I met him through our fathers. Mine was a fan of music, especially jazz. He often hung out at bars in San Francisco and became friends with Turk Murphy a trombone player. It was there that he met Dusty's father an accomplished trumpet player. Our families got together once in a while and Dusty became my friend.
While I was at West Point and in Vietnam, Dusty became a hippie and an artist and a good one at that. For some reason he decided to "educate" me about the counterculture of the time. I was curious enough about it to go along with his schemes. That education included several interesting encounters like Ken Kesey's renewal of wedding vows and a party in a bar in San Anselmo California. It was 1970 and I was out of the army and living in Mill Valley just across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. I called Mill Valley "hippie haven".
Ken Kesey was an American writer who was a hero of the countercultural revolution and the hippie movement of the 1960s. At the Veterans Administration hospital in Menlo Park, California, he was a paid volunteer experimental subject, taking mind-altering drugs and reporting on their effects. The inspiration for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” came while Kesey was working the night shift at the hospital. There, Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs he had volunteered to experiment with. The main message of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1962) is individuality. The novel explores the themes and ideas that explain human thoughts and behaviors and what makes them unique. He further examined values in conflict in “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1964).
One day Dusty told me that we were going to a party in the Santa Cruz mountains. LaHonda to be exact. The drive took about 3 hours. We arrived at the Keseys' house pictured below. It was then that he told me we were attending the Keseys' renewal of their wedding vows and the party they were throwing. And, oh what a party!
I was sitting on the ground in a grove of trees listening to a band play on a makeshift stage. It was the Grateful Dead, friends of the Keseys. Next to me were several Hells Angels and their old ladies. Suddenly one of them took the stage and while the band played growled into the microphone. Just growling noises. One of the gang sitting next to me asked, "what are you looking at?" in a menacing tone. I simply smiled at him and responded, "the performer". He said, "oh you've got your TV on" and turned away much to my relief.
The Keseys had an open marriage and nudity and sex became part of their social experiment. Strip poker was not that unusual, nor was the occasional topless moment or nude sunbathe. Even before drugs entered the fray — which tended to lower people’s inhibitions even further — things could get pretty loose. Anyway, in the afternoon there was a ceremony in which the Keseys renewed their vows and walked a few steps to a platform with a mattress on it and laid down. Ken announced that they had renewed their vows and that now they wanted the assembled masses to come by and "touch them". I didn't.
The Merry Pranksters were followers of Ken Kesey. They lived communally at Kesey's homes in California and Oregon, and are noted for the sociological significance of a lengthy road trip they took in the summer of 1964, traveling across the United States in a psychedelic painted school bus called Furthur, organizing parties, and giving out LSD. During this time they met many of the guiding lights of the 1960s cultural movement and presaged what are commonly thought of as hippies with odd behavior, tie-dyed and red, white, and blue clothing, and renunciation of normal society, which they dubbed The Establishment. Tom Wolfe chronicled their early escapades in his 1968 book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”.
On another occasion Dusty took me to a private party in a bar. It was the first time I saw women dancing with and making out with women. The men were doing the same. It was a gay party. The band was guys dressed as women. I escaped to a back room where a huge canister of laughing gas had been rigged with about twenty tube through which one could breath the gas. I decided to try it. After all, I thought, dentists use it. I took a few puffs and was sitting there waiting to feel any effects when the guy sitting next to me surprised me by putting his hand on my leg. I gently removed his hand and said, "no thanks".
Thanks to Dusty, I became much more aware of the counterculture although I never really became a part of it. I just couldn't let my hair grow long. However, I did learn to question authority. I learned about individuality and acceptance. I became tolerant of "the movement" and started to understand the attitudes espoused by it. In his own way, Dusty helped me adjust to life as an amputee war vet trying to understand what was going on around me.
I have more stories about my experiences in Vietnam, the military and at West Point. Plus lots of life stories, stories about adaptive sports and great music too. When you click Subscribe you will be presented with options. One is to remain a free member . The next level up is $5 monthly and you can unsubscribe anytime. Check it out.
Hi Doug, I remember driving along Larkin Street or mane Polk with Dusty, telling about his dad playing trumpet with Earl ‘fatha’ Hines at the ‘black sheep’