is why you are a band. This is going to engrave you in people’s memories. We’re gonna get so many fans from this. You’re going to get your dream of audiences. Get on that truck and go to that park and PLAY. And all that happened. We wanted them there; we invited them; we helped them get there; Danny convinced them; and they showed up.
Then after that, they were sometimes available for free concerts. So was Janis [Joplin]. Janis was at an indoor event we had called Free City Convention. We had a Free City Convention [like a conventional political convention], where people had signs that said things like State of Innocence; y’know, State of Grace. [laughs] We burned money. And I remember all that going on and Janis singing at the same time. And Stanley Mouse painting on the pillars inside the Carousel Ballroom. That’s where it was, the Carousel Ballroom. And everything from teenagers from Hunter’s Point to people in Army uniforms were at this event. Wonderful.
What about The Invisible Circus event at the Glide Church?
While I was still at the Mime Troupe, a group of us thought it would be a very good idea to start an artists’ organization that would make statements about social change that artists supported. We called it the Artists Liberation Front. The Artists Liberation Front had a couple of events. Small-scale benefits. There were some notable people involved. Brautigan was one, Ferlinghetti was at some of the early meetings of it. I’m sure that’s how Lenore Kandel got swept into the Diggerly Do. At any rate, the Artists Liberation Front morphed through a couple different identities, but at a certain point the idea was that there should be a massive event—a city-shaking event—and it would be called The Invisible Circus. And at it there would be people who were poets and musicians and actors and writers and painters and members of the general public and it would be to manifest this free, creative identity and it would have a Digger overlay. So essentially the Diggers brought it about. And the Diggers worked for it in concert with various artists, who thought of themselves as artists but also as social/cultural activists, among whom, primarily, was Lenore Kandel.
There was someone at Glide Memorial Church—there was a person there who was very straight—blue suit, short hair, but he was teaching the congregation about ‘sexual deviation’ and he was showing pornographic films and he had lecturers that were gay and lesbian lecturers, and he wanted to have a major role in this. He thought this would be good for changing the identity of Glide Church. On its own, the Methodist body in the United States decided that this church in San Francisco would begin serving minority groups and the poor. They made that decision. And they got rid of the top personnel and anointed a blue-suited, short-haired, thin, African-American preacher from somewhere in the South named Cecil Williams. It was going to be one of the first mainline, previously white churches now overseen by a black minister. So in this interim period, Glide Church is available and one of the key people operating it is the man who’s trying to teach about deviant sexuality, or ‘alternative’ sexuality. We approach him and say why don’t we have this event in your church. Glide Church is a really large building. It takes up maybe a quarter of a block, or, a corner of a block, both sides of the block for some distance. It’s really quite large. Had a lot of spaces in it—several floors. An elevator, going from floor to floor. And over time, mostly because Lenore Kandel convinced them they had a sacred, spiritual obligation to serve the liberation of people and that the Artists Liberation Front and the Diggers were doing that, that we were on a mission to accomplish the liberation of people, and that this was the spirit of the Church, eventually convinced them that we could have this church for 72 hours to do whatever we wanted. And every time they’d say, “well, no such-and-such,” Lenore would say, ‘Now wait a minute, that isn’t liberation. [pointing finger, speaking gently] Every time you say no, you’re not liberating. Come on, get used to it. Loosen up. You must liberate.’
“Come on, get used to it. Loosen up. You must liberate”: Lenore Kandel, holding a copy of her Love Book.
So now they turn the whole Church over to us, for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And we went absolutely mad. I decided that every pet annoyance I had with society, I would turn around. I was annoyed with the space program, so there would be a room that had newsprint, completely as an artificial wall. People would be brought into this room. They would not know that this was an artificial wall. They would watch NASA footage of the earth, and at a certain moment, belly dancers would crash through the paper, bellydancing to the music of the Orkustra. The chamber Orkustra. Who are playing Middle Eastern-sounding music. And the bellydancers would move amongst these people, who, moments before, had been watching the space program’s vision of the earth.
That’s one of the things I wanted to do. The other one was, I wanted to have an obscenity panel. I remember convincing the church people that this would be a great thing: an obscenity panel where a minister, an ACLU lawyer, a writer on sexuality, someone else, would start talking about censorship and pornography and obscenity in front of a glass case that was in this wall. On the other side of this wall was an actor who took his clothes off and began playing with himself [laughing] so the audience is watching this panel and seeing through this panel to seeing somebody being obscene, because you know obscenity panels never had anything very obscene about them. And in the middle of all this, someone who was a fireeater would walk over to one corner and start blowing flames out of their mouth [laughing]. I think I was dressed in scrubs, hospital scrubs, as the doctor, you know, to talk about obscenity.
Lenore was saying, I want to do something but I’ve been so busy organizing things, I haven’t thought of something to do yet. I think what I’ll do is be a palm-reader. I said, You know, it’d be much more interesting if you did foot reading. Why don’t you have people take off their shoes and put their foot up in the air. And we’ll have a foot [diagram/poster] that says Happiness, Joy, whatever, and you’ll be a foot reader. Just pass yourself off as a foot reader, convince people that you can read feet. So of course she was totally charmed by it. She did that. She also—it turned out that in the Church there was a room where brides get ready for weddings, and Lenore took that room and put KY jelly there, and candles, incense, silk and satin, and low lights, so that it was a seduction room. And it was used for seduction. Emmett filled an elevator with shredded plastic. So you pushed the button [laughing], the elevator door opened, it was like waist-deep in shredded plastic. I think it was clear plastic, and white plastic and red plastic, shredded, in bands. [laughing hard] And you had to fight your way through the plastic to ride on the elevator. Brautigan decided that his event would be to have an instant publishing service, called the John Dillinger Computer, and for this he would use a Xerox machine. You would write a poem, he would run in, put it in a form that could be read, and turn out copies of it and pass it around, at the same time encourage somebody else to write a poem. Everybody writing poems and then publishing them on the John Dillinger computer. Someone else got a hold of all the films of the sexual variation class and opened up a blue movie theater in the church, a pornographic theater, that just ran continuously.
And I have not yet mentioned most of the activity. I didn’t see it all because I was involved with overseeing these events that required coordinating the fire-eater with [laughing very hard] the person playing with himself. Takes a lot of coordination. So I didn’t see it all, but at various times I saw Mike McClure walking around with an autoharp, singing his poems. Hells Angels moving through it. There were a lot of military personnel because Lenore had decided that the primary target for this should be militarism. Because militarism was so anti-liberatory. So she put out flyers, she had them distributed at Army bases, Navy bases, Marines, to come to this event, in order to experience liberation. So Hells Angels and poets and semi-naked or fully naked people, there was one gorgeous woman who took all her clothes off and did belly dancing, people made a circle around her, she was just so beautiful that no one touched her. It’s so interesting to see that phenomenon: that if someone nude was sufficiently in it, that they could have transcendental manifestation, and people, instead of grabbing at her, would stand back and just look at the beauty of it. Which happened. In fact there are photographs of her with people standing in a circle, just staring at her.
The place started crowding up with sailors, both in and out of uniform, soldiers of all kinds, everybody from the Haight-Ashbury. It got very hot. This was in the winter. It got very hot inside the Glide Church. So we threw all the doors open. So now you’ve got all the people in the Tenderloin coming in, which is homeless people, and people dealing hard drugs on the street. They’re coming in. Cops got interested in this. [chuckles] In the spirit of helping to manage this event, I go to the door where this cop is standing, door’s wide open, he said, What’s going on in here? I said, It’s a church service. It’s a church social. It’s a social event of the Church. He said, Uh huh. [squints eyes] You know, the doors are wide open? Anybody at all can come in and there are a lot of characters in this neighborhood. I said, Indeed. Yes, I believe this church’s new purpose is to serve the neighborhood. He said, I just want to make sure you know what you’re doing, cuz there’s some really scary types out here. And all this time he’s looking over my shoulder, looking inside. One thing about San Francisco, when the cops relax, they do relax here. They’re not on 24-hour fascist duty. And he’s trying to see in because there are naked people in there, and all of that. And eventually he says, Well just as long as you know what you’re doing. I said, We do. We will be doing this all weekend, and it’s serving a valuable purpose. And he left it alone.
So it goes on into the night. It started at something like 7 o’clock. For us it started during the day we had to get underway, and all of us laughing because we’re going to be pulling this off. They let us have the Church for this! And we know some of the things people are planning and can’t wait to see them. Some of us would run from one thing to another, say [waving hands] Is Brautigan doing the Dillinger Computer yet? Is Lenore doing footreading, I gotta see this! Have you been to the bridal room? Did you see what Lenore did in there? Wonderful, wonderful event.
It got to be something like midnight or 1 o’clock, and it’s too much for the Church authorities. They somehow get wind of what’s going on, and they want to close it down. Well, closing it down means you’ve got to go to every room and pull these people off of each other that are having sex, go into these rooms full of Hell’s Angels and sailors and tell them to put down their whiskey bottles and [laughing] go home. So it took the rest of the night to clear the place out, and then there was an incredible mess, from their point of view. Lenore was still, We did a very good job of liberating the people, here. And she’s sincere! I mean, there was nothing insincere about it. From the outside, if you were looking at it, you’d think it was almost like practiced that she would do this. But it was coming from her own integrity.
So by Saturday, dregs of things are happening. By Sunday, it’s closed down. And Cecil Williams shows up—Cecil Williams, the product of the Civil Rights movement, in a very anointed position now, to be running this formerly all-white church, in a mixed neighborhood of the city, he’s going to be the integration personality, he has to get his schtick somewhere. It’s not going to be Bible-thumping. Y’know, you’re not gonna Bible-thump for the drug addicts and hippies and whatever are coming to Glide Church. We felt we had loosened the church up for Cecil Williams’ eventual renown. He has a tremendous amount of renown for wearing African costumes, having choruses that are mixed race and of course giving away free food. Quite an indentation into that Church scene.
Can you talk about the SDS meeting in Michigan that you and other Diggers attended?
In early 1966, the Mime Troupe had become a bastion for the New Left. In fact, the New Left Review magazine was sharing space with our studio. Things from the New Left were always passing through the office, including the Port Huron Statement, that had been written by Students for Democratic Society [SDS]. I actually read it. Most of the actors in the Mime Troupe did not. As far as I know, none of the Diggers ever did. But I read it. I thought it was watered down. It was progressive, like the Progressive Party had been, in the U.S., whereas most of us felt that a revolution was underway. By the time the Diggers were rolling in the Haight six months to a year later, we were sure we had part of the answer for the alternative society to be. And at that time SDS was going through a leadership and affiliation crisis. There were SDS people who wanted to be violently active, and eventually the Weather movement came out of that as well. Well the people who remained behind in Students for Democratic Society and did not become more militant wanted to re-define themselves, and they had a conference that they called Back to the Drawing Boards. And I learned that it was going to be held and I thought this is where we should have our New Left encounter, for the Diggers, should be at this event. So I convinced Emmett, Bill Fritsch and Billy Murcott to go with me to Denton, Michigan and present the Digger alternative as part of the future that Students for a Democratic Society should strive for.
Billy Murcott and possibly Bill Fritsch. Date, location, photographer unknown.
Somebody supplied a rented car, a very large station wagon. So off we head for Denton, Michigan, and along the way Billy Fritsch and Emmett Grogan got into a “man” competition type of thing, about who could drive better, who should drive, etc. It bored me. Billy Murcott was smoking pot in the back, he didn’t really care. At that point Billy has settled into his ‘happy hippy’ role. And so we hit a small rural road, and the argument is how fast you should drive on a road that’s mostly gravel, and they’re screaming and yelling at each other. Emmett was driving and he hits a hill, and the car partially took off and we ended up in a creek, with water coming in over the sides of the doors, and the four of us sitting there, and Emmett and Fritsch begin yelling at each other about whose fault it was. You made me do this by yelling at me. You did it because you can’t drive worth shit. So I’m looking at Billy Murcott like These guys are completely out of it, let’s get out of this car. [laughing] So we crawl out of the windows and we wade up to our waist to the bank. I’m looking at a white station wagon with two people arguing in the front seat in the middle of a running creek in a part of the Midwest that I know nothing about, the Northern plains somewhere. Murcott and I are yelling Get outta the car, get outta the car, it’s gonna fill up with water, it might float away. So they finally get out of the car. Now the argument is whose fault is this and who is going to take the blame for this, with the police and whatever. I want to get to the conference. I don’t care what these guys are yelling and screaming about, I want to get to the conference. I want to make some kind of presentation there. Heroically, Fritsch says, or maybe to one-up Emmett one more time, he says I’ll take the bust, I’ll say I was driving, I’m going to go to a phone right now, tell ‘em where we are, tell ‘em that I was the driver. We all knew that he had a record. Prison record. He was a felon, which meant that that would come into the consideration—a crime had been committed, and a felon had committed it. So I said Okay, if Fritsch takes the fall for this accident, and he gets into some scene about it with the police, obviously they’re gonna have a lawyer of some kind at this meeting, so we’ll get a lawyer and get him out immediately, maybe before the police find out about his record.
So, we get a ride in a tow truck, we go to the conference, the three of us. Billy goes to jail. We walk in the door and say We need a lawyer immediately. At the time Tom Hayden was giving one of those puerile speeches that Tom Hayden is capable of giving. And Todd Gitlin is recording everything into a tape recorder—Todd Gitlin of the book The Sixties fame—and people are sitting around staring at their star, Tom Hayden. I’m stating it the way we saw it, because we’re having this real-life drama occurring, and there’s something crucial involved, which is how long Fritsch is gonna go to jail. So we come in there, We need a lawyer. Well, people are talking here, you can’t just come in, who are you? We need a lawyer. One of you must be a lawyer. If you’re a lawyer, raise your hand. Somebody raises their hand. I say Okay, here’s the deal. There’s a rented car in the creek, our guy’s in jail, he’s a felon, if they find out they’re gonna give him a lot of shit. The political act right now should be to get him out of jail. So that guy goes off.
Now people say, Who are you people? And I say I’ll tell you if the guy with the tape recorder turns it off. You, will turn off your tape recorder. But I’ve got to record all this for the purpose of history! No. You’re not going to record anything that I say. I’m just going to talk to people here. Turn off the tape recorder. It wasn’t that I was afraid, I just didn’t want it to be historicized that way. It looked ridiculous to us to all be sitting around, pretending to be this political organization. It looked ridiculous. [chuckles] Right, so the Diggerly act was to turn off the tape recorder. The guy did, very reluctantly.
Now I asked Emmett, what do you want to say. He said, Nothing. Billy Murcott said, I wanna play tambourine. I said, Okay I’ll tell you what we’re doing in San Francisco, and this is what we think is a good direction for SDS to go down. You should become Diggers. This is what we do. I gave this long rap. Well the one who wanted to record it was really furious now because he wanted to have recorded that. The guy next to him, in an Army fatigue jacket, says, That’s fantastic. I’m going to do what you do. My name’s Abbie Hoffman. I’m tired of this civil rights plain existence. We should be having fun. We should be dressed up, we should be doing these things, you guys are on the right track, you’re fantastic. I’m going to go back to New York and do what you do. The rest of you—you should go back and do what they’re doing. So he became [raised eyebrows] a little bit of a creepy ally.
Hayden was really disinclined to have anything to do with us. We must have smelled like the devil, like sulfur and brimstone. Fritsch gets out of jail, he comes in. He starts crawling around on the floor, saying ‘Which – one – of – you – girls – wants – to – fuck -meeee?’ [laughing] And he’s talking to social workers and elementary school teachers? Oh, Billy. That was his way. [laughs] Anarchy by act! Anarchism by the deed. So then we got back in the car and argued our way back to San Francisco. And to a large extent, the other three really didn’t know why they’d done it, and what they had done. They weren’t following it. Fritsch was in a state of rejecting communism. He’d been a longshoreman and a merchant seaman. And his best friend’s mother and father were figures in the English Communist Party. They were looking for an alternative to Communism and anything that sounded remotely political put him off. Emmett was apolitical. I think he’d been subjected to too much Irish Revolution stuff. Probably his family was IRA supporters. They were working class Irish. And Murcott, it’d never been part of his life. On the other hand, I saw us as having a historical anarchist role to play. I’m not sure of everything that came out of it. I know in the book The Sixties, Gitlin says that I personally destroyed SDS, which I think if true, that means that anybody could’ve pushed it over. [laughing] If I pushed over that entire organization, it was ready to fall.
Almost all the Diggers made forays of one kind or another. For example, someone gave us a piece of land that we called ‘Free Land.’ There was a trip up to take a look at it. There was a trip to see the land that was going to become Black Bear Commune. People made trips to fields that had been harvested to glean them for vegetables and produce that would go into Digger Stew. I wanted to go to the East Coast after we had done the Denton, Michigan thing. We knew that we would start having a presence on the East Coast, and sure enough a group called the New York Diggers started with the painter Martin Carey and his wife Susan and Abbie Hoffman and for a while Keith Lampe, who later changed his name to Ponderosa Pine. They were all members of the New York Diggers. And they did similar things. They had a free store on the Lower East Side, they did some events, etc and we wanted to check them out to see to what extent we were kindred.
At the same time, word came that Alan Burke, a particularly aggressive TV shock jock for that era, who had a program called The Alan Burke Show, on which he performed vivisection on the guests, wanted to have a Digger show up to represent the hippies. Somebody on his staff had researched hippies and come up with the Diggers. Nobody felt particularly able or capable to do this, but I thought it would be a great event, I thought there was a way that I could twist it around, once I got the lay of it, which I never really got to do. I met Paul Krassner, he knew about the Diggers in New York, he wanted to know about us. He got very turned on with us and later put together the Digger Papers out of various Communication Company publications.
Anyway, eventually it’s go on the Burke show. I brought as a prop an antique pistol. The kind of pistol that’s a cap and ball, Revolutionary War-era pistol. I kept it in my jacket, with the butt sticking out. I also arranged to have one of the women Diggers be there with a pie that they would throw in somebody’s face at some point. So I go on the show. The first thing that happened was in the green room for that period, there was someone who was promoting himself as a representative of the hippie generation. He wanted to be, he was a New York hustler type who wanted to be a media personality. So he was asking me questions: Do people really smoke banana peels to get high? That kind of thing. So I saw that this is the image that the staff had of who we were, and they were not going to be ready for anything that I was going to do. So they say Come on the show and I come on out, sit down. ‘I’m Alan Burke.’ ‘I’m Peter Berg.’ And I looked at the audience and said I’m going to be talking to the audience all the time that I’m here. Never looked at this guy [Burke] again. So he’s asking me questions and I just began talking about what I wanted to talk about. I don’t remember all of it. A certain amount of it was repartee, like I would take off on something he said and say something completely different, so that people could see that I could be a free individual, even within his format. I felt that television was extremely coercive. So what I wanted to show that. At one point he says that he’s not having any luck getting his questions answered, maybe if people in the audience ask questions, I will “deign to answer them.” So a woman comes up to the microphone, says I think you people are making a lot of noise about nothing in particular and I think you should tell us why should you be free, I don’t get this. Burke says, Don’t you have a leader named Emmett Grogan. I said, No, there is no Emmett Grogan. There is a woman named Emma Goldman, and she happens to be here tonight. Emma, would you come and explain to this woman with a pie what we stand for and why we should get what we want. And the woman, Natural Suzanne, a particularly strikingly good looking woman who liked wearing fur coats for reasons I’m not sure of, it was winter, comes up with the pie in the box, opens up the box, takes out the pie and pushes it in this woman’s face. [laughing] So the whole audience is outraged! Just an innocent woman asking questions, but by the way being very demeaning, about who we are. And Burke is, What just happened on my show? So I looked at the camera and said to the cameraman, would you come over here, would you put the camera on me, Hey!, [whistles], You got me? Good. Now turn the camera up to the top of the room. Up to the top of the studio. Let everybody see the girders. The guy’s going okay. He moves the camera up. I’m looking at the monitor and he’s showing the girders and the lights and everything that’s hanging, all the wires. This is what the television studio is, it’s actually like your television SET! People watching this: this is a television SET, that we’re in, that you’re watching ON your television set. Do you get it? They’re broadcasting a television set to your television set. Now, would you, bring the camera on me now, put the camera on me. Got it? Good. I’m getting up, and I’m going to walk out that door. Would you show the door that says ‘exit’? Show the door. That’s it. Okay. Good. Back on me. Thanks.
I’m going to walk out the door, and when I walk out the door, I want you to turn off your television set. So I’m going to walk out of this television set, and you’re going to turn off your television set. See, we can do this. We have the power to do this. Here we go. I’m getting up—keep the camera on me—I’m walking toward the door. You got the camera? Thanks. I’m opening up the door. Goodnight! Goodnight, everyone. Opened up the door and walked out.
I have no idea what happened afterwards. I didn’t stay. I asked Natural Suzanne, and she said she felt she had to get out of there fast. [laughs] Then I thought, This guy asking me if you can get high smoking banana peels in the green room, [laughing] he’s going to come on, and he doesn’t have the wit to know this guy’s gonna take him apart.
Amazing.
What was the relationship between the Diggers and the Hells Angels?
As with asking anyone about the Diggers, you would get different answers as to what their purpose was, the relationship between the Hells Angels and the Diggers were similarly a hugely…It had a huge range of possibilities. For example, some of the Digger women had affairs with Hells Angels, so to them, some of the Hells Angels had been their lovers. Anything else about it didn’t particularly matter, that was the relationship.
My relationship with them was that I knew we had to be heavier than we were. The Diggers called themselves ‘heavy hippies’—it meant they weren’t flower children. We were capable of carrying out acts and confrontations with the police that were above the level of flower children. We deliberately provoked the police on occasions. I designed a street event that stopped traffic deliberately for which all the characters were arrested. And went to trial. And we were acquitted. The acquittal made the front page of the Chronicle and became sort of a totemic image of the psychedelic rebellion. Flower children didn’t do that. Flower children didn’t have anarchist history, or connection with the anarchist political tradition. It should be clearer than it is, that when the overthrow of kings was a prospective activity for the French, what would replace the monarchy was as often thought of as an anarchistic option as a democratic option. Anarchism had a very good reputation in Europe for at least 150 years, as a real option. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an anarchist; Jean-Jacques Rousseau is considered to be the founder of the philosophical idea of liberty. So anarchism had a tremendous reputation and a huge number of adherents, especially in places that were more peasant-dominated than others: Russia, Italy, Spain. The anarchist tradition still survives in those places.
What was going to happen ultimately with authorities, and in fact happened, was that the police were the agency that closed down the Haight-Ashbury. You will read euphemisms, or excuses, for the demise of the hippie rebellion as being the introduction of hard drugs, or ‘the bloom was off the rose,’ or blahblah. The police closed down the Haight-Ashbury. They brought in mercury vapor lights that burned all night, bright orange. It looked like the Berlin Wall on Haight Street. They made the street one-way, so that traffic barreled through it. They put paddy wagons through it about every 15 minutes, picking up people from the street.
So they militarized Haight Street. And there was a reason for it. It was because we had withdrawn this neighborhood from the control of the city. [laughs] We had taken over the Haight-Ashbury! We could shut down the street anytime we wanted. We could take over the street. People were walking DOWN Haight Street six and eight abreast; if you see footage from that period, it’s unbelievable, it looks as though there’s a parade in progress. And that was normal, daily activity. Everybody’s passing each other, giving things to each other, passing out joints, tabs of acid… You’d get off a bus at the Greyhound bus station, make your way to the Haight-Ashbury. Food, a place to stay, your dream of smoking marijuana suddenly realized. The Grateful Dead, playing for free in the park! Right? It was all going on. It was an incredible magnet, and it was our neighborhood.
The HIP [Haight Independent Proprietors] merchants thought that our “1% Free” poster meant that they were supposed to give one percent of their income to support the Digger activities. [smiling] They thought that our poster was extortion. It amuses me that they thought that. And some of them in fact volunteered to pay the rent on the free store.
Full-page ad for the Free City Free Bank in the Feb. 29, 1968 edition of the San Francisco Express Times. Via diggers.org
“Chinese are 101% Free”: this photo of the Tong, or one very similar, was the inspiration for the Diggers’ 1% Free image.
What did the slogan mean for you?
Only one percent of the population can bring this off, at this time. Only one percent of the people are capable of acting out the Digger vision. “One percent free”: [the term was there] to provoke the rest of the population, to make them want to be part of that one percent, until it was a hundred percent. We put one up in Chinatown and someone made a balloon coming out of the Tong men that’s on the poster, a little balloon saying ‘White guys are only 1% free. Chinese are 101% free.’ [laughs] I’m not sure what that meant, but I thought it was wonderful.
Today Vicki Pollack is known as the legendary founder and director emeritus of the San Francisco Bay Area-based Children’s Book Project, the non-profit organization that has provided over 2.9 million “gently used” books to local kids since 1992. But in late 1967, Vicki was a directionless, 25-year-old college graduate and Civil Rights activist who’d left her welfare worker job in New York City to move to the Bay Area in pursuit of something more.
She found it in February, 1968, when she walked into an extraordinary old Victorian house on Willard Street in San Francisco. Some Diggers were living there, plotting to expand the audacious social liberation work they had spontaneously begun in the Haight-Ashbury district just 17 months prior. Now they were setting their sights on the whole of San Francisco.
Actor Peter Coyote and the late Emmett Grogan are the usual names associated with the Diggers, as they wrote books chronicling their participation in that era; Grogan’s Ringolevio is the most notorious. But there were many others, like Vicki, who participated in the various Digger initiatives of the time, and whose stories — and unique perspective and insights — have never been told at length, or in any detail, in public.
With that in mind, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to share this interview with Vicki, constructed from two conversations I had with her in San Francisco in 2010. There has been some editing for clarity, but for the most part, this has not been edited down for a general audience, and many incidents and personages are spoken of without context, or only in passing. As always, my advice to the casual-but-curious reader is to simply let these unfamiliar/unexplained bits pass. Keep reading, you’ll like the next part.
This presentation has been prepared in extensive consultation with Vicki. Any errors of transcript are mine, and notice of any corrections of fact would be greatly appreciated. This is the fifth interview in my series of Diggers’ oral histories; the others are accessible here. For more infromation on the Diggers, consult Eric Noble’s vast archive at diggers.org
Please note: I have incurred not insignificant expenses in my Diggers research through the years. If you would like to support my work, please donate via PayPal. All donations, regardless of size, are greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Vicki Pollack: I was born in 1942. I grew up in Virginia, which I loved, and then we moved to Maryland, which was much more rural than it is now. My mother was a housewife and my father worked as a lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board. I have two brothers and a sister. I’m the oldest. I was a typical ‘50s kid, except that I was Jewish in a school where people were prejudiced. Otherwise all my goals were the usual teenage girl goals: get good grades, be popular. I would love to have been a cheerleader.
High school senior Vicki Pollack, age 17, 1960.
My family lived in a community that was basically a housing co-op. During World War II, there had been a food co-op in the area, and after the war, the members decided they were going to do a communal housing co-op. There was a golf course that was up for grabs, so they bought it. The community, which was called Bannockburn, wasn’t just Jewish. At the point that we lived there, it was probably 50/50. Every family there knew each other. They had meetings, they built a community swimming pool, they had this clubhouse. [See this fantastic 1986 Washington Post article for more about Bannockburn’s history.] I lived there from the time that I was 9 til I went to college. The people in Bannockburn were radicals. My parents were Democrats, but they were never big radicals. My mother gave some money to help the Spanish Civil War. That was all.
Nothing really seemed different about me growing up except that I was Jewish and I was living near areas that were very prejudiced against Jews. I did care a little bit about others, but I always thought I’d be a typical ’50s-style housewife, a mother. There was nothing growing up that would indicate that I was going to go in a totally different direction.
Where did things start changing for you?
Interestingly, Bannockburn was surrounded by areas where Jews weren’t allowed to live. The whole region was segregated. And in 1960, right before I went off to college, students and activists from Howard University started picketing the segregated Glen Echo Amusement Park, which was so close by we could hear the rollercoaster from our house. The whole Bannockburn community took part in the picketing and in supporting the demonstrators. It was part of the Civil Rights movement that was in progress then. It was dramatic: there were Black activists, there were American Nazi Party members, there were police.
I started that fall at the University of Wisconsin and came home for Christmas vacation, and got further involved in civil rights activism. There were plans to start doing anti-segregation sit-ins in Baltimore, which I wanted to participate in. I went to the workshop ahead of the sit-ins that was held in a small meeting room in a local church. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught the workshop.
Whoa.
At that point, he was just a person — he wasn’t Martin Luther King, Jr. yet.
Incredible.
When I started being on picket lines, at 18 years old, it was very exciting. I would participate in them all the time. But sometime later, when I was back at the University of Wisconsin, I found myself at a picket line and all of a sudden I realized I didn’t know what this picket line is for. I looked at myself and said, You better step back and think about what you’re doing: You’re picketing not for a cause but because being on a picket line is exciting…
I ended up graduating from Berkeley with a degree in English. While I was there, I’d been hanging out with one of my best friends who I grew up with, who was living in the Haight-Ashbury. It wasn’t yet the “Haight-Ashbury” but it was starting. The summer before the end of my senior year I’d gotten engaged to a guy in Washington. We broke up, and I moved to New York. I was a welfare worker there, and got involved in an activist group called the Real Great Society — there were amazing people at these meetings. Linn House, who later changed his first name to Freeman, was there. Abbie Hoffman was there.
Linn House (center) presides over wedding of Anita and Abbie Hoffman in New York’s Central Park (June 10, 1967). Vicki Pollack is at far left, in the row behind Abbie. Not long after, Linn moved to San Francisco, joined the Diggers and changed his name to Freeman. Photo by Fred W. McDarrah
But still, I didn’t really like New York that much. I thought there’s got to be more to life than this, there just has to be. And then one spring day, this guy comes in and he said, Come with me, you’ve got see the music and dancing going on at St. Mark’s Church. We got there. I smoked weed, and I just went out of my head, dancing. That St. Mark’s Church event made me realize I had to get back out to San Francisco. I broke up with my New York boyfriend, because he didn’t want to go, and came back to Berkeley in ’67, and got work in North Beach clubs. One day, around Valentine’s Day, 1968, I was walking down Haight Street and I bumped into Linn, who I hadn’t seen for two or three months, and he said, Oh we want you to work with us. [laughs] He and David Simpson, who I knew, were producing the Free City News and they needed help. He sent me to this really big, absolute stunningly beautiful communal Victorian house on Willard Street that had a whole extra lot for a yard. And that’s when I started meeting everybody.
To me, it was a magical world. I’d experienced some of it in New York and some of it in Berkeley and I’d experienced some of it in San Francisco. I was there at Death of the Hippie. But I’d just showed up at that event; at that time I didn’t yet know guys like Ron Thelin and Jay Thelin from The Psychedelic Shop, who were part of organizing the event. Frankly, when I’d got to the Haight in late ‘67, I was pretty disappointed because it looked grimy to me. But when I got to Willard Street, I met the people that I wanted to know my entire life. They were me. Linn was living there. Ron Thelin was sleeping in the living room. The Free City News was being produced in the basement. I got there, and I thought, Oh this is my home. This is where I belong. I said, I don’t care if you’re filled up, I belong here. I moved into the house and I became the dishwasher because I didn’t want to cook. We made dinner every night for maybe 40 people. It was unbelievably exciting. I’d lived on a kibbutz in Israel for a little while in 1966 and thought, If I’m going to do something like this, I’m going to do it in my own country. I wanted to see what was possible. And now, here I was, doing it.
David Simpson of the Diggers at work on Free News in the Willard Street basement. Photo by Chuck Gould.
We did everything together. Nobody had regular jobs. We were sharing money. And we were partly living on welfare — I would get this welfare check for $45 every two weeks and buy my cigarettes and toiletries and give the rest to the house. We’d be living without money — and it was okay. We were sharing, especially the women more than the men.
The people that had got the house were Rose Lee Patron and Patty Davis. There were four or five women, and a man named Tom Dury. You don’t think of them so much as the Diggers, because Black Bear Ranch started soon afterwards and they went to live there, and then they went on and did other things with their lives. They were such remarkable women. They made sure the rent got paid. You always hear about Emmett Grogan, but do you hear about Nina Blasenheim? Nina was the person who made the food happen. She was very capable. And so beautiful. She’s not in very many of the pictures, but everyone wanted to marry Nina.
Nina Blasenheim. Source unknown.
Rose Lee Patron, circa 1968. Photo by Chuck Gould
Ron Thelin at Willard Street. Photo by Chuck Gould
By 1968, the Diggers had evolved into talking — and being — the “Free City” Collective, or “Free Family.” There was the Free City News. They were planning a Free City Summer Solstice celebration, a Free City Convention. What were these “Free City” concepts?
When I got there, everything was already in process, and I had to figure out what it all meant. “Free” this, “free” that. They were going to the food market to get the food that would be prepared for free meals in the park, they were starting the first Free City Convention… There was so much going on, and everybody took part in different things. People just did what they wanted to do. For example, for a while we’d go every single day to the City Hall steps and read poetry, and pass out leaflets.
Via diggers.org: Diggers arrive at City Hall with a few modest proposals (see below). Vicki Pollack is at right, followed by Freeman House, Paula Sakowsky, Arthur Lisch and Hilda Hoffman. Photo by Chuck Gould.
Infamous lawyer Melvin Belli (center) with Digger Arthur Lisch, broadsheets in hand, on the City Hall steps. Photo by Chuck Gould
A typical “Free City”-era unsigned poetic broadsheet from the Diggers.
You have to understand how crazy we were. Ron Thelin and Ama got arrested for wearing those scarves, pretending to be Billy the Kid or something.
For the big Summer Solstice event, I helped with some of the advertising. Somehow I managed to get up really early, get a truck, and I got somebody to drive me around. I got helium tanks, and then I put way up in the sky bunches of balloons at each site. Up on Twin Peaks, and all over, there were balloons that I had put up, advertising the solstice—because the concept was we were supposed to be going into Eternity on the Solstice. Somewhere you’ll see it in one of the Free City News pages, it shows the different parks, the schedule.
And so on the day, we went to each one of these parks, singing and playing and Ann and Bill Lindyn would do their Punch and Judy show… Just having a wonderful time. That symbolized how much fun those days were.
“Free City”-themed Punch n Judy puppet show by Ann and Bill Lindyn, 1968. Photo by Chuck Gould
Vicki Pollack and Julie Boone at Straight Theater dance class. Photo by Chuck Gould.
I was one of the bellydancers on this big bellydancing flatbed truck that was going through the Financial District at lunch hour. Lenore Kandel and Judy Goldhaft and Jane Lapiner were really good trained dancers. They led free dance classes at the Straight Theater. They were good dancers, and they had dancer friends, and some of them were on that truck. I was not one of the stars there, but I went out on this truck. I could not believe that people were actually going to work. I thought, What are you doing? How could you be going to work? It’s the Summer Solstice! Here, come, join us! We had so much fun.
Bellydancers on flatbed truck floating down Montgomery Street in San Francisco’s financial district, celebrating the Summer Solstice, 1968 (Still from Nowsreal, courtesy diggers.org).
Someone had got a cable car, and Bill Lindyn and I were on that, it went all over… I think it was before the actual day. It was just amazing, it drove around all the parks, people would get on and off. People singing.
Destination: Eternity. 1968. Still from Nowsreal, courtesy diggers.org
We did a free bakery. We were doing masses of bread baked in big coffee cans. I organized that at one point, made sure the flour was there. There was this big ranch down in Sonoma—maybe Novato—called Olompali, owned by Don McCoy, that had become a commune, and somehow we got involved with them. They had ovens. We went there and bake bread and swim nude, basically. Immense parties. And then we’d bring the bread loaves back to the city and distribute them for free.
From diggers.org: “View of the concrete pad [at Olompali] where the bread baking oven was located. This photo shows the Grateful Dead getting ready to perform. The oven is barely visible (right rear of photo).”
A report on Olompali from the July 12-18, 1968 Berkeley Barb touches on the weekly poolside baking of Digger bread.
You see burning of money in Nowsreal. Was that a common thing?
Not really. Back then, it was just the freedom—Oh, let’s burn the money. It was just like a symbol. But… You should do it. Try to burn a dollar. It’s an interesting thing to do.
The Diggers were a pretty amazing heavy duty group of people. ‘Heavy’ was a compliment. Other people would be like ‘Oh you guys are so heavy’ —they were more like ‘We’re light, airy-fairy’ kind of stuff. You have to understand: People like Emmett and Bill Fritsch were so impressive. Peter Berg was probably one of the smartest people on the planet. And Freeman [House] was one of the most remarkable men I ever met. To me, he was pure, just…good. I am probably the most impressed with him. Just incredibly impressive, charismatic people. So they could get a lot from people. They started going down to L.A. for money.
Freeman (formerly Linn) House. Photo by Chuck Gould.
And Willard House was the center. It was like the hangout. Everybody came there. You never had to leave if you didn’t want to, and you got to meet everybody. All the poets came there. Janine Pommy Vega and Kirby Doyle and Lenore Kandel were frequent visitors. Artists lived there: Billy Batman, Bryden Bullington. Hells Angels came there. It’s where I met Peter Coyote and Sam, and Peter Berg, and Bill Fritsch [aka Sweet William Tumbleweed]. And Tony Serra. Frank Oppenheimer came to talk to us before he created the Exploratorium! All the musicians. People like [Grateful Dead co-manager] Danny Rifkin. Whenever we wanted to go to a show, any one of us could go to a show for free. When they did Carousel Ballroom, we had free tickets. So whenever we wanted to go down there and see anybody, we could go.
Pete Knell, president of the San Francisco Hells Angels. Circa 1968. Photo by Chuck Gould.
Bill “Sweet William” Fritsch and poet Janine Pommy Vega, Caffé Trieste, San Francisco, 1968. Photo by Chuck Gould
Artist Billy Batman Jahrmarkt and poet Kirby Doyle, location unknown, 1968. Photo by Chuck Gould.
The women did a lot of the stuff. It was very sexist—the men were all talking and planning, but the women were handling it. Handling a house with 40 people. Making sure there was food. Making sure there was laundry. And eventually there were many, many kids involved. Little kids. I guess the most wonderful thing was coming out of my room in the morning in this beautiful house and seeing so many people I loved to talk to and work with and travel with and play with. Vinnie, Gail, Cathy, John Glazer, Rosie, Ron, Holly, Phyllis, Emmett, Nina.
Willard Street residents, 1968. Photo courtesy Vicki Pollack.
[Reading from a text she wrote in 1983] “My memories of Willard Street are so joyful. Learning how to tie-dye. I never liked doing it, I only did it once, but I loved to see the color of the tie dyes hanging everywhere. Learning how to clean squid. Eating whale meat on chocolate chip bread. Going on a motorcycle ride with Pete [Knell] of the Hells Angels…”
I’m going to throw some names out there of people who are gone, or who I haven’t been able to interview. You knew Richard Brautigan…?
A little bit. We did do things together. I put on an event with him in North Beach when he needed help. I really liked him. I loved his poetry. A lot of what went on at that point, was poetry.
I just liked him as a poet. He wouldn’t’ve known me, but I knew him. One time I want out to Olompali, I went out there and there was going to be a big party. I have no idea who I went with, but Lew Welch was there, and Magda his wife, and I was sitting at the table and whoever else I’d gone out there with. They were telling me about Magda’s straight son. You know who that was? Huey Lewis, who would become Huey Lewis of Huey Lewis and the News. [laughs] And at this party someone had spread white powder out on the table and we were all licking at it, all evening long. When people came the next day for this huge party, we were absolutely totally out of our heads, psychotic. I was flashing in and out of consciousness. People were three feet tall, going in circles. And Bill Fritsch, for some reason, anchored me enough that I came back to some extent. We didn’t know what we had taken. I had taken LSD before, but this was something else… [laughs]
Was LSD a big deal for you?
I took acid here and there. LSD wasn’t that important. It was never really big for me. It just wasn’t. I had already dropped out! I’d already done everything I needed to do, without it. I really didn’t like it.
A funny thing is when I came back from that party, my timing was absolutely perfect. I’d be thinking, Oh I want to go to Ashbury Street, and somebody would come in a car and be there to take me.
Bill Fritsch was an amazing man. Bill was in and out of Willard Street all the time. And Lenore Kandel was on the periphery. I was so much in awe of Lenore that I couldn’t even talk around her. The first time I ever saw Lenore, she was reading poetry, and she was reading Word Alchemy. I was just floored, it was so beautiful, the poetry. It was the first time I think I ever enjoyed poetry in my life. [See Endnote]
Lenore Kandel at her and Bill Fritsch’s apartment, 1968. Still from Nowsreal, courtesy diggers.org
And then I met her—and I’m still like this around writers—and I shut up, I’m in such awe, I put them on a pedestal. I never got over it really until she was old. When she got old and I went and helped her shop and everything, then I got over it, I saw her as a person. And Bill, Bill was just…Bill was Bill. I wasn’t involved, though. I just thought he was the most handsome, sexy man I’d ever seen in my life.
I went to her place where we prepared for this huge seder at David Simpson and Jane Lapiner’s. People cooked for it. Lenore made things like I’d never seen before. I just remember this huge table, filled with food, and we thought at one point it was gonna turn into an orgy, but it didn’t. [laughs] Allen Ginsberg was there. It was quite the event, amazing.
Lenore Kandel and Bill “Sweet William” Fritsch on the set of a Kenneth Anger film project, shot in San Francisco in 1966-8. Footage from this shoot would eventually surface in Anger’s film Invocation of My Demon Brother, with music composed by Mick Jagger.
Broadsheet for Digger poetry reading, June 14, 1968, at Glide Church.
Who was Emmett Grogan to you?
He was so beautiful. I still dream about him. By the time I got there, he was already more distant. But, right before he died, we spent time together. He stayed at my house. We weren’t lovers — we were good, good friends. I don’t even know what to say about him. He was a beautiful man.
How about Billy Murcott?
I didn’t really know Bill Murcott. The person who knows is Phyllis. I’m really good with dates, but she’s really good with subjective memory. She’ll go, Oh it was Endless Time. Because to her, it was.
I never knew how people were connected to each other, because nobody talked very much about their past. All I knew is I could tell the people that belonged and the people that didn’t, it was pretty obvious. People did not talk about their past. You lived from that moment, so the things that today, looking back, things you would think people would have known about each other at the time, they didn’t.
[Reminiscing] There was so much going on. I was involved in something in Berkeley called the Six Day School. For me to get there, I had to hitchhike into the city, and get over there by the entrance to Golden Gate Park, where they picked you up. And they took you on a bus all the way out to Glen Ellen, which is where Jack London lived. It was far. First time I ever learned about nutrition, about how to to can and preserve foods, about psychic games. Everything was free. They would give these classes, and then they would take you back and drop you off. I think I went twice.
Who were these people?
I didn’t know — and I went, anyway! We were living free, and living without money. Here’s a story I love because it just shows how absolutely crazy we all were. I had this one little welfare check and every month I would buy my cigarettes and some Tampax and whatever I needed and then give the rest of the money to the house, and then I would literally live the rest of the month without money. Now, this friend of mine and I decided that we were going to go to New Mexico together. She had a scene—it was her, her boyfriend and her little two-year-old son and a dog. And she said, Come with me, I’ll pay. We barely knew each other, and I had no money, but I was so into the whole idea of Free, that I went.
And I had incredibly mystical experiences for the first time in my life on that trip. I saw people before I met them. We went to all these ruins in New Mexico, and I would feel what was going on, the history of the place. One day we got to this ruin and I said, You know Sarah I don’t feel anything here at all, this is strange. She said, Read the plaque. Nothing had happened there. All these kinds of experiences were happening and I was reading Herman Hesse’s Demian and it was the first time I learned that psychic stuff could be real. I’d been raised by a father who was very scientific, who didn’t think any psychic stuff existed.
It continued when I got back to San Francisco. It got so that I could call somebody psychically from across the city and have them come over and they’d say, What are you doing to me? [laughs] I went to Big Sur and I met a woman who said, I just fell off a cliff and a doctor was at the bottom.
Woodstock was so beautiful. The setting was so beautiful. My younger brother had gone early. He’d gotten food and camping stuff. I only went to Woodstock because I had a sister that was 16, and our mother had told her she couldn’t go unless I went with her. I was 27 at this point. We were up in the country with the family, and they dropped us off, 11 miles from the site. I loved Woodstock because I did nothing but sit there with my mouth open, listening to the music — I wasn’t a Digger, I didn’t help Wavy Gravy, I wasn’t helpful.
So, Altamont. Pete [Knell] didn’t go. Phyllis and I went down on the bus with the Hells Angels. There was this guy Moose, who we dropped acid with. We got down there at night, and remembering Woodstock, I was telling people, Oh just wait till the morning, you’ll be so surprised, it’s going to be so beautiful. Well, it wasn’t. It was California at its worst. Absolutely dry. Yellow. No water. I don’t know how much of it was intensified because I was on acid, but I just remember it being so ugly. They made you wait all day long for the music. It just went on and on and on. People were throwing bottles at each other. I think one of the things that got me out of there was I had to go to the bathroom and there weren’t any toilet facilities. I didn’t even hear [the Stones]. I hitchhiked out, because I couldn’t go back to the Angels’ bus by then. I knew that there was no way I could go back down there.
Afterwards when I came back, Pete said to me, You know you better stay away from the Angels for a while. I said Okay, fine with me.
Why didn’t Pete go?
A lot of people didn’t go. I never knew all the background of what went on.
Bill Fritsch was there…
Yeah. And Lenore was there.
What happened with Lenore in the ’70s? Was there some kind of accident?
Lenore was in a motorcycle accident. Bill was driving. I think what happened was her neck was broken but because she was with the Angels, they took her to General Hospital and then she went home and never really did anything with it. And I know, because I took her to doctors, to the chiropractor. Her whole back was crumbling. She was in really bad pain that seemed to get worse as she got older.
What do you think happened to Emmett? Was it a suicide, or…?
I was living with Peter Coyote’s lady Eileen at the time. Emmett would call her and get me on the phone and somehow he started to see I wasn’t just this dippy-dippy crazy person. So then he came to stay with us. We got to know each other. We weren’t lovers, we were just close.
I don’t know if he was killed. But I’ll tell you what makes me wonder. Months before he died, he stayed at my house, and we got really close. He was very paranoid. He kept thinking that people—government people—were after him, and he didn’t want me to tell anybody that he was there. And I didn’t.
Did you guys talk about the Diggers much?
Well no, because it was still so recent. He was telling me about his son, and his wife. He gave me his manuscript for Final Score.
When he died… Well, you can say, Oh it’s all drugs, he was crazy… But I don’t know. We’ll never know what happened. He was so convinced that they were after him. You can say that was paranoia but at the same time, who knows. He seemed pretty rational to me.
What happened to the Diggers? Why did it end when it did?
I don’t know why it didn’t continue. I think it doesn’t really matter. Some people got into drugs. A lot of people moved out to the country. A lot of people coupled off. People’s lives went on. But what stayed for almost all of us were the connections between us. I was meeting these wonderful people who are still my friends. Sister friends. People like Nina. It’s way beyond friendship.
But generally, people went on and did other great things, other good things. I really had hope in the ’70s, when the government was hiring artists to work with the poor, things like that, that’s when I really believed the change was coming. I’d studied socialism in college and I was thinking, Well gee, we’re in the synthesis period.
You know Richard Brautigan’s poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace? I really believed that, the idea that computers would come in and do all the work. The social problem then would be what are you going to do with all the leisure time. [laughs] Of course this is not what actually ended up happening; instead, computers have made it so a few people make a fortune and everyone else becomes poorer. But back then, ideas like this were in the air. Even somebody like Goldwater was saying everybody should have a guaranteed income. It could have happened.
This piece by poet/author/Digger Richard Brautigan was first circulated via free broadsheet in the Haight by the Communications Company in 1967.
How did your family back east respond to what you were doing in San Francisco?
I would go home and talk to my parents and my friends, and they just thought we were being totally unrealistic. I truly believed—and I don’t know if this had to do with dope or what—that we were going into the Age of Aquarius and we were going to change the world.
There was a paper that I wrote at the time called “Living at Willard State in 1968.” I intended to send it to friends who lived in New York, telling them about what we did and why they should either send money, or come be with us. It was a very logical paper. I never sent it and I never showed it to anybody, until much later. I was trying to figure out what people were talking about at this house. The way I saw it was that if you get a bunch of people together, living communally, and if everybody picks a job, you’re gonna get everything covered because everybody has different interests. And that general idea could be expanded further outwards. That’s the thing I got to. To me, it was all just some kind of an experiment… But at the same time, we were doing it.
People at home would tell me, This isn’t going to work. But I really believed it was going to work, that we could make a difference. I look back at it now, I go… Why did I think that? I guess it’s youth. The optimism of a 25-year-old is so unrealistic. Even though the Vietnam War and everything was going on, it was much brighter then, in that way, than it is now. When I look back, I see all that hope. And then I look around and see how sad the world is now. It’s just unbelievable.
I have friends today that say, Oh yeah I experienced the Sixties, I dropped acid, and all these things. And then I reply, But you were working a full-time job, or being a housewife — you weren’t experiencing what I was experiencing. When I got to Willard Street in February ’68, it was like I had entered a Technicolor movie. I couldn’t believe how beautiful everything was. What I was involved in at Willard Street was being with the women, doing the day-to-day operations, and more importantly, finding ourselves. And I think almost all of us did find out who we were, and what we were supposed to do with our lives.
By August 1968, some people from Willard Street were moving out to Black Bear. I eventually went to live with the Hells Angels, but these people from Willard Street have been my best friends ever since. Later on, when our children came, Joanie Batman and I did a free school. And that’s really what I learned about myself from that time, that I liked teaching and being with kids.
Joanie “Batman” with her kids. Photo by Chuck Gould.
ENDNOTE
Vicki assembled the poems that made up Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel, published in 2012 with a gorgeous, haunting preface by fellow poet Diane di Prima.
In this infamous early counter-culture photograph from November 1966, (l-r) Robert LaMorticella, Emmett Grogan, Kent Minault, Peter Berg and Brooks Bucher celebrate the dismissal of charges brought against them (and two 8-foot-tall puppets) for participation in a Diggers street event in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Photo courtesy diggers.org
The San Francisco Diggers were meant to be loose, free and vaguely anonymous — or pseudonymous — but perhaps inevitably, some people’s names got out. Usually they were the ones who spoke to a reporter.
And there were a lot of reporters in the Haight-Ashbury during the Diggers’ heyday of 1966-8. Such was the Diggers’ presence and notoriety that seemingly every reporter filing a story on the Haight — even, memorably, a typically dyspeptic Joan Didion, for the Saturday Evening Post—included the Diggers in their account.
“A band of hippie do-gooders,” said Time magazine. “A true peace corps,” wrote local daily newspaper columnist (and future Rolling Stone editor) Ralph J. Gleason. “A cross between the Mad Bomber and Johnny Appleseed,” said future Yippie Paul Krassner in The Realist, “a combination of Lenny Bruce and Malcolm X, the illegitimate offspring resulting from the seduction of Mary Worth by an acidic anarchist.” Didion wrote, “In the official District mythology, [the Diggers] are supposed to be a group of anonymous good guys with no thought in their collective head but to lend a helping hand.”
Who were these guys? Actor Peter Coyote and the late Emmett Grogan are the usual names associated with the Diggers (and their later incarnation, sometimes called the Free Family collective), as they wrote books chronicling their participation in that era; Grogan’s Ringolevio (1972) is the most notorious. But there were many others who participated in the various wildly audacious Digger initiatives of the time.
Kent Minault’s involvement in the Diggers wasn’t a secret. He and four other Diggers, including Grogan, were identified by name in a photograph that ran on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle in 1966 — well, kind of, as Kent gave his first name as Pierre to the Chronicle. Later, Kent appeared in Ringolevio as “Slim Minnaux,” and was featured heavily in Coyote’s 1998 memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall. When David Hollander and I interviewed Kent at his Los Angeles home in 2006 for a documentary film, it was the first time he had spoken on the record about his time with the Diggers. He had a lot to say — and, as a veteran stage actor, a wonderfully theatrical way of saying it. Details, color, context, insight: it’s all here in Kent’s vivid storytelling.
The following text is a combination of that initial 2006 interview and a follow-up interview I conducted with Kent and fellow Digger Harvey Kornspan in May, 2011. It has not been edited down for a general audience, and many incidents and personages are spoken of without context, or only in passing. There are, inevitably, a few digressions. My advice to the casual-but-curious reader is to simply let these unfamiliar/unexplained bits pass. Keep reading, there’s a good chance you’ll like the next part. (For more about the Diggers, consult the vast archive that has been maintained for decades by historian Eric Noble at diggers.org)
This presentation has been prepared in extensive consultation with Kent. Any errors of transcript are mine, and notice of any corrections of fact would be greatly appreciated.
Please note that in 2017, Kent presented a fantastic one-man performance, “Diggerly Do’s,” in San Francisco, detailing the early months of his Diggers experience. His script drew from the transcripts of our conversations. You can see a video of one of the performances here.
This is the third in a series of interviews with Diggers that I am presenting online for the first time. The others were Phyllis Willner and Chuck Gould. More to come.
If you would like to support my work, please donate via PayPal. All donations, regardless of size, are greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Kent Minault: I’m an old man. [laughing] My memory may be destroying things. We must acknowledge this at the outset. Because I read the stuff that other people have written and things that they say in the interviews and I go, I’m not sure I remember it that way.
Jay Babcock: How did you become involved with the Diggers?
I came to San Francisco in ’65. I had been an actor in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. There were two rides, one going back east and one going out west. And I said, Ah, I’ll take the one going west. And so I ended up in Berkeley. I knew that there was a sofa, or a floor at least, that I could sleep on in Berkeley. I stayed in Berkeley for a while and I got a job as a traffic surveyor, cuz they needed to figure out where to build the BART. So it was kind of a pork barrel job, but the money wasn’t bad and I did that and I cast about because I knew I wanted to be an actor but I had no idea how to do it. So I got into some bad plays in San Francisco and was disgruntled and thrown out of the companies.
Then I was working on a paper for my college degree, which was belated, and I was typing away in this little cottage that I subsequently rented and there came a knock on the door. And this guy was there who I’d been in a little singing group with in college. I hadn’t seen him in years. He said, I heard you were in town. Listen we need some actors over at the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Do you think you’d have time? And I had seen the Mime Troupe a couple of nights before and I thought they were just amazing. They were intimidating to me—I thought I would never be good enough to be in a company like that.
So I went over and I did my Shakespeare monologue, my Biff Loman, and [SF Mime Troupe director] Ronnie Davis sat there, squinting at me, with the smoke from his last quarter inch Camel cigarette, and he looked at me and thought about me for a minute, and then he said, Okay, stick around. And he went back in the office for coffee. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. There were people hanging around, playing guitars, smoking and talking to each other, so I wandered around and got to meet people. It turned out that you could do stuff there on a Monday night, do little workshops. So I was a Mime Troupe actor, and within a year I was in the Minstrel Show.
So that was kind of my conservatory. But it was out of that that the Diggers really started. The Diggers was originally a performance of a kind. It was a piece of theater.
What was intimidating about what the Mime Troupe was doing?
Well, its physicality. They could sing, they could dance, they could act, they were funny. They created these amazing pictures. It was sharper and more disciplined then any theater I’d ever seen before. And y’know, I was sort of the big actor on campus in my college days, but when I saw that, all of that meant nothing because the skill level was really high. They were really good.
Scene from A Minstrel Show: (l-r) Julio Martinez, George Matthews, Willie B. Hart, Jason Marc-Alexander, John Broderick, Malachi Spicer, (back of) Robert Slattery. Photo by Neil Robert Miller via SF Mime Troupe.
Program for A Minstrel Show. Kent is listed as musician and understudy.
Who was the friend who knocked on your cottage door?
Ken Whiterow was his name. He was a stage manager at that time. I think he quickly left and began doing something else. And as I got involved with the Mime Troupe, I was in correspondence with my college buddy Brooks Bucher—he and I had been roommates in the University of Rochester. When I came out and got involved in the Mime Troupe, I had been passing letters back and forth with him. And he came west later on. And he sort of took over what Ken Whiterow had been doing, started doing stage managing and stuff at the Mime Troupe. He was never interested in being an actor.
Brooks and I had an odd relationship. He was my best friend, really, for quite a few years. But we had a relationship whereby we could dare each other to do things. And when we were in the university together, we dared each other to go to Europe, to work our way to Europe. We couldn’t get a ticket—which was fine, because we really didn’t have the money anyway. We had to get a job on a boat. So, in the middle of my senior year, we left the university, we went to New York City, we slept on a friend’s floor, we walked around to boats and just asked them if we could work on the boat and go to Europe. And people just laughed at us. They thought that was the stupidest thing in the world. Nobody did that. Maybe 20, 40 years ago they did it, but not now. But we persisted and someone said, You know so long as you’re talking to American or English boats, it is indeed a waste of time. But try the Scandinavians and the Italians. So we narrowed down our search a little bit and indeed after three weeks we found a job on a Norwegian freighter, and we went to Europe. So we did the thing.
And so our relationship was characterized by those things. While we were in New York doing that, he said, Let’s climb to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge—at midnight. And if you go to the Brooklyn Bridge, those cables go right up to those towers, and they have two little cables along the side so you can actually walk right up those. So we went at midnight and walked up to the Brooklyn Bridge, said Okay, let’s go, and we walked up to the top and took a few photographs to prove that we’d done it. That was the kind of thing we did.
Brooks Bucher, mid-flight. Photo courtesy Kent Minault
So then when I was involved in the Mime Troupe, he came out, because this was clearly the thing to do. It was my little moment to lead the relationship, and dare him to get involved with this radical theater company. So he came out, and you know, had no acting experience, and wasn’t really interested in being an actor, but he could do lots of other things.
Let me give you a little background on Brooks. He came from a little town in New York called Painted Post, a little rural New York state town. I think he had been adopted because his father Jerry was actually his stepfather. He was the kind of guy who would wear broad lapel checked blazers and loud ties and things like that and shake your hand real firmly. I only met him a couple times. Brooks in college… I thought Brooks was just the coolest guy, because he had a great walk. His shoulders were utterly relaxed. He was a great looking man. And he was on the football team. He had football shoulders, a football build. He was on the Rochester football team, played a little bit. He also had a real uncanny sense of how to hustle something well. He got ROTC to pay for his education for three years and then dropped out. And somehow, they were appalled at him, at his lack of patriotism, and he just paid for the last year of his education on his own, and so got three years of free education. Totally pissed off ROTC but at least at that time there was nothing they could do about it. He didn’t see any reason why one shouldn’t do that, [because] they would pay for his education and then immediately consign him to DEATH. So he figured if they’re gonna play me that way, I’m gonna play them. So he thought that way.
He had that “special light that shone on him” quality, where you can do things like that and he was perfectly happy with it. Though some people might find it morally questionable, he never would. He had women climbing in his dormitory window at night, stuff like that. He was very attractive to women.
I think his romantic interest at the time flamed out and then he came out west. I assured him that there was plenty of romance and adventure in San Francisco. When I came to San Francisco in ‘65, I happened to move into the Haight-Ashbury, but it wasn’t because there was anything about the Haight-Ashbury, it was just a place where you could get a cheap room. The “Haight-Ashbury” had not started yet. But, by the time he came out a year later, it had. I think it was early ‘66 or something, we got this place together over in Noe Valley.
Brooks was no actor, and didn’t want to be an actor, but he thought the Mime Troupe was pretty interesting. So he became a stage manager, in charge of props and moving stuff around and when the truck would go to the park, he would be there with it, and so on. Brooks was a smart guy but I think he was really there for the adventure, he was just looking for a way to be a part of it all. Brooks and [the Mime Troupe’s] Emmett [Grogan] were just the kind of people who would get along with each other. They both had that cocky confidence. They had a similar walk and everything—it was like a relaxed swagger.
The Diggers began because this young black guy was killed by the police, and the next day, Emmett had done something where he’d gotten free food out there [in the park]. Because Emmett could speak a little Italian, and all the produce wholesalers were these old Italian guys. Unless they were Chinese. In any case, he went down there and got free food out of them, and that’s how it started. Now, Peter Coyote and I and a lot of the other people who became involved with the Diggers weren’t around at that time because we were on tour with the Mime Troupe. The Mime Troupe had gotten a lot of attention and some of us had got arrested. I remember when we came back to the airport, it was like the big media heroes. When we got off the airplane, news crews came up and shoved microphones in our faces. And we were being interviewed and everything like that.
And I remember Brooks is standing off to the side, looking around impatiently, waiting for us to be done. He was there to pick me up cuz we had a place together up on Noe Street. He took me back to the place. I said, Touring is exhausting man, I’m just gonna sleep for a week. He said, Well no, not exactly. You can’t. You’ve gotta go get the free food. And I said, What free food? He said, For the Diggers. And I said, What’s the Diggers? And he said, you’ll find out. But you gotta get up at 5:30 in the morning. I said no man, I’m not getting up at 5:30 in the morning, I’ve been getting three hours of sleep a night for the past two months, I can’t do that. He said, Just this once, then you can go back to sleep. And because of our characteristic relationship, he sort of had some right to insist. So I go Oh, okay. So he said, Here’s the keys to the yellow Volkswagen box. Brooks had bought this yellow Volkswagen bus—well, it wasn’t a bus, because it didn’t have the windows, it was like a panel van. A big tin box. It was a yellow box on wheels. It was like a camper van but it had no windows, so it wasn’t a camper. This was called the “Yellow Excess.” And a lot of our early adventures happened in this Volkswagen bus. I remember we spraypainted on the side, ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ Anyways, it didn’t have the quote from Blake painted on it yet but probably would within a few weeks of this. So he said, Here’s the keys. Now you gotta get up at 5:30, so set your alarm clock.
My room just had a pallet on the floor, and an orange crate for the night table. And it was cold—it’s San Francisco, right? So the thing rang, 5:30, I got up, and I said, Now what am I doing? How do I get the free food? He said, Go to the produce market. I said, Well where is that. He said, It’s down on Army Street. I said, Well do you have an address? He said, Don’t worry, just go down Army Street, you’ll see. It’s 5:30 in the morning and I was disoriented and confused, and he just shoved the keys into my hand and pushed me out the door.
It was still dark. I staggered down, started up the bus, which slowly coughed into life, and I drove down the hill, and I found Army Street, and I went along Army Street, towards the 101 freeway. And sure enough pretty soon there was a sign, one of those green marker signs, that says San Francisco Produce Terminal and it’s got an arrow, and you had to follow the arrow and then there’s a U-turn and then you go around and pretty soon I’m in this new area I’d never been in before. I come out into this large open area and there’s a parking lot in the middle, and these big industrial tin siding buildings down two sides, and it’s the San Francisco Produce Terminal. It’s got a big sign there in the middle, and I’m unmistakably there.
The San Francisco produce terminal
I drove the Volkswagen up to this thing. Trucks are pulling up, guys with hand dolleys are loading in cases of food, they’re all busy about their day’s work. I walk into this place, look around, nobody’s paying the slightest attention to me, so I walk around and look at a guy and I say, Um hi, I’m from the Diggers and um we’re giving away free food to poor people up in the City. Could you spare anything? The guy looks at me, he said Nope! And walks away. So I went, This is ridiculous, what has Brooks got me into, this is just going to be an exercise in futility. When can I go back to sleep? So I pull the truck out, I decide to try again for the next one. So I pull up to the next place and this is Chinese. So there’s these Chinese people running around, same thing, and so I walk up to the guy and say the same thing. Sounds pretty good, and especially if I say ‘poor people,’ that’ll work. So I say, Hi, I’m from the Diggers and we’re giving away free food to poor people up in the City. Could you spare anything? The guy says, No, not today. He walks away. I go back to the truck again, and then suddenly someone whistles. I turn around and this guy says, he points to something on the ground, and he motions. Like, Take that. There’s a case of artichokes. So I said, Oh! Thank you! But his back is already turned, and he’s already doing his work. So I pick up the case of artichokes, I almost feel guilty, like somebody’s gonna catch me, but I put in the van. Okay, at least I got a case of artichokes.
So I go to the next place. Now things are starting to work. People are giving me things. Here’s a case of tomatoes. Here’s a little bit of lettuce, carrots, parsnips, rutabegas — vegetables that I actually seldom eat. But I’m getting them, and the truck is gradually filling up. I come to the end of the thing and there’s a place that has chicken! And they give me three boxes of chicken wings, packed in this heavy cardboard with a little ice in it. So I take the chicken and then I cross over to the other side of the terminal, and I continue, and indeed some places say No, nothing, and other places say Yeah, take that. And by the time I’m done, the truck is [buckling] on its springs with the weight of all the food I’ve got. I’ve absolutely packed it. And I go out of the terminal and I’m unsure whether I’ll actually make it back up the hill with this thing.
Now it’s daylight. I’m feeling pretty good! I actually went and got free food without the slightest idea of what I was doing. I drove back up, and Brooks was there, walking down out of the house with a cup of coffee in his hand, and he said, Ah! You got the food, good! You can go to sleep now. But come up to the Panhandle Park at like Oak and Ashbury or something like that, and we’ll have the free food there, you gotta see this. I said, So this is the Diggers? And he said, Yeah I’ll tell you all about it later.
So I go up and I fall asleep for another four hours, and Brooks goes somewhere with the truck. I wake up and I make my way over to the Panhandle park, and I’m standing around and here’s six or seven people standing in line with wooden bowls in their hands, waiting. I look around. I look up the street. And there’s a couple of people coming down the street and my god, they have bowls in their hands too. People are gathering. They know about this place! Pretty soon I hear a shout. Here comes Brooks, up the street, it’s like it’s a stagecoach, someone’s driving the yellow van and he’s hanging out the door, waving. The van pulls up, the double doors open, and there’s one of those big old-fashioned industrial milk pails. It’s about 15 gallons of stuff. Two people carry it. So he comes over and he and I muscle the thing out of the van and we take it over and plunk it on the ground. And there’s one of those soup ladles, and he ladles out chicken soup, made from all the vegetables and the chicken that I’d gotten from the produce market. And somebody’s got a loaf of bread. And they start giving away food to these people.
Carrying the milkcan of stew to the Diggers’ daily free food event in the Panhandle.
Scenes from the Diggers’ daily free food event in the Panhandle. Photos by Gene Anthony.
I said, What is this? And he then explained the history of the thing, of how Emmett had decided to respond to the murder of this black kid by giving away free food in the park. And, just because of the kind of time it was, the logic of that was apparent to me immediately. Somehow, that connected. I think it’s an important connection because there was always a rapport between the black radical community and what we were doing. Y’know, they kind of did their thing separately, there was a Black People’s Free Store down in the Filmore. We were always connected with them and did things with them. And the Minstrel Show was a black-white thing. We always did things together. I remember one time, for a rehearsal for the Minstrel Show, we had done this thing… Well, first some background. Some of the Diggers had gotten these Gestetner machines. It was an early form of duplication. This was basically the propaganda organ of the Diggers. We put out broadsides, which were basically a piece of paper that was handed around the street. One of the broadsides was about this thing which we just saw, where traffic was congesting on Haight Street. Haight Street was becoming a tourist mecca. People would sit in their cars going five miles an hour down the street, leaning out, taking pictures of all the hippies gathered on the street, as if they were some kind of anthropological exhibit. We didn’t like that. We thought that there was a better way to have our public life, a better way to have the street there.
Haight tourists encounter a hippie in his habitat. Photo by Michael Alexander.
And so…this broadside had been put out by somebody, promising that the Diggers were gonna show up on a Sunday afternoon and clear all the traffic off the street.
So we were in this rehearsal in the morning, I think it was like noon or one o’clock, we got out of our Minstrel Show rehearsal, and I remember Willie B. Hart and Jason Alexander were there with us, and then there was Peter Berg, and me, and I don’t know if Peter wrote the broadside or not, but I remember he felt enormously responsible, because it was like we had promised the people that this was gonna happen. And then we went up there. Peter had this old Volvo, so maybe we all drove up in his car. But we got out of his car, parked it somewhere and we walked out on the street, and it was just so intimidating because from Broadway all the way up to Stanyan, it was just packed with traffic, and the sidewalks were packed with all these people. There must have been tens of thousands of people on the street that day. Oh my god, what are we gonna do. We told the people we were gonna clear the traffic off the street, how could we possibly do this?
Broadside for the Intersection Game, written anonymously (probably Peter Berg) and printed/distributed by the Comm/Co.
So we walked up, I think we were at Haight and Masonic, between Masonic and Ashbury, and there were so many people on the sidewalk that you couldn’t walk that fast on the sidewalk, but we made it that far and we were in consternation about how to proceed because we didn’t really have a plan of action at all.
Now, there was this song that we used as a warm-up in rehearsal in the Mime Troupe, which was a wordless round, very kind of stately. I remember always thinking that calm, stately music was a great way of organizing people, and during the Digger adventure, sometimes I would use classical music to offset the mad psychedelic frenzy of the music that was popular at the time. And this had this feeling. It was very ancient, almost medieval sounding. And I said, Let’s sing that. And the guys looked at me like I was nuts. Sing that? How’s that gonna compete with all of this psychedelic frenzy around us? I said, Well let’s just start doing it. So I started, and I remember I got Jason, Jason would agree to anything, so we started singing it as a duet, and it’s a five-part thing, and when you get the harmonies going, it’s kind of resonant, but it’s slow and stately. And we started singing this thing very quietly. And so we formed a group on the street and as people passed us on the sidewalk, they went, Whoa what’s this, what’s happening here? So they would start, and we would turn, and we would, just in pantomime, teach them the thing. We just simply proceeded to sing it ourselves, but got them to sing it along with us. And then Peter and everybody started singing it as well.
So there was a group of us on the sidewalk, and we filled the sidewalk, and when the sidewalk filled up, in order to get around, people had to go between the parked cars, or even walk streetside of the parked cars, out almost in the traffic. So there’s a little cluster of people on our side of the street, and over on the other side of the street, people noticed that something was happening. So they stopped and looked to see what that was. So then there got to be a cluster on the other side of the street. So we beckoned them, Hey come on over and join us. So people dodged through the slowly moving traffic and came to our side of the street and the cluster was bigger and bigger, until actually the cluster amoeba-like joined the cluster on the other side and so there were people moving across the street so much, that we’d actually in fact blocked the traffic. And, since the traffic was one-way, the street gradually cleared.
Then the police showed up, and they barricaded off the street so the traffic had to go up to the side streets. We had inadvertently just occupied a block of the street. We hadn’t cleared the traffic off all of Haight Street, but we’d cleared the traffic off one block! So then we looked around and suddenly the street was just filled with people, and they were all celebrating and happy. I remember looking over and there was some group had a long staff and on it was a big circle with some mystic symbol, and they had a live white rabbit with them. And I didn’t know what they were doing but they seemed to have their own thing, and they were intoning something of their own, because at this time, whatever songs had spread, millions of songs had filled the street.
I remember thinking in the back of my mind like a strategist, well if we’re clearing all the traffic off of the street, how do we get past the police? We have to take over another block, but the police have set up a line of sawhorses to contain us. And they had paddy wagons and all that stuff, almost like they were ready for a riot. And everything was so joyful and so wonderful in a way, that it clearly wasn’t a riot. But I didn’t know how to get past the police. I was really helpless to do anything. These people with the mystic symbol and the rabbit, they went up to the police and they started doing some religious ceremony of some kind, singing to them or something, with the symbol, holding the rabbit high in the air, they were doing this thing, I couldn’t hear what it was—something—and the police just looked at them, picked up the sawhorses, threw them on the back of the paddywagon and split.
And we moved across Ashbury, down toward the South, we started advancing, and the cars went off down the side streets, and we took over another block, so now we had between like Masonic and Clayton, two blocks of Haight Street, was completely cleared, filled with cheering people, and then the same thing happened at Masonic, and we went on further south and further south. Now the police were all the way down by Buena Vista Park, clearing traffic, and we went all the way down to Buena Vista Park, we looked back. Let’s go up to Stanyan, which wasn’t that difficult cuz since it was a one-way street, the traffic had sort of cleared itself. So we did, we walked all the way several times between Stanyan and Broadrick. We’d done it! We’d cleared the traffic off Haight Street.
I remember walking around and seeing Arthur Lisch. Arthur had found himself a box of colored chalk, and he was going around the street, creating a new environment, a vision of the future, this is what the street is gonna be. He would draw out a garden, with the carrots and the celery and the peas and the corn, and he would draw out a meditation center, and here’s where a little brook could run, and here’s where a park and a playground for children would be, the solar energy collectors, and all. He just drew it in chalk all over the street. That’s what the street is gonna be. So he just created that vision of it and people started doing that.
Haight-Ashbury street chalk work. Source unknown.
I remember we just walked back and forth and said, Well, we did it, and it was 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Jane Lapiner had a place on one of those streets off of Haight, south of Masonic, and we all went over there. And I think we heard later on that the police did sweeps of the street and clubbed people and arrested people and stuff. But I think after that, a permit for a Haight-Ashbury street fair was applied for and granted. So that was sort of the first Haight-Ashbury street fair. And I think they’re still happening today.
Do you remember what you sang?
Yes. It goes like this. [sings]. So that’s five of those and if you do it alternately than anything harmonizes and you’ve got a five-part round. It was something that somebody brought into the Mime Troupe and it was used as a vocal warm-up.
Can you talk about the street event in which you got arrested?
A lot of that was dedicated to confronting the issue of traffic on Haight Street. Now, we had this thing called The Free Frame of Reference. It was basically made out of four yellow 2 x 4s bolted together at the corner and they were about maybe ten feet long or something. Just enormous. It was just a big square. We called it the Free Frame of Reference. And so whatever was inside the Frame of Reference was, allegedly, free. And so, people would look at this thing and go, …Okay? So what is that? Clearly, unmistakably it was just a big square made out of 2 x 4s. It was nothing, you know? But then it was a frame, also, so you could put it around something and then look at it.
Did it actually say ‘free frame of reference’ on there?
I don’t think so, but I don’t really know. There probably is a picture of the damn thing somewhere but I don’t know.
Now, in that picture, which has us all jumping around on the steps of City Hall, there’s a guy with a beard—Robert LaMorticella, who was a master puppet maker. And he made these puppets that were about eight feet tall, and they’re all made out of the kind of dowling you use to hang your clothes on in the closet. There’s a big long piece of doweling, basically across, and the cross member would be the shoulders of the character, and then he would make this big papier-mache head on top and then there would be a piece of clothing that would come down in sleeves, and the sleeves were just hanging cloth. At the end of the sleeves on two pieces of plaster lathe, were the hands. So the basic art of the puppet was a head and two hands. He had these puppets which were originally made for Robert Scheer’s campaign when he was running for political office. His opponent was a guy named Jeffrey Cohelan , and at the time, Scheer was represented as a forceful guy who could make gestures like this [fist into hand]. He could go like that. And Jeffrey Cohelan was represented as a kind of dithering, insubstantial person who would go like this [makes motion of sad hands].
We had these two puppets. And you could put different kinds of costuming on them to make them different things, so we just immediately adapted them to whatever characters we wanted. I can’t remember exactly what we were doing with them but I remember I had the forceful Robert Scheer puppet.
Robert LaMorticella (right), at a demonstration with the puppets that would later be arrested in the Oct. 31, 1966 Haight Street incident involving the five Diggers. Source unknown.
So we were all on Haight Street, with the Free Frame of Reference. It was getting to be dusk. We were in and out of the Free Frame of Reference. So we would go into the Free Frame of Reference and act through it, then we would go around outside it and act outside of it. What I noticed was that the puppets were so huge that you could take a puppet and you could incline it down so that a person driving a car along the street would suddenly have this head looming down into their windshield. That actually seemed more fun than doing anything with the Free Frame of Reference. So we actually began intimidating the traffic with the puppets, and shaking our fists into their windshield!
We continued doing this, and then, the police came and arrested us. They collapsed the Free Frame of Reference, took it apart, made it into four two by fours. They took the puppets and stuff and they threw all this in the paddy wagon, and took us off to Park Street Station. So there we were, late at night, sitting in Park Street Station on this bench, and we just watched the life of the police department for a while. Police would come in, chat with each other, one cop would look at the other and say, Who are those guys, what’d they do? They said, They were giving a puppet show on the street corner. Puppet show? You arrested them for doing a puppet show?!? He said, Look at the puppets! They’re eight feet tall! Oh okay, well then. Because the puppets were so big, that meant that we must deserve to be arrested. [chuckles] So we just watched all this.
Who was in jail?
Brooks, me, Emmett, Peter Berg, and I think Roberto as well was there, cuz Roberto didn’t let those puppets out of his sight. So there were five of us. I guess we spent the night in jail, I can’t really remember. But the next day I remember out attorney was Richard Wertheimer, an amazing man. He had some disability where he was in a wheelchair all the time. He just had this quiet, loving attitude. He talked to us and said, Well I know the assistant D.A. so let’s go talk to him. There was a court date. We were arraigned and brought into court. I remember Dick took us into this guy, the assistant district attorney for San Francisco, his name was Artie Schaffer. He looked at us and he said, You guys. Okay. It’s clearly freedom of expression issue. We’re gonna get this thrown out of court, I want you guys to know. Now get out there and make revolution or I’m gonna bust your asses. These guys were old Lefties from the ‘30s that had gone into the Establishment and so there was a deep kinship between us. And this was the first time I really noticed that there could be something like that, that we could have a real kinship of purpose with people who are inside the Establishment and had positions like assistant district attorney and stuff. It was a very interesting thing.
So then what happened in court was really of no interest at all. The judge was told by the assistant district attorney that they were dropping the case. He was a little miffed at having the court’s time wasted and stuff like that but he couldn’t do anything. It was one of those miracles. We didn’t know what would happen to us. Strictly speaking, we were blocking the sidewalk. We were intimidating the cars. I didn’t know if they had witnesses or anything. Could we spend time in jail for this? We had no idea.
So we were absolutely delighted about the way things were turning out. It was almost like the world was saying, Just keep doing that. Even the assistant district attorney of San Francisco was telling us to go out and make revolution. To do what we were doing. We were doing just the right thing. It wasn’t a bunch of dropouts who got it, these were like major people in the society, who saw what we were doing and saying, Yeah, do that! This was important because as we were going along with this thing, a person might have some self-doubts, like, Is this just completely insane? We were used to protest. Clearly the Vietnam War gave a legitimacy to doing something different besides what was going on in society, but of course once you start actually doing something, you might question its value. A free store — is this just a dump? Sometimes you’d go in the free store and it would look great, you could see how somebody could walk in there and find a Harris tweed and have their mind blown. But other days you’d go in there and it just looked like chaos. And then a third day you’d go in there and something equally beautiful and amazing would be happening. So you walked around with this question in your mind. Clearly we were onto something, but where was it going, where could it lead? Everything we did had no plan at all.
And so doing something like that Free Frame of Reference puppet show, which was totally an improvisation without a structure, what were we really doing? And I myself was distracted from whatever play Emmett had in mind, cuz Emmett had this idea of the Free Frame of Reference and we’d do a play with it, and this would really be something that would change people’s minds. And maybe it did! I don’t know, I was distracted by shaking my fist at the windshields of the cars, and that’s what happened to me. Again, without it being planned, things happened. Would they be positive, would they be negative? I was never sure. I’ll tell you another story in a minute because it really brought the thing home, because when you don’t have a plan and you don’t know what you’re doing, you could actually do something really stupid. It’s possible.
So we were at this point with Artie Schaffer telling us to go make revolution, we were at the point of absolute exuberance, because it was almost like the stamp of approval. Yeah, that’s right, what we think up on the spur of the moment, is PURE GENIUS! So that creates the feeling that’s expressed in that picture. The outrageous thumbing your nose at the Establishment and my expression of…the King Kong of revolutionary exuberance. You could see in Emmett’s stance and everything, almost a criminality, is being expressed in the picture. All of those things were just sort of there. Here we are, we’re at large, free to offend again. And we will.
The exuberant reaction of the five Diggers to the dismissal of their charges made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle.
There was another event that came up… All of these things really had to do with taking over public space, and the space that was most available for us to take over was of course Haight Street. There was an event. We had started meeting the Hell’s Angels and talking to them. We found that the Hell’s Angels were incredibly sympathetic to what we were doing, and of course the ‘free love’ and everything like that we were doing was very conducive to their rapport. But they liked us, and seemed to be willing to give up a little bit of their violent demeanor in order to be around the hippies and enjoy the opportunities that our culture created for them.
There was this guy named Chocolate George, a Hell’s Angel, and, during one of these events, our friend Phyllis [Willner], got together in this magnificent white gown and Chocolate George drove her down Haight Street, STANDING, on the back of this motorcycle. Spectacular piece of theater. Just looked stunning. So Chocolate George drove down Haight Street with Phyllis like this, and when the police saw that—there’s certain things that push the buttons of policemen and that would be one of them. I guess the technical thing is, Don’t stand up on motorcycles, that’s illegal. But, she did, and so Chocolate George was arrested. I don’t know if Phyllis was or not, I don’t think so. But a couple of the Hell’s Angels, Chocolate George and Harry the Horse, were arrested. And that made me angry. The Hell’s Angels had this kind of more outlaw, more criminal image than we did. But this event, this was our event. This was our celebration. And yet they went and arrested the Hell’s Angels. They were arresting the thing most obviously offensive to that middle class sensibility. Let’s get those Hell’s Angels! Yeah, that’s it.
Chocolate George of the San Francisco Hell’s Angels. Photo by Gene Anthony.
The news spread around the street. It was getting to be dusk on Haight Street. People all over the street. I remember feeling so incensed. I did this stupid thing, out of a B movie, but I was seized with anger about this, and I got up on to a roof of a car that was parked on the street, and I said THEY’VE JUST ARRESTED CHOCOLATE GEORGE AND HARRY THE HORSE! TWO OF OUR BROTHERS! LET’S GO DOWN THERE AND GET THEM OUT! And I got down off the street, off the car, and I started walking up Stanyan Street towards Park Street Station. And after I walked a block I turned around and by God, there were a bunch of people with me. I couldn’t believe it. It was again one of those things, Oh shit. I might be doing the dumbest possible thing in the world. I might be leading a whole bunch of unarmed people up against the San Francisco Police Department. But, I was already in movement so I kept on going.
People head to the SFPD station to free Chocolate George and Harry the Horse. Note Michael McClure with autoharp on right. Photo by Gene Anthony.
And people moved through the dimming light up towards the stadium there and Park Street Station which was in the shadow of it. Park Street Station was right up against the stadium, and the stadium had these huge walls, so you could kind of…corner them. So actually, without quite thinking about it, this enormous group of people, must’ve been close to a thousand people, suddenly moved up to the station, and SURROUNDED it. We had them surrounded.
So now, this is the point where it’s good to have a plan, and we didn’t. So what happens when a thing like that occurs? The policemen were looking out the windows, Oh my god! Y’know? They were indeed surrounded. You could see the look on their faces. They didn’t know what the hell to do. I remember [poet] Michael McClure, coming and talking to me and he said, What are we gonna do here? And I was like, Uh I don’t know. I had no idea. But I saw that a bunch of the women were handing out candles. Somewhere they’d gotten candles and they were lighting the candles and so this candlelight spread out all down the line of this surrounding bunch of hippies. And goddammit, they started singing Silent Night.
The Park Street police station is surrounded. Source unknown.
And it was actually the perfect thing to do, cuz it has all these peaceful words and this peaceful sound to it. So suddenly they were surrounded by peace. And the event completely turned different. So then somebody went in there, it was either [poet Richard] Brautigan or McClure, somebody like that, and these guys were a little older, you gotta remember I was like 23 or 24 years old at the time, and these guys were in their mid-30s. They were already established writers with reputations and stuff like that, so they were more comfortable walking in and talking to the police and presenting the image of a mature person. They indeed said that we thought it was wrong to have arrested these guys, that they were part of a peaceful activity and they were in no way a threat to public order. And the police said, Well in fact it is illegal to stand up on a motorcycle, and maybe Harry the Horse had been drinking on the street, or something like that, but we established that the legal representation that we had enjoyed would be available to them as well.
Scene elders: poets Michael McClure and Richard Brautigan, San Francisco, circa 1968. Photo by Rhyder McClure
So they did indeed have to spend the night in jail, but we also let the Hell’s Angels know that we were good hosts, and would be able to take care of them to the best of our ability. So we weren’t able to go down there and attack the police station and spring them out, which had of course been my initial impulse, frenzied fool that I was, but nonetheless, the event turned out well. So again, it’s just another example of how some insane impulse was made sane by just the social environment that we were a part of. And, violence and insanity were avoided by just the inspiration of somebody, I don’t know who, to light candles and start singing Silent Night. It was absolute genius to do so.
The Angels and the Diggers became close…
Lots of close personal relationships started happening. I remember later on Peter Coyote was over there, and he bought himself a motorcycle. Billy Fritsch [aka Sweet William Tumbleweed] bought a motorcycle. These guys helped them paint the tank. That’s what you had to do, you had to paint the tank, that was your personal statement. I never got into that, but I did visit with them, I was over at Pete Knell’s house a few times.
What are your memories of Emmett Grogan?
Emmett was an actor, and he was in the Mime Troupe with us. The whole thing started out of Mime Troupe activity. I remember Emmett being in Olive Pits and creating these characters.
One of the most interesting things that we created was a little play called Search & Seizure. This was the brainchild of Peter Berg. The idea was to do the play in little clubs and things. It was a police line-up play. The characters were four policemen and four people who’d been busted for different drugs. I remember I was a cop, and we all used our real names. There was somebody busted on downers, somebody who was busted on speed, somebody who was busted for grass, finally somebody was busted for LSD. The police were able to break down each person, but not the acidhead. The acidhead I believe was played by John Robb, a phenomenal actor. The acidhead, in this characteristic way, by changing the frame of reference, turned the police around and was not broken by them. The play came on completely opposed to the usual style of Mime Troupe plays. It was a piece of gritty realism, in which we actually created a realistic police line-up type of environment. I remember we did this at The Matrix. At the time there was a band playing there, Country Joe and the Fish, and so we shared the backstage with them. We would do our play and then they would do the second set. And I remember coming back there and them going, Jesus you’re supposed to scare the shit out of them, not us! So the play was this terrifying little jolt. Emmett played one of the police officers. And his forceful personality and his New York speech rhythms created a really terrifying character. In terms of being an actor, that was really one of the best things I’d seen him do. He was the one that created the jolt of adrenaline in the play, and he could really do that.
He had come into the Mime Troupe. His face was amazing. If he’d really wanted to be an actor, and maybe he did later on, because he came down here to Hollywood, I think somehow later on toward the end of his life there he was actually seized with the Hollywood thing… Anyway, his face was crooked, I think that his nose had been broken at some point. And he had this jawline and these goggly eyes, and he had a way of looking out of the side of his eyes.
Emmett Grogan, early ’70s.
And I remember when he walked, his hands faced straight back. It gave him this hunched swagger. If you look at Ringolevio, there’s a picture of him walking across one of those New York streets with the look of a guy whose jacket isn’t warm enough against the cold. And he favored military fatigues and things like that.
Emmett, New York City, early ’70s.
It’s a working class face. And he’d been in Italy, so he could speak Italian, and that was what gave him the cache to talk to those guys at the produce market and make the original foray into the free food thing. Something that I wouldn’t’ve thought to do. Once it had already been established that one could do it, even a guy like me who was half-asleep could blunder through it and get the free food. But Emmett actually went down there, and talked to them in some way… To have been a fly on the wall at that time, to hear that conversation, would have been incredible.
Who was Billy Murcott?
He seemed like almost the sidekick? Emmett would be the guy with the personality and the force. But it’s interesting, because Billy wasn’t the comic sidekick so much—he really was the brains. Billy had this gift of language, and I think he gave the gift of that kind of Digger poetry to Emmett. And together somehow there was a symbiotic relationship. When you read some of those Digger broadsides, the way they use language is very interesting. It has an inheritance from beatnik poetry, and indeed Emmett was pretty close to Gregory Corso. And he brought Gregory in, and Gregory hung out with us a lot.
DH: Emmett called Gregory his favorite poet.
Right. There’s a quality of incantation in the language. And what the Digger language would do would be to break up sentences and re-arrange words in a manner that was sort of like Beat poetry but also psychedelic, so it was like: “Take a cop to dinner. Cop a take.” And so he would take words like that and re-arrange them and create a different meaning of it. What was that? Take a cop to dinner. It was about bribery and corruption. Copping a take. Suddenly reversing it would make the language hip and streetwise. So street language had this almost coded or incantatory quality to it. They were able to write it down, on one of those broadsides, so that, passed out, it would really have an effect. It would create this thing where people were all communicating on the same level.
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” Some people say the Diggers popularized that slogan…
Yeah, I think they may have. I guess if you asked me off the top of my head I would say Emmett made it up, but it could have had an earlier literary reference. The language trips, that is really what Emmett and Billy [Murcott] brought to it. You have to look past Emmett and see Billy as the source for inspiration.
Speaking of inspirations. There’s a Com/Co broadside that advertises a screening of the film Miracle in Milanat the Free Store.
I believe Arthur Lisch brought it to us. It was a movie that in some way was about what we were interested in that this guy [Italian Neorealist filmmaker Vittorio] De Sica had made, and yeah, we showed it. It was a movie about an essentially free activity. It showed what a free frame of reference would look like in actual practice. I think at some point in the movie the squatter village is oppressed by the authorities. At the end they fly off to heaven or something, an absurd ending, which by its very absurdity makes the point. Even that, the absurdity of the ending, helped, because again, it’s that kind of beatnik thinking, whereby taking something in a completely different direction, the mind goes where you want it to go. And that was a lot of what we were trying to do.
Arthur was very interesting. I don’t recall Arthur ever having really long hair. He came in from churches. He would always relate things to churches, and felt that churches should be doing things, so he had a spiritual component to the way he thought. He would always do interesting things. He would frequently be at our events dressed in a coat and tie, and would do things like sweep up. He would take care of the janitorial work and make sure that everything was clean and well-organized. He would basically take on that role of representing a clean, well-organized vision. It could be free, and clean, and well-organized! WHY NOT? He would think that.
Infamous tort attorney Melvin Belli (center) with Arthur Lisch (in plaid, holding sheets) on the San Francisco City Hall Steps, 1968. Photo by Chuck Gould.
Do you have any memories of the Invisible Circus event at the Glide Church?
The thing I do remember about it and was interesting politically, and this is really about Emmett, was that Emmett really saw something that…I don’t know… If you could, like, bottle this insight, and let everybody’s who’s politically active just drink it, it would make such a huge difference. He saw that it was all one thing, that we’re not separate political movements. He was really interested in making connections with everybody who needed to be liberated—that felt the need to be liberated. And that’s why he felt this kinship with the Black Power movement. There was a time when he went, and I remember him saying this to me, he said, We need to get together with the fags. He put it just like that. The fags, man, that’s where it’s at. Let’s go meet the fags. They’re down in the Tenderloin. And that’s what really brought us to the Glide Church. The Tenderloin has a big gay population. And he wanted to be closer to the gay thing. He felt that that was a real source of kinship—that they got something that we needed to be involved with, and that they needed to get what we were involved with. He really led that. That’s one of those things that would never have occurred to me, that he saw immediately. Gay culture had been part of a demimonde, an underground culture, and he wanted to share and participate in bringing that up above ground, making it part of the big dialogue. Of course, later on, that happened. But he was talking about that in 1966! That’s what’s interesting.
The gay population is a big part of the ministry of Glide Church. So I think that’s really what brought us there. Conceptually, again, we just didn’t have the framework for properly dealing with that or making the political connections. But that’s an interesting part of the Digger thing. As I look back on it, sometimes I think we made big mistakes. One of the mistakes we made was we were against voting. We had a big campaign: “Vote for Me.” So you’re your own representative. Okay well, I can see the logic of that, but being against voting? That’s stupid. We shouldn’t’ve been against voting, we should’ve figured a way into that.
Diggers/Free City broadsheet, 1968.
The point was that the democracy was supposed to be participatory, and in order for that to happen, you had to de-ghettoize life. You had to break down walls that separated people into little groups: the blacks, the gays, the peaceniks, the hippies. You had to say, The hell with that. And so that was one reason why we had that big ‘Death of Hippie’ thing. We couldn’t be ‘the hippies,’ because that was a bag they put us in. We never invented that word anyway. So one of the things politically that I think the Glide event was supposed to do was to un-bag everybody. To get people in there together.
And in a way, the Tenderloin was more representative of that than the Haight-Ashbury. The Haight-Ashbury at that time was still kind of a white neighborhood. You look at the footage and yeah there’s some black people around, but the black people in San Francisco thought of it as a white place. And it was. The Tenderloin, however, that was GENUINELY multi-ethnic and multi-sexual, multi-EVERYTHING. So that was really the melting pot of San Francisco. And so if you wanted to have a political or social or artistic activity that broke down those walls then going into the Tenderloin was the way to do it. And I think the Invisible Circus, it actually did that in its outrageous way. I have no way of evaluating the consequences of it. I just don’t remember. It’ll be very interesting for me to read Cecil Williams’ book and see what the reverend thinks of that, because yes, we damn near wrecked his church, I think.
Above: Kent discusses his sizeable contribution to the Invisible Church event.
DH: Cecil Williams saw it a moment of affirmation for him… He insisted on the “fuck the church” graffiti in the bathroom wall be kept up.
I always thought Cecil Williams was such a cool guy. The forces that he brought into that church made it what it became. And, you know, a lot of things that we did continued there. They started a huge free food thing. So yes, Cecil Williams was definitely a kindred spirit there. The idea of “fucking” the Church I think was sort of part of a different kind of spirituality that was coming out of what we were doing. As Diggers I don’t think we really addressed that very much but there were later on many of those people went into various spiritual things. When we went on into the ’70s, people went into things that seemed really wacko to me but the thirst for a spiritual discipline or spiritual life definitely came out of that stuff.
You guys were thinking politically and economically, but you guys were actors, not activists.
The essential vision of the Diggers is economic: We’re gonna do economic activity without money. And that was sort of the point of it. So it started out with the free food. And then, we set up the first free Haight-Ashbury medical clinic — it wasn’t done under proper Establishment auspices, and subsequently I think they set up what they would call the ‘real’ one, but we had doctors there that were actually giving, prescribing medicine, treating people. Then we set up the free store.
Ronnie Davis connected us with a politically active tradition. Later on, the Mime Troupe became a blatantly Marxist company, although at the time we were there… I mean there were Marxists in the company, and SDS had a little office right next to the Mime Troupe’s studio and they had a mimeograph machine that churned out their broadsides. So we were in conversation with people in SDS, student radicals, Marxists, anti-war people who favored the idea of a possibly violent revolution that would overthrow the government. We would talk about that, think about it, but… I remember there was this British guy, Ray Davis, who would hang around with the Mime Troupe. And in the Mime Troupe we would have these big meetings sometimes where we would discuss very big things, and I remember he got up one night during the meeting and he said, ‘I think we should all agree that capitalism is the worst system ever invented by man, nature or circumstance.’ And the entire room burst into laughter. That was kind of the relationship that our circle had towards Marxist communism at that time, that it seemed something that was so filled with pronunciamentos like that was ludicrous. It would have been difficult during the ‘60s for us to say, We’re Marxists, or, We’re communists. It’s not that the ideas of a cooperative or a planned economy were somehow bad or anything, it’s just that it was a style of thinking that would just make us laugh. And Ray was part of a slightly older generation more conditioned by the ‘30s and so while he thought that was such an important idea, that if we could all agree to it, it would make us all so much more powerful… Nah. The thinking had moved beyond that. It just couldn’t be there.
At some point the two Peters [Berg and Coyote] and Emmett and I and a few other people were basically saying, We’re not gonna do another play with the Mime Troupe. We’re gonna go out in the streets and we’re gonna do Diggerly-dos because THAT’S what theater really should do. We don’t want to put on a play and then have people go home afterwards — we want to actually CHANGE the public reality that people are in. So at that point we were like — we took over City Hall! And did shit like that, read poems on the steps.
There was definitely a separation between the radical political thinking and what we were doing. I don’t know how healthy that was. Because I look back now on the antiwar movement and everything that was going on and it seems to me, when you look at it from the point of view of political history and you see, take ’68, the assassinations—Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King—all these people that got assassinated at that time, you think, King started talking about Vietnam. A few months later they killed him. And the same thing with Robert Kennedy. He was talking about peace in Vietnam and linking the antiwar movement to the civil rights movement. And it seemed to me that everybody who started talking about making connections between those two things got killed pretty soon after. That’s what they were afraid of, for it all to come together. Cuz all the pieces were there. And so if you were running the government and wanting to keep everything as it was, having all that come together as one thing, that was the threat for you.
Peter Berg talked about the importance of LSD as a catalyst, and a dividing line with the past.
Yeah, I think so too. And that was the point of that play Search & Seizure, is the final guy [played by John Robb], who is on LSD, he couldn’t be broken down because his point of view had changed. He had a new frame of reference for his life and his thinking. And that’s what we were all looking to do, was to let our lives incorporate a new frame of reference. Calling it a frame of reference is a little weird because a frame is a square box with defined borders and that’s exactly what we didn’t have. We didn’t know what limits we could have. Coming out of the Digger period, many of us left San Francisco, we went and we started a commune up in Ron Thelin’s house, and the women took over and said Okay now it’s time to make babies. So the next thing after that was really becoming a family, and having our own children, and raising our own children and seeing what that would do. Of course, the thing that it didn’t do was make us go back and become squares again. It actually forced us to bring up our children in a different way.
Nina Blasenheim, Kent Minault and their daughter Angeline, early ’70s. Photo by Chuck Gould.
What was your family background?
My family background is quite normal. I’m an east coast boy. I was born in Brooklyn. My family moved around a bit when I was in my infancy: Virginia, upstate New York, Bingington, places like that. When I was 7, in 1950, we moved to a suburb in Boston and that’s when my parents really felt at home. My father’s an immigrant coming over from France when he was 17. He had a constitutional terror of poverty. He had been poor in France as a kid, and then he had been poor as a young man in the depression and he had worked his way out of that. He got here in 1929 and immediately the stock market crashed. He managed to wash dishes and get a mechanical engineering degree at Ohio State University where he met my mother, and then graduated from university with this great degree in the middle of the Depression, where he didn’t really have any employment options, and spent a few years that were fairly depressing for him. He was teaching French at the University of Chicago which is not what he wanted to do. He wanted the roar of the factory, he wanted to engineer shit. Then he got tuberculosis, he thought my mother would leave him just because he was a total wreck. But then, they came out of that and as the armament industry started gearing up, really getting ready for World War II… the armaments industry knew what was coming, so ’37-‘38-’39, somewhere in there, he got a call, and he got brought into a company called at that time Sperry-Rand, which was a big defense contractor, and so he was well employed from there on in. But he would go from a variety of companies — he was a very smart man — became plant manager and stuff like that. I was sent away to a prep school, Principia in St. Louis, and given a nice education by prosperous middle class parents.
During the ‘60s, when I was in San Francisco, having dropped out of society and become an actor… I remember, they saw me perform with the Mime Troupe in Detroit, and I remember they were really angry about that. They just thought that was an awful thing for me to be doing, to be doing theater, like that. My mother tried to be understanding and my father sat off resentfully by himself.
My younger brother Paul, who’s now an attorney, visited me at that time and I remember he expressed a traditional middle class horror at the way I was living. At the time he was terrified of the draft and he was hoping I would save him because of my ‘superior wisdom’ about that.
How were you avoiding the draft?
I used my acting skills. It was appallingly easy.
You’re often mentioned in the Grogan and Coyote books in association with the Digger trucks…
Yes! One of the things that happened to me was I became Pierre Le Truck. During the Diggers stuff, trucks became very important because the Diggers were always moving stuff around. There was a point during this time that I had no car, y’know. When we opened the free store, somebody came by and said, Here’s a free car. It was an old Studebaker Lark. So I got in it, started it up and it worked. Okay, I’ll take the free car for a while. I think it wasn’t a day before I piled the thing up. I wrecked the car and I walked away from it. To whom was it registered? I have no idea! Free cars, this wasn’t gonna work. Free stuff was great but free cars was an administrative hassle that we couldn’t handle. I was moving stuff around, we were borrowing trucks from people… It was clear that we needed trucks.
There was a guy named Jonathan Glazer — Jonathan and Sara, I remember they were close to us but I don’t quite remember what the source of the connection was— Jonathan had an old ’51 Chevy pick-up that he wasn’t using, there was something wrong with it, it didn’t work. And so I think Billy Fritsch went and talked to him and said You gotta give the truck to Kent. There’s something about Billy, when he used a certain tone of voice, you just had to do what he said. So they give me the pink slip, but the truck is on the street. I could have the truck—but I had to fix it. I had no idea how to fix anything. I had studied anthropology in college, how did know how to fix a truck?
Billy said, Well you gotta get the repair manual. How do I get a repair manual? He says, Listen. Talk to [poet/Digger] Lenore [Kandel]. And she said, Go to the Reference Desk at the library! They’ll not only show you the thing, they’ll photocopy the pages for you and give them to you. See, Lenore did charts, she was an astrologer. When you’re into astrology, you have to get a thing called an ephemeris. If you were a really professional astrologer, you have to have all these books that show the position of the stars at various times to do your chart from where the stars were at your birth. She didn’t have them herself, so she went to the library. She knew how to use the reference desk. So she said, you could do the same thing for auto mechanics. Aha! The library was very cooperative. I ended up with this bunch of papers. Somehow we got the truck towed to a place. I had a friend who ran a garage nearby, and would help the Diggers with various things. So he showed me what to do. And I remember my friend J.P. Pickens had a hot Sears credit card. So we did this act of criminality. We went to Sears with this credit card, and I bought all these tools—the wrenches and the sockets and everything that you needed to fix the truck, outside of the machinist work. We were constantly fixing up Chevy pickup trucks. Everybody had to have a Chevy truck. They were all not working cuz they were 15 years old at the time. We became obsessed with machinery. We learned how to fix more and more components of the engine. And I would get more pages out of the library and I would build myself a little book. And that’s what made me Pierre Le Truck.
Kent in Pierre Le Truck guise.
Digger truck, circa 1967. Photo by Jim Marshall.
Arthur Lisch driving the same Digger truck on Haight Street, 1967. Photo by Elaine Mayes.
How well did you know Lenore and Bill Fritsch?
We’d go over and visit them in their place in North Beach. They had a North Beach apartment. They straddled the era between the hippies and the beatniks, so they knew a lot of the kind of older people. Like I was at that time in my early 20s, 23, 24, 25. And they were in their 30s, and they knew Brautigan and everything. These were all interesting people to us because they’d been kind of doing this for ten years before we’d even showed up. So it was always fun to go over there because she would have all those books from the City Lights bookstore on her shelf and she knew Ferlinghetti as a writer. She was one of them. She’d published the Love Book by that time so she was also, had achieved celebrity and notoriety as well with these kind of racy psychedelic poems. They were always very gracious. It was great to be there. They were almost, I don’t know, not the parent figures but something like that—they were the older, wiser people.
That day at the free store when someone had said, ‘Here’s a free car’? The old Studebaker Lark. I got it and we drove it that night over to visit Bill and Lenore at their place in North Beach. We sat around smoking dope and talking for a while. It got to be late, so Nina [Blasenheim] said, Eh let’s go home. So we said we’re going home. At that time, the intersections were not regulated like they are today. A lot of intersections in North Beach had no stop signs either way. So we were going through an intersection and we ran into the side of this poor old man’s pickup truck, with the Studebaker. Basically totaled it. I talked to the guy and everything and I was going to stay there and make sure he was okay and let the cops come and whatever. I didn’t know what was going to happen but I was gonna stay there. Nina went into a liquor store and called Bill and Lenore.
After about 15 minutes — I think somebody had called the police and everything but you know, the police take years to come — so we were standing around there with this guy and the side bed of the pickup truck had been stove in and the front end of the Studebaker was all crumpled up, water running out of it. And Billy came, walking up the street. He said, Hey man, you guys okay? Huh, yeah. We’re fine. He looked at the situation and he said, So what cha doing? Ah, well we’re just waiting for the police to come. He said, Uh I wouldn’t do that, actually. [laughs] I said, Really? He said No man, you see the situation, a free car and all that shit? You gotta walk away. I said, But the guy’s truck is wrecked. He said Yeah man but you can’t do anything about that. Just walk away. Let’s go, c’mon. So I just fetched a breath and we walked back to his house and they drove us home and we never saw the free car again. We did just walk away from that, and leave that poor guy with his wrecked truck.
You were saying the Diggers were always moving stuff around.
Yeah. Well, the food was one thing. But then we were starting to go out to the country too. This is probably a story from later on, in the ‘67 part. Brooks was living on Webster Street in the Filmore in a corner storefront that he rented. It was common in the SF area to have a storefront where the doors would not open on one street or the other, but onto the corner. That’s the way his place was. So he had a little bed in back. The hookers in the Filmore would come down and chat with him at night if there was a lull in business. He had some job working for a guy who had a chain of toy stores, five-and-dime-type stores around town. And the guy had entrusted Brooks with a big Avis rent-a-truck with a electric liftgate on the back.
So, the thing about everybody moving to the country was, they needed to BUILD. We were in touch with people up at Lou Gottlieb’s Morningstar Ranch, and there was a guy there that to this day I really admire, a guy named Calvino Filipas. He must have been about 60 at the time, but he was hanging out with us. He was an old Italian anarchist who would hand you a book by [Errico] Malatesta or one of these guys, full of anarchist principles, and say, Read that! It’s about just what you guys are doing!
He was up there, and he was talking to Lou Gottlieb and the people who lived on this place, all of whom were just looped on acid all the time. He was talking to them about … He’d say, The thing you need to do is organic farming. And to do organic farming, you must prepare the soil. So they’d go dig for mussels in Tomales Bay, and bring back the mussels and eat them, and then they had these shells. So he was out there, he would have sledgehammers, and we would stand on a concrete pad and we’d CRUSH the shells and shovel the crushings into the compost pit. He was preparing the soil because, [he’s say] We’ve got to be self-sufficient, we can’t rely on the pigs to feed us! He actually had a solid rap. If you go to the farmer’s market today, that whole thing that Calvino was talking about then is now happening.
Calvin “Calvino” de Filippes: He had a solid rap. Date/location unknown. Courtesy Phyllis Willner
Above: A contemporary look at the Morningstar Commune.
So these people were living in tents and Calvino was talking about how they need to have lumber to build the basic structures to house these people. Calvino had this idea of building this movement. I don’t think he was quite aware that these people did not have mental or emotional resources to build shit…but we weren’t aware of that either! We were persuaded by his thing. So alright Calvino, we’ll get you the lumber. It’ll be here sometime next week. He went, Alright.
We went back. Brooks knew he was gonna get this big truck from his boss. So the plan was we would take my little truck, the Chevy pickup that I fixed with the reference book, and we would go out to Diamond Heights, where they were building this housing development. They were building a new suburb on this beautiful hill. It was all like corporate housing and stuff, so it wasn’t so much stealing stuff from individual people who were building their homes. So we loaded up on essentially plywood and 2 x 4s. We used the little truck. We didn’t take the big truck up there because we didn’t want to queer his relationship with the guy. The big rig truck could easily be traced, anyway.
Oh, you used the big truck to take the stuff to Morningstar.
That was the idea. We were loading up his storefront, and then eventually we would take a big load up to Morningstar. That was our plan. So, we’d go and boost some stuff from Diamond Heights, then we’d load it up in the store, then we’d go home. And then the next night we’d do a little more. And a little more. So four, five nights we did this. One night, the cops pulled right up in front of the place and they come in. They say, What’s going on here. I say Well we’re just loading in some lumber. Where’d it come from? It came from blah blah, and Brooks had some thing where Calvino’s son or somebody was supposed to say well we brought this from his uncle’s place over in the East Bay—he invented some story. The cop said, I see. Call him up. Alright! Get the phone. We call up Calvino, pass the phone to the cop. Ring ring ring. No answer. Cop says, Okay, well… If we hear that lumber is missing from somewhere we know where to come. Oh yeah, okay, well…we’ll be here! They leave.
So. Um. I’m not telling the story right because this happened in two parts. I think it was like the next night, or two nights later, and we’re loading the lumber ON to the huge truck. Now the cops pull up and their headlights are shining in the door. And they come in. And I think this is where they asked us to call, where we ended up calling. So we were totally in suspense. We didn’t know if they knew that this lumber had been boosted from Diamond Heights. They could have been informed of that but evidently they weren’t. So this was a really close call.
But we did manage to get all the lumber, load it onto the truck, and then we got up in the morning and drove up to Morningstar Ranch, Sebastapol. I think it had been fairly wet weather so we drove it through this kind of mushy … And we said, Hi, where’s Calvino? Oh he’s not here. I see, well this lumber is part of the building for you guys’ houses. Groovy, man! Far out. Put it there, I don’t know, wherever. Far out! You know, people were walking around naked, tripping. And so, nobody even helped us unload it. But we unloaded all of this lumber, got rid of it, and then the goddamned truck was stuck in the mud! So we had to call a tow truck—and pay for it! To get the truck unstuck and get it back out of there. Nobody lifted a finger, they were just, they had no idea what was going on. Wherever Calvino had gone, we didn’t know. It was one of those things where it was like, WHAT THE FUCK are we doing? The risk we took to get what must’ve been thousands of dollars worth of lumber.
There were so many different episodes. This is just one. We would go out on runs with other people, with other trucks, and we preferred rainy, foggy nights, naturally. Nina would always be a little bit worried, you know, cuz we just had this lovely little boudoir there with our little bit of hashish in the pipe next to the bed—it was just so lovely. But then I’d go out at one o’clock in the morning. Imagine her feelings: maybe I wouldn’t come back or she’d get a call, I’M IN JAIL! By all rights, we should have been caught many times. Somehow, we just weren’t.
The pickup truck was really meant for light service. It was a half-ton pickup. But I was carrying around a lot of heavy shit in it, and it was too much for the springs, so I wanted overload springs. There was a guy named Don McCoy. Don McCoy was kind of a millionaire and his wife Paula had come from money. They were married but separated. Paula was a willowy beauty, stunning woman. Blonde and real lanky. Beautiful woman. I guess when they were separated Don set her up with a beautiful Victorian in the Haight. She was one of those well-born girls that liked to hang out with hairy guys like us. Romance and adventure, artistic and political something, who knows. Don, her husband, I guess he’d married money with her, but he’d also taken something and made something of it, because he had a houseboat-building business in Sausalito. He was part of the Sausalito houseboat renaissance, and so he made a chunk off of that. And then in ’67 or ’68 or something like that, he got hit with the free vision and everything and rejected the capitalist lifestyle but he had a whole bunch of money.
One of the things he did, he gave us his Shell credit card. This was not a hot card. This was a real credit card. And I went to this Shell station, run by these two black guys, I think it was like at Masonic in the Panhandle. Don McCoy’s fortune paid to have those put overload springs put on. He’d given us the card, and we passed it around. We put gas on it. I said, This is just for gas, right? And people said, he didn’t specify anything like that. So later on there was a huge contention between Paula’s parents and Don, because essentially Don was giving away the fortune that they felt that the children were entitled to ultimately so they sued him and I don’t know what the fuck happened. But his fate was not happy because he had this place called Olompali Ranch, and we would go up there and have nude baking parties and shit. People would be fucking in the woods, baking Digger bread to take back down to All Saints, and Don owned this very luxurious place, but ultimately I think one of the kids drowned in the swimming pool. His fate was not happy.
To be rich, to be rich on that level, and then to get SEIZED with the vision, like what do you do? It must be very difficult. I think that he and other members of the family must have suffered for that. Poverty can certainly fuck you up, I know people that have been fucked up by that, but wealth can also really do you. You can really get fucked up by money. Don McCoy’s tragedy is not necessarily part of your story, but he did spring for us in this extremely open-handed way, with no complaint.
Paula McCoy’s place was on the same block as where the Dead had a house. What was the relationship between the Diggers and the Grateful Dead?
A lot of these groups were around the neighborhood and if we had an event in the park frequently there was a rock band who was glad to play. I think many times they played for free. They were making money, they had concert tours and recording contracts and everything, and so as money started to move through the culture, rock n roll was really one of the legitimate ways it could start moving. The other way of course was drugs, which was not legitimate. Those were the two kinds of people who had big concentrations of money: rock bands, drug dealers.
Did you know [LSD manufacturer and Grateful Dead associate] Owsley?
Not really. As a Digger, I was the guy in charge of operations. People like Billy and Emmett and Coyote, they would come down here to Hollywood, they would talk to movie stars, people like that. I didn’t really get into that. I was Pierre La Truck—I fixed things. I did a lot of the moving and hauling and physical work, and things like that. I never met Owsley.
And I didn’t really have a close rapport with the rock groups either. I started noticing that I didn’t like the social environment that was created by rock n roll. It tended to be frantic and egoistic. I remember once when we doing the free food… You know, it had to rotate, so nobody had the burden of doing it all the time. It was like you got a call—We’d like to use your apartment for the free food. So somebody’s apartment would be devastated for a day because there’d be this shit all over the kitchen. The stove would be fired up, the kitchen would be unbearably hot, the women would be in there sweating away.
Anyway, at one point, I was living with Peter [Berg] and Judy [Goldhaft], right across from the free store on Cole and Carl, and I remember there was a point where we didn’t do the free food in the park anymore, we just distributed it as groceries. People were coming to the front of the house to get the groceries. A case of tomatoes would be put on the sidewalk, a case of artichokes, a case of carrots. So they’re just there in boxes and people would come and get stuff and that was the free food. The truck pulled up, the food was put out there, people were elbowing each other out of the way and it started to be this feeding frenzy. I thought, that’s not it! Don’t do that. That’s not a way to distribute the free food. Something’s sick and wrong here about this. And I remember I said, Try music. And I went up and put my stereo in the window, right above it. And I put on these Italian trumpet concertos—again it was something stately and measured and dignified—and I said like, listen to that. And I played the music. And pretty soon people started going After you. No go ahead, that’s okay. Oh there’s only one left? You have it. People started to behave like that because the music tended to create a different reality.
I remember watching that magnificent documentary Gimme Shelter. Gimme Shelter has Diggers in it, y’know. I remember seeing a picture of Billy Fristch in it. Because Billy started working with the Angels. He became an Angel. And, that concert was set up by Emmett. When you watch the movie, it’s like what’s being expressed in the music and the performance is an angry, cocky, egotistical projection. I remember watching it and people start shoving and pushing each other in the audience and Mick Jagger’s going, What’s the matter, people? Hey why can’t you be loving and groovy? Then he’d go back to the kind of thing he did in his performance, which is cocky and angry and confrontational. And so the qualities of the performance were being reflected in the activities of the audience. Coming out of the stuff we had done where we were Diggers, where we were basically arranging theater events, I mean that seemed so abundantly clear.
At Altamont: school bus with “Hells Angels Frisco” banner. Still from Gimme Shelter.
I remember one event on Haight Street, and this involved the Grateful Dead, I think. We had set up a street fair. Maybe it was a year after we had cleared all that traffic off the street. There was a street fair. And again Arthur Lisch had his colored chalk. We were setting up things. I was walking up and down the street. There was a string quartet playing music, and then there was somebody else playing one of those bamboo flutes, and here was a person selling these extremely imaginative color candles. So there’s all these hippie artists. People were selling clothing, artifacts, sandals, wall hangings, art and posters and things like that. And everybody was wandering around and it was this wonderful environment, where you could smell the pot and the incense, and it was filled with love, and it was the best kind of Haight-Ashbury event that you could imagine.
And then I looked up and right by the Straight Theater, this big U-Haul truck backed across the street. It was filled with these enormous amplifiers. And the Grateful Dead were on the truck. And as soon as the truck was in place… CHONG! This giant chord resounded down the street. And everybody stopped what they were doing and sat down and they watched. And so all of that interaction just stopped, and they were watching one hugely amped activity. And the music was very nice, the Grateful Dead were terrific musicians, but really the life of the place just stopped with that. And I thought, Eh I think I’ll go home. Cuz it was suddenly an event for people who were fans. And what had been going on before was an event for participants.
The Dead play in the street; Kent goes home. Source unknown.
[thinking back to earlier in the conversation] Pardon me though, because I did come to Hollywood once with Coyote, but this was much earlier. Coyote had been a member of the Diggers for like a week or a few days when there was a guy in Hollywood called Zev Putterman who was a friend of Peter’s dad, or who at least knew Peter’s dad, and he produced a show, called the Les Crane show, which was a talk show. And Les Crane had this idea of putting on a guy called Bart Lytton. Bart Lytton ran a company called Lytton Savings and Loan. Litton was a colorful, articulate, handsome, silver-haired capitalist representing the Establishment. And Les Crane knew that Peter was this articulate guy, or maybe Peter had appeared on TV or y’know, he was an actor and doing the Mime Troupe stuff and all that. So, he wanted to get Peter down to L.A. on one of these debate things with the Les Crane show, with Peter Cohon versus Bart Lytton. But Peter has only been in the Diggers for a fuckin’ week! So Coyote said Kent, you gotta come with me on this, I’ll get you on the show. So we came down and were admitted into a studio. I remember walking in with Peter, and this guy Zev Putterman ‘Hey Peter, howyadoin? Hows your dad? Great to see you” and Zev was there and it was almost like he was saying So if you want to work in Hollywood, we can find you an agent and stuff. I was totally being pared off. People who were to the manor born were admitted and I was being asked to read a magazine. Peter wanted me to be with him on the show. And he told them, Listen, Kent knows so much about this, and the guy said, You know, we can’t. The lighting has already been set up. Sorry. So I was left to heckle from the audience. But it was a brilliant idea, because Peter was actually FAN-TASTIC at that kind of thing. And much better than I would have been, really. He has an unbelievable gift for that. He invented things during the conversation like “the equal-opportunity shaft,” stuff like that. Burt Lytton was giving all this liberal stuff about how organizations like his, they were the real things that were bringing people out of poverty and building the American dream, and the hippies were really a misguided… ‘not that I have anything against you personally, I’m sure you’re nice people but let’s face it…’ He would have to give the Establishment argument like that. Peter was fantastic, he totally threw a loop around his arguments and tripped them up and showed where the Establishment was actually creating poverty, the War was shifting money away from… He totally had the guy, he was running circles around him. It was a great show, it was very interesting. Questioning the very way that money works, to divide people into classes and stuff like that. He was terrific, just fantastic.
And we went to see the L. A. Diggers, they were a little bit different. They had none of the criminal glamour of our group. They were very much well meaning people who wanted to give food to poor people and ‘help.’ They were very nice.
Emmett was really interested in doing that because Woodstock had happened, y’know? Woodstock had happened back east. The idea for Altamont was that we would have a Woodstock for ourselves here on the West Coast. I’m not close to the event. I wasn’t there. So I don’t really know what happened. But I think it’s really part of the whole story of Haight-Ashbury. It’s a story with a beginning middle and an end. It’s a story with an arc to it, because at the end of 1968, if you stood and you looked down Haight Street you saw Beirut. Plywood boarded up all the windows. It was a smashed and wrecked place.
And if you looked at it before late ‘67 or early ‘68, you saw a place that was bustling with life. People moving through it—It was really a river, because it was a river that was going somewhere else. People that came to the Haight were ultimately on their way to another thing. Y’know, it’s the old story, you look at the letters of the young kids that came through at that time, and in my early 20s, I was already one of the older guys, cuz it was a place really where a lot of teenagers came through, they would write home to their parents: I’ve met these really beautiful people. And those beautiful people would go somewhere else, and do something. And that was what it was really about.
Kent in 1968, in his early 20s: already one of the older guys on the scene. Still from Nowsreal, courtesy diggers.org
There was another event I remember, at Winterland. We were starting to see these guys—big burly muscular guys, they all wore white turtleneck sweaters and sportcoats and they had cars with phones in them. We thought of them as the Mafia. I don’t know what they were but they were walking around, riding around, and right at that time, Superspade was killed, and we had other people that we knew who were drug dealers and they had to get out of the city.
William Thomas, aka Superspade
I remember someone said, Get Kent, he’s always got a truck. I had to drive somebody out of town because they were in fear for their lives. So what had happened was that the drug traffic which had been this free-form thing was being taken over by organized crime. The sources of money were being grabbed, and controlled, by various people who were interested in those things. And people who were gonna stand in the way were gonna lose their lives. That’s what happened to the Haight-Ashbury. I think the story of Altamont is part of that story. I can’t tell you any details because I wasn’t there. The best I can do is try and put it into context. That’s what was happening in late ‘68 and early ‘69.
What exhausted itself was the hippie thing in the Haight-Ashbury. The Digger thing did not exhaust itself. Leaving town to have babies was a fresh lease of life for it. You might actually say it brought a real stability and power to what we were doing. We really didn’t call it the Diggers anymore, we called it Free Family, but it was the same thing, really. “Diggers” was an urban, quasi-criminal thing that was really about short-term theatrical effect. I mean, you could say we started the free medical clinic in the Haight-Ashbury and stuff like that, but really, that was David Smith, he was really the one that gave it staying power. We created theater that could have the potential for that but we didn’t have any of the skills necessary to really make a free medical clinic stay there for years. But when we moved to the country and started having kids, then it was different because people started talking about buying land. Black Bear. [David] Simpson’s place, Nina and Freeman [House]’s place up in Petrolia—those are examples.
What happened to Brooks?
Brooks seemed to me to be the most emotionally healthy guy—he was completely spontaneous, he was totally in touch with his body, he was adventurous, kind, resourceful. He wasn’t a big intellectual but he respected intellectualism, would read a few books like James Joyce and shit, just to keep up his end of the conversation. He had real intelligence and a great, great personal energy.
Shirtless Brooks, date and location unknown. Courtesy Kent Minault.
But as the time we had together went on, he would start to do things with drugs that were in fact a little odd. And then our lives went in different directions. I went on the road with the Minstrel Show and in ’68 I came back and then… In 1969, Nina and I were looking for the place to have the baby. We wanted to find Brooks because Brooks was kind of part of it for us. But Brooks had gone off, and we hadn’t seen him for a year or something. I heard that he’d been seen running naked on the highway up in Marin County around Bolinas. He was in Bolinas a lot. People in Bolinas knew him. Somebody said he was up in Mount Shasta. And I went there and found him, walking along the road with a 60-pound square honey tin on his shoulder. He said he was living with some other woman somewhere in a lean-to on the mountain. He had just gone totally out into the woods, to live in the woods. That was the last I saw Brooks for about 10 years.
So somewhere around ’79, I was living in San Francisco. I was working for the city, I had a job working for the arts commission, and also, I was starting to act in plays around town, and I got a telephone call from Brooks. I told him my address and said meet me there later on, because I had to do something with work. When I came back home, he was sitting on my front stoop. And he was emaciated. He looked like a concentration camp survivor and he had a big scar on his forehead and his glasses were like coke bottle bottom glasses. He had obviously injured his face in some way. Mentally he was absolutely shattered. He needed money. I had a very low income job but I did have money, so I helped him out. He tried to tell me stories of what had happened. He’d been in Canada, he’d been with some kind of commune, maybe Moonies or something like that, he had been with some very religious people and some adventure where he’d hopped a freight and been thrown off the train and hurt himself. I got the impression also that he had had drug experiences of some kind.
So I helped him out, and he was in and out of my life for two or three years there, around ’78-79-80. He would go to a psychiatric place down on Army Street — I remember talking to his doctor — he would take lithium. I would tell the doctor, Brooks says stuff like Rockefeller has a bank account with a million dollars for him. And he said, Don’t humor him in that—if you think it’s bullshit, you should go, Brooks, that’s bullshit. Okay, thanks, that’s good advice. I would start doing that and Brooks would correct his story, say Ah I was just joking. But he was constantly veering off into outrageous delusions.
He was crazy in what seemed to me at the time the best sense of the word. He was completely impervious to social conditioning. Later on I got news that he’d gone back to upstate New York, where he’d come from originally, and where his mother still lived, in Painted Post. The final word I got was that he’d escaped from a mental institution in upstate New York. It was cold weather when he escaped. And that he had drowned in a lake in the middle of the night.
It’s such a sad fucking story. The thing that Brooks and I both liked and were interested in, and I must confess I still like it today, it was glorious adventure. Romance and adventure. That’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to do really interesting, far-out things and get laid. And, y’know, have interesting relationships with the women that we got laid with. The Diggers and the Mime Troupe were interesting, especially to Brooks, not for any reason of political ideology like you’d get from interviewing Berg or Coyote, but because it was really exciting and sexy and fun. Now of course those things were interesting to those guys, too. Those were the kind of things that we were pursuing at the Noe House. We had various relationships with women. I remember there was one woman we both wanted to fuck, and I remember we were there, we were talking about who’s gonna take her up to their room, because both of our rooms were on the second floor, and I remember we both turned to her and said, Well how about it? What do you think? And she was totally intimidated by that, just by the frankness of it: Well, you decide. We’re obviously at an impasse, neither of us are gonna give up, so what do you wanna do?
From Revolution, by Jack O’Connell, shot in 1967. The speaker is unknown. The location is the Black People’s Free Store at 1099 McAllister Street in the Fillmore district of San Francisco.
(I’m technically unable to make a clip from the YouTube file, so please disregard what follows the speech, which is about 95 seconds in length.)
The Diggers were meant to be loose, free and vaguely anonymous — or pseudonymous — but perhaps inevitably, some people’s names got out. Usually they were the ones who spoke to a reporter.
And there were a lot of reporters in the Haight-Ashbury during the Diggers’ heyday of 1966-8. Such was the Diggers’ presence and notoriety that seemingly every reporter filing a story on the Haight — even, memorably, a typically dyspeptic Joan Didion, for the Saturday Evening Post—included the Diggers in their account.
“A band of hippie do-gooders,” said Time magazine. “A true peace corps,” wrote local daily newspaper columnist (and future Rolling Stone editor) Ralph J. Gleason. “A cross between the Mad Bomber and Johnny Appleseed,” said future Yippie Paul Krassner in The Realist, “a combination of Lenny Bruce and Malcolm X, the illegitimate offspring resulting from the seduction of Mary Worth by an acidic anarchist.” Didion wrote, “In the official District mythology, [the Diggers] are supposed to be a group of anonymous good guys with no thought in their collective head but to lend a helping hand.”
Who were these guys? Actor Peter Coyote and the late Emmett Grogan are the usual names associated with the Diggers (and their later incarnation, sometimes called the Free Family collective), as they wrote books chronicling their participation in that era; Grogan’s Ringolevio (1972) is the most notorious. But there were many others who remained anonymous while participating in the various wildly audacious Digger initiatives of the time. (A vast archive about the Diggers is maintained by Eric Noble at diggers.org)
One of them is a man named Chuck Gould. Prior to interviewing Chuck in 2010 at his home in Petrolia, California, I didn’t know much about him, other than his name was the photographer credit for the bulk of the rather striking black-and-white photographs featured in Coyote’s memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall (1998). In conversation I found Chuck’s avuncular outspokenness, street lawyerly bluntness, and Buddhist bottom-lineness to be as striking, refreshing and vivid as his photographic portraiture. No mythologizing here; just facts, laughs and tough reckonings.
The following text is for the most part how the conversation flowed that morning; it has not been edited down for a general audience, and many incidents and personages are spoken of without context, or only in passing. There are, inevitably, a few digressions. As usual, my advice to the casual-but-curious reader is to simply let these unfamiliar/unexplained bits pass. Keep reading, there’s a good chance you’ll like the next part.
This presentation has been prepared in extensive consultation with Chuck in the last few weeks. Any errors of transcript are mine, and notice of any corrections of fact would be greatly appreciated.
This is the second in a series of interviews with Diggers that I am presenting online for the first time. The first was with Phyllis Willner. More to come.
If you would like to support my work, please donate via PayPal. All donations, regardless of size, are greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Jay Babcock: So both you and Phyllis Willner spent time at Millbrook in 1966 prior to arriving, independently of each other, later that year in San Francisco and getting involved with the Diggers. How did you get to Millbrook?
Chuck Gould: I got to Millbrook through a loose extended family called the Group Image. The Group Image was a multimedia light show/rock n roll/kookarooka thing. We had a loft on Second Avenue and Fifth Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There was a big neon purple sign that flashed “Show Biz” on and off onto the street, and it was where we kept instruments, equipment, art materials and stuff like that, and where people crashed. Freeman [House] was publishing a magazine called InnerSpace with Martin Carey, who was doing a lot of the artwork for it. It was a small world even in those days, even in New York. So Freeman and I met each other. He would come to the loft to get out of the cold and write.
I went with the Group Image to Millbrook because [Timothy] Leary was doing a movie—I don’t know what the movie was about but it was all kinda crap. A bullshit “advent garde” movie. And Leary was bullshit also, I might add. Trust me, I lived with him long enough to know that he was. He was basically an opportunist. He had no real social conscience or progressive political position or any of that stuff. He was simply in it for the fame. And the women. Regrettably he drank a lot and it was rumored that he couldn’t get it up. Alcohol: not good.
So, we went up there to do this movie. ’65-6. A lot of people were up there. A lot of people would come up there—Michael Bowen (from whom I first heard the term “far-out”) from San Francisco, poets would come up there, Indian gurus would be up there, weirdos and whackjobs and all these pretentious self-styled hipsters. This was the Hitchcock estate. Peggy Hitchcock was a very wealthy woman, or her family was wealthy. That’s where I met Phyllis. I remember her sitting in a wheelchair; her face painted black and white and looking “witchy.” She left after the filming and party was over and I stayed because I had gotten involved with Leary’s secretary, who was 10 years older than me. She was very lovely. After that time in Millbrook I came to California.
Where did you grow up?
On Long Island, outside of New York, and I went to college in Boston. My father and mother were first-generation Americans. He was an importer of fine arts and antiques, and also sold a line of silver-plated ware. My mother was an educated housewife. Four children. We lived in Brooklyn initially and then in Great Neck. I’m the second oldest. Jewish, very Reform. I went to Boston University and was Pre-Med. I have a bachelor’s in Zoology, which means nothing in the bigger view of things except now when I castrate my bull calves I know how to clamp off the bleeders.
When I was in school in Boston I started taking acid, smoking pot, going to socialist meetings and the bottom kind of dropped out. I had always considered myself as politically left, enjoyed jazz, read Marx and poetry and so I began to trade one delusion for another, which we all do. I came to San Francisco by way of Aspen, Colorado where I’d had some history ski bumming, earlier. I arrived around Thanksgiving of 1966. I never looked back. I knew I was home and intuitively “recognized” everyone on the street. Home.
What were you doing with Group Image in New York?
Well, I wasn’t a musician, but I worked a lot doing the light shows while others designed posters and played rock concerts. There was lots of groups like this around.
I remember there was the Seattle Lightworks, they used to travel around and do light shows, and they would come and stay with us. The Grateful Dead would come to New York and play in an abandoned bandshell in Tompkins Square. Richie Havens would open and then the Dead would play. The Grateful Dead would come up to our loft to hang out. I remember Bobby Weir wearing eagle feathers in his hair. I was knocked out by them. Ed Sanders had his Peace Eye Bookstore right there. There was all kinds of alternative stuff going on right there in that neighborhood. The Fugs, Tuli Kupferberg, all those guys were around. I just recently saw Ed Sanders up in Millbrook, with Martin and Susan [Carey], who are good friends. It was all very crazy because Martin and Susan were good friends of Freeman’s. I didn’t know that. I met Freeman and I met Martin and Susan independently, and then Freeman came to San Francisco — was brought to San Francisco, supposedly. There were some rather pompous people around the Diggers in those days who thought that they were really doing earth-shattering things. Anyway, I said to him, “Hey man, we know each other” [from New York]. Of course he remembered and we became good friends.
July 7, 1967: Time Magazine explains the fascinating and mysterious hippie phenomenon to its mainstream readers, with a cover designed by the Group Image.
How did you get to San Francisco?
Well, I had heard about what was going on in California. If you were at all attuned to what was going on in the alternative universe, so to speak, then you knew that San Francisco was one of the epicenters. I went around Thanksgiving of 1966, and lived briefly in an apartment somewhere in the Haight-Ashbury with some people I knew from Colorado.
One day, I’m walking down the street in the Haight-Ashbury and here comes Phyllis Willner, wiggling up the street. Wow, blah blah blah. She said, “Come on I’ll take you someplace,” and we went to one of the communal houses that the Diggers were doing and I got immediately involved in what was happening. It seemed to me that the things that the Diggers were attempting and the predicates that were behind these activities were something that I related to, and were very far-out and seemed to make a lot of sense. And: it was all great, great, great fun. And of course you’re dropping through the rabbit hole at that point in time—you have to understand, this was, for me anyway (I can’t speak for anybody else), in those days the rush of freedom—being out of school, being in your twenties, at the peak of your game physically and all that stuff, taking heavy-duty psychedelic drugs that were opening up this vast cavern, this abyss, of extraordinary insights and imagination, this was all happening at the same time. TOTALLY free. Invincible! No more school or parents. No societal restraints. Gone, that was all gone. I could do whatever I wanted. Endless mananas. In your twenties, you have endless mananas. Tomorrow is tomorrow is tomorrow. And so I got involved with what was going on with the Diggers, although no one wanted to be pigeonholed or characterized in any way.
The only communal house I ever lived in, other than Forest Knolls [in the ’70s], was Willard Street. I lived in my own places. I always managed to find a way to live, or had a girlfriend that I lived with, or lived on the street, or slept in the park. I really didn’t care. As it was, I never had a permanent room at Willard Street. I lived in the coal bin in the basement, where we did Free News. I lived in that coal bin with Ron Thelin on and off.
There are other connections going back to New York. Martin Carey, this guy that I told you about, was Abbie [Hoffman]’s very, very best friend. They grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts together. There’s this famous picture of Freeman marrying Abbie and Anita, and I think Marty is sitting somewhere in the back of that Times photograph in Central Park. It was during this period of time that I met Freeman and all this stuff was going on in New York’s Lower East Side or the so-called “West Village.” We would hang out at Abbie’s St. Mark’s Street pad. It was a psychedelic circus of lefties, street people, artists etc. Martin Carey did some amazing artwork for Digger publications. When Abbie was on the lam [1974-80], after the cocaine bust and all that shit, which, I’d lost track of all these people, I knew Jerry Rubin in New York in the early 1980’s when he’d turned into a faux businessman and was doing his networking thing, I used to go to his parties and stuff like that, but… Marty would go and meet Abbie in airports and bus stations, he’d put on a crazy hat and a beard with a nose, just ridiculous, and he’d go and they’d pass each other in the room and he’d hand him an envelope and then keep going. It was money so Abbie could keep running. They wouldn’t stop and talk. It was hard for them. They loved each other a lot.
So, late 1966, you fell in with the Diggers. Who were you impressed by?
Well, I was of course impressed by Bill Fritsch [aka Sweet William or Tumbleweed]. I’d never met anybody like him before. Emmett [Grogan] was an enigma who would disappear a lot. Peter Berg and Peter Cohon [aka Coyote] and some others seemed to be from another planet. And being around rock musicians, poets, Black Panthers [see video clip below] and Hell’s Angels was damn exciting and turned my head around to a different way of seeing reality.
Above: A clip from the documentary feature film Revolution, directed by Jack O’Connell, shot in 1967. In this scene, shot inside the Black People’s Free Store at 1099 McAllister Street in the Fillmore district, an unidentified speaker (possibly Roy Ballard), talks about what a Digger is, what the free store means for the black community and what’s going on in the Haight-Ashbury. The gentleman’s monologue begins around 6:08 and lasts for 95 seconds. Disregard what follows his speech.
Who was Bill Fritsch before the Angels?
He was William Fritsch, a Jewish former New York longshoreman long before the Diggers and Angels. He was Lenore [Kandel]’s boyfriend. He was a well-known member of the bohemian/beat/art community in North Beach, a lot of which centered around the the Committee theater group, Caffe Trieste and places like that. And Ferlinghetti’s bookstore. All that group from the ‘50s that he and Lenore had run with. He and Lenore had moved into Gregory Corso’s apartment on Chestnut Street. Gregory lived there with Belle and Belle’s daughter Sasha. They there together for a number of years and so when Gregory moved on, Bill and Lenore moved into that apartment. They lived there, and that was a center of activity. People got their ears pierced, got high, shit like that.
Longshoreman-biker-poet Bill Fritsch (left) and poet Janine Pommy Vega at Caffe Trieste, circa 1968. Photo by Chuck Gould.
Bill was quite a fascination to a lot of us. Here was a man who was incredibly charismatic and handsome, vital, virile guy with this amazing poet wife. They actually were married, and remained married until she died. They just never got divorced, for whatever reason. Medical insurance? Who knows what they were doing. They were estranged at the end. Sad.
So I was very impressed with Bill, because he was so different. Drove a motorcycle. Shot dope. What did I know about this kind of stuff?
Who else impressed me? None of them ‘impressed’ me really, to speak of.
Okay: impressed, enamored, whatever… Who were the people who were doing Diggers stuff that made you want to get involved with them?
That’s just what kind of happened. You fell into it. You’re living in a house and people say tomorrow we’re gonna go to the produce market [to procure ingredients for the daily Free Food event in the Park] and blahblahblah. I said, I’m coming with you. That kind of thing started to happen. Food preparation. Street theater. Those kinds of activities. Other events. This is a long time ago, I mean… Peter [Coyote], who’s still a good friend of mine, wrote a book about the time, and the first thing I said to him upon reading it was, How do you remember this stuff? Come on man. Get serious. Everybody was stoned all of the time anyway. I can’t even remember all this shit. He says Oh, I kept a journal. [laughs] To which I said, Oh. Okay. Cuz there’s all this contention about Peter’s book as to what was true and what wasn’t true; memory is a funny thing.
What about Emmett Grogan? Were you impressed by him?
Emmett was an impressive guy. Emmett was an enigma, Emmett was elusive, Emmett kind of ran in a number of different circles. It was very clear that Emmett was very committed to Emmett, and that what Emmett was doing was very, very interesting and important and vital, but that he always appeared, in my opinion, to have a hidden agenda. And part of Emmett’s agenda was, in my opinion, hyping up the notoriety that came as a result of just being Emmett Grogan and having been in the Artist Liberation Front Council or whatever it was that people were involved in, in the early days in the Haight and the advent of the radical new progressive politics of “Free.” I leave the precise articulations of this “New think” to those of us who are more versed than I am.
Yeah, this kind of stuff. Emmett was someone who, early on, had gotten into hard drugs and that kind of made for a bit of a separation between him and other people. Emmett was very secretive. He didn’t like to be photographed. He even told me not to take photos of him and I didn’t. Emmett was paranoid. He was sure, and he may well have been right, that he was on somebody’s enemies list—you know, using the old Nixon term, “enemies list.” He was very charismatic and he was a lot of fun to be around, when he was fun to be around. I mean, I remember going with Phyllis… Emmett had broken his arm, I don’t know when this was. He had broken his arm and Phyllis and I were taking him to the hospital. Must have been to S.F. General, because where else would hippies go but to General. Emmett checks in, they want to know his name. No one had ID in those days—if you did, it was phony ID, completely made up. So he says his name is Roger Payne. Because he has a broken arm. He spells it out P-A-Y-N-E. They put us in an examination room, the nurse goes out, and he immediately starts to rifle the drawers. He’s looking for needles and the syringes, which he finds and he puts in his pocket. And as he puts them in his pocket, the nurse comes back in the room and he turns around and you hear this rustling. She pats his pocket, she says What’s that? And he says, Potato chips! And the three of us run out of the room in different directions and disappear into the night. This was life with Emmett.
It was that kind of thing. It was crazy. I remember once being with Emmett and Ron Thelin. Ron had a white Chevy panel truck, closed panel truck. What we were doing, why I was there, I have no idea. We drive it along and we pull up to a light and there in front of us is a butcher truck, stopped, the doors are open, the guy is hauling a quarter of a cow into the butcher shop and the back of the truck is open and hanging with meat. Immediately Emmett sees the opportunity to steal meat. We pull over, and he says to me, Go get some meat. Me, right? I run over to the truck, I jump into the truck, I unhook—it’s hanging on a hook—a thing of meat, run back and throw it in the back of the panel truck just as this guy comes out of the shop he was delivering to. He yells, “Hey,” we slam the doors and we drive away and we take the meat to Paula’s house. Paula McCoy, where he was living. Well, he may have been living with her—I never knew what the nature of their relationship was… Emmett was into star stuff. He liked that whole hippie royalty notoriety—this is my take on him now; again, this is strictly my perception, who knows what was going on?—but he liked that stuff. He liked going to Hollywood, he liked hanging out with Dennis Hopper, that kind of crap.
Well, he was hustling for money for the Diggers, right?
Whatever he was hustling—he was hustling. You got a sense it was contrived. Hidden agendas. Okay, so he then proceeded to butcher this meat right in Paula’s kitchen. Now, I also remember that around time, a kind of poignant but predictive thing happened. There was a family meeting at Pierce Street, which was one of the houses we had—David [Simpson] and Jane [Lapiner] were living there in the attic, I think Freeman was living there too. The Pierce Street house had been where a seder had taken place that turned into kind of a debauchery scene like most of these things did. The meeting was about what to do next. Bear in mind, the whole “Digger thing” was maybe two years. What happened after that, the so-called “Free Family” and all that other stuff leading up to us sitting here that went on afterwards, also incorporated all of the nuances of Digger craziness and the paradigms of Free and all of that stuff, but it wasn’t being done by an organization that characterized itself loosely being the Diggers… The “Who’s in charge? You’re in charge” period, that was kind of over.
And part of the reason it was over is that by 1968, people were moving, families were coalescing, people were hooking up with women, children were starting to being born, things were changing. The Haight-Ashbury were filling up with people who had no ethical or spiritual or philosophical or intellectual goal or direction whatsoever. They were there because they had heard some music that appealed to them, they’d smoked a joint and decided to drop out and come to the Haight-Ashbury. And it turned into something that… Well. I never considered myself to be a “hippie.” I don’t think any of us did. The whole concept was kind of weird. “Hippie”: What is that? We were there because we wanted to kick off a revolution. That is what I wanted to do. I had come from a very bourgeois middle class background. I had seen a lot of things, I had kind of dropped the stuff away, and now a lot of things that I had thought about when I was younger coalesced into more cogent ideas that now had some semblance of a new radical political-economic-social paradigm.
So what we were doing really appealed to me, you know? In those days going to construction sites with Kent Minault and stealing construction material was perfectly okay. Today, I say to myself, Well it’s stealing. You can call it whatever you want. You can call it redistribution of wealth, you can give it all kinds of fancy names, but hey, guess what? You’re stealing. This all came back to haunt us [in the ’70s] when our children started shoplifting. You get a phone call, your five-year-old little girl has been shoplifting, she’s been caught. Then we’d go, Oh my god, of course she’s shoplifting. She learned this from us. So, when children get born, things change. Your perceptions of everything shifts toward the center a bit. But I digress.
Kent Minault (left) and on the other side of the glass, looking in, Emmett Grogan. Source unknown.
So, there was this meeting that took place. This would’ve been maybe 1968. I remember Bill was there. I remember that because I asked him to take me someplace on his bike afterwards and he did. Scared the shit out of me. Emmett was there. Emmett had started not to be around a lot, by now. He would go to New York, he would go to London, he was deeply into a heroin habit I think by then. He had a bike and he’d become very elusive, paranoid. He was living I believe with Joanie and Billy, the Batpeople, on Roosevelt Street, in the top apartment of the building that Pete Knell had rented. Pete was the president of the Angels in San Francisco. [Freewheelin] Frank Reynolds lived there also. I have photographs of him in that apartment, of Frank in that apartment. In that house, whatever it was. It’s all gone now. Upscale housing. Highest and best use they call it.
Emmett had made a suggestion. The meeting was about “what’s next…?” The suggestion that Emmett made, and there was this rivalry, I’m probably gonna get in trouble for saying this, but so what, there was a rivalry between Peter Berg and Emmett. That’s the fact. People can say I’m crazy, I don’t care what they say, I’m telling you there was a rivalry between them. It was a power thing. Who’s the smartest, the fastest, who can come up with the most out-there, relevant ideas. It wasn’t just about hanging out… we had a mission. A passion. Every piece of “Free News” that got published had a very specific message, you know, as to what it meant, and what it was supposed to be, and what its intended message was. Obviously it wasn’t news about what the mayor had done that morning. It was about doing your “own thing.” So, Emmett’s idea for the next shot was to do a free butcher shop. I don’t know what he was really thinking about, but this apparently was just an extension of the free store/free free free mentality. And I remember that this was knocked down at this meeting, and it seemed in my mind to create some bad feeling. That now it was not a “do your own thing” thing, it was people kind of lining up in different camps and there being people who wanted the appearance of being leaders and people who weren’t interested in being overtly leaders. To a large degree I think that was, in my mind, the last formal Digger function that took place, that meeting. Now, whatever we continued to do… the “liberation” of City Hall, etc. — that all seemed, to me, to have a different flavor or feel. But I remember that being the sense a lot of us had. Death of Hippie. Death of Digger.
I always perceived a bit of an egotistical power struggle that went on between some of these guys. It was irrelevant to me. It was something that I didn’t want to know anything about. It wasn’t nice, as far as I was concerned. After all, It was antithetical to what we were supposed to be doing. To who we were. And things like that come up all of the time. That stuff just comes up in people. Human nature?
The other people I remember from that time… Kent [Minault] was so much fun to run and do shit with, it was just always hysterical to be with Kent. Vinnie [Rinaldi] was another friend whose lifestyle and often inverted thinking influenced me greatly. Brooks [Butcher] was a sad case. I didn’t know him that well, but he was a sad case. Obviously, I was close friends with Freeman and David and Jane and the Bergs and all of these people. We were all around and we lived with each other, on top of each other, whatever. And Phyllis, Julie [Boone] and Natural Suzanne [aka Siena Riffia]—she was no longer with Emmett by now, that was over, and lots of other people. Our extended family eventually began to morph into almost a biological family.
Ron Thelin and Freeman House in discussion, circa 1968. Photo by Chuck Gould.
What about Bill Murcott?
Oh yeah. I loved Billy Murcott. Still do. He left San Francisco and went back east. I think I got to know him better years later. He was really the main architect of the politics of “Free” I think. Mostly in retrospect. His social, economic and political insights were profound and right on. Why he left and went back to New York is still not clear to me but I think it had something to do with his sense that things were swinging away from the early vision. Maybe. Just my take. Ya gotta ask him. Not that he’ll talk about it a lot.
Siena [aka Natural Suzanne] says Emmett worshipped Billy.
Yes. They were friends from New York, and I don’t know if they came out together and all that stuff, because remember, I arrived let’s say end of ’66/beginning of ’67, this was rolling by then. So I walked into the middle of something that was already happening. I don’t know about Phyllis’s connection to those guys from before, I have no idea. I know she was in some way connected to Nina, or maybe to Julie? Julie Boone.. Julie was really central to all this. She was a very close friend of Nina and Phyllis’s. And my lady friend. I adored her but didn’t treat her right. Too much male macho stuff. One of my regrets.
Who were Bill and Ann Lindyn?
Bill and Ann were Mime Troupe folks who developed a medieval style or Dell’arte, Punch and Judy show. They created a moveable theater, the Free City Puppets, and would pop up around town and preform puppet shows, the content of which embodied progressive and Digger thinking. And it was hilarious. The kids really loved it and got what they were getting at. Destiny [Gould] and I lived with them off and on and played in the shows with them. I remember being cast as the puppet called “The Judge.” A hated character whose only lines were: “guilty, guilty, guilty. Death!” Then the audience would boo me and throw shit at me. I was so happy!
Ann and Bill Lindyn at work with the Free City Puppets. Photo by Chuck Gould
I didn’t like Brautigan. I never considered him to be a hippie or anything. I thought he was a bad poet. That’s all I know about Richard Brautigan. I didn’t care for his style. I thought it was bullshit with the hats and scarves. I thought he was something of a weird guy and using us.
What can I tell you about Kirby? I guess I really met Kirby through the poets, or through Billy Batman, who was a painter, not a poet. Again, Batman is one of the guys who go back to this scene in North Beach in the late ‘50s. I met Kirby in the City, he was very much into amphetamines. He was kind of a wild flamboyant guy. He eventually ended up living in Forest Knolls with his girlfriend and they had a child together whose name was California. Kirby died in Yerba Buena hospital, I went up to see him right before he died. Kirby was a wild guy. An out-of-control kind of guy. He was not involved, per se, in any of what was going on. He did some things that were published in the Digger Papers. Kirby was influential in the way that all the poets were, as Gregory was, and Lenore, and Lew Welch, but then Lew disappeared. Suicide. Gary [Snyder] was in and out. And Diane di Prima of course. We spent a lot of time at her house. I remember being at her house on Oak Street, right on top of the Panhandle. She, and Alan Marlowe, There was a whole poetry scene there, and we would go there and eat. And take acid on the full moon. We’d eat anywhere we could.
I think that Kirby’s and the poets’ influence or role was one of idea incubation. Oh, they would come to City Hall steps and read poetry. But you wouldn’t catch them going out on food runs. Or doing any of those other things—these shots, these bits. They weren’t really involved in stuff like that. Lenore was, in the beginning. But then Lenore kind of withdrew. When Bill got involved with the [Hell’s Angels] club, Lenore withdrew to a large degree from a lot of these activities, although their house on Chestnut Street was still a center—but only while Bill was prospecting the club. Then they kind of disappeared from the scene, which was really sad—a lot of people felt badly about that, that we’d lost Bill to the Angels. We saw that was not gonna be such a good thing for him. Which it was not.
Bill Fritsch and Lenore Kandel, date, location and source unknown.
How much of a connection is there between Altamont, the Hell’s Angels and the Diggers?
I don’t think there was any direct connection between Altamont and the Diggers. I know Emmett was there… but Altamont was something that unfortunately, I think, was a turning point historically, at least in terms of the American public’s perception of what was going on with the alternative community—that it was violent, drug-ridden, all of that stuff. I did not go to Altamont. I remember being in an apartment, it may have been the Bergs’ apartment, the morning that it went down and hearing about these things. I don’t know if Emmett and those guys were there, maybe they were. I know Billy [Fritsch] was there, because he was in the club by then. You see him in the films of that so called concert.
Anyway, Altamont was nothing that would have had any direct relationship to what we were doing. I mean, theoretically, and at its most pristine incarnation, the Digger vision, if you could even characterize it as such a thing, was really an attempt to evolve alternative social, political and economic paradigms. Which ultimately led to a sense that we were anarchists because there wasn’t any extant system that we could relate to. Ultimately that level of anarchy really puts you in free-fall in many ways, including emotionally. It leads to no good. You can understand the connection. It’s like too much of a good thing. Like drugs or sex.
You think it was bound to fail because of that?
No, I never said it was bound to fail, and I don’t think it was intended to succeed, or not succeed. It wasn’t that kind of thing. It was meant to be kind of an ‘Invisible Circus’ kind of thing.
Did you attend that?
Yes. I remember mostly that there were a lot of bizarre and grotesque and wonderful things going on—people having sex in the church, all this other stuff, a lot of crazy shit was going on. You know, you go there, you take acid, you drink wine, you smoke weed, the music, the lights… Who can remember this stuff, right? Who can remember?
Anyway. I don’t want to sound like I’m slandering anybody. The truth is, people talk a lot about all these things that were done, like the food trip or free stores but the real work or “do” of it got done by people other than the people who may have come up with the ideas. Kinda weird but it reflected a growing hierarchy which again was antithetical to so-called fundamental Digger thinking. You know: Who is in charge? You. No one.
Digger, the head Digger mechanic, circa 1968. Photo by Chuck Gould.
Did you know Chester Anderson?
Didn’t know him that well, didn’t know the Communication Company that well. Knew Claude [Haywood] and H’lane, but not well either. They were not directly involved with us. They didn’t live with us. Chester was an inspiration for me. His early writing was kinda profound.
How important was LSD?
In my opinion, it was huge. It was almost everything. There’s a lot of people who denied it for a long time because to acknowledge it would be kind of demeaning. But for me, myself? Those experiences were the experiences that broke the old mold, destroyed old conditions and then there was just a universe of endless possibilities. And in that context, one was able to see what was missing, what was beautiful, what wasn’t beautiful, and begin to, in this totally new world, where anything goes, one was able to begin to develop reasonable new paradigms.
The other stimulant, in addition to acid and other drugs and our social experiments was the configuration of the universe at the moment in time, which included not just the configuration of the stars, but also the war, and the Kennedy assassinations that had been taking place. And all of the stuff going on. The nascent woman’s movement. The gay liberation. The African-American unrest that was beginning to be really well articulated with all the people that were involved in that movement. All of those things going on—and the one magic ingredient: YOUTH. Youth was huge. This is the kind of thing that never would have happened in a population of 50-year-olds. This had to happen with people under 30. I mean, there was the classic slogan: Never trust anybody over 30. Who said that? Abbie Hoffman? [It was actually a student activist named Jack Weinberg.] Then he turned 30. [laughs] Now what are you gonna do?
Youth, alternative lifestyle and drugs were gigantic. It’s not the only thing that mattered—obviously we were surrounded by fantastically talented artists and poets and musicians. I just think that there are times when there is a confluence of events and social and celestial influences that lead to these extraordinary changes, and this was one of them. To many people, the changes that took place, they’re not even aware of them. I mean, for me, these changes [definitely] took place, right? For my parents, the changes didn’t take place. But I maintain that if one looks around our world today, you will see everywhere the influence of those times. You will see those ideas being articulated and made manifest all around us, be it the women’s movement or progressive black politics or even environmental issues, which certainly sprung out of back-to-the-landers.
Back-to-the-lander came about as a result, in my opinion, of psychedelic drugs, which made it almost impossible to live in the cities. I used to say that a time came when the dogshit started to glow on the street for me. The moment I said, Oh the dogshits are glowing, it was time to get out of the city. I used that as my own personal thing. And we left the city. Peter Coyote had moved to Olema to recover from hepatitis. He was staying there with two Grateful Dead groupies whose name were Spider and Slade, and they had rented this dump ranch at this beautiful place in Olema. West Marin. Kind of close to Bolinas, Point Reyes Station, Marin, the San Geronimo Valley. It’s all right in that same part of the world. He and I lived there, and then the groupies left, and he stayed, and a lot of people coalesced there. A lot of people coalesced around Ron Thelin’s house, which was in Forest Knolls, which is where you will find Marsha Thelin and her family to this day. Going to visit her is a sure enough time machine.
No glowing dogshits here: Chuck Gould, somewhere outside San Francisco, circa 1968.
So yes, LSD was very important, youth was hugely important, this particular moment in time was important—of course everything is always predicated on those kinds of things, I believe.
The Digger thing was kind of unique in that we didn’t consider ourselves to be “hippies,” at all. In fact, it was, to me, an affront. We considered ourselves to be social, political and economic anarchists. We could see that we were “leaders,” if you will, by example. Because there wasn’t anybody who said, “This is what we do today.” It was just leading by example in the community. A lot of the things that we tried to instill in other people never happened. A huge but informative disappointment. It was a very short-lived run — a couple of extraordinary years. I mean, it wasn’t officially anything. You know all the clichés: people coming into free stores and saying, Who’s in charge, and being told they were, and people stealing stuff in free stores. But if you looked closely you could see the seeds of change like diamonds in the sand.
The Diggers had friends in the Grateful Dead. What do you remember about that connection?
I went to New York on a couple different drug deals to raise money for what we were doing. I took the draft text of the Diggers Papers to the Realist office, and had been given by [Grateful Dead co-manager] Danny Rifkin a shoebox full of STP, whatever that was, to sell in New York, where I had some contacts. You want the details? I haven’t got any details for you. I remember going to the Realist office, I remember having the STP, I know it came from Danny, through the Dead. Danny was one of the few in the Dead family that we had anything really tight with. Jerry [Garcia] was a good guy. Pigpen was a good guy. The rest of them were into show business, money and all that. Well, that’s what I saw. But I was a snob of sorts, I guess. Too judgmental.
The Grateful Dead lived across the street from one of the houses we lived in, from Paula McCoy on Ashbury Street. Paula had been married to a guy whose name was Don McCoy who had actually brought a guru over from India, and he was living in Olompali.
Paula McCoy at her Ashbury Street house circa 1967. Photo by Chuck Gould.
Danny had rented the house across the street, and needed roommates. The roommates showed up in the form of the Warlocks. And they moved in. That’s how I met them. I don’t know what Danny’s connection [to the Diggers] would have been prior to that. Maybe through Artists Liberation, I don’t know. That’s kind of how I met Danny: on the street, playing softball. Some people that lived on the street didn’t like this, but we played anyway. I remember that house. That house had the original gas jets still in the wall. Without the globes on the things, still in the wall. So that’s how we met Danny: getting high on the stoops. In those years in our community everyone knew everyone.
The Dead was one of the bands that we could count on to be supportive of our activities and come and play for us if necessary. The Jefferson Airplane? Not a fuckin’ prayer. Those people were living on the other side of the park. I can show you the house they lived in, with long columns on it. They were living in a different world. And there were some bands that would play with us and some that wouldn’t. Janis [Joplin] was very much a player until she got to be really a superstar. Albert Grossman and people like that hung around at Paula McCoy’s house; those guys were always around because of the rock scene.
The rock scene I think was very appealing to people like Emmett and so forth because there was a lot of money and flash and notoriety and that kind of stuff.
I barely knew him. I had taken plenty of his product, but I didn’t really personally know him. I knew who he was, in the way I knew Allen Cohen from the Oracle and guys like that. People were just around. It was a relatively small community… until 1968 or so when suddenly there were tour buses on the street, and it got weird, you know? It became, What’s going on here? Because remember, what you see on Haight Street today is bizarre. None of this was here. None of it. That was a bank. This was a delicatessen, this was a shoe store. It was a neighborhood. That’s what it was. It was a western extension of the Fillmore. That’s what it was. That’s what the Haight-Ashbury really is. There was no such place. The term ‘Haight-Ashbury,’ like the term ‘hippie,’ was coined by [San Francisco columnist] Herb Caen. He actually made those terms up….
It was very transformative times. I can only speak for myself and for the people I was close to. We were transformed. Peter [Berg] and Judy [Goldhaft] said to me a couple months ago, we were having dinner, and they said something about, ‘the Diggers ruined us.’ And I knew exactly what they meant. They meant, it’s a slippery slope. Our lives and thinking were changed forever.
Look, I went on, because I had to raise my daughter, I went on and I got a job, working for a guy who was drilling gas wells in West Virginia. Now, I’m in the oil business, he’s paying me $3 an hour. I’m raising a child as a single parent. Well then, my life went on from there. But certain things don’t change. Your perceptions become transformed and altered. Things changed forever. You can’t go back. There’s no going back. The forms may change, if you know what I mean by ‘the forms.’ My form is very different from David [Simpson] and Jane [Lapiner]’s forms. But David is one of my closest friends in the world. And yet our forms are completely different. But the substrate of our thought processes are “Digger times”-inspired.
But it is this underlying perception of “how things are”—”paradigm” is the right word, that’s what it means—that was to a very large degree shaped by our experiences on the street. The way in which these things happened. I maintain that we became who we were not just because of the moment in time, although I think that’s always true, but because of drugs and our youth and because of our shared experiences. [When] you go to the San Francisco produce market to get food to give away, right, and you meet the working guys on the dock there, and you SEE what kind of good guys they really are, and then you see the kind of SURPLUS there is in America, and how cavalierly it’s treated…. This kind of thing. Then you also see the fact that the people that you’re trying to help, not just by giving them a meal, but also by transmitting this wisdom, and they just don’t get it. Or they don’t want to get it. This changes who you are. All these things lead you to a common experience with other people similarly situated and it become almost a cult. There are things known just to us [Diggers], by virtue of our shared experiences. ‘Cult’ is too strong a word, but you understand what I mean. You become a very, very tight, extended family. It becomes almost genetic. Our kids get it. Born that way. Go figure.
Emmett didn’t stay in the family. He had to deal with the post-Diggers fallout/comedown all on his own. He was obviously in pain. There’s an interview in the early ’70s where he says, ‘We showed them how to do it and they didn’t want it. So fuck them.’
This was painful. Cleaning up after a big event in the park, filling bags full of garbage because the people who came to the event didn’t bother to pick up their own cigarette shit? What is this? Don’t you guys get it?!? Hello? They didn’t get it. A lot of them didn’t get it. Many people did. But a lot didn’t. The appearance was, a lot didn’t get it. So I mean I shared Emmett’s feeling of angst and disappointment about these things. But it did help clarify, inform and ultimately substantiate our Diggerly instincts. But it hurt.
Emmett was a very complicated person. He was a strange guy. After Siena, I don’t remember Emmett being in a relationship with a woman per se. Not that I was aware of. Well, Paula I think. Emmett never lived with us. He always had his own place. Junkies are tricky people to love.
Everybody felt a certain amount of pathos about him because he kind of got away from us. Whether he got away because of something we did, or he got away because he’d lost faith in what was happening, or he got away because he got too deep into drugs, or whatever it was, we kinda lost him the way we lost Billy Fritsch. I personally felt badly. I missed having Fritsch around. It was exciting being around the Angels up until a point in time when it kind of turned on us. And that really was an event, a very specific event where the Angels had made a conscious decision that this was it. In Olema. Like love between a way young girl and an older guy: it has to end at some point. That was the end of the relationship.
That was sort of the terrible bookend to the beautiful beginning, to that Diggers-led march to the police station to free…
Chocolate George. Exactly. The Angels liked us. The Black Panthers liked us. Kathleen Cleaver once fed me lunch with somebody else because we were involved in the Black Man’s Free Store, which was being put together. Those people liked us. I enjoyed being around Black Panthers, to the degree that we were; much less so around them than we were around Angels. I liked being around the Angels, it was dangerous, exciting. Who am I? Middle-class Jewish kid from Great Neck, hanging around with these guys?!? Killers. Criminals. But they were wonderful. We loved them. Admired them. These guys, you know they would have machine guns and Nazi flags on their walls as art. [laughs] I have pictures of that stuff, I can show you pictures of the insides of Pete Knell’s apartment. I learned about respect, loyalty and bravery from them.
Hell’s Angels wall art, 1968. Photo by Chuck Gould.
I had to be careful of what I photographed. Like I knew Emmett didn’t want to be photographed. He didn’t want it. So I didn’t take pictures of him. You had to ask first. Respect.
How do you square that with, as you put it, his quest for notoriety?
Whether he really was paranoid or whether it was true, he had this thing that we were all on FBI lists and so forth. We were a danger to the establishment. I’ll tell you a story. I was living in Aspen, Colorado, where David and Jane and everybody used to come and live with us—outside of Aspen, Colorado in a place called Conundrum Creek, WAY in left field, man. Fucking way deep left field. One day there’s a knock on the door. Out there nobody knocks on your door unless it’s a squirrel. It’s not a neighborhood. And there’s two guys outside, wearing suits. They introduce themselves and flash their IDs, we’re the FBI, would I mind looking at some photographs and tell them if I recognized anybody. I said certainly. I knew immediately who they were looking for. I go through the pictures, I go right past Anna’s photograph, keep on going. She had been a Weatherperson, and had been implicated in the bombing of some bank in San Francisco. And I went right past her picture and said, Nope, don’t recognize anybody! Well thank you very much, they said They were doing their job, they checked it off, now they were going to lunch. Bureaucrats, that’s who they really are. That’s the FBI—people think they’re cops? They’re really bureaucrats. But dangerous depending on where you stand. Emmett liked the idea of being an outlaw. It appealed to his sense of theater and to his ego. He was a conflicted guy.
This harassment and surveillance was constantly going on. There would be cars that would slide around in front of the houses we were living in, with two guys in the front, and a little antenna on the back. Who do you think they were?
There was all this paranoia about subversives in America and all this stuff. These were strange times. It was hard to live in those times, and believe in anything except ourselves because our culture obviously was a sham. Right? We had learned that from our own activities, and from drugs, and from other things. Our political systems, even the radical political systems that many people had espoused—the Marxists, the Trotskyites, all the other fancy guys who were out there—that was all proven to be mostly untenable nonsense.
It was a paranoid time. Y’know? Our heroes being killed. The Kennedy brothers: heroes, killed. Martin Luther King: hero, killed. All these guys. What the fuck is going on here? When they killed Martin Luther King, I then became sure that there was CLEARLY a conspiracy and to this day I think there was, to kill these people. I don’t doubt it for a fucking minute. I don’t doubt it for a minute and I think it was an inside conspiracy or ruling class struggle that did involve Hoover, and all of those stories that have come up again and again, I believe they’re true.
Anyway, be that as it may, our family was a mechanism that helped insulate you from the outside. And as the Digger thing progressed and then went on, this Free Family notion became permanent. I mean, my best friends today are still those same people that I ran with in my twenties.The same people. David and Jane, Freeman and Peter and the Bergs and Nina and Vinnie and Kent and our children. Our children all got raised together. I always say they were “snot bonded.” It’s actually morphed into a biological family of friends, a tribe. It’s wonderful and amazing.
Judy Goldhaft holding Ocean, Destiny Gould holding Solange, and Peter Berg. Aspen, circa 1970. Photo by Chuck Gould.
The Diggers weren’t conventional activists, pleading their case in protests and such.
We weren’t talking, we were doing. The Do was the thing. Life acting, Berg called it. And it was. And it changed you. Practice. Like working on music or meditation.
And when it was talk, it was beautiful talk—because it’s poets and playwrights and theater actors talking.
Yeah. Well I’ll tell you that I certainly was not one of the real talented, verbose people. But you had people like Freeman: incredibly articulate. You have Peter Berg: incredibly brilliant. David Simpson and Kent Minault, Emmett, Lenore and Claude… all these people—articulate, charismatic, perceptive people. I think that talk/think was an influence on what happened. Unfortunately, we wanted to see a complete revolution, if you will, a transformation, and of course that may have just been our youthful naivete. Who knows what it was. But it was fantastic and beautiful and true and nothing was ever the same after those times.
They were wonderful, wonderful, magical times. It was incredible fun. It was incredibly empowering. I would submit to you, from my point of view again, I was really “born” during that time. I became the person to a large degree that I am now. I came out of a shell that I was in. I was raised in a very close-knit middle class American Jewish family in an affluent community. I had never been around a lot of the things… Billy Fritsch had been a longshoreman; what did I know about stuff like that?
Chuck Gould (bottom) checks out the Diggers/Free City scene at the City Hall steps, 1968. Still from Nowsreal, courtesy diggers.org
How did your family back home understand what you were doing?
Had no clue. Had absolutely no clue. In fact by then I didn’t feel alienated from them but they weren’t really dealing with me anymore. I was supposed to have gone to medical school, blah blah blah. I’d dropped out and disappeared off the face of the earth. For me the realization of that alienation took place when I made a collect phone call home and my father refused the charges. That to me was the A-HA! moment. [laughs] Things have changed. You’ve arrived, you’re on your own now, son. Congratulations, you’ve grown up. That was a biggie. And a little scary at first. Change is scary, right.
How did you avoid the draft?
Not easily. I had a mild case of polio when I was a little boy and I’m deaf in my right ear as a result. I was called to an induction center in Denver, Colorado. I was in Aspen at that moment. They called me and I went to this awful place swarming with soon to be in body bags kids like me and I got a 1-Y deferral because of the deafness in my ear, which stood for one-year deferral, literally. And I was told that in May of the next year they were changing the rules because they needed the men and anybody who could hear in one ear would be inducted. The army guy said to me, “We’ll see you next year.” And I said to myself, You ain’t seeing me ever again, preparing to do whatever I had to do. I wasn’t going to Vietnam, that’s for sure. And, I never heard from them again. Don’t know why. Don’t care why. “Why” gets you the boobie prize; what so is what’s real.
Diggers did events but not protests, not demonstrations per se.
By 1967 or 8, I was realizing that all of these anti-war demonstrations were counterproductive because the media, and the government, would use those events to create a picture of what was going on that was not true. Sound bites. Selective editing of footage. That kind of thing. I also thought that what people were demanding were irrelevancies anyway. That a lot of it was the old stuff.
We were trying to empower people with their innate own power. Although we might not have articulated it precisely that way, but I mean, you go down the street on the back of a Hell’s Angel motorcycle, throwing dimes at people, handfuls of dimes in the air: this has an impact on people. It does, you know it does. You can get up and have a rally against money but probably everything you hear will be the wrong message. ‘Well, they’ve got too much money, we want some of their money.” This would be the message. Our message would be, We don’t want any of that shit at all. No one should have any money anyway! It’s the wrong medium of exchange. But free money? That had power. That said everything you needed to know about money in a corrupt society.
Bill Fritsch tossing coins to the general public from aboard his motorcycle. Still from Nowsreal, courtesy diggers.org
So our thing was a very different than what the mainstream lefty community was dealing with. It didn’t put us at odds with mostly everyone else. For instance. The Yippie thing that Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were doing was laughed at by the Diggers because it seemed to be so inappropriate and so silly and such a pandering to fame and the national press and so forth. And it was inherently inside the very system they were supposedly against. A contradiction. Now, there may have been some Digger ego involved—there’s always ego involved—I’ve been studying Buddhism for ten years and you just don’t get away from the ego… There may have been some ego involved. Them/Us. But we weren’t really trying to influence anybody, it wasn’t that way, although, yes, there may have been some people that were into that sort of thing. Ego.
Diggers burned money in public. That is so intense.
It was a thing. People were always burning their draft cards, burning five-dollar bills. Burning draft cards was powerful also because it was an absolute Fuck You to the authority. And this was done in public, with news cameras running, by people who could have cared less. This was ASTOUNDING to people who were not as far-out and changed as we were, as far gone as we were. To see someone having that level of audacity! The government issued you that card? How can you burn it? People would look at them like, You must be kidding.
We did lots of things like that. Playing movies on the walls of buildings in the Haight-Ashbury. Free stores. Unheard of! These were huge events. Transformative. I can tell you stories about Kent Minault and I going and stealing concrete to build a free bakery, and getting back to the Red House in Forest Knolls and discovering that in the dark we had stolen 50-pound bags of sand. Oh! Offloading the sand, and going back at dawn and stealing the concrete! Those stories we can tell you, they’re endless. But what was really going on there, you know? What was behind all this stuff? What was this “free” thing? What was this notion that everything was intrinsically free? That began to kind of have inherent problems as events progressed. When you live communally, you very quickly see those things. You get somebody who has a totally inappropriate notion with respect to ‘free’ and thinks that your kid and your wife and your truck or bed, well it’s all free. Well excuse me but that’s not exactly what we meant. And then you have these problems with people who don’t get it, or who get it imperfectly, that kind of thing. It created a subtle tension.
I now feel that the people most influenced by Diggers activities were ourselves and to a lesser degree the people that were around us. I mean, I know we influenced people who we didn’t know, but I don’t know who they were, where they went and what happened to them. It’s a pebbles thrown into a pond kinda effect.
Free food: there’s something incredibly powerful about feeding other people. Both the person feeding and the person being fed. The Giver, The Receiver and The Gift. There is this extraordinary union that takes place—especially when the food is free, and there’s no consideration being offered or asked for, or anything like that. It is simply a gratuitous feeding of one’s self, if you will, where it begins to really break down the distinction between self and other. Thou Art That. Hindu expression.
Partaking at the Diggers’ 4pm daily free food event in the Panhandle. Photo by Jim Marshall.
Even between family and non-family…
Right. All those distinctions start to fade away and THAT was really what we were looking for. I mean, it’s kind of a Buddhist concept: no self and other distinctions. No duality. If you wanna talk about duality, then self and other is an articulation of duality. And those things start to break down just by virtue of what you’re doing. You don’t necessarily know that it’s a Buddhist concept, or it’s called ‘duality’ or whatever it’s called, but suddenly you’re in this new world. The light is kind of pink, and the music… Something sweet happens. Its real freedom. It’s transformative, and as I find with seated meditation, sometimes you sit and meditate and nothing happens. But later, something happens, and you go, Oh I attribute that to this. This realization I’m having, or insight, I know is related to my sitting. Those kinds of things are similar to Diggerly Do’s.
I’m glad I did it. It was really the best of times. Period. The worst of times was all outside. And because, once again, it was the outside times that helped instigate, stimulate and formulate what happened. You can’t point to any one thing in my opinion and say, This is why it happened. It was all of these brilliant people. It was the influence of the artists and the poets that were so near and dear and who articulated what was going on. It was the evolution from beatniks to hippies to back-to-landers to environmentalists to who knows what happens next.
It was just us being part of the whole wave of the times, of history, of the new dialectic perhaps that leads us to the next present moment. And the next present moment. And, the next present moment after that. The Diggers were a vehicle. An ideal, if you will. No one knew where it would lead us but we were all-in and all aboard.