THE DEAD Volume I - Hank Harrison

1 IIITHE DEADV olume IIVTHE DEADV olume IHank HarrisonThe Archives Press San Francisco London AmsterdamVCopyright 1972, 1985, 1990, 1995 by Hank HarrisonThe Archives Press334 State Street, Suite 536 Los Altos, California 94022No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photo-graphic, or electronic process, or in any form of magnetic, phonographicor laser media, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, orotherwise copied for public or private use without the written permis-sion of the EditionIlluminated letters by Glenn ChaseBook design Triona WatsonManufactured in the United States of AmericaLibrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataHarrison, Hank (1940- )The Dead Book ( Volume One of a Trilogy)Urban AnthropologyCover Title: The Dead ( Volume One of a Trilogy)Includes index.

2 PPhoto index. Title II. A Social History of the Haight-Ashbury Experience1. Rock and Roll History2. Social HistoryLibrary of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-072168 InternationalStandard Book Number: 0-918501-48-2 0-918501-49-0 (pbk.)VIIn memory ofRobert M. Petersen andBrent MydlandLEGENDFor Merlin read:Augustus Owsley Stanley, IIIFor Troll read:Robert M. PetersenFor Mikto St. Johns read:Margo St. JamesFor Odduck read:Hank HarrisonFor Ira Sandoyster read:Ira SandpearlVIICONTENTSA bout the Archives Logo ..viiiAbout the Cover ..ixForeword ..xiAuthor s Preface ..xiiiForewarned ..Go Sub1 San Mateo ..The Beginnings15 Palo Alto ..The Condensation47 Berkeley ..The Politics75 North Beach ..The Beatitude97 Haight-Ashbury.

3 The Celebration123 Marin ..The Exodus147 Big Sur ..The Holy Land177 Europa ..The New Jerusalem195 Index of Illustrations .. 218 Annotated Index .. 230 VIIITHE ARCHIVES LOGOThe logo used by The Archives Press is an exact copy ofan Occidental magical formula cast in a zodiac circle. It isderived in part from the Monas Hieroglyphica of John Dee,the Elizabethan magus. The earliest source of this signet, ac-cording to Dee, is a woodcut in a handwritten copy of Denatura rerum of Isidore of Seville (560-636). In that workthe signet accompanies a quotation from the Hexameron ofSt. Ambrose (III. xiv) Mundus annus homo. This was takenby the alchemical philosophers to mean that human beingsare an exact depiction of the cosmos.

4 The figure describesthe interrelation of the four alchemical elements: fire, air, earthand water, with their complimentary perceptual qualities: hot,cold, dry and astrocabalistic formulas, such as that depictedin the logo, were common in Europe from the fifth centuryuntil the end of the Renaissance. In the tenth century JohnScotus Erigena, an Irish monk, expanded the idea by adapt-ing memory systems used by the Celtic bards and Greek ora-tors. Erigena named his system ars naturae: the art of also added Aristotelian structure and found proofs of thenatural paths to God in the folk traditions of the Irish, Welshand Greeks. Although Erigena was Christian his system didnot meet with church basic cosmic conception symbolized by the knot can be traced to Paleolithic shamanism.

5 In thisprotodemocratic scheme each human being is linked to thecosmos by the Earth element which is dissolved by is linked to air by evaporation. Air is linked to fire bycombustion and fire is reunited with Earth by heat. The sig-net also represents the eight yearly festivals or harmonieswhich inspired the Atlantic Neolithic mound builders to recordnatural laws in THE COVERThe cover art for The Dead, Volume One was rendered bythe renowned visionary artist Mark Roland from San Fran-cisco. Mark, a true flower child, attended the first human Be-in at age original edition, published in 1971 as The Dead Book,had a simple black and white cover depicting an Ouroborus,or snake eating its tail, rendered by the surfer artist GlennChase.

6 In its current form Roland depicts the colorful beastat the exact moment of metamorphosis. It takes three formsas it evolves. In its primary guise, as the snake eating its tail,it symbolizes immortality, infinity and the cosmos, but it alsoappears as a Celtic Dragon or Griffin, symbolizing controlover the self, and as a Phoenix, the mythical bird which con-tinually renews itself from its own figure is ascending into the cosmos from a mysteryplanet. Light for its expedition is supplied by the sun at fulleclipse. The rays of the sun penetrate in all creature moves through its cycle in a concave scal-lop shell similar to those used as drinking ladles by the pil-grims who trek the alchemical path on the road to the shrineof Saint James at Compostella in Unit Zappa and the GTOsXIFOREWORD TO THE ARCHIVES EDITIONhis is not a book about rock and roll or about theGrateful Dead.

7 It is, instead, a book about tribalformations and ritual and should be viewed assuch. Anyone who thinks of it as a book aboutthe Grateful Dead will be disappointed. For de-cades this book has been relegated to the music sections of bookstores, but this categorization does not explain it s life Dead Book, Volume one of a trilogy still in progress,has been published in three languages and has seen a number ofeditions. It was first released in 1971, but soon found it s way toa British Commonwealth mass market paperback and a Germanand French translation. Its publishing track record is amazing. Itcan only be called an underground 1976, when the first version went out of print, we havebeen trying to publish a revised version.

8 We have received hun-dreds of letters and phone calls asking where the book could beobtained, but the author vowed not to release the book, or thefinal Volume in the trilogy, until it could be done exactly as itwas originally present edition contains a great deal of the material de-leted by the censors in the original version and excludes a lot ofdumb material originally included to appease the marketing types whose sole motive was to exploit the name of the GratefulDead, ignoring the sociometric merits of the repeat! This is not a book about the Grateful Dead. It isonly about that group in so far as they are a microcosm of theother bands and the Haight-Ashbury experience in general. Thestyle of presentation has changed between Volume One and Vol-ume Two because the author and the subjects have changed.

9 Theessence of The Dead Series is to reflect the basic maturationalprocess and to provide an impressionistic, real time chroniclefor future it were not for this study, the world would have only thetwo dimensional journalistic account of the Haight-Ashburyphenomenon. This more anthropological approach will hope-fully fill in the gaps. Consider it a note in a Draper, Publisher, The ArchivesXII2 Hank Harrison at Presidio Gun EmplacementXIIIAUTHOR S PREFACE TO THE ARCHIVES EDITION eing the Jane Goodall of rock and roll ain teasy. It s hard to chronicle any serial phenom-enon over a 30 year period. I m not even sure Iwanted to do this, but the compulsion to write asocial history, to be a Xenophon, outweighs alldiscretion, all pain.

10 You stand around with apencil in your hand and somebody gets nervous, you treatpeople like chimps and they get offended, even when theyact exactly like chimps. You try to climb a tree to get someperspective and you fall out. One can feign the role of fooland fool a few, but eventually you must face the fact that youare interfering with the process. This study is thus much more could I have said? How much gossip couldI have included? Clearly from my binocular perch I couldhave fallen prey to temptation and digressed into chimps it s easier. In any controlled study, the observercan remain aloof, but with people you must: Be There! In anystudy involving instinctual animals, circadian rhythms, lunarcycles, or nonverbal communications, the scientist simply ob-serves and makes phenomenological tests.