Here is my "Rockin' A Hard Place" blog-rant for March, which I performed on Sunday March 27 at Coupeville High School's Performing Arts Center.
So here we sit on a Big Rock. A bunch of dudes and dudettes, many of us looking a bit gray around the edges, trying to squeeze our aging behinds into high school auditorium seats designed for much narrower teenage butts. And feeling all warm and fuzzy about that peace, love and flower power stuff we had back in the 60s.
Well, before we go on, let me remind you of what a wise person once said: If you can remember the 60s, you weren’t there. My friends, I was there. So you will kindly disregard everything I’m about to say.
It was pretty amazing and it happened so quick. In less than five years, I switched from reading Time magazine hoping I’d be smart . . . to reading Rolling Stone hoping I’d be cool. I careened from the sweetness of Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music” to the grunge of Dennis Hopper in “Easy Rider.” I went from Lesley Gore’s “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to” on AM radio and to a well-worn vinyl track of Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane’s “One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, and the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all . . . Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall.”
Wow, man. What a trip. I gotta lay back.
I was a University of Washington student in the 1960s. I started out as a fresh-faced kid wearing neatly pressed corduroy slacks and white shirts. By 1968, I was heavy into raggedy jeans and army jackets. I confess I wasn’t much of a hippie. Way too Scandinavian for that. But I did consider myself a hippie wannabe. Cool but careful.
I grew my hair pretty long on campus . . . ah yes, I do remember my hair! But I always got it trimmed before going home to Tacoma. My mom would yell at me if I walked through her door looking like a beatnik. I tried to tell her she was a generation behind and maybe she meant hippie. She never understood the difference. As far as she was concerned, they all needed a bath.
We really thought we could change the world in the 60s, and maybe we did . . . but not quite the way we hoped. We held Gentle Thursdays outside the Husky Union Building and drew pictures with colored chalk on the sidewalk. It was all about liberating ourselves from racism and materialism and the military-industrial complex. Not too successful, were we?
We protested pretty much everything: the war in Vietnam, anybody over 30, the draft, the midnight curfew at the girls’ dorm, racial segregation, the buck-a-day that U-Dub charged to park in the landfill lot by Lake Washington where you needed an umbrella to dodge the deadly seagull bombs, and -- worst of all -- the U-Dub tuition that cost us a hundred and forty five bucks a quarter. Outrageous!
I visited Whidbey Island a couple times during those years. It was like traveling to a strange, exotic land lost in time. Let me tell you about one particular time. Three of us piled into my friend Charlie’s ‘55 Chevy one Saturday. We grabbed a burger at Dick’s on 45th and headed up Highway 99 through far distant Edmonds to the ferry dock in Mukilteo. Ferries didn’t run as often then and there was no Internet to check when they did. But there was a place to eat at the dock called Taylor's Landing, if you had the munchies while you waited. Now they call it Ivar's.
We had no idea what we’d do on Whidbey. We’d heard that some mellow people lived there. In the 60s, mellow usually meant glassy-eyed college dropouts in tie-dyed tee-shirts who said “wow” a lot.
Imagine our disappointment when we got off the ferry to find mostly bait shops and beer joints. And old dudes who looked like our dads and spent their weekends on Whidbey fishing and playing cribbage. Bummer.
Today, I realize those old dudes were just like hippies, though they’d ferociously deny that. Every weekend they turned on, tuned in and dropped out. Now, of course, their turn-on was strictly beer. And their tune-in was the tide, weather and fishing report. And their drop-out was from their wives’ list of planned weekend chores. But see what I mean? They did everything but say “wow.”
On that particular visit to Whidbey we found a hippie guy selling tie-dye shirts and macramé by the side of the road somewhere near Langley. He said there were quite a few mellow folks on the island but most of them lived in the woods so they could do whatever they wanted. He told us to drive up the island to a little ghost town called Coupeville. It had a lot of cool old buildings.
Old dudes and hippies got along just fine in Coupeville, he said, not like in Seattle. And the brand new state highway on the island would get us there in only half an hour. So off we went in that two-toned Chevy, racing up Highway 525 that at some point turned into Highway 20 for no good reason. Wow, man. That was weird then and it still is.
I don’t have much recollection of our visit to Coupeville that day, except I think we had a good time. That was years before the tourist hordes started swarming the place to enjoy a quaint shopping and dining experience. Front Street was mostly a slow-paced hangout for locals. It even had lots of places to park.
I asked my good friend Judy Lynn, who’s writing a book about Front Street, to help me picture what it must have been like when I was there. Judy said it’s very true. Old dudes and hippies did get along fine in Coupeville. They always have, she said, and they still do.
She told me that in the 60s there was even a head shop in Mariners Court. Well, actually, it was an import shop called the Asian Moon. But it sold a few items that . . . well, let’s just say they were designed to enhance your smoking pleasure.
In Mariners Court there also was Knots and Bolts, a shop that sold macramé of all kinds. Macrame was so cool in the 60s! Those hippies did find some intriguing uses for hemp, didn’t they? I can just hear an old Coupeville fisher-dude back then telling the hippie at Knots and Bolts that he thought hemp was only good for making rope. But, right there in front of him, it was twisted into everything from shoulder bags to bookshelves!
All in all, it’s easy to see why Whidbey has become so popular as a place to retire for those of us who survived the 60s. The old dudes and the hippies still get along just fine. And people still do pretty much whatever they want in the woods.
Anyway. It was really cool to visit the Rock as a hippie wannabe in the 60s . . . even though I don’t remember much. But I’ll tell you a secret. Forty years later, it’s WAY more cool to live here as an old dude!
Peace, love and arthritic brotherhood, everybody!
