Q: Why won't vultures eat dead lawyers?
A: There are some things that would gag even
a vulture.
|
I have done a rewrite
on my book about the
original tribes
that lived in the Texas Hill
County...living
in the ranch in the Hills of
Beverly I had room
to spread my projects
out on the floors
of the vacant bedrooms.
FROM
ARMADILLOS TO MASTADONS. |
 |
ggh
 |
Time to go to Las Vegas again for a
Greatful Dead show. I had the idea
to produce a show and wanted to do
a vending fair on the Las Vegas strip.
All the people to get permits from
said...nope, never been done. NO
WAY JOSE...
With time and talks and back from
one office to the next...I got the 5
permits that we needed and did the
show.
Click
here to see enlargement
of
the wild week of Yipi-tie-die-O
|
The real genius behind the Beat movement in
literature never published a book during his life.
He appeared as a main character in many books,
though, from 'Go' by John Clellon Holmes to
'On The Road' by Jack Kerouac to 'The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' by Tom Wolfe.
His
free-flowing letter writing style inspired
the young Kerouac to break his ties to the sentimental
style he'd picked up from Thomas Wolfe and
invent his notion of 'spontaneous prose.' Without
Neal Cassady,
the Beat Generation would never have happened.
In the 1960's, as Kerouac withdrew into alcoholism
and early middle-age, Cassady began an
entirely new series of road adventures, this
time with young novelist Ken Kesey in Jack
Kerouac's place. When Kesey organized a trip
to the New York World's Fair in a psychedelic
bus named 'Furthur,' Neal Cassady was the
madman behind the wheel.
In the spirit
of Kerouac and Kesey we loaded in
a van...Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas style
loaded with pretty
girls, spirits and drugs and
headed for sin city.
|
xxxxxKen
Kesey |
Ken Kesey
is for sure one of the fathers of the "Counterculture" of the 1960s.
Kesey wrote the best
selling
novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
which was published in 1962. In July of 1964 Kesey
and
a group of his friends loaded up in a 1939
International Harvester school bus, "That
they had painted
fully
psychedelic
and equipped with sound systems, platforms on top and, added to the rear,
turrets to
climb
up and down from the top platform, a windshield on top to break the wind
and a generator on the
back
to power their equipment. The word "Further"
was painted on the destination shield to show their
confidence
in the old bus. They recruited Neal Cassady
(from Jack Kerouac's On The Road) to be the
driver
of Further," as described by Levi Asher.
They
were known as The Pranksters and their journey inspired Tom Wolf to write
'The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid
Test' about
this journey. It was on this journey that
Timothy Leary the prophet of
LSD
was part
of
the fun. Ken Kesey
prior years had volunteered at Menlo Park VA Hospital in a government-
sponsored
program to study the effects of hallucinogenic. During these experiments
he was taking
some
of the best LSD made by the US government labs.
Kesey
also wrote "Sometimes A Great Notion," he later published "the Further
Inquiry," a screen play
with
many photos from the bus trip which Kesey, Cassady and others.
During a part-time orderly job at
the
psychiatric ward of the local VA hospital, while still feeling the effects
of these chemicals, he began
to
have hallucinations. He envisioned an Indian sweeping the floors; it was
just what had been missing for
his
current writing project. His new novel needed a narrator to keep the story
in third person and "Chief
Broom"
became the vital ingredient for his new novel, "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's
Nest."
The
pranksters
began to organize "Happenings"
at local halls, with sound effects, wild light shows,
film,
costumes, strobes, poetry and music. A local struggling band
known as the "Warlocks"
played
their
Psychedelic-Sound,
they would later become the Grateful Dead.
This
bohemian community lived
in
a placed called Perry Lane. Parties were known for certain chemicals
that were being put into the
punch.
Eventually the government decided to make LSD
illegal
and Ken and the Pranksters ran off to
Mexico.
They came back to the U.S. to do a performance called the "Acid Test Graduation,"
Ken and
a
few others were busted on a 420. After
jail, Ken moved to a farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon and
settled
down.
By
Buffalo Benford
The universe will reward you
for taking risks on its behalf. Shakti
Gawain
The late astronomer and author Carl Sagan was
a secret but avid
marijuana smoker, crediting it with inspiring
essays and scientific
insight, according to Sagan's biographer.
Using the pseudonym "Mr. X",
Sagan wrote about his pot smoking in an essay
published in the 1971
book Reconsidering Marijuana. The book's editor.
Lester Grinspoon,
recently disclosed the secret to Sagan's biographer.
Keay Davidson.
Davidson, a writer for the San Francisco Examiner,
revealed the
marijuana use in an article published in the
newspaper's magazine.
"I find that today a single joint is enough to
get me high ...in one movie
theater recently I found I could get high just
by inhaling the cannabis
smoke which permeated the theater," wrote Sagan,
who authored popular
science books such as Cosmos, Contact and The
Dragons of Eden. In the
essay, Sagan said marijuana inspired some of
his intellectual work.
Yep, I am an old
hippie country music outlaw okie, that was raised in the same hills of
Texas that Willie
Nelson grew up...They say if you remember the sixties you weren't
there...and I did
inhale...as Willie says, "I didn't come here, and I ain' leavin'."
Jimmie
Buffet said somebody
told me I'm in town tonight." And from the People's Guide to
Mexico..."Where
ever you go...there you are."
MUSIC BECAME
THE POLITICAL FORCE, THEIR POWER WAS LOVE.
The fifties has
set the stage for rebellion. The youth of post war America, whose identity
was characterized
by bras, flat-top
military haircuts, girdles, bobby socks, and backyard bomb shelters was
ready to explode.
Then came the
payola scandals in Rock n’ Roll. As the decade came to a close the noose
around the
young culture
was drawn tighter.
Elvis
was drafted into the army,
Chuck
Berry and Allan
Freed, the man who coined the word Rock
N’
Roll, were both
put into prison, Little Richard
had become a preacher, Eddie Cochran
had died in a auto
wreck and then
...Buddy
Holley died in a plane crash with
The
Big Bopper and
Riche Vallens.
It
was 40 years ago this year...FLASHBACK.
Billboard
Magazine reports on the new movement of "folknicks", a young
Bob
Dylan is playing his first
concerts...the
times they are a changin’. Some saw rock n’ roll as dead, while Polaris
missiles are being
fired, satellites
launched, Doo-Wop music and the twist set the beat...Dion,
Pat Boone’s "White Sport
Coats and Pink
Carnations" are the order of the day...underground Bohemian ripples are
beginning to
cause waves.
A producer named
Spector
starts a record label and Dick Clark’s
"Caravan of Stars" is setting a stage.
In Europe a
British Invasion is a seedling growing in Liverpool England. Kennedy is
inaugurated. John
Glenn orbits
Earth and Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring.
Janis
Joplin is still in Texas and the
CIA is experimenting
with LSD.
Flowers are beginning
to be worn around San Francisco and around Stanford University inner space
is
opening up as
is outer space.
Elvis
is on the charts again. Then in 1963, the year before the
Beatles
blitz America
an American President is shot in the streets of a Texas town.
The
Beach
Boys and Motown is how America defines
Rock N’ Roll, but underground something more
than a "fad"
was bubbling...the "folk" movement and their "hootenannys" were singing
of radical political
beliefs...soon,things
would change again forever.
Before the decade
of the sixties was half over the
Beatles
would invade America and America would
invade Vietnam,
while
Ken
Kesey and his merry Pranksters loaded
in a psychedelic painted 1939
International
Harverster school bus and blasted out of their minds and high on
the times went on the
road, Jack
Kerouack
and
Neal
Cassady style. We remember the beat
writers like Allen Ginsberg
William
Borroughs, Kerouack
and
Cassady.
In Los Angeles
a band called the Byrds
had formed and the Warren Commission declares that Oswald
acted alone.
Steven
Stills says,
"Something is
happenin’ here, what it is isn’t exactly clear"
The establishment
and the revolutionaries, war
and
peace.
Between the generations there is a gap,
everwideing
and escalating.
Joan Baez speaks forth and rock becomes art and
a statement made by an
entire counter
culture, from the old world across the sea to the new.
The
SUMMER
OF LOVE 1967, began early in the year
with a "Human Be-in" staged in Golden
Gate Park in
San Francisco, it was called a "Gathering
of the Tribes", all the National press
coverage
marked a beginning.
Then in June
the Monterey Pop Festival
took a counter culture and their music to the world, that same
month theBeatles
released,
SGT. PEPPER’S
LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND and there
was a paradigm
shift of the youth...psychedelic went around the world...rock music was
changing and
creating a new
nation. After the Summer of Love
America’s youth would never be the same.
"In The Year
2525" topped the charts as Senator Ted Kennedy drives off a bridge at Chappaquiddick.
Richard Nixon
is inaugrated as a nation begins a "bum trip". A young fan is killed at
Altamont while the
Rolling Stones
rock n’ roll, and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" ask, "Who are those
guys"...Jerry
Garcia forms
the New Riders of the Purple Sage.
Buffalo Benford at the corner
of Height and Ashburry
The world today doesn't make sense,
so why should I paint pictures that do?
Pablo Picasso
QUACK...QUACK
