Latest news with #HaightAshbury
New York Times
20-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Political Legacy of Jerry Garcia
Jerry Garcia, the iconic frontman for the Grateful Dead, remains, nearly 30 years after his death, a revered figure, singular in his approach to life and art. A multimillionaire by the time of his death, Mr. Garcia never lost his fundamental understanding of himself as a musician, which makes him among the most relatable, if misunderstood, figures of modern times. Much of the pull he continues to exert on the culture lies in the fact that his music and his life were an exploration of what it means to be free. He was not political, per se. Though he came of age as the American counterculture bloomed — and though he and the Dead stood at the center of many of that period's most memorable occasions — he did his best to shun politics as such. He disdained candidates, avoided campaigns. 'We would all like to live an uncluttered life,' Mr. Garcia said in 1967, 'a simple life, a good life, and think about moving the whole human race ahead a step.' Mr. Garcia lived among artists and built up a community around him that was, psychologically and in some ways practically, impervious to government power. The Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco offered one early experiment in community organization; Dead shows in later years stood as a kind of traveling bubble of freewheeling creativity, dynamic hubs of music and art, blissfully insulated from the outside world. It was, to Mr. Garcia, a ride on the rails — a little dangerous but happily in motion and in contact with others. 'There's a lot of us,' Mr. Garcia said, 'moviemakers, musicians, painters, craftsmen of every sort, people doing all kinds of things. That's what we do. That's the way we live our lives.' Would you like to submit a Letter to the Editor? Use the form below to share your thoughts on this or any other piece published in The New York Times in the past seven days. If your submission is selected, an editor will contact you to review any necessary edits before publication. Most published letters will appear in both the online and print editions. Your submission must be exclusive to The New York Times. We do not publish open letters or third-party letters. Click here for more information about the selection process. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Wall Street Journal
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Last Great Dream' Review: A Wrong, Strange Trip
The message was clear, Dennis McNally states in reference to Haight-Ashbury and its pervasive atmosphere in the 1960s: 'The Bay Area was the promised land.' Promised lands are a fixture of most belief systems, but the milk and honey on offer in the Haight was of a kind untasted by earlier pilgrims. It came in the form of a tiny pill to be placed under the tongue. In Mr. McNally's telling, the effects shook the temple to its foundations. 'What LSD ultimately did was challenge the rational materialist Western approach to life and suggest that there was far more going on than the authorities taught. . . . It was the philosopher's stone for an entire generation and for many in succeeding generations.' One philosopher after another is called upon in 'The Last Great Dream,' most of them part of the shifting assembly of bohemians, Beats, hippies, Diggers and motley teens on the run from the infidels—or, if you prefer, their parents. Among the believers is Ron Thelin, the co-owner, with his brother, of the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street. (The information that their father had once managed a nearby Woolworth adds a poetic touch.) Thelin outlines the promise: 'There's a whole new symbolic reprogramming, and the programming is mankind. Planetary. Universal. It's one to one, it's joyous. I'm tempted to say it's wise. . . . And it's evolving.' His wife, Marsha, adjusts the phrasing while following the thread: It was, she tells the author, 'the change from the Age of Pisces (faith) to that of Aquarius (knowledge).' It was 'an explosion of consciousness.' Mr. McNally may dismiss Timothy Leary's pithy 'Turn on, tune in, drop out' as a 'Madison Avenue-esque slogan,' but it makes a decent fit for his own thinking in 'The Last Great Dream.' This is not Mr. McNally's first book on the cultural background to what, for shorthand's sake, we call the '60s. Earlier publications include a biography of Jack Kerouac, an account of the melting-pot foundations of American popular music and an 'inside history' of the Grateful Dead. Publicity for 'The Last Great Dream' asserts that it covers 'everything that led to the 1960s counterculture.' Everything in Haight-Ashbury and Greenwich Village, that is, with a concession made for the emergence of the Beatles in the Abbey Road studios and Mary Quant's Chelsea fashions. The book opens with the reasonable proposition, attributed to the Grateful Dead collaborator John Barlow, that the invention of the atomic bomb and its deployment at Hiroshima left 'a 'soupçon of pure nihilism' in the minds of the generation born during and after the war.' Artistically inclined people on the Haight and North Beach scenes sought a form of resistance. Mr. McNally places the poets Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan at the heart of what would later become known as the San Francisco Renaissance: two highly original writers, whose influence grew as the years passed. Rexroth is renowned for his translations from the Chinese and Japanese, and for acting as master of ceremonies at the Six Gallery reading on Fillmore Street in 1955, where Allen Ginsberg first read 'Howl.' Gary Snyder and Michael McClure announced the beginnings of eco-poetics at the same event. Duncan, who had ties to Black Mountain College, was developing an 'open-form' poetry related to the color-field painting of Clyfford Still, one of a few notable Abstract Expressionists to work on the West Coast. (It is interesting to learn that Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell had their first solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art.)
