Lost Sea Shanty-Circus Maximus Toiler On The Sea-Stranglers
Richardson Bay was the stage for an armada of houseboats who pulled off a victory at sea with revenge so sweet, it might have been 1914 at the Falklands rather than the heady days of Summer 1971.
Sunk quite "mysteriously" yet right smack dab in the sea lane of the "man" was a 3 ton dry dock - and when quizzed by the media and other land lubbers, no one wharf rat seemed to have any idea just how it got there... mm mmm, my my!
Floating freeloaders finally faced-off feds in a fight for the right to live aboard vessels such as the Trans-Love, the Loafer, the Lotus and Joe's Camel.
The nautical battle made page 1 of the SF Chronicle:
Waldo Point was a natural magnet for artists, poets, actors, musicians, drifters and grifters on the cheap.
A decade prior to the media blitz of June '71, modern day pioneers were quietly moving into the ferryboat frontier. Though floundering and abandoned alongside Bechtel's shipyards, these grand old dammes served as mansions to the bohos.
Sterling Hayden, Alan Watts, Jean Varda, Jack Kerouac, Shel Silverstein, Otis Redding, John Cipollina and Pam Tillis were Sausalito boat people.
Above picture was taken by my wife Linda as I introduced her to Russell's boat at Gate 5. She fell in love at first sight with the Lotus.
The Lotus offered visitors a taste of ancient India, hot from the pressure cooker of Russell Grisham.
One local hero actually had a day job at the Sausalito Heliport. All he'd do at his desk was slowly open packs of Camels, cajole the tobacco by rolling and twisting the ciggies one at a time, and without tearing the empty paper cylanders, he'd tamp in finely ginched cannabis buds.
When 20 cigs were refilled he'd reseal the cigarrette packs in their cartons... they looked like they were as new, unopened. Then he would casually open a pack and have himself a "legal" smoke - that was a busy day at the job for guitarist John Cipollina of Quicksilver Messenger Service,
Check out this vintage ad with John lending his good name to Carvin amps. Looking sharp as always.
QMS made their sole music video (for Dino's Song) on the waterfront location. Gate 5 dock party scenes are intercut with strange hallucinatory fx.
Ralph J. Gleason aired Dino's Song ("I don't ever want to spoil your party babe, Tell ya where to go, or what to do!") in it's entirety on his 1968 West Pole special examining the Bay Area rock scene. A clip from Dino's Song is in the rockumentary, John Cipollina Electric Guitarslinger.
The uncut Dino's Song footage features waterfront landmarks such as The Owl, a fantastic three story sculpture topped with a loft and 2 large round picture windows that served as the owlet's eyes. It was designed by Chris Roberts, one of the unknown artists who transformed Gate 5.
One sunny Sunday at the always windy Marin City flea market, Cher (sans Sonny) was seen strolling along holding hands with Dino Valenti, the folkie who sang have another hit of Fresh Air in Quicksilver with Cap'n Chips on wang bar guitar. Valenti lived on the waterfront at The Owl or thereabouts for a while. Of course, he's the Dino Dino's Song refers to. He was in jail at the time for pot possession.
Then we had the RedLegs. Who? RedLegs were the house band that rocked the docks of the Bay. At one mid-day RedLegs kegger, a wylde woman drew a red stripe down my leg.
Pam Tillis picked me up in 1977 at a barge party thrown by the Red Legs. At the time I had no clue about Pam's country star daddy, Mel Tillis.
I went to several Freelight rehearsals and gigs with Pam. She introduced me to her lead guitar player in the band, John Cipollina. They made me feel right at home. Friends of John regularly arrived with green cheer at the sessions.
Some of the craziest and most brilliant actors performing in town were Snake Theatre, known for their off-beat, hands-on tell-a-plays.
The community included eccentrics such as Buddha incarnation "Uncle" Bill, always willing to share tea and peanut butter sandwiches along with paradigms, Bill was the subject of a 3-D stereoscopic Lenny Lipton film; Uncle Bill and the Dredge Dwellers (1978, 25 minutes).
It also featured dredge dwellers Michael and Penny Woodstock. The Woodstocks and their angelic children epitomized the houseboat riches to rags style.
Surrounded by yards of water on a dry dock barge, an Emerald isle of pot, they would row out to friends in need who signaled with a whooping Miwok Indian call.
Playboy magazine gadfly and madly sly humorist Shel Silverstein parked his pate next to the sculpted boathouse "the Owl".
Nearby a real relic from the thriving ferry -across-the-murky Richardson Bay lay beached along the methane-rich front lines, and for a time the poet Varda lived in the Captain's quarters rent-free at Gate 5.
Another cartoonist who connects with his readers and gets them to slow down and laugh at the foibles of social solutions that are doomed. Phil Frank spent a good chunk of his waterfront years drawing Farley, often in the shared quietude of the Sausalito main library,
Don Arques, the original Gate 5 landlord, never pushed too hard to collect back rent from the many squatters seeking a refuge from the real world. After all, the waterfront did have a high percentage of genuine talent somewhat tempered by unwashed urchins straight out of the pages of Charles Dickens.
Alan Watts had an opulent office inside another one of Sausalito's beached ferry boats. We listened to him on KTIM and KSAN. Above all, he had a sharp sense of the absurd, of cosmological contradictions. His secretary kept the space open after Watts passed on.
Hank Harrison is another of the psychedelic pioneers who lived for a time along the gates of Sausalito, "doing it all for the bossa nova" as he said at a houseboat party. Hank, aka Gladstone Odduck managed a bar band in Palo Alto called The Warlocks back in mid '65.
Bob Kaffke met Hank and his wife Linda in NYC in 1963, where the couple soon had my dad babysitting their 1 year old daughter Courtney Love. Their paths would cross again in 1966 at SF State Experimental College. Hank started LSD Rescue on campus:
I was the first person to ever bring anybody down from a bad acid trip on the phone. Anywhere on earth. I invented crisis intervention for drug abuse via telephone. I trained several hundred counsellors.
Meanwhile Bob "Roberto" Kaffke was becoming known for his political correspondence and travel to forbidden zones.
In Sept. 1968, Esquire magazine's Campus Heroes issue outdid Playboy capturing the revolutionary climate on campuses in the Berkeley Barb-esque midsection. Featured in an article entitled "Guerrilla Guru", Roberto is profiled without regard that perhaps the Director might not appreciate the tongue-in-cheek exaggeration applied throughout the bonus section intended as a dry satire of the underground press.
Eventually both bad pennies turned up where else, but the last bastion of crusty curmudgeons... the docks of Richardson's Bay. Years later Bob taught me how to ride and jump and led me into horsemanship. I now own a horseranch near Sacramento and train ponies and horses, partially due to his understanding. (italics - Hank Harrison)
All around existential athlete, well-educated adventurer and professor of sublime revolution Roberto Kaffke was no stick-in-the-mud waterfront man. Up early every morning after a quick shot of insulin...
He lived on a houseboat at Kappa's in 1969 for a few months, but the cruiser was a vessel, on the water... he loved living aboard a real boat. Bob always kept the path inside the cabin open and clear, stern to aft.
Once when he let a woman stay on board while he was in Mexico, I came by and was astonished by what she had done to make it livable... the head was turned into a closet hanging up her colorful clothes, and there was a cozy queen-size futon on a board between the 2 bottom bunks. Crystals were hanging everywhere... she had temporarily turned it into a houseboat! He didn't mind or anything, but 5 minutes after she was on her way home - he had it looking like a proper boat again, as he preferred.
Friends felt at home in the cabin cruiser, and not because it was comfortable, especially without heat or electricity, crashing on those narrow bunks. Roberto himself made that freezer seem warm, welcome. Spend the night, tell stories, sleep 'til 7, hit the deck and head to Fred's for coffee.
From there, go ride his horses, make plans to bus it down to La Paz, take the ferry to Mexico and meet up with the Sandanistas; never a dull moment.
Roberto and other local intellectuals would start their days holding court at the "stammtisch" round table in the early Sausalito mornings, come rain or shine...the hub-bub coffee buzz institution along Bridgeway directly mid-town known as Fred's Place.
Bill Graham drove his little sports car to Fred's whenever his clipboard schedule allowed, arriving ready for coffee, unshaven and in a dingy T-shirt. A regular joe.
Maggie Catfish, Fred's waitress in the late '70s (and still working as a waterfront singer-songwriter was as down to earth as low tide itself but she always had a glint in her clear blue eyes. Her smiling over-bite and horn rims let you know you were among friends.
Fred Peters himself was ever cantankerous and seemed to loathe hearing comments calling his place an "institution". In the evenings, philosophy, poetry and petting resumed at a relaxed pace in Sausalito's little sister to North Beach's Cafe Trieste.
Dad's favorite song on their juke box: "Blue Bayou" by Linda Ronstadt (originally by Roy Orbison, of course). Lovely ladies would listen and purr to Roberto's deep dulcet tones, he would stroke their long hair, while speaking of favorite places, inviting friends to go, to Mendocino, Mexico, Paris, wherever the beer was cold and women warm.
Women were always welcome at the Gates, if they were ready to be absorbed into the lifestyle. Those dudes were honchos who should have known better than to give me the treatment, because I was planting lovely female flowers in the realm.
Not many of the hard-boiled barnacle Bills could fathom the depths from the crest, often as not sticking to that same cutthroat competitive thing designed to protect their turf just like every other macho gang plank.
The independent waterfront women were often saltier and especially savvier than the men. But there were all kinds. Different folks all but unnoticed by others who presumed they knew everybody and everyone around them. A lot of friendly, down to earth people were out there, and few as open door policied as my own father.
Dad's trojan cruiser at Napa St. Pier was always an available place to bring a playmate to stay overnight, after nightclubbing, dear old down to earth Dad already cozy in his cubby might sing a word of greeting and was right back asleep, and some honey such as Sugar Bear and I would get it on, on one of the bunks a few feet from peaceful Papa Kaffke.
I was on the roof of the Lotus making posters for Waterfront Preservation Association meetings that aked "More energy Needed" when my sweet thing Harriet walked up, impressed I came up with the idea to draw the letter A like the Owl house boat sculpture that stood out so well on the center of Gate 5's jagged edge.
There was a documentary made years before the flood of gentrification called "The Last Free Ride". It's available at last from Saul Rouda, on vhs or dvd. (from Waldo Point -link below).
from Bill Daniel's site; (link below:-) - "June 8, 1971, the infamous 'Battle of Richardson Bay' occurs between the boat community and the Marin Sheriffs. This event would later be recreated for the filming of Last Free Ride."
Flash forward to the 1977 Battle of Richardson Creek:
It didn't end in an apocalyptic blood bath fighting cops in the Gate 5 parking lot. For a while we were expecting a scenario something like that to happen, and the WPA woke the troops up one morning with an air raid siren. The bulldozer had arrived and we met the enemy head on. There was some hair-pulling by the cops to drag us from the trenches as the last of us including me were put into paddy wagons. Cool heads prevailed and we were let go. Months later photos from the last battle and other blow-ups were displayed at the biggest WPA meeting yet. We put up a fight, but we knew the writing was on the wall.
Development would sink the more anarchic aspects of houseboat subculture sooner or later. Eventually the totem poles would be bulldozed, the colorful Marin City flea market would be paved over for the hungry franchises, and those wacky methane toilet barrels filled with human excrement intended to become the main source of heat and light for Gate 5 would be abandoned. As in dumped into the mud of low tide.
Shitting on the dock of the bay may have been the final straw... waste disposal was a big issue with hillside Sausalito. We were looked down upon in more ways than one.
On occassion the scruffy artists inevitably crossed paths with tourists and the downtown gentry.
Sausalito's main drag had 2 hang-outs with more locals than tourists. The No Name bar went out of it's way to put the short pants and kodak crowd on guard, with warning signs promising to cheat tourists, and the place literally had no name on the front.
The Trident was the only fancy restaraunt in Sausalito that tried catering to non-traditional clientele.
Friendly to freaks, it scared away the straights who weren't ready to have struck up a casual conversation with one of the Smothers Brothers, pass the time with psychedelic poster artist Stanley Mouse sipping wine at the bar, or play along with boistrous Bill Graham running up his tab while entertaining other diners within earshot, celebrating his 50th birthday.
By 1980 I was working at The Trident, not making much, but nightclubs were the place to be and I jumped at the chance to rent an apartment back in town. I bussed lots of chops, caused jaws to drop dressed over the top doing my job in peg-leg pants, brothel creepers and a tie to die for.
On the other hand, I wasn't the only outcast working the place over. One afternoon David Johansen of the New York Dolls sat there staring down everybody going anywhere near his table, mainly looking at the waitresses but a little surprised that this rich hippie joint had a punk rocker busboy.
One night I went over to The Owl to find Russell Grisham, and some honcho pulled a bowie knife on me, like I was trespassing, he didn't know I'd been there many times before but now my hair was short and he wasn't trusting me. I had a badge with a pin that I bent and pointed at him... ok, let's get down to stabbing and jabbing... nothing happened, and I left the way I came.
It got wild around Gate 5 in late 1977 when packs of dogs roamed loose, one of whom had belonged to a nice Jewish girl named Marcie from the Sausalito hills.
I brought her to the houseboat I was renting at the south pier, near the Fire Pit.
Marcie was new to the area but melted right in so fast she had an old man with a boat elsewhere at Gate 5 by the next night. This was a somewhat straight woman with a job who dropped out just like that, likewise her dog Zoey joined the pack. Zoey's fancy collar was gone quick, traded in for mange by the looks of it.
Somebody broke in that boat when I was in Mendocino for the weekend and stole the ebony and mahogony dulcimer my Mother gave me as a wedding gift.
I played it pretty good too. I'd give a lot to be able to bring it back home and play "Lady Jane" for Mom. Alas, I never saw it again.
I tried living on an anchor out in 1978 I paid a grand in cash for. I was away when 2 patches plugging up holes on the bottom slipped off.
Before she sank out of sight, a friend towed The Flotsam to a large parcel of open land. For several months it sat there, just north of Gate 3, propped upright near 2 other houseboats slowly undergoing hull repairs.
Nobody said anything about it being trespassing. We were just "there".
Suddenly things got weird. Searchlights would snap on if I tried to sneak aboard my own boat. Guards showed up telling me to leave the area.
I'd find blackened spoons on the galley table, after staying elsewhere for a week or so. At least something on the boat was getting fixed. One day the bulldozer showed up and turned The Flotsam into jetsam.
Russell Grisham had been through some changes too, when he finally opened the trap door of the Owl loft, he had been so out of it he had smashed everything of value up there, and even uprooted his sacred Tulsi plant.
My father passed away in 1983 aboard Le Cherie, his trojan cruiser berthed at Napa St./Galilee Harbor. I tried to keep her afloat or replace her with another boat but the barnacles at Gallilee stepped in and saw to it no one would keep that tiny berth.
Le Cherie vanished, said to have sunk. I've never seen it at low tide.
Gum Up The Years, Imbecilic Journey, Green Fuzz Warp
I'm warming up the chronosynclastic infindibulator.
We're criss crossing a long anticipated moment that we have already been through, breaking the boundries of the parallel wormhole circumference of the time thread. In layman's terms that means a journey through time is not a journey through space.
I'll be arriving already there in the same time frame I started from. Put simply in complex terms, the e.t.a. was calibrated asap, post-annually by the magnetic field before and after a counterclockwise reversal bends over back to front, left to right at 360 or the polar opposite of all the above as seen below. It will be the time of the season, day and hour the same as the time before that which will be when I was which I will find when I arrive!
I can't occupy both 1966 and the present at the same instant. Unless there were 2 of me! Which there were when I start the end of when, again then some time sooner or later, you never can't tell! There are after all, certain laws of physics we cannot warp or transcend. Or can we? This trip will place me at the exact same second, minute, hour and day as now, only 40 years prior - New Years Eve 1966/1967. The Airplane and Dead at their youthful high energy best, before the flood of vagrants, runaways and predators turned the so-called Summer of love into a crisis situation.
The Fillmore Auditorium will be a few short blocks away from the point of the dimensional threshold I will enter through, and return... Return... I hope, in 40 - or actually, 80 years, counting the round trip. I'll wing it.
Here's my now rare, original unused ticket from the previous night, supposedly good for tonight. It's either the vintage ticket or digging around for pre-1967 currency. One slip-up and I'll be spending more than a New Year explaining to the Feds where I got dollar bills from the 21st century.
OK, it's time. Time to go one step beyond the outer limits of the twilight zone... 'Way out!
****** Meanwhile... I've arrived. In 1966. With 1970 memories clogging my mind. I gaze up and down Fillmore Street. Primarily a neighborhood densely populated by blacks not entirely at ease with the sudden influx of hippie kids. I'd forgotten about how the Fillmore used to be feared by white people, but the mood is up despite the lateness of the hour.
If I were hung up on the race thing, I'd have gone back to the time and place in 1972 when I was shot in the back by 2 young African-American boys. Fortunately the low calibre bullet went right thru me, without hitting anything vital. I had instinctively turned sideways, and avoided taking it in the stomach.
I tentatively inch forward. Not entirely from caution. My legs feel like lead, unable to move quickly... as if in a dream.
Radios tuned to KDIA blare soul music from paint starved Victorian flats... A few more yards to go, and I'll be on the corner of Geary and Fillmore, ready to walk upstairs to the auditorium lobby - an apple a day... when I spot an old friend dressed up in 2nd hand finery, heading from Upper Fillmore St. walking towards the same place I presume. Looking younger than I remember her, from 1969 when we were in high school, taking the same public speaking class... It's Kate Gould! I want to call her name, but nothing comes out. She wouldn't know who I am, not yet. We didn't meet until my girlfriend Ivora Fungetz brought me over to her place in 1970. Kate seemed to have everything for a girl still in school, her own apt. neatly kept up by her fussy boy toy Cecil, and her own car - a green Gremlin - how perfect! Yet she wanted to be more creative, like Ivora, deeply sensitive and artistic. Kate had her own worldly confidence and a magnetic sense of humor. We basked in her natural beauty while she displayed uncharacteristic sweetness in the presence of Ivora. Kate admired Ivora's salt-of-the-earthiness combined with a fine mind.
I found it difficult to be as animated and articulate as they were, overcoming my shyness by drawing cartoons inspired by underground comix or playing an appropriate song to express irony.
**** I'm reflecting on various mid 1970 Fillmore West-Carousel Ballroom Grateful Dead shows I saw.
There was still a bit of audience/band banter... the guys talked to individuals in the dark, from the stage... I was there the night Weir stopped everything when someone made a request and asked -
"Who is that guy? You're always requesting 'Golden Road'... we don't know how that goes anymore..."
Until I came across that moment again online at Archive.org I had thought the dude was either requesting "And So We Leave The Castle" or "Whatever Became Of The Baby."
Then there was the night in 1970 of the standees vs. the sitters!
Between half or so of the audience with their blankets spread on the floor in the dark, they were all in unison, calling out "Sit DOWN!" and then the rebuttal, "Stand Up!"
That went on for a little while, Jerry and Bobby watching this slightly weird argument with no winners...
Bobby broke the spell... by doing a news anchor voice with his amused drawl, "Stand on your heads!", and everyone cracked up. Jerry added, "There's nothing to see!"
Suddenly anyone could do anything they wanted. Permission granted...
By the height of the night with "The Eleven" and PigPen's "Turn On Your Lovelight" cover goading us on, some of us were winding through the crowd like a dancing snake, forming a long conga line. A blissed out crowd smiling at each other, strangers now old friends.
The firemen came in, made a sudden 'what are they doing in here' inspection with an all-business look on their faces... We laughed at their uniforms and seriousness... we couldn't be razzled or intimidated.
I finally took Ivora soon after that night, to her first Dead show... her Father was a 78 record collector (he won a Grammy for his work on a Folk music collection, Luis Kemnitzer), ofreally old country records... she knew about American folk, blues and especially Carter Family 78s.
While she was not keen to get into the Dead and the acid rock scene, boy, did she get a surprise the night we ventured into the ballroom.
With that puzzled, quizzical, brilliant look on her face, they band may have noticed her, we were so close to the stage. I think they bounced off of certain people and then looked back later to see what we thought about their music or a new song... And that night she blurted out, "Oh I SEE! They're just Good Old Boys!" One or two heard that and did that little smile... cause that's exactly what they were or wanted to be. She was steeped in that Bakersfield, Oklahoma dust bowl regional music and all that, as much as the band was. I just smiled the whole night... we weren't stoned on anything but the music and the moment... oh well, that was really sweet... gee.
Dukes - I Am An Unskilled Worker, Avengers - American In Me
In his 1965 book The Great Comic Book Heroes, Jules Feiffer mentions the June 22, 1941 Spirit tale by Will Eisner:
"There was one about Hitler walking around in a Willy Lomanish middle world: subways rolling, Bronx girls chattering, street bums kicking him around.
His purpose in coming to America: to explain himself, to be accepted as a nice guy, to be liked. Silly when you thought of it, but for eight pages, grimly convincing."
SPOILER WARNING: Eisner's 10 page tale ends with the dictator seeing the error of his ways. He returns to Germany to begin reforms. When he tells his associates of his plans, he is shot and replaced by a double.
One of the strangest historical events that actually happened in Nazi Germany was on Christmas Eve 1937.
Hitler was spending the holidays avoiding the boredom of accepting calls and visits from cronies, enjoying a little privacy in an unusually carefree mood, according to his valet Krause.
The two of them were wrapping gifts, kneeling on the floor of Hitler's private Munich apartment. Krause accidentally tied a knot on top of his master's thumb. The Führer just laughed, clapped Krause on the back of the neck and asked for his dinner jacket.
Hitler was determined to celebrate the night in style, and commandeered his valet as a companion. Avoiding SS guards, the two sneaked down the stairs like conspirators to a waiting taxi.
"No one saw us and Hitler was quite relieved. I wanted to sit next to the driver but Hitler grabbed my arm and I got in the back with him."
For the next two hours the taxi toured around Munich, constantly changing directions. Finally Hitler gave his destination: the Luitpold Café.
The driver, having no idea who his passengers were, seemed relieved to get rid of them and drove off rapidly once he had his fare. "He probably thought we were a couple of nuts," recalled Krause, "probably not unjustifiably so; the whole thing struck me as pretty peculiar too."
Instead of going into the café Hitler set off for the Koenigsplatz. Noticing that Krause kept looking around nervously, he said, "Don't be afraid. No one would believe that Adolph Hitler would be walking around here alone in Munich." Even so he lowered his own head when someone approached. On and on they walked until they came back to the apartment. Hitler seemed as delighted as a little boy that he not only eluded his guards but managed to walk around the city unnoticed. But the next day Himmler reprimanded Krause for participating in such an escapade. Thereafter, such plans must be reported even if the Führer forbade it.
That is the uncontested account, as it appears in John Toland's biography of Adolph Hitler.
But what if the 2 men were spotted sneaking out by one of his enemies, such as Roehm's Avengers? That cab waiting -it might have been planted.
The great dictator could have been replaced with a double...
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