SF: Haight Ashbury

Broken Clock, August 2014

With a few hours on my own, I took a walk around Haight Ashbury to see what's left of this place that has such a large presence in our idea of counterculture. What stuck out about the place to me the most, the idea that I couldn't shake no matter how much I tried, was the amount of bad energy that swirls around the place.

A big part of that is in how the place still attracts and draws people who are looking to live in a certain way. Walking up past Buena Vista Park, you smell marijuana and you can't figure out from where. No big problem there, but you see the folks huddled around — there was a fierce, cold drizzle bearing down from the ocean. I was a bit stunned by how young many of them seemed. They are living some kind of fantasy of self-realization, but the reality looks more like a very sad joke.

This particular vibe around the neighborhood is hardly new. Joan Didion explored it at great length in her magazine piece "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" about the human cost of the "Summer of Love." For awhile I thought her tone and focus was excessively negative — that she was more interested in making fun of Jerry Garcia than hearing his music. But it's really there. The way she identifies in the inarticulate longings and hopes that characterize the people that went there and tried to make a life, and how that is a product of our consumer culture that has only gotten much, much worse in the past few decades.

There was, of course, something self-indulgent and self-absorbed about the whole thing. It is one of those things in the art and music of the period that I try to ignore. Though sometimes, it just pops up. I happened to come across an article quoting Garcia and the Dead upon hearing of the death of their friend Janis Joplin in 1970. There was no talk about the tragic, avoidable, and stupid loss of a brilliant talent. It was all about how that was her trip, man, and ain't nothing nobody could do about it. It sounded monstrous.

There is a weird, complacent danger of "finding your tribe." On Haight Street I spent some time at an anarchist bookstore, and it was a very warm and pleasant place for me. All the books were interesting, all the t-shirts proclaimed sentiments I would proclaim were I the type to proclaim things on my clothing. There was a whole rack of small press pamphlets and broadsides — a scene that appeared more vibrant than their minuscule circulations would suggest. I bought a book by Viktor Serge and was happy to be a part of the solution.

There was a young man at the counter chatting with the fellow that worked there —volunteered there, rather. He was gushing, asking about writers and books and where he could find them. The guy at the register had walrus-y sideburns and was glad to talk. The young man explained that he was passing through town — just traveling from one place to another, you know? But he'd definitely be back. The walrus-y fellow piously declared that the Haight was the only part of the city worth anything anymore.

Which based on the rest of my wandering around the neighborhood is a pretty wild assertion to make. If he said Berkeley, or Oakland, I'd buy it, but the rest of the area seemed warped and frozen in place, but in a preposterous way.

I'm fascinated by what Haight Ashbury means to certain generations. I feel very much for what drove all those kids there in 1967, but even more so for those that felt the pull but stayed put. Much has been made of the way that the "Summer of Love" was inflated, exploited, condemned, and killed by mass media. But the message of it must have been very powerful for young people trapped in sad cloudy milltowns, or the military, or any of the less exciting parts of the country. It must have been very important to know in the back of your mind that there was the idea of escape — as you dragged yourself through school, or a tour in the Army, or a shift at the factory so you could pay your suddenly adult-looking stack of bills for your new family. Sometimes ideas have power.

So what would that person who stayed make of what the Haight has become. It is part tourist trap, part magnet for purposefully lost children. It is a regular procession of shops selling everything tie-dyed, with water pipes and mood rings and vintage Quicksilver Messenger Service posters. But even that message, its own history, is getting a few whacks in strange directions. The sonic firmament is shifting — lots of Grateful Dead, of course. Janis Joplin remains big, and there is a definite presence of Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix. The Beatles are there ex officio. But the plot starts to get confused with Bob Marley — now we are interpreting the spirit a bit more broadly. But it goes wildly off with Led Zeppelin. This story belongs to no one anymore.

And progress and capitalism diligently, relentlessly clomps on. Haight Ashbury is in San Francisco, and markets wait for no man in the United States. I strayed off Haight onto Ashbury Street to find the Grateful Dead house, the cheap dilapidated rowhouse where the whole band and its various hangers-on and friends lived in a brief kind of communal harmony (for a little while at least). It was easy to find the house, thanks to the impromptu sidewalk graffiti featuring Dead iconography (and Bob Marley, for whatever reason). But the house itself is just another amazing old Frisco Victorian. With huge windows and fresh paint and plenty of urban appeal. When you walk off Haight Street today, you are transported in ways Owsley and the Diggers could have never imagined — you are dropped right back into some of the most expensive real estate on earth.

Haight Ashbury, August 2014