McClure reads but Dead go missing

More 1960s adventures from the SF scene

EARLIER this year, Rock and the Beat Generation published a lively and evocative essay by 1960s San Francisco scenester Antonio Pineda. The writer and actor, who has a novel entitled Bijou in the pipeline, flashes his journalistic searchlight once more on another series of incidents and connections linking the entwined worlds of Beat lit and radical rock in the city by the Bay…

‘Straight theatre? How poetry, drama and rock shared the stages of San Francisco’

By Antonio Pineda

Photographer Larry Keenan shot a black and white pic in 1965 that foretold a brave new world. The shot was of a Straight Theatre marquee featuring the text ‘Michael McClure-Grateful Dead’, a production slated for the Avalon Ballroom, as the Straight was not yet open. Keenan, a seminal figure on the North Beach/City Lights literary scene, had his luxury car of the day parked in front of the marquee, giving the impression of a film noir angle. 

Flashback. Harry Tsvi Strauch, hip boutique owner and Harvard intello, remarked: ‘The Hayes Valley in San Francisco below Fillmore Street experienced a bohemian resurgence in 1963-64. Young bohemians, students and artists found the cheap rent and mixed race population irresistible. The neo-Beat scene flourished.’

Young bohemians adopted the Beat lifestyle of cheap wine, pot, and jazz. Rent parties, warehouse gigs and jazz and soul music were shared by all. Robert Duncan and Carolyn Cassady frequented poetry readings by established and obscure poets. The neo-Beat life was like a cool black and white Hollywood movie where hipsters had their fingers on the pulse of a futurist art movement.

A young poet from Buffalo called Jim Wilson and his wife Betty moved into a large Victorian flat there. Playwright Ed Bullins and his wife Patty also took up residence. On weekends, bohos would gather, read their poetry, dig jazz sounds, and live the dream. Norman Mosher and his wife Shoshana would found a poetry-lit magazine of the day, Illuminations. The mag soon moved to the upper Haight. It specialized in publishing unknown new faces, as well as well-known intellects. ‘Illuminations’ was a reference to Rimbaud.

Pictured above: Antonio Pineda’s forthcoming novel Bijou

The scene spread to upper Haight Ashbury. Jim Wilson, myself and many more were soon liaising to open the Straight Theatre. Brent Dangerfield, sound engineer, and Luthor Greene, producer, were part of the wolf pack to celebrate this new art movement. Since the theatre was in the process of being renovated, it was decided to host the preview at the Avalon Ballroom. Chet Helms, a lean, lanky Texan, had discovered Janis Joplin. Chet enabled the Avalon to host a Straight Theatre prequel. Helms was instrumental in converting the Avalon into a trend-setting vehicle for music and art.

Leading Beat poet Michael McClure was to headline. The support act would be the Wildflower, a hot psych band of the day, noted for lead singer Michael Brown. He had also recorded a song penned by McClure, entitled ‘Baby Dear’. Ed Bullins presented a one-act play, Clara’s Old Man. The Dead cancelled at the last minute. It was to be an evening of poetry, theatre and song.

Pictured above: The poster for the Michael McClure-Grateful Dead event, though the band cancelled at the last minute

Tsvi recalls the event. ‘Culture had changed. The neo-Beat had evolved into the hippie counterculture. Antonio Pineda introduced McClure on stage. McClure performed ‘Ghost Tantras’. It was preceded by the play by Ed Bullins. The mise en scene opened on a bare stage where two street signs were the stage furniture. One read ‘Beatitude’, the other sign was titled ‘Negritude’.

‘Theatrically costumed as a black hooker, a beautiful actress prowled the stage. It was a revealing portrait of racism, sexism and social dysfunction applicable today. Wildflower had the joint rocking. Once upon a time poetry, music and theatre combined to better society.’

McClure befriended the Straight Theatre. The Blossom, a play of his was produced by the theatre. It was directed by Bill Tara. The piece was part of his ‘Billy the Kid’ trilogy. The event was produced by the aptly named Johnny Hombre. The divertissement was provided by a Grand Guignol. Bill Tara cast me as the Harlequin. The Philosopher’s Stone was based on The Theatre and its Double, a manuscript by Antonin Artaud. For lack of a better word, it was psychedelic theatre. Both productions received favorable reviews from the San Francisco Chronicle. 

I often visited McClure at his crib on Downey Street. It was there I was first introduced to Free Wheeling Frank Reynolds. The Hells Angel poet showed me a self-published poem complete with meth drawings and text out of a Frank Frazetta landscape. Frank had the privilege of McClure ghosting a book of his life entitled, Frank Reynolds, Secretary of the Hells Angels.It was a daring and visceral concept. Frank also went on to perform a reading of his poetry at Winterland with many Beat poets. The occasion was The Last Waltz, a film directed by Martin Scorcese.

Frank was cool and friendly to me despite his fearsome reputation. I visited him when he was confined to San Francisco General Hospital with a broken leg from a motorcycle crash. Frank experienced Zen later in life. Curiously, he went from being a fallen Hells Angel to a Zen angel. This was a beautiful reversal of the Luciferian angel who fell from grace to fallen angel.

Pictured above: Michael McClure captured in San Francisco in 1967

Bruce Conner attended school in Wichita, Kansas with McClure. By synchronicity, Bruce was my next door neighbor on Carl Street. Albert Nieman and I screened films of Conner via a Straight Theatre Viewing Society, an avant garde cine club. It also screened Stan Brakhage who famously said, ‘McClure always, and as he grows older, gives his reader access to the verbal instincts of his whole body, an instinct from simply and only brain think, as it is with most who write…He invents a form for celluar messages of his, a form which feels as if it is organic on the page, and he sticks with it across his life.’ McClure was immortalized by Jack Kerouac in his novels The Dharma Bums and Big Sur.

My hippie commune was located around the corner from McClure at 625 Ashbury. The upstairs was an old mini-ballroom fashionable from the Victorian era. It had been converted into a yoga and Tai Chi studio. McClure came by with Rip Torn in tow. Rip checked out the vegan kitchen. He and Michael dug the dance studio. Grandmaster Choi Kam Man taught Tai Chi classes. Rip encouraged us to contribute to society via the arts. They were best friends with the author Terry Southern.

He became a recommended read in our commune. When the Living Theatre arrived in San Francisco to play the Straight, several came to stay at our commune, many for years. It was an eclectic atmosphere and famous for art happenings centered about a lysergic punch bowl, but such was the meter of the times. Rip graciously referred to us as ‘the Peacock People’.

I  was a huge fan of the Doors. I visited McClure at his pad and Jim Morrison was hanging out. Jim and Michael were working together on a volume of poetry by Jim that would become The New Lords. It was self-published by Jim as a small collectors’ edition. Much of it became a part of the ground-breaking spoken word album by the Doors entitled An American Prayer.

Morrison was in his pomp. He was congenial and hail fellow well met. Jim loved poetry and prose, and was well-spoken and literate. Michael seemed like an older brother to Jim, who promoted an introduction into a magical society, where the divine reigned. Poets were above mere mortals by virtue of art and talent. Michael deemed Jim to be a young poet who could later shape his generation by virtue of his talents. Indeed if one assesses the spoken word recordings by Jim, it becomes apparent that Jim was influenced by the voice of McClure.

Michael spoke in a light baritone when he read. His cadence and tempo were singular and recognizeable. An alpha persona shines through. It is a voice developed over years of performing readings. Jim was in this sense like an actor influenced by Lee Strasberg. Van Morrison is said to have had the same effect on Jim. Van played a gig at the Whisky a Go Go in Hollywood. Jim was struck by the swagger, aggression, and muted menace that the Belfast Cowboy wielded on the audience. Jim incorporated all the aforementioned elements into his art.  

Pictured above: A 1966 presentation of Michael McClure’s play The Beard

William Kunstler, famed civil rights lawyer, was to coin a legendary bon mot: ‘Now that the statute of limitations has long since expired, I can reveal that I dropped LSD with Jerry Garcia at Woodstock.’ One foggy San Francisco night I was in North Beach with Teresa. We had a gig at the Orphanage, a bar that cultivated what was then exotic hippies dancing on stage in mock coitus.

Opposite the Condor was a small venue, the Peppermint. It was a modest and cosy go go bar. Jim espied us out on the street and waved us in. He toasted us to cocktails, then enquired, 'You got anything?’ I reached in my jacket and pulled out capsules of needle point mescaline. Jim dropped two on the spot. He was in good nick. He raved about the poetry scene in San Francisco. He was bright as sin. Well-read and a lover of cinema, Jim expressed a desire for the purity of poetry over the tawdry showbiz world. The mescaline was starting to hit me. We hung out until last call for alcohol, then Jim disappeared into the psychedelic mists of the San Francisco night.

Michael and Jim loved the vogue of the Living Theatre as espoused by Julian Beck and Judith Molina. The Living played the Straight Theatre in the final days of existence. Jim and Michael arrived at the show drunk and disorderly. There exists a fabled photographed sent to me by the late poet David Gitin, a dear friend of McClure. It depicts Michael, Jim and his wife Pam, backstage. Jim carries a six pack of beer. Michael flips the paparazzi the bird. Luis Bunuel has a repartee for situations like this once referring to Garcia Lorca: ‘It is ignoble to speak badly of great poets.’

McClure issued spoken word CDs of his own with Ray Manzarek of the Doors. He also recorded with avant garde composer Terry Riley. The Beard was to celebrate his success as an important playwright. Staged in the blue velvet of eternity, it starred Billy The Kid and Harlow. The outlaw Kid swaggers and prances in his trousers of black leather, exuding sexual magnetism. Harlow confronts and seduces, the ultimate temptress. It finishes with Billy performing oral sex on Harlow.

It created a huge scandal. The great British playwright Harold Pinter promoted it as art. The actors Richard Bright and Billie Dixon were arrested by the SFPD after the third performance. In retrospect the justice system had lost the plot. After all, Grove Press and Maurice Girondias had gone before the Supreme Court to defend Henry Miller, and the court ruled in favor of Miller to publish as he pleased. The Beard went on to be critically and financially successful. It is still one of the most performed plays by university drama departments.

See also: Antonio Pineda’s previous memoir ‘Meeting McClure & Morrison: Beat dreams & a mescaline memory’, August 20th, 2023