 I would like to welcome Reginald Eugene Williams to Video Oral History Project in the 1960s. I want to thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Rebecca. It's nice to be here. I'd like to just give you a chronology of the straits art in the movies and a chronology of all the events in the theater, including shows with the dead and Janice. Well, my name is Rebecca Nichols and I'll be moderating this event. Thank you very much. Let's start right from the beginning. Where were you born? I was born in San Mateo, California, fifth generation in California. Wow. My family is from Humboldt County. Wow. And I've been in the Bay Area for a long time. I went to Burlingame High School and college at San Mateo and graduated San Francisco State with the A in History. Wow. And what are your parents' names? My mom's name was Cynthia Edwards-Williams. My dad was Kermit Lawrence-Williams. And where were they born in California? Yeah, my mom was the daughter of a wire rope manufacturer, self-made millionaire in South San Francisco, had an industrial setting and she came from Humboldt County. Ranchers in Humboldt County that date back to the very first people that went to that county. So, if we went all the way back, fifth generation, where did the original, where in the world did they come from before they immigrated? Here, do you know? In a lot of ways, my mom was a little nutty and one of the ways was spending money on genealogy and, you know, for every genealogist you've got an opinion of course, we've got William's, so that makes this related to William McComper, ties who will, how long more, any of the famous Edwards' of course that were pilgrims and Puritans. So, I couldn't give you a straight answer to that. Sure. Well, fifth generation, that's a lot. Yeah, I know where they were. They were from North California and they're still there. Oh, they are. Wonderful. Wonderful. Okay, so I am going to bring you like a time capsule from your early birth to the sixties. Great. Here in the Hade Ashbury. I would love you to think back your memories of the sixties. Let's start with its early beginnings. Okay. I have a chronology that I've worked in to the straight.com, which is my website for the straight on the Hade, which is my manuscript. And basically, you probably hear recurring themes about early roots in the sixties. Well, 1960 is when I graduated from high school. And then in junior college in San Mateo, college San Mateo, I was the chief justice of the judicial council for three years. And during that time, other people in that turned out to be in the Hade Ashbury and in the scene later, like the bass player, Big Brother and the Holy Company, was Peter Album. Peter Album. And he and I and other people would collect behind his house in a little shed and puff the magic dragon. That's right. And one thing led to another and he took me to where his brother, who was also a famous, more famous at that time than he was, but an established musician that unfortunately died too early, brought and he was managing 1090 page at that time. Right. And so that's where I met a lot of the people and ended up in a scene kind of coagulating out of the folksy, which we've been following since we were kids in Norwich, Fox and the Hound, Coffee and Confusion, Billy Roberts and the drinking board when it moved out to Union Street. There was a whole very strong support group for folksy and stuff that was pretty much going on New York at that same time, but without the luminaries out here. Here we also had a kind of a beginning of the civil rights movement and it coagulated around Cadillac Road downtown and the rights of black workers and was very early in the 60s. In 1962, I was at a church over here on the upper Fulmore and to hear Louis Lomax, who was an author, a well-known black author at that time, telling people we ought to go to Washington DC and support Martin Luther King, so I hitchhiked across the country and that was in August 23rd and a month around that, around 63. And then when I came back and went back to being the Chief Justice of the Judicial Council and within a month or so, Kennedy was shot while we were at a conference at a Syllomark for student leaders that were collected from the junior colleges that were from all over the state, so I remember exactly where I was when that happened, everybody broke into crime. What are we going to do now? And basically, the effect it had was to make us more hardcore. It wasn't going to be a happily ever after kind of thing. The forces of assassination were reaching in and would continue, actually, to pull down victims either by conspiracy or by some casual coincidence. At that point, it really changed a lot of people's lives in terms of how we looked at authority and also this widening war that was happening at that time that was pretty much fit right into what I was learning about worldwide and U.S. imperialism and my graduate studies at seminars at San Francisco State. So it was easy to fall in line with the free speech movement over at Berkeley and hop on, you know, get over there for that. People's Park. Was it People's Park? Was there when PCN, the bus and all those people, it was the first time I'd ever seen them, did when we mobilized in Berkeley and marched on the Oakland Depot. And we're turned around by the Hell's Angels. But basically, there was a lot of people at that time that were coming together on both sides of a lot of these questions. Civil rights and the war, as it grew intense, the opposition grew more organized and intense. And I had documents with my friend. I grew up with a fistful of friends that lasted through high school and became more intense during college and after college. And actually, they were the core people that ended up running the State Theater. Also in 63, a little later on in the year, I wasn't going to San Francisco State at that time, but I went to San Francisco State with friends and sat in the aisle and heard Alfred and Leary talk for an hour about what they've been doing for hours. And they had mentioned the idea of a sensorium or a place we'd go when you're high in psychedelics, enjoy music, enjoy companies, relaxation, couches, you know, a very non-threatening set and setting. It was part of a set and setting theory. And it stuck in my mind, you know. So when the whole thing kind of blossomed for one reason or another with the mind troops arrest in the park and you try and get the toothpaste back in the tube and all of a sudden you develop a genre I'd never seen before where the music and the people dancing and the lights and everything became one thing. And it was a new way of life. It really seemed to us at that point that it didn't matter what was going on out there, we would just do our thing and we would eventually end up with legalized pot, you know. People would dress like we do and we look around and we really invented a lot of the styles that we usurped by Madison Avenue and other places where they left the content on the floor, the civil rights aspect, the anti-war protest and kept the sideburns for a while, the puffy shirts, the bell bottoms, the style and even a lot of the lingo. So we were really, everywhere you looked at San Francisco State on the street, I described and if I was going to read anything, I described that when I found the Street Theater Chapter, which is basically a walk down Hade Street. Love to hear about it. In that time, it's the next chapter to go online. Basically the point was at that point the film war was kind of spreading out. The people that lived in this area were basically, except for students from UC, they were Eastern European families and the Poroski Palace up there was one of the main centers that kids would go to get 50 cent Poroskis and pockets of meat and so we could leave very cheaply back then, you buy a pork chop for 25 cents. So there was a lot of things that made it easy for younger people to say, I'm just going to live the way I want to live. So where do you live? North Beach and Skyrocket and the troop. So as the mine troop thing developed, the very first time I went there into the film war was to make sure I did, because I had gone down to the warehouse and there was a line around the block and I couldn't get into the first mine troop benefit. I heard about it too late. So the second one, which was at the Film War bill that found the film war in the 1930s dance hall, 150 a week and rented it and they were doing the benefit and they went up about four in the afternoon. We should come face to face with Bill Graham and he said, oh you can't come in here. And so he did his Bill Graham thing and I turned around and left. I made it back that night and I witnessed the whole thing and basically the troops festival. I went every single night too and I had a lot of my ideas from what light shows should be from watching them and I was inspired to do that myself and coincidentally one of my old friends who was in the theater and also went to grammar school with me, Luther Green, introduced me to Bill Graham as he was introducing me to Tony Martin who was his friend and an artist at Mills College who had been the one settled in on to do the lights at the Film War and just like Don Winkler did the sound effects, Tony Martin did the lights. At the beginning at this point it was a very exciting forum and with a wife and young baby and Bill deciding after a few months that you know you don't need to give that much money to the light show, we've got to give it to the band so he started strangling the light show wages so Tony just started treating it like eat lunch at the job so he'd sit there and he'd just bag lunch while rock and roll music was going on and he's much more of an artist like a lot of the people Bill Hammon included are that ended up doing lights. I basically would get psychedelicized and like the movement, like the color flowing around and very soon I demonstrated a talent with being able to make patterns like fire dance or molecules rush or whatever it was that we keep track of time with the bands. Sure. And Ron Colty the night of Saturday night he was the manager of Quicksilver and they were playing with Paul Butterfield we should make that about March 31st the end of March beginning of April at the film war when they brought them in from out of town and by that time Tony was just not interested he let me just step right down front and just walk out. I demonstrated that light is faster than sound. Five or six plates I could have a sound and a shape and a movement. You did five six plates at once? Oh yeah. I do three and I think it's a lot. Five six? Yeah. Double handed. Yeah, both sides. Amazing. As a result Ron Colty liked what I did and he had just gotten more and more offers from promoters and other people booking events up and down the coast. He said we're going to take the light show with us so I ended up doing events in Hayward or Berkeley or... They have Clover opening for them in those days? Clover? I remember Clover was coming along a little later but basically I did San Jose with him and Merced and it was great going out on the road doing lights for the great for them and all of them. But that happened that week and then at the very next week I was walking down Hay Street seeing this blend of people that lived in the neighborhood at that time and it was easily 60% boarded up windows. We're talking 65, 66 somewhere now? Yeah, exactly. In 65 it probably reached the bottom. It was all vacant boards, broken glass, plywood over the windows all the storefronts covered up. Right. Slowly in the end of 65, about the same time we'd blossom and pull on away one by one the stores would start being rented out in the bank and the people that he was with were above the psychedelic shop there and movies and psychedelic shop and all those people. Basically it seemed at that time that we were in an idea of community so it gathered momentum. Very soon we were there. I walked down the street and I just saw this amazing building on the corner in 1912 it was built as it turned out Bauteville Theater. So the acoustics in it are perfect 1500 capacity, they're balcony with about 40 rows of seats on the stage to the underneath the balcony and the acoustics were perfect and the lights were shut off and I saw the note saying go to the hardware store I went to the hardware store, got the key and went around in there with the borrowed search flashlight and the mold had taken over and it was under water and a lot of the stuff that deteriorated but as it turned out the electricity had been gutted out of the building for its copper content there were two previous tenants in the 60s in the theater itself and one was an Abyssinian type church a black church and the other one was a gay radio station a gay congregation center so a lot of the people because Luther just came up with the name straight basically because it sounds like hate and that's what the movie theater was that we did that so we were friends with the dad who just lived right up the street and I was good friends with Rock and Danny so we were rehearsing at the theater during the day and Danny still in touch with him and started ripping out seats because we envisioned a big dance floor there and the 40 foot high screens and the entertainers and the home balcony with the light show so that's basically my friends Hillel we talked to and Bill his brother who was my actual partner and we were the managers of the theater and nobody actually owned it and it ended up just it was an unincorporated partnership is what it was basically and we started chucking and driving with no money and Luther came up with a friend from back east that was a plumbing contractor and we had the money to buy the materials and people just started dropping in to help out fantastic artists who did tie-died napkins that covered the lobby just incredible hard people changed the whole building into psychedelic green and gold and vibrating and we started there right away in the first month we had a benefit down at the Alpalon and we did lights for Grateful Dad and we went to my core to raise money for the street and then we got involved with Chet at that point because he came to us in a very short period of time when he was doing both diddly and wanted to borrow money so this fellow from Buffalo Jim Wilson who was the one who was representing the money guy became the DBA guy and started wheeling and dealing and gave Chet a thousand bucks which on the weekend that he both three times in all over the town killed himself so every weekend for thereafter I had the pleasure of going to the Fillmore and getting the money back fifty dollars at a time that's how I got to no-bill ham and hang out with Chet quite a bit so it was real serendipitous yeah I'd love to this is a wish longer piece but I want to capture some stuff and make sure we don't leave out what are when the straight theater opened between the time it opened and closed give me a few of your great memories of something of things that happened there the Grateful Dad were there in and out they were there with our christening they played the opening of the theater they came in for them in their own history we had them that was the last time they ever played it in public as the original Grateful Dad and then when they came back in six weeks that was the first time they had the two drummers so we had the last of the old dad and the first of the new dad and Janice would come by all the time I don't beat since public college the bass player and the big brother and she fell quiet on there and nurse her bottle of southern copper and just spent hours hanging out and then she'd move on down the street and hang out with somebody else but one night when she was singing for a benefit for us they never took the money from us they just played and let us keep the money but it was like the she was whispering from the stage and you could hear all the way in the back and it was like the angels came down around the whole west it wasn't just the light show there was some truly magic moments when the Native Americans came and did their day area thing there they really helped cleanse the theater from the equinox of the gods which Kenneth Anger had run at the theater and they came and did a big pow wow they came after Kenneth Anger they did this big drum thing and the ceiling went off and the hall took off like a UFO that was one of the best moments and Steve Gaskin and his Monday night class was one of the it's not in that chronology every Monday he did the Monday night class and he was sitting on the floor before he moved out so that was always what kind of class did he give? it was called the Monday night class and it was basically he didn't want to do it on Sunday because it would be too much like he was the preacher basically it was a new age preachy and it was a dance school as well and I love Caitlin Huggins and she and Annette Rice started a modern dance school there because the dance school was a dance school it was with a fellow that I mentioned previously from Buffalo the poet who ended up being the president of Street Theater Enterprises found that the Masonic Hall next door served great purposes for offices and that sort of thing that was down straight towards the park was attached to the building to the west and it became later the I-Beam but it had large studios and so Caitlin and the family started the dance school and then a year later when we opened the theater on the corner we passed the health inspection all the inspections but we couldn't dance because it was bad at the neighborhood and so we said well look we're a dance school we're not a dance hall it's semantics we got a lot of information about the dance school from some of the other from Luther Green and her whole kinetic thing but she was there quite a bit and it was making a big story about new dances probably if this video is watched tomorrow 50 years from now or 100 years from now this is archived in the library it's for not-for-profit it's for children's children and they punch in Reginald Eugene Williams Reggie I sense a feeling you had in this period I sense a passion about what you were doing and I have found from doing many of these interviews as well as being themselves it almost was a calling, a passion people became a family things coalesced and you had to take sides even the hip independent proprietors hit with the Merchants Association Merchants Association would let them in even though they were falling down and deteriorating they still didn't want new blood in there so it was always that give and take it's a synthesis antithesis what kept you going and do you still have some of that in you now? oh yeah I'm still in the show business I'm the IATSE for 30 years make movies and produce and manage what's the future? oh yeah I have my light show that I continue to build and it has meaning and I know what I'm doing now when I was filming back then I had no idea what an aperture was or what it really did or how lights and now I'm pretty much no lighting by Kelvin so you're equipped in a second nature? I don't have any good equipment but I know how to use other people's equipment I know what you're supposed to do and a young person was watching this 50 years from now how can you inspire them considering what you've been through what you're doing now and you're still going? well I think that that's a good opportunity here to say that the whole story like I said earlier was you served by Madison Avenue the parts they could sell the rest they denigrated and made the bad guys so now the anti-war protesters are the bad guys and the war mongers and the Marines are the good guys and so this is what people can do for themselves is believe in what they're doing regardless of what's out there and I see it was the dawning of the age of the quarter it's gonna be silly about it and basically the whole thing hasn't happened yet but it's turned into little kernels all over the world every little town you go through Orville or has there even Tucson, Arizona is the fourth avenue and basically there's the sea to spread all over the world but it's still not understood and the intellectual part of it if you all the jokes, the snide remarks about if you can remember it you weren't there basically means you got in mind this rod I don't think so I was a historian I held on to pieces but I still have a strong oral tradition and think that people should talk about it and share it eventually yeah it's a great story to be told to me it's like the 13th century in general I think this would be a renaissance totally relate the poster art all my friends yeah I'm gonna have to show you those I would look forward to seeing it I would like to know if I had a net that I could throw you and you could capture your favorite moment what stands out in your mind I know you have many, but grab one yeah I could say I can't say the human being without getting my wife upset so it must be I'll give you two, okay it must be being married in the street theater by Bishop Skilman being wedding in the theater and pictures and all that basically a lot of the films they took to revitalize my images of certain things so maybe I prefer them more than the ones I can't remember to the human being was a great time the day they made Acida illegal how long they wanted to call it the love pageant that it had more to do you can make it legal but now you're gonna have to do something about it basically they did was change people's minds but now it's a dangerous drug their minds are dangerous I think that people have to filter and believe in what they believe in by research on your own and you don't just get fed dogma by politically paid journalists I just want to thank you so much for being here you have not seen The Last of Us and I know we haven't seen The Last of You but the 60s and the Heat Ashbury is a giant puzzle with lots of pieces and you have a big part of it so we want to thank you so much for being here and I know you have a whole lot more stuff you would like to show us so we're gonna go film some of this in a few moments okay thank you