• Studs Lonigan: Looking Back Into My Future

    Studs Lonigan: Looking Back Into My Future

    In the course of a search for Patrick Hamilton’s The Gorse Trilogy, I wandered into bookshops new and old across...
  • Winter 2012

    Winter 2012

    It’s been months, has it?  Well, I guess it has, and while I feel guilty for having let this splendid...
  • Spy Rock Memories, Part 11

    Spy Rock Memories, Part 11

    Udo died in the autumn of 1991.  He’d been driving alone late at night, so no one ever knew exactly...

Studs Lonigan: Looking Back Into My Future

Studs Lonigan: Looking Back Into My Future

In the course of a search for Patrick Hamilton’s The Gorse Trilogy, I wandered into bookshops new and old across several miles of San Francisco, uncovering little more than blank stares and frustration.  I was all the more exasperated because I had already acquired, thanks to Aaron Cometbus, the middle volume of the trilogy, had read halfway through it with a gusto and élan few things in life remain capable of eliciting in me, only to set it down at San Francisco Airport coffee counter and walk off without it.

My quest took me on a meandering route from North Beach to the Mission.  It was an unnaturally warm and sunny day not long before Christmas, but by the time I passed the once-hellish, now pleasantly re-imagined Valencia Gardens project, the sun had slipped behind Twin Peaks and a wintry chill intruded into what had been a benign breeze.

It was time to duck into La Cumbre for a warming burrito, but as I crossed 16th Street, I noticed a sign that read “Used Books.”  Not just a sign, I reasoned; it had to be a sign.  A bookstore suddenly appears on a block I’ve walked down a thousand times over the past several decades?  Advertising that it specializes in “hard-to-find” and “out-of-print” volumes?  What could this mean but that my hunt was about to have a happy ending?

I walked in and instead of heading straight for the shelves, asked the proprietor how long the shop had been there.

“22 years.  People are always saying they never noticed us before.”

All those walks from the 16th Street BART to La Cumbre, the hours spent staring out the front window of Pancho Villa, long-ago trips to Epicenter and Blacklist Mail Order, and Forest Books had managed to remain invisible to me for over two decades?  I wondered if I was dealing with some ephemeral presence along the lines of Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley.

Which made it all the more plausible that they would have the book I’d been searching for, but no, as it happened; he’d heard of Patrick Hamilton, sort of, but wasn’t really familiar with his work.  Resigning myself to finding the Hamilton book next time I was in England, I decided to take a quick spin through the aisles to see if they had anything else of interest.  I hadn’t made it ten steps before spotting a hardbound copy of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy, and decided instantly that I had to have it.  I bounded up to the counter, almost as if I were afraid someone or something might snatch it away from me before I could pay for it.

The proprietor gave me an odd glance, followed by, “Whoa, how do you even know about this book?  You’re not old enough.”

Perhaps he flatters all his customers that way – I guessed he and I were about the same age – but as it happened, I not only knew the book, but had read it as a young teenager, some 50 years ago.  My first copy of Studs Lonigan had been a paperback, sold for 35 cents – now that I think about it, I almost certainly stole it; that’s how I rolled in those days – on one of those revolving racks you saw in every drugstore.

I’d never heard of the book before, but the cover showed a kid about my age, dressed up like a tough guy, his hair slicked up and back, hanging out on a street corner in a manner clearly meant to annoy the bourgeoisie.  I tore through those pages with a fervor others reserved for religious texts.  The author might have intended it as a cautionary tale for aspiring hoodlums, but I read it as a design and ideal for living.

It was a long book, the longest I’d ever read at that age, and for the first couple hundred pages, the life of young Lonigan was filled with exactly the sort of mischief and thrills I was looking to add to my own.  Opening on a warm evening in 1916 as Studs (“that dreadful name,” according to his mother, one of the few who insisted on calling him William or Bill) is graduating from eighth grade, it follows him through a dreamlike summer of roistering and rollicking with his gang on the streets of Chicago’s South Side.  I began reading it in 1961 as my eighth grade graduation gave way to a very similar summer on the streets of Downriver Detroit.

Studs and I were Catholic boys graduating from Catholic schools, retaining a visceral loyalty to the Church while ignoring or flouting nearly all its precepts.  Our gangs were made up of the children or grandchildren of immigrants, predominantly Irish, riven straight through by the Catholic obsession with guilt, suffering and doom.  We sinned repeatedly, felt terrible about it, and took it as given that we would pay harshly for our transgressions in the end.  An end, we assumed, which would probably not be long in coming.

Half a century later, re-reading Studs Lonigan as avidly as I had the first time, I was surprised – not just surprised, shocked – to see how closely his exploits and misadventures had mirrored and prefigured my own.  The initial intoxication of running wild in the streets gave way to the boredom and monotony of day after day and night after night in front of the pool hall or drugstore.  We groused that there was nothing to do but bragged that at least we weren’t like the punks and cake-eaters who scurried home after dark and tried to live up to the expectations of nuns and parents.

Some of the guys dropped out – waylaid by after-school jobs or girlfriends –to be replaced by more serious criminals and nutcases.  By the time I was 15 I was carrying a pistol and had earned the nickname “Drunk.”  Considering the drinking habits of the gang that gave it to me, I took it as one of my proudest accomplishments.

At 17 I’d graduated from the drugstore to a pool hall identical to the one Studs frequented toward the end of World War I, right down to the perennial poker game sequestered in the back room and the shady characters lurking around out front trying to sell boosted auto parts at pennies on the dollar.  I’d begun to pride myself at climbing – in retrospect, of course, it was more like descending – the criminal ladder faster than Studs had, but then I wasn’t as burdened by conscience as he’d been.

It might have taken me a year or two to finish the Studs Lonigan trilogy the first time, because after a whiz-bang beginning, Studs’ life began deteriorating so badly that it was painful to read about.  Not just because I’d come to care about him, but because I’d made his existence such a template for my own.

The fights, the hangovers, the arrests, the tentative attempts at love and the blithe, inevitable rejections; eventually it became difficult to tell where his life left off and mine began.  Re-reading it in 2012, I’m struck not only by how clearly I remember nearly every scene and bit of dialogue – I’m normally the kind of guy who can’t tell you what a movie or a book was about 20 minutes after I’ve finished it – but also how I could no longer be certain which of my memories came from my own life and which from his.

Long before I’d heard of Oscar Wilde, I was a dutiful subscriber to Miss Prism’s dictum, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily.  That is what fiction means.”  So I wasn’t surprised when Studs ended unhappily, even though, in the final analysis, he wasn’t that bad at all, just foolish, stubborn, and proud.

All qualities I possessed in spades.  And by most standards, I was worse than Studs, with fewer redeeming qualities.  Yet for some reason, I haven’t ended unhappily – at least not yet – despite having spent the greater part of my life anticipating such an outcome.  As Studs himself might have observed, “Geez, it just ain’t fair how things work out sometimes.”

Winter 2012

Winter 2012

It’s been months, has it?  Well, I guess it has, and while I feel guilty for having let this splendid forum remain blank all this time (and for months before that using it for little more than posting installments of Spy Rock Memories), I have actually been fairly busy.

In fact, when I complained to a good friend who often acts as an unpaid adviser that I was feeling overwhelmed with all the responsibilities and challenges – not to mention deadlines – staring me in the face, he said, “Hang on a minute, isn’t all of this stuff exactly what you’ve been saying you wanted to do for the past several years?”

Which, of course, was completely true, so that was enough to stop me complaining, at least to other people (I can still occasionally be heard muttering to myself, but then I’ve been doing that for years, regardless of whether things were awesome or abysmal).

However, as of late it almost feels like everything is coming up Livermore (with a couple exceptions that are too inconsequential and/or hopeless to bother mentioning here). First off, though I believe I’ve mentioned it here before, it’s now official: Spy Rock Memories is coming out as a book, in both printed and digital form.  The precise publication date hasn’t been set yet, but it looks to be sometime this spring, and once the book is out, I expect to be setting out for several months of traveling to various bookshops and cultural centers around this great land to promote it.  No definite schedules yet, but I especially look forward to visiting as many towns as possible around the Emerald Triangle and in Northern California.  Anyone who has suggestions for bookstores or other worthwhile venues is welcome to get in touch.

Almost simultaneously, the songs of my old band, the Lookouts, almost all of which have been out of print for 20 years or more, are being reissued, on a double LP as well as digitally.  One of the records will be the original Spy Rock Road, which we released in 1989, and the other will contain our 7″ and compilation tracks, which adds up to another 13 songs.  Tentative title for the package is Spy Rock Road and Other Stories.  We’ve been urged to re-unite for a show or two to help properly launch the record, but as usual, our drummer finds himself very busy with his new band (the one he joined in 1990), so the likelihood of that happening any time soon remains in doubt.

Cover to the original Spy Rock Road album; the re-release will contain a second record and 13 additional songs.

Right about the time the decision was reached to bring the written and musical versions of Spy Rock to the world at large, I received a call from Billie Joe Armstrong, who asked if I’d be interested in putting together a compilation of my favorite punk rock and pop-punk bands for his Adeline Records label, and though my initial reaction was, “Oh no, how am I supposed to find time to do that, too?” it was too exciting an offer to refuse, so I said yes, and it turned out – thanks to modern technology, much of which didn’t exist when I was last putting out records – that within a couple months I had not only rounded up 16 outstanding bands, but also got them into the studio, and bingo, just like that, we have a compilation: The Thing That Ate Larry Livermore.  Old-timers among you will of course recognize the allusion to the 1988 Lookout Records classic compilation, The Thing That Ate Floyd.

Patrick Hynes artwork for the new compilation.

Hoping to remain true to that spirit, I recruited my old Lookout Records (and Potatomen bandmate) Patrick Hynes to do the cover artwork, and while it’s true we recycled the concept from an old issue of Lookout magazine, I think it came out fantastic, and am looking forward any day now to see the back cover, which is likely to be equally amazing.  Release date is also sometime this spring; in fact we’re shooting for early April right now.  I’ve posted the names of the bands elsewhere, but what the heck, I might as well do it again: Dear Landlord, Mixtapes, Lipstick Homicide, Dopamines, House Boat, Vacation, The Max Levine Ensemble, Emily’s Army, Mean Jeans, The Hextalls, Weekend Dads, City Mouse, Be My Doppelganger, Night Birds, The Copyrights, The Visitors.  Quite a list, wouldn’t you agree?  Unless, of course, you don’t follow this particular style of music, in which case you’re probably reading off the names with a glassy-eyed stare as you wonder what if anything it all means.

Had a bad dream this morning just before I woke up – well, maybe not a *bad* dream, but definitely a disturbing one.  For some reason I was driving through Mexico and while attempting to back out of a parking lot, inadvertently knocked another car over the edge of a small cliff.  Yeah, surprised me, too, because I barely touched it.  But instead of stopping to deal with the situation, I panicked and took off, and the rest of the dream consisted of a series of buses and bus stations (don’t know what happened to my car) where whichever way I traveled, it was the wrong way, and the authorities were inexorably closing in on me to lock me away in a Mexican jail cell for the rest of my natural, etc.  Thankfully I woke up before things got any worse, but it was still troubling.  I don’t often have dreams like that anymore, although when I was young I had them all the time.  Hopefully this means I have mended my ways since then, or at least have less of a guilty conscience.  And just in case you’re wondering, no, I haven’t, as far as I can remember, committed any crimes in Mexico in recent memory, and I think we could safely extend “recent memory” to include “ever.”

That digression aside, one of the worst aspects of not keeping up with the blog these last few months is my having neglected innumerable opportunities to comment on what has taken shape as the most ludicrous and pathetic political campaign in my memory, and is only likely to get worse.  When I was a kid I was inordinately fascinated by the Roman Empire, what went wrong with it, and what we could learn from its demise to prevent America from stumbling down a similar path.  If you read Gibbon – which I did, albeit only partially – one thing that strikes you is that in Rome’s latter days it was afflicted with a succession of ever more corrupt, weak-minded and idiotic emperors.  There were other parallels to our present-day situation – squandering the imperial treasury on futile and pointless colonial wars, the wholesale abdication of responsibility on the part of both the ruling class and the general citizenry, the substitution of cults and mysticism for reason and discipline – but given the clown show of candidates the Republicans have managed to come up with, and given that it’s far from unthinkable that one of them will become president, precipitously declining standards in public life just might be our biggest single threat at this point.

I recognize that many people – myself included – are disappointed in Obama, feel that he has been too sympathetic toward the corporate class and too willing to compromise with the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party (is it fair, though, to call it a fringe anymore, now that there’s little left to the Republican Party but a lunatic fringe?), but even seen in the worst possible light, Obama remains a rational, intelligent person who adheres to at least some basic principles (we don’t have to agree with those principles to recognize that they are in fact principles).  So it bewilders me when many of my friends and fellow left-of-center types are ready not only to abandon Obama, but to work actively against him.  As I said, I understand and share your disappointment, but I can’t conceive of a single scenario under which our lot would be improved by replacing him with someone almost infinitely worse.  It was a similar logic that gave us George Bush in 2000: because Al Gore was insufficiently progressive for many of us, we instead allowed one of the most disastrous presidents in history to be installed, and I believe the jury is still out on whether the country will ever recover from the damage Bush and his cronies did to it.

You’d think the fact that every single Republican candidate this year is more extreme than Bush – not to mention, in the case of most of them, more intellectually and morally deficient – would give people pause before they take any action to increase the chances of one of them getting into office, but you would in fact be wrong.  There are those, of course – I know, because at times in the past I’ve been one of them – who cling to the belief that things need to get worse in order to prompt the full-fledged revolution that we need, but this thinking ignores both history – most revolutions take place when things are already beginning to get better, not when they are plummeting toward their worst – and common sense. The USA is not – the admirable efforts of Occupy Wall Street notwithstanding – in a pre-revolutionary situation.  It is more likely to be in danger of imminent collapse.

Perhaps I’m getting a bit carried away?  I spent most of my younger years in fear of an apocalypse that never arrived, and it’s perhaps a bitter irony that just when I had reached a state of tenuous accommodation – i.e., accepted the supposedly more “grown-up” notion that most of the time things were neither as awful nor as outstanding as they appeared – that the actual end times might be arriving.

Not everywhere, of course: many parts of the world, including some that I’ve visited this past year, seem to be doing just fine, and doing so by following policies that are precisely the opposite of those being advocated by Republican extremists and too easily acceded to by Democratic moderates.  But enough of that: we’ll survive – or not – and life will go on – or not – and hopefully you’ll all be sufficiently untouched by the impending havoc that you can still afford to buy my upcoming book and records.  Personally I’m debating whether to stop paying attention to politics altogether.  It’s childish and irresponsible, I know, but I get so wound up and agitated whenever I watch these people lying on a prodigious scale and/or giving vent to paranoid flights of fantasy.  The chances that my opinions, no matter how vociferously expressed, will have any impact on the political climate or its outcome are slim, and I’ve also got a couple more books to write (subject matter to be revealed in the upcoming months) before I get too terribly much older.

On the mostly plus side: it’s the middle of winter and we’ve had a spate of shirtsleeve and light jacket weather more appropriate to March or even April than January.  I only put it on the “mostly” plus side because it makes it very hard to stay indoors and do the massive amounts of work I seem to have signed up for.  Happy New Year, everybody, and let’s hope it’s not nearly as long before we meet again!

 

 

Spy Rock Memories, Part 11

Spy Rock Memories, Part 11

Udo died in the autumn of 1991.  He’d been driving alone late at night, so no one ever knew exactly why or how his car wound up at the bottom of a ravine.  The best, most likely guess was that he’d swerved to avoid a deer and lost control.  We buried him in Little Lake Cemetery, at the south end of Willits.  Afterward we gathered at Tre’s parents’ house.

It was a gathering of old mountain friends such as I hadn’t seen since the uproarious, carefree parties of the early 80s, but with, of course, a far more somber purpose.  It was hard to avoid noticing a certain awful symmetry: eight and a half years earlier, we’d gathered at the same cemetery to bury Kira, Udo and Josie’s daughter.

She’d been an angelic child.  I can’t remember a single negative thing ever being said about her.  The world felt like a brighter place when she was around, and there was the slightest hint of a frown on your face or a gloomy air overhanging your mood, she’d immediately set about trying to find some way to send it packing.

The last time I saw Kira, she and Tre’s cousin, Bex, had emerged on horseback from the woods in front of our house.  They stopped to chat for a few minutes, I snapped a blurry photo of them, and they rode on.  Shortly afterward, she collapsed and died of an aneurysm in her classroom at Willits High.  She was 16.

It was spring when we buried her, but a harsh, chilly breeze tossed clouds across a dismal, tattered sky.  As they lowered her coffin, Udo all but flung himself into the grave, his coat flapping in the wind as he cried, “My baby, my darling baby.”  It was a stunning, shocking moment, made all the more memorable because Udo, a strong, stoic man, was almost never given to overt displays of emotion.

When I first came to Iron Peak, you might recall, it was in search of something more “real” than the hothouse existence of city life.  “A man could die up here if he wasn’t careful,” I’d thought.  The idea that death was a more constant and palpable presence in the mountains was probably not accurate – no doubt people die with similar frequency and drama wherever you are – but it felt that way.  I suppose the difference is that in the city, you seldom know more than a handful of your nearest neighbors, whereas in the country you’re usually aware of, if not directly affected by, every death that happens for miles around.

And though Kira’s and Udo’s deaths hit closest to home, there were others.  Many others.  Michael Ferretta dropped dead of a heart attack, Judi Bari passed away from cancer.  Teepee Doug, spokesperson for the ragtag band of hippies who’d tried to frighten me out of the publishing business, spun out on the curve where 101 shifts from a Sonoma County freeway to a Mendocino mountain highway.  Lester, one of my nearest neighbors, and Craig, his brother, both had their hearts give out while still in their 40s.

Not to mention the slow but steady stream of accidents and murders that, while they happened to strangers or people known only by name or reputation, cast a pall over their surroundings.  There was the case, for example, of the woman whose mangled remains were discovered in a streambed near Registered Guest Road, about a mile beyond the Iron Peak turnoff.

It was clear to investigators that a bear had eaten her; what remained a mystery was whether the bear had killed her, or if it had merely happened upon her body after she had died from another cause.  People were inclined – or preferred – to think the latter; the number of bears roaming the woods had increased noticeably since the late 80s, and it was unsettling to think any of them might be deliberately gunning for humans.

 

Udo (holding baby) with his family, during happier times.

Udo’s funeral was the first time I’d seen Tre in a while; he’d been spending most of his time on tour with Green Day, who were now attracting attention from far beyond the punk rock scene.  Tre’s dad, Frank, was talking about refurbishing an old bookmobile and using it to drive the band around, which he would eventually do, right on through their major label breakthrough in 1994.

Even by late 1991, the band was the biggest thing Mendocino County had ever contributed to musically, and there was much talk about what their next step should be.  Frank maintained, as he’d been doing ever since Tre joined the Lookouts, that they needed to get “on a big label.”  As usual he cited Warner Brothers as an example.

His high opinion of Warner Brothers possibly stemmed from the fact that it was home to his beloved ZZ Topp, who, he never failed to make clear, represented his ideal of what a rock and roll band should be.  But he was far from the only one suggesting that Green Day move on to a “real” label, a concept that never failed to irritate me, since as far as I was concerned, Lookout was not only real, but also doing a pretty good job of representing Green Day.

Their records were selling in the tens of thousands and, as I always had to point out, they were getting paid, at a higher rate than they were likely to receive from any major label, for every single one.  Between record sales and touring, Green Day had become practically self-sufficient, something that in those days was almost unheard of for a homegrown punk rock band.

A couple months later, their second album sold out its entire first pressing of 10,000 copies the day it was released, and we – by underground standards, anyway – had a hit on our hands.  Combined with the similar success of Operation Ivy and the first Green Day album, it meant that Lookout Records was now generating more income than I had ever earned – legally, anyway – in my life.

Hardly something to complain about, you’d think, but immersed as I was in trying to finish my senior thesis so I could graduate from Berkeley, it was like finding myself astride the proverbial tiger.  Not that I was in any hurry to dismount; releasing punk rock records was proving to be more fun than I was likely to have trying to control classrooms of unruly high school students, and the pay was decidedly better.

But becoming a substitute teacher had been part and parcel of my plan for returning to Spy Rock.  As it became more and more obvious that I neither wanted to nor could afford to abandon my responsibilities as a newly minted record mogul, the Spy Rock dream slipped further from reality.

First months, then years, slipped by without progress toward returning to the mountain.  It would have been no problem – especially once Green Day’s meteoric rise to international celebrity in 1994 sent our grosses from the hundreds of thousands into the millions – to refit and rewire the Spy Rock house to serve as a fully equipped office, but instead I found myself preferring to leave it as a telephone and internet-free escape hatch for when the pressures of business grew too overwhelming.

My increasingly infrequent visits seldom lasted more than a couple days, much of which was spent driving there and back.  But there came a time, one mid-September, when a relationship gone sour combined with the ever-mounting demands of keeping the company on an even keel left me on the verge of a mental meltdown.  It was agreed – my employees being particularly vocal on the subject – that I needed to take some time off.

The garden falls into disuse and disrepair. Kong is not impressed.

I spent a few days at Spy Rock, doing little more than sleeping, playing with the animals, and ruefully taking inventory of the repairs and maintenance I’d been neglecting for so long.  Then I set out on a rambling journey that took me through the bleak wilds of Northeastern California, on into Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alberta and British Columbia.  The scenery, the weather, everything was heartbreakingly exquisite and beautiful until I reached Vancouver, normally one of my favorite cities. There a bank of clouds lurched in from the sea, bearing the first of the chilly autumn rains.

It was time to go home, and I drove the 835 miles back to Spy Rock almost nonstop.  As usual Kong greeted me at the top of the driveway, but Ruf-Ruf was nowhere to be seen.  I drove down to the house and spotted her sleeping under the wind chime and crystal-laden Ponderosa Pine that had grown up from infancy to hold pride of place in what could be loosely be termed the front “yard.”

She was not as young as she used to be, and had been noticeably slowing down from her frenetic pace of running and barking pace over the past couple years.  But never before had she slept through my arrival.  I got out of the car and headed over to where she lay; I was not even halfway there before I realized she was not sleeping.

I loved both the dogs, but Ruf-Ruf had always been the special one.  She knew it, too, and had always made sure Kong never forgot it, nipping and yelping at him whenever he got in her way, even though she was barely half his size.  Living in the mountains had long ago made me aware of nature’s darker side, but even so, I wasn’t prepared for Kong’s reaction to the death of his longtime companion and tormenter.

I buried Ruf-Ruf not far from where I’d found her, but within hours, he had dug up her corpse and set about systematically demolishing (and possibly, though I didn’t personally witness this, devouring it).  I dug a deeper grave, covered it with stones, yet somehow by morning he’d managed to retrieve what was left of her.  The cats and I watched from the front porch as he snarlingly ripped great tufts of blond fur from her tattered hide.  He’d been holding back these feelings for a long time, apparently.

Ruf-Ruf’s death left a large void, and the Spy Rock chemistry had irretrievably changed.  Though Kong kept close to me when I was around, and begged openly for the attention Ruf-Ruf had always had first dibs on, he lacked the exuberance that she had brought to the simplest stroll across the land.  The cats, who had always led separate and aloof existences, often disappeared for days or even weeks to prowl the forests or… who knew, really where they went or what they got up to?

I often gave them up for lost and presumed eaten.  The giant owl that roosted in the oak at the top of the driveway and sometimes spooked me by bursting, like Hegel’s owl of Minerva, into its twilight flight so close above me that I could feel the wind from its beating wings, was just one of many woodland creatures that could have made short work of them.

But again and again they’d surprise me by turning up bedraggled and mewling under my window on some random dawn, missing bits of fur, bearing mysterious bite marks, yet eager to return to the comforts of home and a regularly filled food tray.  They’d hang around for a few days or a week, as purring and playful as you’d expect any pet to be, then just like that they’d be gone again, into the wild.

Ruf-Ruf had been the anchor that kept the animal family together, even during my long absences.  Once she was gone, the cats, who as kittens had often spent cold nights cuddled with her in the doghouse, put in fewer and fewer appearances.  Often during my visits now, I wouldn’t see anyone but Kong.

And they were just visits, that was the saddest thing.  When, back in 1985, Indiana Slim had described me as a salmon swimming upstream, he could have been looking into the future, describing my attempts to find my way back up the mountain to a home that, despite appearances to the contrary, was no longer there.

 

Sadly, I do not have a photo of the actual bear that was the author of so much misery for me. However, this is more or less what he looked like.

1996 marked what was to be my last serious stab at becoming a mountain man again.  Lookout had moved into a suite of offices and accumulated a staff of 14 employees, so it was no longer unthinkable for me to let things run on their own for a while as I attempted to re-establish myself on Iron Peak.  I made several attempts, and usually they would run something like this: I’d arrive just before dark, examine the premises, and make a list of everything that had to be repaired or replaced.

The following morning I’d drive to Laytonville or Willits and buy the necessary materials, but by the time I got back from town I’d be too tired to do anything more that day.  Or the next day, or the day after that, it typically turned out.  Work had left me so exhausted that I would mostly doze on the sofa and reflect on the unexpected course my life had taken until it was time to go back to Berkeley.

One chilly, intermittently rainy spring day, I was lying there in my usual position, eyes occasionally opening wide enough to appreciate the lush array of greenery that, at this time of year, looked intent on overrunning the entire mountainside, when a large black dog went strolling by.  It was unusual, but not unheard of, for a neighbor’s dog to come sniffing around in search of food or a new mate.

You didn’t want them making a habit of it, though; otherwise you could wind up feeding someone else’s dogs as well as your own.  So I stepped outside to shoo the uninvited guest away.  I had no idea who it might belong to; Kong was the only black dog I knew of in the immediate vicinity, but this one was at least twice his size.  I was only a few feet away from him before I realized it was in fact a bear, still young enough to be slightly cute, but already way too big to be cuddly.

“Go on, get out of here!” I told it, calmly but firmly.  “Shoo!  No bears here!  Only people, dogs and cats!”

He looked at me quizzically, almost as though I’d hurt his feelings, but gave a slight shrug and padded away into the forest.  A couple days later he was back, and this time didn’t seem in as much of a hurry when I told him to leave, so I banged on a pot with a large serving spoon to emphasize my point.

That was the beginning of what would become a more than year-long contest of wills.  Captain Ahab may have had his white whale, but I had my black bear, and in both cases, the animals appeared to be winning.

If I was at home when he showed up, I could chase him away, but each time it became harder.  He’d figured out that my yelling and noisemaking had no power to harm him, and also seemed to understand that sooner or later I’d have to go back to the city.  As soon as I did, he’d move right in and make himself at home.

He found the spot under the house where I left food for Kong and the cats, and after scarfing down a week’s supply in a single sitting, would settle down for a nap, leaving my animals hungry and out in the cold.  As he grew bigger and stronger, he saw no reason to wait for me to come back and refill the food trays; tearing the padlocked door off the shed, he devoured everything inside, including 100 pounds of dog food and three bags of fertilizer.

The next time I came home, I found his claw marks on my front door, near the doorknob, in fact, almost as if he’d been trying to figure out how to open it.  He hadn’t made it inside this time, but his intentions were clear.  He’d lost nearly all fear of me.  Shouting, pot-banging, rock-throwing, none of it worked anymore.  He’d look calmly back at me as if I were a mildly annoying idiot.

If you were a bear, would you be keen to go up against a mountain man looking this steely-eyed and determined?

The only thing capable of chasing him off now was a blast or two with the shotgun.  Not at him, merely in the air, but I wondered if more drastic measures might soon become necessary.

They did.  I walked into the house one afternoon to find my back window shattered and my kitchen in ruins.  Apparently he’d been poking around on the back deck, stood up on his hind legs to look in the window, and fallen through it – either accidentally or accidentally on purpose – into the house.  Once inside, he’d smashed open everything that looked remotely like food, leaving a trail of broken glass and molasses in his wake as he headed over to the living room sofa for a nap.

People accuse me of making this part up, but the evidence was clear: there was a deep depression in the cushions where he’d been lying, and the blanket was covered with burrs and bits of fur.  Eventually, he’d made his exit by pushing out a window screen on the side porch, leaving a couple claw marks in it as his calling card.

It took me the rest of the day to clean up the mess.  Because he’d shattered not just the glass in the kitchen window, but the entire frame, the only repair I could manage was to cover it with polyethylene sheeting – hippie glass, as it was sometimes known.  I slept uneasily, never doubting that he’d be back.  It was only a matter of when.

Until then I’d never seriously considered shooting him, partly because I was a supposedly non-violent vegetarian, partly because I was terrified by the prospect of shooting anything that big.  What if I only succeeded in wounding him enough to make him really mad?  And even if I did manage to kill him, what would I do with a several hundred-pound bear corpse?  I couldn’t very well just leave it in my front yard to rot.  Not to mention, though I suppose this shouldn’t have been my first concern, that shooting bears without a license and out of season was highly illegal.

But what choice did I have?  Either the bear had to go or I did.  Worried that I’d arrive home one day to find him in the house again, I began taking the shotgun with me whenever I left the mountain.

It had been years since I’d been stopped by the police, let alone been given a ticket, but one of the first times I drove to the city with the shotgun in my trunk, the CHP officer everybody up and down Highway 101 knew simply as “Clarence” pulled me over, claimed he smelled marijuana, and asked for permission to search my car.  It was his standard operating procedure; he’d singlehandedly busted hundreds of traffickers using that ruse.

In this case, however, I knew he was straight-up lying.  I was driving a brand new car that had never contained or even been near marijuana.  What’s more, I hadn’t personally touched the stuff since 1993, when a couple tokes had triggered a terrifying panic attack.  I grew righteously indignant, and told him so.

“Well,” he allowed, “I can’t search your car without permission, it’s true.  But if you’d rather do it the hard way, we can sit here for a few hours until a canine team can get here from Ukiah and give the car a going-over.  They’re very thorough.  You never know what they might find.”

Was he threatening me?  For all the hippie paranoia floating around those parts, I’d never heard a convincing story about the cops planting evidence in someone’s car.  At the same time, there was no doubt they could get away with it if they were so inclined.  The cops’ word against that of a guy driving down to the city from Spy Rock?  Based on what I knew about Spy Rock, even I’d be inclined to believe the cops.

Regardless of whether or not I could trust the police not to frame me, I didn’t feel like waiting for him to bring in the dogs.  I had things to do and places to be in the city.  So, much as it galled me, I told Officer Clarence he could have a look in my trunk.

Thankfully the shotgun wasn’t loaded, or I could have been in real trouble.  As it was, he gave me a stern lecture about the legal way to transport weapons, how the gun had to be kept in a separate part of the vehicle from the ammo, and how I was lucky I hadn’t wound up handcuffed and spreadeagled face-down on the pavement.

Which wasn’t far from what happened a couple weeks later.  This time I was driving the old Subaru station wagon, so it wasn’t physically possible to keep shotgun and ammo separated.  I compensated as best as I could by stashing the gun at the back of the car and the ammo in the glove compartment.  I’d have to have really long arms to put those two together, right?

I won’t claim to be one of those people who never broke traffic laws, but I usually did so judiciously enough that I was unlikely to get caught.  There was nothing judicious, however, about my driving that night.  I was riled up about something at work, and anxious to get back to the office to set it right.  Near the Marin-Sonoma line I encountered a car that insisted on poking along at 45 mph in the fast lane.

I blinked my lights, honked my horn, tried tailgating him, but he wouldn’t move over to let me pass.  I tried passing him on the right and he sped up so I couldn’t get around him; then as soon as I got stuck behind traffic in the right lane, he’d slow back down to 45.  Whatever his reasons might have been, he was determined that I was not getting to San Francisco before he did.

My increasing frantic and furious attempts to get around him – I wouldn’t be surprised if I was almost literally frothing at the mouth by this time – attracted the attention of a patrol car.  “Why are you pulling me over?” I demanded.  “That guy in front of me is crazy!  You should go after him and get him off the road before he causes an accident!”

“With all due respect, sir,” the officer said, “you looked like the crazy one.”  Had I been in a slightly less agitated state, I might have seen his point, but as it was, I was practically beside myself at the thought that the driver who had been causing me so much misery was going to get away with it while I, a perfectly sane and responsible citizen, was stuck here on the side of the road being unjustly harassed.

When a police officer asks if you have any weapons in the vehicle, you ideally want to be able to tell him calmly, coolly, and truthfully that no, in fact you do not.  Unfortunately, in my case, none of this was possible.  My years as a greaser and a hippie had given me plenty of experience with being shoved up against the car to be searched and handcuffed, but this being the first time it had happened since the early 1970s, I was a bit out of practice.

Once I’d calmed down, the cop turned out not to be such a bad guy.  He took off the cuffs and let me – well, more precisely, ordered me to – sit on the hood of his car while he searched mine.  The spot he pointed out for me left me silhouetted by one of his headlights, and he cordially advised me, “Just so you know, I’ll be able to tell if you budge from that position, and if you do, I’d be fully justified in opening fire.”

Clearly this bear business was doing my nerves no favors, and needed to be brought to a conclusion.  With a full moon coming up that weekend, I decided to lay a trap for him.  I filled an old cooking pot – already sporting a couple bullet holes after a previous encounter with a pesky raccoon – with dog food and set it out in front of the house in plain view of my upstairs bedroom window.

The shotgun, loaded with one-ounce lead slugs, reputedly capable of blasting a several-inches-wide hole in almost anything they hit, lay beside my bed.  I’d slept that way ever since the bear’s first home invasion, but tonight I had no intention of sleeping.  Based on his past behavior, I anticipated he’d turn up between midnight and 1 a.m.

I lay on my back waiting; in my adrenaline-charged state of combat readiness, I assumed there was no danger of drifting off, but somehow I did.  Suddenly I was standing on the shore of a semi-circular bay, at the center of which lay an island that looked like a cross between San Francisco and Normandy’s Mont St. Michel.

Water lapped at my feet; fish, dolphins and eels splashed and leapt about.  Then came a great sucking sound, as if someone had removed the plug from a bathtub.  The water rushed away as it might in advance of a tsunami, leaving behind a vast expanse of sand covered with plastic inflatable sea creatures in pretty pastel colors.  The one I remember most vividly was a dead ringer for an old-fashioned cream-and-green Checker cab.

Before I had time to make sense of this spectacle, the water came roaring back, threatening to inundate me.  But before it reached the shore, I sat up straight, heart pounding, nerves pumping a double blast of electricity to my fingertips.  I knew without having to look that the bear was here.

Sliding across the bed, shotgun in hand, I peered out the window, and there he was, halfway through the pot of dog food.  Leaning back on his haunches, he looked so harmless and playful that I felt a twinge of guilt for tricking him this way.  I had to force myself to recall the havoc he’d been wreaking on my life.

Although the gun held eight rounds, I knew it was the first shot that would count.  If I didn’t bring him down with that one, there was no telling what might happen.  But at this range – no more than 20 feet – how could I miss?

During my years on the mountain I’d had to shoot skunks, raccoons, rattlesnakes, and – don’t ask – a few obstreperous blue jays, but I’d never imagined coming up against anything so much bigger and stronger than me.  What did I think I was doing?  Couldn’t I just give up, retreat to Berkeley, and let the bear have its way?

 

Ruf-Ruf and Kong when they and the world were still young.

That’s what my city friends had been telling me to do.  They were horrified when I mentioned the possibility of shooting it. “He’s just doing what bears do, they protested.  “It’s his home.  You’re the one that’s trespassing.”

That line of reasoning irritated the hell out of me.  “I was living on that land for years before that bear was even born,” I’d argue.  “And his ‘home’ is a hole in the ground out in the woods.  I don’t go poking around in his den, and he can return the favor by staying out of mine.”

City people typically envisioned my land as some sort of Jellystone Park, with me as the villain trying to stymie the jolly, fun-loving, picnic basket-stealing bear.  “If you really don’t want to share your land with him, at least call the rangers and have them move him somewhere farther out in the woods where he’ll be happy,” they’d urge, refusing to believe me when I told them that this wasn’t TV fantasy land and that there weren’t any “rangers” to take care of my bear problems.

All this raced through my head as I picked out my target and prepared to fire.  It would have to be either the head or the heart, and the heart made more sense; it would be too easy to miss his head altogether, whereas I only had to hit him somewhere in the vicinity of the heart to stop him getting away.

I struggled to get my breath under control, reminded myself to squeeze rather than pull the trigger, but at the crucial moment my concentration broke, my arm jerked slightly, and while a deafening explosion rang out across the canyon, the bear didn’t go down.  Instead, he jerked spasmodically, his hindquarters lurching into the air.  After the briefest of pauses, he went tearing off at breakneck speed into the woods, down the hill, and out of sight.

I had to have hit him somewhere; his body was far too broad a target for me to have missed entirely.  Yet it was hard to imagine a wounded animal being able to move the way he had done.  And when I examined the area the following morning, I found not a trace of blood or fur.

Nonetheless, I continued to tell myself – and anyone who would listen – that I must have at least winged him.  Why else, I argued, would he have never come near the house again?  I did run into him one more time, about six months later, down at the bottom of the hill, at least half a mile from the house.  The two of us were face-to-face, alone in the woods, and I was unarmed, but he took one look at me and ran away.

But now that I had vanquished, or at least banished, my black beast, I began drifting away from the land again.  So, too, did my animals; the last of the cats disappeared for good, leaving Kong entirely on his own.  With no bear to worry about, I could leave him a month’s worth of food at a time.  I felt bad thinking about him wandering around alone up there, but still couldn’t seem to find time to visit more often.

Then one chilly February evening I realized it had been too long – less than a month, true, but in winter it was more important to keep the food supply replenished, since I never knew when I might get snowed out.  On the spur of the moment I grabbed my pal Robert Eggplant and took a late night dash up to the mountain, stopping at the Willits Safeway for a couple 50-pound bags of dog food.

There was not much snow on the roads, but a lot of frost, its crystals sparkling and shimmering beneath the headlights.  I could hear and feel the ground crunching under my wheels as I pulled into the driveway.  Just after rounding the bend above the house, I ran over a rock or a log that, as often happened in winter, must have fallen onto the road from the hillside above.

It was enough of a bump that I thought I’d better check to see if it had done any damage to the car, but figured I’d wait until I got down to the house.  Kong was nowhere to be found, which was very unlike him; in the more than 12 years since he’d come to live there, I’d never known him to wander out of hailing distance from the house.

With a sinking feeling, I remembered the bump in the road, and walked back up the driveway to find Kong’s corpse, frozen so stiff that my car hadn’t put a dent in it.  If there was any consolation to be had, there was plenty of dog food left under the house, so at least he hadn’t starved to death.  He’d been showing his age for a while; 12 years isn’t a long lifespan for a city dog, but mountain life tends to be a bit harder on both animals and people.  Ruf-Ruf had been the same age when she’d given up the ghost.

I got out my guitar and played a memorial song for Kong; lacking anything in my repertoire about deceased dogs, I sang “Sam’s Song,” a number I’d written for my new band, the Potatomen, about the sad and lonely streets of Eureka.  The ground was frozen too hard to dig him a proper grave, but the following day a blizzard swept in and left him buried beneath the snow until spring.

To be continued…

 

 

 

Spy Rock Memories, Part 10

Spy Rock Memories, Part 10

From my back door the view stretched at least 30 or 40 miles.  The hills fell away until they reached the Eel River, then began to climb again until they turned into the full-fledged mountains that lined the horizon.  To the west of the river there were hippies, homesteaders, and a diehard handful of hillbillies, in other words, us; to the east was Indian land.

We mostly knew that, if only vaguely, but seldom talked or thought about it except maybe when looking for interesting tidbits with which to regale visiting city friends.  “Indian land” sounded ancient and exotic, but I’m not sure the full implications ever sunk in, maybe because from that elevation and distance, the millions of trees carpeting the mountainsides look more or less the same, regardless of the color or culture of the people dwelling beneath them.

Indian Island, site of the 1860 massacre.

Northern California’s Native American tribes were among the last to be subjugated by Europeans, not necessarily because they resisted more fiercely, but because the place itself – remote, precipitous, often nearly impenetrable – resisted subjugation.  But when, in the wake of the California Gold Rush, whites began arriving in significant numbers, they wasted no time in putting an especially bloody stamp on what had been a mostly peaceful land.

In Humboldt Bay, midway between Eureka and the Samoa Peninsula, lies a small island that was home to a band of Wiyot Indians.  Accounts vary, but it sounds as though a group of what we might today call good old boys were up drinking late one Saturday night and decided to do something about “the Indian problem.”  Armed with knives, clubs and hatchets, they descended on a native village and killed every inhabitant apart from one infant.  All of the dead were women, children or elderly; the tribe’s younger men were out collecting supplies for a religious ceremony.

Bret Harte, then an apprentice journalist in Eureka, sent this account to the New York Times:

A more shocking and revolting spectacle never was exhibited to the eyes of a Christian and civilized people. Old women wrinkled and decrepit lay weltering in blood, their brains dashed out and dabbled with their long grey hair. Infants scarcely a span along, with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly with wounds.

Sentiment among local whites, however, remained notably unsentimental.  The Humboldt Times, progenitor of today’s Eureka Times-Standard, editorialized:

For the past four years we have advocated two—and only two—alternatives for ridding our country of Indians: either remove them to some reservation or kill them. The loss of life and destruction of property by the Indians for ten years past has not failed to convince every sensitive man that the two races cannot live together, and the recent desperate and bloody demonstrations on Indian Island and elsewhere is proof that the time has arrived that either the pale face or the savage must yield the ground.

By the time the marauding posse had finished its morning’s work, as many as 200 Indians lay dead in several different locations.  The tribe’s population was decimated, and continued to decline dramatically, with disease, hunger and displacement all taking their toll.

Some of the first inhabitants of Nome Cult Farm, later to become the Round Valley Reservation, 1858.

To the south, in Mendocino County, events unfolded in a similarly grisly manner.  A militia captain named Walter Jarboe formed a paramilitary group called the Eel River Rangers that hunted down and killed Indians as if they were wild animals, and drove the survivors – “like cattle,” as many witnesses described it – into the Round Valley – that sloping, elegantly shaped expanse that I had looked out over and pondered ever since I came to the mountain.

Originally known as the Nome Cult Farm, what would become today’s Round Valley Reservation was chosen for its remoteness and inaccessibility, but neither factor stopped white settlers from tearing down fences and claiming its best lands.  The reservation might have looked vast from where I stood, and was the largest single piece of property set aside for Indians, but its 23,000 acres represented less than one half of one percent of Mendocino and Humboldt Counties, all of which had once been “Indian land.”

Native Americans made up about 5% of the area’s overall population, but in our neck of the woods, the proportion was much higher: nearly 20% of Laytonville’s citizens and close to half of Covelo’s.  Yet they remained strangely invisible, an almost phantom presence in a place where for thousands of years they had been the sole inhabitants.  Or perhaps the truth was that I – and, I think it’s safe to say, most of my neighbors – remained blind and/or oblivious to their presence.

Late one evening, I was chatting with the cashier at Albert’s Texaco in Laytonville when he asked if I could do him a favor by giving a lift home to “that Indian guy” who’d been hanging out in front of the station.  I didn’t have anything better to do, so I agreed; the man hopped into my truck and the next thing I knew, he’d talked me into driving 20 miles out of my way to retrieve some tools he’d left at a residence north of town.

He didn’t even ask very nicely; it was more along the lines of, “Hey, before you take me home, drive me up Woodman Canyon, okay?”  But there was something about his manner, not at all menacing, just quietly insistent, that made me want to do as he requested.  Besides, I kept reminding myself, it wasn’t as if I had somewhere else I needed to be.

I dropped him off – he never did mention his name, or anything else about himself – at the Rancheria, a small reservation nestled among the pines a couple miles southwest of town.  It was like a parallel, alternative version of Laytonville – one that I had never seen before and had only vaguely heard of.  He wandered off onto a long dirt road that wound past several plain wood cabins and disappeared into a low-hanging mist.

I never saw him again, and I’m not sure I would have recognized him if I had, but he made a powerful impression on me.  And the impression would abide: that once again my view of the county, the land, and its people had proved to be deceptively superficial.

Soon after that I finally got around to traveling out to Covelo, the county’s most remote and probably least visited town.  As the crow flies, it was not much more than 10 miles from my back porch, but the drive, which required a long, roundabout route by way of Laytonville, took the better part of an afternoon.

The road to Covelo.

Bruce Anderson often touted Covelo as one of his favorite places, and as one of the last remnants of the “real” Mendocino, but his opinion was, I suspect, a minority one.  Many locals gave it a wide berth, considering it somewhat beyond the pale, even by Emerald Triangle standards.

I found it more sad than fearsome; despite the exquisite natural surroundings, the town looked fleabitten and hard done by, like something you’d expect to find in rural Appalachia rather than the prosperous precincts of the Golden State.  To be fair, that had been my initial impression of Laytonville, too, and while our town still didn’t look like much, economically, it was booming.

For all the havoc it had wreaked on the community, CAMP’s attempt to wipe out the marijuana trade had achieved precisely the opposite effect: the increased risk involved in bringing a crop to harvest had caused prices to rise to unprecedented levels, which in turn prompted nearly everyone with access to a patch of land to throw a few plants in the ground.

As a result, the marijuana gold rush was producing riches even greater than before the crackdown, benefiting not only the growers, but also the many ancillary businesses that provided them with the necessities of their trade and the luxuries they could now afford.  Even rank amateurs understood the basics – don’t grow out in the open sunlight and don’t get too greedy – and if they didn’t, an unpleasant encounter with the CAMP raiders would soon teach them.

Ironically – and, slightly to my chagrin – my own days as a grower were coming to an end just when I’d started to get halfway good at it.  I planted my last crop in 1990, resisting the temptation to make it an extra large one.  It turned out to be the right decision; I no longer had the time, energy or inclination to look after it.

Covelo city limits.

Significant amounts of money were starting to flow in from the record label, not enough to make a living, but enough to encourage me to keep at it.  That spring I released the first full-length album by Green Day, along one by Neurosis, both of which sold far better than I would have dared hope.  It still seemed like a crazy impossibility that I’d ever be able to rely on punk rock records as a primary source of income, but maybe not so crazy as I’d once thought.

Despite my improving circumstances, I spent way too much time worrying about my future, not just in a material sense, but an existential one as well.  I was in my 40s now, and troubled by the idea that I might spend the rest of my life scrambling to make ends meet.  I was also experiencing a gnawing discontent triggered by the notion that time was running out for me to do something “important” or “worthwhile” with my life.

True, the bands who were getting exposure for their music, not to mention actually getting paid for it, thought what I was doing was worthwhile, but I was consumed with fear that anything that easy and that much fun had to be morally suspect.  Perhaps I hadn’t left my Catholic upbringing – the part that idealized suffering and martyrdom – as far behind as I thought.

There’d been a time, much earlier in life, when I’d had aspirations to be a teacher.  Bombing out of college on five separate occasions, not to mention my criminal history and nearly nonexistent employment record, seemed to have put an end to that ambition, but someone pointed out to me that I might still be able to work part time as a substitute teacher.  Apparently background checks were minimal, and the only real requirements were a college degree and passing a basic competency test.

It looked like the perfect solution: work two or three days a week doing something that both I and society at large could agree was “respectable,” and spend the rest of my time running the record label.  I assumed, of course, that I’d be an excellent teacher; there were few things I enjoyed more than hearing myself talk, so it stood to reason that my students would feel the same way.

Looking out over Round Valley.

My exaggerated self-regard was further buoyed when a Eureka High School teacher I met at a punk rock show asked me, “How do you do it?  I can’t seem to get these kids to read anything, but everywhere I look I see them with their noses buried in your magazine.”

“Write about interesting things,” I somewhat arrogantly answered, failing to consider – and as friends with actual teaching experience would point out – that kids were probably attracted to Lookout magazine by its irreverent attitude, its generous use of swear words, and its tendency to reduce complex problems to simplistic sloganeering.  They might not be so receptive to scholarly tomes about the decline of the Roman Empire or the evolution of English literature.

Untroubled by – in fact not even contemplating – that possibility, I decided it was time to acquire that seemingly trivial piece of paper, a college degree, that would enable me to pursue this latest scheme.  My last and best attempt to acquire one had crashed and burned in a miasma of alcohol and drug abuse back in 1977, but I was so much better than that now, or so I’d managed to convince myself.

Between then and 1965, when I’d made the first of my star-crossed attempts at higher education, I’d amassed a fair number of credits.  Exactly how many, I had no idea, but guessed I must be at least halfway to graduation.

Decades of pumping up my self-esteem through various means, many of them chemical, had convinced me there was not much I actually needed to learn at college.  It was a matter of jumping through the necessary hoops and filling out the appropriate paperwork, I told myself.  Something I could master in my spare time, probably with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back.

With that attitude, I looked around for the college that would be fastest, easiest and cheapest to breeze through.  Humboldt State in Arcata was the obvious choice.  It was the closest four-year school, and the only one I could attend without leaving the Emerald Triangle.  I knew people there, liked the area, and, judging from its reputation, it was not exactly the toughest place to get into or graduate from.

Downtown Covelo.

Even enrolling at HSU would mean leaving the mountain temporarily.  Arcata was two and a half hours away, so I could get back for the weekends, and, if necessary, the occasional daytrip, but it was too far for daily commuting to be a realistic prospect, especially once the winter snows set in.

But it would be worth it.  Once I started teaching, I could put in a phone (when I’d first moved to Spy Rock, extending phone service to the back side of the mountain would have run about $30,000, but the phone lines had been creeping closer over the years, to the point where between $3,000 and $4,000 might do the job), allowing me to turn my home into a full-fledged office for Lookout Records, which in turn would enable me to live happily ever after in my mountain aerie.

It would take one and a half, maybe two years to get my degree, I discovered.  I also learned, to my annoyance, that because of something called a “breadth requirement,” I’d have to pass at least one course each in science and math, two subjects I’d made a point of avoiding ever since high school.  Being logical, orderly and systematic had never been my strong suit.

Knowing these would be the toughest hurdle, I decided to get one of them out of the way and simultaneously give college a trial run that summer by enrolling in a basic environmental science course at Eureka’s College of the Redwoods, widely known by irreverent locals as “College of the Retards” and/or “College of the Deadheads.”

John Denery, who sang and played guitar for that most Arcata-ish of bands, Brent’s TV (their hallmark was playing most of their shows on street corners and parking lots, or, most legendarily, in laundromats), was going away for the summer, so I sublet his apartment, packed a few belongings, and headed north to Humboldt County.

The dogs and cats, accustomed to my constant comings and goings, looked on bemusedly.  By now they’d come to trust that, if nothing else, I’d always show up in time to replenish their food supply.  Neither they nor I suspected that I’d never again be back to stay.

Its disparaging nicknames notwithstanding, CR provided a good if not overly arduous re-entry into the world of formal education.  Class and homework took up three or four hours a day; the rest of the time belonged to myself and Lookout Records.

Gone was the unrelenting sunshine of a Spy Rock summer; here, where the mountains flattened out into a broad coastal plain, life was lived under an almost perpetually cloud and fog-shrouded sky.  If the Humboldt Bank sign was to be believed, the temperature hovered at a constant 54 degrees from June right through to September.

Arcata.

Redwood Summer kicked off with a mass demonstration at the Samoa pulp mill, but after all the planning and anticipation, it did so without the benefit of my presence.  Instead, I spent that afternoon on my back in the emergency room at Mad River Hospital, convinced that I was dying.  It turned out to be nothing more than a painful bout of kidney stones, but I spent the couple hours it took them to make that diagnosis tearfully composing my goodbyes and regrets.

Much as when I’d been buried in the snowbank, I became fixated on the notion that my life was ending just as I was finally figuring out how to live.  By the time I was discharged, armed with a bottle of painkillers and a warning that I could be looking forward to months or even years of similar attacks (which turned out to be true), I’d undergone a fundamental shift in attitude.

It wasn’t that I’d lost sympathy for the redwoods or the environment, but I had lost interest in putting my body on the line in their defense.  I was not proud of this; in fact I was rather ashamed, but some of the fiery, confrontational spirit had gone out of me.

I could still shoot my mouth off in print, but couldn’t find the heart or the courage to go face-to-face or toe-to-toe with riot cops, undercover FBI agents, and pissed-off mill workers.  Though I did attend a couple events, including the summer’s closing march and demonstration in Fort Bragg, in a replay of the self-obsessed 70s, I spent most of the summer “taking care of me.”

Could this change of heart have had anything to do with the bomb that had exploded in Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney’s car a month earlier as they drove to a Redwood Summer organizing meeting?  Like many people, I had responded with a mixture of fury and fear, but in my case, the fear seemed to predominate.  In an ongoing debate with myself, I wondered if my pullback from frontline political activity was a cowardly retreat or a prudent withdrawal.

I was reminded of the way I’d reacted when Diana Oughton, a woman I’d known casually – though well enough to develop a crush on – blew herself up making bombs for the Weather Underground.  That, combined with the shootings at Kent State, reduced me to an apolitical – and, it might be fair to say, self-indulgent – state that lasted until the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan finally managed to rekindle my sense of outrage.

Welcome to the Arcata Plaza.

In any event, honesty requires me to acknowledge that as the battles of Redwood Summer unfolded, I was preoccupied with making records, learning to skateboard, and falling in love with the cool, gray dream world that Arcata had become for me.  The passion I felt for that place was unlike any I’d experienced before, all the more so because I couldn’t even put my finger on anything particularly special about it.

Its attractions and charms were subtle and small, to the point of being invisible to casual visitors, and maybe even to many of the locals.  Perhaps it was the pervasive sense of timelessness and tranquility, something, friends pointed out, that would largely vanish once the HSU students began returning from their holidays.

And with summer fast disappearing, a decision loomed for me, one I wasn’t looking forward to but would have to make nonetheless.  Would I stay on in Arcata, as I very much wanted to do, and finish my degree at HSU?  Or would I have to bite the bullet and admit that Berkeley was the better choice?

I’d been a student there in the 70s, but had always assumed that I’d destroyed my chance of ever returning when I simply stopped showing up in mid-semester.  It wasn’t the first college I’d pulled that stunt at, and each of the previous times I’d tried it, I had unceremoniously been given the boot.

Berkeley, it turned out, was far more forgiving.  A visit to the registrar’s office in Sproul Hall revealed that not only was I still a student in good standing, but that I’d somehow managed to obtain a B+ in one of the classes – a graduate seminar, no less – that I hadn’t attended for the last two months of the term.

Re-enrolling at Berkeley, I was advised, would entail nothing more than filling out a few forms.  It would be far easier, in fact, than arranging a transfer to HSU.  Even still, I had little desire to return to the Bay Area, and was desperately unhappy at the prospect of leaving Arcata.

I went anyway, and to this day occasionally wonder if I did the right thing.  Was it vanity, the notion that a Berkeley diploma would look better on my wall than one from HSU?  Or a determination to get the best possible education?  Some of both, I suppose.  I remember the day I made my final decision: I had just read a San Francisco Chronicle article about graduating high school seniors and the desperate measures they were resorting to in hopes of gaining admission to the crown jewel of the UC system.

Entrance standards had grown far more stringent since I’d started at Berkeley, making it unlikely that I’d be able to study there if I were starting out as a freshman.  Wouldn’t I be foolish to pass up an opportunity that was afforded to so few?  My brother had a $98-a-month rent-controlled room just three blocks off campus that he’d been using as a workshop to build windsurfing boards; he agreed to turn it over to me for my college residence, and the die was cast.

With my decision made, the remainder of the summer tore by, tinged with growing sadness at the prospect of saying so long to Arcata and Humboldt.  My tight-knit little coterie of friends threw a farewell party for me, and I very nearly cried – okay, a tear or two may have inadvertently escaped – at the thought that I’d no longer be randomly running into one or several of them at Los Bagels, crossing the Plaza, or perusing the racks at People’s Records.

On the bright side, it had been a productive – and profitable – summer.  Determined to prove I could run the label on my own now that David Hayes had jumped ship, I’d gone on a record-releasing spree, coming out with 10 7” EPs in June alone.  I also got together with my band, the Lookouts, to record a few songs.  We’d been drifting apart over the previous year, not because of any bad blood, just that life had taken us in different directions and it was rare for all three of us to be in the same vicinity at any given time.

It would prove to be the last – and easily the best – work we ever did.  Hoping to beef up our sound, I asked Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong to join us on lead guitar and backing vocals.  It would be the first time that Billie and Tre played music together.

Around that same time, Green Day began their first national tour with a stop in Arcata.  As often happened in that very laid back town, the original show fell through – it’s possible, even likely, that someone had completely forgotten to book it – and they wound up playing in the living room of someone’s apartment across from the Greyhound station on 10th Street.

Soon afterward it emerged that Al Sobrante, their original drummer, wanted to put the band on hold while he spent a couple years at HSU having, as he put it, “the full college experience.”  Billie asked Tre if he’d like to fill in on drums, and in November I watched Tre play his first show with Green Day at a student co-op on Berkeley’s North Side.

They’d always been an excellent band, but Tre’s skill catapulted them into a whole new dimension.  I knew on the spot that Green Day were headed for much greater things and that the Lookouts, after five and a half years, were history.

A more seemly - and possibly retouched - photo of the Plaza. Note, for example, the dazzling blue sky and sunshine.

That disappointment aside, Berkeley was turning out better than I’d expected.  Still, it felt a little unreal, as though I were on an extended holiday in an educational theme park.  Home still lay high atop Spy Rock, on the hind flanks of Iron Peak.  In the midst of a less than enthralling lecture, or while plowing through some abstruse passage of Marx or Freud, or as I blearily compiled sales and disbursement charts at 3 o’clock in the morning, my mind and heart inevitably went drifting back there.

Getting my body there was another matter.  It had been easy when I was living in Arcata; I’d drive down to Garberville on Saturdays for the radio show, then continue south to Laytonville.  After my class at College of the Redwoods ended in late July, I’d usually go twice a week.  But the trip from Berkeley took much longer because of the greater distance and the traffic nightmare that was Santa Rosa.  Increasingly, it became easier to say, “I’ll go next week.”

I’d come to rely on a neighbor stopping by to feed the animals, which encouraged that kind of procrastination.  I never doubted I’d be going back for good when my education was done – which, at the rate I was proceeding, would be in late 1991 or  early 1992 – but while I was too busy to notice, life was busy making other plans.

There were new friendships and relationships, there was my growing reliance on the conveniences of urban life, but most of all there was the record label, which continued to grow faster and larger than I would have imagined possible.  By early 1991 I had two fulltime employees, a roster of a couple dozen bands, and a balance sheet that, while full of promise, was also a daunting challenge to someone with my limited understanding of bookkeeping and accounting.

Still, it didn’t seem that terribly complicated: as long as we paid our bills and didn’t spend more than we had, we should be fine, right?  This fundamental principle carried us forward while our business was roughly doubling in size every year.

Another year or so, I kept telling myself, and this will all get a lot simpler.  Once I graduate, I’ll have more time than I know what to do with.  Meanwhile, my visits to Mendocino County continued to grow shorter and less frequent.

I saw the same people – though far less often – and the same places – though missing the subtle changes one notices when passing regularly and constantly through a landscape.  My connection to the land was fraying, if not yet broken; instead of getting back to where I had once belonged, I was slowly fading away.

To be continued…

 

Ten Years

Ten Years

It was exactly 10 years ago tonight that I had my last drink.  I’d been stopping and starting for a year or two.  I’d get sick of myself getting sloppy drunk again and again when I’d only intended to have a civilized glass (or two) of wine with dinner, so I’d pull the plug and stop cold turkey.

The first couple days would be awful, but by the third or fourth I’d be feeling pretty good, and by the fifth and sixth, I’d be on top of the world.  Should have done this years ago, I’d tell myself, and by the seventh and eighth days I’d be telling everybody else, because by then I was feeling distinctly superior to the mere mortals who were still slaves to alcohol.

By the ninth day, I’d be getting a little irritated that my Nobel Peace Prize hadn’t arrived yet, and a little annoyed that so many people – friends, relatives, colleagues and strangers – showed no sign of appreciating what a marvelous accomplishment it was that I hadn’t had a drink in over a week.

And on the tenth day or thereabouts, I’d be starting to annoy myself.  Hadn’t I proved that I didn’t have a drinking problem?  Not just that I didn’t have a drinking problem, but that I was a human being of rare and impeccable moral character.  How many people, after all, could go ten whole days without drinking alcohol?  Practically none, as far as I knew.

In fact, I thought, wasn’t it possible that I was overdoing this whole temperance business?  Moderation in all things, including moderation, wasn’t that how the saying went?  It wasn’t that I wanted to get drunk – why, it went without saying that I was never again going to get drunk; only weaklings and moral defectives did that – but surely a beer or a glass of wine now and then wouldn’t hurt.   In fact, it would probably help.

Not for my sake, of course, but for the sake of others that I had to get along with.  There was such a thing as being too perfect, my reasoning went; now that I had licked my alcohol problem, er, I mean, proved I’d never had one in the first place, it would make perfect sense to have a single celebratory drink – or maybe two very small ones – in an appropriate social setting.

Heck, why wait until I got into the social setting when it would be more efficient to have that drink before I got there; that way, I’d arrive relaxed and affable and ready to slip into the swing of things.  Okay, two drinks, just in case it was a tough crowd.  Sometimes that drink or two would open the floodgates and I’d instantly be back on an idiot’s drunken binge; other times, I’d just have the one or two and wait another couple days before descending into full-fledged drunkenness.

But the end result was always the same.  Regardless of my intentions, regardless of the most fervent efforts of my will, I’d end up drunk again, depressed again, with my physical and emotional well-being deteriorating alarmingly, and increasingly unable to see any value or point to going on with the sort of life I was living.

The tail end of summer, 2001 was especially tumultuous and disturbing.  I’d stopped drinking in mid-August, fallen spectacularly off the wagon during the Reading Festival on the last weekend of the month, then cleaned up again in the wake of September 11, when after drinking myself into a sodden, jellied mass of protoplasm plopped in front of the TV for the first couple days following the attack on the World Trade Center, it occurred to me that I didn’t want to be such a helpless mess should the terrorists turn their attention to Notting Hill (not a likely prospect, as you’ll know if you’re familiar with the place, but rationality was not my strong suit at the time).

So the next ten days were sober ones, and as usual I grew in wisdom, strength and grace while I contemplated the glory that would be mine when I led my neighborhood defense committee in turning back the terrorist menace.  And I had no intention of drinking again, I was quite sure, until I heard that my old friend Danny had arrived back in London from a year-long hitchhiking and backpacking trip around the world.

He had been pretty much my best friend in London, and we’d spent many a happy hour sitting around pubs talking over the day’s crucial historical, political and social issues.  Pubs being pubs, we’d generally lubricated our discussions with a few pints of beer.

Danny wasn’t much of a drinker; he’d typically only have one or two pints, which I found both inexplicable and exasperating.  If you were going to drink, I figured, then you should drink, and not lollygag around sipping a little beer here and a little there, sometimes not even finishing your whole glass.

The worst thing, though, was that it cramped my style.  I couldn’t very well down two or three pints for every one that Danny did.  Well, I could, but it wouldn’t look so great, would it?  So with great pain, strife and forbearance, I’d match Danny’s drinking pace, and then, once I’d said good night to him, rush home or to another pub where I’d make up for lost time by drinking everything that I would have drunk if I hadn’t been so worried about what he might think.

Obviously Danny – like most normal people – couldn’t have cared less how much I drank, or even if I drank at all.  As long as I didn’t vomit on him, or shout too loud at him in public places, he was content with me consuming as little or as much as I chose.

But now, with our first meeting in a year looming, I felt horribly torn.  I wanted it to be like the old days, a couple of highly civilized gentlemen having a highly civilized conversation over a few pints, but at the same time, I was worried sick that if I made even a one-night-only exception to my no-drinking rule, I’d be back in the soup again.

In the middle of going back and forth over this, the phone rang; an old punk rock friend who’d been sober for years was calling to see how I was doing.  I told him about my dilemma, and he said, “Well, you’re free to do whatever you want, but instead of worrying about not drinking again for the rest of your life, why don’t you just focus on tonight?  You can always change your mind tomorrow, but just for today, try making a decision not to drink.”

That made sense, and I promised him I would try it, but I knew all along I wouldn’t have the nerve to tell Danny I was going to have an orange juice or a 7-Up instead of a beer.  We went to the pub, had two pints each, and were busily catching up on what had happened in the year since we’d last seen each other.  Around 11 pm, which was the hour that most pubs closed, it became apparent that this pub had a late license.

We could – if we chose – carry on for another three hours.  I got up to go to the bathroom, and on my way there, realized, thanks to my leaden feet and sluggish mental reactions, that I was already as drunk as I needed or wanted to be.  It was impossible, I protested.  I’d only had two pints, a fraction of my normal intake. But it was undeniably true.

So I had a choice of sitting there for another three hours drinking nothing, sipping soft drinks, or telling Danny I’d had enough and calling it an early night.  You can probably guess the choice I made: three more pints of extra strong lager, and by the time we parted company I was in enough of a state that I still don’t know how I made it home from Kentish Town to West London.

I woke up the next morning with the worst hangover of my life, and the pain was only exacerbated by the knowledge that I hadn’t drunk nearly enough to merit this sort of suffering.  Why, I’d downed ten pints and a bottle of whiskey and felt better than this.  But logic was of no avail; all day Saturday and all day Sunday, I lay there in agony, cursing alcohol for turning on me and myself for having turned back to alcohol.

It was Monday evening before I felt well enough to leave my room, let alone the house.  I was still shaky, but I’d already racked up my first three days of sobriety.  Since then, I’ve counted 3,649 more (including leap years), and today I’ve reached what once would have been the unimaginable milestone of 10 years without a drink.

And what do I have to show for it?

In a word: everything.  I probably wouldn’t be alive today if I hadn’t stopped drinking when I did.  At least half a dozen people I know weren’t so fortunate and did in fact pass away during the time I’ve been sober.  More than just being alive, though, I have reasons – abundant reasons – for wanting to be alive.  That wasn’t always the case.  I enjoyed some material blessings, and some of the trappings of success, but they were never enough to give my life purpose or meaning.  For most of my adult life (and the bulk of my childhood as well), I was one of the most miserable, unpleasant, arrogant, sarcastic and insensitive sonofabitches you’d ever not want to meet.

It probably goes without saying that during most of that time I was deeply depressed, frequently to the point of seriously contemplating suicide.  I may not have completely freed myself from the arrogance and insensitivity, though I think I’ve made progress, but the depression is almost completely gone, and without the use of shrinks, psychiatric drugs, or anything else more remarkable than a substance-free existence and an assiduous effort to clear up the wreckage of my past.

I laugh a lot these days – not always at things that “normal” people would consider funny, it’s true – but though I’ve still got many of the same worries and problems – especially in the finance and romance departments – that I had 10, 20, 30, even 40 years ago, they just don’t seem to faze me in the way they once did.  My writing is getting better, my music is getting better, but most of all the quality of my life and my interactions with my fellow human beings is increasing by leaps and bounds.  For the first time in my life, I can unhesitatingly say, on almost any given day, that I am enormously happy and grateful and thrilled just to be alive.

Do I miss anything about the old days?  The jagged romance of hanging out in late night boozers, of staggering comically into oblivion, the poetic mystique of the beautiful but doomed loser drinking himself into the grave over lost love or unfulfilled ambition?  Sure, there’s a certain dark charm to all that, but it’s one that I can live – and have lived – very happily without.  Once – and for a very long time – I didn’t know anything else, but now I do, and it’s nothing short of awesome.

So it’s a day for celebration, but also a day for quiet thanksgiving, for remembering those who weren’t so fortunate and didn’t make it.  And, of course, to acknowledge the people who offered me a helping hand, some useful advice, or just a kind word or smile over the years.  Some of you know who you are; others of you may have no idea that some seemingly insignificant thought or gesture on your part played a vital role in saving my life and making it shine.  To all of you, thank you so very much; I could never have made it without you.

Spy Rock Memories, Part 9

Spy Rock Memories, Part 9

Everything did change, not all at once, not in an obvious, visible way, at least at first, but the wheels were already in motion.  Life on Spy Rock unfolded peacefully and quietly through the rest of 1988 and into 1989.  I barely noticed winter that year; spring was bright and full of promise.  The Sweet Children record was nearly done; they’d gone into the studio at the end of the year, and by March we had the pieces in place for a 4-song EP.

Then they casually informed me, just as I was about to print the covers and labels, that they’d decided to change their name to Green Day.  I blew a gasket.  It was too late; there was no time to change all the artwork.  Besides, I insisted, it was ridiculous to expect me to sell a record by a band no one had ever heard of.  “Green Day?” I sneered.  “What’s that even supposed to mean?”

But as was often the case with my best bands, they had decided what they wanted and that was that.  Thanks to my copy shop connection, we were able to throw together a new cover, and the record came out on time.  It didn’t sell much at first, but I’d expected that; Sweet Children/Green Day were a slight departure from the usual Lookout Records fare: poppier, more melodic, almost, dare I say it, a little mainstream.

Although I loved the record, it was far from the only thing on my mind.  The long-awaited, much-delayed album by our most popular band, Operation Ivy, was finally ready.  Closer to home, I was putting the final touches on a new album by the Lookouts.

Four years earlier, with people threatening to burn down my house for bringing too much publicity to the area, calling our record Spy Rock Road would have seemed near-suicidal.  In 1989, it never crossed my mind to call it anything else.  It wasn’t just the name: the cover art, by the Anderson Valley Advertiser’s cartoonist, the mysterious “M,” simultaneously lampooned and paid tribute to our little corner of the world, replete with rampaging lumberjacks, CAMP cowboys dangling from a low-flying helicopter, a punk rock band plugged into a pine tree, and a bullet whizzing through the Spy Rock sign.

Cover of the new Lookouts album. Art by "M."

If my neighbors had opinions about the Spy Rock cover, they kept them to themselves.  Times had changed.  They really had; who could have imagined, back when the reaction to our fledgling band had run the gamut from indifference to hostility to outright threats of violence, that not so far in the future our songs would be echoing across the hills of the Emerald Triangle over the airwaves of a powerful homegrown radio station?

KMUD, which in 1985 had yet to advance beyond the crazy dream stage, was now consuming as much of my time and energy as the band, record label, or magazine.  In addition to my Saturday afternoon slot with Chris, I was sitting in for other DJs, hosting public affairs and call-in programs, attending staff meetings, and becoming an avid fundraiser.

Chris and I were no longer KMUD outliers, it seemed – we were actually named “Programmers Of The Year” for 1989 – so I thought it was time I showed that punk rockers could help support the station, too – not just culturally, but financially.  I organized a benefit concert, and when KMUD management questioned its viability, volunteered to finance the entire event myself.

The lineup I had put together would, I was sure, easily draw a crowd big enough to cover expenses and produce a substantial profit for the station.  The main reason I was so confident was that Operation Ivy had agreed to headline.  Their popularity had spread beyond the punk scene; even Humboldt kids who’d never been to a punk show in their lives had heard of them.

I rented the Vets’ Hall in downtown Garberville; we’d packed the place in February when the Lookouts had played there with MDC, my old San Francisco flatmate’s Pope-terrorizing band.  Despite it being an unusually snowy night, the show had been a roaring success, even if Tre did dislocate his knee showing off for some girls and wound up in the hospital (he was considerate enough to wait until after we’d already played).  That night had convinced me that the blue-eyed rastas and terminal Deadheads might finally be losing their stranglehold on the local music scene.

My optimism was unfounded.  Two weeks before the benefit, Operation Ivy broke up.  I begged them to put aside their differences long enough to play the show, but they’d decided to say their goodbyes where it had all begun, at Gilman Street, and suddenly my star attraction had vanished.

Two years later, either of my opening bands – Screeching Weasel and Green Day – could have filled any Vets’ Hall in the land, but on June 10, 1989, this was not yet the case.  Especially in Garberville.  I had replaced Operation Ivy with the Mr. T Experience, who had a decent following in the Bay Area but were largely unknown up our way.

Still, I was cautiously confident.  Musical events aimed at young people were infrequent enough that you could count on a crowd for anything that didn’t involve Scottish clog dancing or an all-day klezmer fest.  Sadly, my confidence was misplaced; maybe 100 or 150 people showed up, a turnout big enough not to be embarrassing, but nowhere near enough to make any money for KMUD.  Instead, the event actually cost me a few hundred bucks.

 

Flyer for the ill-fated KMUD benefit. Art by Christopher Appelgren.

The author of my misfortune was Jerry Garcia, who, unbeknownst to us, was performing a few miles down the road.  Our audience had deserted us in droves in favor of the Grateful Dead frontman.  That was Humboldt for you: kids were happy to check out something new, like a punk show, but Jerry remained first in their hearts.  Apparently the rastas and Deadheads still ruled the roost after all.

For those who, unlike me, didn’t have to worry about money and logistics, it was a pretty good show, despite a few hiccups.  Mike Dirnt, Green Day’s 17-year-old bassist, had been drinking heavily (I got the impression it was something he wasn’t used to doing), and when it came time to play, he was outside puking in the bushes.

We had to half-lead, half-carry him to the stage, and once there, help him find his bass (he’d failed to notice that it was already strapped across his shoulders).  Assuming his being blind drunk would prevent Green Day from playing their normal set, I was ready to cut it short, but the minute the music started, it was as though he’d been transported to another world, a world where it was impossible for him to play anything other than note-perfect renditions of every song he knew.  As long as he didn’t fall over, that is, which always seemed like a possibility.

Screeching Weasel didn’t fare as well.  Ben Weasel, their acerbic frontman, had a regular schtick of trying to provoke and insult his audience, but the hippie-tinged punks of Garberville weren’t buying it.  Or even getting it, for that matter.

Ben’s material consisted mostly of in-jokes that would only make sense to MRR-reading devotees of “the scene.”  The sunny-faced Humboldt kids stared blankly back in the face of his vitriol, as if to ask, “Dude, why is that guy having such a bummer?”

Ben’s bummer did not diminish when he and his band had to follow me up to Spy Rock to spend the night.  They were city people, driving a city car, and the concept of miles of precipitous unpaved roads, devoid of streetlights or Burger Kings, did not compute.  His next MRR column began, “What kind of asshole lives nine miles up the side of a goddam mountain?”

Green Day made the trip up Spy Rock, too, without complaints or comments, except for the next morning when Billie and Mike complained that my “ferocious” dogs had kept them prisoner in their van all night.  “Ruf Ruf and Kong?” I marveled. “The worst they could have done was lick you to death.”

We drove down to Berkeley the next morning, after, at my insistence, a stop in downtown Laytonville.  I wanted the visiting bands to see a little of my world, a world they’d heard me talk so much about, but I also had a not quite so honorable motive: I knew it would drive Ben Weasel right up the wall.

It was the weekend of the annual Laytonville Rodeo, and our normally quiet little crossroads was abuzz with life, the kind of life, I was sure, that Ben was not going to have encountered back in Chicago.  We found ourselves sandwiched in between half a dozen cowboys and a flatbed truck hauling a similar number of hill muffins in dazzling day-glo and tie-dye.  In front of us was a crowd of jugglers and clowns from Camp Winnarainbow.

The camp, whose founder Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney is best known as the disembodied voice advising Woodstock attendees against the brown acid, was situated on land just north of Laytonville owned by the Hog Farm, a long-running hippie commune dating back to the 60s.  The idea had sounded highly questionable when first broached – who was going to entrust their children to a bunch of legendarily stoned-out acidheads? – but Camp Winnarainbow had proved to be a resounding success.

My niece and nephew had spent time there, and so, to the everlasting shame of the Lookouts, had our drummer, Tre Cool.  We hated to admit it, but he was still summering there well into his teens, which meant that when we had a show we often had to stop and retrieve him from whatever drum circle or mime class he might be engaged in.  “Aren’t you getting a little old for camp?” I’d ask, to which he’d retort, “Never too old for having fun!”

Ben, as I’d anticipated, was not enthusiastic about hanging around Laytonville to take in the sights and sounds of the Rodeo.  He was the kind of guy who had very fixed, sometimes quite arbitrary ideas about how the world should be ordered, and within this scheme of things, there was little room for clowns, hippies and cowboys, especially not jumbled together in a single place.  I could see him fuming, could tell he assumed that the town of Laytonville, with myself as co-conspirator, had deliberately cooked up this concoction of clashing cultures for the sole purpose of tormenting him.

Though punk rock was still at the center of my personal and professional life, my explorations of the North Coast’s backwoods and byways were bringing me to into contact with music and musicians I previously would have ignored.  It’s not that I’d become completely open-minded – there was never a danger of that – but my enthusiasm for local culture led me to at least give a listen to sounds and rhythms I once would have instantly dismissed.

There was Indiana Slim, of course, who’d gone out of his way to befriend me at a time when I most needed it.  I’d never cared much for blues or blues-based rock, especially when played by white guys, but Slim imbued his work – and his life – with such infectious enthusiasm that it was hard not to be a fan.

He and his wife – she fronted their band, Baby Lee and the Red Hots – cruised around in a wildly impractical but undeniably elegant gold Cadillac with giant tailfins evoking an earlier, more profligate era.  Slim was a walking, talking monument to the age of hepcats and crazy jive, and Baby Lee, well, if anything, I was even more in awe of her.  She exuded a star quality that would have been at home anywhere from a honky-tonk roadhouse to the Radio City Music Hall, making it all the more incongruous to encounter in the parking lot of the Laytonville Post Office.

I never learned where or how they lived, though I wondered if Slim ever had to swap his ebony winklepickers and lamé sportcoat for rubber boots and a rain jacket when it came time to dig out a blocked culvert or chainsaw a downed tree.  Mostly I assumed that mundane rural realities never intruded into what looked like their magical, charmed existence.

Through Slim I met Michael Ferretta, a singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar and an in-your-face attitude that might have been called folk-punk if that term had existed at the time.  He’d become something of a mountain troubadour, especially for the growers and their families.  One of his signature songs, “Locked Gates And A Loaded .45,” bemoaning the paranoia and violence that had invaded the once-peaceful pot trade, had becomes something of a local anthem.

He lived with his wife Holly, their three children, and Michael’s dad, in an expanded, updated version of the log cabin his grandfather had built early in the century.  They were homeschoolers, and their kids seemed years ahead of their contemporaries, academically as well as socially.  I’d met other homeschoolers, most notably the Colfaxes of Anderson Valley, who’d gained national attention when three of their sons were admitted to Harvard, but the Ferrettas were the first I was able to observe in action.

They were dead serious about it, establishing study hours and assignments more rigorous than anything the kids would have encountered in the Laytonville schools.  As the kids grew older, the adult Ferrettas were constantly having to brush up on their own studies in order to keep up with them.

A perennial question about homeschooled kids was whether they missed out on the “socialization” process that a conventional school supposedly offers.  Based on my own not especially happy experiences, I had my doubts.  To its proponents, socialization meant learning how to work, play and interact with one’s peers; for me it had meant bullying, ostracism, and singling out for attack anyone who deviated from the norm.

Growing up, and even once grown up, I harbored the fantasy that I would have been happier and better adjusted if I hadn’t been forced to attend school with dullards and thugs.  In that light, homeschooling looked like a highly desirable option.  What I didn’t realize, but eventually came to see, was that the Ferrettas put as much effort into their own kids’ “socialization” – by ensuring that they spent quality time with other kids, and adults as well – as they did into the formal educational process.

Sadly, not every parent claiming to be a homeschooler was motivated by the same principles and values as the Ferrettas or Colfaxes.  There were some who kept their kids at home merely to save themselves the trouble and expense of getting them down the mountain in time to catch the school bus, while others were indifferent or actively hostile to the very concept of education, and saw it as a brainwashing tool of “the man.”

Another of the Lookout "theme" issues, this one on global warming. Was I ahead of my time or what? Cover art by Marty Maceda.

“Kids are smart, they can learn on their own,” they’d insist, then proceed to smoke, sniff or drink themselves into oblivion while their children effectively ran wild.  I know of at least half a dozen functionally and socially illiterate young people who grew up without acquiring any of the skills they’d need should they ever want to leave the mountain and try their hand at civilization.

Witnessing the damage being done chipped away at my anti-authoritarian attitudes; for the first time I began giving serious thought and study to how education should work ideally.  This led me to publish the first of several “theme” issues of the Lookout.  The cover looked as irreverent and iconoclastic as ever; the headline shouted “HEY STUPID!  WERE YOU BORN LIKE THAT OR DID YOU LEARN IT IN SCHOOL?”  But inside was some of the most serious journalism I had ever attempted.

I interviewed Bruce Anderson, an outspoken critics of the educational establishment, and, speaking in defense of said establishment, Laytonville’s Superintendent of Schools, Brian Buckley.  I devoted a couple pages to an anonymous homeschooling family – I suppose after all these years it’s all right to identify them as the Ferrettas – and rounded it off with my politically liberal, socially conservative 80-year-old uncle, who’d spent half his life as an educator of the strictly disciplinarian old school, whose idealism and devotion had remained remarkably undimmed.

The issue was surprisingly well received.  I was reaching new, previously undreamed of levels of respectability.  Local organizations and institutions sent me their press releases and announcements as though I were a bona fide media outlet, and I suppose, in a way, I had become one.

Records, books and magazines also came flooding in, and no longer just from punk rockers.  I seldom had time to give them the attention they deserved, but one cassette, from a singer named Darryl Cherney, quite impressed me.  I Had To Be Born This Century was a well-crafted collection of tunes, some pleasant, slightly hokey (I liked slightly hokey) stories about local places and people, others serving as rallying cries for the environmental movement and its new, ultra-militant manifestation, Earth First!

Most people thought of only one thing when they heard the name Earth First!: tree-spiking.  In reality, the loose-knit organization – so loose-knit that it was almost more of a concept than an actual organization – advocated a whole range of tactics.

Only some involved ecotage or “monkeywrenching” – pouring sand into a bulldozer’s crankcase, for example – while at least as much emphasis was placed on traditional civil disobedience techniques like picket lines and sit-ins.  But nothing struck fear into the hearts of forest workers – or evoked their anger – like the threat of driving spikes or nails into trees to make them unharvestable.

There were few instances of this actually happening – it had always been more a threat than a reality – until a Sonoma County mill worker was almost decapitated when his saw hit a nail that looked to have been deliberately placed in the log he was working on.  Tensions ratcheted up between environmentalists and loggers, to the point where violence often felt imminent.

I drove up to Piercy, a barely inhabited hamlet at the north end of the county, to meet Darryl Cherney, who was living in a cabin a stone’s throw from the then-placid Eel River.  It was as he’d described it in his song about the great flood of 1986:

I was living down in Piercy, a hundred yards from the river’s edge
But when I woke up on Sunday morning I found its waters on my doorsteps

It was my favorite song of his; I liked how the chorus namechecked the towns scattered along the course of the mighty Eel, turning ordinary place names into something like poetry:

And if you lived in Myers Flat or Benbow
Miranda or Phillipsville
Sprowel Creek or Weott
Scotia or Rio Dell

Redcrest or Redway
Or by the bridge down at Sylvandale

His folksy manner and easy-going drawl belied the fact that Darryl was not exactly a local boy.  A master’s degree-sporting product of New York’s affluent Upper West Side, he’d come to California to re-invent himself, and done a pretty convincing job of it.  He’d recently teamed up with another East Coast transplant, Judi Bari, who I also met that afternoon.

 

Old growth logging: just a section of a single tree filled an entire truck.

I liked Judi immediately; she was outspoken, almost a little strident at times, but her uproarious sense of humor softened the effect, and made her a lot of fun to be around.  Among my favorite – and certainly most vivid – memories of her is the time she, Darryl and I were hanging out on the porch of the Boonville Brewery after some meeting or other we’d attended.

Admiring her t-shirt, which was an intense, pulsating green punctuated with a black fist and the Earth First! Logo, I asked if she knew where I could get one like it.  “I’ll trade you,” she said, and before I had time to think about it, she was standing there topless, waiting for me to hand her my shirt in exchange.

I did love my Earth First! shirt, but was seldom brave enough to wear it during my comings and goings around the county.  Having spent several years learning how to fit in, I wasn’t ready to start making a whole new set of enemies.  Besides, I rationalized, I was a journalist now, and had to retain at least some semblance of objectivity in dealing with the diverse elements of our community.  But mostly I didn’t want to get punched in the face.

Looking back now, I can see where I should have tried harder to understand where the loggers were coming from.  Until the arrival of marijuana, logging had completely dominated the North Coast.  The industry paid well – or at least better than anything else – and almost no one doubted that there was a never-ending supply of logs to be cut and milled.

But by the 1980s, the landscape had changed dramatically.  The trees were still being cut – faster than ever – but instead of being sent to local sawmills for processing into lumber (which was where most of the jobs were), raw logs were shipped en masse to Asia and other parts of the world.  Corporations like Louisiana Pacific and Georgia Pacific, run by outsiders and committed only to maximizing profits, had embarked on a race to liquidate what was left of their forest holdings.

The Pacific Lumber Company, Humboldt County’s largest employer, had not joined this cut-and-run orgy, but instead continued to log at a sustainable rate, as had been the case for decades.  Its integrity became its downfall: by keeping its most valuable asset – its old-growth redwoods – in reserve, Palco made itself an attractive and vulnerable target for a hostile takeover.

Charles Hurwitz, a Texas corporate raider who’d enriched himself by buying healthy companies, selling off anything that wasn’t nailed down and looting their pension funds before driving them into bankruptcy, swooped in to give Palco the same treatment.  The only way to pay back the junk bonds he used to finance the takeover was to immediately start clearcutting the last major stands of privately owned old growth redwoods.

After the forests were leveled: a truckload of what the loggers called "pecker poles."

It didn’t take a genius to realize that at this rate it wouldn’t be long – perhaps as little as ten or twenty years – before the cathedral-like forests would be reduced to spindly stands of what the loggers derisively called “pecker poles.”  But in the short term, there was an upsurge of logging jobs, and the mistrust of hippies and environmentalists shared by most workers – and cynically nurtured by their employers – ensured that few heeded the warning posed by Darryl Cherney’s song, “Where Are We Gonna Work When The Trees Are Gone?”

In late 1989 press releases began to appear for something called “Mississippi Summer In The California Redwoods.”  Based loosely on 1964’s “Freedom Summer,” when activists from across the land descended on Mississippi to challenge its Jim Crow laws and register African-Americans to vote, the idea was to invite thousands of protesters to spend the summer of 1990 defending the last of California’s great redwood forests.

The idea had potential, but I questioned its chances for success.  The “Mississippi Summer” name felt awkward and unwieldy; it would be next to meaningless for many young activists who might not even have been born by 1964.  I argued in favor of calling it “Redwood Summer:” it would be catchier, as well as more succinct and to the point.

Darryl and Judi, who’d assumed a leading role in planning the protests, agreed with me, but thought it would be too difficult to persuade other coalition members, many of whom framed every political action in the rhetoric and tactics of their beloved 1960s, to consent to a name change.  Exasperated, I took matters into my own hands by referring to “Redwood Summer” at every opportunity, in print or on the radio.  It still seemed like a losing battle until I collaborated with the AVA’s “M” on what would become a semi-official poster for the event.

While I can barely draw a rudimentary stick figure, I can occasionally come up with concepts that an actual artist – and “M” was an especially gifted one – can turn into reality.  I don’t remember how much if any of the picture was my idea, but I did produce a tag line –“This Is Where The 90s Begin” – and, most crucially, persuaded “M” to scrap “Mississippi Summer In The California Redwoods” in favor of “Redwood Summer.”

 

Marathon runners traverse the Avenue of the Giants, one of the few remaining stands of old growth redwoods.

I circulated thousands of copies of the poster by way of Lookout magazine and Lookout Records mail orders, at Bay Area punk rock shows, and in bookshops, food co-ops, and wherever else my travels took me.  I can’t claim to have single-handedly turned the tide in applying a more sensible and user-friendly name to the summer’s action, but I’d like to think I played a part.

Did my publicity campaign bring in any additional bodies?  I have no way of knowing, but Redwood Summer did attract a significant sprinkling of punk rockers who previously wouldn’t have come within miles of anything perceived as “hippie,” the heading that saving trees and embracing nature would have traditionally fallen under.

The ensuing cultural interaction may have helped produce a new hippie-punk hybrid, something I took note of when Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra, introduced to Mendocino County by friend and collaborator Winston Smith, began touting the medicinal and economic values of “hemp,” aka marijuana.  I too had been toeing the party line, recommending marijuana as a panacea for society’s ills.

Someone, somewhere, claimed that hemp oil would replace fossil fuels as our chief energy source?  I unquestioningly repeated it as fact.  Could it cure cancer, depression, AIDS, practically any other disease known to man, physical or mental?  I didn’t see why not; after all, “everyone” knew the government was only trying to eradicate it to protect the profits of the giant pharmaceutical companies.

Personally, I had become less and less fond of the stuff.  I hadn’t given up smoking it by any means, though I often thought I should.  After a couple decades – I’d smoked my first joint in 1967 – of believing that it heightened my consciousness and made me a more spiritually and morally elevated being, I was beginning to suspect that most of the time the drug was doing me no favors.

Having seen far too much of my time and energy vanish into a dope-inflected haze, I tried harder and harder to curtail my usage.  I’d be successful for a while; then, like a classic amnesiac, forget everything I’d learned and start reasoning that putting a little “edge” or “buzz” on the morning would make it more enjoyable and productive.  Ten minutes later, often before the sun had cleared the trees and with the clock still lumbering its way toward 7 or 8 am, I’d be cursing my stupidity and accepting that another day had disappeared irrevocably down the drain.

Was the solitude finally getting to me, as I’d seen it do to so many others who lived alone on the mountain?  What with the record label, the band, the magazine, the radio station and my new political work, I was meeting and interacting with more people than ever, but I always came back alone to my mountain redoubt, convinced that a hermit’s life must be what I had been fated for.

There might have been something in that, but looking back now, I think it was mostly the marijuana.  Not only was it making me lazy and stupid; it also encouraged me to hang out in my own private universe, a fine place to be when you hanker to reign supreme and run roughshod over reality, but a very lonely place if you’re hoping to meet another human being who isn’t you.

At any rate, I was soon going to have to give up growing marijuana, which would in turn cut off my smoking supply.  The record label was becoming too big, too much of a legitimate business.  If, God forbid, I should ever get raided, the authorities would

The green hills of Humboldt, on the banks of the mighty Eel.

assume that its finances were intermingled with the proceeds from dope growing – in reality, they were not; the record label was now completely self-sustaining – and confiscate everything.

Until now I’d addressed this problem by having my partner, David Hayes, be the legal owner of the company, but he’d told me he was quitting at the end of the year.  It had become “too much like a job,” as he put it.  The upshot was that if the label were to keep going (I had my doubts), I was going to have to go “legit.”

These were the sorts of things running through my mind as the achingly beautiful autumn of 1989 slipped softly away.  On one hand, I’d never been happier with Spy Rock and its way of life; on the other, I had a nagging suspicion that something was not quite right, that everything was coming undone.  Such was my mental backdrop on that exquisite October day, as I cut firewood and listened to the World Series until it suddenly broke into a play-by-play of the Loma Prieta earthquake.

As was often the case when natural disasters struck down below, I felt as though I were floating safely above it all.  Why, I often asked, would I ever want to leave this wonderful world?  And, just as often, something told me that a time might come when I would have no choice.

Angst and feelings of unsettledness aside, there were also moments of sheer magic.  One morning, ferrying a truckload of kids down Salmon Creek Road, I slipped the cassette of the new Lookouts album into the tape player and my favorite song came blasting forth.

I’d written it a couple years earlier while visiting the UK; it drew a parallel between Celtic tribes driven into the west country by invading Roman armies and our own “tribes” of hippies and back-to-the-landers striving to maintain their way of life on one of the last frontiers of America’s modern-day Rome:

And the rain still falls on the green hills of England
And the sun beats down on our California home
And the wind blows free across all your borders
Why must we be always on the run?

There are writers, gifted and visionary, no doubt, who can effortlessly turn out classic lyrics and soaring melodies whenever they set their minds to it, but most of us ordinary mortals have to content ourselves with an awesome line here or there, or maybe, if we’re really lucky, one perfect chorus.  This was mine, or at least as close as I was likely to get.

In every direction, as far as I could see, the green hills of Humboldt were transfixed upon my eyes and transfigured in my soul.  This was my home, my heart, my destiny.  I could no more leave it than it could leave me.  It was a moment, I knew, that would become a touchstone for all that mattered, for all the rest of my life.

The year glided to a gentle conclusion.  On New Year’s Eve, the Lookouts spent the afternoon at KMUD, clowning around and playing soft, acoustic versions of our usually abrasive punk songs.  They felt well suited to the day, which was mild and swathed in a not unpleasant cloud of melancholy and nostalgia.

Midway through “That Girl’s From Outer Space,” Kain’s upright bass “exploded,” as I put it.  In reality the bridge had just broken loose and sent the strings flying every which way.  Instead of cursing our luck or feeling our performance was ruined, we laughed almost hysterically while the bass was reassembled, then played some more, until we’d all but run out of songs.  Chris, who’d been manning the control board, faded into an extended version of “Disco Inferno,” and we spilled out onto the parking lot to say our goodbyes.

It was only then that I remembered it wasn’t any old New Year we were celebrating, but the turn of a decade.  At the beginning of the 1980s, I’d been fearful, almost despondent, about the direction I saw my life going; ten years down the line, I was almost brimming over with optimism and excitement.

1990. It really felt like the future now.  Like science fiction, almost.  Who would have dreamed I’d live this long and still have so much to live for?  I knew before it began that it was going to be a banner year, and that proved to be true in almost every way.  What I didn’t know, what I couldn’t or wouldn’t have wanted to know, was that it would also mark the beginning of the end of my time on Spy Rock Road.

To be continued…

Kreayshawn Reconsidered

Kreayshawn Reconsidered

Some of the best – and some of the worst – writing I’ve done has been in a fit of pique and/or passion, with words spilling out onto the page faster than I can reflect on the full extent of their meaning.  Or meanings, I should say, because it’s a rare word and a rarer sentence that doesn’t admit a multiplicity of interpretations.

I didn’t mention it in yesterday’s piece on racial stereotypes, but I used to know Kreayshawn’s mother.  It’s been a long time since I saw or talked with her – maybe not since Kreayshawn was an infant or little girl – but we used to move in the same punk rock circles, and had a number of friends in common.

If I’d been more aware of this, if I’d have stopped to think it through, would I have written about Kreayshawn in the same way?  Probably not, and I’m a little ashamed to say that, because ideally, writers who set out to tell the truth about the world should, as Joseph Pulitzer said about newspapers, “have no friends.”

I don’t think he meant we were fated to live solitary, alienated lives – though it can sometimes feel that way – but that we can’t afford to play favorites, give one kind of treatment to those we know and like, and another to those who exist only as anonymous media presences.

For 1980s punk rockers, Maximum Rocknroll, especially its letters section, functioned like a low-tech version of the internet, filled with endless shit-talking and Talmudic examinations of hopelessly arcane principles.  Accuse a band of charging a dollar too much for its shows or records, suggest that their lyrics lacked the appropriate sensitivity to the crucial issues that consumed us, and you could set off a firestorm of charges and countercharges that sometimes rose – “sunk” might be the more appropriate word – to threats or even acts of physical violence.

As author of a monthly column in MRR, I was often in the middle, if not the instigator-in-chief, of these disputes.  I was quick to judge, quicker to criticize, and did not always bother to have all the facts in my possession before I let fly with my opinions.

As a result, there was always somebody, if not several somebodies, mad at me about one thing or the other.  I figured that went with the territory, and didn’t think too much about it until the first time I really upset someone in my own immediate circle of friends.

He had editorialized against the gentrification of San Francisco’s Mission District (yes, the argument has been going on that long) and I pointed out that he, having recently moved into a large warehouse in the Mission, was himself part of the process he was criticizing.  He called to complain, and when I didn’t immediately see things his way, slammed the phone down with such anger that he broke his hand.

We became friends again, but it took a while, and I began to reconsider – something I’m still doing today, almost 25 years later – just where to draw the line when it comes to offering advice and opinions, whether to strangers or friends.  Some people follow the course – a course, incidentally, which has often been recommended to me – of having, or at least expressing no judgments at all, of simply accepting that different people view the world in different ways, and embracing the diversity.

Others maintain – and I guess I’ve always leaned more in this direction – that we have our critical faculties for a reason, and that we have both a right and a duty, to use them.  “I try to keep an open mind,” MRR’s Tim Yohannan used to say, “but not so open that any old crap can fall in.”  If no one points out what’s wrong, this view holds, how can we expect it to be righted?

The trouble is that most of the time none of us knows with any certainty what is wrong and right, especially since a great deal of what goes on in the world falls somewhere between those extremes.  This is how I’m feeling today, in the wake of some very strong reactions – both positive and negative – to my Kreayshawn article.  It’s inevitable that this will happen when one wades into the thicket of race and class issues, as I should know, since I’ve been tackling this subject, from a variety of standpoints, ever since my 1980s MRR days.

If I should have learned anything over those years, it’s that I need to be extremely judicious in my use of words like “racist” or “racism,” perhaps so judicious that I banish them from my vocabulary altogether.  I’m not sure who first said it, but it’s been observed that these days, with the n-word having become such a conversational commonplace that it’s lost much of its sting, “racist” has, at least in some circles, replaced it as the ultimate insult.

Maybe I was subconsciously thinking of this when I deployed such heavy verbal artillery against Kreayshawn; maybe it was a cheap shot on my part because I felt unable to come up with the words to say what I really meant.  I don’t know: what I do know is that I was wrong to accuse Kreayshawn of being a racist, at least in any normal sense of the word.

I still feel – and feel strongly – that some of what she says and does has the potential to do great harm, and that whether or not she’s aware of this, it needs to be talked about, broken down, studied and understood.  I don’t doubt that she’s an intelligent woman, and her friends and family tell me that she’s a kind, gentle and loving person as well.

Put it that way and I almost – almost – feel bad for bringing the subject up at all.  But while I’ll cop to being wrong for hauling out the r-word (it might have been more accurate to say that her glorification of ghetto stereotypes provides fuel for real racists), and wrong for trying to psychoanalyze her reasons for acting the way she does, I’m standing by my main point: that with great power comes great responsibility.

Kreayshawn needs to recognize that she’s becoming a major role model – she probably realizes this anyway – and that the words, images and attitudes she employs have real effects on real people.  It’s been pointed out – and it may be true – that I’m not knowledgeable enough about hip hop to critique her style and flow, but that’s not what I’m here to do.

The values I’m talking about transcend musical and cultural genres.  What I’m hoping is that Kreayshawn will use the ability and opportunities she’s been given to step up her game and lift people up with her instead of dragging them down – and letting herself be dragged down – to the basest street level.

Kreayshawn: The New Face Of White Racism

Kreayshawn: The New Face Of White Racism

(See also: “Kreayshawn Reconsidered”, in which I realize I went way over the top with some of the things I said in this article.)

I guess I’m late to this party; a quick look around the interwebs demonstrates that debate has already been raging for months about whether or not Kreayshawn, the Oakland-based white rapper, represents America’s cross-cultural, post-racial future, or if she’s simply recycling and regurgitating tired old racist stereotypes for fun and profit.

At first I was in the pro-Kreayshawn camp; contrary to what some people are saying, I think she’s a decent rapper, she seems to have a good sense of humor and style,  and I’ve always been favorably inclined toward any new artist capable of outraging my less-mainstream-than-thou friends.

Curious to learn more about her, I subscribed to her Twitter feed, and for the first couple weeks saw nothing more remarkable than the usual swagger and bluster I’d expect from a rap star on the make and a bold yet insecure girl not all that far out of her teens.

But yesterday she posted a couple things that had me re-evaluating her.  The first was “Snitchin in the hood aint good,” the gangbanger mantra that has made it all but impossible for police to get a handle on the murder and mayhem that has become endemic in the America’s inner cities.  She followed it up a few hours later with “Ridin round and lookin for something to shoot.”  To both of which I was like, SHUT YOUR STUPID FACE, WHITE GIRL.

Kreayshawn, you are not from “the hood,” and I’m not talking geographically.  I don’t care where you come from (her bio says East Oakland), you are a pop star for whom “the hood” is a marketing device you can pick up or put down as it suits you.

Ditto for your playing at being a bad-ass gangsta chick mimicking the tragic trope of brain-dead thugs tearing the heart out of one black neighborhood after another with pointless beefs and drive-bys.  For countless African-American families, gang violence has meant death or crippling injury for their sons, brothers, and fathers.  To your silly white ass, it’s a fashion accessory.

Mouthing mindless slogans isn’t necessarily the worst crime in the world; let’s face it, we’ve probably all done it at one time or another, especially when we were young.  And honestly, I don’t think she’s doing it just to sell records or promote her image; more likely she’s just after what white kids have been aspiring to for generations: to be a little more “black.”

Nothing wrong with that: hipsters, musicians, entertainers, or just repressed white suburbanites in pursuit of a makeover, have been doing this since at least the Jazz Age, maybe, if you wanted to stretch a point, all the way to whites performing in blackface minstrel shows in the days when slavery was still the law of the land.

The knock against minstrel shows – and against mid- 20th century counterparts like Amos and Andy, was the way they pandered to the worst stereotypes about black people, mocking them as lazy, conniving, shiftless, unintelligent.   The 21st century version of the minstrel show, perpetrated by black artists like Odd Future as well as white ones like Kreayshawn, has added violent, misogynistic, homophobic, drug-addled and sex-crazed to the mix.

Unlike some of her critics, I don’t care if Kreayshawn sprinkles her speech or her raps with n-bombs.  As the product of a time when “nigger” still functioned as one of the most hateful words in the English language, I dislike hearing anyone, black or white, use it, but worrying about it is a lost cause now that it’s become a conversational mainstay for kids of all races and backgrounds.

And I don’t think Kreayshawn’s obvious, almost desperate desire to “be” black makes her a racist, either.  There are innumerable things that people can learn and adopt from African-American culture, starting with but hardly limited to most of the music I grew up with or the heroism and devotion displayed by pioneers of the civil rights movement.  Language, fashion, politics, philosophy: all have been immeasurably enriched by African and African-American influences.

But what does make Kreayshawn a racist – and, you might say, the most problematic, even dangerous kind of racist – is the kind of “black” she is trying to be.  I’m reminded of another well-intentioned white guy (at least I’m sure he thought he was), William Upski Wyatt, who in his mid-90s book Bomb The Suburbs urged privileged white kids like himself to show solidarity with black people by turning their own suburbs into urban-style ghettoes.

Cover the walls with graffiti, hang out on your front stoop smoking blunts and drinking 40s, he told them, apparently never considering that there’s nothing intrinsically “black” about vandalism, unemployment, or drug and alcohol abuse.  On the contrary, millions of black Americans – no doubt the vast majority – would profoundly love to see all of them banished from their own neighborhoods.

If you’re a white kid who seriously wants to “be black,” there’s no end of admirable African-Americans to pattern yourself after: authors, scientists, community leaders, even the President of the United States, not to mention the millions of working class men and women who faithfully devote themselves to supporting their families and building a future for their children.

But racists like Kreayshawn don’t see any of that.  Say “black” to them and all they hear is hood rats, ghetto bling, and prison-bound thuggery.  The only thing that distinguishes her view of black culture from that of a Ku Klux Klansman is that she wants to be part of it – at least as long as she can retreat back to her safe suburban home whenever things start to get unpleasant.

So hire a bunch of black actors to be in your videos, pay a bunch of black “friends” to be in your entourage, live out your fantasy, Kreayshawn, but no matter how famous you get, how much money you make, you’ll never escape the bitter truth: that you did it by spreading negative, hateful images of African-Americans that will poison the minds and attitudes of your impressionable fans while letting you believe that you’re “down” and dripping with street cred.

Know it or not, admit it or not, Kreayshawn, what you’re doing, is racist to the core.  It will hurt people, a lot of people, while you’re laughing all the way to the bank.

Spy Rock Memories, Part 8

Spy Rock Memories, Part 8

I don’t know how much time passed before I woke up.  It might have been half an hour; it could have been a few minutes.  My mind had lapsed into a state that was as dreamless as it was dreamlike.

I was reminded of how the nuns had described limbo, the nether world where innocent but unbaptized infants were sent.  Neither heaven nor hell, neither good nor bad, devoid of meaning or purpose.  The place I had been – and it felt like a place more than a state of mind – was swathed in and completely suffused with gray.

Not a dark, brooding or foreboding gray, but quiet, peaceful, mysterious.  What it most resembled was being caught in one of those clouds that periodically enveloped the mountain, minus the dampness and chilliness.  Quite the opposite: this cloud embraced me with such warm and welcoming arms that I couldn’t imagine wanting to tear myself away.

Yet something was nagging at me, tugging at my memory, insisting I pay attention.  My eyes opened; I closed them and tried to slip back into that happy cloud feeling, but they wouldn’t stay shut.  Now I was angry; I could feel the cold again, feel the snowflakes batting at my face like so many icy insects.

I tossed my head from side to side, as I would have if they had been actual insects, and in doing so, caught sight of my truck, still sitting where I had last seen it, now covered with a bit more snow.  I remembered that I had been trying to get to it, though I was no longer sure why.

Then in a moment of clarity it came back to me.  I was on some sort of mission.  If I didn’t make it to that red truck, something terrible was going to happen.  What that was, or what I was supposed to do about it, remained a mystery.  I knew I couldn’t stand up, let alone walk.  That was when I hit upon the idea of swimming.

Anyone looking down on me from above would have assumed I had gone mad.  It must have appeared as though I was lying on the side of a mountain, in the middle of a blizzard, trying to make snow angels.  If you’d asked, however, I would have told you I was doing the breast stroke.

It got me nowhere, but when I switched to a sort of dog paddle, I found myself moving forward.  I might be exaggerating if I told you I made it the rest of the way like that; the truth is that I don’t know or remember.  My first clear memory is of opening the truck door – by which point, logically, I had to have made it onto my feet – and discovering I wasn’t strong enough to climb in.

But by leaning backward onto the seat and grabbing the armrest on the passenger side, I was able to pull myself into the cab.  I sat up behind the wheel, all of me now safely inside except my legs.  Try as I might, I couldn’t muster the strength to pull them up over the door jamb until I hit upon the idea of sliding my hands under first one thigh, then the other, and lifting my legs into the truck as if they were a couple pieces of cordwood.

The truck started easily enough, but then I encountered another difficulty: my legs were so numb that I couldn’t push down on the accelerator or the brake with enough force to drive.  I sat pondering this dilemma until the warmth from the heater breathed a little life into my muscles.  It wasn’t as though I needed to really step on the gas to get moving, I reasoned; on the contrary, accelerating even slightly too much could send me careening over a cliff.  Hitting the brakes too suddenly or heavily would be just as disastrous.

My other challenge would be getting the truck headed in the right direction.  I had left it facing uphill in a spot where the road was barely wide enough to turn around under clear and dry conditions. Now I could hardly see the road, let alone make an accurate judgment about how deep the snow was or where the road ended and the cliff began.

Never mind; I’d done this kind of thing before, and after dragging myself out of a blizzard, I wasn’t going to screw it up now.  It turned out that I didn’t need the gas pedal at all; just putting the transmission in drive or reverse would get me moving as fast as I wanted to go.  With both feet resting on the brake, I shifted back and forth 15 or 20 times until I was on my way downhill.

From there on it was easy.  There was one rough patch, on the sharp bend above Spy Rock School, where a foot or two of snow had piled up, but my momentum carried me straight through it.   After that it was as simple as slaloming down an unusually loopy toboggan course.  The snow was still falling when I reached the highway, but at that altitude, not much was sticking to the pavement.

At 2 am I woke up the manager of the Cottage Motel in downtown Laytonville, rented one of the old cabins out back, and slept for the next day and a half.  When I thought I was ready to continue my journey south, I discovered that every,muscle I owned ached so miserably that I gave up on the idea and went back to bed for another day.

By the time I reached the Bay Area, I was already dreading my next trip up the mountain, but the weather eased soon afterward, and for the rest of the winter, I was able to drive in and out.  “I hope you appreciate me risking my life for you,” I told the dogs and cats when I next saw them, but if they did, they didn’t show it, except in their usual ways of climbing all over me when I arrived and looking sad and mournful when I left again.

 

The original Lookout Records logo, created by David Hayes.

Four 7” EPs, the first official releases of Lookout Records, came out on schedule in January of 1988, and were surprisingly well received.  When I say “surprisingly,” I mean that I had expected to sell a couple hundred and then have the rest sitting around the house for a year or two, as had happened with the Lookouts’ record.  While in the back of my mind I harbored hopes – I suppose anyone who puts out records does – that they would catch on and become wildly popular, my more realistic guess was that if we were lucky, we wouldn’t lose too much money.

But inside a month, we’d sold out our first pressings and ordered new ones.  At that point we got picked up by a distributor, which greatly increased our sales, so much so that even those 800 unsold Lookouts albums disappeared from my kitchen at last.  Around that time I got a letter from some college students in Arcata, asking if I could bring some of our bands up for a show.

I knew very little about Arcata.  I vaguely remembered stopping there on a road trip, and hearing an old Led Zeppelin tune echoing through the deserted streets.  Deciding that the place was haunted by the ghosts of undead hippies, I’d hopped back in the car and headed straight out of there.

I was slightly more familiar with Eureka, the forlorn and mostly forgotten industrial town that lurked and slouched along the waterfront on the other side of the bay.  A 19th century boomtown that had grown rich from providing the redwood logs used to build San Francisco, it had long since fallen on hard times.  When Anne and I had visited in the early 80s, its once-opulent Victorian Old Town, today something of a tourist destination and bohemian magnet, was little more than a dingy and disheveled skid row.

Although only half Eureka’s size, Arcata enjoyed a far better reputation.  It was home to Humboldt State, the North Coast’s only four-year university, which meant that many of the area’s young people wound up there, if not to attend college, then simply in search of the semi-urban excitement that just wasn’t on offer in places like Willits or Garberville, let alone Spy Rock.

Even knowing that, I wasn’t prepared me for the crowd we found waiting for us outside the HSU student union.  Kids had come from at least three counties, as far as 100 miles away, to see the Lookouts, Operation Ivy, Isocracy and Crimpshrine, as well as Arcata’s own Schmidtheads.  Outside of our insular little scene, all five bands were virtually unknown, or so I would have thought.

Flyer for the March 5, 1988 Arcata show. Crimpshrine played, too, but were not advertised (though those in the know would instantly recognize the coffee cup as a Crimpshrine image) because their singer, a runaway, was being sought by the police at the time.

It was one of the best shows we’d ever played, and I was still glowing as we started to drive away.  Just then a young kid came running out in front of my truck.  “Wait, wait a minute!” he shouted.

His name was Chris Appelgren, he was 15 years old, and he was the host of an every-other-weekly radio show on KMUD in Garberville.  I’d heard of KMUD, but I hadn’t actually heard it.  Eventually they would install transmitters up and down the coast, but at that time it produced little more than static on my side of the mountain.

Chris was hoping I’d supply him with copies of our records, and, intrigued by the idea of a station that would give a teenager his own program (as it turned out, there were a couple other hosts who hadn’t even reached their teens), I decided to deliver the records myself and see what was going on in Garberville, yet another Emerald Triangle town I was relatively unfamiliar with.

KMUD consisted of two ramshackle cabins at the south end of town, where I found Chris and several of his South Fork High School cronies who helped make up the revolving cast of “Wild In The Streets,” the name Chris had given his show even though, as I seldom tired of pointing out, the area offered a distinct shortage of streets to run wild in.

He invited me into the studio, played the records I’d brought, and interviewed me about Lookout Records, Gilman Street, and the recent gig in Arcata.  While doing so, he gave me a crash course in how to work the microphones, cue up records, keep a FCC log, and in general, operate a radio station.

I’m not sure if he invited me back or I invited myself, but within a couple months I become a regular guest, and, eventually, co-host.  In addition to playing the sort of punk rock that had seldom if ever been heard over the Southern Humboldt airwaves before, Chris and I developed an on-air rapport that had me pompously kvetching about anything and everything, and him responding with the non-linearity and spontaneous exuberance you’d expect from an abnormally bright and precocious kid.

We had occasional run-ins with the KMUD power structure, but for the most part they were amazingly tolerant, even when besieged by complaints from merchants who’d grown used to letting KMUD play as background music in their shops and didn’t appreciate the frequent F-bombs and similarly obnoxious material featured in the songs we played.  Broadcasting from behind the Redwood Curtain, there was a general sense (extending to many KMUD personalities besides ourselves) that FCC regulations and other legal niceties didn’t apply to us.

This would change as the station grew in reach and influence, and eventually I became versed in and (for the most part) observant of the rules.  Not because I necessarily agreed with them, but because I had grown passionately devoted to KMUD and didn’t want to do anything to endanger it.  There was one exception: I was not aware of it at first, but even after it was pointed out that I shouldn’t be playing records released by my own label, I continued to do it anyway.

People might consider it tacky and self-aggrandizing – well, let’s be honest, it kind of is – but apparently it’s also illegal.  I rationalized that a) we were representing local culture; b) the music wouldn’t have been available to listeners otherwise; and c) our play list would have been pretty thin without it.  And while someone might accuse me of using the show to promote my own financial interests, the number of records I was likely to sell to backwoods denizens who had neither record players nor, in some cases, electricity, was minimal.

Though at first “Wild In The Streets” was mainly listened to by kids, and not too many of them, we began gaining listeners, especially once we’d learned to dial back our attitude a bit.  Even some of the reggae and Grateful Dead fans who made up the biggest part of KMUD’s audience were open-minded enough to give us a chance, despite our music being completely foreign to most of them.

Something I especially appreciated about KMUD – and one of the reasons I came to think of it as the heartbeat of the community – was the way it could almost instantly mobilize opinion or stir people into action.  With newspapers and magazines – and at that time there were quite a few serving the Emerald Triangle – it can take days or weeks before a story reaches the public, let alone elicits a reaction, whereas when communication happened over the airwaves, the results could be almost instantaneous.

It wasn’t just KMUD’s regular CAMP reports – listener-provided updates about where helicopters and marijuana eradication teams were operating – that prompted growers and non-growers alike to keep their dials set at 91.1.  We were also a constant clearinghouse for less dramatic but equally vital information about road or school closings, lost dogs, bear sightings, as well as demonstrations and public hearings.

Early KMUD logo by Southern Humboldt artist Janet Young.

When contentious issues arose, such as conflicts over the “appropriateness” of certain acts appearing at the Mateel Community Center – the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for example, who performed wearing only a strategically placed sock each, or the Oakland rapper Too Short – a brief discussion on KMUD could spark an old-fashioned town meeting packed with concerned (and ostentatiously unconcerned) citizens ready to speechify for, against, or to no apparent purpose at all.

The Mateel was another Southern Humboldt institution that mightily impressed me.  It seldom hosted acts or events that appealed to me personally, but I thought of it as the hippie Gilman Street, built and financed entirely by volunteers and donations.  Derided by some as the “Taj Mateel” for the fine (and expensive) craftsmanship that went into its construction, its existence and continued success would have represented an unlikely achievement in most mid-sized or even large American cities, let alone the tiny town of Redway, itself little more than an appendage or afterthought to Garberville, its slightly more metropolitan neighbor two miles to the south.

If you rubbed Garberville and Redway together, you might come up with 2,500 people, but the twin towns were a relative hotbed of cultural and political activity.  The more time I spent there, the less need I felt to travel to the Bay Area, which was a good thing, since I no longer had a part-time home there.

Over the winter I’d briefly moved in to the Maximum Rocknroll house in Noe Valley, which had seemed like a good fit for me because of its state of the art computer and publishing facilities.  But I’d quickly fallen out with head honcho – or, as he preferred, first among equals – Tim Yohannan.

When I stayed away for several days covering the Interior Department hearings in Fort Bragg, a veritable Woodstock of protest in which thousands turned out to oppose oil drilling off the North Coast, I came back to San Francisco thinking I’d have a great story for MRR as well as my own magazine, only to find Tim furious that I hadn’t been around to perform my normal duties of typing up scene reports and record reviews.

I tried pointing out that he himself always said MRR was meant to be as much about politics as music, but he sneered, “That stuff isn’t politics, it’s a bunch of yuppies that don’t want their oceanfront views spoiled.”

It was all downhill from there, and instead of looking for another place in the Bay Area, I went back to living fulltime on Spy Rock.  As mad as I was at Tim, it turned out he had done me a favor; I was entering what would prove to be the happiest and most productive of my years on the mountain.

What had once been a constant struggle now became an almost carefree way of life.  It couldn’t have been as unrelentingly easy and enjoyable as I remember it now, but a long stretch of good weather and the fact that I’d finally become comfortable with the ins and outs of country living meant that for a good while there were no crises to confront, no disasters to manage.

I’d spend days at a time working around the house or in the garden; twice a week I’d venture down to Laytonville to shop and to retrieve the contents of PO Box 1000, (the box that had been randomly assigned to me when the new post office was built; was there ever a surer sign that I was destined to be in the mail order business?).

I was receiving so many orders for records and magazines that the box was usually stuffed beyond capacity.  I was afraid I’d get on the wrong side of the post office staff if I didn’t empty it more often, and also worried what they must think about some of the mail that arrived for me.

A package I sent out from the Spy Rock division of the Lookout Records mail order department. A fan in Mexico inexplicably saved it for all these years.

Letters and fanzines could be rather scabrously illustrated with colors, pictures, and slogans that, well, let’s just say they were likely to make a vivid impression on a quiet country post office.  But apart from a quizzical but friendly raised eyebrow now and then, the counter clerks seemed completely unfazed.  If I didn’t come in for a while, my mail would be decanted into one or more large boxes that would be cheerily handed across the counter with a “Got your work cut out for you this week!” or “Looks like business must be booming!”

It was.  Mail order only accounted for only a tenth of Lookout Records’ overall sales, but it was by far the most labor-intensive aspect of running the label.  I’d never done this kind of work before, but there was enough variety to the letters and orders to keep it from getting tedious.  I worked out systems, figured out how to create a computerized mailing list, and bragged in our ads and press releases that the entire operation was solar-powered.

I’d once been able to say the same thing about our band, until we had to move our practices down to Willits, where Tre and Kain were now living and attending high school.  Tre’s dad built a soundproof room at the back of his new house, but it was never quite the same as the old days on the mountain, when we could play as loudly and as long into the night as we wanted.

True, one of those marathon sessions had nearly ended in disaster.  It had been midwinter, before I could afford to upgrade the solar panels and batteries, and we had to run the generator if we wanted to practice for more than an hour or two.  That night we were working on “Trees,” a dirge-like piece about environmental apocalypse that lent itself to endless jamming and riffing.  Which is what we were doing when I noticed an orange light that appeared to be dancing on the walls in time to the music.

I took it as a sign of how well and intensely we were playing, but as the light grew brighter and eerier, I had to consider that it might be something other than a magical aura or spirit invoked by our powerful musicianship.  Turning around, I discovered that the shed was engulfed in flames.

Tearing out the door, grabbing the hose as I went, I frantically sprayed water on the fire, aware that leaning against the shed’s back wall were plastic containers holding 20 gallons of gas.  I could move the gas out of harm’s way, or I could fight the fire, but I couldn’t do both; meanwhile Tre and Kain were still inside noodling away on their instruments, oblivious to the danger.

The generator had rolled up against the wooden shed and the heat from its exhaust pipe had set fire to it.  A few more minutes and the gas cans would have started blowing.  At that point we might have been able to save ourselves, but the house and its contents would have been a lost cause.

Winter perils like that seemed far away now that summer had arrived with its plentiful sunshine and the light and electricity it provided.  Water was abundant that year, too, and my garden grew spectacularly.  I’d filled it with things I liked but had never tried growing before: watermelons, eggplants, tomatillos, and three kinds of chili peppers.

The apple tree I’d planted in 1982 was bearing buckets of fruit.  The cherries were thriving as well, and a once spindly, half-dead plum tree came roaring back to life.  The grape vines had produced a crop for the first time, and a nectarine tree, as prolific as it was improbable, had sprung up unbidden from an old compost heap.

There were the marijuana plants, too, tucked away beneath the manzanitas and madrones.  On warm evenings I’d sit examining their flowers, plucking away the occasional dead leaf and basking in the rich perfume that hung lazily over the hillside.  Sometimes I’d bring my radio and listen to KMUD, now that the station had upped its power and its signal reached right around the mountain.

Monday was my favorite listening day, when I liked every single program from morning until night.  Best of all was Hot Potatoes, a Celtic music show hosted by Estelle Fennell and Sue Moon; the sound of lilting fiddles and loping drumbeats echoing up and down the canyon remain among the most cherished of all my Spy Rock memories.

I still had to travel to the Bay Area from time to time to meet with bands or take care of other Lookout Records business, and when I did, I’d usually park the truck under some trees in an obscure corner of San Francisco and sleep in my camper shell.  Most of my big city business, though, could be handled by driving ten miles down to the nearest pay phone, in the parking lot of Grapewine Station on Highway 101.

Friends at the Shred of Dignity warehouse in San Francisco had let me install a phone line, which I connected to an answering machine stored in a heavy wooden box to muffle the loud clicks and beeps it gave off.  Every few days, equipped with a bag of quarters, I’d spend an afternoon in my phone booth “office,” retrieving messages and returning calls.

This system had its drawbacks, a major one being the semi trucks that frequently roared past and drowned out any possibility of conversation.  Another was the difficulty of getting city people, especially those in Los Angeles, to understand that there could be a corner of the world – in their own state of California, no less – where people somehow existed without telephones.

“Can I speak to ____?” I’d say, putting in a call to the record pressing plant or the mastering lab.  “Give me your number and I’ll have him call you back,” a secretary would tell me.  “Sorry, he can’t call me back; there aren’t any phones where I live,” I’d have to explain.  At that point I’d sometimes get hung up on, the assumption being that I was a crank caller.  Although I was eventually able to convince some people that they needed to speak to me right away if they wanted to speak to me at all, others never got the hang of it.  Somehow, one way or the other, business got done all the same.

It was during one of those rounds of calls that I heard from John Kiffmeyer, aka Al Sobrante (a tribute to his East Bay hometown of El Sobrante), who’d been a driving force behind Isocracy, one of the original four Lookout bands.  Isocracy having broken up, Al wanted to tell me about the new band he’d formed with two teenagers from Rodeo, California.  “They don’t know much about punk,” he said, “but they’re really good.  Know any shows we can play?”

As it happened, I did know of one, though as I told Al, it wasn’t much.  Tre had informed Kain and me that he’d volunteered our band to play at a party hosted by one of his 10th grade classmates.  We’d played for high school kids before, and it was usually a hit or miss situation.  Most kids wouldn’t know or care about our music, but every so often we’d get an audience that appreciated us.

But a show was a show, even if it meant an 80-mile round trip into the wilds above Willits, with, if the weather could be believed, the possibility of an early snowstorm.  “We’re playing Friday night at some cabin up in the mountains,” I told Al.  “There’s no money, it’ll take you at least three hours to get there, and if it snows the whole thing might get called off at the last minute.”

“We’ll be there,” he said.

The weather turned out almost as bad as predicted.  There wasn’t much snow, but large swatches of ice left the upper reaches of Sherwood Road more treacherous than usual.  It’s often said in Mendocino County that you don’t go driving up Spy Rock Road if you don’t know where you’re going or have legitimate business there, and Sherwood, especially the remote stretch we were attempting to navigate, is kind of the same deal.

When we arrived we found three kids shivering outside the cabin where we were supposed to play.  The guy whose party it was – and who had the keys to the cabin – had decided to stay in town because it was “too cold.”  So, apparently, had almost everyone else.  Two more kids showed up, bringing our potential audience to five, but that was it.  It seemed like a shame to have come all this distance and not play, but what were we supposed to do if we couldn’t even get inside?

Tre suggested driving back down to town to get the keys, but that would take hours, assuming we could even find the kid who had them.  As we kicked that idea around, a van drove up and Al Sobrante’s voice boomed out, “What’s going on?  Let’s get this show on the road!”

He introduced me to his new band.  They were called Sweet Children; and at 16, the two new guys really did seem like not much more than children.  Both were quiet, in a bashful but not completely standoffish way.  The tall, lanky bass player was Mike; the singer/guitarist, shorter and even quieter, had long curly hair and introduced himself as Billie Joe.

I don’t want to say whose idea it was – partly because I don’t know if the statute of limitations has expired, and partly because I honestly don’t remember – but somebody suggested that we break into the cabin and start a fire before we all froze to death.  And somebody – again, I’m not sure who – did just that.

Once we were inside and beginning to thaw out, it seemed only logical to go ahead with the show.  The cabin had no lights, but there were plenty of candles, and while there was also no electricity, we found a generator out back to power the bands.  Sweet Children took the “stage” – a cleared-out space between the kitchen and front door – and played for the five high school kids sitting politely on the floor in front of them.

I watched from the back, only half paying attention as I changed my guitar strings, until suddenly I couldn’t not pay attention.  I had seen this level of performance before, but usually only in giant arenas, delivered by bands at the peak of their careers and playing for tens of thousands.  16 year old Billie Joe exuded a casual self-confidence, only partially offset and belied by his shy, self-effacing humility.  He stopped several times to thank his minuscule audience for being there, but mostly he sang and played as if he’d been doing this all his life.  Which, I would learn later, was not so far from the truth.

Walking up to me afterward, he offhandedly asked, “What did you think?”

“I want to make a record with you guys,” was all I said.

They’d been together a couple of months – this might have been their third or fourth show ever – but I’d seen and heard all I needed to.  To be honest – and I’ve been saying the same thing to interviewers ever since – they were like a modern, updated, punk rock version of the Beatles.  They could seriously be that big, too, I caught myself thinking.  This was crazy talk, of course, and yet at that moment it made perfect, undeniable sense.

The Lookouts never played that night; by the time Sweet Children finished, it was midnight and our “audience” said they’d be in trouble with their parents if they didn’t get home right away.  I drove back to Spy Rock, twisting the radio dial in search of an audible signal, grateful for my aging truck’s slightly more than adequate heater, little supposing that the night’s events were about to change my life forever.

To be continued…

 

 

Spy Rock Memories, Part 7

Spy Rock Memories, Part 7

One of the drawbacks of dividing my time between Spy Rock and the city was the rigmarole I had to go through every time I left or returned.

It wasn’t a big deal in summer.  I’d leave food for the dogs and cats, make sure the water tanks were full and the drip irrigation timers working, and I could take off, reasonably confident things would run smoothly for a week or so.  I didn’t even bother locking the door, not that I could, anyway; the lock had broken a year or two ago and I’d never got around to fixing it.

In winter it was more complicated.  The most important thing was to get every last drop of water drained from the pipes and water heater.  If I slipped up – as I did a few times – I would come home to shattered pipes, a broken toilet, a no longer functioning shower or bathtub.  Sometimes I could repair the damage – most of the pipes were easy enough to mend, and although the new toilet I installed wobbled like a ship at sea, at least it worked.

But the shower plumbing was embedded behind the artfully installed redwood paneling, and short of taking a crowbar to the walls, I couldn’t get at it.  I was able to get the tub working again, but I had taken my last shower at Spy Rock.

Things would have been simpler if, like city people, I could leave the heat on while I was away, but you can’t really do that when you’re relying on a wood stove.  Not just for the obvious reason that someone needs to be there to feed the fire, but also because it’s really not safe to leave a wood stove unattended for long.

An earthquake, for example, could tip it over or knock the stovepipe loose.  The biggest quake we’d had so far hadn’t been that strong, but it had literally rolled me out of bed and left me momentarily wondering if the house was going to stay on its foundation or even in one piece.  Another concern is the chimney fire: if you don’t keep your stovepipe sufficiently clean – something I’d been known to be guilty of – a residue called creosote builds up, and if it catches fire, it can get hot enough to melt the pipe and set your roof alight.  If you’re there and catch it in time, you can close the vents and cut off the oxygen supply.  If not, you can come home to a pile of ashes where your house used to be.

Ruf-Ruf frolicking in a field of flowers, a practice that would prove to be her undoing.

Another result of my not living there full time was that the house itself went into a slow but inexorable decline.  Wooden awnings that shielded the windows from the sun, wind and rain collapsed under the weight of accumulated snow when I wasn’t around to clear it off.  The siding on the east-facing wall began to buckle and come loose, a process that was greatly accelerated when I unthinkingly cut down a large oak that had been shading that end of the house.

I’d been looking for more light and a better view of the Eel River Valley; I hadn’t anticipated the havoc that would be wreaked on the house and deck by several additional hours of unfiltered sunshine in summer and unbroken winds in winter.  The wood cracked and in some cases broke under nature’s relentless barrage; possessing next to zero skills as a carpenter, I was completely flummoxed about how to fix it.

The logical course would have been to hire someone to make the necessary repairs, but the marijuana trade had hopelessly skewed the local economy.  You couldn’t pay skilled tradesmen enough to work up there.  I did find one guy, but he disappeared after three days when a grower down the road offered him twice what I could afford to pay.

The deterioration doesn’t happen all at once, and mostly occurs in slow motion, so I didn’t notice it from day to day, especially with my mind on so many other things.  Gilman Street, the Berkeley warehouse/club I’d been working on had opened its doors, and in early 1987 was doing shows every weekend.  The Lookouts were getting invited to play more often, and I was finishing up work on our album, which we planned to have out by April.

Having acquired some rudimentary computer skills while doing the cover design, I bought my first computer, a powerhouse 512mb Apple.  If I labored assiduously enough, it could produce a page of copy in no more than ten times as long as it would have taken me on the old-fashioned typewriter.

But the ability to manipulate fonts and type sizes made it possible to include more content in Lookout magazine, which continued to grow in both size and circulation.  I’d found a copy shop in Berkeley that offered much cheaper prices than I’d been paying, and the deal was to get better yet, when the manager pulled me aside to say, “Yo, I been reading that stuff you’re printing; you got some funny-ass shit there.”

He offered me a super-discounted price – I’m not sure it covered his costs – and the Lookout’s print run shot up to a thousand copies and more.  It felt like I was on a roll, leading me to redouble my efforts to cover everything of interest in the Bay Area as well as the Emerald Triangle.  Best of all, it seemed I was finally gaining a grudging acceptance from some of my Mendocino County readers.

 

One Planet One People: The first album by the Lookouts. Cover art by Davy Normal.

I still had my enemies, of course, and even those inclined to agree with me continued to question my tendency to resort to purplish invective at the slightest provocation.  But at least they were engaging with me, and my letters pages proved it.  If I’d wanted to, I could have filled an entire issue of the Lookout with nothing but readers’ letters and my long-winded responses.

While you could digest the town’s “official” newspaper, the Laytonville Ledger, in five or ten minutes, the Lookout kept people entertained and/or infuriated for hours.  Even those who claimed they would never stoop to reading “that rag” had an opinion about it, and since they didn’t want their complaints (along with my snarky retorts) showing up in the Lookout, they began writing to the Ledger to complain about me.

The Ledger had pointedly ignored me for a couple years, but it was hard to do now that I was generating more discussion than they were.  Things came to a head in March when the town was riven by a bitter controversy over Sheila Larson’s attempt to build an asphalt batch plant on her property at the center of what might generously be called “downtown” Laytonville.

Her property was also home to Boomer’s Bar, which for years had served as the town’s only saloon.  Its clientele consisted mainly of good old boys (and girls) of the cowboy-booted variety; some hippie types ventured in, but others (probably, but not certainly without justification) feared they would be risking their lives to do so.  Another bar, the Crossroads, had recently opened across the street to cater to “the new people;” if a sociologist had wanted to do a study of class and cultural conflicts in Northern Mendocino County circa 1987, the contrasting populations of these two watering holes would provide all the data he needed.

There were certain old-timers – the Geigers, who ran the general store, the Harwoods, who owned the lumber mill, Bill Bailey, whose logging supplies business was making him the richest man in town – who had grown used to having things done the way they wanted, usually without so much as a question or an eyebrow being raised.  That’s not to say that they run roughshod over the town; on the contrary, they were left largely unchallenged not only because of their money and influence, but because they were generally perceived as having the community’s best interests at heart.

Sheila Larson had been around a while, but made the mistake of assuming she had achieved full-fledged old-timer status, and the greater mistake of assuming everyone – at least everyone who mattered – would agree with her view that what was good for Sheila’s business was good for Laytonville.  She announced her batch plant as a fait accompli, touting the jobs and income it would allegedly produce.

The trouble was, as nitpickers like myself pointed out, that asphalt plants produced a great deal of noise and pollution, and she was proposing to locate this one right next door to Laytonville High School.  It also meant that hundreds of heavy trucks would be converging on the two-lane highway that doubled as Laytonville’s “Main Street,” helping to transform the heart of Laytonville (there were wags less charitable than myself who questioned whether such an organ existed) into a smoky and smelly industrial facility.

Extra! Extra! Big trouble in little old Laytonville!!  The special edition of the Lookout devoted to the batch plant brouhaha.

Granted, Laytonville wasn’t much as it was, but it had, as an optimistic real estate agent might put it, potential.  While Bruce Anderson had described it as “a rural slum without a single redeeming feature,” I tempered my own criticism.  “Its dusty roads, gun-racked pickups, and wild-eyed dope growers make it an easy target for ridicule from the more sophisticated quarters of the county,” I wrote.  “It’s not cute or quaint or glamorous or vital, but there are those who happily call it home, and even those who, inexplicable as it may seem, love the place.”

That was from a two-page special edition of the Lookout that I cranked out in response to the batch plant brouhaha.  I described the public hearing where Laytonvillians descended en masse on the dreary county seat of Ukiah, likening it to something out of Frank Capra or Norman Rockwell, an outpouring of “country bumpkins, urban expatriates, leather-skinned pioneer women, brown rice and tofu hippies, sweet-faced grandmothers, and good old boys who self-consciously doffed their NRA caps as they entered the room.”

Journalistically I felt it was my finest hour, not just because I’d covered a breaking story and had it in the hands of the public before the Ledger had bothered to notice it was happening, but also because I had provided a focal point for the opposition, who, in a stunning reversal of the way things were usually done in Mendocino County, stopped the project dead in its tracks.  Suddenly I was no longer persona non grata in town; as I made my way through my usual rounds of the post office, Geiger’s, the nursery, and the lumber yard, people were stopping me to shake my hand and thank for me what I’d said.

This view was not unanimous, however, as I was to learn when the Ledger belatedly bestirred itself to cover the controversy.  For the first time anyone could remember, the town newspaper published an actual editorial.  It was not, as I would have expected, about the asphalt plant, either for or against, it was about me, and the verdict was unmistakably, unmitigatedly against.

It wasn’t just the editorial; the bulk of that week’s Ledger was given over to correspondents writing in to denounce me.  They weren’t necessarily on Sheila Larson’s side when it came to the asphalt plant; what they were up in arms about was my characterization of the town and its people.

And I had thought I was being flattering!  Apparently I had much to learn about the art of flattery.  I’d been inspired by this upwelling of protest from a town I’d previously thought of as a backwoods Podunk; I was genuinely surprised to find that the residents of Podunk didn’t necessarily see their town in that same light.

“If he doesn’t like it here, why doesn’t he leave?” and “Who appointed this Livermore guy to speak for me?” were typical sentiments.  One vexed resident said she wouldn’t vote for me as septic tank inspector, “even though the job does suit him.”  Another called me a “pompous, presumptuous, pretentious pedant” and a “jabbering jackal,” and titled his contribution, “Every Town Needs A Village Idiot.”

One reader fired back, “It is hard to believe that someone who wanted to locate a Hot Rocks plant in the middle of Laytonville, went around cussing like a trooper when opposed, and reputedly carried a .357 Magnum, is now portrayed as a good guy, while someone who wrote an unkind but largely factual account of the hearing is now the villain.  Laytonville doesn’t need a village idiot, it is one.”  For some reason, the Ledger didn’t print that one.

Just when I thought things had finally settled down, I showed up at the Mad Creek Inn to play the piano, something I’d been doing on a semi-regular basis for a couple years.  It was a magical place, an old roadhouse dating back to the 1920s – Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were said to have stopped there on a weekend getaway – that its owner and hostess had transformed into a relaxed candlelit refuge from the workaday realities of mountain life.

Mad Mary, as she was affectionately known, made everyone welcome, loggers, hippies, tourists, anybody who happened to stroll into her little island of serenity 14 miles north of Laytonville on Highway 101.  She’d befriended Anne and me from the start, and when times grew tough, invited me to play for my supper and any tips that might come my way.

My repertoire consisted of show tunes, 60s and 70s hits by the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan, etc., and even some slowed down and prettied-up versions of the angry punk rock songs I’d been writing for the Lookouts.  I also improvised, playing simple repetitive melodies in the style that had come to be known as “New Age.” I didn’t think I was especially good at it, but the customers didn’t seem to mind, and were soon dropping dollar bills (occasionally fives and tens) in my basket.  I taped the first dollar to the wall above my piano at home in honor of it being the first money I’d ever earned playing music.

Few if any customers realized I was the notorious rabble-rousing Lawrence Livermore until I made a flippant reference in the Lookout to the time my arch-nemesis Bill Bailey left me a $20 bill.  It was the single largest donation I’d ever received, and I wrote about it as much to let people know how touched I was by his generosity as to gloat about putting one over on the logging supplies baron.

Whatever my intentions, the normally blissful Mad Mary, wearing a face like a thundercloud, banished me forthwith.  “How could you?” she asked repeatedly.

Angry and hurt as I was, I came to see her point.  For the sake of her business and the tranquil atmosphere in which it flourished, she couldn’t be seen giving aid and comfort to someone who routinely had half the town up in arms against him.  My lack of discretion meant the end of my first – and to this date, only – piano-playing gig, and also to the wonderful home-cooked meals Mary had served me after the last of the customers had gone home.

Still smarting from that rejection, I was offered what looked like a new opportunity to connect musically with the community.  A young girl had tragically drowned while crossing the creek during a spring flood, and Indiana Slim’s band helped organize a benefit concert on her behalf.  Slim invited the Lookouts to play, suggesting it would be an opportunity to mend some fences, to show that everyone, regardless of ideology or culture, was coming together to support the bereaved family.

I was thrilled at the prospect, but remembered my past experience with Piano Jimmy, who played a prominent role in Slim’s band.  “Are you sure Jimmy will be all right with this?” I asked.  Slim told me not to worry, just to bring my band and our equipment, and that he’d take care of Jimmy.

I don’t know how Slim was expecting to do this, but as it turned out, Jimmy was most definitely not all right with it.  After Slim’s band played their set, Kain, Tre and I dragged our amps and drums up to the stage, thinking it was our turn to play.  But instead of clearing their things out of the way, Jimmy and a couple other musicians re-took the stage and began idly riffing in the blues-based style they specialized in.

“We’re supposed to play now,” I said.  “Slim invited us to.”  Jimmy gave me a wordless smirk and kept plinking away at his piano.  At that point I lost it.  Bitterly disappointed, furious that Jimmy, who I perceived as a thug and a bully, was going to get away with denying us our opportunity to play, I ran my hands across his keyboard and busted up whatever melody he’d been putting out.

It was, stupid, I’ll admit.  You don’t do that to a musician, even a genial, good-tempered one, and Jimmy was not one of those.  He pounded one of his hamhock-sized fists straight into my eye.  If you wanted to dignify the encounter as a “fight,” it was over before it began; Jimmy was roughly twice my size, at least by volume, and the only victory I could claim was managing to stay on my feet when I should have been flat on my back.

The more timid townspeople, especially those with children, got up to leave.  After a few more minutes of kerfuffle while Indiana Slim tried to smooth things over, the band went on to play another hour or so.  We finally got to do a few songs, after almost everyone had gone home.  When I next found myself in front of a mirror, I discovered that Jimmy had given me the most spectacular black eye of my life (given my penchant for shooting my mouth off, there had, as you can imagine, been others).

The Lookouts at Gilman Street, 1987. Note Kain’s black eye. Photo by Roman Schmidt.

No big deal under normal circumstances, but the following night was our record release show at Gilman Street.  I knew I’d be in for both questions and ridicule when I turned up sporting that shiner, but before we took the stage, something quite remarkable happened: Kain and Tre used magic markers to draw their own black eyes in solidarity, many members of the audience followed suit, and any self-consciousness I might have had vanished.

I’d begun doing a column in Maximum Rocknroll magazine, the logo of which featured a picture of me that had originally run in Beth Bosk’s New Settler Interview.  Before that month’s issue went to print, someone at MRR doctored the photo with another drawn-on black eye, creating what for a while would become my de facto public image.

The show was well received – perhaps our best outing yet – but the record, not so much.  As I’ve noted, it wasn’t very good; our friends and fans dutifully bought up the first couple hundred copies, but 800 more would sit around my kitchen for the next year.  I was disappointed, having genuinely believed (or at least dared to dream) that we were going to set the world on fire with our long-awaited (by ourselves and possibly half a dozen other people) first release.  But too many other things were happening with the band and the magazine for me to sit around licking my wounds.

In Laytonville, another uproar was already unfolding.  Smarting over the attacks the Ledger had unleashed against me, I used my newly learned computer skills to combine its logo with the Lookout’s, publishing my next issue as “The Laytonville Lookout and Ledger.”  On the front page I claimed to have successfully sued the Ledger for libel, and as result, taken over ownership and merged it with the Lookout.

Far-fetched?  You bet, but there were people who took it seriously.  Others were outraged by my printing a picture of Jesus on the cross and titling it “Easter 1987: [Ledger editor] John Weed, Sheila Larson, and Piano Jimmy party at Lawrence Livermore’s crucifixion on Cahto Mountain.”  Laytonville was not a deeply religious community, but it was religious enough to take offense at that.

Or, I should say, parts of Laytonville were; when I next ventured into town, the dirty looks were outnumbered by thumbs-ups and knowing smiles.  After years of feeling like Public Enemy Number One, I was shocked to find that a fair sprinkling of locals had come to like, appreciate, or at least tolerate me.  If I’d accepted every offer to buy me a drink in the Crossroads that afternoon, I’d have been far too drunk to drive home.

Black eye or not, I was starting to feel almost popular.  Or if that’s overstating the case, at least I felt as though I finally belonged here.  Not just in my private fiefdom atop Iron Peak, but in the community as a whole.  It was a new experience.  Not only had I never before lived somewhere where it was possible to know most of my neighbors, but I was also starting to let go of the sense of alienation that had always been my default setting.  For the first time, I was able to genuinely commit to a place and its people, to unabashedly admit that, warts and all, this was my home, and I loved it.

The "classic" Livermore photo, originally from the New Settler Interview, and used as my column header for years at Maximum Rocknroll. Feel free to draw in your own black eye. This is only a newsprint version of what was an outstanding photo by the New Settler's R.D. Deines (I can't seem to locate the original just now). And no, I wasn't generally in the habit of taking my typewriter to the Ukiah Denny's to crank out the latest edition of the Lookout.

My new sense of belongingness notwithstanding, I still felt very alone much of the time.  More than two years after Anne had left, I hadn’t been involved in anything that would qualify as a date, let alone a relationship, unless you counted the time I wound up in a woman’s house on the outskirts of Laytonville, who, by way of making me welcome, laid out a line of cocaine.

I was out of there like a shot, having decided in the wake of Anne’s departure and other ensuing misfortunes that my problems had originated in what the hippies used to call cocaine karma.  I’d resolved never again to look at, let alone touch the stuff.  I’d stuck to this resolution, too, giving me a perhaps undeserved reputation as a goody-goody in certain circles.

That spring, though, I became obsessed with a girl I’d met in the Bay Area I first noticed her in a photo taken when the Lookouts had played at the band shell in Golden Gate Park (we’d played so loudly and/or badly that we were shut down, by the police, despite having been issued a permit by the city; they claimed they’d received complaints from three miles away in the Marina District).  Soon afterward I discovered she was a fellow contributor to Maximum Rocknroll and a volunteer at Gilman Street.

She was about as uninterested in me as a girl could be without taking out a restraining order.  I exaggerate; we spent some time together and had many long, involved conversations, only some of which involved her explaining in great detail just how clueless I was.  When it came to romance, however, her interest in me remained completely nonexistent.

Undeterred, I invited her up to the mountain; for reasons I never understood, she accepted.  She loved it, despite not being by inclination a country girl.  Our weekend passed in complete chastity, but it was pleasant having someone around for a change, especially someone who seemed to appreciate the wonder of a Spy Rock spring as much as I did.

Before driving back to the city, we took a walk up to a stately rock formation that was straight out of one of those misty mountain Chinese scrolls.  The previous winter a flock of wild turkeys had hung out there, following me around like puppies and kittens until the day I brought my rifle along, after which they’d decamped to my neighbor’s property across the canyon.

Ruf-Ruf ran ahead, covering ten or twenty steps for each of ours, charging into the bushes in search of grouse, wood rats, squirrels, or anything else that could conceivably be killed.  Suddenly she gave a sharp yelp and reared up on her hind legs.

I spotted something moving in front of her; simultaneously I heard a chilling rattle.  By the time I reached Ruf-Ruf, the snake had vanished, and Ruf-Ruf looked unharmed, if a little spooked by her close call.

We walked back to the house, with Ruf-Ruf as lively as ever as we left for San Francisco.  When I got back two days later, I was surprised not to find her waiting for me in her usual spot at the top of the driveway.  It wasn’t until I pulled up in front of the house that I saw her.  She was standing, feebly swaying, as though the slightest breeze might knock her over, seemingly desperate to stay on her feet, as if she knew that once down, she would never get up again.

The Laytonville Lookout & Ledger. A number of people weren't too pleased with this. It's worth noting that the Lookout ultimately outlived the Ledger, which eventually was sold and was turned into the Mendocino County Observer.

She’d lost half her body weight; hollowed-out flesh hung from her stomach almost down to the ground.  I had no trouble locating the puncture wounds left by the rattlesnake, smack in the middle of her throat.  It was a miracle she’d survived as long as she had.

I tried giving her some milk or water, but she could barely move her head or even her tongue.  I managed to get a few drops into her mouth with an eyedropper, but she was too weak to swallow.  Carrying her into the house, I begged her not to give up, though I sensed she was almost certainly a goner.  Hoping to lift her spirits, I decided to play the piano and sing for her.  But what sort of song, I wondered, was appropriate for a very sick dog?

The only one I could come up with was a big favorite of mine as a small child: “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?”  I sang it over and over, tears streaming down my cheeks as I watched for any sign that she might be perking up (or, alternatively, making tracks for the door to escape my mawkish caterwauling).

It was like a movie.  There might as well have been a schmaltzy string section building to a dramatic climax as Ruf-Ruf tilted her head ever so slightly in that quizzical manner with which she always observed her master’s strange behavior.  Her eyes opened a bit wider, and her head seemed to nod almost imperceptibly in time with the music.  A few minutes later she was able to take a full-fledged drink of water, and soon afterward, some milk.

It would be a couple days before she was able to eat solid food, and several more before she was strong enough to wander around again, but the crisis had passed.  There was some nerve damage, leaving her with a slight palsy that she never completely shook off, but apart from that, she made a full recovery.

Once again I felt guilty for spending so much time away from the land.  If I’d been even a few hours later coming home, Ruf-Ruf probably wouldn’t have made it.  But it was hard sticking around when so much was happening.  The Lookouts were getting more and more opportunities to play, and Gilman Street was not just thriving; it was producing a crop of young new bands that were as exciting as anything I’d heard in years.

My San Francisco pied-à-terre was a 2-bedroom-turned-into-4 apartment across from Mission Dolores (enabling Dave MDC, one of my flatmates, to bring his band up on the roof to serenade the visiting Pope John Paul II with the raucously anti-Christian “This Blood’s For You” and prompting the one and only Secret Service raid I’ve ever been involved in – so far, anyway).  David Hayes, another of the guys I shared the flat with, and whose pet rat was responsible for it being known as “The Rathouse,” had been compiling cassette recordings of some of the Gilman bands.

He and I talked about the possibility of turning that project into an actual record label.  The next thing I knew, I’d impetuously offered to put out a record for a band called Operation Ivy, who I’d just seen for the first time, and who’d been together all of three months.

They seemed surprised by my offer (many years later, I learned they also thought I was crazy), but said yes.  Having created a record company out of thin air, I thought I might as well sign a few more bands (“sign” in those days meaning a verbal exchange along the lines of, “Hey, wanna do a record? “Um, ok, I guess.”).  David, who actually knew something about making records, stepped in to help, and we soon had four 7” EPs ready for release the following January.

That girl I still had my heart pointlessly set on came back for another visit.  This time we attended a Harvest Ball at Beginnings, a redwood hobbit hall of a community center several miles west of Garberville in Humboldt County, where she proceeded to dance with everyone in the room except me.

I suspected her of consciously choosing to do so, in hopes it would dispel any illusions I was still harboring.  For that reason, I wasn’t as angry or hurt as I might have been.  Besides, it was exciting to see her appreciating and embracing what I’d come to see as a unique, almost indigenous culture springing up across the Emerald Triangle.

To most Bay Area people, Mendocino and Humboldt comprised a mysterious land of unreconstructed hicks and retrograde hippies.  Try as I might, I hadn’t been able to convince anyone that there was something powerfully authentic, almost elemental about this way of life that, like agricultural societies from time immemorial, revolved around the rhythms of the earth and its seasons.

By the same token, my North Coast contemporaries couldn’t understand the attraction I felt for urban culture.  Nor could they see how today’s punk rockers, no matter how alien their music and appearance, embodied many of the same ideals that aging hippies seemed to think they had a monopoly on.

Seeing this very urban, very modern punk rock girl twirling around in the dreamy half light of a hippie harvest ball, I thought I must finally be making progress toward introducing the two cultures to each other and bridging the distrust and suspicion that divided them.  By the time we drove back to Spy Rock late that night, she’d stopped making sarcastic remarks about hippies, and I’d stopped asking her why she would never love me.

The warm weather lingered late into November that year.  I should have known better, but I let it seduce me into not making adequate preparations for the coming winter.  To save face, I pretended to be surprised when the mountain was buried under a foot of snow that, combined with a hard freezing rain, left the roads impassable, even for most four-wheel drives.

I was in the Bay Area at the time; if it had been up to me would have stayed there until spring, or at least until the snow melted.  But I couldn’t do that; I hadn’t left enough food to last the dogs and cats more than a few days.  I would have to travel in on foot to re-supply them.

Spy Rock Road, much of which is maintained by the county, had been cleared up to where Iron Creek Road turns off and heads for the back loop, and it was there that I left my truck.  It would be four miles to my house, including a 1,000-foot climb up to the ridge and a similar descent on the other side.  I was on snowshoes, and carrying a pack filled with 50 pounds of dog food.  By the time I got started, it was the middle of the afternoon, and the darkening, lowering skies made it look even later.

I made good time, though, and reached the house about 4 pm.  It was a good thing I’d come, because the animals were down to their last few scraps.  I refilled their bins and went inside to rest a few minutes before starting my trip back.  I was tempted to spend the night, realizing that if I didn’t I’d be walking most of the way in the dark, but I knew it would be a bad idea, both because I hadn’t brought any food for myself, and because the radio was full of dire warnings about a more severe storm moving in.  If I didn’t get out tonight, I wasn’t getting out for a while.

I had hoped the snow would hold off until later, but already I could hear the wind driving it against the windowpanes.  I knew it was time to get going, no matter how tired I was.  Snow levels were forecast to drop another thousand feet, which meant that if I didn’t get to my truck in time, I wouldn’t be able to drive it out, and would be marooned, five miles up Spy Rock from the highway.

Darkness had fallen by the time I reached the bottom of my driveway.  Wary of feral dogs (some pot growers abandoned their pets at the end of the season) or other wild animals that might be attracted by the smell of the food I’d been carrying, I took my shotgun along for protection.

Striding along in my long dark trench coat, gun strapped across my back, I imagined myself as the modern incarnation of a Soviet soldier fleeing the Nazis across the Russian Front.  Before I’d made it up the first small hill I was completely, hopelessly exhausted.  I could manage no more than ten steps at a time before having to stop and rest.  I’d anticipated a hike of one and a half to two hours; at this rate, I calculated, it would take eight or nine.  If I made it at all.

It was by no means certain that I would.  A round trip of eight miles, even on snowshoes, shouldn’t normally be that big a deal, but hauling the 50 pounds of dog food had taken a lot out of me.  To make things worse, I was hiking straight into a blizzard, with wind gusts of 30 to 50 mph, and facing a near-continuous climb of at least three miles.

I wasn’t sure I could do it, and toyed with the idea of turning back to the house, where, even if there was no food, I at least had enough firewood to keep from freezing.  But given the intensity of the storm, I knew it would be a long time before I’d get out again.  A lot longer than I would want to go without eating, I reckoned.

By sheer force of will I continued my pace, ten steps followed by several minutes of rest, for the first mile.  When I started up the main grade I was managing thirty steps, with commensurately longer rest periods.  At 9 pm I still had almost a mile to go before the ridge, then a mile down the other side, which meant I was about halfway.  Given the storm’s intensity, it was possible my truck was already snowed in, but it was way too late to turn back now.

I made it onto the ridge, in complete mental and physical agony, but at the same time exhilarated at the knowledge it would be all downhill now.  The blizzard was at its worst up here, with the driving snow feeling as though it might rip the flesh right off my face, but as I began my descent, the wind subsided and the stinging icy pellets changed to great fluffy flakes.

It was easier to walk through and much prettier to look at, but it also meant the snow was piling up faster.  I stopped taking rest periods and charged straight ahead.  Finally I saw the dim outline of my truck in the distance.  It looked as though I might still be able to drive out, but only if I could get there in the next half hour or so.

I almost made it.  I was three or four hundred yards up the road, and in my semi-hallucinatory state imagined I could almost reach out and touch the truck I was counting on to bear me away to warmth and safety.  I softly congratulated myself for having been tough enough to weather this journey, and then I fell.

I don’t know exactly how it happened.  I suspect that my snowshoes got entangled, causing me to trip over them.  The next thing I knew I was face down in a snowdrift, unable to move more than a few inches in any direction.  I couldn’t get my snowshoes separated, and somehow the shotgun had gotten stuck in there, too.  Eventually I managed to roll myself over so I was looking up instead of down, but I couldn’t move my feet or anything else below my waist.

A sinking feeling told me this was as far as I’d be going.  Already the snow was beginning to cover me.  And I was so tired.  So very tired.  I’d read stories about people freezing to death, and this was exactly what it had sounded like.  I struggled a bit more, but nearly all my muscles had gone numb.  I was actually starting to enjoy lying there, as though it were the most comfortable, deliciously luxurious featherbed I’d ever have the privilege of lying in.

I knew that if I lay there much longer, I was going to die, that in fact, the process of my body shutting down might already have begun.  I felt a great sadness about this, not so much because I was afraid of dying, but because so many things had been left undone, so many hopes left unrealized.  I supposed those records we’d recorded would come out without me – David would take care of that – and that a neighbor might come by before the dogs and cats ran out of food, but as for me, it would be days before anyone would travel down that road and find me lying there half buried in the snow.

Ah well, I sighed, nothing to be done about it now.  I wished it could have ended differently, a little less ignominiously, but we’re not always given a choice in such matters.  I marveled at the soft beauty of the night, at the bitter irony of it all, at the way thousands and millions of snowflakes floated toward me, displaying the same effortless grace with which the firmament of stars had danced above me on long-ago summer nights.  Whispering a bittersweet goodbye to all that had been, that could and should and would have been, I closed my eyes and slept.

To be continued…