Haight-Ashbury state of mind

I was going to write this column a few months ago, when a cosmic confluence of events (of the “moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars” variety) suggested it, but I’m glad I held off a bit, because our recent visit to San Francisco added immeasurably to the experience I’m about to describe.

The events I mentioned are landmarks that any child of the Sixties would recognize with a smile and maybe a lump in the throat: the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival last August, the release of the digitally remastered complete Beatles albums last September 9, and the death of Mary Travers last September 16. Of course we were too young, too far away, and maybe too stuffy to be at Woodstock when it happened on Max Yasgur’s farm that balmy mid-August. I was 14 in 1969, a high-school sophomore with the un-coolest crew-cut and a rash of pimples on both cheeks, but I was already — indeed acutely — aware of the fact that some people out there led more interesting lives than I did in Barrio Malinao, Pasig, Rizal. Mostly we got that from the movies we watched (the truly interesting ones had titles like “Bedroom Mazurka”) and the music we listened to on our ‘60s iPods, those plastic transistor radios with the mushroom earbuds. We knew the Beatles by heart, and could name any Beatles tune in three notes, from “Love Me Do” to “Come Together”; we dreamed chastely of our crushes to the accompaniment of “If I Fell” and bemoaned the passing of a “Yesterday” that we hadn’t even gone through yet. Not only could we sing the Beatles; back in those days, it was crime to be a teenager and not to be able to play the guitar, albeit with the aid of a chord chart that we memorized better than we did the Periodic Table. (Which reminds me, I’d be happy to pay a small fortune for a copy of an obscure songbook titled The Book of NUDES, which had the most esoteric chords and featured classics like “Yellow Days.”) We snuck out of school to take a bus trip to Quiapo and Raon to blow our savings on Lumanog guitars — and maybe indulge our budding, uhm, literary sensibilities with a bootleg copy of Fanny Hill from nearby Recto. But compared to what was a-borning in places like San Francisco, the Beatles and their kind (the Dave Clark Five, Freddie and the Dreamers, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, the Monkees) were cute and clean-cut; even the Rolling Stones were a tad too uncouth for most of us, although we did groove to “Satisfaction” and got moony over “As Tears Go By.” The inner hippie had yet to be released in us — imagine how my swishy bell-bottoms went with my military hairdo — and for some, it took a Woodstock to push them over the edge. Without cable TV, the Internet (which was busy getting born that year), and YouTube, we had to settle for a screening of “Woodstock,” the movie, many months after the event. I remember standing in a packed Galaxy Theater on Rizal Avenue to marvel at how singers like Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin — who looked like they’d either just woken up or hadn’t slept for five days — could get thousands of people all worked up. I still preferred sweet to sour, lapping up Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young when they launched into “Suite Judy Blue Eyes” and a cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird.” And who could be sweeter on the ear than Peter, Paul and Mary, whose “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” might well have been the decade’s anthems, paeans to a lost innocence and to the inconstancy of life? They were clean enough to be sung in church (“Five Hundred Miles”) and yet ambiguous enough to be accused — almost certainly unfairly — of pushing mind-altering substances through a song like “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” When they harmonized on a piece like “Early Morning Rain,” they made even loneliness sound good. And all over PPM’s work was Mary’s signature alto, clear as a bell, soaring above the raucous confusion of the age. All these came back to me in San Francisco, where — with a rental car to use and a morning to while away — I answered the question “So where should we go?” with something I’d never done in three or four previous visits to that city. There’s no streetcorner more revered in the history of American counter-culture than that spot where Haight meets Ashbury, and that’s where we went. Home to 1967’s famous “Summer of Love,” Haight-Ashbury would come to epitomize the best and the worst of the Age of Aquarius: the free love, the pacifism, the hallucinogens, the grime and grit, the long, languorous drifting away into another realm of thinking and being, at a time when B-52s (flying out of our own Clark AFB) were pulverizing much of Vietnam, when other Americans were walking on the moon, when Barack Obama was a young boy and it was still illegal for blacks or Asians to marry whites in 16 American states, when even the Beatles themselves had traded in their suits for Nehru jackets and Pancho Villa moustaches. Haight-Ashbury attracted the genius and the lunatic, the earnest and the curious, the divine and the drifter. For a time, the district went through a steep period of decline and decay, until its rehabilitation into the present neighborhood, one as welcoming of bug-eyed tourists as any other San Francisco locale, dotted with shops selling distressed-fabric T-shirts, silver jewelry, Tibetan imports, and the inevitable bong (if you don’t know what a bong is, you’re too young to need one). Psychedelia still hallmarks the place, in the fruit-cocktail colors and the swirly scripts, but gentrification has also set in, in the neatly restored Victorian homes and the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream store, even in the cheeky exhibitionism of hosed and posed legs popping out of a window, among other signals of mid-life mellowing. I didn’t meet anyone wearing flowers in her hair, nor was I offered anything more mind-blowing than Coke with a capital C, but as we drove away from Haight-Ashbury to explore nearby Castro with Beng, our daughter Demi, and her husband Jerry, I couldn’t help humming a tune in my head, something that spoke about “You, who are on the road, must have a code that you can live by…. And so become yourself, because the past is just a goodbye…” A goodbye, indeed, and sometimes a welcome back. Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.