History of My Reading: Summer of Love

Summer jobs during the college years could have a number of purposes.  They could result in money for school or at least for summer support and entertainment, they provided "real world experience," they were something to do over those long unobligated months. Among the major motivations for summer jobs were money and parents.

Especially for those of us who had just completed our third year, a summer job could also be an opportunity to explore work we might pursue after college.  And in 1967, doing some good in the world was also a goal and a motivation.

They were also something to talk about when we returned, or in letters during the summer. These letters over the years often cast a harsh and despairing light on "real world experience."  After months of unrelenting and often intense mental and emotional stimulation at school, many found their summer jobs to be so tedious they threatened their sanity.  The corruption, greed, stupidity, vapidity, cruelty, arrogance and intolerance exhibited by bosses, coworkers, customers and so on, tended to make "the real world" seem deeply unattractive if not horrifying.

But even the most unpromising-sounding jobs could be enlightening.  I recall Leonard Borden returning one year with admiration for the wisdom of his coworkers collecting garbage on the early morning streets of Wilmette.

Jack Herbig.  Photo by Leonard Borden

Or at least the job could provide a good story or two.  Another Chicago area student--I'm pretty sure it was Jack Herbig--drove a city bus, and was once robbed by a man with a unique weapon: a scorpion.  This driver watched a large man showing various riders the contents of a small box he was carrying, until the last stop came, and he was the only remaining passenger.  He then showed the driver the scorpion in the box, and demanded all his money.  The driver complied, even offering his wristwatch.  After ascertaining that the watch belonged to the driver and not the bus company, the robber declined to take it.  (The story was too good for me not to preserve it at the time.)

Wendy Saul.  Photo by Leonard Borden

I learned from letters during that summer of 1967 that classmate Wendy Saul was working with inner city kids at an Upward Bound program in Connecticut, and Barbara Cottral was a staff writer for her hometown newspaper in Clinton, Iowa. Valjean McLeignhan, who had already graduated, was a summer apprentice at the prestigious Williamstown Theatre in Massachusetts, before beginning graduate school at Iowa in the fall.  Joni Diner was working as a waitress in Denver while taking a biology course at the University of Colorado.

A few months before it seemed I had the choice of several jobs for this summer.  I applied for and got into a program that had agreements with newspapers across the country to supply them with summer interns for their newsrooms, subject to individual approval.

  Back home, my parents assured me there was a job waiting for me with the railroad.  And late in the spring, the Knox publicity director--for whom I'd written an article or two on assignment for the alumni magazine--had taken the initiative to find me a spot with a Quad Cities newspaper, with the stated intent to test my long-hair ways in that ever-popular real world.

I applied for newspaper jobs in several places including in upstate New York. During the break before spring semester I interviewed for one in Pittsburgh and--as my "safety"--on my hometown newspaper, the Greensburg Tribune-Review (not yet a Scaife right wing prototype for Fox News.)  The editor there pretty much assured me of the job, since for one thing it was unlikely there would be another applicant from the program.

With all these choices, I decided against a blistering summer in the Quad cities, and headed back east.  I arrived to the news that the railroad job had fallen through.  As for the remaining newspaper jobs, I got one rejection and did not hear back from the others, including the Tribune-Review, where someone else had applied at the last minute.  Having seen those gray concrete offices and met the pale and uniformly middle-aged male editors, I was not surprised that they chose a bright and energetic young woman when she gave them the opportunity.  So I was left without a summer job.

Parks wrote this book about his
adventures in Tuscarora

Other classmates were similarly free, at least for part of the summer, as a number of them showed up in the tiny "ghost town" of Tuscarora, Nevada, where ceramics prof Dennis Parks hosted a "Summer Retreat and Pottery School."  (Parks did not return to Knox in the fall, and still lives and works in Tuscarora to this day.)  I had letters from Julie Parks (who sadly died just last summer) and Doug Wilson, who included his own "Things To Do in Tuscarora" poem.

I hasten to add that these letters--and others--came in response to letters from me.  For I had plenty of time to write them.

I had various intentions and half-made plans to travel--the West Coast was an incredible magnet (in their letters, former Knox students Mary Jacobson and Mike Hamrin wondered if I was coming to the Bay Area), for this was the Summer of Love, and Scott McKenzie was on the radio advising that "if you're going to San Francisco/be sure to wear flowers in your hair."  These travel ideas also came to nothing, mostly because I didn't have the money, but also because I was otherwise engaged.

I had a few temp jobs over the summer (doing inventory at a discount department store for a week until I managed to get myself fired, for example) but basically, I wound up spending the Summer of Love in my parents' basement. And though it was oppressive in many ways, it also was one of the most creative summers of my life, certainly to that point.

For it turned out that I didn't need to be in San Francisco or LA or London or even Tuscarora, at Haight-Ashbury or on Carnaby Street, to feel the incredible energy of that summer, which had been building in the Bay Area but more generally was chiefly unleashed, formed and amplified by the one and only Billy Shears, and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The Beatles were said to have been working in the studio for months, and their new album was widely anticipated.  So when I saw Bill Thompson on Galesburg's main street walking with purpose towards the record store in early June, I knew where he was going and why.  He knew that the album was in, and he was on his way to get it.

I wrote about this and about the summer of 1967 a couple of years back in a fiftieth anniversary of Sergeant Pepper post. Here I intend to do what we old folks do best and repeat myself, while--like some bloviating congressman feeding the Congressional Record--revising and extending my remarks.

I listened to the album straight through for the first time with Bill Thompson, and I probably bought my first copy in Galesburg.  By the time I was back to Greensburg, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band had already sold more than a million copies in the US in just a few weeks.  Demand was so great that there were nearly 100,000 back orders.

I more than listened to that album in June--I inhabited it, as it inhabited me.  I played it when I got up, to set my day, on the big stereo in the living room.  I played it while I was in the kitchen, and while I took a bath.  My parents were both at their jobs, and only my 13 year old sister Debbie and I were in the house for most of the day. I reveled in the music that matched the beat of my blood and my soul, in the lyrics that sang of a familiar world in a new way. Even the English major in me reveled, as I noted the irony of "fixing a hole" that "keeps my mind from wandering;" you know--closing something up in order to wander freely. And of course, the multiple meanings in just the title of "Within You Without You."

Not everyone felt this way about this album, or the other aspects of the musical and cultural explosion.  Most were bewildered and many were dismissive, caustic and even angry.  It was all of a piece with alarm over other obvious cultural shifts.  This was definitely the era when I would hear "are you a boy or a girl?" called out to me on Main Street because of my long hair (or what passed for long hair in that year)--nearly every time I walked that hot street, trying to keep the beat in my mind.  The people who yelled it seemed to believe it was clever, and delighted in laughing together in appreciation of their own wit.  Soon I was keeping my daytime trips to town at a minimum.  There were other, more personal incidents that were as unpleasant to experience as they are to remember.

Sergeant Pepper was remaking my world, though much of the world around me seemed oblivious.  But it was too big a cultural story to pass unnoticed, even in the Tribune-Review and the Pittsburgh Press Sunday paper.  Everywhere there were newspaper and magazine stories, reviews and interviews.

There wasn't much of a musical press yet--but Sergeant Pepper would help create it.  Both Rolling Stone and Creem would get started before the year was out.  The only such publication I knew about was a short-lived one called Cheetah.  I was such a fan that I sent away for a Cheetah sweatshirt.  Otherwise there were the teen magazines, some of them dreadful, at least one of them--TeenSet--pretty good. Their interviews with the musicians were particularly interesting, especially since nobody else bothered.

Sergeant Pepper was so pervasive an influence among the self-selected elect that it even created a kind of secret language.  Titles of songs and lines from them made their way into letters and conversations.  If the songs weren't enough, there was that fantastic cover, with the images of pop culture heroes arrayed behind the Beatles transformed into the Sergeant Pepper band.  There would be endless discussion in the coming year over the meaning of every detail, spun out through long cannabis nights. But that was yet to come for me; I still hadn't had a proper toke.

I had my own theories about the album, including why it seemed like one unit, a "rock opera."  There were attitudes that united the songs, a feeling that was undeniable.  But technically I realized they were unified by one small change that hardly anyone mentions these days: the dead space between the tracks was considerably reduced from past music albums.  One song flowed more quickly into another.

There was of course more new music exploding into the air, although it was hard to hear much of it.  We were still deep in the hegemony of top 40 AM radio.  I had to wait until late at night, in my bed in the dark, when I could feverishly search and delicately tune the elusive signals from distant stations in Cleveland or even Chicago on my transistor radio, that would play Jimi Hendrix ("The Wind Cried Mary,"  "Foxy Lady",) Country Joe and the Fish ("Not So Martha Sweet Lorraine"), the Jefferson Airplane songs that Pittsburgh AM wouldn't play ("White Rabbit"), and of course the long version--with the keyboard solo--of the Doors AM hit, "Light My Fire."

One thing to be said for Pittsburgh area radio stations, though, was that there was a long history of playing black music, promoted mostly by WAMO and other black music stations, but going mainstream on the top 40s and the biggest and most establishment station, KDKA. And this was a good summer for Motown (the Supremes "Reflections,") soul singers (including white soul, like Chicago's the Buckinghams), Aretha and Stevie Wonder ("I Was Made To Love Her.")  But it seemed like the psychedelic music coming from England and the West Coast was a bit more threatening.

Sergeant Pepper and this other music became like brain oases in the desert, or in terms of television, the vast wasteland.  Television was then dominated by the likes of The Beverly Hillbillies, Peyton Place, Hogan's Heroes, Petticoat Junction and the Lawrence Welk Show.  I might watch an occasional rerun of Jackie Gleason or Man From U.N.C.L.E., Star Trek or the Monkees, but except for the Smothers Brothers and the Steve Allen summer show, it was a matter of three channels and nothing on.

So Sergeant Pepper blasted during the day, but at night things were different.  My old room had been converted into a den, so I slept on a fold-out in the area of the basement known as "the other side."  It was in fact the space where my parents and I had first lived on this piece of land, before the house on top of it was built, and this cement structure was literally "the foundation."  This became my domain, for hours during the day and certainly at night, safe from the blathering television and other impositions.

Inspired by Sergeant Pepper and all the stories about the Beatles in the studio, I created my own recording studio there.  I took over an old reel-to-reel tape recorder that I somehow manipulated to record on two separate tracks.  I electrified a guitar with an old microphone and even older amplifier and speaker--all this equipment accumulated by way of my father's inconsistent interest in tinkering with amateur electronics as a hobby he didn't really have time for. There was also an old piano salvaged from a neighbor with dubious tuning, bad action and a few broken keys, though it could sound properly bluesy in certain registers.  A small chord organ had migrated to the basement from the living room.

So I became my own Beatles. I knew enough three and four chord progressions on guitar and piano for rock, blues and even some jazz sounds (which at Knox I had too often inflicted on fellow students in line to dinner by means of the piano in the student union), and I was learning new combinations from the music I was hearing.  I wrote song after song, layered instrumentation on the tracks, sang back-up and even tried harmonies and double-tracking, adding homemade percussion with some old rattles, my sister's tambourine, drum sticks and coffee cans.  I experimented with feedback, random overdubs and found sounds.  All with the aid of old earphones that didn't always work.

The 4-track tape recorder for Sergeant Pepper's

The results were hardly professional but often surprising.  I was participating in the kind of exploring the Beatles did on a different level, though technically not so far apart: all the layered sound of Sergeant Pepper had been done on four-track recorders.  By re-recording multiple tracks on one track, and adding to them on the other track(s), the layering could be endless--on my machine as well as theirs.  After Pepper, professional recording rapidly expanded to 8, 16, 32, 64 tracks and up.  The technology wasn't that hard--once the Beatles showed how it could be used.

I didn't stop with music.  There were old magazines and catalogs in the basement, so I cut out pictures and some text, and created elaborate collages, a few of them quite large.  I gave them all away, which seemed like part of the spirit of the thing.  Just endless creating, all gifts.

But sometimes on those humid nights I couldn't contain myself there any longer.  Fortunately there was a new all-night hamburger joint on Main Street, and it was air-conditioned.  Very late, when everyone else in the house was asleep, I escaped into the damp empty streets, safe from hostile stares, and loped through the dark, down and up the hills to town. Then I would sit for hours under florescent light, drinking coffee and writing.  Mostly letters--the letters I sent all these people, who wrote back to me.

I also sent tapes occasionally.  I sent one to Tuscarora which included a few songs I'd written using Emerson images ("Expanding Mellon," "Give All to Love") and a song I wrote about Tuscarora itself, modeled on the Mamas and Papas hit "Creeque Alley."  Apparently they tried to play it at some sort of group function, but the electrical generator gave out, and it slowed and slurred to a premature close.  Which I suppose is the outcome of that summer.

The 1960s paperback

This series of posts is ostensibly about reading, but I don't remember any specific book titles from this summer. I had requested and received a reading list of contemporary fiction from the incoming teacher of fiction writing, Robin Metz, but the titles I recall were those of books I couldn't find in Greensburg, and I'd already read the others.

Basically I was still enthralled with Richard Farina's novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.  For a long time it seemed the most characteristic 1960s novel, although the action takes place on a college campus in 1959.  I tried reading it recently but except for taboos it broke and the beat of the writing, it no longer resonates with me, especially the main character.

This time I read a later paperback edition with an entertaining preface by Thomas Pynchon, who knew Farina at Cornell, and knew people who inspired the characters in this book.  Pynchon claims he didn't know Farina well, but they did once go to a costume party together: Farina dressed as Hemingway, and Pynchon as Fitzgerald.  That, more than the book, blew my mind this time.

I am reminded however, not of books I read but an author I did not read at Knox at all, and wish I had.  That would be Charles Dickens.  He was not taught in any class I took or knew about, which might have been a good thing, given the scholarly opinion at the time reflected in the defensiveness of novelist John Irving's preface to Great Expectations (Bantam edition 1981.)  On the other hand, what Irving says in praise of Dickens makes me wish that I'd gotten to the Iowa Writers Workshop in time to know him, as well as his teacher, Kurt Vonnegut.

What puts me in mind of Dickens in considering the summer of 1967 is his persistent theme of childhood potential either squelched or nurtured by the people and circumstances of the child's world.  That need goes beyond actual childhood.  Perhaps everyone has a Summer of Love in them.  But it is seldom permitted, let alone encouraged to develop, transform and flourish.

Sergeant Pepper, now universally praised and even loved, stood in the middle of a great divide in 1967.  For those whose minds and hearts it opened, it opened them wide.  We experienced ecstasy in the moment, and in the prospect and promise of a new world, or at least a new way, which was especially welcome in the brutal and condemning context of Vietnam and the thermonuclear Cold War.  But others experienced fear and disdain and hostility, and expressed it. That made their hard world seem even emptier and more cruel.  It is less ironic than illustrative that I found communion while alone in my basement.

  I did see a few friends that summer.  My songwriting partner Clayton was in L.A. staying with relatives for the first months, but the other Crosscurrent Mike was living and working in Latrobe, some 10 miles away.  Despite inconveniences of time and distance, we had some adventures.  We tried attending a high school class reunion, but our "long hair" and improvised Carnaby Street gear (complete with granny glasses I borrowed from my actual granny) so mystified and eventually alienated the classmates who showed up that we spent most of the evening talking to each other.

We had some female friends from high school sharing an apartment in Pittsburgh who we visited, sleeping in their living room if it got too late to hitchhike or take the bus home.  But one night our presence became inconvenient, and we wound up walking a considerable part of the 35 miles back, until daylight provided a bus. Despite this, one of the women residents--Joyce--was an important part of this summer, and of my life for years to come.

Our biggest adventure however was the night Mike and I became rock stars.  We traveled to Pittsburgh for a Mamas and Papas concert at the Civic Arena.  We got there hours before the show started.  We escaped the hot sun by ducking into the cool dark lobby of a hotel, where we soon found ourselves the target of a group of enthusiastic teenage girls.  At a loss, we retreated to an elevator, only to have the operator chat with us as if we were guests, and famous ones at that.

members of Moby Grape 1967

We were mystified, as we did not look anything like even the Papas, but we soon learned that there was an opening act called Moby Grape, a new San Francisco group with their first record out, introduced at the Monterrey Pop Festival earlier that summer, a now legendary event engineered by Papa John Phillips.  Evidently they were staying at this hotel, but nobody really knew what the band members looked like.  Or maybe those girls just didn't care--we looked strange enough.  Mike and I wound up sitting on some back stairs, contemplating the price and extreme brevity of our phantom fame.

Eventually, Mike had saved enough from his job to buy a used yellow VW bug, and Clayton returned from L.A. with gifts of buttons (buttons were the rage there), three of which I wore the next year at Knox.  They said "Reality is a Crutch," (which tended to befuddle administrators and faculty members), "Totally Illogical" (I grok Spock) and "Lennon Saves."

These replaced the button I had been wearing my third year--it was white with Chinese characters in red.  I heard whispers of speculation on what they said--a Zen koan perhaps, or a dark revolutionary slogan.  Actually they were supposed to say "We Try Harder."  It was a button from the Avis car rental company, with their current slogan.

The Crosscurrents reunited musically a few times that I remember.  Once at Mike's apartment we tried out the new song on the radio by the Youngbloods, "Everybody Get Together," and nailed harmonies that astonished me.  And down in my basement I finally made use of that chord organ to do the keyboard part on "I'm A Believer" by the Monkees as Clayton and I improvised our version.

The three of us made one road trip together in Mike's VW at the end of the summer, to Canton, Ohio where lived a young woman who Mike had met and dated during the previous school year.  I remember three things from this trip.  Clayton was a natural punster, and he let go with one of his best when Mike asked him, "is there a red spot on the back of my neck?"  To which Clayton replied, "No.  It's a pigment of your imagination."

Second: during a Crosscurrents command performance for the young woman in question, she thought it was funny to burn holes in the lyric sheet of a new song with her cigarette, while we were singing it.  We did not agree, and I believe it damaged that relationship as well as the paper.  We didn't hear anything more about her after this trip.

Beatles playing "All You Need Is Love" for first
global broadcast

But at one point Clayton and I left the couple on their own, while we spent the evening at a local bar.  The Beatles " All You Need Is Love" was a hit single by then, and people played it several times on the jukebox.  Every time it began--with those opening strain of the French National Anthem--Clayton and I stood up and saluted.  We got stared at, but at least we didn't get thrown out.  Later we met two young women, one of them with long dark hair who called herself Cher.  They eventually invited us to leave with them, but in fact they ditched us. So I don't have many warm feelings for Canton, Ohio.   So much for the Summer of Love.