 I'd love to welcome Robert Simmons to the Haydash Berry Video Oral History Project and I know what your friends call you a zoo. My name is Rebecca Nichols and I'll be moderating this tape. I'd like to learn a little bit about you. I know you've been a great contributor to the Oracle and many other things in the arts and writing and spirituality. I would love to know about your early beginnings. Where were you born? I was born just a few blocks from here at St. Mary Hospital. So right near the Haydash Berry. I had Fulton and one of his brothers. Cole, somewhere right up there. Fulton and... It's still standing there right now in 2005. And what were your parents' names? My mother's name was Mary Shannon and my father's name was Warren Simmons. And I was brought up right at 6th Avenue at Fulton right next to the Goldbeard Park and I went to Lowell High School. Amazing, the old Lowell High School. And then after that I went to San Francisco State College. I heard your grandparents were also born. Yeah, I'm the second and third generation. San Francisco. I had a grandmother that lived on Calister in Fulton. Do you remember your grandmother's name? Yeah, Wilhelmina Hintz. And she was all in black and she was in a big Victorian one thing or other. And she was a bootlegger. And then we were during the time of the bootleggers in the day. So she was up there as a children. Do you remember your grandfather's name? I can't remember my grandmother's name. Sure. And we would sit in my grandmother's big lap with her big black Victorian clothes on. She holds all like a big hand. Wonderful. I'm out. Do you have any brothers and sisters? I have a deceased sister. What was her name? Marilyn. Marilyn. Do you have any children? No, one child, yes. Nothing, one child. Do you know that child's name? I have a child named Carrie. Carrie, beautiful. So he looks like he had a rich life. I would love to ask you real quickly because then I want to move to the sixties. Oh, yes. Do you remember the hate Ashbury at all before the sixties? Well, of course, because when we got out of junior, when we got out of high school at low, we used to watch as two blocks. Sure. We'd go up to eighties and we'd go up to all these restaurants and we would play football and batting and basketball and everything in the panhandle and then tennis park on the way home. Just like in the fifties? Yeah, that was like in the forties. In the forties. Yes, so I remember very vividly, you know, the Second World War, like when you asked Travis about some of the traumas that you remember. Sure. Of course, I remember the concentration. Wow. When were you born? 1929. Wow, you look great. You really look great. Chinese era. Chinese era, it's very inspiring. So you remember H. Street before the big? Oh, yes. It was very simple. It was very naive. It was right out of Foster's and, you know, the gang that hang around at Miller's eating chocolate sodas with whipped cream fillers. Do you remember any of the businesses on the street that may not be here now? Do you remember? They were all little five and dime stores. And as I say, it was very simple. Everything was inexpensive. You remember Walgreens? Walgreens and E.D.'s was the big one. Walgreens where the actual Oracle office ended up landing somewhere right near there? Right over there. Right? It was very simple. It was kind of, even though there was a war on, it was a different kind of feeling. Everybody was in uniform. Everybody was running around the market street and da-da-da. And also there was a lot going on creatively in the 40s and 50s. When I went to state college, we had, you know, all the existential plays, waiting for Boudot and Lorca and all this stuff being played. Sure. You had the beatnik era coming in the North Beach. We had the early beatnik era that was coming in. So it was a big interest in existentialism and sardine and ruling. Literary abstract painting and all of that was very active. So you got some inspiration from all of this? I went to San Francisco to take out a major liberal arts. It basically means you can take anything. So I take art history. I take Asian art. You know, this and that. They had all kinds of things. Sure. And I lived with a beautiful lady at the time, right up here on Twin Peaks. And I think we had a house with two bedrooms and rent was 3750. Amazing. That was a view. I had a house on Ashbury and Page in the middle of the Six Ages. Yes. Big, white Victorian. I paid 125. Right. But anyway, living with Barbara, she was from New York. She was a few years old. She was very sophisticated. She was up on all the latest theater films, cinemas, plays, you know. Sure. That sort of thing. So I got very turned on to intellectual, you know, lifestyle. I guess you would call it Bohemian before it would beat me through the Bohemians. Exactly. Exactly. When did you first find yourself having some type of talent with the arts or with writing that you started admiring that? Well, I went, the Korean War was on when I was in school. And everybody was afraid of getting caught in the Korean War, getting drafted and all that. And people were ducking on and out and one thing or another. Well, I happened to be a straight A student, so I got a direct commission in the Medical Corps. And I went to the 4th Center in June for a few months. And then I was sent to Fikon, which means Far East Command. And suddenly here I am, 21, 22 years old, and they're rolling out, you know, beautiful carpets, you know, Alicia girls and everything in Japan. And I'm in a tea house at the August moon kind of, you know. It's a great environment, getting turned on to Buddhism and the Zen and, you know, reading books and that kind of thing. Sure. And they got very interested. When I came back, I went to the East Coast with my cousin and went into the building business for a few years. And then I made enough money to go over to Europe, where I moved to Europe and I went to the Sorbonne, Paris, studied French language and literature. I lived in southern France and I actually moved on. So traveled through most of Europe and the Greek islands and then finally Morocco. Well, Morocco, you know, the swinging place, especially in the 50s and 60s. Did you ever make it to India? It was really great. I traveled all through Morocco and wrote a novel about it called Berber King. Give a website? Well, we're building it all the time, you know. Okay. And so after Morocco, I went back to my apartment in Rome. And there were, of course, a lot of actors there in a lot of America and making Cleopatra at the time. Right. And this friend of mine, Alan Midget, said, oh, my name was still Bob Simpson and you should go to New York and see this guy, Dr. Cleary. I think he had his name that stood for Cleary. Cleary. And they're having sessions over there and it's quite fantastic. He told me all this in Rome. And I said, well, I was getting ready to go back to America. Anyway, I had been painting. I had a lot of canvases and a lot of writing to present them on and so I went to New York and as soon as I got to New York, who do I meet? I meet Dr. Mishra. I meet Leary on the outboard. I meet Metzner. I read the psychedelic review, all the books that you were talking about. Sure. All that stuff was going on. Cleary was having these big psychedelic parties and, you know, it was pretty extravagant. Do you ever go to Milbrook? Do you ever make it to Milbrook? Oh, yeah. I went to Milbrook several times. Maybe I saw you as a child. I lived at the Oshrom. Oh, you lived at the Oshrom? Yeah. And now when I was at the Oshrom, before I came out to California, it was like 1964, 1965, 1964, in comes Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in comes Bhakti Vedanta, in comes Amrit Desai, in comes Yogi Bhathalves, in come all these people. So I didn't have to go to India by the way. I was suddenly getting all this input of, you know, the whole thing. And when I remember when Maharishi was sitting up, Dr. Mishra's Oshrom, he had flowers all over. And he described everything in terms of flowers and that everything should be surrounded with flowers and that our life was like a flower, that it grew, that it exuded, that it opened up like a flower. And the fragrance of your being and your essence and your business, all comes out. So that was actually the beginning of the idea of the flower child. Wow. Because when Maharishi came out to Berkeley in San Francisco after that, the whole thing was surrounded with flowers and everybody wore flowers and danced with flowers. I would fight to the death that I wasn't a hippie, that I was a flower child. So anyway, I studied with Dr. Mishra this whole thing about the Eden, the Pingali, the right enough hemisphere of the brain, the Kundalini, the serpent consciousness, all of that stuff. The chakras. So by the time I got to San Francisco, I was ready. You were ready. I would have had to put out all this knowledge I had of travel experiences and gurus. Would you come when you first came back to San Francisco at this point? Well, what happened, I was with a lady who was Hungarian from Budapest. Remember the whole war that happened over there when people left? And she was a painter and artist also. And we came out of California. We met at a macrobiotic camp up in the mountains in New Jersey. And of course, the Paradox Restaurant in New York City was happening. Remember that one on the 6th? So there was the Paradox Restaurant. She was a macrobiotic cook. I was super interested in macrobiotics. So we said, let's go out to California, put up our opinions, and have a macrobiotic restaurant. So we did that. We moved in on Pine Street, 2140 Pine. Next door to Bill Hamm, who did the first light show, right across the street from the old Family Doorhouse. Family Door later moved up further up towards Venice. So at that restaurant that we opened up, underground macrobiotic restaurant, because macrobiotics are taboo for the straight world. You're going to take LSD and macrobiotics and die. So it was there that I met Martine and that I met other people. And Gary Goldhill, Jay Thalen, Ron Thalen, and they all came in and they looked at all my paintings and said, wow, you're a part of the scene here. And I said, I've also got this writing here on my experiences. Where was your restaurant? Was there Pine? Yeah, 2140 Pine. Pine and about Webster, Buchanan. And so the next day I was over with my manuscript, the first thing I published in the Oracle, which is Yoga and the Psychedelic Mind. And I did a drawing for that. And it was about my experiences in New York City, taking acid and walking all through the streets in New York City or through the park and doing things like envisioning the bar, those fates and all that kind of stuff. It was all new. And we were looking for a vehicle for all this. There hadn't been an explosion of anything psychedelic since the time of Rambo and Berlin but they called it Poets Maudit and the Parnassian movement and the club they had Sheesh, which cocktail and all those people, they all went to North Africa and smoked all this stuff. So there hadn't been a kind of psychedelic spark since then. And this was now the big psychedelic spark that was opening these two dimensions beyond the first and second chakra, beyond your personality, into a really deep sense of freedom. Awakening was considered to be the realization of your true self as none other than your immortal self. Well, if you talk about immortal self before the psychedelic, they could put you away. They put you away. But suddenly the mortal self is who you are, who you've always had been, and this realization and this awakening that also happens on psychedelics in the right setting can trigger off this disidentification with the false personality and with the small self. So suddenly there was this explosion and an opening of the big self, of the Renaissance self. And actually the tradition of the whole 60s spiritual movement and everything goes all the way back to Egypt, goes back to Okhnat and goes back to Nefertiti, to Hermes, to all the Hermetic philosophers and teachers and to the masons and to the free masons and to theosophy and the whole thing. It had nowhere else to go. In other words, this was a kind of reemergence of a Renaissance because that energy moved up through Hermes and moved over to Babylon and eventually moved to Leonardo da Vinci and up to Goethe and Faust and to the man god, which was being expressed. And of course, still to this day, I'm sure that the Catholic Church and one thing or another is pretty antagonistic about 60s movements or about hippies or about long hair or about, you know, regarding yourself as a god person or a goddess person. The goddess movement is... God completing himself in you. So all of that started then and then it all came out and came out into the woman's movement. You could say in many ways that even the 60s movement was a precursor for what they call the New Age. Surely, the Aquarian Age. The Aquarian Age and all that. And in many ways, it looked like we were against something like we were battling down the old to bring in the new and I suppose there was some degree of that. Don't forget that the Vietnam War was on and with the Vietnam War on, that tempered everything. There were very intense political people, which was of course Berkeley and San Francisco, which was more this spiritual orientation of your true self being rather than your immortal self. Sochi dnanda. Thou art that, om tatsad. If you said that around Catholics they would say you can't say that or Muslims too, these people get killed and not go up and say that. When did you first, when you came back see the amazing masses that were coming up to San Francisco, coming to the hate? Do you remember your memory? Well, it wasn't an amazing man, it grew slowly. It didn't really grow into the B.N. It was about the issue number fourth or fifth, I can't remember. And that was of course the summer of love and the B.N. The 60s movement was very brief. It only lasted about a year and a half. And it lasted about the time of the length of the oracle. But to show you the difference between the Western thing, Michael Bowen called me one day in Martín and Gary Goldhill and I was with Yaya the cook and we said let's go to Berkeley we're going to unify San Francisco and Berkeley. I said great, so we get in the car and we drive over, we're going to meet Jerry Rubins and Mario Di Stavo, you know and we drive up in front of the Steffen Wolf club, you know Steffen Wolf's magic theater and you walk in and we walk out the end and do its second car and drive away everything was so clandestine and hidden, you know in Berkeley. And so we finally meet and they're all sitting on one side and they've got beret, capstone and camouflage jackets and we're all sitting on the other side Yaya had just made a beautiful Buddha's shirt you know with all the plenty of Buddha's on and so they're looking at us and they say what do you think this whole thing is about and I said it's about fun and love, it's about celebration and joy and they all looked at me like I must have been and well that's the difference between we're into politics and confrontations we organize in Chicago 7 and you know everybody's got to be tough and so you can see the difference there between Berkeley, the difference between you know Oracle and Berkeley Bar and between the mentality and the attitudes of what you had to do What drew you to the Oracle what opened up the connection for you to be involved with the Oracle Well there was that first article that I wrote which was Yoga and the Psychedelic Mind because I knew that whole thing and don't forget I had all this expansive travel, Cherokee, Morocco different people all over the world I met all the dollies and the wallies and the mollies and the women in the world and volley and all of those people So the second one came up which I wrote which was called The Life because Timothy said tune in, tune in, drop out and it was really hard for a western person to understand we all wanted to say take over but drop out was very difficult and to this day it's used in a very pejorative negative way even if you read the paper there drop out but in India and in Morocco and everybody you can drop out and you can join an ashram and you can join a community and you can play drums and stay high all the time and you're considered a hajima long a sadhu or a wild baba you bowed to this last Kuhmela film was quite good and it shows the vastness 18, 20, 30 million people all dancing wildly well here they would put everybody in a nut house throw a dancing naked in the river you know so the thing is that's what drop out meant and that's going to drop out in this country it was very hard the massive resistance thing had a little bit of the Sachegraha thing of India but not much but where do you drop out to and that's always the question that comes up and can you drop out before you've dropped in and do you have to have a self before you can have a no self like you said you were running around doing things at a very very early age before you had the subject of object duality split before you even experienced what latency period was or puberty these things before you develop a discerning mind could you possibly go into letting it all go and dropping out and you can imagine having that dealt with all the millionaire people back in the east coast in Chicago and stuff and they leave 20 or 30 million dollars for their children to go to school and they give it all to Maharaj or Maharishi they must have flipped out because they wanted to drop out two years later they wanted to drop back in and get their money back and they couldn't go out of the situation and change and you know there was no more Roshneesh Poornam and that dada dada dada Do you write any other articles for the Oracle? Yeah well then what happened I went to Mexico and when I came back I went to Mexico during an article an awful number of four or five and six and I went to Mexico and I was down there in Mexico painting traveling around and I came back and when I came back I'd noticed the scene had changed I said my god oh don't you know the psychedilical office has been psychedilical stores have been busted and all the people that were in the store are going to court and they're having a big court case downtown and city hall with Melvin, Bella and Chulose and Alan Cohen is on the stand and J. Kalim is on the stand and the other one, Ron is on the stand they're all going to get busted and have a felony against them so naturally I went right there and I sat in on some of it and I became a good friend of Bill Chulose who later became a collector of mine of painting and art and stuff but already now they were really attempting to smash the scene down you know and they were going to court over the F word you couldn't say the F word now if you watch television whatever it's F F F F F F everything is F right? Rappers, F was one with a book that was written by the name of Leonora Candell she wrote a book called the Love Book which was a beautiful book beautifully illustrated, really powerful tantric book and she used the F word and that put everybody in jail or bail or something you know you couldn't even use the F word then what do you think in your background and you're so much like you were designed to be part of this whole thing yeah I was designed to be part of it right what do you think what do you think your passions were what drove you to I had spoken to Travis and he said he was very inspired for a whole year because Kennedy died and wars were going on and what inspired you? Well I wouldn't say that the wars were things that inspired me more than he was freedom freedom was the main thing to me and the expansion of consciousness I mean I had seen worse things in the Second World War I saw 65 million people die people say what 65 million yeah 30 million Russians 10 million Jews 10 million yeah you should open the paper to me in the million so I was interested in freedom freedom from anything Hitler like freedom from any kind of control freedom from any kind of suppressing yourself to be greater good of the Fuhrer or whatever and control and all of that so freedom was mainly my thing freedom sure so I was interested also in freedom from conformity freedom from negative past imprinting and freedom to self-realization self-integration because we had so much coming in to be able to handle a little integrate a little the male and the female the male and the female most hadn't really met yet they didn't meet until the 60s and say my god you're a whole person I thought you were a Barbie doll whatever and so it all all changed radically so there were freedom too also we had freedom with our diet which were radical changes we had macrobiotic restaurants we had health food stores we had clothing to wear these Renaissance style now what I walk around today looks just like the 60s it's retro what is macrobiotic for those that don't know macrobiotic is a balanced food diet that's between the yin and the yang see what we usually do is we usually eat extreme yin go out and have an ice cream soda you know and have a milkshake you know and have a big giant burger we had ourselves around with these extreme yin and the macrobiotic is eating in the middle it's eating grains it's eating from the earth it's a balanced way of diet that slowly opens you up and unfolds you and gives you incredible strength and wonderful connectedness to earth and to organic foods and especially to foods that are little I would say more yam foods and herbs and carrots and beets and potatoes things that are grown in the earth where they really get the minerals into them and so how long you've been eating like this oh I wouldn't say that I'm a macrobiotic the macrobiotic thing was a phase I also did gourmet food in Europe and I also lived in Thailand for what 7 or 8 years I've eaten all kinds of Thai food what are you doing in your life right now well we're having a kind of reemergence of this oracle thing that's going on right now and also that was the last piece of individual writing I did after that I started doing illustrations for Steve Levine's poetry in the last number about number 7 to about number 12 I did all of his poetry other illustrations that cover the Ichin Mandala House many things like that that are in it and so I'm continuing to do writing, poetry painting, exploration publication what's your vision for the future what's your vision for the future my vision of the future well my vision of the future is a long world I love it because this thing will leave you that's the one thing that I wanted to bring up which was if the 60's was about anything it was about love it might have been Romeo and Juliet love but you know there was this feeling of love like right now I would say because of the war and the situation that's going on TV and he had into one thing there's a slight depression of the collective consciousness well during the time there was an expression of collective consciousness that was joy happiness, peace, sharing but you know Ali Oda was in office then and he didn't want to see that go because they called him up he lied himself up to run for president he said how are you going to run for president if you can't even control the hippies wow 400 police came out of the street didn't everybody with deads and clubs it was unbelievable but that's about when my name changed when I came back from that name I used to name Azul it changed when I came back from Mexico and we were all at the Oracle office and if your name was Harvey or you became Harry Krishna and if your name was you know Gladys you became you know Govinda and everybody took on different names so this lady that was with by the name of Vicky I just came back from Playa Azul she said Azul and then Alan Cohen who was standing right there giving me my last name Zangpo and we were both reading Lamigoldinda The Way of the White Clouds and Lamigoldinda's Great Treaties The Way of the White Clouds and the other one Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism and it was all about this wonderful person Zangpo was an architect he did rivers he did castles and the hills and you know and the Tibet thing has been quite on the line also it was the first time I saw Tibet when I first saw Tibetan art I understood it completely I saw it on an island in New York City and of course we were on psychedelics about the Tibetan Sanctinians completely described every aspect of life and death and what you go through in the barro states and how the whole thing works that was really what we meant by expansion of consciousness seeing the big picture the big landscape not just the limited one that happened and people were reading Madame Belofsky and Annie Besant and you know whoever knew anything about Aquarian Ages and Piscian Ages and you know the Golden Age and the Sat Yuga and the Kali Yuga we didn't know about those sorts of things in time expansions and one thing through these interviews we're going to actually do some filming of the Oracle we're going to be able to to video some of the photography the line drawings of the writings and stuff and most of those are signed, what is your signature on your work? Azul, yeah so we'll look for that Robert Simmons goes on the checks on the checks the passports and the driver's license so in the future when young people are looking at this full of ideas, what happened here why did it happen here you know well it always happens here the Bohemian thing was very strong here after the Second World War but it moved very strong into socialism communism and the McCarthy thing and the Beatnik thing came out of that and then after the Beatnik thing you got the hippie thing the hippie was not quite the white word to use as a matter of fact when I went to France and people said what have I been doing in California I went to a hippie bien conuqua what a hippie bien conuqua it's terrible hippies are terrible they can last people who don't even clean their underwear you know so it was really something you know two minutes I used a word in a lot of my articles a spiritual revolution or the awakening the rebirth of the Renaissance I love the one family yeah the one family because as people are looking at this film in the future it's still the same family generations moving down and what happened here in the Bay Area not only affected the Bay Area it connected New York, England and London affected the world on the art scene, on the music scene the word hippie actually came from Southern California from the Mexicans they had a big watch and they used to go like this with their watch, swing it around like that and they all smote grass and that was considered you know they moved their hips, so that was considered hippie and of course the hulu hippie, it didn't even move the hips Elvis the pelvis well you know I want to thank you so much and we're going to be doing another tape a little later on in the day and we welcome you to join in on this let's do one on the evolutionary background, the total evolutionary background of the whole movement that's what we would like to talk about I want to thank you so much