So, I was going through my FaceBook news feeds and one of my friends posted a link to this site, WesternDigs, which is an archeology site. I read the article I was linked to and then noticed this one: http://westerndigs.org/vinyl-records-excavated-at-famous-60s-commune-challenge-hippie-stereotype-study-says/
When I was doing wine tours up into Napa and Sonoma County, on the way back to the City, we passed a sign for the Olompali State Historical Site. I figured it was a Native site, probably Coastal Miwok. Well it was, but it was more than that.
As the article says, the mansion there, built on the foundations of the original 1770s adobe, having passed through several hands and being bounced back and forth from the University of San Francisco - a Jesuit College my grand-godson attends - and a variety of people who all defaulted on their payments was leased by a local rich proto-hipppie and became the commune called "The Chosen Family."
WSJ First Bay Area Commune
A lot of interesting people passed through there in the year and change that the commune was up and running, including the Gratefull Dead, Janis Joplin, Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and others as they came to San Francisco. The core group was 22 adults and 18 children, including and a little girl named Courtney Love.
A fire, while the members of the commune were attending a Gratefull Dead gig at the Longshoreman's Hall near Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, gutted the mansion and pretty much ended things at Rancho Olompali and disbanded the Chosen Family, although they still remain in touch and hold a reunion each year at the State Park where their commune had been.
The archaeologist - E. Breck Parkman, the State archaeologist - who did the dig found a number - nearly 100 - vinyl records. What surprised him after identifying them by the stamping codes etched into the vinyl, the labels having mostly gone away, was that they weren't what one might expect at a "hippie commune" frequented by a lot of the top musical acts of the period.
There were show tunes, mainstream jazz, comedy albums, commercial folk and calypso albums. A very eclectic collection of musical styles. His opinion is that these were the records that commune members brought with them, relics of a musical past that they were, for some reason, reluctant to just jettison.
I got to thinking about that. I grew up listening to my parents records, first 78s, then LPs and some 45 singles. They were mostly show tunes, my moms passion and boogie-woogie, another passion of hers. Some calypso, some real genuine indie pressings from Jamaica by people we'd never heard of who were very good when you could understand the island patois. Some Harry Belafonte, also my mom's. And Dixieland jazz, a lot by bands my parents had seen in New York when they were dating before the War as well as some real New Orleans stuff including Louie Prima and Keely Smith - the original Sonny and Cher - and a few early rock records, like Elvis and Bill Haley and the Comets and Jerry Lee Lewis, which were my early contributions to the mix.
When I was working as a cop at San Francisco General Hospital, when discussions about music turned to show tunes - not surprising with a lot of rather dramatic gay men working there - they were surprised that such an obviously butch straight guy knew a lot of the material, could even remember some lyrics. "Are you sure you're straight?" I was asked more than once. "Yeah, but my mom loved her Broadway musicals."
And I remembered a lot of the lyrics to hymns. I had been a choir boy before I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church and pretty much lost my faith in that system of belief. I not only remembered the Christmas carols most people can struggle through, but more obscure stuff, some anthems not in the hymn books. Some are still in my head.
As I got older, my tastes in music grew more eclectic still. I liked a lot of '50s and '60s jazz, mainstream be-bop, West Coast cool, Chicago blues, Miles, Coltrane, Mingus, Mulligan, Getz - and through him a lot of Brazilian stuff, too. I listened to the radio, an old AM Emerson, as I recall, in a red leatherette case. I took it out and mounted it on a wooden board to make it look cooler and often went to sleep with the gentle glow of its vacuum tubes giving the room its mood. I listened to WINS, WMCA, all the top 40 stations and later, when I added an FM tuner to my hi-fi system, to WRVR, the voice of Riverside Church, a large interdenominational, interracial church that was the only all-jazz FM station in NYC. I listened to Jocko, the hippest DJ on the air, "E-tiddly-eye, E-tiddly-oh, this is your engineer Jock-o, coming to you on the Rocket Ship Show on Double-you-a-d-o, one-two-eight-oh on the ray-d-i-o." Jocko played a lot of stuff that was definitely not Top-40 material and mostly R&B and blues-ish.
My Dad and I built a one-tube super-heterodyne radio that covered a couple of bands. Late, late at night I'd see Dad, illuminated by the glow from that one tube, sitting at my desk, gently moving the tuning capacitor, searching for a signal with the cans on his ears. He'd beckon me over to the desk and hand me the 'phones so I could listen to a radio station from Chicago or Kansas City playing big city blues or jazz. An engineer, he explained to me the principle of atmospheric skip, which allowed AM signals to travel long distances when the conditions were right.= and the more powerfull stations might be off-air.
I got really, really bored with Top-40 radio in the early '60s with the plethora of Bobbys from Philly and the bland sameness. Occasionally there would be something interesting, but I gravitated more to jazz and blues and even some classical. I love Bach, having been introduced to him in the choir with "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" which we did fairly often, with a lot of organ breaks for all the Baroque ornamentation Back was noted for. I devoured the "Well Tempered Clavier" by Wanda Landowska, the legendary harpsichordist and a lot of solo guitar renditions of Bach and other classical stuff as well as Flamenco.
I started hanging out in Greenwich Village and doing a column of jazz and other music criticism for the Villager, the conservative weekly that competed - not really - withe Village Voice and was edited by my Dad's sister, my Aunt E.K. I got exposed to the beginnings of the folks explosion, hanging out in small coffeehouses, like The Four Winds, The Bagamin (which was a riff on a Fred Neil song, That's The Bag I'm In) Cafe World with a stage so small that the performers were pretty much in you lap. Intimate. (I occasionally played brownie bass there, sitting in) and some of the more famous ones like Gerde's Folks City, Cafe Wha?, The Bitter End and The Village Gate, which I covered a bunch and where I ended up working for their publicist Ivan Black, a blacklisted former A-level guy at places like Cafe Society doth the Uptown and the Downtown locations.
I am not in the least surprised at the records found at the former home of The Chosen Family. I left most of my old music history where it belong and with the people to whom it belonged, my Mom and Dad. Over time, I've lost a lot of my records, some to dust and neglect at a cottage in Putnam County New York, others on the shelves of the townhouse of my ex, from which I will someday retrieve them and transfer them to the FLAC format - what my step-son considers the best format to archive recordings, since it preserves most of their dynamic range and audio quality in the analog-to-digital conversion - and store them on the terabyte external drive I got for the purpose or burn some to CD. In fact, maybe I'll hearken back to a couple of decades ago and make some mix CDs, doing the DJ bit. I enjoyed doing that, using two turntables, a mic and a mixing deck. Much easier with computers and you can sweeten up the sound and clean up the clicks and pops - or, leave them. More authentic.
So, another trip down a rabbit hole, chasing the serendipity rabbit. This may not interest anyone but me, but I had fun doing it. Sometimes you just have to sweep the clutter out of your mind and this is a good way to do it. If other people find it interesting, so much the better. Sort of like "Sidewalk Modern" decor - your discarded stuff might suit someone to a T.
