Hello, San Francisco!
An early warning that I’ll be evacuating the canyon and parachuting into the Bay Area for some readings and a round of media whoredom next week.
First up, Tuesday, June 20 at 7 p.m., a reading and book-signing at The Booksmith, the Haight’s esteemed indie bookstore . . .
Next, Wednesday, June 21 at 7 p.m., I’ll be at the uber-charming Depot Bookstore & Cafe in Mill Valley, doing an encore read ‘n sign . . .
At both events, we can get into the whole L.A./Laurel Canyon vs. S.F./Haight-Ashbury mashup, in re: which city was “more influential” as a Sixties folk-and-rock-and-roll nexus; did John Phillips and Lou Adler “commercialize” and therefore ruin the Monterey Pop Festival?; and the inevitable Who Really Invented Folk Rock, the Beau Brummels or the Byrds? Tons of fun.
I have a soft spot for the Bay Area in that San Francisco was the first bonafide big city I visited after graduating from callow youthdom into clueless early adulthood. A bunch of my musician pals from college moved West which gave me an incentive to save my dishwashing money and score an Apex fare to California from time to time to hang out with them as they slid into insolvency.
Years later, somewhat less clueless and sliding toward insolvency myself, I was dispatched to Mill Valley by the L.A. Times to write my impressions about the town. Here was the lede from my story:
“My indelible memory of Mill Valley . . . is of a blazing blue Monday near the end of the disco era, when a friend took me on his rounds arm-twisting club owners to book his act. The Bay Area that day glistened with flawless postcard imagery warranted to render a 22-year-old Midwestern rube such as myself speechless. As we motored past Mill Valley’s timbered city hall, I beheld, at high noon on the front lawn, a ringer for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi massaging the back of a stunning, shirtless young woman with a nut-brown tan. The effect of such a tableau on a barely post-collegiate hayseed cannot be overstated. Man, I remember thinking but (I hope) not actually saying, this is GREAT . . . .”
Native Californians vastly underestimate the primacy that the very idea of California, as defined in San Francisco, Mill Valley, Tiburon, Sausalito, and Laurel and Topanga canyons in the late ’60s and early ’70s, had and for all I know continues to have on outlanders.
John Phillips met Michelle Gilliam, his second of four wives, while on tour in California with a faltering folk outfit that would later become the Mamas and the Papas. The memory inspired him to write, during a dismal winter in New York, the shimmering ’60s anthem “California Dreamin’”. That song, and the golden imagery from the other, untold musicians writing about California at the time, no doubt subconsciously nudged myself and thousands more out of our complacent landlocked hideaways and into the world.